Summoner is CRIMINALLY bad at any level below 80

Like it teaches you very wrong habits with its skill acquisition that you basically have to unlearn when you get to the level it's meant to be played at (80).
It used to be worse during 5.0 too.


Egi assaults are there for weaving, movement, and to generate ruin IV (once you get it) so that you can either spend it for demi-bahamut for max wyrmwaves, or for movement (level 70 will make ruin IV feel so bad because you are given just enough to fit into your demi-bahamut phase and no more.) They do about the same damage as ruin III or outburst thanks to pet potency making their tooltips hard to read for some reason.

I will say, though, at level 80, SMN feels so damn groovy to play. At least for me. The rotation lines up super well with itself and the logic just clicks. I highly recommend, if you can, to try to play it at 80 before the rework, just to better understand SMN's weird journey through this game lol.


(Though, despite it being SUPER FUN AND SATISFYING TO PLAY, I would agree that it is a badly designed class. Because of the leveling progression I stated above, because the current design has hit a brick wall where it can't really go anywhere, and because its systems don't support the total feel of summoning gameplay. The fun is all very abstract instead of being tied to the fantasy of the job. Now, the rework doesn't improve it either, and in fact supports it LESS, but in both cases our big summon abilities are just cooldowns to wait for and not anything that we have to actively work towards achieving. We aren't summoners, we're waiters. We wait for cooldowns. Also, pets good, pet jank bad.)