think I'll just stick to my summoner and try and watch some YT guides on how to setup my UI and what skills I should have slotted. I'd appreciate any recommendations.
Summoner uses almost all of its skills besides the following:
Break (weak outside of like the first 4 ARR dungeons)
Physick (Waste of time when you could be shooting laserbeams)
Drain (healers will cover you, maybe only useful during solo instances)
Summoner plays differently from 50, 60 and 70. But your main goals are: keep your DoTs up (Bio and Misama), use your Aetherflow skills (try to time the cooldowns so you are never wasting it, this takes practice), and don't leave Trance too early unless you are going to end the fight soon or the boss is transitioning. Also make sure your pet stays alive, it's about 1/3 of your total dps by the end of the fight.
You don't
have to manually control your pet but learning to do so can help you line up buffs and skills with your party members, like a Ninja's Trick Attack during Contagion. But you can clear most content with the pet on AI if it is too much to keep track of.
Speaking of pets, Garuda is currently better in this patch, since Ifrit was nerfed a bit. Titan should never be used except for solo instances.
Summoner is a job that can adjust on the fly, but maintains a pendulum-like rotation going back and forth between Trance, Aetherflow and Bahamut phase over and over. People who say it has a two minute rotation are kinda right, but it's more like three smaller rotations used together in order. Basically opener -> Aetherflow -> Trance -> Aetherflow -> Trance -> Aetherflow -> Bahamut and repeat with minor changes because you lack the opener part.
If you die this messes this dance up, especially if you just used Aetherflow. But if you can master the job you'll be the AoE king >:D