I’ve had an idea recently for how to revamp the summoner class.
Instead of the summoner always summoning phantoms, the summoner could summon all sort of different units. He could do this by using a new type of magic called summon magic. These would be tomes exclusive to summoners that each summon a specific unit type. So the Swordmaster tome could summon swordmasters, the archer tome could summon archers, etc. There could even be some overpowered tomes that summon really powerful units like dracozombies, but to prevent this from being too game breaking, those tomes would have to be really rare or have very limited uses.
I’ve been wanting to see this idea tinkered with for awhile now and so far only two hacks I’ve seen even tried to do something different with summons.
Myth of Blights gave the summon skill to halberdiers and instead of a 1HP phantom they instead called forth a “Knight” of a certain class with different weapons and were basically just generics you can call forth to slow down or weaken some foes for a few turns.
The real interesting one was Embers Entwined since it had this whole ass Necromancy system that used the units Res as a resource and if the raised unit dies he was just out that res for the rest of the map.
The summoned dancer can also use the heal staff.
However, they initially appear as moved (Gray), so they can act from the next turn.
HP is 1, so be careful on the first turn.
Furthermore, up to five dancers can be summoned, which is quite strong if used well.
Vanilla Summoner is a useless class, but FE8Girls redesigned it about 13 years ago as a very useful class.
Just be aware it was a “telephone” hack so some of the story is a bit wonky and the difficulty can be somewhat erratic due to maps being made by different people.
There are also some hidden quirks of it particular hack but just remember to check unique enemy discriptions and you should be fine.
Going to second not touching vanilla summoning if you want to do something cool. EE’s summoner doesn’t touch vanilla summoning at all. It uses the special event unit patch to call an event that manually spawns, moves, and add stats to the unit.
Well, while Embers Entwined uses some custom eventing to make that whole thing work, Myth of Blights really just changed the phantoms in the unit list into actual units with stats since the phantoms can actually be re-assigned who they belong to due to the summon skill being able to be added to different classes.
Also there is Deity Device: Saint’s Blood by Permafrost, he has a protagonist who has the ability to summon a familar who is able to cast spells.