Pets! what works, what doesn't, and how to improve them for 4.0, maybe?

Okay to start, please do not turn this into another summoner/egi debate, it's been done to death, thank you.

Pets, love them or hate them they are here to stay. So why not let SE know what we like about them, what we don't like and what we'd like to see in 4.0

As I was writing stuff about this topic it got really wordy, so I decided to keep it at a bare minimum and let people express their ideas afterwards.

Controls:
For the most part the controls of Sic, Obey, Place, Stay, Heel, Away, Guard, and Steady are good the most basic they could be and i see no issues with them

Icons & Animations
When we just had the 2 Carbuncles as an Arcanist, and the 3 Egis for Summoner the animations made sense; though honestly they never made sense on Scholar. I think with the changes to the battle system coming both the icons and the animations should be changed to be more generic looking to represent any possible summons over specific ones. Possibly just a generic looking crystal or even just changing Summon III to a Red Carby. As for the animations, I wouldn't know what to change it to, a generic swirl of colors?

Egi-Glamour
We will be getting more Egi's to use for glamour, this is a fact, when is unknown; please god not another 5 patches. Anyway, at the moment the system is bare bones, just replacing the Egi with a Carbuncle, leaving the attack animations the same. But when the actual system is fleshed out more, seeing Ramuh do fire attack or Shiva doing Wind attack wont work, so most likely we'll be getting updated attack animations as well. that's a lot of animations. The other thing I think should be added is icons, similar to the ones we have, crowns, chair, flag, etc. These Icons would immediately identify the current Egi as either Melee, Ranged, or Tank, possibly a Fist, Bulls-eye, and a Shield. This way we can have our glamours in PvP as well as PvE. And "when" Scholar get this as well we can do the same thing for the Healer and Support pets, maybe a Sparkle/Sun and a Moon?

Skills & Abilities
In 3.0 we got no new pet skills, T.T, but for 4.0 hopefully we get something, at least one new skill. Here are just a few ideas I thought of for each type of pet. I'll be using the current pet themes for naming convenience.

Melee- Flame Purge - Deliver and attack with a potency of 25 to all nearby enemies. Additional Effect: Damage over time with a potency of 15 for 15s. Radius - 5y, Recast - 60s
Ranged- Piercing Gale - Deliver and attack with a potency of 120. Additional Effect: Silence - 2s Range - 25y, Recast - 60s
Tank- Terraform - Deliver and attack with a potency of 100 and absorb the damage as HP. Range - 3y, Recast - 60s
Healer- Fey Radience - Places a Healing Aura on the ground around the pet. Cure Potency: 100 Duration: 24s. Recast - 90s or 120s (not sure which is less OP)
Support- Fey Guard - Creates a barrier that nullifies 10/15% of all damage for 21s on all party members withing range. Recast - 180s

Enkindle
Finally with each new Egi they will require a new Enkindle ability, one that showcases their uniqueness. Admittedly besides the common attack names I am unsure of what the attack names are for the 3 "newest" primals

Leviathan - Tsunami
Ramuh - Judgement Bolt
Shiva - Diamond Dust
Ravana - Bloody Fuller
Bismarck - Breach Blast (Attack from VI)
Lakshmi - Alluring Embrace (Attack/Heal form VI)

I would actually like to see more companions and improved AI for all pets and companions

I don't disagree with a lot of this, and I'm almost completely certain that the reason we only got Carbuncles this early is because we are either receiving significant changes to how Summons work OR they just wanted to wait and spend appropriate time to make fitting animations for each Egi visual.

Also, just as a correction, Bismarck's ultimate is "Breach Blast."

As far as the state of Titan-Egi, I feel that they should probably give up on trying to build a Summon that can tank, and instead shift its role to that of a Summon that supports your real, human tanks with its abilities. An example would be to make Titan's Earthen Ward specifically affect the player with the highest Aggro, effectively channeling a Tank Cooldown onto them. As it stands, Titan is unusable and as long as the focus continues to be "pet that is built to tank" that status won't ever change.

There's actually one thing that has to be done first and foremost when it comes to pets: an auto-attack cancel.

Basically whenever you have a pet on Sic or Obey, it will always be using its basic attack/heal skill (fairies will automatically use Embrace on any target below 70% health), and whenever you want the pet to use a different skill (i.e. Enkindle, Contagion, Fey Wind, etc.), the pet will always always ALWAYS put its basic skill first and only follow your command once it's successfully cast its basic skill. As long as the pet control system doesn't have either a "Stop Cast" feature or is able to prioritize any other command over its basic skill, things like extra skills would be better off being cooldowns used solely by the caster without any pet involvement.

What I've always wanted for SMN / SCH is to see more WoL x Pet interaction via spells similar to Enkindle. It feels bad when pets are just...there like some automatic turrets.

I'm not so sure if we'll see more pet skills though, sadly. I feel like, at least for summoner, they will focus more on Trances. If anything they will probably revamp summons.
Also I think they should just get rid of pet roles (tank isn't needed at all, even for solo) and just make all of them DPS, just categorize them as either ranged or melee. That way if they revamp Titan-egi we might even get to use it more.

And for SCH I doubt they would add any new pet skills, they are already struggling enough with balancing the job cause of the fairies.

I feel like Sic and Obey should be Removed, and changed to a per skill method. As in you turn on say skills 1-3 on auto and leave skill 4 as obey command and cast when needed.

SMN could probably do with a whole rework, tbh. Maybe with PS3 being ditched in 4.0 there's a chance they'll go back to being permanent full-bodied entities without fear of making peoples' potato hardware lag? Dreadwyrm Trance was a poor man's substitute for any new Egis in Heavensward, and the class benefited not at all from a fussy MNK-like stacks mechanic (on TOP of managing Aetherflow).

If I could only choose one issue to address though, I think it's definitely the utter uselessness of the Titan Egi. No Provoke-like ability because the general playerbase can't be trusted to manage their pet or not troll with it in party content, so the chance of using it to save a party in a clutch situation is nonexistent. In open world content, there's virtually no real danger present where the more effective strategy isn't simply to just blow all your cooldowns and burst down whatever is trying to kill you before you kill it. Due to no HP-share cooldown or SMN life leech from the pet, it also serves no niche functionality in PVP. I'd like to see it serve some sort of purpose, even if that purpose is relatively niche.

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Originally Posted by Desteroth

I feel like Sic and Obey should be Removed, and changed to a per skill method. As in you turn on say skills 1-3 on auto and leave skill 4 as obey command and cast when needed.

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With hunter pets on WoW, you have the ability to right click to toggle auto-casting of certain skills while left clicking to manually active them and I think something similar could be done for the pet bar here.

We should be able to battle our pets in turn based battles. Way different then verminion. You should be able to challenge someone to a minion battle and battle them one on one.

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Originally Posted by GMERC

stuff

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I like the idea of making Titan-Egi a support type pet, and I agree each pet needs to be viable in any situation. A tank pet is not required anymore. Hopefully we'll see changes like this soon enough.

I don't agree that Titan should become a DPS. I like Titan as it is right now as a tank and I find that helpful for soloing and doing the MSQ. My chocobo companion is very low level and I use Titan pet and my chocobo as DPS.

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Originally Posted by Korbash

I don't agree that Titan should become a DPS. I like Titan as it is right now as a tank and I find that helpful for soloing and doing the MSQ. My chocobo companion is very low level and I use Titan pet and my chocobo as DPS.

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Nobody said Titan should become a DPS. I've suggested that Titan should have an actual purpose and contribute something to a party and not just be a mediocre soloing pet (consider summoning Ifrit or Garuda instead and see how little good your "Tank" pet actually did).

I'd even argue that Titan-Egi should have its damage increased to be significantly closer to that of Garuda on top of having abilities that support your human tank players.

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Originally Posted by GMERC

Nobody said Titan should become a DPS. I've suggested that Titan should have an actual purpose and contribute something to a party and not just be a mediocre soloing pet (consider summoning Ifrit or Garuda instead and see how little good your "Tank" pet actually did).

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How else will I get full credit on hunts, or be able to solo HW A-Ranks? :( (At least, Lord of the Wyverns, that's really fun!)

I like having a tank pet, but I'm all for improvements. Wish there were more opportunities for difficult solo, PotD is nice for Titan.