Quote Originally Posted by Sapphidia View Post
As people have said, the issues you bring up arent really relevant because they affect most dps classes. Black Mage has no personal tank, just some shields. Most melee DPS have only the bare essentials of a self heal.
They are issues, though, because, even if I pulled aggro off titan-egi after 3-4 hits, that's 3-4 hits that it took instead of me, and likely with the mob far away from me, because I know how to position myself and my pet so my foes spend more time running between us than getting hits in. And ultimately it isn't about how much damage is soaked by who, it's about the feel of the playstyle, and I play pet classes so that I can juggle aggro and do other fun things with my pet, and in order to do that, the pet needs to be able to aggro and take hits. If I had wanted to play a class that just blasts things, I would have picked any of those others to begin with.

In every other MMO I've played, the pets were combatants and they offered some additional pet-specific utility (cc, healing, tanking, debuffing, cleansing of debuffs). In FFXIV, that was barely the case with titan-egi, and now the egis are just sparkling blobs that float around you, and their "pet-specific utility", except for one damage shield on the caster, is slightly different forms of doing damage, most of which are AOE and will pull extra aggro when I don't want it. If, for example, titan-egi offered an earthbind slow cc, or garuda-egi had a blind, push, or pull, or ifrit offered fire resist, those would actually be interesting things in spite of the pets not being combatants any more, but we don't even get that, it's just more dps.

World of Warcraft Warlocks (vanilla anyhow) and Guild Wars 2 Rangers both handled the pet survivability problem in similar ways—when you want to, you can sacrifice/merge with your pet to get a buff (+damage, +regen) or take on some of the utility actions of the pet (which were actual utilities), scaled appropriately. Either of those approaches would have worked better than flatly removing pets as separate combatants.

I've read other threads about how Summoner still holds its own on damage, however busy it might be or however much tunnel vision it might require, but I'm not interested, because it just isn't a pet class any more.

All of the issues can be easily fixed by one single thing - USE YOUR COMBAT CHOCOBO.
Chocobo isn't available in instances and you can't control it directly.