How Would You Do... Summoner?

[Heliantheae]

I always joke about how the Ninjutsu is going to have the primals come down and assist and be more like Summoners than the actual summoners. But I was thinking, you know how in the old games the summoners would disappear after summoning with orbs floating off and bringing down the summon. Why not give the summoners four commands like the ninja. It'd be Body, Mind, Soul, Evoke. And based on the order you'd get your summon.

Ifrit - AoE fire damage and burn status that lowers attack and a DoT
Titan - Linear Earth damage and defense boost to the party.
Garuda - AoE wind around the caster and group haste
Ramuh - Conal lightning damage and magical defense boost
Leviathan - Linear water damage and lowers magic defense
Shiva - Sweeping Ice AoE and lowers physical defense

And King Mog would be the fail and it does a random effect to both sides.

[Silverquick]

Ifrit - AoE fire damage and burn status that lowers attack and a DoT
Titan - Linear Earth damage and defense boost to the party.
Garuda - AoE wind around the caster and group haste
Ramuh - Conal lightning damage and magical defense boost
Leviathan - Linear water damage and lowers magic defense
Shiva - Sweeping Ice AoE and lowers physical defense

And King Mog would be the fail and it does a random effect to both sides.

Ahh and this is the REAL reason new pets won't work.

There's no difference between any elemental damage in the game... there's no elemental wheel... hence why ONLY the most damaging pet ever gets used...

And the SMN class is the DPS class... the SCH is the Support job...

Their abilities are neatly divided along those lines. Remember this is a dual class here... one side is the DPS... the other side is the Support. So when you start making the SMN the Support class... you begin taking away the roll of the SCH.

Remember there are TWO sides to the Arcanist... the DPS (SMN) and the Support class (SCH)

And when you start moving in that direction, you begin stepping on the toes of the SCH, whose job it is to shield and buff and heal. Many of those abilities would be excellent on an SCH, and I would suggest talking about Improvements to the SCH job like that over in the healer section.

Example here:

The SMN job DOES have access to debuffs like Virus, Physick, Ressurection, and Eye for an Eye... but they rarely get used on the SMN side at high levels because he's only DPSing.... they do get used by the SCH who is running a lot of healing, shielding, buffing abilities.

So any support abilities given to the SMN... end up stepping on the toes of the SCH... AND likely never get used by the SMN side which is concentrating on DPS only.