Summoner 5.05 changes are in

[Hasrat]

I'm not really a high level player. Hell, still leveling my SMN from 60 right now, not maining it by any means. But, for me, it almost doesn't really even feel like it has a "rotation" as much as spamming a bunch of oGCD and weaving in Ruins where you can. I might be missing something, maybe it all starts clicking together with Bahamut and/or Phoenix. But, it doesn't even really feel like there's a particular flow to this job, it's just a bunch of stuff you can use whenever.

[Taranok]

At least 4.0 SMN was actually so busted that it was top DPS and that made up for it. 5.0 SMN is just the absolute worst.

SMN wasn't busted in 4.0. They gave it some buffs in...4.05 I think? Maybe 4.1? It didn't become busted until Demi-Bahamut was made 160 potency wyrmwaves and the DoTs buffed to 1050 potency combined, which was later nerfed (Wyrmwave) because SMN had the whole oGCD echoing on DB as well that basically busted the classes balance. I'm not 100% sure when it happened, but it definitely wasn't at launch.

I'm not really a high level player. Hell, still leveling my SMN from 60 right now, not maining it by any means. But, for me, it almost doesn't really even feel like it has a "rotation" as much as spamming a bunch of oGCD and weaving in Ruins where you can. I might be missing something, maybe it all starts clicking together with Bahamut and/or Phoenix. But, it doesn't even really feel like there's a particular flow to this job, it's just a bunch of stuff you can use whenever.

This is kind of the big issue. My biggest complaint is that SMN doesn't really have a rotation right now, and I describe it as "John Madden" because of how much it has to throw out, and it tends to pulse in waves. It has very limited resources for unpenalized movement and has to just follow so many separate timers. It has substantial amounts of time wasted under FBT because ruination doesn't impact it at all, and the class fundamentally lacks flow.

The biggest giveaway to a rotation being bad is when you see players doing unnatural or tedious things to maximize damage. E.G. it's unnatural to end DWT early. You can, but it's unnatural to. And you're expected to with the current SMN to maximize DPS.

After leveling both Machinist and Bard, as well as Black Mage, I can safely say Summoner's rotation is by far the worst of all of them, outright, hands down. Bard actually handles the "Manage a bunch of different cooldowns and timers" gameplay that SMN is trying to handle far better than Summoner does, and Machinist handles "Busy rotation that flows well but has some hiccups" better.

Summoner's rotation just...isn't. It doesn't have one so it feels like a chaotic mess that's constantly fighting itself instead of complimenting itself.

So this means that there's either a big SMN redesign in the works, or the development team has just given up on SMN entirely. Either way, I'm probably best off just giving up on SMN entirely now, not even worth levelling to do the caster DPS role quests.

It's worth leveling, because DB and DP are legitimately awesome. But the class has a lot of issues right now, and the biggest are its ST and AoE rotation feel like complete and utter crap.