I think this game could use a warlock class.

[Iromi]

I envy you. Endgame SMN with the people I played with was "Stand there and heal," or "Use Aerial Armor because this is before tanks knew how good /nin was," or more likely "Go change jobs."

Who did you play with? That is odd. I was a SMN main in FFXI since release (2003) I got my WHM up to 60 fairly quickly and then did the lv65 avatar fights. In end game on my SMN I did sub WHM but never touched the spells, only sneak and invis to get to the camp. My LS leaders had me do damage...always. I was put in a PT with a brd and rdm and had my pet out all the time with my AF2 (I got the full set very quickly,w as lucky lol)

The only "healing" I did on SMN was in EXP PT. in end game it was always damage, damage, damage. I played with JP/NA mix and we did a lot of world firsts and fought all the hard stuff. Bringing a SMN to heal in end game was a very mediocre thing to do. WHM was far superior. I am not defending FFXI SMN, I do not want that in this game either, but that is just absurd. Sure, now and then I would throw a Cure if someone went in the red but that wasn't too often unless playing with bad players...

Most smn's I know completely micromanage their Egi's skills, very little is left to "the pet just doing it's thing", same with most sch's that I know

The only micromanaging I do is put Garuda on obey...and Ifrit is left on auto. From what I am told I am always top damage dealer by our raid leader and we've gotten many clears. Lol Summoner has very little pet managing to do. The main focus is the upkeep of dots, trance and what not. Nothing to do with pets...which makes no sense, seeing how in 1.x the player poll wanted a PET CLASS the most. This is NOT a pet class, it is a dot class.

What I wouldn't mind having is Aion's spirit master. The pet's would evolve, were a pretty decent size, and the Spirit Master themselves had dots too..but the main and powerful attacks came from the pet. It was a good balance, at least when I played it was.

[Duelle]

The only "healing" I did on SMN was in EXP PT. in end game it was always damage, damage, damage. I played with JP/NA mix and we did a lot of world firsts and fought all the hard stuff. Bringing a SMN to heal in end game was a very mediocre thing to do..

That's kind of the thing, though. You have a job that was used as a poor-man's healer for most of its life. The worst part was that no one expected SMN to do anything other than healbot until the lv70 Blood Pacts came in. Of course, that still leaves levels 1-69...

The main focus is the upkeep of dots, trance and what not.

If we're talking about SMN mechanics, I think the focus should really be on Dreadwyrm Trance. I remember people were celebrating when that was revealed and saying "omg i get to become bahamut" instead of asking "wait, where are the pet abilities I thought I was getting with the expansion?".

Unfortunately, lore must always take a back seat to mechanics, otherwise there would be some horribly over powered classes. Such as summoner, could you imagine how weak an egi would be to allow all three or more summoned at once. Unless you want people to be able to one shot a boss without a party.

Not necessarily. Temp summons would be one way to do it. Say, you summon Ravana-egi to auto attack the mob for 15 seconds, and upon hitting the 15 second mark it does an egi version of Chandrahas (that deals reasonable damage) and then vanishes. And there's nothing that prevents temp summons from being more fragile than egis.

[AnaviAnael]

Who did you play with? That is odd. I was a SMN main in FFXI since release (2003) I got my WHM up to 60 fairly quickly and then did the lv65 avatar fights. In end game on my SMN I did sub WHM but never touched the spells, only sneak and invis to get to the camp. My LS leaders had me do damage...always. I was put in a PT with a brd and rdm and had my pet out all the time with my AF2 (I got the full set very quickly,w as lucky lol)

A lot of people had zero idea what a SMN could do. Plain and simple. Either they didn't play the job and therefore "it must suck," or they played with bad SMNs who gave people the impression the job was garbage. A lot of jobs in FFXI suffered that fate (people don't know the job/play job poorly and it must be the job's fault).

I totally agree. I just find it funny that in making this argument in the lore as for why we can't have more than 3 egis, they kinda made it questionable why we can't have more than one egi active at the same time.
And now we're getting the egis anyway albeit as glamour. I can't wait how they try to justify this in the lore as it contradicts their earlier statement... :P

Lore: The cause of and solution to all of XIV's problems XD