Is there an unneeded hostility towards regular classes in this game?

[Ryuko]

People give smn too much credit in ff11.

Nobody played them in endgame. Endgame LS would laugh at you if you applied as only smn.

Smn in ff11 was a subpar whm all of the time, especially while they were leveling. You were lucky to get smn to max level pre-abyssea because smn was a huge gimp to exp parties. They only had two uses. One was hate free damage on HNMs, which rarely still happened. In old old old ff11 days, people would rather just have one or two thf or dd/thf SATA the tank nonstop while other dds can fight the HNMs. The only other use for smn was Alexander and that was still rarely used.

Sure you can get a bunch of smns together and go kill some trials, but I can solo the primals as rdm, so what did it really matter?

Smn in ff11 was trash, it was just all novelty. People need to stop making it sound like ff11 smn was great when they were just completely useless to anything in the game.

You are incorrect. Before Abyssea, I had SMN, WHM, and BLM at 75. Was SMN useful for everything? No, but it did have a lot of uses. My endgame LS (which beat all content before dwindling in WotG) loved using SMN for wyrms (Tiamat/Jormungand) and basically any kited mob -- even before Diabolos made it easy to do a reliable 500~ magic damage from far away. I remember one time joining an entire SMN/BST alliance (back before endgame LS's had monopolies on Tiamat) and downing her that way. It was REALLY fun. The first Carbuncle x5 BCNM win on my server was almost entirely made up of summoners coordinating with each other. There were entire Summoner linkshells that could get almost anything done using pets and coordination.

You just literally said they were trash, showing you really did not know the class very well. Also, Alexander was not added until much, much later -- far after they introduced the ability for avatars to MB and SC, and also long after they split the offensive/defensive bloodpacts into two timers/groups. Summoners stopped being grossly seen as merely a 'gimped healer' at about the time SC/MBs were introduced. I believe it was a few years later they actually made Summoning Magic *count* for something, too. It is true that not all exp parties were SMN friendly, but there were some that were prior to TP burns. Astral Burns were also an option -- similar to Manaburns for BLM.

Every class had its ups and downs. When I hit 75 with my BLM, it was during a time when EVERYONE was doing TP burns on those birds in ToAU areas. No one wanted a BLM. I actually ended up soloing to 75 on those qiqirns in the indoor area (that's as specific as I can be, as it's been a while).

I soloed a lot of difficult things as summoner, and took great pride in doing so. I can't tell you how many times I soloed avatars for others, or organized Fenrir parties to help low level summoners get their beloved avatars. I would also team up with a beastmaster to duo some of the harder NMs in the game. BST pets held hate well, but did little damage. SMN pets did nice damage, but did not hold hate well. Together, we were an unstoppable team.

That said, I'm not saying SMN was the best class ever... but I also do not like that you are saying they were horrible and using THAT as a reason to discredit OP. The beauty of FFXI is that you could really find a use for any class if you are creative. My first Divine Might win was filled with several summoners AND a beastmaster on top of other less-than-desirable class combinations. This was when most people just went in and nuked it down as a group of BLMs.

Where I WILL agree with you is that FFXI and FFXIV are not the same game -- as you will see from my earlier reply -- and that SMN in FFXI and FFXIV should not be seen or treated the same way. They are very, very different classes with very different functionalities. Even the lore behind the two jobs is very different.