Quote Originally Posted by Kevee View Post
Every class can do that if you want to.

Every single one.

When you seek to perfect the job, SMN is very intricate. Whereas DRG, the most complicated class, has more of a priority-based rotation, SMN has a timing and judgement based rotation.
Yes but your timing judgement is based over 15-20 seconds (quite long). Not only that, if you fail to recast Bio/Bio II/Miasma at the right moment, you at most loose A BIT of your dps.
Not to mention the fact that the micro-optimization to reach max DPS is not that important because during a fight you have much more things to do (avoid things and such) that keeping your rotation up to get a hit, is always a bad idea.
"Time judgement" over 20 seconds is long, you have 20 seconds to choose what to do... is really long, easy.

Quote Originally Posted by Squa View Post
SMN is easy? 4 separate dots, with different cooldowns and reapplication times, and aetherflow management makes SMN fairly difficult imo (on top of unintuitive pet management)
I played BLM and dragoon on a friend computer and they are much more difficult than the summoner, which is my main character.
Even play a SCH is much more difficult than a SMN because you do (almost) the same thing a SMN do + you have to heal (yea you don't have fester, that's the difference, you replace thunder with aero).

And sorry, 4 separate dots => Easy instantly, dots with long duration are the easiest thing to handle, expecially when only one has more or less different duration over the others (bio II), the others can be easily recasted in sequence.
What dot management? I just need to recast them before they expire. My biggest decision is to cast thunder (and SF) or not because of mana usage.

Yea, managing pet is interesting that's true, but at least that is what I expected from a summoner. Considering I feel the same while playing a scholar (oh and my scholar pet has 4 useful abilities instead of 1), I still feel bad when playing summoner, it's so stupidly easy.

If you take a BLM that have never played the class and same for SMN, the SMN will do more damage because the class is pretty straightforward.
In case he has problem with pet management, just take out ifrit and eventually heal him every now and them, he is more resistant.