Quote Originally Posted by aveyond-dreams View Post
You are absolutely correct that FFXI Summoner's Carbuncle can deal damage. It can deal small amounts of damage whenever you summon him before you go on to obtain your main summons: Ifrit, Shiva, etc. His attack abilities are Poison Nails, Holy Mist, Meteorite, and Searing Light. Otherwise, he leans towards support abilities. As he has done so in the majority of his appearances. Funny how one of the more popular versions of Summoner is one of the standards people hold FFXIV's summoner to.

In any case summon magic in general has a traditional way of working wherein we summon the thing, it does the attack, and then leaves. If it works great as a pet that can hang around that's fantastic. Egis however were useless and their appearance has been a meme for the past 8 years. Why was Titan suddenly reduced to a chicken nugget when he is the God of Earth in some games? Why was poison magic dealing more damage than the actual summons, the point of the job?

We are not hurting in terms of offensive summon magic though everyone agrees that we would like to have more pets. They are probably coming in the future, now that the job has a clear and focused goal. Please look forward to it!
Which is why Carbuncle getting autoattacks again wouldn't be a problem because it would still keep the focus on supporting abilities. I don't even want autoattacks back because I care specifically about autoattacks, but because I want Carbuncle to get a better purpose. Searing Light and Radiant Aegis could very well be skills of the Summoner and not only the aesthetics of the job would be improved, but its functionally would get better too because it makes no sense that we are locked out from using two skills every time we summon.

The things you mentioned either still persist or took another form. We still have Egis (for 89 levels!) and you actually have to see all of them every time now. They should have made primals available from level 30, but instead they decided on making the job an inconsistent visual mess.

We don't have poison magic anymore, but a large portion of our damage comes from Verfire 2.0, Verstone 2.0 and Veraero 2.0 now and not the summons themselves.