[Fern]

This happened to me recently, so take what I say with a grain of salt.



While it's cool for Bonder to possess abilities that make it useful, Youkai pack large amounts of damage that get far too overbearing when every Youkai you summon gets to act immediately... with a momentum bonus, mind you.

With a white spirit, you're allowed to summon the youkai and make it use a spell twice in a round right after it's summoned for 200+ damage per cast, 130-ish if you pack at least 40 RES.

I understand that Youkai are painful to level, and that they are currently fragile. But this allows them to basically explode someone when you use it with the intention to bring out every Youkai in your arsenal in 2-3 rounds.

My offers are the following:

A) Make it so Fast Offense only works with Bonded Youkai
B) Make it so Fast Offense's status goes away once you summon a Youkai, at least requiring you to re-apply it.

Thoughts?

[Stenzio]

Option B sounds like a nicer idea in my opinion.

[Selfish Gene]

As someone who has been using Bonder on and off, mostly recently with one of my characters, I can honestly agree wholeheartedly with this. After a few brief tests and even delving into the "scum" that is Bonder/Priest, I realized that the damage output Youkai can give someone is ridiculous. I will admit that in order to get 3 Bonded Youkai to level 60, it took me about 14 hours of solid grinding (Which I did in the span of two days due to IC reasons) and it was painful, but evidently well worth it. The funny thing is that I never even bothered to possess myself with a Fast Offense white spirit because 1.5x damage from Holy is honestly frightening to deal with.

But I digress. I have still used one of those spirits in a Bonder/MG build and it was honestly repulsive how much damage I could deal. Why even bother using my guns when I can use Fast Offense and summon 3 Youkai in the span of 1 1/2 turns and have them dish out ~300 damage on squishy players EACH for minimal cost? For that reason alone, I disagree with the A because having 3 Bonded Youkai make this severely daunting for anyone to face. Can't hit someone? Fast Offense and summon a Youkai to deal arguably more damage than I would have with 7 momentum worth of attacks. Not only this, but a very clever combo that can be done is using a Youkai spell, then summoning said Youkai with Fast Offense and using the same spell two more times, thus letting you use a Youkai spell 3 times in a single turn if you already have Fast Offense in use.

Needless to say, as much of a pain as Youkai are to level up, especially for Grand Summoners, I don't think the amount of time invested into Bonder should reward them as greatly. As I've said, it only took me about 14 hours of solid grinding to have 3 Bonded Youkai and have them reach level 60. I personally feel more inclined to agree with B because this way it lets someone pop a Youkai and have them move and attack (or attack twice in a single turn with a spirit) on the same turn they were summoned. This makes it fairer and easier to deal with as someone facing a Bonder as well.

[Ranylyn]

I'd like to propose a third alternative. "Summon Shock."

Being pressed into service so suddenly is disorienting, and as such, the Youkai suffers a penalty on that first turn. Move is reduced by 2, and the scaling on their skills are reduced by half. Summoning without fast offense gives them time to look around and get their bearings, while summoning with it leaves them going "Wait what hold on I - ack!"

Why do I propose this? Simple. Right now, the only 2 summoner classes are Bonder and Grand Summoner, both of which have a completely different aim (Mass Summon vs Limited Summon with benefits) but also basically want each other's skills (Why do bonders NOT have something like Reihou or Spirit Regeneration!? And a GS would love something like Ritual Sword for even more FP.) So basically, in my opinion, both options A and B would be harmful to a dedicated "pure" summoner-type.

[Autumn]

What? Youkai themselves are far from a position that requires nerfing, this is only the interaction between white spirits and fast offense.

Its very simple, just make fast offense not scale past rank 5 so that ridiculous things do not occur.

[Snake]

Option B.

Fast Offense is too momentum efficient.

[Selfish Gene]

That's not a bad idea, I could definitely see the benefit and balance that could be gained from that and wouldn't be opposed to seeing that implemented. However, my biggest concern is that oftentimes people use Fast Offense when they're already in range and will likely seize the opportunity to spam attack twice in a round. I see where you're going with the halved scaling on attacks, but at the end of the day, that's still equal to a fully powered attack. For example:

Turn 1: Fast Offense + Summon Youkai + Youkai Skill (1/2) + Youkai Skill (1/2)
Turn 2: Summon Youkai + Youkai Skill (1/2) + Youkai Skill (1/2) + Summon Youkai + Youkai Skill (1/2) + Youkai Skill (1/2) + Turn 1 Youkai Skill (1)

If you do the math to calculate how much damage is done within two turns alone, [(1/2 * 6) + 1)], it still deals a total of 4 full damage in said span of two turns. If each skill deals 200 to 10 RES characters and 135 to 40 RES characters (for example, don't take that too literally), that's still a staggering 800 damage to 10 RES characters and 540 damage to 40 RES characters in two turns from Youkai alone.

The last thing I want to do is sound like I'm challenging or disagreeing with you Ranylyn, I assure you. I just think that the theory is great on paper, but in scenario testing, it still seems pretty one-sided towards Bonders. I just think the damage output for Youkai is horrific and adding a whole new status effect for Youkai to try and counteract this, and possibly fail at doing the job justice, is asking a bit much when a solution could very well be just restricting the number of Youkai that benefit from it, for example.

[Autumn]

The biggest issue with fast offense is literally just summoning two youkai with 7m on top of someone, not that fast offense itself is broken, I would instead encourage people to single bond youkai that they'd actually summon because it brings variety to the table.

This is why if you just disable the white spirit compatibility with it, you won't run into many more problem cases at all, option A is far more preferable to option B, but I'd rather just disable the compatibility completely, my proposal also doesn't make destiny summoner complete hot garbage this way as well, dig?

[Selfish Gene]

I would be inclined to agree with you Spoops and I do agree with you that the fact that white spirit Fast Offense offers 7 momentum for Youkai is a tad bit absurd. The only reason I'm not very fond of just slapping a "No this spirit doesn't exist" solution on this matter is because it just seems like a slap-on fix with no legitimate reasoning behind it. It'd be awkward for a new player to join the game and say:

Oh hey, so I'm new to the game and I'm fiddling around with possession. I've been trying to get a white spirit for Fast Offense so that I can get an extra momentum for PVE fights, but I haven't had any luck. What gives?

And if the solution to that is quite literally:

Oh yeah, we thought it was too OP in PVP so we decided to make it impossible to get that one spirit due to said reason.

I don't know, that doesn't really rub me the right way. I would rather spark a well thought out discussion and talk about potential fixes the community can think of that isn't just slapping on a white spirit ban for the skill and calling it a day. Would it be easy? Yes. But it's too easy if that makes any sense.

Edit: Also, the game already promotes and highlights the use of 1 Bonded Youkai by providing other skills and effects that benefit you if you choose to do so. Fight As One grants +30 Evade, Hit, Crit Evade, and Crit if your Bonded Youkai is near you. Synchro Summon increases both you and your Bonded Youkai's stats by 6. Offensive skills give bonus effects if you only have one Bonded Youkai as well (For example, Ritual Sword will summon the Youkai to your side). I think it's fair to say that if someone wants to only have one Bonded Youkai they're more than free to, it's just that in its current state, having many Youkai to summon with Fast Offense offers the most benefits.

[Joseph Jostar]

Points worth considering but I'm too uninvolved with the game to provide details on:
- Non-bonded summoners will have a TON of elemental and secondary effect options to choose from for fast-summoning and blasting people with before they can react.
- If the summoner is slower than their opponent and fast-summons a youkai faster than that opponent, that youkai will have a solid two turns of doing whatever it wants without interference. (Though from what I understand, only the first will have the 7M?)
- Apparently fast offense works with summon storm?????