Archanists want an image of primals...not Digimons

[Madoka]

How can it be my logic when you're implying I'd ignore FFIII NES?

I don't wanna be an Evoker. I prefer choosing what I summon.

Look this is something I've had to point out to a dude on the dps forums many times. The way summoner plays in every other FF will not work in XIV. It will. Not. Work. As for us using dots, SMN has always been X + Y except in 3. In 4 its + BLM, in 5 its + whatever you want, in 9 and 10 it's + WHM. Now it's + ACN. Deal
Casting one long thing to make a primal show up and wave its dick for a second and do damage is the only possible way to make it translate to what could be called playable and accurate, but it would be boring as shit. Also evading mechanics constantly would kill your casts constantly.
XI's system of "the avatar does everything" won't work because you cannot manage two avatars at once in mechanics properly and it would be completely unfair is our pet did everything while we were able to just stand around and dodge aoes.
A X or XII system would just be trash. Nobody wants their party replaced by a primal so they can do literally nothing.

As for the looks
Us summoning a full sized primal would make no sense from a story standpoint. Primals are terrors on the land that give 0 fucks about who summons them, only their own power. A "scaled down" model would work, but you all seem to hate the size of the egis as it stands, and seem to think replacing the model with a normal primal one would mean they have to make it bigger for you. People already have trouble telling when they get marked with whips and voice and crap in dungeons, do you really want another human sized thing blocking what your party can see? May as well let someone ride the behemoth mount around in dungeons

[tymora]

Our minions look better...haha

[Malamasala]

Our minions look better...haha

This is really the main problem. Why do SE put more effort into design of minions than summons? I'd rather we delete the summons and just make Summoner a minion power up class so I can use any minion and let them attack.

[Swagcity]

I wished they looked like Digimon; lol.

[Esmian]

Anyone else hoping Leviathan egi looks like Seadramon?

[Spellbinder]

Anyone else hoping Leviathan egi looks like Seadramon?

Leviathan you say? Here you go.

[Esmian]

That would be better than summoning any other variation of Leviathan so I would take it.

[Prototype909]

"It's ok that summoner looks and serves as the utter anti-thesis of everything Summoner harkens back to in Final Fantasy games because of some half assed lore excuse, never-mind the fact that the pets are an afterthought in terms of the way the class itself plays."

It's a bait and switch. Advertised as a pet class but all you do is run around with Egis (Oh excuse me, Egi singular, because Garuda is the only one that's relevant) that looked like they were shaped with play-dough and throw diseases at people. Some "summoner" this class turned out to be.

Recycle the "Oh but the lore says "X" excuse all you want, the lore says why we can't have the full scale manifestation of the avatars themselves. It doesn't say why the existing ones have to look so unsatisfying.

As for immersion, please. We have 1000s of players running around on Behemoths, 1000s of players running around as White Mages and Dragoons who are supposed to be the last or or elite few of their kind, players running around garbed as Odin himself. No excuse.

[Quesse]

well.... Your "real" primals are supposedly still coming. Although they've been 'coming' for 2 years now......

Yoshi in 2012:

The players will get together in their Free Companies [guilds] and they will fight Ifrit. If they defeat him, they will get the opportunity to summon him once. That Free Company will get to decide where and when to use him. Then Ifrit goes out to another place in the world for other people to go get him, so it’s like this competition between people in the world. This won’t be instanced, this will be public content, so anyone in the world can do it.” Until Ifrit is summoned, no other player group will be able to summon him. When Ifrit is actually brought into a fight it seems like nearly everyone in the server will know, because the skies will turn red. Then once the skies clear, you’ll know Ifrit is again available to defeat and acquire. “The whole world is involved in the summoning of these monsters.

[Prototype909]

I'm entirely skeptical about the "FC beats primals to summon them" system. As if that otally won't be monopolized by the same Free Companies over and over again just like people complained about NM camping in FF XI. Not the solution people are asking for.