Quote Originally Posted by Navycrow View Post
Just make it like FF 11 SMN.... FF 11 SMN was so much fun
There is some ridiculous romanticization of FFXI Summoner going on in this thread. The job was a total disaster for well over a decade.

For at least a few years after it was released, avatar perpetuation cost was so steep and Blood Pact abilities so weak that no one ever even summoned anything. They had everyone playing SMN use a WHM support job and use their big MP pool to heal people. And they didn't have Haste or Refresh, so they were the last possible choice for that role anyway. Oh and you had to be max level in something else first (which could easily take some people a whole year in that game) because obtaining all the summons required endgame fights. Not that you'd be summoning them anyway.

Eventually they gave them some decent buffs and separated Blood Pact into two abilities with separate timers, so you could conceivably give people some buffs and throw out a single damage spell. People like me still waited many hours to get invited to parties like this, because the damage was worse than pretty much anyone else's and the buffs weren't even close to an actual buffer like Bard. You also needed an even more endgame fight to be able to do this than the original summons - Fenrir. Avatars also couldn't magic burst or skillchain for a long time (I forget the exact timing of these additions now) which were important to early parties, and then when this functionality was added it was still hard to time.

After many years, when the third expansion had been out for some time, SMN finally got invited to some specific endgame events for a couple of abilities that were powerful against very high level enemies. Although this did make them more desirable overall than the many jobs in XI that just got ignored by players, the gameplay here wasn't anything all that special. In fact, it was very similar to old-school summoning, because every minute (slightly less because of gear) you'd summon one thing, have it use one ability, release it, and then rest for the remainder of the cooldown.