Hi, Tsundere Imouto here.

I've been looking for a job in this game that isn't just auto-combos and set rotations. I wanted a job that takes awareness and true resource management. I wanted a job that felt like there was always something better I could be doing. I played SMN in 3.0 because it was the closest thing to that, but it was still pretty straightforward once you started to understand it.

A lot of people have called 4.0 Summoner clunky, and to be fair to them, it is. Skills are seemingly arbitrarily locked behind other skills (rouse and bahamut, aetherflow and dreadwyrm trance). However, I see this as things that you can do correctly and incorrectly. If you fail to account for any of these things in advance, you are punished for them. Summoner now requires forethought, planning, intense management of your resources and knowledge of the fight timings. In short, it feels like when I make a correct or incorrect decision on Summoner, it makes a tangible difference.

One complaint I will address here is that Summoner's don't feel like a true pet class, because your pet is simply following your orders. A lot of people have also had the complaint that Bahamut is stupid because he just sits there if you are stunned. I do not understand these people. Bahamut, to me, is a very interesting pet to manage and work with. When I summon Bahamut, it feels like he and I are fighting together; I meaningfully change the way that I play Summoner when Bahamut is active, by reserving "off global cooldown" abilities and using them one by one to eke more Wyrmwaves out of him. Bahamut is cool because I have to plan in advance and work to get him to deal maximum damage; if he just flew in and did a big akh morn and left, it would be boring. As it is now, there are tons of things to think about with him, especially when you take AoE phases into account.

There are some things I would change about Summoner. Pets are unresponsive to no fault of the player, and this needs to change. Enkindle can currently be desynchronized from Rouse if you get too many Ruin IV procs to no fault of the player. There are others, too, but I consider these things managable next to the gratifying challenge of playing the class correctly.

I felt like making this post as a dissent to the common opinion here. Personally, I feel like Summoner is weak and undertuned numerically compared to Red Mage and post-buff Black Mage, but I find playing Summoner very fun nonetheless. I honestly think more jobs should be like Summoner; one of the reasons I haven't played Red Mage is because it's so simple and straightforward, I could learn it in a single day and mostly understand all of what was important and what I should do. People say it "flows well," but to me, you're never making any interesting decisions, so I don't understand what people mean by that. Does it flow well because the next thing you should do is always obvious?

Summoner is cool. Unlike the other casters, your mana management actually means something important, and you are encouraged with your options to save whenever you can and refrain from overflowing. Unlike the other jobs in the game, your Global Cooldown abilities are very straightforward; you put your DoTs on and Ruin. But your off global cooldowns and the time-flexible resources they're attached to (bahamut, aetherflow) are really cool because you can save them for big DPS windows and try to maximize their effectiveness under effects like trick attack, potion, contagion, etc. Summoner encourages you to watch everything and think about when you are using it, as opposed to jobs like Samurai who have maybe 2 or 3 things to watch, and a shallow flowchart of what to do depending on what is off cooldown.

So, thank you for making a Job that is challenging in ways that push me to always try to be better and get more out of it. I know I am not representative of the whole; many people dislike that Summoner has become so difficult to keep track of. I really enjoy challenges and I think that Summoner is very engaging in that right. Thanks for reading my post.