Quote Originally Posted by Valmarus View Post
I'd like to see a tip more towards this end though with a few changes. I'd like to see the ward/rage charges that came in to FFXI later on for smn. I'd also like to see the removal of the superseeding of egis.
The fact is that if we take a look at the roots of the job, it's clear that it was intended as a pet DPS, and this is why it originally was, and still is to an extent, entirely built around dots. You place dots so you can dance between summons and use their toolkits, right? But it doesn't work like that, and with every expansion they shifted the class identity towards a more streamlined magical DPS.

I don't think it's a bad choice in itself, but when you choose to embark on that tuning journey you need to shift the roots of the job, starting from level 1. Playing summoner from level 1 to 50 is a job, from 50 to 60 is another job, from 60 to 80 is an entirely new job. The result of that caludron is that you feel like actions are working one against each other, you have to micromanage an absurd number of resources during downtime, you risk to lose tons of damage because things don't line up.

It's pretty clear that the original concept was: place you dots, summon carbuncle and use something reflect-like, summon ifrit and use hellfire, use another egi as a standard DPS then refresh your dots and adjust according to encounter situations. It was a lot more complicated than what FFXIV ended up being. IMHO something like that would have beeen 10 times better for job identity. Now, the easiest solution is rework the starting toolkit and getting rid of redundant elements, and this is why we are in a thread suggesting to remove egis.