SPOILER: Xelphatol

[Dualgunner]

Did the last boss seriously just...summon Garuda? Solo? That's not supposed to be possible I thought.

[Derio]

The summoning supposedly was not complete, so it was garuda but not at full power.

My guess is it was a egi garuda just full form. But not the full strength of the primal.

There are still so many questions

[AskaRay]

I'm assuming it was just a fraction of Garuda's power since the cutscene afterward specifically stated we STOPPED them from fulling summoning her so...

[MagiusNecros]

Meanwhile the actual Summoner class is stuck with...?

[Fynlar]

Don't see why not, Gilgamesh could summon a primal on his own as well... sort of...

[Kikoten]

Haha, Summoners, you get a gremlin for a Garuda.

Wait, I'M a Summoner. Aw, darn it.

[Alenaar]

Here's what a friend of mine had to say about this :

I have got to say, as someone who's mained ACN/SMN ever since it was first available in closed betas, I actually feel insulted. Even initially it was a little weird, our summons not really having much power (if any at all), while us the actual mages were reduced to simple DoT-wh××es. But ok, fine, it would probably improve. Higher and higher levels - it didn't improve, it didn't change, and when we in fact became summoners, we got these weird, ugly looking little things for pets. At least the carbuncles were cute, felt like actual living creatures. But apparently summoner on a grand scheme could not be done in an MMO, we can't have so long cast times and epic cutscenes for giant summons to turn all our enemies into ashes. No worries, we thought as newer and newer primals appeared, at least we would get more Egis. We didn't. We went on with the same exact things, and somewhere down the road words were heard about how complicated new Egis would be, what an immense additional workload they would be, and so on. But maybe changing the appearance of the ones we do have could be done in future.

Then Heavensward dropped, and the very first Summoner job quest had the gall to tease us with new Egis, only to end up with #lolnope. I'm not sure about others, but to I for one felt it was in pretty bad taste, all things considered. And the new levels, the new skills didn't change much either - not in the direction of a summoner anyway, instead we started to feel like some sort of shamans. Egi glamours were talked about some more and promised again, over and over - only to be delayed further every single time. Then suddenly Carbuncle specifically was mentioned as the first glamour, slated for 3.4 - here I'm willing to believe something was lost in translation and it wasn't actually 3.4 that was said but rather 3.4x, but either way it's something that would use assets that have been in the game since ARR's launch more than three years ago. And yet: the first live letter preview omitted it, but there was going to be another ... which then also ended up without one word of it. From some other (albeit still official, but very much Japanese-only) source we once again heard 3.4 for Egi glamours, via a third party... Only for that to turn out to have been incorrect, a day or two later, also via a third party, informing us that yes that was not right and it's going to be late. Again.

And now, after all this, here we are with Xelphatol's final boss doing a form of actual summoner that I'm pretty sure could be accepted by everybody as a rather accurate and fine way of doing a summoner in this game. Again, I'm not sure what everyone else thinks, especially those also maining summoner since the beginning, but personally I sure feel like I've been slapped in the face. Hard.

[SessionZero]

My assumption is that because the boss is an Ixal, and a rather powerful-looking one at that, likely trained from birth to be a master of his arts, that he can call forth slivers of Garuda's power for the one-off attacks we see in the fight. It's not a complete summon, rather more like the brief surges of power akin to Final Fantasy Tactics summoners who call forth eikons for devastating attacks and then they disappear.

Conversely, the WoL, who starts out as a scrub with a notebook who, in lore, doesn't even know what a primal is until he blunders his way into one, can still summon slivers of those primal's powers (the egi) but at least he can keep them as a constant companion, rather than one-off powerful attacks. The summoner is not a fervent believer in the primal, rather he uses ancient Allagan techniques to rip primal powers from beyond the veil and bend them to his will.

Granted, I haven't done the 50-60 SMN questline, so maybe my information is outdated, but it seems like a simple case of wrapping lore up in game mechanics.

[Zohar_Lahar]

Did the last boss seriously just...summon Garuda? Solo? That's not supposed to be possible I thought.

It seems to be new type of summoning. The whatshisname Ixal guy described it as "calling" a sliver of Garuda's power. It's quite different from arcanima egi or the full manifestation of a primal.

[Jetstream_Fox]

Here's what a friend of mine had to say about this :

I can relate to your friend, I felt insulted when they decided to name the Bard of Darkness to the Ranger of Darkness and gave her the power to combine her arrows with magic.