Thread: 5.0 SMN: Increasing the skill gap

To put some of my ideas on what should happen here now, also considering some other issues brought up so far.
These ideas are somewhat realistic for 5.1 or 5.2, not for the next minor patch, as they involve changes to how the job works mechanically. They still fit in the overall ShB design however.

1. Reducing the number of timers to track. (and improving downtime)
A solution for this would be to go back with gating trances behind the aetherflow system. Energy drain/syphon would be the main timer to track, and trances will be flexible within a 1m cycle.
This can be implemented by something like this:
Energy Drain: 100p ST, grants 2 aetherflow, 1 aethertrail and Syphon Ready, 30s cooldown
Energy Syphon: 200p 50% falloff AoE, grants 2 aetherflow, can only be used when Syphon Ready (consumes the buff), 30s cooldown (shared with ED).
Energy Syphon is thus an "upgrade" of Energy Drain, and you will alternate using ED and ES. This gives us 1 aethertrail buff every minute, which we can gate trances behind.
Both trances would have a 20s cooldown, and require aethertrail. The combat requirement can be removed from DWT.

This won't fix the issue with DoTs in an optimized situation (due to the desire to align both demi-summons with raid buffs), but it will give you flexibility and you may hold trances for a long time without loss to the cycle.
You will still need a target for ED and ES, and with them gating the trances, it'd be more frustrating to be unable to hit them. For that I'll bring a solution:
Aetherflow can be brought back as a sort of "tornado kick" function, you want to use it to keep your cycle going, but using it is a dps loss in a vacuum:
30s cooldown shared with ED and ES, grants 1 stack of aetherflow.
Additional: Grants another stack of aetherflow when Syphon Ready, Grants aethertrail and Syphon Ready when not.
Cannot be used out of combat (to prevent pre-pull stuff)

These changes are neutral on the number of buttons you have to bind.

2. Reducing Pet clunk:
Please make bahamut/phoenix proc ww/sf right after summoning again.
Also reduce the cooldown of Aetherpact (devotion) to 2 minutes so it can be weaved in DWT nicely. Can come at the cost of some of the buff's potency.
Egi Assaults aren't too bad, wouldn't change them. If anything, list the skill effects in the tooltip itself.
Also please normalize pet potencies to follow player potencies, it's time for that, and makes it easier to understand how much value an EA has.

3. DoT/Trance clunk.
The changes I suggested in 1. will have one major impact on the rotation: It makes the second minute full of downtime, as you'll be holding resources to build to a 30s offset reset rotation, so you can:
(actually starting around 2m) 0: phoenix tri, 30: dwt tri, 60: bahamut hardcast 90: natural tri
Things aren't ideal yet, you want your hardcast to be before phoenix, not before bahamut, so I suggest doing something else:
The 72 trait that gives you FBT, also gives summon bahamut a tri-d reset, but FBT itself won't.
Now we can get a situation where we have a comfortable back to back reset, allowing a hardcast before phoenix, and more flexibile DoT usage. This change will even work in isolation, independent of the changes suggested in 1.
(starting on-pull this time)
0: tri dwt, 13: tri deathflare bahamut, 43: tri, 73: hardcast fbt, 103: natural tri 133: repeat at 13

Of course, get rid of fester ruins anyway, even if the dot cycle is fixed. Or at the very least, remove it from Ruin 2 and Ruin 4, we should not have to suffer optimal clipping and even not rolling the gcd for a bit.
This CAN be a thing for the minor balance patch in 5.05.

TL;DR
1. Reduce timers to track and downtime issues by putting trances behind the aetherflow cycle again. Energy Drain -> Energy Syphon as alternating skills every 30s, where energy drain grants a buff that allows you to enter a trance.
2. Reduce some pet clunk by making demis proc ww/sf right away again, reducing devotion's cooldown to 2m (at potential cost to the buff's potency) and normalize pet damage/potency to equal that of a player.
3. Fix DoT issues by bringing back the back-to-back tri-disaster reset by moving it from FBT to Summon Bahamut at level 72.
4. #deletefesterruins