Summoner/Make Carbuncle useful again

[Cabalabob]

It was with Stormblood, and it's the reason I'm always in absolute disbelief when people say SB was peak Summoner. Does no one else remember what a disaster trying to get Garuda to contagion before the demi window was? God what an awful experience. Either it took so long you started drifting from Trick and other buffs or you'd just ghost it because the demi registered first. There was no good solution and it would only be infinitely worse in the current meta.

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While its true that there is probably some shenanigans with having multiple pets, this is only true for demi-summoning itself. There was zero reason for gem summons to be tied to the demi system though. It would have worked identical to how it is now if the primal summon was just a VFX that had no impact on Carbuncle at all. In fact it would be significantly better because there wouldn't be a delay on damage caused by the entity spawning in before it can attack. Just an utterly absurd decision. Anyone actually playing Summoner could tell within 10 seconds what an awful idea that was even with the pet being made damn near vestigial but they did it anyways.

Honestly I have 0 faith in Dawntrail fixing anything for Summoner. I've been saying the demi summon mechanic is awful since it came out in Stormblood, and yet the dev team has doubled down on it to the exclusion of everything else in the jobs kit. It's just stripping everything out while ignoring the problems this one mechanic has infested the job with, and even with all of that it still hasn't fixed anything. They'll probably just delete the rat and happily exclaim they finally fixed ghosting without having fixed anything at all.

If I sound bitter, it's because I am. I've given them 3 expansions to solve the root problem and they've not only ignored it every single time, they've also just doubled down and made it worse every single time too.

At this point I honestly think they should just rip the bandaid off and get rid of carbuncle and turn everything into nothing more than animations, similar to dissidia’s Yuna. I have HATED that suggestion every time I’ve seen it come up in the past when people talk about SMN reworks, but we’re basically there already and carbuncle is just a delusion that we’re still a pet job. If they removed him and just made it so when you used radiant aegis a carbuncle jumped out of your book, shone a light on the target then vanished, I don’t think it would make any difference at all…

Searing light could then be given a new Carbuncle animation, OP’s suggestion to replace fester and painflare with Carbuncle related animations could fit, maybe just throw them on a charge system and do away with energy drain and replace ruin with egi-assault (really just ruin with a new animation of a carbuncle auto-attacking) just to completely eradicate any trace of arcanist from the job.

They could then rework the gem summons into just animations as well, replace the gemshine animations with just an egi coming out of your shoulder and launching the attack, demi-summons could be put on a stack system similar to what other jobs are getting like WAR’s inner release, other than that they wouldn’t need to change because there’s no janky carbuncle interaction for them anymore and we’re there.

It’s not the route I would have chosen personally. In my opinion SMN was on the right track with stormblood and particularly shadowbringers, it just needed some refining. But the endwalker rework killed my hope that they could give me the summoner I wanted to see.