Quote Originally Posted by battleshadow66 View Post
No thanks, the Arcanist toolkit doesn't even fit the SMN job well. It works well for Scholar though. Miasma, Bane, fester, these spells feel like they were added into before SMN was being worked on and the devs just said, "f it, looks good". A lot of what Arcanist does fits Scholar well, but feel wrong for SMN.
Hard disagree. Summoner was designed around Arcanist first and foremost and it shows in how imbalanced Scholar has been historically for being tied down to half of Summoner’s toolkit. Hell the Arcanist instructor literally tells you how to unlock Summoner once you finish the class quest line, not Scholar. And the Summoner questline makes repeated references back to Arcanists and Arcanima while Scholars only acknowledge it once. Scholar the job and scholar the title are also treated vastly differently within the context of XIV’s overall lore, the latter is used to refer to experts in general and is often used interchangeably with other terms while Allagan aetherochemists are called out explicitly multiple times and are directly linked to Summoners in their job lore. Scholar, the job, is mostly contained within itself, and while it is associated with Tacticians aesthetically, Arcanists are also linked to that in general, while Scholars make up a subset of that group historically.

Mechanically speaking Scholar only really cares about Energy Drain and Aetherflow as tools which are easy to rename and functionally replace. Everything else isn’t necessary. I would like Scholar and Summoned to coexist within their Arcanist roots equally but when push comes to shove it’s Summoner that will be tied to it while this game lasts. That’s why their role has remained as DPS since 2.0’s launch and SE has persisted in minimizing Scholar’s connection to Arcanist in the wake of a potential split.