Please don't delete tank carbuncle from SMN

[Rarrum]

Looking over the shadowbringer changes, I'm sad that summoner will no longer be a pet class. That was the main reason I picked it. The pets are now all just glorified buffs. That makes some amount of sense from how they're typically used in most groups, and for the wind and fire pets it won't really be missed. However the earth egi/topaz carbuncle is very different. This pet combined with sustain is central to how solo-play works.

Brave little topaz carbuncle even raid-tanked yesterday when our normal tank went linkdead but the other alliances didn't want to wait:


The new earth-egi is probably fine for general group play, but I really hope they consider adding back a solo-oriented tank pet (perhaps as a 4th pet if they want to keep this one for group stuff). I don't feel like a 20% shield will come anywhere close to making up for the loss of not having to face-tank stuff solo. "Maybe" if they fix Physick it'll be ok.. but nobody knows whether that's happening.

[XenabelleS]

I 100% agree but I think it is probably too late. I've swapped to RDM as, if I have to facetank things, I at least need a reliable heal.

[Zyneste]

What I can see more likely that they would do is remove Sleep from BLM and give it as a role skill [Like repose was removed from WHM when SCH/AST lost their only crowd control skills, SMN/RDM losing their bind would warrant the same action.]

Titan Egi-Assault is essentially manaward with less potency but on a much much shorter cool down.

If BLM can be expected to do things, SMN shouldn't have an issue. We always have our healer chocobos as a backup as well.

[Warlyx]

sad times for smn no doubt ....the pets now is cool looking dot , its good that its invulnerable to all the dmg but ugh thats not a SMN , pets are there to do and take dmg for the summoner.

[Kurando]

ugh thats not a SMN , pets are there to do and take dmg for the summoner.

Most of the time Titan-egi can struggle to even keep aggro with the SMN's burst potential, then you have Demi-Bahamut that takes your pet away and resets the aggro to yourself thus complicating things further. Titan might have been useful at lower levels but at higher ones it's just not a practical pet to use and wasn't updated enough to compliment the SMN's kit... until 5.0. The other pets would often take damage just because they had little choice (i.e. it didn't move in time, or it's area wide damage) and not that they were literally taking it for the SMN, otherwise if they did take it in place of them then sure they would have been more useful in that department.

[Fellgon]

Pets wont tank anymore and wont take damage. sorry, they will behavior diferently in SdB.

[Shirokami]

Pets wont tank anymore and wont take damage. sorry, they will behavior diferently in SdB.

While we know that to be true, I fear it will have detrimental outcome for SMN leveling and solo duties. With no personal pet tank, with only heal (Physick) scalling from Mind rather than Int, and with HP shield that Titan will now give being 20% on 30 sec cd... I don't think we will have much staying power.

[Vulcwen]

You'd underestimate how powerful a 20% shield is on such a low cooldown (and it's a charge skill as well). Survival won't be an issue.
What could be an issue are some of the class/job quests that at this point rely on you using pets to distract enemies (either to not let a NPC get killed, or so you don't get hit when interacting with things). We also lost access to any form of CC with the 5.0 changes, so we can't use that either to be able to interact without enemies interrupting your cast.

Main thing is that pets are changed to glorified dots rather than entities you actually have to take care of, which is kinda sad, but also not really a big deal.

[MPNZ]

TBH, sometimes the FF14 playerbase seems to see zero value in anything but "did the numbers get bigger", and it really doesn't help that situations like this tend to just happen and really necessitates such utility skills existing for such emergencies. But this is mostly that players want to finish things quickly and that translated into a large focus on DPS numbers. Though, haste buffs are an issue because of clipping issues similar to blood letter procs cancelling blood letter inputs, and animation lockouts in the past which is a massive QOL issue, tbh

[CorbinDallas]

While we know that to be true, I fear it will have detrimental outcome for SMN leveling and solo duties. With no personal pet tank, with only heal (Physick) scalling from Mind rather than Int, and with HP shield that Titan will now give being 20% on 30 sec cd... I don't think we will have much staying power.

How will it be detrimental? Just kill the thing before the thing kills you. I never once needed Topaz/Titan to tank hits for me, just like every other DPS job manages just fine solo. Advocating to keep an arguably useless "tank pet" is one of the most pointless things I've heard.

You don't see other DPS asking for an external entity to tank things for them when solo, you just play your job correctly and kill the thing.