I wish Summons became spells in 5.0

[Darkstride]

Have you played ultimate? Every phase have frontal cone tank busters that kill the pet. Ultima phase have even one extra mechanic that make your pet die if it is not in the correct place.

You dont want use your skills randomly all of the time even for ifrit. If you use sic ifrit all the time, it use radiant shield while boss is not target able or for the phase where you dont get much benefit from the it. Thats why you wanna use skills sometimes manually. I agree outside radiant shield and contagion pet skills could be little bit more interesting.

Sure, there are instances where placement can be incorporated or maybe even necessary, but for 90+% of the game, they can just run on auto-pilot.

My point is, the job is designed as a mage with a pet just to call it Summoner. You can choose to micromanage the pet for a small performance gain, but it's hardly the primary focus of the job. You lose a lot more DPS by mis-managing your personal abilities rather than your pets' abilities. If it were a genuine pet-oriented job, that ratio would be more in the pets' favor, or at the very least more balanced. They shifted to the Bahamut-style summoning for a reason.

[Sunako]

They shifted to the Bahamut-style summoning for a reason.

Well Bahamut work as big cooldown pet only because you can build up your aetherflow, tri-disaster, addle and weave these skills whole Bahamut duration, but if it would be 100% time like that, it would be really boring and lazy desing imo. If they would want shifted from egis, why would they bring us devotion during Stormblood and other utility skills pets currently have?