Dear Summoners...

[Lollie]

Ifrit-egi is not a drg thank you, he can't tank the floor if he never touches it.

[TruebladeNuke]

Given some of the runs I've seen in WoD, I've always been tempted to bring out Titan-Egi as a SMN when I see the Tanks NOT pulling adds and getting their attention off the rest of the party. I call those Tanks "lolTank".

I'll admit when I first joined this game, ARC/SMN was actually my first go to class while I was still learning the game, and kept my pets on "Sic" instead so that I didn't think about having to micro-managing my pet while I'm still learning just how to play as the class itself. I imagine most of the low level ARCs/SMNs I see felt/feel the same way as they're still learning the class itself. It wouldn't surprise me if there were notable "lolSMN" players out there if they insisted on keeping the pet on "Sic" even after they've had tons of time to learn the class.

Fast forward to today, after all the time I've spent Tanking and Healing dungeons over DPSing, (WAY more in fact... and I kinda really took a liking to Tanking, lol) I eventually went back to my SMN... and couldn't help but notice the stun moves on Ifrit and Titan this time around, along with Garuda's own version of Fluid Aura, which by itself can act like Fluid Aura and interrupt a spell cast of an enemy. I switched to using "Obey" at that point, I rebuilt my SMN hotbar action list to not only consist of User Macro inputs to tell the pet to do something, (Usually, telling them to unleash an AoE burst) but I've even set their stun/push moves as separate actions on my hotbar, so that I can manually order them to stun an enemy should the Tank I happen to be working with end up being a "lolTank". (Or, in the WAR's case, they already used their stun move and can't use it again for a bit) Heck, I find myself doing this as all DPS roles in general now. I've Tanked dungeons so much that I have a habit of timing my DPS stun moves like I'm Tanking the dungeon, forcing myself to remind myself that the Tank player has that covered unless I see otherwise, lol. (Oh, and I've got Garuda's "increase length of debuffs" set as a separate hotbar action too)

By doing this though with my SMN hotbar, I DO get a lot of them annoying error messages saying "You're current pet can't do that" and all that, but I feel I made SMN more fun for myself by taking more control over what my pet does. Who knew taking all that time Tanking dungeons and knowing when to stun/silence an enemy as said Tank would do so many wonders for how I view stunning/silencing enemies as a DPS?

[Lilyarel]

*snip*

Marcoing summoner pets isnt all that hard. Since they barely take damage from AOEs and benefit from medica 2, you dont need to move them all that much. Unless the boss has a swipe auto attack then you should move them. But other than that you never need to activate ifrits spells when youre using him on a boss unless its a very specific boss like the scorpion in Satasha HM. Garuda is the same. Only difference with her is activating Contagion.

[TruebladeNuke]

Marcoing summoner pets isnt all that hard. Since they barely take damage from AOEs and benefit from medica 2, you dont need to move them all that much. Unless the boss has a swipe auto attack then you should move them. But other than that you never need to activate ifrits spells when youre using him on a boss unless its a very specific boss like the scorpion in Satasha HM. Garuda is the same. Only difference with her is activating Contagion.

Already knew that thanks.

[FoxyAreku]

I like Summoners who have garuda on Sic on the first boss of tam tara hard.

[Zaft]

Honestly, they need to do what WoW did and turn off the auto-cast on every ability except the basic DPS abilities. You're a pet class. You should be micromanaging your pet. If that's too hard, don't play a pet class.

[Buff_Archer]

Speaking of macros, this one is really helpful for Garuda and her Aerial Slash AOE so I get more frequent use out of it with her on Obey, by tying it to another ability I use when enemies are in close range of each other:

/ac "bane" <t>
/pac "aerial slash" <t>

And with error messages disabled, if the latter is on cooldown or I have a different pet out, bane still works with no annoying messages. If I wanted to bane without unbinding already slept/binded targets this would interfere with that but if you're not level synced below where you get aerial slash, odds are super high you're fighting something that can't be bound/slept already. And you can always rebind them if they're bindable, like soloing open world mobs. I've replaced bane on my main hot bar for SMN with this macro it works so well for me.

[Kuurei]

Titan-Egi is our lord and savior in awkward situations, tbh. More tanks should hope to be a floating chicken nugget with as much hp, defenses, and strength as he.

[Mature]

Fail thread

[Tsukino]

Not that Summoners shouldn't use Obey instead of Sic, but this is at the very bottom of the list of things done wrong in at least my last...30 World of Darkness runs?