Quote Originally Posted by Pyitoechito View Post
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.