LONG LIVE TAMU V4.5 

After testing the new prospective changes on global labs. My opinions on some things have also changed. 

I also made a point to go grind PVE as well on the tamer to get a feel for what it's like with all the new changes that have accumulated for awakening tamer. I know that it will never be comparable to the aoe classes that have amazingly fun or easy pve, but I do believe awakening is getting to a point where one could argue its not obviously dumb or a waste of effort, to spend your pve mob grinding time on awakened tamer.

I still mainly focus on pvp 1v1, small groups and R.B.F and only play awakened tamer or other classes. I've been obsessed with awakened tamer mechanics and combos of this class for nearly 2 years.

Since the reworks happened awakened tamer PVE has improved dramatically and for this i offer my greatest praise. I now will tell people it's not a complete waste of time. There are classes that will fundamentally always be better at PVE and it's due to how they are designed.

As for the most recent global lab updates.

1.  Splitting legendary beast dance directions could have been decent in theory but i would say most tamers refrain from using this skill unless cored and if cored probably only use vermillion bird for the protected group float engage. Lbd if used off cooldown hits like a wet noodle so i can see how splitting it could be a good idea, i personally believe every direction of legendary beast dance should combo into intimidation and full moon (black turtle can combo into intimidation, all directions can full moon currently) lbd splitting is also potentially good for simplifying PVE
2. I think you can indirectly improve legendary beast dance by improving the chain of things i can do while it's on the 5 sec  cooldown. If full moon had more connections we would be more inclined to use it. I personally think moonlight strike >lbd >flow:intimidation> lbd:echo> flow:full moon> Flow: soaring strike>beast rampage…. Would be a good pve flow especially for lower zones.(you could potentially achieve the same outcome as splitting if it was a 3 sec or 4 sec cooldown)
3. WW availability from awakening will be game changing forsure, if you could make celestial slam cancelable with WW it would be amazing. The only downside to celestial is that you have to finish it and that's a really big 2sec opening we could shorten if only we could flip out of it. I've seen many people request to remove cc and add protection, if we can cancel it, I think most people would be happy with iframe cancel out of celestial slam

SUGGESTIONS

OFFENSE

1. Flow:Full moon should be accessible from Moonlight Strike, Flow: Intimidation, Legendary Beast Dance, Legendary Beast Dance: Echo, Flow: Soaring Strike.. Having this skill as a almost 3rd echo would be great for pve especially in lower zones (i think moonlight>lbd>intimidation>lbd:echo>full moon>rampage>celestial>soaring... would be a great simple combo chain for grinding anything but the most high end zones where you would benefit from moving faster or more precisely )
2. With WW being available from awakening there's no need to use resonance for swapping anymore, which is a welcome change because if resonance was down I'd have to Y swap while running for FG or bolt wave swap with no protection. So having a short iframe swap is greatly beneficial to the overall kit. Flip to pre or slide to awakening that's some great simplification.
3. Tree climb improvements allow air lightning, scratch forward/left/right. Then improve speed of flurry kick cancel(can't kick fast enough to make it worth using) and surging tide cancel(unprotected backflip is too slow to be useful)
4. Scratch should be available left/up/right from WW and Tree Climb possibly shorter cooldown like 5 sec. But mainly just want to have more left right movement possible while at high speed.
5. Fearful Trembling should be sped up at least 30-50% due to damage in current meta being so high that skills that take a tamer 2ish seconds to complete are giant openings for someone to 1 shot me through. Speed up please.super armor doesn't even really help much.
6. Celestial slam cannot be canceled and is another giant 2ish sec opening skill that needs something, it does great damage, stiffens and down smashes but it locks you in place and makes you complete the animation. The stiffness is unnecessary since I mostly use this to confirm a kill after a successful intimidation/beast rampage has already pushed them to cc cap. Another common usage is after lbd:echo vermillion which would have most likely cc capped the enemy as well… so i would actually suggest that you drop the stiffness and give a frontal guard or just make skill cancelable with new WW. both leaving openings for outplay.
7. Heilang howling should have a button combination; there are still buttons available like LT+RB(awakening),Down+LB,  Down+RB+RT  or something to make it more available, especially since it now has a 10 sec cooldown. The delay from usage on hotkey(console)also makes the skill worse because its slow to finish already

DEFENSE

1. Throat burn should have its buttons changed to stop button conflict with all around spinner to make frontal guard and heal in pre awaken more accessible. 
2. Leaves and gust are too easily wasted when holding guard. Leaves and Gust should be 2 & 4 sec cooldown instead of 3 & 5 sec cooldowns(maybe something can be done with this interaction?)
3. Pre awaken S-block… tamer is too squishy to have no s block in pre awaken. It's also very easy to think you are in awakening s-blocking while actually just walking backwards unprotected in pre awakening. Having no guard also promotes the ADHD spam heavy playstyle that i hate succession for.
4. When guard is held in awakening dp buff should be applied on hit, or after 1 second whichever happens first if not immediately
5. New WW does a lot to simplify the tamers defensive strategy. Being able to iframe out of a lot of skills immediately and being able to iframe after the rest is an amazing change to the kit. Now instead of relying on cheeky swaps to pre for iframe. we can just iframe to pre and keep iframing until we want to swap back. Since resonance is 15 sec cd you could only free swap every other rotation now with WW you can swap 2-3 times per rotation. Ww leaves an opening so it's not completely “free” swap but significantly better than waiting 15 sec, fg y swapping or bolt wave swapping.
6. Work on the leaves/gust and frontal guard interactions, it's too easy to waste charges of leaves and gust when transitioning to and from guard.
7. Fix speed of heilang howling, celestial slam, fearful trembling they just leave you as sitting ducks in a meta where you will be severely wounded if not killed in 2 sec flat 

DOG:

1. In siege, node war, rbf, arena of solare, arena of arsha,or anywhere where pvp is expected to occur please make heilang auto spawn or make some sort of action we can do to summon heilang without pressing the summon heilang button my main idea being hold guard for 3 seconds… holding guard should trigger different things.(1 sec/buff 2sec/dog:stay or protect 3sec/summon dog, if not summoned )
2. Easily distinguishable between my dog, teammates dog and enemy dog, also have a icon on cooldown bar to denote i currently have a summoned dog at a glance
3. Dog standard mode should be attack although traps can be used for defense in any group fighting situation it's more likely to be a good offensive move to stiff at target location dog atk mode should also be triggered by moonlight strike and maybe legendary beast dance since those 2 skills are likely going to happen when full engaging someone. And make guard trigger the stay/protect dog function.(Moonlight> ww> air lightning>lbp  would be a good send trap combo in large scale)
4. Using the Guard skill should put dog into stay mode after holding for 2+ sec which would give people who want it the ability to run away hold guard to swap dog stance then apply whatever trap strategy they want, summoning dog to your location while guarding also improves the defense of the guard, since dog can block some projectiles/attacks
5. Dog stance being changeable via specific skill interactions reduces hotkey congestion on console
6. Healing howling should be 50% faster if this skill is completed faster. I wouldn't feel so tied down. Currently if i don't iframe out of heilang howling this skill feels like it will get me killed no sa and just standing there waving arms about.
7. Ww priority on console.

IN GENERAL I MOST OFTEN GET KILLS LIKE THIS:

OPENING CC OR GRAB

ENGAGE/DEBUFF

INTIMIDATION SWAP/ REFLOAT

BEAST RAMPAGE +CELESTIAL

IF NEED MORE DOWN SMASHES, TURTLE ECHO, SOARING STRIKE.

THEN RUN ASAP AFTER KILL.

With the new WW that was proposed on global labs, the defensive strategy is greatly simplified. since you don't have to do a weird bolt wave unprotected swap, a running y swap for frontal guard, unprotected trample swap +lbp cancel  or resonance swap for super armor on 15 sec cd to access your pre awakened iframes. Instead you can just quick swap with the iframe, which removes most of the danger the above mentioned swaps had associated with them.

The new ww also makes for more consistent iframe chains increasing the likelihood of us actually getting away in a fight where we have more than one opponent since i can just go straight to iframe spam without doing one of the above mentioned swaps.

New WW 

Immediately cancels: beast rampage, all around spinner, legendary beast dance, soaring strike, Garuda, ascension, heilang:howling, guard… WW >air lightning>lbp is probably the fastest safest way to send/set a void lightning trap 

Must finish before WW: leaves/gust, lbd echo, echo pierce, moonlight strike, full moon, celestial slam(would be great if this was immediately cancelable), intimidation, dog attack hotkey

Howling problem continued…

Heilang howling is way too slow, the casting of the ability takes longer than the .7 sec stiffness it inflicts on the opponent if he even travels to attack the right person. Howling takes at least 1 sec to complete. But its cc lasts less than one second. And it's only cancelable via iframe, lbp, guard. 2 of 3 being skills with movement. So if heilang successfully inflicts stiffness I don't have much time, if any, to cancel the ending and close the gap with a skill like cloud stomping because getting up on the pole takes the duration of the stiffness. Running to them with 2-3 dashes would take longer than a single stiffness…it pretty much makes howling useless outside of pve especially because dog targeting is bad, skill animation is too slow, introduces openings (no protections), unable to follow up cc because of .7sec stiffness cc duration and gap to close. unless the dog hits the proper target and gets multiple stiffnesses which in turn would mess up the potential combo chains .

Once I press howling I need to cancel it with an iframe then close whatever gap exists between me and my opponent all within the window a single stiffness(.7 seconds) would allow if successfully applied. Currently this is impossible unless i'm right next to the person(if i was and was doing something unprotected like howling i probably already lost the fight.) 

Random ideas 

Succession heilang quickmount

Succession heilang cloud stomping

Succession heilang swap places with dog