Summoner - I don't know much about it but...

[Steady]

I keep hearing how the job has MP issues...

So... why not an ability that consumes your pet and refills your MP bar?

Primal Syphon - Sacrifices your pet to refill MP to 100%. That primal cannot be resummoned for 1 minute/30 sec something like that.

And then your stuck using Ifrit for the duration, which you could just Swiftcast out.

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I also keep hearing, since launch, how lackluster the primals are... soooo

Why not for one... turn their Limit Break into the same limit breaks as their primals? Garuda uses Aerial Blast, Ifrit Hellfire, etc. You could pretty much copy the same animations... though would hafta tone down the scale based off how many charges.

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Personally, I still kinda miss seeing the role played like FFXI, where you were assisting your Primal, and not the other way around.... but meh.. I'll stick to tanking.

[Brianmj]

Because the pet is a not so minor part of the job's dPS. And having to resummon the pet will just exacerbate the job's mp problems.

[Steady]

Because the pet is a not so minor part of the job's dPS. And having to resummon the pet will just exacerbate the job's mp problems.

You can swiftcast your pet back out... and I wouldn't think you'd be so frequently manaless with no where to go that you'd need to spam the ability.

There's always gotta be a downside to sacrifice abilities, or they get abused. You could use the ability, get full mp, swiftcast summon the other pet.... and your back in business.

Full MP for the cost of a few seconds. Sounds like a gift horse to me.

[Azgalada]

Because the pet is a not so minor part of the job's dPS. And having to resummon the pet will just exacerbate the job's mp problems.

+1 for using exacerbate in a sentence.

[Senliten]

I keep hearing how the job has MP issues...

Only in Parts of FCoB

Also while pet tapping is nice, the concept for your skill would hinder us heavily in dps. I would think a % of HP from the pet converted to MP would be a bit safer, said % however more or less would scale to our primary stat in some shape or form.
But we'll have to wait and see what SE brings us firstly by the sounds of it.

[Romsca]

pets, iirc, do roughly 1/3 or so of your actual dps. They cost over 500 points of mana to resummon. Not shooting down anyones ideas but there is a simpler fix for mana issues and that's just to increase the amount of mana points we get per point of piety, and that can be done at the job soulstone without affecting arcanist, scholar, gear stats etc.. If we had around 3600-4000 mana pool, aetherflow would return 720-800 mana per minute cooldown and our in combat mana regeneration tick would be around 75-79 every 3 seconds which is the cost of a ruin. Now I don't know how long we would last before running out of mana but we would certainly last a lot longer, use fester more often than energy drain, have mana to cast revives etc.

[ShaolinMike]

I keep hearing how the job has MP issues...

So... why not an ability that consumes your pet and refills your MP bar?

Primal Syphon - Sacrifices your pet to refill MP to 100%. That primal cannot be resummoned for 1 minute/30 sec something like that.

And then your stuck using Ifrit for the duration, which you could just Swiftcast out.

Unless the syphon does something funky like give you a free swiftcast, your DPS would fall further into the crapper than it would if you just let your MP drain away.

[Brianmj]

You can swiftcast your pet back out... and I wouldn't think you'd be so frequently manaless with no where to go that you'd need to spam the ability.

There's always gotta be a downside to sacrifice abilities, or they get abused. You could use the ability, get full mp, swiftcast summon the other pet.... and your back in business.

Full MP for the cost of a few seconds. Sounds like a gift horse to me.

Swiftcast isn't always ready. It gets used for applying dots and raise. Upon further thought, it does sound like a nice idea, it does seem like a remedy to mp problems, but it will affect the job's DPS. Anything that happens to the Egis will lower the job's DPS.

[Steady]

Was just thinking back to FFXI.. they had Elemental Siphon... so their is some precedence to and ability like this.

Anyhow, I would think an ability like this would be use in the dire situation where your just tapped out. which I would think would happen infrequently enough that the rare clutch situation you need it, it would be worth the cost. Kinda like a Holmgang for MP :P.

[MartaDemireux]

On MP problems: It's less about the loss of DPS with not having your pet out for a couple seconds as it is redundant to fill your MP bar only to have to deplete it immediately after by 532(?). Sacrificing a pet's HP to restore your MP over time as a reverse Sustain would be the best way to go about this in my opinion. Another option (but would also impact SCH) would be to allow Aetherflow to increase your maximum MP in the same way that Defiance does with HP. Defiance turns each point of VIT from giving you 14.5 HP at level 50 to 18. Aetherflow could give you 10 or so MP per PIE instead of the normal 8 at 50. I believe this would increase MP enough to give an ample auto-refresh while Aetherflow is active (which it should be most of the time). SCH doesn't really have MP trouble as it is though so this could make it a bit overpowered. The inverse of this however is that WHM generally has more PIE from their weapons leaving them with a bit more MP anyway. Might not be an issue at all.

On egi's: As far as their appearance, that's all lore. Think of it as if you're imbuing just 3 crystals and/or gemstones (I forget if the egi's use gemstones too or if it's just carbuncles) with the power of the primals. It takes tens of thousands just to summon the easy mode primals if I recall correctly. These 3 crystals we're using just basically mutate the crystal into the primals likeness. Therefor their Enkindles shouldn't look exactly like their beefed up versions, they should look inferior to them as they do. However if you look carefully at the animations, they do look like smaller/weaker versions of the primals special attacks.