Quote Originally Posted by Sequora View Post
2.0 summoner was very far removed from what they were. To build a job off of poison spells just doesn’t fit.
It does if you realize the reason you're corrupting their Aether is because you're attempting to use the very tactics of primals against them. There's been plenty of terms for those afflicted by primal influence. An explicitly magical Poison/Curse isn't all that different from it. The Egi needed to take advantage of the damage being caused by those poisons to extract aether from your enemies, enabling you to call upon the Avatar spells. That's the mechanical flavor that was missing that connects Arcanist and Summoner together, reflecting what the actual lore states about their field of Arcanima.

That's the thing you're missing. Summoner and Arcanist ARE why we play this job. You know, the poison carby programmer/scientist mage subtheme that's carried the job since its inception. And unlike most subthemes within XIV classes the magic we use from it is directly responsible in the job quests for enabling us to defeat and summon primals at all. The people who fell in love with the job wanted to see the marriage of those individual aspects, to see SE intentionally combine both identities in the mechanics since its inception. Because mechanically it had the pieces for Arcanist, but not Summoner in ARR, and now in Endwalker it's the exact opposite. You know how Astrologians got mad when Time Dilation and Celestial Opposition had their extension effects removed because it 'killed Time Mage' for them? The removal of DoTs is in that exact same vein. Lore wise I wanted Poisons to empower our Egi. And I sure as hell wanted Carby to be an active, persistent participant in the rotation way more than these one and done Avatars and fake spells. Sure, the 'big flashy primal' aesthetic of the Summoner job wasn't there until Stormblood, but I wanted that contained to the Demi-Summons. I think Bahamut was merely awful from a mechanical standpoint back then (still is now, but for reasons that aren't getting fixed in Endwalker), but aesthetically? Ya'll kept being hyperfixated on the Egi instead of asking "Where in Bahamut's name is my 7-pulses of Akh Morn spam!?". Even so, SE retained the Arcanist side through it and Shadowbringers, and ya'll couldn't see past "Egi aren't pretty enough" when we literally summoned grandad birb and got exactly what 7.0 summoner is but better. Tying Phoenix to a single moment actually made it cool and distinct, while still respecting the Egi part of the rotation. Now we'se seeing that aspect and much more being stripped away. SE is killing that moment and the important part of the Arcanist job entirely. I took the 5.0 iteration's quality in and ran with it because all the little details that needed to be ironed out with Egi were almost entirely fixed, and instead of taking the last step of adding charge action autos and making Egi all ranged to help fix player input priorities SE gave up and catered to players who didn't even play the goddamned job despite getting exactly what they wanted four years ago. If you think 7.0 Summoner is the bomb, current Summoner did that and could have done so much more! It was a complete job. As of Endwalker it's half of one again.