New to the game. Do summoners become actual summoners later or in the expansion?

[Nutz]

Enter a state where summoning a full sized Avatar is possible. Let it drain your MP as long as you remain in this state. Be mindful that any attacks you do with your summoned avatar will also drain MP. Or do away with that and let the summoned state last about 10 seconds. Cooldown 2-3 minutes. Summoning full sized Avatars do require a lot of Aether as mentioned by lore, but no one said it couldn't be done for a few seconds. MP draining can signify the 'loss of Aether'

I don't know. Random passing thought.

My only concern with this is the ridiculous size of the full sized avatars (primals). I've turned up dead due to no visibility during meteor before and this could be a lot worse (also you can turn off flashy LB effects, but where's the fun in that anyway?). Also I'm assuming this would do substantial damage so the class would have to be 'rebalanced', unless it were part of the new rebalancing anyway (since lots of things will change from 50 to 60). Well, it would certainly make a lot of SMNs happy to have big flashy spike damage available to them even if only periodically (I don't think draining all of their MP would work the way Flare does for BLM because of mp management differences, but the 10 second idea could work).

[Lorielle]

My only concern with this is the ridiculous size of the full sized avatars (primals).

A lot of people refer to the huge avatars whenever something is being summoned. Honestly, SE can tailor it to be smaller scale. People just want to see the actual summon, not some Egi 24/7. I mean, if we have Eos and Selene with Egi's here partially, what's the harm in an actual Avatar? Depending on their attacks as well, it shouldn't "get in the way" of anything. Meteor is different because that's just a blinding big flash. It can be tweaked accordingly, as I said it was just a passing thought. I wouldn't drain MP entirely like BLM with Flare because SMN doesn't have a efficient way of getting MP back. That's why I said MP Ticks according to how long you keep the avatar out. You can -opt- to dismiss early, but that just goes according to your MP Pool.