Have summons had any major updates over the last couple years?

Its been a long time since I last played ROSE, at  the time I was playing a muse/cleric with the sword summons and the pink dinosaur thing. It was a lot of fun while leveling up, but at a certain point it hit a brick wall since high level mobs would kill the summons in 1-2 hits, which wasn't fun. At the time there wasn't any plans or notions of plans to buff them, so went back to playing other stuff.

Are summons more viable now? Is it viable as a class (i.e. they don't die when sneezed on)

Same goes for the mechanic class with his black knight and archer/soldier things.

Summons now take over your stats. And they are easily buffed with party buffs. Big improvement. Now you can use them the whole game and you won´t outlevel them.

Thanks, another question on muses:

you used to be able to get the IM group buffs then reset to get a bunch of free skill points, I noticed this on the update page referring to unique skills and wondered if it applied to the IM skills as well

"You may reset your unique skills to regain skill points if you so choose. But remember, a skill will not work, if you do not meet the requirements to learn it! So if you reset your class skills, remember to get the skill the unique skill will require in order to use it! There will be no more free skill points gained from resetting."

even if that doesn't apply to IM buffs, do IM group buffs affect summons?

Yes, group buffs wich are the same of "party buffs" do affect summons right now.

I just don't know about the mall bufs right now because with the skill update we had this month you can have in game, target and group bufffs.. I had mall buffs, now I don't use it anymore.