Job Change Suggestions for SMN

[ArcaneCarbuncle]

Personally I'm not a big fan of any suggestion that includes "cycling" through Demis/Trances. Current SMN is already inflexible enough with 2 Demis and especially Pheonix is sometimes annoying due to its rigid timing. If anything, Demis need to be more flexible, instead of doubling down on rigid timer.
I do however think there is some potential in identifying what does and doesn't work about Demis and Egis each and creating a unified concept in which Egis function as weaker, permanent "Pets" that build up a ressource used to summon Demis as flexible Burst Phases.
Best of both worlds, imo.

I'd prefer a loadout system to glamours. Glamours take away all the summons' identities. If we could go out and collect a dozen or so egis and each was at least slightly different with a few unique ones here and there but we could only put 3 or 4 on our action bars at a time, I think that would be ideal but probably more complex than the devs would like.

"Unique" Egi aren't going to happen. All that would lead to is the majority of people simply using whatever the internet maths out as the best combination of pets, which would defeat the purpose of having them all in the first place. Glamour allows for the Devs to include a good number of the summons currently in game and at least make them visually distinct without having to worry about a balance that doesn't exist.
And what Identity? Honestly, look at earlier Final Fantasy games and tell me where the difference lies between, say, Ifrit, Shiva and Ramuh, because outside of the elemental wheel there rarely was any.

That said, they could still very much use a loadout system to manage Glamours, and between the Blue Mage Spellbook and Egi Assault I wouldn't be surprised if thats what they were going for.

I'd like to wait and see what they do with BLU with its next update. Why is this relevant? Because giving SMN its own ui page dedicated like BLU has, would potentially cause an uproar from all the other jobs. It could also just cost a lot of work and resources. I can actually attatch this request to one made about skill glamours for other jobs, and then maybe they would be okay with having yet another page added. After all, the pvp page for jobs exists as well, so maybe its not as bad as im thinking to implement. I'm not saying that egi glamours cant be a thing, but im just saying that they would have to spend some time and resources to make it work better than just typing a command in the chat box and forgetting how to undo it a year later. That being said, they could possibly go a long with the idea, if they make sure that other jobs arent going to nuke them over making smn special. And I think the best way to do this is combining both suggestions to a common cause.
This, is also assuming a lot. btw for starters, we don't really know what direction theyve chosen for smn in 6.0, we can only guess. I think theyre probably trying to phase egi's out, thats just my observation. Arcanist being the base for smn however says otherwise, so maybe they will stay.
If thats the case, then its just a matter of them taking feedback seriously about the issue. We were told "more to come" but its been what, 6 years now? Maybe longer? Maybe they've been working on it the whole time, theyre awfully quiet about it if they have. So either something big is being worked on, or not.

Bard has had its own Gimmick in the form of Performance for years and the number of people complaining about it is vanishingly low. If anything most player would probably welcome the potential for more visual customization.
And I'd wager it woudn't be hard to implement at all. Repurposing UI elements isn't all that difficult, and there are already plenty of loadout systems in the game they could base a "Summoning Spellbook" on.

I'll never understand how people can think they are phasing out the Egi. One of the major SMN changes going into Shadowbringers was making the Egi a more active part of your Rotation, which is the exact opposite of getting rid of something last I checked. They might make further adjustments to how they function, but im fairly certain they'll keep them around; especially with how they've kept the general gameplay idea of every other job they've reworked, so I dont see why they'd make sweeping changes to Summoner specifically.

The last mention of Egi Glamours in an at least semi-official fashion was actually in May? June? of this year during one of the Live Letter reruns. They might not have mentioned it at newer Live Letters and such, but Yoshi-P is certainly not shy about reconfirming Egi Glamours as a thing when prompted; if they had scrapped the Idea completely he'd simply ignore any mention of it.