Can someone give me an in-depth explanation why Summoner is arguably the worst DPS?

[Brianmj]

You know what is telling about this thread and all the others concerning Summoner? Game players make horrible game designers. Suggestion are just thrown out with no regard for balance, no regard to how said suggestions would affect player behavior. No regard to how job abilities are played out in other systems (pvp, levemetes, guildhiests etc) You feel Tri-disaster is useless? I use it all the time. It's a very important kiting tool. Just because you have no use for it doesn't mean someone else doesn't.

[ShaolinMike]

Just a hunch I guess - When they buffed dragoon, they said it was because they monitored player activity and noticed that the frequency of dragoons being included had been decreasing due to the issues. If it is in fact true that people are either saying no to SMN's in their group, or switching to BLM for ease of use, then I'm pretty confident that Square will step in, as they are quite afraid of a job "dying" IMO.

I could be wrong.

This is what I'm REALLY hoping for, as I continue to spend time working on my Nexus. Please, SE, don't make me regret it lol.

[Ardan]

You know what is telling about the thread and all the others concerning Summoner? Game players make horrible game designers. Suggestion are just thrown out with no regard for balance, no regard to how said suggestions would affect player behavior. You feel Tri-disaster is useless? I use it all the time. It's a very important kiting tool. Just because you have no use for it doesn't mean someone else doesn't.

Unless it's PVP or maps, Tri-Disaster is largely a useless skill that serves no purpose. The enemies in newer dungeons will flat-out resist sleep and bind. It's not completely useless as a skill, sure, but it doesn't change the fact that it needs to be looked at.

[Tex_Mex]

@Brianmj

None of us here claim to be game designers man. Obviously SE has to take everything said in forums with a grain of salt because it will always be biased, one way or another. But that statement is true about everything ever said about everything EVER! So making a point to call it out is kind of a waste of time.

Regardless, there have been some really good ideas out of these forums. Things like summon pets party buffs, slight changes to skills or mechanics, discussion on stat weights etc. You just have to ignore all the trolls, wade through the very extreme BS, and look for the little bit of usefulness that is here. If that isn't a life lesson, i don't know what is.

[Akiza]

So a 30 sec CD on enkindle AND a pet damage buff of 20% is extreme. I think there should be buffs, but that is too much. Remember that ifrit accounts for ~ 120 dps while auto attacking (i110 weapon), so a 20% buff is a 24 dps increase on its own. This is pretty big. Adding to that the enkindle CD reduction is too much. Plus it fails to address the sustainability issues that are the big issue.

I prefer a more subtle approach. Give fester a 50% chance to allow the next energy drain to cost no aetherflow stacks. This solves the sustainability issue while also providing marginally more dps. (5-10). Baby steps please. We do not need FoTM classes, just balanced ones

More Mana won't do anything for the Summoner because they instantly lose 20% of their DPS after 4min and it rapodly declines even more after that. The problem is DoT is not built around sustained damage it's built around spike damage in the form of Aetherflow and Fester. Reducing the cool down on Enkindle and increasing the pet damage by 20% will be in increase of 54-75.6 DPS but it'll realistic be a flat DPS increase of 60 or = to increasing the pet damage by 27-33%.

[Tex_Mex]

More Mana won't do anything for the Summoner because they instantly lose 20% of their DPS after 4min and it rapodly declines even more after that. The problem is DoT is not built around sustained damage it's built around spike damage in the form of Aetherflow and Fester. Reducing the cool down on Enkindle and increasing the pet damage by 20% will be in increase of 54-75.6 DPS but it'll realistic be a flat DPS increase of 60.

The reason their DPS drops off after 4 minutes is because they run out of mana and are forced to energy drain instead of fester. More mana alleviates that problem entirely, since you can spend your aetherflows on festers instead of energy drains. Oh ya, I was told earlier not to take you seriously. Got it.

[Sleigh]

The reason their DPS drops off after 4 minutes is because they run out of mana and are forced to energy drain instead of fester. More mana alleviates that problem entirely, since you can spend your aetherflows on festers instead of energy drains. Oh ya, I was told earlier not to take you seriously. Got it.

It's actually because Rouse + Spur come up at that point and you have nothing strong after that except for Enkindle (which is best throttled until the next Rouse + Spur unless you can attack multiple targets with it in this window) until the next RS, which is 6 minutes in (where SMN is very strong again CD wise, RS + Aetherflow stacks + Contagion + Rouse + Spur + throttled Enkindle, but MP issues).

Although yes I do agree with you, SMN damage is more or less okay. A small boost would be nice, nothing major needed. It just needs to be able to put it out 100% in a real fight.

[Akiza]

The Black Mage destroys the Summoner in every area single target, aoe, survivability and utility. Black Mage's also have a soft DPS cap so they can easily exceed DPS checks with the minimum amount of gear while the Summoner can't they have to over gear endgame raids to viable. Despite what many people think Black Mage is sustained damage all of their spells hit instantly and they are able to maintain their damage around their maximum. Summoner's are spike damage there DPS starts high then after 4min their DPS rapidly declines because they instantly lose 27% of their dps for 60s since they have no Aetherflow stacks, Shadow Flare is a waste of mp to cast and enkindle is on an ungodly long 300s cool down for a move that contributes to 2% of our total DPS. Even with all of our DoTs ticking which is 35% of our Dps with the pet doing around 28% and ruin spam 10% anyone can plainly see during the phase in which Summoner's are out of Aetherflow stacks we lose 27 - 30% of our DPS for a minute which is 8100 damage if they do around 450 DPS and 40,500 damage over the course of a 10 min fight. That is if a Summoner plays perfectly if the Summoner is good or average they can easily lose 60,000 damage over a 10 min fight which lose of 100 DPS that is the issue with Summoner players are punished for playing perfectly and brutally punished for being good or average.

[Judge_Xero]

Summoner's are spike damage there DPS starts high then after 4min their DPS rapidly declines because they instantly lose 27% of their dps for 60s since they have no Aetherflow stacks, Shadow Flare is a waste of mp to cast and enkindle is on an ungodly long 300s cool down for a move that contributes to 2% of our total DPS. Even with all of our DoTs ticking which is 35% of our Dps with the pet doing around 28% and ruin spam 10% anyone can plainly see during the phase in which Summoner's are out of Aetherflow stacks we lose 27 - 30% of our DPS for a minute which is 8100 damage if they do around 450 DPS and 40,500 damage over the course of a 10 min fight. That is if a Summoner plays perfectly if the Summoner is good or average they can easily lose 60,000 damage over a 10 min fight which lose of 100 DPS that is the issue with Summoner players are punished for playing perfectly and brutally punished for being good or average.

Please tell me how you make your 3 Festers do 8100 Damage. The best I could do with lucky crits is probably closer to 4500 Damage (75 DPS), but on average it's more like 3200 Damage (53 DPS)

nvm

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To OP, I agree with others that it sounds like you don't want to play SMN.

As to why SMN is the worst DPS, is because it's a DoT class. It is punished for things dying quick, because you don't get the full potency of a spell if your dots don't run their full duration. Not only are the dots expensive, but they are also incredibly weak if they don't run their full duration.
Because of this you have to constantly plan ahead limit your resources to keep MP and maintain as much damage as you can.

I.E. Main boss has all 3 dots, Shadow Flare and you just refreshed Contagion. 1 single mobs spawns with ~20,000 HP. (it has to be tanked on the opposite side of the arena, because if it gets too close to the boss the arena explodes) Between you and your other DPS party members you have 1800 DPS, so this mob is going to die in ~11 seconds.
Do you
A: put all three dots on this mob, Fester and Swift Cast Shadow Flare
B: toss on Bio and just Ruin Spam
C: Energy Drain X 3
D: Ignore the add and just continue to attack the main boss.

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Then you can ask yourself...how could I know how much HP this mobs has? and how the hell do I know on the fly what the Raid DPS is between the members attacking this mob.

Rhetorical Question of course, since you can't really know, you can only guess. But unfortunately for SMN, it could be the difference of:
(in addition to what your dots are doing to the main boss)

A: 1500 Damage for 650 MP
B: 1550 Damage for 422 MP (plus an unused Aetherflow Stack - 1000 Damage to use on the main boss wahoo!!)
C: 1575 Damage for 0 MP and 1575 lost Damage because you just wasted your Aetherflow ><
D: A loss of 560-700 Damage (depending on the server tick) because you could at least have tossed a Bio on the add, and then Ruin'd the main boss.

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On the opposite end of the spectrum though, SE can't make Summoner's potency too high, because their are people who can think on the fly like that, and create a bit of a Monster in the DPS world. You do need a risk/reward balance as well seeing as SMN has some of the highest risk in casting any of it's spells.
SMN seems to be the worst DPS because it's reward is less than it's risk. Not saying that the class isn't amazingly fun or that is has much less damage than other classes, but for the average player you're better off playing a class where the reward at least equals the risk, that way if you can't push it to it's potential, you can at least win all the things.

[Huntington]

I said this in another SMN thread:
"I suppose I shouldn't be surprised when SMN starts falling to the wayside again in a Final Fantasy game, seems to happen over natural progression regardless. It should be getting enhanced in the future though with the issues people are all seeing in FCoB, which is end-game raid content and not necessarily quantitative of the Job's issues in other content, but with so many being brought up to speed with the other Jobs, I guess it's just SMN's time as well.

I stopped maining SMN awhile ao when I found more fun in WAR and MNK, since then I've been keeping it up to speed, but I just don't see it as the best case of how I'd like it to be played, especially if it doesn't really bring much to the table besides an occasional combat raise. If it ends up being a third rate class that no one wants in their groups like in XI, then SMN just can't be used "right" in a MMORPG'er I guess."

Maybe it's just that the fights in FCoB aren't to the favor of SMN's, maybe more people are noticing issues with it because a lot of other jobs have been enhanced in some way or another, and now the circle has come full tilt and it's SMN's turn, I don't know for sure.

I do seriously find it ironic that when I did play XI, being a SMN and being able to summon all of the best Avatars from the Final Fantasy universe was my biggest attractor for going through the hellish time of playing it on a 360 and doing all the updates and getting acclimated to the game itself. But once it was at 99 and ready to be played, I noticed nobody wanted SMNs in their groups. All your damage came from your pet, and you would be brought along as an extra WHM if it was needed basically in the content. So SMN's weren't wanted nearly as much as say Rune Fencer's, Ninjas sometimes, or Geomancers and Rangers. If you couldn't come along as a SMN, you weren't wanted at all on that class.

Is there some issue that keeps happening with SMN's in SE games? They seem to keep lagging behind in their games and most see them as crappy mages when we could be using a BLM or something else most of the time.