A more summonery Summoner

[Alberel]

Those 3 examples are nothing like X/XI, which everyone is mentioning. SMN in every other instance was nothing but a spell that did spike damage (not even a pet) at the cost of high MP with no control over the "pet". Otherwise you were a watered down magic class. X and XI changed this by allowing the player some control over the pet and giving the player more utility outside of being a ghetto black/white mage.

Two different methods. Everyone complains about wanting the X/XI version without thinking about not only the implementation of such a system at this stage, but the fact that the dev team wants it to be different from XI, so it won't happen anyway. You can summon primal spirits. You control them. You are a summoner.

This isn't XI, which is what people want it to be.

The thing is FFXI's SMN was mechanically sound, just very poorly balanced. There was actually no reason to change it and Yoshi's cited reason for doing so is incredibly misguided.

The reason Yoshi didn't want to implement FFXIV's SMN like XI's was because he thought XI's incarnation was unpopular due to its passive gameplay. The reality is that it was nothing to do with passive gameplay. EVERY job in XI had a lot of passive gameplay simply due to the resource systems the game used (MP was slow to regen, TP required dozens of autoattacks to regen). XI's SMN was unpopular due to it having such ridiculous MP costs to keep the pets out and an absolutely stupid shared cooldown for all its skills; it was just pathetically weak as a result of poor balancing and zero attention from the devs for years.

If they had simply lowered the damage on some of their abilities, lowered the cooldowns proportionally and entirely removed the shared cooldown across all skills SMN could have been well balanced, fun and popular.

XI's incarnation of SMN is thematically one of the best ways to have done it in an MMO setting. You have to realise that the traditional nuke-style summons would not work in an MMO simply because the job would end up playing like a BLM. SMN simply has to be a pet class in order to ensure it plays differently to the other casters. XI accomplished that very well mechanically; the problems all stemmed from poor balance. When the dev team decides to implement a job like SMN in a way that is different to XI (where it worked well for an MMO) yet uses entirely incorrect reasoning to justify that change then everyone here has a valid reason to be complaining about that difference.

The 'this isn't XI' argument doesn't really hold up anyway. This isn't WoW either yet we're stuck with a WoW warlock playstyle...