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+--- Thread: Food For thought, First Edition:Summoner. (/showthread.php?tid=3914)
Food For thought, First Edition:Summoner. - Raigen.Convict - 12-22-2016
Alright, ladies and gentlemen, it's that time again. With the recent addition of boxer and how it uses skills from Boxer to raise its Schwarz Sturm level, a friend gave me an idea. If Grand Summoner or possibly Summoner in general functioned similar to this. Where The Summoner uses skills from Summoner and its promotions only to buff the youkai and keep them stable through the fight while you act as a sort of battery, supplying them the fuel they need to protect you and stay alive, but the weakness is the fact that doing anything but concentrating on keeping them alive will weaken your maintenance on them and cause them to be easier to take down, like they are now.
Since isn't the whole point of Summoner to be that 'you' bring these creatures in and allow them to fight in your place, keeping you safe while you support them? As it is, Summoner is more like a type of mage that deploys fragile turrets and if they're destroyed you have no reliable means to recover them without sacrificing a large sum of Momentum with Reihou in Grand Summoner and if you're a Bonder, you can't revive them at all and are left with whatever offensive capabilities you have to fend for yourself, while with Bonder being a physical class utilizing both of you assaulting the enemy at once, this isn't the biggest problem. But as a Grand Summoner, losing your youkai is a pretty big deal since not only does it remove a bit of friendship but this also lowers your offensive power unless allowed to recover with Reihou, and even then most enemies won't let this happen with either silence, or knocking the invocation apart.
Most people tend to use a support class like Priest with Grand Summoner but in all Honesty, Grand Summoner should be a support class in itself with both the youkai being helpful offensive partners and the Summoner itself supporting them and possibly allies in a few special ways and be rewarding for sticking with the Grand Summoner and Summoner support skills.
"Okay you've addressed a lot but how do you plan to do anything about it." You might ask. Well my answer is this. We give either Summoner or Grand Summoner a passive that rewards the player for staying with skills from Summoner and its promotions and these rewards either diminish or dissapear when non-passive skills from other classes are utilized. This also encompasses any buffs you activate yourself as well such as 'Painproof' or 'Wraithgaurd'. But skills that activate passively such as 'Pacifists Boon' or 'Auto-Enchant' are fine. One idea i've tossed around for a while is the use of 'Energy Transfer' on your allies besides just youkai and being able to transfer your install to a nearby ally and grant them bonuses from doing this.
"This is starting to sound a little broken." You may say. And that's why it's becoming more of a support class that creates offensive allies to protect YOU rather than being able to zap everyone with youkai spells and defending your precious turrets like it is now. I'm also proposing that we tone down the elemental attack scaling for youkai skills just a bit in trade for maybe the passive effect I mentioned to as the battle goes on to give the youkai ramping power and defense possibly so they don't just all get instantly destroyed in both PVP and PVE. This way, players who rely on being quick and assassinating targets can easily do this since the summoner is still open early in the fight. While characters who get better as the fight goes on with preparation and buffs get an actual challenge instead of how things are now where the summoner could either A. Summon storm and never reach the target due to the generally 5 movement of most youkai coupled with 6 momentum meaning they only move once, unless the RNG of summon storm is nice to you and they appear close enough to the target. Even if one or two do make it to the target, if they're fast, they can dart through them and use positioning to wait them out, if they're durable, they can still move twice and use their durability to tank through the minimalized damage they deal at 40 resistance which is about 90 or so per skill at level 60 and let's not forget elemental resistances.
I also suggest we move Evoking youkai spells to an Installed youkai only so that way there's a depth of strategy to the class instead of just contracting as many as possible in order to shoot all the spells you want like it currently is.
For an example let's say the skill is something like this:
Passive: Grants the Summoner a buff that causes all currently summoned youkai to gain additional Elemental attack, Physical Defense, Magical Defense, Hit critical and status infliction chance equal to LV * 5 % up to a maximum of LV 8 for 40% more in these areas at max LV and if the summoner uses anything that is not from Summoner or its promotions these bonuses disappear instantly. The status infliction chance only raises at half efficiency.
The bonuses start at level 0 at the beginning of the fight and every round that you haven't used anything not from Summoner you gain a LV up to 8. These bonuses are strong but not over-bearing. I left out evade and crit evade, granted no youkai except izabe has ANY crit evade since it'd be a bit -too- much for them to gain that on top of the other things. Maybe though, adding in the side effect that for every youkai that dies, the LV of this passive is decreased by one or two would allow for evade and crit evade to make it into this passive. With the addition of this, keeping the youkai alive becomes a higher priority and gives incentive to summon them in the first place, while also giving the opposition more incentive to destroy them first in place of the summoner WITHOUT give the summoner something ridiculous like the Astral Aegis from Sigrogana Legend the first. (As long as one youkai remains summoned the summoner receives 1/4 of all damage for those who never played it.)
I also suggest lowering the elemental attack scaling on level 60 evoke skills to 310% of elemental attack. This being a thing makes them less of a threat early, but as the fight progresses causes them to hit 350% elemental attack essentially making them slightly stronger than they are now.
This would also probably warrant a look at the rest of the skills in Summoner and its promotions accordingly, Soul Chains for instance I feel could become much more than it currently is, as it is it's a nice set up skill for only one purpose. But if Soul Chains became capable of ally AND enemy use, it'd be useful as a support skill AND an offensive skill. Transferring your install onto a nearby ally to grant them the effects of install and maybe use Energy Transfer to replenish a bit of an allies focus reserves in trade of your own, bringing a completely new concept to the game. Just food for thought and maybe some discussion for everyone.
Re: Food For thought, First Edition:Summoner. - K Peculier - 12-22-2016
I say we first compromise to make bonder offense skills available to all weapons. Because bonder needs love.
Alright, after giving your suggestions a read I feel like going for a huge overhaul like that might seriously break many things in the current meta without us having a good test server for it. Otherwise it seems more like straight out buffs or a straight out nerf to summoners depending on how braindead easy commanding youkai becomes.
But if this adds any degree of complexity and rewards smart decisions rather than 'summon youkai, use spells' I'm all for it!
Also, youkai feel pretty damn useless for normal hits. Maybe there should be a path of basic hitting youkai vs the autohitting/spell stuff we have now.
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So far I like the way Dev has been handling new classes/rehauls. Rewarding smart, tactical decisions should be key rather than playing the numbers game and a braindead spam button *COUGH* WRETCHED OIL *COUGH*. The way boxer has been nerfed in regards to autohits was a good direction.
Again, simply giving FREE DAMAGE and FREE HEALS to everything is awful game design.
Re: Food For thought, First Edition:Summoner. - Raigen.Convict - 12-27-2016
Another idea I had over the holidays, this post will be much shorter, don't fret.
I had the thought of either Youkai at certain levels gaining their own unique items (Torso, Hands, Legs, Accessories, ect) to better help them not feel so helpless. Since dragon race youkai as a whole already have decent defense, they still get torn through easy because they lack crit evade. I had a thought that maybe they should have a unique torso item that grants them 'Armor'. Because doesn't it make sense their scales would be hard to naturally penetrate with normal weaponry? And the fairy youkai and Phase Python have plenty of Celerity so they'll go first a majority of the time but they lack any luck to boost their evade to the levels it SHOULD be at. So maybe a special leg item on them that grants additional Evade. And a torso item that grants them access to rogue's 'Evasion' skill. This way they can be squishy as they are, but actually have a little bit of longevity to do what they're meant to do. (Asrai is a special case, we may have to hold off on Evasion for that one due to vitality scaling water damage.)
I also had a thought of if not this way, maybe make youkai items that summoners can find in chests and enemies like other items and in the companions tab the summoner can equip or un-equip these special items to their youkai. As far as lore-wise, maybe they're like ethereal pieces of equipment that sort of fade from view after equipping or something, or perhaps runes that you place on them.
Re: Food For thought, First Edition:Summoner. - Raigen.Convict - 12-29-2016
Yet another idea from the depths of my thoughts. What about if we disallow youkai to gain any buffs or healing from non-summoner classes, but give summoner or Grand Summoner ways to heal and support youkai on the feild, movement increases and such? This would prevent some of the cheese other classes can present such as my current combination of Grand Summoner and Priest. A consistent air of salt presents itself from the fact Priest can supply Sanctuary, Quickness from Curate, Brighten, and graft all youkai around the summoner. That being said though, the Summoner being the source of power and buffs to the youkai so that they don't just instantly die while the youkai being the one line of defense the summoner has seems fair to me. But this is just one option of many we have.
Re: Food For thought, First Edition:Summoner. - Raigen.Convict - 01-03-2017
Another small idea, this one doesn't have as much thought put in for which class it would go to, but my vote is Bonder. A skill that allows for half of the elemental attack of the damage type the youkai's basics uses to go into additional damage for it. (if it's blunt pierce or slash then default strength/fire elemental attack). I say it'd be interesting on Bonder as it would actually encourage the use of basic attacks on youkai since Bonder does have bonuses to hit crit and evade already.
Re: Food For thought, First Edition:Summoner. - Raigen.Convict - 01-03-2017
I had a thought recently about if Summoner got some changes, I feel in order to boost the usefulness of youkai, a good drawback on them would be only allowing the summoner to bring out one per round, which would also maybe increase the viability of Summon Storm and make them a bit more fair to be against. Since supposedly from some of their backgrounds when examined Youkai are supposedly pretty powerful creatures. Should it really be so simple to bring them forth as just popping them out two at a time like a generator?