Quote Originally Posted by Sjol View Post
And I LOVE mechanical pet jobs. Necromancers, beastmasters, hunters, rangers, mechanics. If it has a pet, I'm on board. But I still understand the designers need to compromise to get to something that satisfies as many people as possible -- not make them happy or ecstatic -- but satisfies. People wanted to summon big bads. I remember when the new rework came out and so many people were saying, "finally, I'm a real summoner now".

And it's in line with most of the FF franchise where summons weren't something you controlled. They were just something you hit from time to time and watched a minute and a half cutscene as all the knights came by.
Then I guess I am mistaken that you do not like pets. For that, I apologize.

To answer the last line, and I think I mentioned this in a thread somewhere, the evolution of summoning in FF went towards pets:
  • FFVIII - summons had HP.
  • FFX - summons take the slot of party members and are able to command what to use.
  • FFXI, FFXII, FFXIII - summons have become persisting entities that follow you.

ARR and HW SMN were building up to have primals summon-able as the story progressed.

If they removed the dots from ACN, for as long as the pet mechanics remained, they can simply reintroduce it specifically to the jobs. Just look at Bio.. it is now a SCH spell.