the particle effects on the abyssos weapons look sooo good in portraits

Character Brief

Astraea Helbourne is a half Duskwight/Succubus Paladin of indomitable spirit and insatiable lust for adventure. She often feels invincible, but lives voraciously knowing how suddenly things can change.

Main Reference Sheet

I got Summoner to level 100 last night, and it’s much as it has been since Endwalker, but with more experience under my belt I view it differently.

First, the good points. Summoner is a fairly hard-hitting caster DPS job, and is pretty solidly the most mobile caster in the game. I’ve heard it said that it plays more like a ranged physical DPS than a caster, and that’s a pretty accurate statement — out of your entire one-minute basic rotation, you have maybe 3-4 spells with a cast time, one of which you will usually Swiftcast. Combine that with the generally low requirements for weaving, and you get a job that’s one of the easiest DPS to successfully handle fights with — you can almost always dodge without penalty, almost always stay at range, and you even have a beefy personal barrier to mitigate damage if you can’t avoid an attack. Summoner also brings some party support in the form of Phoenix and Solar Bahamut heals and the occasional raise (although since a typical Summoner rotation will use Swiftcast routinely, Summoners won’t always have a Swiftcast raise available!).

The job does have a couple minor bad points, however. One is that it has an awkward hole in its rotation before level 60, so it feels kind of weird to level until Dreadwyrm Trance sockets into that hole and makes the whole job come together. The other, more significant one is also more subjective, and one that I didn’t really feel during Endwalker because I was concentrating on Scholar and was generally less experienced: Summoner just feels a little boring to play sometimes. You do your big once-a-minute summon and use its attacks for a while, then you cycle through your elemental summons, then you maybe have a filler GCD or two and repeat. There are a few finer points of optimization, particularly when to go into your vulnerable Ifrit phase and when to use Slipstream so that the enemy will stay put in it as long as possible, but it doesn’t have the risk-reward thrill of staying in danger a little longer to get a big spell off as a Black Mage, or the fun of planning out a fight based on movement and downtime as a Pictomancer. In short, it’s a fine job, but its gameplay tends to be unexciting for me.

All told, then, Summoner is a good job that’s probably the best pick for new players. It’s simple and straightforward to play, keeps you mobile and has pretty decent survivability as DPS jobs go, stays competitive in terms of damage all the way into the endgame, and can even provide some clutch party support with a timely raise. But after playing it for a while, you may find yourself wanting to try something else for more excitement.