Quote Originally Posted by Jerbob View Post
I get that - certainly a completely unaltered, direct import of FFX or XI's Summoner into XIV isn't something that would work. But why not the general concept of the pet focus? Why not a job where the pet "does the work" and the character supports it? In all the instances where XIV's SMN is casting Bio, Ruin, etc etc, could this hypothetical job not be interacting with or commanding the pet? Surely there's nothing in XIV that prohibits that.
There's a couple of reasons.

First is concept. FFX's summons basically replaced the entire party to justify how strong they were, and that's overpowered as hell and not something that would work here.

Second is incongruity in class growth. Every class in this game follows a template of 18 class skills, 10 job skills, and 11 traits. SMN as implemented in FFX would require breaking that entirely, which can be good or bad depending on what it is replaced with. FFXI actually underlines this quite well, since SMNs get almost nothing between version updates additions unless the devs add new avatars. And it's clear they've struggled with that (look at how long they took to add Cait Sith; not to mention the arguably contrived conditions to summon Odin and Alexander, which was partly done to justify how strong Zantetsuken and Perfect Defense are).

Last is use of the summons. FFX's aeons were obsoleting each other, with Yojinbo and Bahamut being the "top" summons. We can lean towards situational use by giving each summon a niche, but even that has limited and forces you to water down their relative power (hence why FFXI's summons were largely jokes for a big part of the game's lifespan). Stuff like Healing Ruby, Aerial Barrier, Earthen Wall, and Ecliptic Growl would be OP as all hell here and make SMN a must for pretty much every raid encounter (and in turn force the devs to balance the game around bringing a SMN in every group comp).

You might try to argue that summons are already situational because of how Ifrit-egi is melee, Garuda-egi is a caster and Titan-egi is a tank, but having pets with different roles is not the same as having all of a class' pets be DPS with random utility. That's not even taking into account the elemental affinities of the FFXI avatars, and how that wouldn't (and shouldn't) be part of the equation in this game.