[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.