I Love 4.0 Summoner. A lot.

[Ariomi]

Yes.. which is why I said, "Just in different areas."

Took me two pulls in Lahsmi ex to get a good parse on summoner. Purple parse numbers, with no astro, and the only buff being battle litany.
And there is literally nothing to the class. Dots up, Ruin 3 till your mana is lower, Ruin 3 More when Lucid Dream, Fester thrice Dreadwyrm Contagion Tri-Disaster ruin 3 spam deathflare. Repeat until Bahamut, Ahk morn as he is summoned, ruin 2 addle ruin 2 until ahk morn off cooldown and back to dots and dreadwyrm.
And those intricacies, you talk about, revolve around Summoner as a whole being dumbed down. You can debate with putting your pet on sic with the Op. I don't do it personally but the fact they do it, means Summoner requires even less effort.

Summoner's current intricacies include: Deciding to Contagion the first dreadwyrm trance then using it on the next one, or going into dreadwyrm early and popping contagion on bahamut. Using as much Ruin 3 as possible to get the most out of lucid dream, using addle to squeeze out one last wyrmwave, and that's literally it.

I have an issue with summoner when ways for it to outdps a bard are made impossible. Can't fester in dreadwyrm, and everything about the class is funky.

https://www.fflogs.com/statistics/17#boss=42

Click here. You will be hard pressed to find a fight where Summoner has more dps then a bard, a support class mind you. Support class meaning lower personal dps, with the trade off of high utility. And unless every summoner who has ever played including you doesn't know how to play the class properly and there is a way to achieve higher numbers then a bard, then the class is too simple, and the dps too low.

[i2agnarok]

SMN is above BRD in Hali, Exdeath, and Neo Exdeath, though...

They're even above BRD if you filter by All Bosses. For the record, I don't totally disagree, but I think "hard pressed," is a bit of a stretch....

[Dregenfox]

The issue here is that everyone's saying summoner is dumbed down and ez, but the DPS among summoners varies a LOT compared to an easy class like monk/rdm. If we look at it from an unbiased POV then summoner is a difficult DPS class to play, because not all of the decisions are intuitive or obvious.

For example, you have AF off CD and 3x DWT stacks, I guarantee you some SMN's will use up the full duration of their DWT, while others will pop trance, tri, and flare immediately so they can pop AF. It's not really obvious to most people which one results in higher DPS because most don't treat this game as a math problem.

OTOH it's very obvious when playing monk when you're supposed to pop tornado kick, and when you should keep up GL3. All you need to learn are the fight mechanics - it's very easy to see that you need to save your oGCD's for your RoF window, and that maximizing DPS requires hitting your positionals.

Did you know that the hard modes in most games doesn't change the actual difficulty, it only makes the enemies hit harder or gives you less lives/health? That's pretty much what summoner is. It's Super Mario with 1 life. Mess up once and you have to start over from the beginning.

[Ariomi]

SMN is above BRD in Hali, Exdeath, and Neo Exdeath, though...

They're even above BRD if you filter by All Bosses. For the record, I don't totally disagree, but I think "hard pressed," is a bit of a stretch....

It's like a 20 dps difference with Hali, Bard being only slightly lower, and if you are looking at exdeath and neo, Summoner is in the same situation with Red Mage.

Red Mage and Bard bring much more utility, and bring better, or similar amounts of dps. I wonder how much of Summoner dps there, is fluff from adds.

[Dyvid]

It's like a 20 dps difference with Hali, Bard being only slightly lower, and if you are looking at exdeath and neo, Summoner is in the same situation with Red Mage.

Red Mage and Bard bring much more utility, and bring better, or similar amounts of dps. I wonder how much of Summoner dps there, is fluff from adds.

Can you explain the utility that RDM is bringing? I know the unlimited Rez is a thing now but once players move on to farming it's a moot point because you won't have a lot of deaths that the healer can't deal with. Other than that what else does RDM have over SMN? Just curious really.

[Ariomi]

Can you explain the utility that RDM is bringing?

Red Mage has Embolden, which is a buff to all physical damage for 20 Seconds. Starts at 10% and dwindles down. Summoner brings 2% Physical damage increase with radiant shield, or contagion which is 10% magic damage increase for 10 seconds. You will hardly notice either buffs.

Red Mage heavily synergies with teams, as most teams only have one caster(Caster being red mage), meaning that if you have Bard, Ninja, and a Monk, Embolden would stack with things such as Foe Requiem, Brotherhood, and Trick attack would benefit all the dps and the tanks more then Contagion and Radiant Shield are able to. Summoner is also more selfish with their mana, (They need their mp to do more damage,) While Red Mage can freely Mana pass to Bard's to extend Foe Requiem without it effecting their dps. A Mana Pass would steal two Ruin 3's from a summoner.

[Tsumdere]

SMN is above BRD in Hali, Exdeath, and Neo Exdeath, though...

They're even above BRD if you filter by All Bosses. For the record, I don't totally disagree, but I think "hard pressed," is a bit of a stretch....

Sample size for Halli, Exdeath and Neo Exdeath are incredibly skewed.

Also you have to take into consideration the difference in number between SMN and BRD parses. On Neo Exdeath, there are 31 (THIRTY ONE) total SMN parses compared to BRDs 551. The SMN numbers you see on Neo Exdeath are the BEST of the BEST of all SMNs in the world, while BRD numbers are mixed between the best BRDs and the above average BRDs. Even then, the max parsing BRD still beats the max parsing SMN and the SMN average with how skewed it is, is still only a inkling 20 dps above RDM average with 479 parses.

Once more average players begin to reach those fights, you'll start seeing averages very similar to Alte Roite.

[Dregenfox]

Red Mage has Embolden, which is a buff to all physical damage for 20 Seconds. Starts at 10% and dwindles down. Summoner brings 2% Physical damage increase with radiant shield, or contagion which is 10% magic damage increase for 10 seconds. You will hardly notice either buffs.

I read on reddit test thread that Radiant shield actually reflects damage off both aoe magical and physical attacks, but doesn't show up in parser. If true summoners are doing ~150 or so dps more that's not included in fflogs, which could account for why their DPS looks so low. Especially with the 3x physical meta and nerfed contagion it just doesn't seem worth it to bring garuda over ifrit.

Anyway it's still worth it to consider these buffs since the ifrit shield can account for as much as 5% of a summoner's dps contribution. Though yeah the garuda magic-only buff seems lackluster in comparison, prob 1% at best.

[Ariomi]

Anyway it's still worth it to consider these buffs since the ifrit shield can account for as much as 5% of a summoner's dps contribution. Though yeah the garuda magic-only buff seems lackluster in comparison, prob 1% at best.

As a Summoner, I have never seen Radiant Shield Proc off anything Magical. The only exceptions are things like Sophia's tank buster, which count as physical? In Susano, During Lightning phase, only auto attacks seems to proc it. And Radiant Shield would be more like 1-2% of a Summoner's dps at maximum. Even if you were to include 50 potency scaled from a tank.

[Dyvid]

I read on reddit test thread that Radiant shield actually reflects damage off both aoe magical and physical attacks, but doesn't show up in parser. If true summoners are doing ~150 or so dps more that's not included in fflogs, which could account for why their DPS looks so low. Especially with the 3x physical meta and nerfed contagion it just doesn't seem worth it to bring garuda over ifrit.

Anyway it's still worth it to consider these buffs since the ifrit shield can account for as much as 5% of a summoner's dps contribution. Though yeah the garuda magic-only buff seems lackluster in comparison, prob 1% at best.

This is correct but FFlogs is finally shows the damage but it's added to the player hit not the summoners. On average the dps from RS is equal to Flaming Crush, Crimson Cyclone, Inferno (......), and even some fights it creeps up to shadow flare levels.