[Trexmaster]

Chaos » Fri Feb 06, 2015 7:33 am[/url]"]The thing about Summoners is that versatility is their strong suit; as long as they have the slots, they can touch any number of bases with the diverse types of Youkai available. Does that mean they're literally a master of all trades? No. On its own, the Summoner class is a foundation to build the Youkai on, and without Youkai, it is completely useless; hell, even the Grand Summoner has only one meager fall-out plan if their Youkai fail them.

The issue, is that this versatility leads it to be one of the best, if not /the/ best choice to sub with whatever promo it is you main. Summoner (the base class) is useless without youkai, yes, I don't see why you needed to bring that up? I don't see how that last bit is relevant, or what you even meant by that. You could say the same thing about any other promo's strong suit failing them (A BK's defense being ignored, a MG's hit being rendered useless, etc.), except I don't see how this one could ever happen, there is no true hard counter to everything Youkai can do for a GS.

This also leads into my point on why I feel like trying to cut up Sync-Mind is a bad idea; compared to Class Skills, Sync-Mind skills are weak. The main incentive is the Actives, and even if their scaling promises good damage, they will still have a hefty FP cost associated with them if you want to maximize their potential. Don't even bother with Passives; Class Skills will top any single one of them on any day of the week. (Hell, even a good amount of equipment trumps their effects) Sure, you might get something good if you had specific combinations, but that's just it; a Sync-Mind Passive is there to give a small bump to something else.

The thing is, with the slots for it (which as stated in the OP dev has allowed you to do a faith-run to get nearly /all/ the youkai that'd give you any sort of benefit), you can have a very, very large repertoire of both actives and passives to utilize. Obviously they, by themselves, won't compare to class abilities that do similar, but some actives are capable of meeting or exceeding them, if only for a higher FP price. What this change would do is force you to pick what youkai's abilities you'd be able to access yourself, instead of being able to use /all/ of them. You'd be able to choose about 3-4 youkai types, which is more than enough to get what you want.

Furthermore, the Summoner already can't get every fundamental with how many SPs they get. If you want to get all seven affinities maxed out? Get an extra SP in Summoner, and don't bother with anything but The Contract and the Affinities. You want Sync-Mind/Install/Cracked Mirror? You have only 4-5 Affinities to choose from. Considering how Youkai Growths are written up right now, I have no issue with that many Affinities being accessible. It would be far worse if the Summoner was forced to lose even more SP due to one aspect being split up and requiring maxed-out Affinities to begin with.

Affinities just give a small bonus to installs and the youkai itself--it's not entirely unreasonable to have it be difficult to fit in so many of those into your build. As it stands, you're not penalized at all for not taking the affinity for a youkai if you never plan to summon it.

That's the kind of specialization that belongs in a Promotion Class, not a Base Class.

Okay. You can pick which youkai to specialize in, thus the versatility would remain, it'd simply be more restricted in that you wouldn't have immediate access to every active and passive for yourself. Summoner as it stands isn't specialized at all.