Sorry if I'm bringing this up again, but I've recently been done with my uni business and I was able to get back to this topic which is very dear to me. Lately I've been particularly depressed with EW Summoner and, since I'm a masochist, I've been going over old footage from Heavensward and I've been reading the 3.x Summoner guides. I thought I had a pretty good grasp of old SMN, but I discovered I had much and more to learn — it was even cooler than I thought.

So, I feel the need to point out that, due to my new knowledge, I'd make changes to my proposed "Arcanist Job" skills and traits to reflect some of the things I feel made Heavensward Summoner a real treat, which are the following:

1) Having pet actions on their own GCD really gave a sense of cooperating with an ally.
I know the pet GCD is never coming back, but in my list I ended up putting the Egi-Assaults as Spells, like they were from 5.1 onwards — which I think was a bad idea. Especially since the Ruin filler spell is now 1.5s and always gives you weaving windows, it would only make sense for all Egi-Assaults to be oGCDs just like they were on ShB release, which is the next best way to mimic the old pet GCD. They also should more closely resemble old pet actions in the form of recast times and lack of charges. I especially think charges should be gone — I mean, have you ever seen an opener from early ShB Summoner? It looks like the poor guy is having a seizure with all those fast-paced hand-swings for Egi-Assaults+Enkindle+Devotion x') This would of course limit the movement options of the Job but... you know, this is a Caster Job, that's how things are supposed to be. Also, the Ruin IV mechanic would stille be there as a limited source of free movement you actually have to manage.

2) The interaction between DoTs, damage buffs and Contagion was beyond cool.
So, when I first thought of Contagion extending DoTs it appeared to me as a pretty average thing. Turns out it was amazing to line up Contagion with Raging Strikes (20% dmg. buff), Dreadwyrm Trance (10% magic dmg. buff at the time) and Try-Disaster, so you could have 5 extra ticks of super-buffed DoTs — which actually made even Miasma II better than your filler spell. In my ignorance, I salvaged the StB Contagion which is just plain worse and generic. Contagion should really ultimately be a shared pet-Action amongst all Carbuncles that is identical to Heavensward. For the same reason, having the 3 standard DoTs would really make A LOT of sense... but even I am not delusional enough to think this is ever coming back.

3) The build-up to Dreadwyrm Trance made the skill more meaningful for all the things it provided.
One big issue with EW Summoner is the lack of resource building: everything is just handed to you with a button press. Sure, building up 3 stacks of Aethertrail Attunement was probably far from hard, but it was something, and it gave you a dmg. buff, access to a stronger version of you filler spell by reducing its enormous MP cost, and ofc access to Deathflare. Therefore I think this Arcanist Job should have its old Aetherflow button with 3 stacks that actually serve a similar purpose, just for a different skill since Dreadwyrm Trance belongs with EW Summoner.

Hopefully if I don't lose motivation I'll be working out the details of all these changes in the next days and I also plan to trim down and update my humongous first post to make it less scary in case some kind souls decide they want to read it ç__ç Once again, any sort of feedback on the specifics of the solution would be much appreciated.