Why is Summoner the most ignored, misunderstood and broken job?

[Malamasala]

So, Malamasala, let me try to understand something.

How nice of you to try and understand it.

You want SMN to be able to melee really well, buff really well, deal tons of damage with their pets, and buff amazingly well?

Depends on your rating of "really well". A SMN should melee as good as a PUP, since both jobs are at the core identical (the difference being one has MP the other doesn't). If you think PUP melee too well for a SMN to match it, then it isn't my fault that PUP is overpowered.

And yes, I want the job to buff really well. Have you taken a second glance at our buffs? 90% defensive buffs. What point is there to have weak defense buffs to not replace BRD and COR that has offense buffs? I promise you that even if SMN could give you a 24 hour icespikes effect, they'd still not replace BRDs in parties. The closest I get to challenging BRDs and CORs, is that I want more than 30 seconds Crimson Howl (with 8% attack bonus, it may as well be 15 min duration). I also don't want my howls and growls to depend on moon to be good. (Yea, I know, overpowered to be strong more often than once every 5 days)

I'm pretty sure I've never said I wanted to do more damage though. You must be confusing me with someone else. What I want is to do more debuffs with my low level pacts. Like throw out Dispel, without using my global ward timer. Apply blind to the mob, without using up my global rage pact timer.

It just hit me that maybe you meant my spirit changes? In some ways it would of course increase damage, but the main point is to increase my pet selection, rather than my damage. I also believe I have addressed that on Abyssea mobs with absorb modes, you want the BP control rather than timed nukes that might end up during an absorb mode.

Honestly, my Summoner isn't a main by any means, and I feel I know more about it than you might. But, as I said before, this is all just personal opinion.

I think you probably have to have mained it back in the old days to understand. Main healing with cure 3 for 75 levels and all your merits will make you wonder about what the job really is about. You'll start to wonder what would have happened if you didn't have cure 3. What would you do between recasts of Blood Pacts? Melee or spirits seems like the obvious choices, but neither of them would have worked. Stand and watch? It seems unlikely the design of the job was for you to just BP and clean your room until next BP.

It is these events that make you think outside the box. Trying to find the true purpose of the job, which was never achieved due to clumsy design choices. While NIN didn't become what it was intended, it grew into a powerful tank role. SMN on the other hand shrunk instead into a role-less assist healer.

Any day I'd say I agree with you about what the SMN can do. I'm well aware of it, just not interested. I'm interested in what we could be doing, with just some tweaks of values in the code. I've said it since 2004. It would only take ONE WEEK to make SMN perfect by tweaking the range/duration/recast/cost of things. Nothing new is required, just number tweaks.

I'd like to see any other job (or player) claim they'd be happy to never get anything more, just a maintenance of the existing job.