[SolAndLuna]

Another day, another Balance Fu thread-

Sync-Mind is probably one of the more important Summoner skills people have at their disposal. One thing about it as it is now, though, is that it tends to cost way, way more than it's worth, at least when using spells from your youkai.

While yes, some spells do make sense, like Hunter Wind, there are others that simply... don't. As an example, Drowned Woman's Drown. For something that literally only deals water damage and nothing else, it costing 33 FP when said Drowned Woman is at level 60 is absolutely unreasonable. Flame Jetwing also costs 33 FP with Jhunn at level 60, and it tends to deal far less damage than the FP cost would indicate. Even with it being a line that moves you past everything, the cost seems a bit much.

Other spells that are questionable for the cost are Apodis, Thunder Claw, Seeker Flame, Acid Jet, Fire Wail, Deathtouch... Likely a good number of other skills, as well. The wide majority of them are single target spells, some of which have no bonus effect to speak of while others give a very minor effect, so why do they cost just as much FP and deal similar or less damage than actual AoE spells with existing additional effects?

That's not to say that those spells are completely unusable, they can be used in theory... just that in practice, they're fairly limited in utility.


Another thing I'd like to note is that while FP cost is halved for youkai using their own spells, it isn't enough to allow some youkai to take actions for long periods of time.

For example, Hippogriph's Mare Wing costs 32 FP when used on the summoner. Which would normally be acceptable, it creates air shafts and deals damage in an AoE around the caster. While it's still weaker than the average mage spell, it works well enough.
The problem is that Hippogriph itself only has 65 FP at level 60. It requires 16 FP per use of Mare Wing due to the cost being halved, which means that it can attack 4 times before completely running out of FP. It gets another 50 FP from Affinity: Avian, but that only puts it at 7 uses of Mare Wing instead. It can maybe last through one fight, but trying to rely on it for any longer will simply have it run out and become little more than a meat shield that requires a good deal of FP per round to maintain.

It's likely that there are other youkai that suffer from similar issues with FP, but I'm not familiar with every single youkai, so I can't say for certain. That being said, it's pretty clear that the existing costs likely need to be adjusted a bit. People probably shouldn't have to think "I want to keep this youkai at a low level so it doesn't cost as much to use their spell", or anything similar.

[Senna]

Okay, I can feel you there. The youkai spells are a little too costy for their own worth. The fact is, if you don't hard focus on X elemental attack (Build meme), they're almost not worth using right now. As Sol stated, it reaches the point people refuse to level certain youkai due to the FP cost. (If it ain't damage source, I ain't leveling it)

This is more serious on a Shapeshifter since they're required to use youkai spells yet the cost for said spells makes it hard to not run out of FP quickly without secondary class support such as monk or Mystic Grow Appendage.

Indeed, you're better off abusing your secondary class ability over Youkai evokers. Let's not even get into how fast youkais run out of FP when using their OWN spells.

I understand why alot of people are okay with this large cost due to hate but let's not use one oversize dragon as a excuse.

How to fix this?

Lower the amount of FP cost per level IS a suggestion I would mention. Of course, I'm not saying we need the 5~10 FP cost back but if we can get it down to a reasonable amount to fit the cost. I'd say somewhere around 20~ mark for players and 10~ mark for the youkai.

Why so little for the youkais? Due to the repeat action increasing the cost by 50%, it'll add up to 15~20 mark. This mean, they'll end up using 30~40 FP a turn. Reasonable, yeah? Standard for some mage classes.

[Autumn]

I'd argue FP cost wise you can lower the spell cost to the base cost for the youkai themselves, but only scale if the summoner is casting it.

[HexGirlBestGirl]

I'd argue FP cost wise you can lower the spell cost to the base cost for the youkai themselves, but only scale if the summoner is casting it.

This. Just do this. The costs are fine as they are, especially with ways to reduce it and how they potently only scale on Elemental Attack to my knowledge coming from two sources, not one.

But I believe that Youkais shouldn't have overly expensive scaling skills themselves. That's just goofy and silly. Outright. Notable mentions are Firefox and Cat's Claw for me. Literally Killkenny can't even function by itself and Firefox is pretty much a "unsummon me" button the moment it uses Seeker Flame like five times total.

My point being. If you want my true take on things. Regarding the Shapeshifter comment.

Have Natural Evoke on Shapeshifter refund the current Rank*10% FP cost on a successful Install. Meaning if say, Drown Costs 30 FP. Sure, I wanna install into DW. Shoot and lose that 30 FP but then refund 9 FP back then apply the reduction as per usual so now Drown will cost 21 FP as long as I have it installed.


Secondly. To adjust epic costs overall. If you don't want to do what Spo suggested.


See this? Make that apply to Youkai too. That means Youkai, summoned from a Summoner who has Evoke Mastery gets 75% Reduced FP costs instead. 

Thirdly. For Bonder? Just either make a new skill that's like Shared Pain and Joy only with FP costs strictly for Youkai Evokes (although guess what Parted Pain already does.) or make it so that Two Souls Beyond also reduces FP Costs of Evokes for the installed Bonded Youkai further.

I just don't want you people to forget these things exist and what have you. I don't think I have too many FP Problems on my summoners currently in regards to casting evokes equal to value. But I also use Parted Pain, Natural Evoke and Evoke Mastery on them so. Maybe that's got something to do with it. Since most of said summoners don't go over 300 FP.

But there's a huge fucking problem when i'm being discouraged from summoning my youkai since they have some super wack ass fucking FP costs that are literally only reduced by putting Parted Pain on them which makes them not as useful for finishing a fight but again Bonder is about fighting in tandem with your youkai but you get my point, I hope. 

That is all.

[Perdition]

In addition to lower FP costs for youkai using their own spells, repeat action FP cost penalty needs to not apply to them. That was added to discourage players from spamming the same spell/skill, but youkai are literally incapable of doing anything but that.

[SolAndLuna]

I do think most of the ideas mentioned here are good. One thing I'd like to comment on, however:

I just don't want you people to forget these things exist and what have you. I don't think I have too many FP Problems on my summoners currently in regards to casting evokes equal to value. But I also use Parted Pain, Natural Evoke and Evoke Mastery on them so. Maybe that's got something to do with it. Since most of said summoners don't go over 300 FP.

Don't get me wrong, it's entirely possible to keep summoners from running out of FP while using evoke skills/spells. The problem is that they cost significantly more FP while offering significantly less in terms of effects and damage (assuming a standard setup) compared to other spells, on a class that, in most cases, is expected to either keep losing FP every turn due to maintaining summoning costs, or instead keep using evokes to swap installs. While Evoke Mastery does even it out, Parted Pain only works for the youkai themselves, and the way Natural Evoke works right now normally doesn't help, since Chaos Reflex encourages you to keep switching installs anyway, to the point that re-using the same skill is unlikely.

Just as a sort of example, let's say I have about... 100 SWA with a wind tome and 75 wind ATK on a character. Just for the sake of making it easier to track, let's assume this character is not a Grand Summoner and therefore can't use Evoke Mastery, and currently doesn't have a youkai installed.

With those stats, Air Pressure would do only slightly less damage compared to the wind elemental evoke skills, while costing roughly 7 less FP per cast and having a better range to work with, with Hunter Wind generally being the only one that'd be worth using compared to that unless I really needed Mare Wing's air shaft at that moment. And Air Pressure uses 100% wind ATK and 100% SWA, while there are other spells that scale better, have decent effects, okay range and still end up costing less FP compared to a level 60 youkai skill.

The wide majority of elements end up being the same on that front, as far as I can tell. Comparing Fir to Fire Wail, for example, or Miu to Ice Jet, just to give a few examples. I'm not saying that youkai spells need to be on par with other player spells by any means, but when these spells end up costing far, far more while doing far, far less, it kind of feels like there's very little point to actually using them in the first place.

Sure, both of the stats I mentioned can still be a good deal higher in a lot of cases, but as far as I can tell, unless you're building specifically to use youkai spells of a few specific elements, using spells from other classes is generally better, and some spells simply being a single target damage move within 4-5 range with minimal or no additional effect doesn't help matters. The main advantage the Summoner evoke skills have is that they don't need a specific weapon in the first place, really, but needing to use more FP for generally less effect doesn't quite seem like a worthwhile trade off when you need to burn through FP to keep a youkai on the field already.

The ideas you mentioned for changing the existing passives are still a pretty good solution, definitely, and I agree with pretty much everything else you and everyone else here has said. Just wanted to clarify that, while you can bring the evoke costs down to a point where they're usable, a small handful of them still don't really feel worthwhile, generally.