Summoner Feedback

[azethoth]

Summoner is a great Job, love playing it. Has great utility and good dps, when I am not screwing up my rotation.
However there are things that should and dare I say need to be changed.

First off, it is far too difficult to keep track of the dots. That light green almost white count down does not help in the slightest. That color blends into all surroundings.
Either pick a different color, light a dark red, and or give us the ability to only see our own debuffs,dots on the mob. Preferably the latter.

Secondly, summoner dots need to not be counted as a debuff, except for the debuff effect of say malais. As it is summoner's dots get rolled off the mob once debuffs exceed 30 I belive. Our dots should never be rolled off, that is how we do damage. Given that Shadow Flare counts as a buff on us, you could relocate the dot effects to our buff bars. That would allow us to not only easily keep track of them but also prevent them from rolling off the mob.
Should that not be viable a "dot" bar for mobs would work as well so that they still count as attacks but cannot be rolled off. Bottom line though is keeping track of dots and them rolling off is crippling summoners.

Ruin and Ruin II. While I understand our class relies on our pets for some of our dps, that does not warrant ruin being only 80 potency. 80 potency for the mana cost is just terrible. Given that scathe for THM/BLM is 100 potency we should get at least that, but I would argue 150, since that would put it on par with Blizzard I.

Bio,Malais,Bio II. From what I can see from training dummies, Bio with potency 40 does less damage per tic than Bio II and Malais with potency 35. Is this intentional, or a bug? I would even argue bumping dot potency to 45 for the primary 3, but I do not have the numbers to back up if that would push summoners over the top or not.

Tri-Disaster. This skill is so bad I cannot understand its existence. 40 damage for 3 second cast on an encounter with a bind effect? Really? Blizzard II does more at level 18, than this skill ever does at lvl 50. Why is this skill's potency so low? I have only had use of it once, and that was today, when the party had a mess up. I would honestly be better off hitting a mob with my book than even having this on my hot bar.

Bane, great skill, but so easily wasted. It is not often that it hits all the mobs, and being at range it is hard to tell if they are within range. Example. On Garuda normal. Bane is incapable of hitting all of the feathers that she drops around herself, even though they all spawn in the same place.

Burst dps. I don't expect summoners to be the burst of the BLM. However, we lack very much in any capacity to do this. The demon wall and the feathers on Garuda are good examples of this. Those feathers and the bees need to die asap. However summoners are not the greatest party member for these tasks. All we have is maybe a Bane depending on the situation, Energy drain, Bio(not really) and Ruin II(80 potency 173 mana). But with the limited Aether stacks, make Energy Drain hard to rely on for burst and Fester needs prep to do its thing.

Cross Class skills. As a summoner we can only draw from THM and Archer. With this pool there are only 3 useful skills out of a total of 5 possible cross skills. Thunder, Raging Strikes, and Swift Cast. At 3 minute cool down raging strikes is not that useful to us, given that we are mostly dot based. Thunder is amazing as is Swift Cast for pet summon and Ressurect. But Sure Cast is pretty useless. The agro dump may be useful but I have yet to level archer to 32 to get it.
I would actually argue that they should pull from THM and CNJ like scholar. Aero is better than raging strikes any day.

Enkindle. I would argue that the cool down on this is far too long at 5 minutes. I would think 3 would be reasonable.

Commanding the pets to switch target takes far to long. It takes on average 2 seconds for the pet to start to engage the new target, more so if it is ifrit or titan.

Like I said, love this Job, the utility it offers a party is amazing. Yet it suffers from system issues.