Summoner/Make Carbuncle useful again

So I been a summoner main since ARR, I see Summoner change many of times some good some bad. But right now I like where Summoner is but it has a problem Carbuncle dose nothing, not even an auto attack

So i would like to replace 2 skills to make it more in line with the theme of summoner and gives Carbuncle a real perpes again

Remove "Fester" and replace it with a Carbuncle skill "Poison Nails" as its Single Target attack costing 1 Aetherflow

Remove "Painflare" and replace it with the Carbuncle skill "Meteorite" as its AOE costing 1 Aetherflow

And lastly to keep to the Theme of it, Give Searing Light back to Carbuncle

So at the end of this all Carbuncle will have 2 attacks, 1 damage Shield, and 1 buff skill
and this i believe will better fit the Summoner and make Carbuncle useable that fits in line what is currently there with current skills and play style

Considering you cannot use Carbuncle actions whilst you have the demi summons out or when you have the summon 2 animations playing will seriously restrict when you can use them. Infact, this is the whole reason Searing Light was changed from a Carbuncle action to a SMN one.

Personally, I don't want to see more from Carbuncle because Carbuncle isn't a proper summon; it's a simple arcane entity, one that even non-Summoners can use. I'd rather see Carbuncle entirely replaced with something more appropriate for Summoner within the lore of FF14.

But regardless, Carby still provides Radiant Aegis, and I think that's fine.

If the summoner underwent an rework it is because the AIs of the PETs were catastrophics,
the egis of the old summoner were nice to use, but sometimes their attacks/spells suffered from ghosting.

The concern is that going back and adding spells to the carbuncle would render the reason for the rework obsolete, because it would return to an old problem.

The only thing that carbuncle could do is to generate a new resources with a timer for example, or when a Demi-summon or elementals summons have been summoned, carbuncle captures the ether so that we can cast a special spell or summon for exemple.

That he is a figurine that serves to put shields on us I agree that it is not crazy, but I would be greatly surprised if they gave him autoattacks or spells like the old egi-assaults.

Please don't put Searing Light back on Carbuncle. It was hell before they added it to the Summoner themselves. They can't really have Carbuncle do much other than just auto attack unless they change how it works since its constantly being summoned and unsummoned, barely giving it the opportunity to stay on the field for more than a few seconds. I only want Carbuncle to have more abilities if they rework the job again so its not constantly disappearing.

Carbuncle being used for attacks was the cause of most of Summoners clunky issues in the past.
Carbuncle is still the focal point for some AoE skills, much like Eos/Selene. It's consistent between the two Jobs at least.
As Emitans said, the only thing that would really work is autoattack, and casters autoattacks aren't worth it.

I agree with making the carbuncle playable again and taking him out of dummy status.

The major problems would be eliminated by disconnecting the carbuncle with the other summons and treating it as an entity in itself. the carbuncle only disappears when released or when the player dies.
At this point ghosting would be relatively non-existent.

Furthermore, if the pet only has ranged instant active abilities (avoiding the auto-attack) the delay problem would be completely bypassed.

You could use the pet to add a completely different playstyle to the other classes.
The carbuncle could hypothetically have dots to place on the ground, attacks, aoe shields, aoe buffs, rescue, other stuff involvong the good positioning of the carby.

https://i.imgur.com/QJ1dD4E.png

Decouple the summons from the pet system entirely. It sucks trying to target a particular mob for AoE and having to wait for Carbuncle to transform and/or meander over there at low levels, meanwhile your target gets killed or the tank has re-positioned the pack and you only hit 1 target.

Then make Carbuncle 'useful' by having him do a party-wide spell that deals thorns damage when the boss uses a magic raidwide, similar to the Reflect skill he has in every other Final Fantasy. The Summon Carbuncle button can remain a pet for people who want their companion squirrel.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

Personally, I don't want to see more from Carbuncle because Carbuncle isn't a proper summon; it's a simple arcane entity, one that even non-Summoners can use. I'd rather see Carbuncle entirely replaced with something more appropriate for Summoner within the lore of FF14.

But regardless, Carby still provides Radiant Aegis, and I think that's fine.

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In fact, I think that's quite the opposite... RA is a defensive utility but most of the time can't be used in an emergency where you didn't predict the incoming damage beforehand or messed up, which kind of defeats the whole purpose. If the incoming damage pattern is already predicted, chances are the mitigation and healers already have it covered.

Every other similar action in the game like Manaward, Shade Shift, etc, have no such handicap of not being usable any time, and to justify RA being as clunky as it is they would need to bake in even more utility into it.

I want the carby to be useful, but RA is not it either. I wouldn't mind if they came up with a basic dps action/combo to be used by the carby in between summons.

Ok Everyone makes good points, But after reading get to ask how about a Wyrmwave style of attack for Carbuncle but its a single target attack? I would be happy with that, Thoughts?

Then if the player then cast "Fester" and if carbuncle is out he use "Poison nails" kinda like a added attack, and for Pain flare then carbuncle would combo with Meteorite


So you can still use Fester and Pain flare at any time but you can a bonus with Carbuncle?

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Originally Posted by vetch

Decouple the summons from the pet system entirely. It sucks trying to target a particular mob for AoE and having to wait for Carbuncle to transform and/or meander over there at low levels, meanwhile your target gets killed or the tank has re-positioned the pack and you only hit 1 target.

Then make Carbuncle 'useful' by having him do a party-wide spell that deals thorns damage when the boss uses a magic raidwide, similar to the Reflect skill he has in every other Final Fantasy. The Summon Carbuncle button can remain a pet for people who want their companion squirrel.

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this spell existed during the stormblood period, and was so powerful that they completely removed it. Radiant shield.
Delivers an attack with a potency of 50 every time damage is suffered.
Duration: 20s
Additional Effect: Increases target's physical damage taken by 2%
Duration: 4s
Recast: 60s
radius 15 yalms (on every party members)
https://ffxiv.gamerescape.com/wiki/Radiant_Shield

Fascinating.

They do love to give us worse versions of abilities that they took away before, so if you ditch the phys vuln and reduce the duration to only fit one raidwide it sounds like a perfect candidate.

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

Considering you cannot use Carbuncle actions whilst you have the demi summons out or when you have the summon 2 animations playing will seriously restrict when you can use them. Infact, this is the whole reason Searing Light was changed from a Carbuncle action to a SMN one.

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This.

Me personally, I would just like Carby to have a (SCH) Ruin 2 type ability again. An instant cast attack it peppers the enemy with over time. Would give it SOMEthing to do, and still make it responsive to Radiant Aegis use since it would just be an instant cast spell so wouldn't block a quick oGCD use, mechanically. [EDIT: Saw some people mention auto-attacking doing this, so that could work as well. A ranged auto-attack in the form of a little magic ball/Ruin spell for the animation would do the same job. Just something it can peper the enemy with over time so it's not entirely just sitting around between summons. :) ]

I also remember some big fight once where the team won AS THE SCREEN WAS FADING TO BLACK because their SMN's Carby or Egi or whatever was still attacking the boss and got the last hit in. And something about that is hilarious to me and needs to exist. :D

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Originally Posted by Otaku2188

Ok Everyone makes good points, But after reading get to ask how about a Wyrmwave style of attack for Carbuncle but its a single target attack? I would be happy with that, Thoughts?

Then if the player then cast "Fester" and if carbuncle is out he use "Poison nails" kinda like a added attack, and for Pain flare then carbuncle would combo with Meteorite


So you can still use Fester and Pain flare at any time but you can a bonus with Carbuncle?

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Either its not worth doing because you are losing all the potency gain on using Fester/Painflare under 2 minute buff windows (because the rat is dead the entire time you have bahamut out and good luck getting one in the gcd it takes to summon your finisher gem) or the potency gain is so insane that it becomes completely unintuitive in that you never want to Fester in the 2 minute window to get the 'bonus' damage.

And this is ignoring that having the rat do anything when its despawning constantly isn't throwing the immediate threat of ghosting an ability back into your face.

As long as demisummonning exists as a mechanic the rat cannot be allowed to do anything. The job is infested with hard petswaps that cause ability cutoffs and ghosting problems. Until Carbuncle stops dying for other mechanics to happen it should not have anything to do. The fact your only defensive is still tethered to the rat is insane.

Carbuncle has to be some kind of weird code vestige that we just cannot shake, I cannot think of any real reason they insist on him being summoned in order to use the rest of your summoning kit.

I'd rather Carbuncle to no longer be a pet for the job at this point. Making it into a stance-like buff that is required for using summon-based actions would personally be more palatable than having a pet that's barely does anything while constantly desummoning/resummoning on the field. Lore reasoning? Maybe Carbuncle persists in your grimoire/index because it's a "special arcane construct" that is unique in doing that and attuning to your weapon is now just that easy for arcanists. Who knows, lore doesn't feel like it has much importance for the job anymore anyway.

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

Carbuncle has to be some kind of weird code vestige that we just cannot shake, I cannot think of any real reason they insist on him being summoned in order to use the rest of your summoning kit.

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If I could speculate... it would probably having something to do about the game's code infrastructure only supporting 01 combat entity at once. Probably the reason why the Seraph was also designed like that.

I can imagine it simply because once they stated something like the fashion accessory taking the same slot as the minion, which is really weird to be just be a choice rather than working around a limitation. The game seems to be designed only with 3 available entities other than your cahracter: a combat pet (carby, fairy), a companion (chocobo) and a minion/mount/fashion accessory.

This might be so ingrained in the game code that changing could affect a ton of things (not that is an excuse not to improve it).

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Originally Posted by unjourneyed

I'd rather Carbuncle to no longer be a pet for the job at this point. Making it into a stance-like buff that is required for using summon-based actions would personally be more palatable than having a pet that's barely does anything while constantly desummoning/resummoning on the field. Lore reasoning? Maybe Carbuncle persists in your grimoire/index because it's a "special arcane construct" that is unique in doing that and attuning to your weapon is now just that easy for arcanists. Who knows, lore doesn't feel like it has much importance for the job anymore anyway.

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I wouldn't think lore reasons are keeping it around since before now once you got the egi summons you never saw Carbuncle again unless you glamoured it onto the egi summons. It would be that way again if they changed it to not having to be summoned at all to use the rest of the SMN kit, you would use carbuncle until you got the egi summons and then the final summons we have now at 90.

I don't want to sound like an asshole and clearly my visibility is very limited, but on steam alone there are 36k paying players this month. 360k comes only from steam subscribers. Steam doesn't have the largest chunk of players, and each server holds around 5k players. European servers when you log in, whatever server it is, make you queue. 5k x 16 is 80k players. only subscriptions per month are 800k. I don't consider america and japan (but also china and korea) because they are not on those servers/games. In addition there is the shop and those too have entered. There are costs and everything you want, but with all the money coming in it's absurd that I read stuff like: it's not possible to have multiple pets at the same time.

how much will it cost to make an Array of pet threads with their skill queue? a week of work, 2 weeks, a month? With 800k per month is it not possible to cut out a budget in order to solve this problem of the useless pet?

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

I wouldn't think lore reasons are keeping it around since before now once you got the egi summons you never saw Carbuncle again unless you glamoured it onto the egi summons. It would be that way again if they changed it to not having to be summoned at all to use the rest of the SMN kit, you would use carbuncle until you got the egi summons and then the final summons we have now at 90.

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I always agreed with this option as well. If it's to be useless in combat, just make them optional to avoid visual clutter. And even better, they could let us glamour the Gem summons into them, so we would in fact get an actual 'fighting' version of a carbuncle.

I wouldn't summon them in combat, but I'd certainly keep them while chilling in cities.

Yes Searing Light should come from Carbuncle but Carbuncle shouldn't be a pet. He should just poof in as part of the Searing Light animation (and Radiant Aegis) and then disappear, as the elemental summons do. The removal of Carbuncle as a pet would also afford the changes OP is asking for Fester and Painflare to be changed to Carbuncle actions.

It is the insistence on Carbuncle being a pet that is required to be summoned that makes Carbuncles problematic in the first place. Just make them part of the ability animations and get rid of the pet aspect entirely.

Heck no, I don't want carbuncle have more power. The less the better. Already the ai pet crap tier on this game, the devs knows this, and carbuncle have defense utility feels like older ff. So the current crabuncle is good enough and fits the ff lore.

The fact that scholar can now glamour their fairy into carbuncle is basically confirmation this will never happen.

I’m just hoping for more summons. We’re basically a spell casting version of Clive from FF16.

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Originally Posted by Zarkovitch

Heck no, I don't want carbuncle have more power. The less the better. Already the ai pet crap tier on this game, the devs knows this, and carbuncle have defense utility feels like older ff. So the current crabuncle is good enough and fits the ff lore.

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It would be enough not to give it melee abilities with targets and it would be enough that it is a separate entity and that it can coexist with the other summons.

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Originally Posted by Zarkovitch

Heck no, I don't want carbuncle have more power. The less the better. Already the ai pet crap tier on this game, the devs knows this, and carbuncle have defense utility feels like older ff. So the current crabuncle is good enough and fits the ff lore.

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Pet AI* has been fine since mid-Shadowbringers, that isn't the problem. Demi-summoning killing your pet is. As long as this awful mechanic continues to exist it completely screws with the default pet AI because the pet dies and wipes the action queue. I did a lot of testing near the end of ShB and it was near impossible for the default pet to drop/ghost an ability or not fit its entire repetoire in a 15 second window by itself. As soon as you include demisummoning, that all goes out the window and it becomes an absolute mess.

Demi summoning is the mechanical cancer infesting this job and the only thing that actually needs a rework, but SE continues to double down on the awful mechanic every expansion making the problems worse than before.

*Specifically normal pet AI. Demi AI is still a flaming pile of garbage and they can refuse to attack on summon unless forced to by an action.

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Originally Posted by Ggwppino

https://i.imgur.com/QJ1dD4E.png

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https://img2.finalfantasyxiv.com/acc...d609b6ab93.png

Move over surprised Pikachu it’s confused carbuncle now!

I just want Carbuncle to at least auto attack like it used to. It just bobbing up and down and following us like a lobotomized chihuahua is kind of sad. :(

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Originally Posted by Flana

Pet AI* has been fine since mid-Shadowbringers, that isn't the problem. Demi-summoning killing your pet is. As long as this awful mechanic continues to exist it completely screws with the default pet AI because the pet dies and wipes the action queue. I did a lot of testing near the end of ShB and it was near impossible for the default pet to drop/ghost an ability or not fit its entire repetoire in a 15 second window by itself. As soon as you include demisummoning, that all goes out the window and it becomes an absolute mess.

Demi summoning is the mechanical cancer infesting this job and the only thing that actually needs a rework, but SE continues to double down on the awful mechanic every expansion making the problems worse than before.

*Specifically normal pet AI. Demi AI is still a flaming pile of garbage and they can refuse to attack on summon unless forced to by an action.

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Which is also why they really can’t fix seraph, because seraph is just SCH Demi summon that kills eos

They really should have just given eos “seraph stance” that allows her to queue up consolation and seraphic veil

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Originally Posted by Flana

Pet AI* has been fine since mid-Shadowbringers, that isn't the problem. Demi-summoning killing your pet is. As long as this awful mechanic continues to exist it completely screws with the default pet AI because the pet dies and wipes the action queue. I did a lot of testing near the end of ShB and it was near impossible for the default pet to drop/ghost an ability or not fit its entire repetoire in a 15 second window by itself. As soon as you include demisummoning, that all goes out the window and it becomes an absolute mess.

Demi summoning is the mechanical cancer infesting this job and the only thing that actually needs a rework, but SE continues to double down on the awful mechanic every expansion making the problems worse than before.

*Specifically normal pet AI. Demi AI is still a flaming pile of garbage and they can refuse to attack on summon unless forced to by an action.

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Exact!
They created the problem of ghosting and unresponsiveness in shB. There was no such problem before. Previously the pet worked fine.
Instead of making it work fine, they decided, instead of introducing a new entity into the game, to lazily replace by resetting the "pet" entity, screwing up a system that worked perfectly before.

Here it is clearly not the fault of the pet system, but it is the fault of the lack of desire and laziness to introduce a new entity that acts as a demi.

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Originally Posted by Ggwppino

Exact!
They created the problem of ghosting and unresponsiveness in shB. There was no such problem before. Previously the pet worked fine.
Instead of making it work fine, they decided, instead of introducing a new entity into the game, to lazily replace by resetting the "pet" entity, screwing up a system that worked perfectly before.

Here it is clearly not the fault of the pet system, but it is the fault of the lack of desire and laziness to introduce a new entity that acts as a demi.

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If I could guess, adding a new actor to the combat setup could be something that requires a bigger overhaul to the game's code, as it seems to support only 1 extra actor (carby, fairy) and 2 additional ones outside of instances (chocobo + minion) and when they made it like that was without future-proofing back in ARR.

Not that it's any justification to not do it, but maybe it would require way more work than it seems. I really think they should see to it because it might impact other aspects of the game positively, and I wonder if something like this was thought for 7.0... Maybe we'll only know by JP Fanfest.

There's a lot of money going around ff14. They procrastinated for 5 years destroying a perfectly functional system. I personally don't accept the "it's too hard to implement" excuse. It may be a spaghetti code that has been working for 10 years by a miracle, but they have the resources and they also had the time to fix the crap they've done.

Then by doing so they fix the smn, but also the sch, and they also open up to being able to exploit this with other new classes or even the old ones that could have a demi alongside.

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Originally Posted by Ggwppino

They created the problem of ghosting and unresponsiveness in shB. There was no such problem before. Previously the pet worked fine.

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I believe it started in SB with Demi Bahamut. Before that it wasn't an issue as you didn't have to queue several things in quick succession and it was only started being an issue when the summon disappeared, either for the Bahamut summon or the dismissal of Bahamut, meaning it couldn't execute the queued action.

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

I believe it started in SB with Demi Bahamut. Before that it wasn't an issue as you didn't have to queue several things in quick succession and it was only started being an issue when the summon disappeared, either for the Bahamut summon or the dismissal of Bahamut, meaning it couldn't execute the queued action.

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It was with Stormblood, and it's the reason I'm always in absolute disbelief when people say SB was peak Summoner. Does no one else remember what a disaster trying to get Garuda to contagion before the demi window was? God what an awful experience. Either it took so long you started drifting from Trick and other buffs or you'd just ghost it because the demi registered first. There was no good solution and it would only be infinitely worse in the current meta.

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While its true that there is probably some shenanigans with having multiple pets, this is only true for demi-summoning itself. There was zero reason for gem summons to be tied to the demi system though. It would have worked identical to how it is now if the primal summon was just a VFX that had no impact on Carbuncle at all. In fact it would be significantly better because there wouldn't be a delay on damage caused by the entity spawning in before it can attack. Just an utterly absurd decision. Anyone actually playing Summoner could tell within 10 seconds what an awful idea that was even with the pet being made damn near vestigial but they did it anyways.

Honestly I have 0 faith in Dawntrail fixing anything for Summoner. I've been saying the demi summon mechanic is awful since it came out in Stormblood, and yet the dev team has doubled down on it to the exclusion of everything else in the jobs kit. It's just stripping everything out while ignoring the problems this one mechanic has infested the job with, and even with all of that it still hasn't fixed anything. They'll probably just delete the rat and happily exclaim they finally fixed ghosting without having fixed anything at all.

If I sound bitter, it's because I am. I've given them 3 expansions to solve the root problem and they've not only ignored it every single time, they've also just doubled down and made it worse every single time too.

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Originally Posted by Flana

It was with Stormblood, and it's the reason I'm always in absolute disbelief when people say SB was peak Summoner. Does no one else remember what a disaster trying to get Garuda to contagion before the demi window was? God what an awful experience. Either it took so long you started drifting from Trick and other buffs or you'd just ghost it because the demi registered first. There was no good solution and it would only be infinitely worse in the current meta.

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While its true that there is probably some shenanigans with having multiple pets, this is only true for demi-summoning itself. There was zero reason for gem summons to be tied to the demi system though. It would have worked identical to how it is now if the primal summon was just a VFX that had no impact on Carbuncle at all. In fact it would be significantly better because there wouldn't be a delay on damage caused by the entity spawning in before it can attack. Just an utterly absurd decision. Anyone actually playing Summoner could tell within 10 seconds what an awful idea that was even with the pet being made damn near vestigial but they did it anyways.

Honestly I have 0 faith in Dawntrail fixing anything for Summoner. I've been saying the demi summon mechanic is awful since it came out in Stormblood, and yet the dev team has doubled down on it to the exclusion of everything else in the jobs kit. It's just stripping everything out while ignoring the problems this one mechanic has infested the job with, and even with all of that it still hasn't fixed anything. They'll probably just delete the rat and happily exclaim they finally fixed ghosting without having fixed anything at all.

If I sound bitter, it's because I am. I've given them 3 expansions to solve the root problem and they've not only ignored it every single time, they've also just doubled down and made it worse every single time too.

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At this point I honestly think they should just rip the bandaid off and get rid of carbuncle and turn everything into nothing more than animations, similar to dissidia’s Yuna. I have HATED that suggestion every time I’ve seen it come up in the past when people talk about SMN reworks, but we’re basically there already and carbuncle is just a delusion that we’re still a pet job. If they removed him and just made it so when you used radiant aegis a carbuncle jumped out of your book, shone a light on the target then vanished, I don’t think it would make any difference at all…

Searing light could then be given a new Carbuncle animation, OP’s suggestion to replace fester and painflare with Carbuncle related animations could fit, maybe just throw them on a charge system and do away with energy drain and replace ruin with egi-assault (really just ruin with a new animation of a carbuncle auto-attacking) just to completely eradicate any trace of arcanist from the job.

They could then rework the gem summons into just animations as well, replace the gemshine animations with just an egi coming out of your shoulder and launching the attack, demi-summons could be put on a stack system similar to what other jobs are getting like WAR’s inner release, other than that they wouldn’t need to change because there’s no janky carbuncle interaction for them anymore and we’re there.

It’s not the route I would have chosen personally. In my opinion SMN was on the right track with stormblood and particularly shadowbringers, it just needed some refining. But the endwalker rework killed my hope that they could give me the summoner I wanted to see.

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Originally Posted by Cabalabob

At this point I honestly think they should just rip the bandaid off and get rid of carbuncle and turn everything into nothing more than animations, similar to dissidia’s Yuna. I have HATED that suggestion every time I’ve seen it come up in the past when people talk about SMN reworks, but we’re basically there already and carbuncle is just a delusion that we’re still a pet job. If they removed him and just made it so when you used radiant aegis a carbuncle jumped out of your book, shone a light on the target then vanished, I don’t think it would make any difference at all…

They could then rework the gem summons into just animations as well, replace the gemshine animations with just an egi coming out of your shoulder and launching the attack, demi-summons could be put on a stack system similar to what other jobs are getting like WAR’s inner release, other than that they wouldn’t need to change because there’s no janky carbuncle interaction for them anymore and we’re there.

It’s not the route I would have chosen personally. In my opinion SMN was on the right track with stormblood and particularly shadowbringers, it just needed some refining. But the endwalker rework killed my hope that they could give me the summoner I wanted to see.

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I support doing this as well but since they got so committed to the Demi idea they also messed SCH up with it so they would also have to do something to fix SCH which can still kinda cling to the title of pet job

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

I support doing this as well but since they got so committed to the Demi idea they also messed SCH up with it so they would also have to do something to fix SCH which can still kinda cling to the title of pet job

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To me it’s long overdue that they split SMN and SCH entirely. Either it’s time to do away with the class system altogether and just make us jobs from the start, or update it so arcanist is made into the SCH base class and rework it into a healer and give SMN a new evoker base class that’s just a subsection of the arcanist guild.

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Originally Posted by Cabalabob

At this point I honestly think they should just rip the bandaid off and get rid of carbuncle and turn everything into nothing more than animations, similar to dissidia’s Yuna. I have HATED that suggestion every time I’ve seen it come up in the past when people talk about SMN reworks, but we’re basically there already and carbuncle is just a delusion that we’re still a pet job. If they removed him and just made it so when you used radiant aegis a carbuncle jumped out of your book, shone a light on the target then vanished, I don’t think it would make any difference at all…

Searing light could then be given a new Carbuncle animation, OP’s suggestion to replace fester and painflare with Carbuncle related animations could fit, maybe just throw them on a charge system and do away with energy drain and replace ruin with egi-assault (really just ruin with a new animation of a carbuncle auto-attacking) just to completely eradicate any trace of arcanist from the job.

They could then rework the gem summons into just animations as well, replace the gemshine animations with just an egi coming out of your shoulder and launching the attack, demi-summons could be put on a stack system similar to what other jobs are getting like WAR’s inner release, other than that they wouldn’t need to change because there’s no janky carbuncle interaction for them anymore and we’re there.

It’s not the route I would have chosen personally. In my opinion SMN was on the right track with stormblood and particularly shadowbringers, it just needed some refining. But the endwalker rework killed my hope that they could give me the summoner I wanted to see.

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Currently the smn is very average class. Very nice to see for the VFX, but on the gameplay side it really doesn't have anything different compared to the other classes and it doesn't have anything actually characteristic that influences the way you play and optimize.
I personally am convinced that by reintroducing the pet system done as it should be done, it would make the class a one of a kind class again.

let us glamour our pets with minions (animations don't matter)

Arcanist are supposed to be strategists so I would like to see the upgrade to Summoner involve shifting some of the support responsibilities to Carbuncle. I would remove both Resurrection and Physic as usable abilities and bake them into automatic actions Carbuncle uses. Whenever a person dies Carbuncle would start hard casting Resurrection and if no one is dead use Physic on any party member with less than 70% health. This would free up Swiftcast to be used on longer dps casts and be an interesting contrast to RDM dual cast revive which would clearly be faster for emergencies but Summoner would be able to avoid the MP cost of Reviving people as long as they leave Carbuncle out. This would possibly interrupt the Summoner rotation though as Carbuncle has to be dismissed to summon more powerful entities giving each class a restriction to be careful of. Now this might step on the toes of Scholar a bit but imo healers are in need of a serious rework too but that's a topic for another thread.

just revert this braindead class to shb and try again tbh