1. The books
I hate the books SO MUCH, for myriad reasons. Firstly, they're incredibly unwieldy, and that shows in ALL of the "Summoner"'s battle animations. Even the idle stance is painful to look at, and when we're waving those books around to cast spells it looks like someone setting themselves up for the Hammerthrow. It's like I'm pulling spells out of a slab of concrete. They're ugly, uninspiring, and they make that offensive sound when they open and close that just makes me want to rip my hair out.
For background context, I am a long time XI player. XI introduced a class, named Scholar, that also uses books and which I hate with the undying fury of ten thousand stars for various ranty reasons I won't go into here. Imagine my absolute revulsion when Summoner, my favourite class in XI, was announced in XIV and was combined with SCH and its books. I was utterly disgusted.
2. The "Egi"
What the hell are these even supposed to be? People have ranted on this forum about these monstrosities enough times so I won't bore everyone with a retelling, but honestly. They're offensively bad to look at, offensively bad to use in-game, offensively terrible reflections of the Primals they supposedly represent... Urgh. Urgh. And "Egi"? Really? I mean, I know it's probably not intended to sound like "Eggy", but... how can you not read it that way?
Even Carbuncle, who I love, has moments when it looks pretty shoddy in XIV. Don't get me wrong, I've been a massive fan of Carbuncle through multiple iterations, but that idle pose it does where it sticks its backside up in the air, and shakes and twitches like it has chronic mercury poisoning? I'm not sure why anyone thought that was a good idea.
3. The Quests
The Mithra in the job quests really loves to uncover "hidden ancient summoning techniques" that have LITERALLY NO CONNECTION TO SUMMONING WHATSOEVER. Every time I received another poorly thought out DoT-based ability I wanted to smash my face against my keyboard. FESTER? Really? The only thing I was remotely excited about was Spur - and that was a weaker version of an ability I got from my class more than ten levels ago! Enkindle? Wow, that certainly looks exactly like something that should be on the pet toolbar and not our job capstone. Love a bit of Tri-Bind as well - look, it even seems to have colours associated with our Primal Egis! It MUST be summoning. This makes me so angry.
4. The Lore
The ENTIRETY of "Summoner" lore from the job quests is SE making excuses for why the job is so utterly awful. Here's a summon for you! By the way, it's literally terrible because something something Hydaelyn something Aether something. Also it's kinda basically identical to the associated Carbuncle because something Arcanima something Gemstones something Primal Essence. Remember those Arcanist spells that are unrelated to summoning? Yeah, keep using those because your Egi can't be your primary tool, as something Crystals something something Devours Life Force something Impossible. Hey, how'd you like to crack open a fresh bottle of Bahamut aether and spray that out of every orifice for some direct damage? That's much easier than summoning a new "Egi" because something something Limited Aetheric Capacity something Ritual something something, and it's not dangerous like that evil sort of summoning because something Cartineau something! It's also still definitely summoning, and NOT a direct damage spell, because it's got the name "Bahamut" in it! How completely riveting all this lore is, right?
A class in a game has NEVER been such a complete disappointment to me as "Summoner" in this game. I really want to like it! I've tried so hard to enjoy it, to look past its innumerable flaws, to embrace the patchy and ill-conceived lore, but I just can't. It's bad to the core. Even though I KNOW this, even though I've done this dance a thousand times, I sometimes still swap over to "Summoner" and give it a try - see if it's magically got less awful in the few months since the last time I was naive enough to believe. And it's always still an absolute mess, every single time.
