[Trexmaster]

Just to add my two cents...

...I don't see why people being able to swap youkai out if they've grinded them all is a significant issue, if I'm being honest? One, you need to spend a ton of extra time and effort for it, and two, even after they did, it doesn't guarantee a win in most cases, especially if immunities are supposed to be removed.

Just seems to me like, given the circumstances, summoners already need to spend significantly more time to grind on average, using a sub-optimal strategy for grinding them regardless of what your class is (because you have no reason to summon them in PvE due to it being slower than just using evokes and the other class, and they can take damage and die on top of that). You can use Cypelle to speed up the process, but even that isn't going to make it equal to the amount of time necessary for other classes to get ready - you need bleeding hearts (which are hard to get if you play an even slightly moral character) to unlock the upgrade, and then a ton of Cypelle on top of the usual requirements for crystal terminal upgrades.

Not to mention, the idea of "you can't go beyond 12 ever" strongly discourages any experimentation - you need to delete a youkai to get a new one, and if it turns out that youkai doesn't work in your case? Well, you wasted a ton of time, and now need to spend a bunch more getting your old youkai back. When most other classes can mess with skills/weapons/etc at will without spending nearly as much time, it can already feel like Summoner puts you in a difficult position once you've started playing it.

Even beyond all of this... Frankly, if someone grinded out that many youkai and decided to use them to swap for counters, I feel like that's their right at that point. Especially when items are easier to get and allow you to do similar besides, even if people usually don't.

It's difficult to say how impactful it'll be after potential future changes to Youkai's immunities, reflects, and absorbs. Even if they're downgraded to simply be high resists (which in some cases like against the new bosses this may actually be a buff), it still makes for giving summoners a much more versatile kit for dealing with specific encounters. It may not be an auto-win but being able to hotswap otherwise useless Youkai for the fight you're about to do is extremely useful. Like I said before, letting everyone have 21 Youkai means if you're susceptible to any of them you're going to face it 100% of the time if the summoner knows what they're doing.

The amount of time spent grinding Youkai is irrelevant, especially on Korvara where Cypelle lets you skip the worst part of the grind (level 55-60). Using grinding as an excuse for something to be overbearing is disingenuous. There's almost nothing to work towards after you've gotten your gear and filled out your Legend Book as much as you're willing to, Cypelle will just pile up. It's arguably faster to finish a summoner in some cases where others might need specific 9* items that could take longer to drop than a summoner would take to get so much Cypelle they could level 60 every single Youkai they could possibly get. Point being summoners only need to grind as much as they want to swap their youkai around after they've done the initial grind.

The test server exists for experimentation currently but if you want to mess around or don't like your current picks it doesn't take long to get a Youkai back to level 60 if you have a decent reserve of Cypelle. If you don't, running around the lowbie dungeons that have gatherable Cypelle and hitting what bosses you can gets you the 10-15 or so needed to skip the vast majority of the levelling process for a Youkai.

No one else really has a reason to keep grinding aside from summoners at this point, beyond the mindless acquisition of resources for possible updates that might need them. I firmly believe the amount of time someone has grinded should not correlate to a strict advantage over others if they do not also have the same opportunity to gain such an advantage from grinding. Only summoners benefit from this.

I will weep no tears for a summoner not being able to pull out the exact resists they need to counter every single person they 1v1, it's bad enough with gear swapping.

A compromise I'd be willing to accept though:

Youkai outside of your 12 limit would simply be returned to their respective Youkai statue (or for G6, you'd simply have to find them in a summoning house again). Youkai would retain the levels, ascension, and friendship meter they have when released (Guardian Spirits would be exempt from this since they're already their own thing, so you can't cheese friendship this way).

That way people, if they wanted to swap around their Youkai, would have to move to where the appropriate statue is to get the Youkai back instead of being able to juggle them all around on the fly.

Does that sound fair?