Quote Originally Posted by Silverquick View Post
Then I actually went through all the trouble to get the Summons and wow what a PoS it was. It was hell working the thing up from scratch when you didn't even have any of your own spells other than what you sub, and even getting it to middle levels you literally had to sub WHM to even get a group.

Sure it looked cool on the surface, but wow actually playing it really sucked badly. It was anything but powerful or a Summoner.
The thing is that XI's SMN was balanced around the shit ton of utility it offered. That job could: AoE Blink. AoE Stoneskin. Had heals built in. Could remove status ailments. Deal some damage (they did make you wait until you got the lv70 Blood Pacts, which was a bad move IMO). Became super damage mode every 2 hours. Had access to pretty much every element. Could stun. I'm sure I'm forgetting some more, and all of it without taking subjobs into account.

Not to say they were justified in how that came out in-game, but XI's SMN had a lot of things that would make it really powerful if not kept under control. XI adding Alexander as a summon basically proved this because groups started bringing SMNs for Perfect Defense in order to cheese bosses (only for the devs to then add some bosses that required Perfect Defense, which made SMN mandatory).

Looking back on the design, XI's SMN would have worked better in a MOBA or "action" MMO like Guild Wars 2. Have each summon serve a "stance" with a slew of abilities with individual cooldowns granted to you depending on what you have summoned. XI's SMN was basically just that but with Blood Pact timers acting as a limiting factor.

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On the topic, there's some things the OP is not taking into account. First, Summoners in prior games largely relied on a secondary school of magic. Rydia had black magic to fall back on. Garnet, Eiko, and Yuna had white magic. Our SMN having DoTs is not much of a stretch if we keep that in mind. Especially since in-world classes and jobs don't share spells like in other FF games. This isn't like XI where there was a school of Black Magic that BLM, RDM, SCH, and DRK could all draw from.

Not to mention that even Necromancer depictions vary. Sure, some are disease-oriented, but others are focused on things like hexes/curses and undead minions with a lot of master/pet connections (the caster having spells to heal their pets, strengthen them, sacrifice them for damage, sacrifice them for power, etc).