Starting the game as Arcanist is largely unplayable now

[wereotter]

Did you tell your friend to get a Chocobo companion and use him as a tank? Easy solution.

If you’re a new player, you can’t use that option at level 15. Can’t get a battle bird until after you join a grand company, and that’s locked behind defeating Ifrit and some other story stuff.

[Sylvain]

If a healer, especially AST, can level without using a single heal I can't see how an ARC can't with more potency across the board.

Unless he's part of these people who don't use their dot.

[Goji1639]

I'm new to this game and Arcanist was my first class. Some of the Summoner job quests were difficult to face tank, but overall leveling wasn't that bad. It just feels kind of slow and squishy compared to leveling something like a melee DPS. Even though Arcanist is not a healer Physick is still really useful in those early levels; a lot of people probably don't think to use it but you can heal through a lot with it.

[RubixCube]

I had arcanist as my starter class when I began and will admit I found it pretty dull. For me, the issue was that the other classes decimated mobs at low levels before I’d barely finished applying my DOTs, or even cast ruin, so it felt like I had very little impact in dungeons.

[CrimsonGunner]

If a healer, especially AST, can level without using a single heal I can't see how an ARC can't with more potency across the board.

Unless he's part of these people who don't use their dot.

technically AST starts from level 30 not 1 like ACN ,maybe you meant CNJ?

[Tex_Mex]

I had arcanist as my starter class when I began and will admit I found it pretty dull. For me, the issue was that the other classes decimated mobs at low levels before I’d barely finished applying my DOTs, or even cast ruin, so it felt like I had very little impact in dungeons.

Low level balance in this game is definitely a joke. But fortunately, it is not very important at all. Low level content is so easy that this is a minor inconvenience at most.

[Taranok]

I'd have liked to play with the early carbuncle/egis to see it myself.

Early carbuncle/egis have the problem of basically having very unresponsive action queueing (far worse than it is now) while simultaneously having the single most important DPS increasers for the Summoner on the pet itself (Contagion, esp. post Ifrit nerf in SB and in ARR/HW when it extended DoT durations)

Basically they were vastly worse to control and substantially more important to personally micromanage them.

Of course, for lazy people, such as myself, we also had sic and, while we'd lose damage doing it, the class would function just fine if we put its pets on sic, just not to the heights possible without micromanaging the pet. Literally, imagine pressing the button to order the pet to do the thing, and waiting 6+ seconds for it to still not have pressed it.

Because that wasn't enough, in ARR, pets took full damage from AoE, so you had to constantly heal them, they'd often die, and were still a very important part of your DPS. Dying problems persisted well into SB, but they since nerfed and removed how often these pets could die by later content so random aoes weren't as threatening, but they still very much could and did die.

Putting the pets on Sic was the only way to make interacting with the pets fun, and that didn't alleviate death issues on them. And if we looked at the HW rotation, we could see the true problems of the design because we wanted to line up contagion with raging strikes with DWT for 10%, 30%, and +15 seconds on all 3 of our DoTs to exploit the hell out of snapshotting and our DoTs, which made the class very, very difficult to balance as well as play, since we ALSO wanted to use Aetherflows DURING Dreadwyrm Trance, because there were ways to edge Aethertrail Atunement all the way to the start of DWT if you edged your Aetherflow stacks correctly (which was also tedious) and broke the damage even more.

The class has been a mess since launch because of this, but the egis have persistently been a problem for the class. It's really telling when I say the egis feel better moving into ShB than they were before, and they still feel very bad.