Quote Originally Posted by dezzmont View Post
Yes, XIV's summoner CAN'T be a re-implementation of old summoners and it doesn't have to be slavishly loyal to old ones, but summons are suuuuuper iconic to FF overall and a huge part of every game's cosmology is addressing them. XIV did a great job in some ways (They are fantastically awesome bosses!) but in the way you access them it didn't do so great, both in general and in its own fiction, and this is almost certainly the primary 'pain point' that gets people asking for summoner reworks so often.

SMN is in a weird spot among the trifecta of 'pain classes' (BRD, MNK, and SMN, who consistently are losers in satisfaction/rework polls) because while they get updates to their basic spells and, again, TRULY well designed trances and demis, their basic egi they spend a lot of their time with and with which they are encouraged to base their job identity around has... really bad animations and despite being arguably the most visually prominent part of why you are a summoner it actually does a very bad job at it.
Fully agree.

...Now if only there were more threads starting from more or less brass-tack details by which to make Egis not objectively terrible instead of beginning from requests to burn SMN to the ground (or literally remove it as a job)...