Quote Originally Posted by ShadowNyx3 View Post
Now that egis can't die, there's no reason for them to exist as a separate entity. For anyone who sees them as little more than an extra DoT, you are now seeing what the purpose of micro-management of the egis prior to 5.0 was, to keep your "extra DoT" alive so that you were earning all of that damage from your pet.

Without the threat of death on an Egi, there is no need to even recognize they exist outside of their placement for Devotion or if you're optimizing, having them start close to a target to begin attacking faster. Is it any wonder they feel like dead weight?
Yes, but micromanaging the pet to keep it alive and optimal was terrible gameplay because the game itself lacked fundamental, necessary tools towards "effortlessly" keeping the pets alive. From the Ground Targeted AoE marker being poorly designed and unresponsive to the pet itself being unresponsive. The current iteration is terrible because they don't really do anything except a 40 potency GCD with 2 50 potency attacks every 30 seconds. If they kept something like Contagion or Radiant Shield on the pets but tied to EA, then they would be a delayed activation but still an improvement over 4.0 and prior.

The issue is that unless 100% of every action (or some arbitrary number constituting "a lot," of actions) goes directly through the pet, such as a Dark Age of Camelot Necromancer where the entire class runs through the pet, then it will never quite feel like a pet class.

Most pet classes in games aren't pet classes. They're just classes that have semi-unique DoT robots tacked on that are expendable by nature. FFXIV's tight PvE design and difficult UI means having an expendable pet or a pet with critical components on it is not conducive to good gameplay, whereas in a game like GW2 or DAoC, killing the pet is a valid option to remove it and it's expected in that style of game for pets to die and be swapped out. And obviously with Necromancer, you basically played your class through your pet, so it was a bit mushroom in that regard but represents one of the better-executed pet class concepts I've seen in a game.