Summoner Thoughts

[Ryuko]

If you pay attention to the lore of the main quest and the summoner quest, you will understand why our egis have the appearance that they do. I'm okay with this because it fits in with the lore of the world. They are pretty small, but this is okay because we are only summoning but a small fraction of the power. That has nothing to do with the 'functionality' of the class.

Our damage is really reliable, especially in situations where we have to move a lot. As long as we manage to keep our DoTs up, at least we have SOME damage rolling while we are running around avoiding all of the many abilities we need to avoid. The one problem with this is that the other mage caster, BLM, has instants that rival our DoT abilities. They can cast these on the fly, while moving. This is okay on a single-target boss where you are only kill that ONE target, but not when you have to down adds really fast. Summoners just can't compete with the instant output of a BLM. Even Fester (a great instant) takes time to 'build up' because we need to apply three DoTs to use it.

I'm okay with excelling at single-target DPS, but only if I'm actually doing BETTER at it. A black mage can keep up with us on single target DPS AND kill adds quickly and reliably. We simply can't do that. If a BLM was better at killing adds while we were better at single-targets, we'd both have our 'roles' in raids and both be needed. Right now, we simply do not. Perhaps, to alleviate the fact that we don't have any bursts that don't really rely on DoTs... our pets should get a burst that isn't once every 300 seconds. It will solidify our role as a 'pet class DD' rather than a 'DoT class that has a pet for a little extra damage'.

The pet mechanics need to be reworked. If I have to worry about constantly moving to avoid AoEs like I have to, I should be able to issue commands immediately, even while casting or waiting on GCD. It wouldn't be OP if I could tell my pet to 'follow' me or move to a certain spot the second I see the mob charging up an AoE. In my experience, healers ignore pets because they just have so much to do, and with sustain as weak as it is, I have to just recast my pet whenever it dies unless I have time to heal it. I don't like that pets automatically go back to 'guard' whenever an encounter ends. I'd like if "Obey" was a toggle ability instead of a command.

I will say, my survivability is supreme. If I'm not lagging (and getting hit by AoEs), I'm usually the last to fall during a wipe. I can also instant-raise healers and be a 'backup healer' if it's needed, which is very nice. If I do get hit by something unavoidable, I'll instantly heal myself back up so the healer doesn't have to worry about it and because I won't go oom, but the healer might. Summoners are versatile but we don't excel at any one thing. I fear that, for the time being, hardcore raiders are going to want classes that fit a niche very well.