SMN; How do poison DoTs fit the class?

[Sinh119]

Well you get them as Arcanist for a reason. They are Arcanist techniques specifically, which is why Scholar also has them. Your complaint is more that Summoner doesn't fit as a branch of the Arcanist class, which is valid. As Summoners focus more on demi-primals it makes less and less sense that we are tied to the Arcanist class, to the point where Summoner should really just be its own thing. If they really wanted to they could just replace Bio and Miasma with primal-themed equivalents, but they seem to want to make sure that link to the Arcanist class is still there, and so Bio and Miasma (along with physick) are what we have.

[Taranok]

Well you get them as Arcanist for a reason. They are Arcanist techniques specifically, which is why Scholar also has them. Your complaint is more that Summoner doesn't fit as a branch of the Arcanist class, which is valid. As Summoners focus more on demi-primals it makes less and less sense that we are tied to the Arcanist class, to the point where Summoner should really just be its own thing. If they really wanted to they could just replace Bio and Miasma with primal-themed equivalents, but they seem to want to make sure that link to the Arcanist class is still there, and so Bio and Miasma (along with physick) are what we have.

It's also worth noting that Arcanist originally was designed to support what would become the Summoner in ARR. Which is to say SMN was designed to be a WoW Warlock knockoff with its own bizarro mechanics because the devs didn't quite understand or know where they wanted the class to go and thought the Egi system was the better choice, mixed with 4 DoTs (Bio, Miasma, Bio 2, I think they had Miasma 2 as an aoe DoT, and Shadowflare, though M2 was never used ST). Plus the pets which had an awful implementation that stuck through SB only to be made into a better-but-still-bad implementation in ShB.

So the devs have been trying desperately to keep the core of the class the same (the original poison mage design of ARR) so they wouldn't need to do major edits to the class or rewrites of the lore, but in SB they hit upon the right way to implement summons in FFXIV, and in ShB pushed the class towards that.

Fast forward a bit and you can see the disjointed problem trying to salvage the core design caused. SMN stopped being a true poison mage in SB, but it's being kept because the devs don't want to change the core, which is why this is turning into a mess that doesn't fit either thematically or gameplay wise.

The lore of Arcanist was written to facilitate ARR's summoner, but it no longer fits how Summoner plays now because the current summoner is the closest to a true summoner FFXIV has ever had, while also being the furthest away from poison mage it's ever been, so the class just feels like a mess because of it.