Fix Summoner Once and For All in 6.0 Please!

[Pyitoechito]

The current iteration of the SMN doesn't really feel like a "pet job".

What defines a pet job, anyway? Is it having to rely on delay when commanding pets to perform (especially if you happen to move)? Wonky AI that ghosts actions? Pets executing random commands on their own like in XI?

True pet jobs are just too clunky to actually work in a fast-paced game like XIV. Does anyone remember when Selene had a single-target silence spell? Remember how good it was, trying to get your pet to execute a targeted silence skill while the target was still casting (hoping to god Selene wasn't in the middle of an Embrace)? Answer: it sucked big time. Pet jobs work in XI because being clunky and slow was the norm there.

[Zfz]

What defines a pet job, anyway? Is it having to rely on delay when commanding pets to perform (especially if you happen to move)? Wonky AI that ghosts actions? Pets executing random commands on their own like in XI?

The way it currently works, I can see pets evolve to be progammically processed as just a graphical presentation, so there doesn't have to be delays.

In my comment, I was talking about the case where pet skills replace SMN player skills, i.e. they work just like any other job's skills, except that graphically it's your pet doing the animations, so there doesn't have to be any delays. You're not ordering the pet to do something, it's you who's casting the skill, except the game's graphics shows it as your pet doing the attack. For melee, since pets aren't targetable, they can literally stick to a target even better than any player can ever hope to do, by just doing the processing server side and updating the pet position to be shown on player screens.

But of course that means a complete overhaul of the inner mechanics of the job, so it was more of a musing rather than a serious suggestion.

[dezzmont]

What defines a pet job, anyway?

I think this is a fantastic question.

If the pet is purely aethestetic, which it sorta is except in bad ways right now, the job isn't really a pet job, it just has animations that evoke an external character. This isn't a terrible direction, after all in most FF games summoners AREN'T a pet job, they are casting insane super-spells with mega-flashy animations. Making your OGCDs or procs visually reference primals more often does make a lot of sense for fixing the 'visual fantasy' of the job, which is as important as the mechanical fantasy.

That said, when I think of pet jobs, I think of a second character that actively needs to be managed, either positionally or with their own resources such as health. There are ways to make that non-clunky (PSO2's summoner, for example, is extremely zippy and fast paced and does this with pet positioning and resources mattering quite a bit), but in XIV it is hard to imagine them doing this in a non-limited job. Pet management in a lot of MMOs comes down to you essentially being your pet's healer, buffer, and positioning two characters rather than one. I don't think XIV is gunna do that with SMN, but they might with beastmaster if that ever gets added.

[Rymi64]

I think this is a fantastic question.

If the pet is purely aethestetic, which it sorta is except in bad ways right now, the job isn't really a pet job, it just has animations that evoke an external character.

This is what id want for another pet job (I usually refer to it as a pseudo pet job). They could theoretically just make the pet part of the main attacks animations and have it all be aesthetic wise and i'd be happy about it for another job.