First of all, this is a hardcore X1 server. It is not supposed to be easy. At the same time, it is one of my personal easiest solo leveling experiences ever in L2, granted, if you are not a complete moron.
Secondly, going 20-40 is just regular mage experience. You are not fully a summoner yet and have a regular wizard nuke, which is your primary skill. If you are using summon as primary damage during 20-40 you are probably a retard.
And lastly, you are supposed to deal as much damage as your summon, by having a proper melee build, tattoos, etc., starting from around 46. If you don't, you are doing it wrong.
To get to 40 is pain in the ass, sum is 20 min duration with 2 hours cd
after 40 the pet needs to eat spirit stones to stay alive?? cant even afk with pet outside and you go bankrupt? my pet is my weapon, what other class need to pay adena just to hold a weapon?
cubics 15 min duration and very expensive to cast, they proc very slow when mobs are already dead. its better not to use them...
Beast soul shots not only very expensive but there is no craft or compressed packages of them, on my dark elf mage im supposed to carry 6k of them? 20 min farm then SOE to restock?? in older chronicles when pet had very expensive soulshots it had very big base P.attack to be able to farm.
My suggestions
after 40 make pet to not have cost just to stay alive and remove the duration bar, like NCsoft did with l2classic and l2essence, just spirit ores to summon and nothing more, i have summoner and i cant have my cool pet outside because i go bankrupt ?? What is this lol
make cubics 20 min same duration with buffs, lower the cost a little, make them more active
make beast ss craftable? make them cheaper? make them compressible ? remove their weight? idk anything will help at this point, beast soulshots are just broken at this point. no wonder i didnt see a single summoner on the server and one guy was shouting "wts 54 lvl summoner" lol
OR
just delete the class so noobs like me don't get trapped and then have to quit the server...
GL ALL