Quote Originally Posted by Jerbob View Post
It is absolutely, spectacularly untrue, and is based on a complete misconception. Spreading this lie as a counterpoint to any reference to XI's summoner is unhelpful at best and dishonest at worst. It is deeply irritating to read for a person who actually plays the job.

It's very true that XI's summoner very was badly balanced for a long time. Its support abilities and DD abilities were weak, its MP management was terrible, and it couldn't contribute as well in groups as a lot of other jobs. It shined in some areas - it was a niche soloist, for example - but there was a lot wrong with it.

The only reason it was treated as a healer is because it had a large MP pool and could (in XIV vocabulary) cross class Cure and Esuna at a basically acceptable potency. Even with these limited tools, it was really bad at that role. It had no native healing spells (beyond a couple of niche healing support abilities on a one minute timer), and healing was never an intended use of the job. In short, XI's SMN has never been a healer or support specialist. It's mechanically incapable of being a healer beyond a strange blip in what in XIV would be considered cross-class actions.

XI's summoner continues to develop and is in a fantastic place at the moment. It's still not a healer, and the vast majority of the mechanical problems are now repaired. It's a hybrid job with damage dealing and support options that are entirely based on summoning. It doesn't even have any native spells beyond its summoning abilities. Further still, summoners are the preferred damage dealing job for certain types of content.

I'm sorry if your only experience of XI's SMN was during the "dark ages" when it was quite literally broken.
I too am still a play ffxi and by the "Dark Ages" i'm guessing you mean in the last days of the FFXI community was still alive and kicking. The only thing that has fixed SMN and the similarly miss used RDM is that the ffxi community is dead, so unless you have a good LS you are solo everything which is where SMN and RDM seem to shine