I Love 4.0 Summoner. A lot.

[Ariomi]

First off, Contagion is 15 seconds, not 10. Which means, 10% damage buff for 15 seconds is better than Embolden which starts at 10% and starts dwindling after just 4 secs. So if you hardly notice contagion, you certainly won't notice Embolden.

Contagion is insignificant as magic damage is the lowest source of damage in most fights. With one caster, and 2 healers your buffing on average maybe 800 dps each from the healers, and the caster. With Embolden, You buff both tanks, the Red Mage, and every other physical dps. Trick attack buffs all damage by 10% for 10 seconds. Embolden only drops below 8% physical damage after 8 seconds. Brotherhood is a 5% physical dps that lasts for 15 seconds, and Embolden only drops under 6% after 12 seconds. For contagion to be as good as Embolden, it would either have to last longer, be a larger increase or include all damage.

Even if you are running a comp with 2 healers 2 casters 2 melee and 2 tanks, embolden still would be better as it buffs the red mage, both melee and the tanks. (Over half the group, and the most damage dealing member's of the party)

Lastly, both Contagion and Radiant will time up with TA and other 60 sec cd's. Tri-D, Aetherflow, one Akh Morn and Shadow Flare will too. So, points about RDM's increased utility are valid, but I'd it's at least even for both classes as far as synergy goes.

Synergy wise, Summoner isn't as friendly to the one caster Meta as Red Mage. You can switch between both pets to get radiant shield and contagion, but at the cost of mana to switch your pets. and at reduced personal dps from using your mana. Red Mage is more complex in summoner when it comes to positioning and movement. Rotation wise, they are about as equally complex when you factor in RNG and when Red Mage will get their melee combo. Summoner can just ruin 2 when they need to move, and you can hold or pop deathflare whenever you want without issue. While when I play Red Mage, I only have bursts of movement, and need to juggle movement and casting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07Id6TH72Qk

[Ariomi]

Its not that the class has been simplified. They dont feel like it has lost its 3.x identity or gained a new one.. There issue is simply that the rotation is the most complex of the three and the damage is the lowest.

You are completely off the mark. Summoner's rotation is about average difficulty. The problem is Summoner's dps is low, and don't have any way of squeezing out higher dps.
The class has been heavily simplified. If you look at any rotation, people spend 10% of the time applying Gcd dots, then 90% of their time using ruin 1 2 or three. Spamming Ruin is mindless but that's how their Gcds look like. The rest of the class is nothing but using your oGCD's. Summoner doesn't have a hard rotation. It just is long, with roadblocks imposed for no reason. No positionals, no worrying about dots. You can just reapply them in 2.5s anyways. No hassling with fester in dreadwyrm trance to squeeze out damage, you apply dots, oGCD Ruin 2 Ogcd ruin 2 OGCD Ruin 2 Dreadwyrm trance ruin 2 tri-disaster ruin 3 spam and deathflare. Nothing to it. It's too simple, and the dps matches it.

From heavensward to Stormblood most classes got new abilities, Summoner's stormblood abilities just replaced what it already had, and gave them two more oGCDS. its nowhere near as complicated or intricate as it once was.

Bards have to rotate through songs, Dragoon's rotation is agreed on as generally the most difficult, Monk and Sam are fairly difficult, yet they all do better dps 99% of the time.

[Letz]

Contagion is insignificant as magic damage is the lowest source of damage in most fights. With Embolden, You buff both tanks, the Red Mage, and every other physical dps. Embolden only drops below 8% physical damage after 8 seconds. Brotherhood is a 5% physical dps that lasts for 15 seconds, and Embolden only drops under 6% after 12 seconds. For contagion to be as good as Embolden, it would either have to last longer, be a larger increase or include all damage.

You're conveniently leaving out that Embolden is on a 120 cd while contagion is 60. Which means, if you're going to compare Embolden to Contagion, you can cut Embolden's potency increase in half. It's 20 second duration is already 5% buff on average, since it declines in potency, so cutting it in half again is 2.5 potency for 20 seconds per minute, compared to contagion's solid 10 for 15 seconds, every minute. Even if there are more physical dps in the party, Embolden still doesn't win.

[Letz]

With one caster, and 2 healers your buffing on average maybe 800 dps each from the healers, and the caster.

Even if you are running a comp with 2 healers 2 casters 2 melee and 2 tanks, embolden still would be better as it buffs the red mage, both melee and the tanks. (Over half the group, and the most damage dealing member's of the party)

Btw, I don't know which healer's you've been running with but 800 dps per healer is way below the average. Any time spent scanning fflogs will show you that.

[Letz]

Red Mage is more complex in summoner when it comes to positioning and movement. SMN can just ruin 2 when they need to move, and you can hold or pop deathflare whenever you want without issue. While when I play RDM, I only have bursts of movement, and need to juggle movement and casting.

Movement and position are challenges for all 3 casters. You keep bringing up "squeezing in festers during DWT" as complexity from HW (was that really even difficult?), yet you claim you can "hold or pop DF whenever without issue"? I think you know that you can't use DF whenever you want and expect the highest numbers possible. That may be one of the ways you can up your Smn dps that you are having trouble finding. And you can't claim R2 breaks the game for Smn when literally every other cast is instant for Rdm. Again, the melee combo and it's timing is annoying at worst, but it's not complexity. Melee spend the whole fight up close and have positionals on top of that.

[Letz]

Again, summoner didn't get the best upgrades in SB, I'll agree, but the consensus is that Rdm is the dps class with the lowest skill ceiling. The range of Rdm dps in parses is not nearly as wide as the range of Smn dps. The proof is right there.

[Ceallach]

Thanks for reading my post.

You're welcome.

So, with the way summoners are right now (speaking as a summoner main for the past few months), I'd say it really is rather clunky and there do need to be some changes to make us more able to compete with red mages and black mages. However, I also don't think the job's complexity should be lost. Considering the amount of attention and planning it requires to play as a summoner well, it fits right in with the lore behind the arcanist class it's based on (see the level 30 arcanists' guild quest).

Finding a balance between the two will be the name of the game for the developers, I feel.

[Waliel]

Btw, I don't know which healer's you've been running with but 800 dps per healer is way below the average. Any time spent scanning fflogs will show you that.

Well, Astro 50th percentile is 786 for Alte Roite, so 800 DPS is technically above average.

[KarstenS]

Btw, I don't know which healer's you've been running with but 800 dps per healer is way below the average. Any time spent scanning fflogs will show you that.

It depends. In O3S in most of the good SMN DPS windows there is alot of unavoidable damage incoming. So healers have much to heal while Contagion is up.

[NovaBismarck]

I've played SMN for many years and I'll be honest I am not particularly happy with the changes. Overall, the concept of the change is solid, but there are some application problems that tend to make me cringe. I've swapped to RDM for now until they fix the death penalty issue at the very least. Shadowflare, devotion, and bahamut death penalty and his clunkyness are issues for me. Learning savages would be a nightmare on SMN. At least I know with RDM, I can rebound from dying. It seems to me that you need to know a fight very well to play SMN, otherwise you get penalized for your phase issues, i.e. bringing bahamut out at the wrong time. I can feel my heart sink and damage plummet when I get targeted for AoEs at the wrong time. This is generally not as big an issue for many other classes.

Buffs need to be strong on SMN to replace the DoTs, like they were in FFXI. I'd probably take a buff increase over dps. One approach would be to: 1. Buff party well. 2. Contribute respectable damage. It'd be one way to may SMN better but there are other approaches as well.

While I know you can't compare apples to oranges, RDM is simple in execution, it is fluent in the new content. To me, it feels like SMN does more work for less payout. I'm not sure if it's coming off of 3.0 to 4.0. My damage was respectable with the DoT content. Now, I'm always fighting to keep it up. Granted a casual player like myself doesn't have the experience of some others, but playing SMN casually now feels a bit painful. It makes me sad because I love the class so much.