How I would fix SMN.

[Gallus]

No, rip out aetherflow. Aetherflow by itself is a bad mechanic and was never good in the SMN's rotation as a bulk cooldown for other cooldowns. There is no reason to keep an awful mechanic because the current system is also awful and doesn't solve the fundamental problem of SMN having too many oGCDs, it just means we can use it at any time which is okay, but doesn't fix the underlying issues. If Aetherflow is to be kept around, it should work like lillies and be a 15, 20, or 30 second recharge per stack of resource that can be banked or spent at will, but removing it outright makes more sense given the shift of SMN away from its 2.0 ACN roots and towards being an actual summoner. The mechanic was always an interaction with the DoTs, so if you're going to remove the DoT interaction, then get rid of the old framework based on it as well.

Because this (might) be boring by itself, emphasize summons more by speeding up the summon rotation. Combine DWT and DB into 1, and advance them to happen more often, say every 40 seconds instead of minute, and consider expanding options used during summoning.

The point of this thread was to make SMN a little bit more edible with very slight adjustments that could come in this expansion. If you are going to change the class entirely I would also propose different things. In fact, the very first thing I'd do is get rid of the egis entirely, but that's not realistically going to happen in ShB let's be honest here.