Shock Squall

[gheldhart]

It's true, i've also done my fair share of complaining. I honestly don't see why such an epic class like summoner is one of the weaker and useless classes in the game. It makes no sense given the history of the job. All i'm saying is, maybe SE wanted us to suffer til 99 before we are epic?! I don't know. I mean, they tried to give us a bit of a boost with the Merit (2) abilities, but they didn't exactly pan out that great. I just don't see SE actually making any significant changes to summoner, it doesn't seem that important to them. They'd rather please the samurai's, ninja's and the warriors. I still like the class, but it's just not what it should be, kind of a let down.

[Dekusuta]

SMN were epic briefly with Odin and Alexander and elemental siphon.

As I noted in my Stout Servant thread, our losing ground isn't due to our lack of power. We're still the #1 go to job for a lot of NMs because of our ability to be fairly low maintenance and summoning avatars in perpetuity and the avatar's still decent damage output.

What has seen a huge imbalance is 1) our abilities - majority of the wards we got since the level cap are useless or very situational and the Rage pacts we got came too early, and for pets rarely used and are too weak by BP2 merit standards

2) Other jobs have increased exponentially in power. Beastmasters is a good example. Even pups got Dues Ex Machina allowing them to resummon their pets ad infinitum. We haven't had the same job changing change in the last 20 levels.

The only positive development for SMN has been the MP regen and -perp from gear available has far outstripped the perp cost, allowing even modestly geared SMN to get 2-3 MP per tick.

It's likely there will be a new tier of Rage pacts at 99 so we could well see a latent reward for SMN.

Edit: Merit2s are pretty powerful and even more powerful if you decide to take it to tier 5 and gear and merit your SMN properly. Inside and outside Abysssea. They are your #1 nukes. With +12 MAB trial staff, +10 MAB from merits and +6 MAB from neck and waist.