Should Summoner...

[Greedalox]

In the lower levels, yes, they were glorified healers with small heals and big MP pools. But in the 50's is when you start soloing bombs and beastman (beastmaster) pets (low HP, high exp, hit like trucks but avatars/summons took less dmg than players). Then at some point (for me, Boyahda Tree) you team up with beastmasters using fenrir's eclipse bite in pet parties. After that it was more bomb kiting. I definitely took that 50+ route after having to heal because it was more fun and you were a SUMMONER abusing things summoners could do, and not just cast heals from your subjob to be allowed access to a party for experience points.

That's the problem though, we as summoners were forced to have slower experience due to being unwanted, I played mainly Smn and Brd in XI and leveled the bulk of the way to 75 as Smn soloing bombs, gobbies and Snolls and whatever else was suicidal. The difference between Bard and Summoner in LFG was being asked to party while /anon and waiting 7+ days for a party as SMN. We were forced to abuse a solo play style akin to a meh BST not because we wanted to (Maybe some of us did!), but because of SE's not so stellar design on the class. I'm not saying that SMN didn't have value or wasn't fun, I'm just saying that they weren't this OMG amazing depiction of a pure pet class, they had some major flaws.

When 3+ mobs were dying a minute in a decent EXP party and you could only nuke once a minute, it certainly showed the glaring issues. They were actually more beneficial in a BAD exp group that could only kill one monster every minute or so.