Thread: Revert summoner to 5.55 while re-reworking it please?

I don’t understand what people mean when they said old SMN was a mess or that it had individual parts that didn’t work together. That’s current SMN. Aetherflow and Fester don’t interact with anything. Your Primal phases have no impact on your demi phases. Your raid buff isn’t tied to any other job system anymore (RIP Carbuncle). Everything with current SMN feels like a disjointed, silo’d system.

ShB SMN had many systems that worked with each other. Your stack management during filler affected your Bahamut phase. You conveniently needed 2 ruin stacks to enkindle Bahamut and 2 stacks to finish Bahamut phase without Swiftcast for a total of 4. Oh will you look at that, you can stack up to 4 further ruins, the exact number you need. DWT gives you the weave windows needed to summon Bahamut as well as get pet CDs out of the way. Phoenix needs a stack to weave the summon, but it doesn’t spend stacks itself so it doesn’t need DWT. Don’t need to move? Short cooldown Aetherflow and Fester still had a purpose by burning your stacks anyway. The CD of trances and DWT working the way it did made trance rushing optimal for most encounters, but you could still hold Phoenix for 10s if needed while new SMN is forced to demi almost on cooldown due to the poor implementation of the gem system, leading to jank like doing filler inside raid buffs in P2S. And so on.

Old SMN was unintuitive, sure. That’s a valid criticism. But it wasn’t disjointed and it wasn’t a mess. It had systems that interacted and worked well with each other. From a gameplay and rotation point of view, there is no meaningful difference between not being able to chain certain pet actions and not being able to press 132 instead of 123 of your melee combo.

That being said, I understand the egis were not appealing to a lot of people. I think there is merit in making a more intuitive job. I’m actually OK with the removal of 5.5 SMN.

I just think we should have gotten a much better-designed, more involved, less unfinished/half-baked rework. I do not think the current demi implementation and gem charges system is good design or a ‘good base to build upon’. This argument is a fallacious whataboutism about old SMN. The primal phases of new SMN are too similar, short and inconsequential, the rotation is excessively rigid due to tying nearly everything to summoning a demi, there’s no interaction between the primal phases or the demi phase, the demi phases are completely devoid of mechanics and so on. The current system is too heavily flawed to be used as a base.