With the Endwalker addon, the jobs in Final Fantasy XIV receive new skills and are reworked. However, the Summoner will change the most, finally being implemented in the spirit of the old Final Fantasy games.
That’s why Summoners are important: There are few traditions that have been maintained in Final Fantasy games like summoning. In many parts of the series, they are at the center of events or play a very important role in the story. Parade examples include FFIV, where the protagonist Rydia is the only surviving Summoner, or FFX, which follows the journey of the medium Yuna.
For old FF nerds like me, it has always been a joy to get a new summon and use it for the first time. They were often really strong or could cripple enemies with status effects. The attacks were also often accompanied by fantastic videos and were a delight to watch.
I mean, just look at this:
How cool is it to summon really huge beasts and laugh maniacally while they rain death and destruction down on your enemies?
How was the early Summoner in FFXIV? Accordingly, the original implementation of the Summoner in FFXIV was disappointing for me and many others. During the “A Realm Reborn” time, it was a kind of mix of pet and DoT job.
You could still summon and the pets fought alongside you in battle, but their appearance and abilities were quite lame compared to earlier FF games. They were stripped-down mini versions of the great summons that appeared in FFXIV.
Especially fans of the FF single-player classics and FFXI players were disappointed with the new Summoner, which felt more like a DoT job. “Garuda” was unfortunately referred to as a chicken by parts of the community, while “Titan” was called “Chicken Nugget” due to its appearance. For a long time, it simply lacked the boom and the cool feeling of having control over something truly powerful, as it was in the past.
This is how the Summoner evolved: With the release of new add-ons, the Summoner gradually gained more style and new abilities, bringing it closer to the traditional way of summoning. Thus, players could utilize the abilities of the great Bahamut, and in Shadowbringers, the Phoenix was even added.
However, between the phases when Bahamut and Phoenix were active, you still juggled your DoTs and Egis, waiting for the two cool summons to come around in the rotation again.
Right from watching, real goosebumps
This is how the Summoner will be in Endwalker: With Endwalker, the Summoner receives another overhaul so significant that some players even joke there are 3 new jobs in this addon. The DoTs, which were once a core mechanic of the job, will be completely removed. Instead, the focus will finally be entirely on the summons and their abilities.
The trailer for the new job abilities shows the overhaul of the Summoner in detail. While the character still has his Carbuncle pet out initially, it really gets going after summoning Bahamut.
Bahamut provides the Summoner with three elemental buffs, which are displayed in the resource display in the lower left as colored gems. Each gem represents a summon and calls forth the respective beast that executes its super attack and then disappears. It’s just like in the old Final Fantasy games, and I got goosebumps just watching.
But that’s not where the summoning ends. The character now has the abilities of the summon for a certain period that he can use in battle, which also come with really huge animations. It feels like you truly have the power of Garuda, Titan, or Ifrit in your hands.
Wait! Are Summoners now evil? The lore and story fans among you may look a bit confused now. The summons are actually something bad in FFXIV. The game’s story revolves around preventing the summoning of the Eikons as much as possible because they consume the life energy of the world.
This would actually make the player character, who is suddenly juggling “real” summons, evil, right? No worries, the developers thought of that. During the stream about the job changes, Director Naoki Yoshida explained that these are not the summons of the Beast Tribes.
According to Yoshida, players summon the “gem forms” of Ifrit, Garuda, and Titan. They do not consume the life energy of the world but are maintained through the summoner’s aether. So you don’t have to worry about the lore.
A change the job deserves
Over the years, the Summoner, alongside the Astrologian, has been one of the jobs that has undergone the most complete overhauls. It felt as if the developers were searching for the identity of the job that did justice to its history within the FF series. They always work on a very strict schedule and cannot pull off changes of such magnitude as a job overhaul overnight. Therefore, I am glad that this search now seems to have borne fruit.
From what I have seen so far of the Endwalker overhaul, I think they have succeeded. Even though it will be a big adjustment for Summoner mains that the DoTs are now gone, the job can now fully focus on what is most important: the summons.
Even if the Summoner was by no means a useless job and even dominated the raiding group meta in Shadowbringers as a mage, it felt to me as if it was missing something. It was that feeling of commanding the immense power of something ancient, just like in the earlier FF games.
Therefore, the Summoner is one of the highlights of Endwalker for me, even though it is technically not a new job. What do you think of the changes? Share it in the comments.
The two new jobs from Endwalker, Reaper and Sage, as well as videos of all new abilities of other classes can be found in our article:
Final Fantasy XIV shows new gameplay for the 2 jobs of Endwalker – With real reaper
