Summoner Early Post-Launch Feedback at level 80

[Atamis]

Using just the skills and abilities available to us right now. This is what I would do to see SMN reach 6.0 where an actual rework could be done realistically.

Allow Devotion to be cast with Demi Pheonix and Bahamut out. - Currently this spell wiffs quiet often when trying to weave in enkindle and the assaults and leads to some of the "busy work" when getting ready to summon Phoenix as you stand there waiting until the egi decides it wants to cast the spell. If the Demis could cast it it would be less of an issue of timing everything if it could just be weaved between being summoned.

Remove damage penalty from spreading dots via Bane and increase the chance of resetting dots to 100% (including on the original target) - This directly increases damage (probably not on par with BLM by any means) and makes dot management easier on AoE pulls and allows us a quick way to refresh dots on single target fights. Skilled SMNs can possibly keep ruination spreading indefinably in a dungeon, and there would be zero excuses when bad SMNs let dots fall off.

Aetherflow given 3 stacks again. Energy Siphon usable out of combat to give you three charges, when used in combat it preforms its usual duty. Alternatively give it a long (4s) cast time and it gives you 3 aether every time its used and has no cooldown, allowing the SMN to stack up out of combat and gain aether during transitions. Cooldown independent from energy drain so it would not supersede drain during normal rotations. - This opens up aether usage to be far more reliable, allowing pre pull preperations, and makes downtime in fight feel like a boon.

Egi Assaults should instantly refresh when a new egi is summoned. - This allows titan to actually be used as a defensive cooldown when needed, and allows 4 stacks of ruination to be built back up during that downpahse after Pheonix and before Bahamut trance is back up.

Deathflareshould be guaranteed Direct Critical Hit - This is a damage increase obviously, but makes Bahamut trance feel good again, as that huge number was one of the perks to pulling it off pre ShB.

Demi-Bahamut should be rooted in place to ensure wyrmwaves go off, and the duration increased 5seconds so three Ahk Mourns can be used again.

Physick, scale this off INT or make its potency worthwhile - This is the only defensive thing we have when titan isn't out or has charges. Increase its mana cost to 2400 if you must to avoid people actually using it in a meaningful way, but for the love of Menphina make it do something.

This is all I feel would be necessary to get SMN back on track. No i don't like the current summoner, No i don't think it can be salvaged with the current toolset. but this is atleast attainable with what we have now.

[MagiusNecros]

I feel like Demi summons should be fire and forget like Auto Turret/Queen and be more cinematic and deal huge bursts of damage. I'd love summons to get back on that massive attack status. Give appropriate cooldowns and watch your Dragon throw out 100k on the boss. Either that or make Megaflare/Revel Direct Crit.

Rooting the Demi summons in place would be A ok with me though.

Egi Assaults being separate per egi would be an amazing change since it offers versatility that way. AoE, ST or Utility on the fly. I'd say apply that to their Enkindles as well.

Make Titan's a strong AoE Raid Shield.

[Flana]

Make Titan's a strong AoE Raid Shield.

Honestly this doesn't really accomplish anything unless massive aoe's are going out at 120s intervals. No one is going to want to sit on Enkindle just waiting for a raidbuster, and it will never be needed unless something has gone horribly wrong since healers have so much mitigation and healing now. If they're going to make Titan any kind of niche its only chance is probably severe personal support. Mountain Buster should be single target and at least have an interrupt on it if not a stun (preferably both, since monsters can be immune to stun and still have interrupt-able spells). His Enkindle is always going to be awkward, but something like an aoe buff area for you or a heavy+slow for enemies caught in it might help him eek out a niche.

Sure you're never going to take him into raids, but you weren't going to do that anyways. This way he'll at least have more use soaking damage for solo shenanigans in old content or greater control in future exploratory content where individual mobs can be more threatening.

I feel like Demi summons should be fire and forget like Auto Turret/Queen and be more cinematic and deal huge bursts of damage. I'd love summons to get back on that massive attack status. Give appropriate cooldowns and watch your Dragon throw out 100k on the boss.

I agree, Bahamut should never have done anything more than show up and cast Teraflare for huge damage. It would have been thematic and avoided so many problems that the brain dead lizard still has.

[Mansion]

Aetherflow given 3 stacks again. Energy Siphon usable out of combat to give you three charges, when used in combat it preforms its usual duty. Alternatively give it a long (4s) cast time and it gives you 3 aether every time its used and has no cooldown, allowing the SMN to stack up out of combat and gain aether during transitions. Cooldown independent from energy drain so it would not supersede drain during normal rotations. - This opens up aether usage to be far more reliable, allowing pre pull preperations, and makes downtime in fight feel like a boon.

I think the point of shifting Aetherflow that way was to avoid the lengthy pre-pull requirement (for both SCH and SMN), and we all agree that is was a bit annoying to wait one minute before each pull.
Couldn't we work around that by simply deleting Energy Drain / Siphon, and just making Fester and Painflare oGCDs with charges? Because Aetherflow is just an old charge system somehow.It would take care of the rigid timer on Energy Drain, but keep the freedom of using Festers whenever you have time (and resources) to weave them, while making sure we don't lose uses.

Similarly, I'd make Earthen Armor an oGCD with a longer CD, because it's clunky as you need to make sure you have a charge, summon Titan, use it, hope for not too much delay, summon back Ifrit, cry on that lost Ruin IV.

I agree that Deathflare is almost incidental now. For me it's almost just used as a "thing to weave before Summon Bahamut".

Devotion is better than nothing, while quite underwhelming (and as you say, we can lock ourselves out of it in Bahamut / Phoenix moments). Would it be OP to have an added effect to Bahamut, similar to Everlasting Flight for our team ? (Something like 2% dmg or 5% crit up).

[CecMiller]

Personally I'd love Aetherflow available pre-pull back if the alternative is our current energy drain.

That said, improvements to the old system are always possible whether we had a "hide" ability from ninja to reset our Aetherflow button or we were just naturally given 3 stacks on death.

I'd personally love if deathflare was Direct hit Crit to make it feel more "potent". I also whish our demi moves had "higher potency" abilities potency and trade damage elsewhere. The main argument against this is how dependant we would become on getting those demi-summons out, but would it hurt to have higher than effectively 520 potency on SMN? Especially for our demi summon super moves which are weaker than Fire 4's. Through 2 usages, they total around 1040 potency but that's less than 2*300*1.8*1.15 from 2x Fire 4. Further on this line of thought, I always though that the "Akhmorns" from both demisummons could be a bit different. Bahamut could do the "spam" version (see nidhogg/or ucob bahamut) at reduced potency after the first one, where as Revelation from Phoenix could be more powerful but also only go off once (like morn afah but with 2 charges).

I don't think it would OP to give bahamut a damage up buff for the SMN only. I think its problematic if its suggested it was a party buff. I think 1 is more than enough personally and we're not exactly a job focused around delivering party buffs. A DWT 10% magic bonus like effect would be good however.

Rather than physick, I think drain as a defensive tool might be more in theme with a job like SMN if we were wanting more defensive capability (titan egi shield is ridiculously strong).

I just think egi assaults in general should be more meaningful than "just" ruin 4 generators than they feel like they are now.

[Atamis]

I think the point of shifting Aetherflow that way was to avoid the lengthy pre-pull requirement (for both SCH and SMN), and we all agree that is was a bit annoying to wait one minute before each pull.
Couldn't we work around that by simply deleting Energy Drain / Siphon, and just making Fester and Painflare oGCDs with charges? Because Aetherflow is just an old charge system somehow.It would take care of the rigid timer on Energy Drain, but keep the freedom of using Festers whenever you have time (and resources) to weave them, while making sure we don't lose uses.

Aetherflow can't be deleted right now as its a core mechanic of how SMN currently works. Yes i would like it to disappear, but until 6.x this isn't likely to happen. That is why i said just make it usable out of combat to give stacks, no waiting for it to cooldown, just cast it and go.

[Taranok]

Aetherflow can't be deleted right now as its a core mechanic of how SMN currently works. Yes i would like it to disappear, but until 6.x this isn't likely to happen. That is why i said just make it usable out of combat to give stacks, no waiting for it to cooldown, just cast it and go.

Aetherflow isn't core to Summoner right now. It's core to the damage but the mechanic itself has no interaction with any other mechanic short of how it applies damage.

What makes it "core" is class lore combined with it being 1400 potency every minute, which could easily be shifted to other mechanics while Aetherflow itself was disabled.

What you want would make the class worse, you'd exacerbate every problem the class currently has. When the biggest complaint generally falls into the category of "There's too much to do and too many oGCDs to press," adding more oGCDs won't fix the issue.

I have a laundry list of "easy to implement" changes to SMN that I'd like to see, but the change to Aetherflow I want to see would be buffing Fester to 470 or so potency, buffing Painflare to 215 or so, increasing the charges to 3, removing energy drain and energy siphon, and making it so the trances themselves gave you 3 charges. This is a net-neutral change to the opener, considerably thins out the mid downtime phase where the class can't spare instant casts to throw out more festers, and will help with the flow issues because of that. The potency values are to try to align Fester to about 1400 potency/minute, and Painflare to about 640/minute. The damage will be very bursty, but over a long fight it should even out.

Going back to SB's solution won't fix anything, it's better to anchor the mechanic to trances and even though you won't be able to cast it during downtime, it will also never desync slaving it this way.

[Atamis]

I have a laundry list of "easy to implement" changes to SMN that I'd like to see,

Then feel free to share. That is the point of this thread. I for one only feel busy on SMN when forcing the Egis to do things, the whole aetherflow thing doesn't bother me. I say it is core because its the resource we have to use, yea its as pointless as MCH's battery guage, but it is a core mechanic even if you don't like it. they will not get rid of it without a rework, so once again its not feasible to just get rid of it right now. Nevermind if theres something forcing it to be linked with SCH as well.

[NovaBismarck]

Honestly, the more I play summoner the more I hate the tie in to dots in casual content, I just wish they'd remove the whole dps-buff on ruin based on how many dots are up. Overall, if they can do something for dots and the busywork of the class, it'd be a big quality of life change.

I personally am bummed about where damage is. I see non rezzers argue that both smn and rdm should remain where they are on damage because of the rez. Honestly, I don't want them to remove rez (I know some do), but pretending it's some sort of boon to the smn or rdm themselves feels inaccurate to me. It's amazing to switch to a different class, melee or physical dps and not have to focus on the entire party to make sure they are up. Again, I get in savage people shouldn't be dying in content as often. However, those of us that are casual are literally having to watch it all the time in pug content because people die a lot overall. I get things like embolden and devotion counting against us on damage, but should we take a hit because we have the ability to bring people back up at a dps loss? I don't even mind a slight loss, but I don't get high dps classes like blm and mnk arguing that we are right where we belong, on the bottom, with a larger gap between.

[dinnertime]

Not too sure why they added more DoT dependency on SMN in the first place. Nobody asked for SMN to be more DoT-focused at all, and SMN became less DoT dependent as expansions go, but ShB reversed that for some odd reason.
And to be honest I never understood the Raise tax. Revived players already get temporarily penalized for getting raised, so I don't understand why RDM and SMN should be permanently penalized for just having it.

I don't even mind a slight loss, but I don't get high dps classes like blm and mnk arguing that we are right where we belong, on the bottom, with a larger gap between.

If that's true, I find that pretty hilarious because BLMs before ShB were complaining about having no utilities and demanded they should have Raise, while MNKs were going through things about being inconvenient to play. Now that BLM and MNK are in a good spot (MNK arguably being busted) as the highest DPS jobs in the game, you'd think they'll support the DPS jobs who are struggling right now for going through the same thing before.