People give smn too much credit in ff11.

Nobody played them in endgame. Endgame LS would laugh at you if you applied as only smn.

Smn in ff11 was a subpar whm all of the time, especially while they were leveling. You were lucky to get smn to max level pre-abyssea because smn was a huge gimp to exp parties. They only had two uses. One was hate free damage on HNMs, which rarely still happened. In old old old ff11 days, people would rather just have one or two thf or dd/thf SATA the tank nonstop while other dds can fight the HNMs. The only other use for smn was Alexander and that was still rarely used.

Sure you can get a bunch of smns together and go kill some trials, but I can solo the primals as rdm, so what did it really matter?

Smn in ff11 was trash, it was just all novelty. People need to stop making it sound like ff11 smn was great when they were just completely useless to anything in the game.