Quote Originally Posted by PriyaJugulataris View Post
So that invalidating the whole rapid pet swap thing you're talking about, (and I did say that the summoner's damage would have to be rebalanced in said post) and I'm confused about this "loss in utility" you speak of as the pets have no utility outside of damage bot/tank currently
It is obvious that if they were to change summons as you're asking they'd have to give egis utility. And my point still stands because not only would the egis have to have nerfed damage, but that utility would also need to be weak to be considered balanced because the core mechanic then becomes rapid pet swaps. It wouldn't be like in a single-player console FF where summons are either powerful buffs or powerful nukes with Amano Yoshitaka artwork instead of particle effects.
Especially with the FFXI comment, seeing as FFXI summoner's avatar had a great deal of Utility (Blood Pact:Wards and Astral Flows ARE WAY HIGHER UTILITY than what we have now).
Considering SCH + Make-spells-AoE strategem can outbuff a summoner in anything that is not Eclipse Howl, that's not saying much. Even before SCH came you couldn't really validate a SMN's utility. People didn't care about the job until the whole bit with Alexander and Perfect Defense was added (and how Zantetsuken made it easy to grind exp in abyssea before SMNs were tossed aside and replaced by Ukon WARs).
FFXIV's Summoner's design has already been linked to WoW's warlock numerous times in numerous threads, I don't think that it needs to be stated more, but yes, for FFXIV currently, the design is rather stable. But again. It's a DoT class.
SMN is a pet job with DoT as its main damage source, and that's not a bad thing. Specially keeping the limitations and outright bad design choices for XI's summoner in mind.