New Summoner looks really nice, but...

[Raikai]

I'm suprised with Aetherflow remaining... Looking at this chart with the actions:



Everything else feels like interacting with the bigger picture, yet the Aetherflow mechanic feels kind of... just there for the sake of...?

[Rika007]

Honestly I just feel the Potency needs to be lowered and it put back to 30 seconds, along with a new name and animation for Fester and Painflare that go more under the Summoner motif somewhere down the line in the next expansion. This job has SO many instants (and if its damage is still close to top tier ranged DPS mains have even more reason to be displeased about the 'mobility tax') GCD spells, that honestly I feel we need just so much more oGCD abilities to fill the gaps in those windows. Doing fester only 2 times per minute when it used to be 3 times in SB and 4 times in ShB just feels very sparse. I'd take lower damage for more uses.

[zcrash970]

Honestly I just feel the Potency needs to be lowered and it put back to 30 seconds, along with a new name and animation for Fester and Painflare that go more under the Summoner motif somewhere down the line in the next expansion. This job has SO many instants (and if its damage is still close to top tier ranged DPS mains have even more reason to be displeased about the 'mobility tax') GCD spells, that honestly I feel we need just so much more oGCD abilities to fill the gaps in those windows. Doing fester only 2 times per minute when it used to be 3 times in SB and 4 times in ShB just feels very sparse. I'd take lower damage for more uses.

What's odd to me is that they didn't link aetherflow stacks with Aether charge/demi summons. Seemed like the easy choice

You get AetherCharge at level 6 and it seems perfect to remove energy drain and make it so AC grants AF stacks and ruin 4

[Lastelli]

I'm suprised with Aetherflow remaining... Looking at this chart with the actions:



Everything else feels like interacting with the bigger picture, yet the Aetherflow mechanic feels kind of... just there for the sake of...?

3 more skills per minute with on demand st or aoe damage, whereas the other stuff is more or less fixed because of your rotation.

[Raikai]

3 more skills per minute with on demand st or aoe damage, whereas the other stuff is more or less fixed because of your rotation.

But why it couldn't interact with the rest of the kit? It may work as it is, but looking at how nice everything else turned out to be this part looks like an afterthought to me.

[ItMe]

But why it couldn't interact with the rest of the kit?

Does it need to?
Most jobs have odd oGCDs that don't really interact with the rest of the kit, how is this notably different?

[Tulzscha]

Is that everything? It says it's not finished but I've heard that before.

Yeah Aetherflow is (still) out of place, it kinda went with the dots but those are gone now. I'm surprised they didn't just redesign Aetherflow while they did everything else. With Energy Drain's cd doubled and old Tri-Disaster gone we have less ogcds (except during Titan) and a looot of instant spells from the looks of it.

Also looks like there's a looot of 111 spamming including both Bahamut and Phoenix though the other summons should be frequent enough so as to not make it too boring I hope. I assume the favor mechanic is one use only so Ifrit does 2 casts + instant charge + instant melee then it's done (weird), Titan has a 4x 1-2 gcd+ogcd rotation, and Garuda has one long cast and 4 instants. Unless there's more to favor it's just Ruin spam outside of that, which does have a reduced cast time as well lol.

Still not sure how many Ruin 4 charges we'll get from Energy Drain but that's even more instant spells which should be spent outside of Bahamut/Phoenix. Neither favor nor Further Ruin specify an amount here. But Ruin 2 is no longer instant, it looks like Ruin 1 upgrades to Ruin 2 which upgrades to Ruin 3 so that probably becomes Ruin 4 after using Energy Drain... which would be kinda stupid. Even less to manage or think about.

The number of instant spells + Ruin 3 being a short cast + the lack of ogcds is definitely weird... that's a lot of time spent doing nothing.

Phoenix has a targeted heal now, that's neat, though can only be used once per summon and can't be placed on the hotbar. Wonder what it replaces.

Overall it's still looking pretty boring. :/

[aveyond-dreams]

I would like for Fester to be removed from the kit along with aetherflow and replaced with something else. The name still irks me and brings back memories of how the job used to be.

I think overall the EW kit is fine, can't wait to level it.

[dezzmont]

Having absolutely everything loop into the summons would probably make it a bit too punishing if you died or misstimed thing. Most jobs have an entirely seperate 'mini mechanic' from the core 'point' of their rotation for this reason. Some are more disconnected than others (Sidewinder and Refulgent Arrow have basically nothing to do with your song rotation for BRD, while for RDM your procs do very slightly influence mana gains and how you use dualcast) but having 'lower stakes' elements of the rotation is important for a job's flow.

Besides, how would it even link in? If it was required for summon abilities or is somehow influencing the summons that either means it needs to reset every summon (meaning non-summon aetherflow abilities never get used) or you have to pick which summons you actually care about.

[Tulzscha]

Having absolutely everything loop into the summons would probably make it a bit too punishing if you died or misstimed thing. Most jobs have an entirely seperate 'mini mechanic' from the core 'point' of their rotation for this reason. Some are more disconnected than others (Sidewinder and Refulgent Arrow have basically nothing to do with your song rotation for BRD, while for RDM your procs do very slightly influence mana gains and how you use dualcast) but having 'lower stakes' elements of the rotation is important for a job's flow.

Besides, how would it even link in? If it was required for summon abilities or is somehow influencing the summons that either means it needs to reset every summon (meaning non-summon aetherflow abilities never get used) or you have to pick which summons you actually care about.

It wouldn't necessarily be more punishing, they could just change the name and animation and it'd please some people.

For Bard, all their songs interact with their dots and those two abilities also interact with dots. Refulgent Arrow has a chance to proc from them starting at lvl 76. There is very little in Bard's kit that doesn't interact with their dots or interact with something the dots also interact with, it's all connected pretty well. There are a lot of thematic inconsistencies though, kinda like poison-based dots were for SMN.

ShB SMN very much has two separate ideas going on both thematically and mechanically, they cut out most of one of those ideas and left the rest without tying it in somehow. As for how Aetherflow could be made to fit with EW SMN well there are tons of things that could be done, at the end of the day the job just needs some ogcds one way or another, they don't have to involve Aetherflow.

Without butchering the idea too much though since Aetherflow is still a remnant of Arcanist, Fester and Painflare could simply be made into ogcd versions of Gemshine and Precious Brilliance. That's very redundant design though. A third more generalized spender would be nice, maybe something more niche. To take it a step further the ex-egis have attunements for some abilities so Aetherflow could work with that to give extra casts or empower them or maybe attunement is something that starts at zero and we have to build up over time rather than getting it for "free" upon summoning something, then maybe we could have more control over how long we use each summon depending on the situation. There's all kinds of things that could be done, the moon's the limit.