Quote Originally Posted by kyuven View Post
FFXI's summons had a key mitigating factor that prevented them from being REALLY annoying: they were ostensibly temporary. They drained MP and thus couldn't be kept out indefinitely. Which means you couldn't create a massive lagfest of summons in Jeuno to block NPCs for longer than a couple minutes if at all.
Not entirely true. There is equipment to drastically reduce the MP costs to less than or equal to the Summoner's built-in Refresh effect for many of the summons. You could happily keep Titan out forever.

Appearance aside though, I miss their impact. Summoner doesn't feel like a summoner. It's just another DPS caster. The 'summon', while not useless, is just another half to the same whole. They don't have many skills, and the few they do have are relatively weak. Compare that to Garuda's Predator Claws from FFXI or Fenrir's Eclipse Bite. There's just no comparison. The balance here was that the summoner was weak on their own, so their pets weren't just an addition, they were a necessity.

Say what you will about them, they at least lived up to their job title.