Quote Originally Posted by givemeraptors View Post
O_O

Are you serious?

Wait...you're the same person in the other thread wondering why anyone would bring a SMN over a BLM to a raid. Yeah... I'm going to guess you don't know how to play your job properly.
You're saying SMN pet DPS is noticeable?
Maybe you're the one who doesn't do their job properly.

In fact, that's the problem I'm getting at: Aside from Contagion, pets largely don't matter.

Quote Originally Posted by Ardan View Post
Go sit in Akiza's corner, you'd have two things in common: you don't know jack and have a cult-like love for summoner.
When I think of which class to select, I think of two things:
1) What does its job well enough to stand-out?
2) What does it do?

SMN in FF14 is the typical DoT Killer with a Pet archetype. However, it doesn't exactly do either of these very well.
SMN is pretty great in a long-term fight where it can let DoTs tick, take advantage of Contagion, and properly use Fester. However, that's about it. SMN sucks pretty hard for AoE and for mobs that die in less than 15 seconds, those DoTs don't add up to enough damage to justify casting them. In which case, you're probably going to SF + Ruin spam anyway. If that's what we're looking for to get through trash mobs, I'd rather invite a BLM and have it AoE everything down so we can clear in less than the hour it'd take for the SMN.
As I said above, pets also don't contribute much. Aside from Contagion, do you give a shit what your pet is doing? Do you even use Ifrit or Titan? I can't remember the last time I went into a dungeon using anything more than Garuda. I can't remember the last time I saw another SMN using Ifrit or Titan either. If Contagion didn't exist, pets still wouldn't matter.

And that's the problem. Is this another DoT Killer mage with a pet? Affliction Warlock would disagree.
Is this a pet class with DoTs for sustained DPS? Considering how negligible your pet is, obviously not.

So, really, what the hell is SMN? Obviously it's an identity crisis. If this game didn't have raids, we wouldn't have SMN.