So what's wrong with Summoner?

[CKNovel]

SMN is the perfect opposite of a healthy job.

I feel that the rotation is now completely disconnected. Before, it was spending Aether stacks to get the Bahamut Trance. Then after 2 Bahamut Trance, you got Demi-Baba.

Now Aetherstacks are completely disconnected from Trance and the ability is a set cooldown. And Bahamut trance is now a 15s stance that makes you instant-cast. It resets Tri-disaster and allows the use of DeathFlare but there is no reason to keep the stance as much as possible, it just makes Ruin instant. Also the weird dot rotation, most of the time you resets your dots with Tri-Disaster but you still need to cast the dots yourself once or so every cycle.

SMN also has around 60% instant cast, but 20% of these casts are punishable due to poorly coded pets. Pets will prioritize movement over damaging which can make you loose a Bahamut action for example.

Pet laaaaaaag that will cause you to ghost skills and their clunky unresponsive abilities. But that's the same for all the pets expects SMN/SCH are the only job that needs to give direct orders.

Balancing wise, SMN is simply unbalanced. It can plays like a ranged, perform as well as a BLM and is even better on multiple targets, it can also res to help with the progress. But physick heals for nothing while VerCure heals normally.

I really liked HW SMN despite the garuda memes, SB SMN was special and enjoyable, but ShB SMN? It's a mess that I can't enjoy.

[Mansion]

SMN is the perfect opposite of a healthy job.

I feel that the rotation is now completely disconnected. Before, it was spending Aether stacks to get the Bahamut Trance. Then after 2 Bahamut Trance, you got Demi-Baba.

Now Aetherstacks are completely disconnected from Trance and the ability is a set cooldown. And Bahamut trance is now a 15s stance that makes you instant-cast. It resets Tri-disaster and allows the use of DeathFlare but there is no reason to keep the stance as much as possible, it just makes Ruin instant. Also the weird dot rotation, most of the time you resets your dots with Tri-Disaster but you still need to cast the dots yourself once or so every cycle.

That's the only thing that comes to my mind. As a job, talking about rotation, gameplay and identity, SMN can feel like struggling to embrace its identity. It has to deal with its ACN background (being a DoT mage / Aetherstacks), and then all its past addition kind of stack upon one another. You have to deal with egis (2.X), Trances (3.X), Demi (4.X) and 5.X added some kind of synthesis of 3.X and 4.X while breaking the "logical flow" that we had just before (stacks into trance into demi).

Ruins and DoTs don't feel Summoner-ly to some players.
Aetherstacks feel disconnected from pretty much anything right now (no interaction with Demis nor Egis)
Egis are out of date now that we have Demis which perform better.
But Demis are linked to Egis just for the sake of keeping Egis.

But the job performs VERY well in high end content, so the focus tends to shift upon balance rather than these rotation/identity issues.

And on top of that, you have pet ghosting which has been mentioned earlier in this topic.