How I would Rework SMN

[ReiMakoto]

Oh sorry, I meant more cast times instead of GCDs. I keep messing the two. Still, it also somewhat applies to that. Remember old Shadowflare? Even if it only replaced a Ruin in your rotation, applying it was pretty annoying until they made it an oGCD. It felt smoother to use after that change. DoTs are also the same. People find them annoying to apply manually but they replace a Ruin in the rotation. Why? Because it's designed to be something you constantly need to keep track of, which also contributes to how busy the job feels. That and SMN isn't very linear like BLM and RDM. Egi Assaults being GCD won't really help with anything.

I hate Egi, always will. They're even worse now, but still you can design the pets to have both control and impact, and it's literally in the game already. Demi summons are a good start to what the summons should be, and with Phoenix it impacts in a way where both the summoner and summon are in sync with each other, the summoner channeling Phoenix-themed attacks while Phoenix attacks in unison and it attacks hard. That's what I hope the devs achieve with summons in the future.

And for the last one, it's irrelevant if GNB doesn't have problems lining up things, because SMN in itself does. Devotion already lines up pretty badly with SMN's burst damage phases because of the very long cooldown, and people are already annoyed by the delay so this would just potentially cause more problems with how jankier it'll work. People have already suggested to just have Devotion to be applied by the summoner and that's a better approach to it.

Again, purely subjective, I liked shadowflare on the GCD, and I honestly didn't hate manually applying dots, and it still felt different to BLM and RDM.

Devotion working like how I stated it there would actually reduce delay as it has no queueing or ghosting to worry about in the pet ai, as long as it came out with the summon cast it'd work the same/better. Only reason I didn't say have devotion on the summoner itself, is that imo a summoner should revolve around the summons.