Summoner has some real problems

[Valmarus]

Actually it was very easy to allow titan to tank, even emerald carby and ifrit with a little bit of hate management. Sure you were lowering your dps slightly but that isn't an issue for soloing. Low levels smn really needs them for damage soaking. Carby and Ifrit required a lot of healing, sometimes they would die anyway and you'd have to account for that either by prepping for an insta summon or by putting enough distance between you and the mob to resummon. As it stands low level summoner just gets completely chewed up by some basic world mobs or fate mobs. They need that damage buffer. And if they haven't changed the summoner job quests then they're goign to be a nightmare. Especially the titan one, there's so much DPS from the mobs in that one they used to chew through ifrit, and you can't leave the npc to handle it because they die and it's fail.

I know what people are going to say, low level blm doesn't have any damage barrier. Well no, but they have sleep and you use that a lot low level solo. They can also put out a lot more damage as spike damage so can spike > sleep > repeat if necessary. Or even burn it down before the mob closes the distance (though with the changes to MP costs of fireIII this may have changed since they get at most 3 casts of that now). SMN damage is a lot more of a slow burner.

The problem is everyone talks about their experience at high levels or in parties and says "ah it's all fine" but you can't balance classes completely around that in a game with so much solo content like hunt logs, challenges and fates (yes they're group content but you aren't necessarily IN a group). I keep saying it but SE haven't taking into account GETTING to 60 with these changes and soem classes have really suffered at their lower levels.

[xXAzurePrimeXx]

Summoner has a few issues, however none of the ones you mentioned are even the real ones or even the changes that we actually need.

[OmegaSinX]

nonsense

I main SMN so with a title like this, I thought you would be highlighting real issues. All of the points you brought up are petty complaints. If you want a strong physick, go play SCH. Summoner cant be great at doing everything, if it were, what would be the point of playing other classes

[Niko_Kishiko]

Is Summoner parcing bad against other jobs equally geared? Thats all I care about. I don't mind how busy the job is, I can get used to that, but if I'm busting my tail for low dps??? That sh!t doesn't fly.

[Rakith]

I thought I would find here real SMN issue.. I guess the subject must have been posted by a lvl 15 SMN?...
Never used physics never used titan egi as far as I can remember...

[Sapphidia]

As people have said, the issues you bring up arent really relevant because they affect most dps classes. Black Mage has no personal tank, just some shields. Most melee DPS have only the bare essentials of a self heal.

All of the issues can be easily fixed by one single thing - USE YOUR COMBAT CHOCOBO.

Stick some points in the healer tree to get the level 4 Choco Cure skill, then dump the rest between Tank and DPS trees, spreading points around. Bam, you have a tank for solo or something that can spam heal you without interrupting your dps. Even if you just leave them on DPS stance they're a nice solo DPS boost but a choco with a heal fixes pretty much every issue you have, especially if comboed with titan-egi.

[JarenCorax]

As people have said, the issues you bring up arent really relevant because they affect most dps classes. Black Mage has no personal tank, just some shields. Most melee DPS have only the bare essentials of a self heal.

They are issues, though, because, even if I pulled aggro off titan-egi after 3-4 hits, that's 3-4 hits that it took instead of me, and likely with the mob far away from me, because I know how to position myself and my pet so my foes spend more time running between us than getting hits in. And ultimately it isn't about how much damage is soaked by who, it's about the feel of the playstyle, and I play pet classes so that I can juggle aggro and do other fun things with my pet, and in order to do that, the pet needs to be able to aggro and take hits. If I had wanted to play a class that just blasts things, I would have picked any of those others to begin with.

In every other MMO I've played, the pets were combatants and they offered some additional pet-specific utility (cc, healing, tanking, debuffing, cleansing of debuffs). In FFXIV, that was barely the case with titan-egi, and now the egis are just sparkling blobs that float around you, and their "pet-specific utility", except for one damage shield on the caster, is slightly different forms of doing damage, most of which are AOE and will pull extra aggro when I don't want it. If, for example, titan-egi offered an earthbind slow cc, or garuda-egi had a blind, push, or pull, or ifrit offered fire resist, those would actually be interesting things in spite of the pets not being combatants any more, but we don't even get that, it's just more dps.

World of Warcraft Warlocks (vanilla anyhow) and Guild Wars 2 Rangers both handled the pet survivability problem in similar ways—when you want to, you can sacrifice/merge with your pet to get a buff (+damage, +regen) or take on some of the utility actions of the pet (which were actual utilities), scaled appropriately. Either of those approaches would have worked better than flatly removing pets as separate combatants.

I've read other threads about how Summoner still holds its own on damage, however busy it might be or however much tunnel vision it might require, but I'm not interested, because it just isn't a pet class any more.

All of the issues can be easily fixed by one single thing - USE YOUR COMBAT CHOCOBO.

Chocobo isn't available in instances and you can't control it directly.

[Merryl]

I used to be able to crit heal for almost 3k on summoner back in heavensward. I'll give you some time to think about that.....

[OmegaSinX]

(3) Not having a TANK PET is a big problem.
This was TLTP too long to post sigh

Puhahahaha; let's be honest, in what situation would be having a tank pet be useful? Normal mobs die within seconds and in dungeons and raiding your hurting your DPS for no good reason. All the other DPS don't have pet tanks so how fair would that be if SMN had a formidable pet tank.