Which part of summoner's rotation am I meant to find satisfying?

[Deveryn]

Imo I think the foundation of SMN is great, it just needs more buttons to be less spammy.
It almost feels like you're playing a Healer dps LOL...

Searing Light also feels tacked on imo, there's nothing interesting about it.
I think maybe they could remove it and make up for it with new skills instead, I rly don't think like every Job needs a party damage CD...
There's just too many of them imo, just put it into more personal damage.

I think the sequences are too short too, you're cycling through the summons so fast..
I dunno about buffs with all of the summons tho.
Ifrit at the end could put a burning dot on the target, Garuda could give you a Sps buff at the end and Titan could maybe turn Ruin IV into a Mountain Blaster-esque ogcd for a short period after he ends.
Or just a big upgrade hitter.

But yeah, the summons feel like they have a lack of impact imo because of how you're rushing through it.

I think the problem is the pacing is based around dungeons. 2 summons is about all you get through at 90 in a good group. On more drawn out fights, it would be nice to have more to do.

[fulminating]

I think the issue might be the fixation on having a two minute raid buff window. If the primals were say 25s apiece with 15s for phoenix/bahamut, it'd fit into a 90s cycle which would afford a larger window to each primal rather than them being a flash in the pan. I might be being too conservative here, and perhaps fitting two 40s primals in with a demi would give sufficient room to make engaging. The latter would likely necessitate ignoring a specific primal/cycle, so perhaps the ignored one could be linked to the demi? Naturally this would necessitate the development of a third, but reskinning bahamut again to alex or something could be pretty simple.

Or they could continue alternating bahamut/pheonix, but if you skipped titan maybe it'd upgrade to heritor titan with a different rotation style for the subsequent filler phase. Regular titan could have hard casts and heritor use instants. I think this would allow for a set of rotations, one hardcast focused perhaps with higher damage to compensate, and another more mobility-focused. While I want to suggest the mobility option would be better for prog, I'm pretty sure prog's where you're most likely to encounter enrages so maybe not.

As to what an engaging primal rotation looks like I'm unsure. Maybe every few casts you can build up to casting titan again or have it mesh with the rest of summoner's kit in some way(edit: sorry forgot for a minute) or some aetherflow interaction maybe?

[ZephyrMenodora]

"I am aware that I'm talking about sub50 smn" - to be fair most classes in this game are boring and unsatisfying pre- level 50 at this point.

As far as level 90, I continue to love the current iteration of the class as I find it far more enjoyable than any version since ARR. (Though I can admit there was something about each version I did like given it was my main DPS since 2014).

[fulminating]

I'm really curious about what exactly you like about it, noone ever gets as far as articulating just what it is that they find compelling.

On a similar note, genuinely what difference do you see between current level 50 and 90 summoner, and lv50 ShB summoner?

[ZephyrMenodora]

I'm really curious about what exactly you like about it, noone ever gets as far as articulating just what it is that they find compelling.

On a similar note, genuinely what difference do you see between current level 50 and 90 summoner, and lv50 ShB summoner?

As others have commented over the years, the pet AI was not ideal for the original summoner. That said, I do miss having the flexibility to choose a constantly-out summoner like summoners in other games, and choosing to have things like Titan tank for solo content or choose which DPS egi I wanted in group content. It took me some time to get used to not having that anymore. I miss Shadowflare, but I feel they just gave that back to us with Garuda's cast-time skill so I'm okay with not having that anymore.

I don't personally miss having to set up dots and use bane, as it was often annoying and a lot of content things die before you feel like you even added much to some encounters. Summoners often come as a Dot class in many MMOs but it really didn't work well for me here even though in games like AION, I loved the summoner class which was essentially a Dot-Mage with Pet like SMN was here.

Honestly I don't remember LvL 50 ShB summoner because I was already level 70 when Shadowbringers came out, so the number of times I would have played the class at level 50 was minimal. I found Level 80 ShB Summoner needlessly chaoticand I recall the class being unpopular among casuals for that reason. I am a casual so my perspective is from that of a casual player.

I mean, here are some comments about ShB summoner just from a google search:

"Awful, got to 80, class didn't change from when i got everything at 72, and feels like a clunky fast paced "for cool factor" s***, ditched it yet again and now im leveling BLM, level 75 atm..."
"Extremely hard to play with barely any raid damage (lol devotion every 3 minutes) and from what I've heard it does around the same damage as RDM (provided you play SMN optimally which you won't)."
"It’s really clunky and annoying to play. I have a feeling they will change Smn again, just like with every expac lol. It’s tradition now."
"It's one of the busiest classes in the game with mediocre dps and almost zero survivability, I'm not satisfied at all with it, will be changing mains until further patches. Also Egis might as well not exist, their damage is almost nill."

Sure some did love the class by the end of ShB and there seems to be a ton of nostalgia for it here on this DPS forum, but I was among those who did not enjoy actually playing the class.

I really enjoy the class now. Sure it's "simple" but there is a huge audience for simple, and there is still some skill expression for things like making sure I have carbuncle out instead of a Summon when I need to shield, or choosing the order of the summons based on whether the boss will be moving (Garuda) or if I have time for melee skills and cast time (Ifirit). It's also laid back so I can focus a lot on what's actually happening instead of looking for procs or watching dot countdowns constantly which I personally did not enjoy. Finally, I do love the animations as while people here think that is vapid, I love them and love the feeling of them.

I often get 2 summoners as the DPS on my daily runs and see at least 3 every time I run casual 24 man content at 90 - so I have a feeling people outside the forums have been enjoying the class.

[Kolsykol]

Checking out SMN PvP kinda made me wonder if the devs feel too restricted because of the pets needing to always be out.
I honestly kinda like the idea better of not having smaller summons out and instead having it be this big thing and event like in PvP.

SMN could still draw on Summons powers like in PvP and have more of them obviously.
But like is it really necessary to always have one out at all times?
I kinda like the idea of not having one out at the start then building up to them and having them be more impactful when they do come out rather than just being a consistent and kinda meh always present thing.

[tearagion]

Sure it's "simple" but there is a huge audience for simple

And the audience for old SMN can get fucked I guess? Couldn't have been a new job instead?

[fulminating]

To me, level 50 summoner felt very coherent in shadowbringers - two dots, egi assaults and some filler. By level 80 it did seem to have rather more to do than most, but after sitting down for a bit with a training dummy it sort of clicked. I think the complaints about pet ai hold some weight, but were it to be refined slightly more it could well have been more than servicable. A lot of their issues stemmed from their decision to move when just casting more would have been significantly better. However I would be inclined to say that the knife cuts both ways on this - when comparing Living Shadow and Automaton Queen to Summoners pets the near complete lack of interaction with the former leads to them being scarcely more than glorified dots. Being able to use the egi assaults and theoretically positioning gave the user a better sense of actually being involved.

I do not feel the same way about the dots as you, but I also haven't played AION summoner so might not have always been comparing it to a more realised version of the concept. I suppose for aoe situations being able to detonate the dots to get more value would have been a nice addition, even if not strictly necessary. If we were to look at dungeon parses from shadowbringers, I would fully expect to see miasma III and Bio III up the top by damage contribution for any non-disatrous summoner.

In shadowbringers summoner had extremely good dps, even after the nerf so I'm unsure just when those comments refer to.

As long as your healer's not asleep at the wheel, there's no casual content where shielding is really necessary and to be entirely blunt there's two, maybe three hard casts per minute, the rest of the time you can pretty much run around like a headless chicken mashing gemshine and still do adequate damage.

There's a difference between making something accessible (lowering the skill floor) and removing all traces of complexity. There's no satisfaction in doing something correctly if you can't do it incorrectly: consider inner release - while the stacks might be a well-recieved QoL change, there isn't any satisfaction in getting the 5 3 fell cleaves in because you have to actively be trying to not. The same for bloodwhetting/nascent's flat potency, it used to require a modicum of forethought to get a substantial heal from it perhaps using it under inner release to really maximise the damage done to maximise healing done. Now you're pretty much full hp from any aoe, even without having to resort to chaotic cyclone/primal rend forcing a crit.

The summoner animations are nice I guess - my favourite is probably topaz rite, but I just don't think they can carry the job, particularly not in a year or so's time when everyone's very used to them.

They could be enjoying it or they could just want to watch youtube on the other monitor. I don't think you can assign meaningful motives to anecdotal strangers.

[ZephyrMenodora]

And the audience for old SMN can get fucked I guess? Couldn't have been a new job instead?

Which audience are you referring to? Those who wanted perma-pets or ShB summoners? Both audiences lost their class.

Likely what happened is they are monitoring play and popularity rates and ShB probably saw a decline outside of some hardcore fans of whatever they did with the class then.

I personally believe with no supporting evidence that ShB was probably the least-played version of Summoner among the playerbase as a whole since the game released. If this new one alienates more "old summoners" than it gains new fans, maybe they'll drastically change it again. I think more people are playing it now than ShB personally as far as the playerbase as a whole, but since this is anecdotal I guess we'll see. I think more likely they will add more things to do in the next expansion given overall this class has a lot of open bar space.

[tearagion]

Which audience are you referring to? Those who wanted perma-pets or ShB summoners? Both audiences lost their class.

Likely what happened is they are monitoring play and popularity rates and ShB probably saw a decline outside of some hardcore fans of whatever they did with the class then.

I personally believe with no supporting evidence that ShB was probably the least-played version of Summoner among the playerbase as a whole since the game released. If this new one alienates more "old summoners" than it gains new fans, maybe they'll drastically change it again. I think more people are playing it now than ShB personally as far as the playerbase as a whole, but since this is anecdotal I guess we'll see. I think more likely they will add more things to do in the next expansion given overall this class has a lot of open bar space.

So they can get fucked. At least you're honest, if roundabout when expressing it.