If i had the Wheel Part 3

[Alhanelem]

Its not the most useful thing you can do with the wards, spamming all the buffs makes them operate like a pseudobard

I mean it's quite busy, but with a decent enough master level you can already rotate all the major buffs you might want to use. We don't really need Conduit for buffing in the first place.

SMN Mostly paying attention to the pet and your own positioning and casting many spells to support

Honestly in a lot of content with the right gear and positioning you can use your staff to set up SC/MB, people vastly underestimate the value of this. Even SMN can obtain enough -DT to not get instantly deleted by stuff. You can't get away with this everywhere, no, but even in "real" content SMN can do more than be a gimp WHM with a few neat tricks. The only real problem is just SMN is a "not savage blade" job, so there's no way to do stupid damage with minimal effort. It's kind of funny because in the old days, SMN was usable with basically no gear, and today it needs a ton of stuff.

[Delgear]

Part of the problem isnt just what summoner can and cant currently do, it is also the perception of summoner and what it can and cannot do. I think you are being abit dishonest to yourself when considering how much gear you need to be where you are talking about like every newbie just hitting 99 on summoner can just immediately do all that stuff and participate in end game content. The worst part is what you need to to do that in engame is in fact also gated by endgame gear and large amounts of gil.

Summoner's gear, strategies, and gameplay need to be much more clearly communicated to players. no you cannot just spam all the releveant buffs with normal or low gear for lvl 119. you need almost completely upgraded JSE gear and +1 apogee gear, something no brand new summoner at 99 is going to have an easy time aquiring. Chances are the community will instead force them to not play summoner to get the gear to allow them to play summoner.

I think if you don't believe that than we arent going to find any agreement here, i think you are too far detached from what a summoner fresh to 99 feels like in current day. Especially a new player alone. Understanding how to gear summoned pets is not clear or understandabale to a layman attempting to play the game. long winded research in pet Macc Matt and blood pact damage and how much they are constantly toggling tons of gear and needing so much more lateral improvement than many other jobs (save maybe RDM and PUP) and i myself play RDM in endgame quite frequently as well as Summoner. I still as a NIrvana and near BIS summoner have quite a hard time getting anyone to let me play it in a party ever.

[Delgear]

I think making them touch on and work like either a bard (via buff slots and stronger buffs so they line up with bard and cor and dont need to be able to keep up so many) bard and cor just spam thier buffs and then they get to be dd's or in bards situation possibly backup healer. SMN spends a much more drastic amount of thier time spamming those buffs, its not particularly comfortable or fun way to try to heal, nor will you have anywhere near the amount of time to dd as a cor/brd/geo will get sof the same benefit. It reminds me greatly of the era of FFXI when redmage just spammed refresh and haste on everyone and that was thier entire gameplay.

They could also honestly function much like a geo (Shiva/ifrit/ramuh already operate much like a luopan) simply provide an aura around the summoner as well base don which avatar they have out or which they activated a ward on to create the aura, and give each avatar an entrust typse blood pact ? Thats not to say i want the classes to be identical but if they are similar at least they will be easier to understand for a new player glancing at the class. The difficulty of equipping a summoner is kinda crazy in comparison to even most other pet jobs (except maybe pup which is even more complex). you should on summoner have an Idle set (Omen), A healer/support set(Dynamis Divergence), Pet stats to dd/debuff should be handled by communal gear from ambuscade to save everyone (DRG, BST, PUP, SMN) space in moghouse they all want high accuracy/macc/att/matt for thier pets to macro in when using an ability.

They are on so many peices of gear that are useless and for PUP and BST and they arent on plenty of gear from them that they really need(like DT-) how they deal damage is such a huge math dive to determine if BP+ damage or macc or att or double attack ect. is more useful. it isnt apparent like it is on melees which ataacks will necessarily scale well or even which are hybrid without deep dives into mechanics hidden fromt he player on the surface and only explained in dusty old forum posts and BG articles.

By all means restart your AF quest and get it to 119 and use ambuscade gear and tell me how fun trying to buff and heal a party feels today in 2025. I'm pretty sure you're going to have abad time. Hell try to magic burst for a party, chances are they wont even bother because a fresh warrior can just spam non skillchain ws's for more damage than building a skillcain for you and allowing you to burst would provide. its the modern era so twitch it, se ehow people react to the mere suggestion of what you claim is possible that you don't already know personally from playing the game presumadly for years.

[Delgear]

I can tell you i got summoner to I119 a few years ago and ive probbaly only had the opportunity to use it like 20 times in 3+ years when not soloing even if summoner could very well have filled its role i was trying to get someone to allow me to play it for. Its clunky, and it shows the difficulty of understanding the class doesnt just affect the person playing it, the people not playing because they also don't understand what summoner is supposed to and can do will just assume it can't or its not worth the stress to be able to and pick simpler communicated jobs, that honestly at present do actually meaningfully outperform summoner in all its roles save for AFAK fights.

I also play on Asura where the majority of remaining players reside so if there was going to be pockets of people willing to accept summoner it would be there on the most populated and diverse server.

[Alhanelem]

Part of the problem isnt just what summoner can and cant currently do, it is also the perception of summoner and what it can and cannot do. I think you are being abit dishonest to yourself when considering how much gear you need to be where you are talking about like every newbie just hitting 99 on summoner can just immediately do all that stuff and participate in end game content. The worst part is what you need to to do that in engame is in fact also gated by endgame gear and large amounts of gil.

Well, it was much more true that you didn't really need gear pre-level99 and all the new progression stuff. But I think you misread the post. I said IN THE OLD DAYS, SMN was usable without any gear, and this was true. There was very, very little gear beyond the AF/relic that made avatars stronger. Nowadays there's tons of gear for SMN. But back then, gear was almost useless outside of playing your subjob like it was your main job. And unfortunately, that was a common thing.

[Delgear]

Yeah i can agree to that i remember playing summoner as a /WHM healer from the dunes until level cap. I do't really want a return to that either. I think if summoner heals/supports/or DD's it should be through thier summoned pet. They are the most reliant on the pet jobs of thier pets being alive and they have the least ability to do so at present.

In fact one of my pet peeves it that they don't ever seem to even try to make summoner a viable or useful subjob as well. i could see a whm/sch/rdm enjoying carby or leviathan there to help with debuff removal or healing throughput. but alas they have almost never made any relevant gear for SMN to be supported as a subjob.

[Delgear]

I'm going to be honest, i think it would also help summoner to remove the perpetuation cost for avatars since it is so trivial to get to 0 and then that frees up a line on thier late game gear for more important stats on idle sets they are currently missing (Pet DT-, pet TP gain type stats, Pet regen, Avatar's favor (GEO idea), Ward Potency(BRD idea), just replace with refresh instead of Perp -)

[Alhanelem]

I'm going to be honest, i think it would also help summoner to remove the perpetuation cost for avatars since it is so trivial to get to 0 and then that frees up a line on thier late game gear for more important stats on idle sets they are currently missing (Pet DT-, pet TP gain type stats, Pet regen, Avatar's favor (GEO idea), Ward Potency(BRD idea), just replace with refresh instead of Perp -)

While its easy to negate in the late game, it's still a key part of early game balance for the job, so I don't see it being removed. They'd also have to update all such gear to replace it with something else.