Fix Summoner Once and For All in 6.0 Please!

[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.