what they could do is give you some commands with them, like you could ask them during battle(or the Rendezvous point) to focus on debuffs or buffing or curing and so on. Also what would be nice is to let us call our partner's even under level sync, they can typically be good party filler's, either on attacker style or healer style(if your the tank). Im not sure on how well shield style will work in a party, i don't think they can be targeted by any player other than you.. and then there's the lack of them being able to keep hate.... oh, here's an idea, give them some type of merit's they can earn so we can boost there stat's also... either at will, or a different set for each style they have. That way we could give them more enmity on the shield style, but not the other's.