[Fern]

It'd be a good idea to make it so there isn't a limit to the amount of Youkai you can contract. (I'm not referring to the active Youkai limit.)
  
As it stands, you have to use a fruit to restat so that you can get as much FAI as possible and get all the Youkai then restat again to go back to your normal build, which feels like very unnecessary steps.

[renowner]

We have a hard limit of 12 youkai contracts being active at a time, so I have no issue with this.

[Trexmaster]

I'm torn on this one. While it would be a nice QoL for summoners it'd be an arguable boon to be able to hot swap in from every single Youkai in the game (provided you've grinded them all out).

Currently you can at most have 12 in reserve, which still leaves a fair chunk of the available Youkai out.

I'd be for this if it was capped at 12 total slots, just so we don't have the problem of every summoner running around with the entire available Youkai roster to hotswap in to hard counter people.

Future summoner adjustments may make this less of an issue of course but as it currently stands it's extremely potent to be able to pull in the appropriate Youkai that carries an immunity or high resist to what your opponent primarily uses, and having access to every single Youkai means if your build is susceptible to any of the currently available Youkai, you're going to have it used against you.

[Autumn]

Yeah I agree with Trex, in the current system you can game it to have nearly every youkai available to you by having max FAI + 2 Vorso Versos, I have an elf with this exact line up that I don't really use anymore so I wouldn't be sad to see the youkai hard cap being 12 instead of the OP's suggestion. While also incorporating the suggestion that FAI only controls how many active contracts you may have.

[renowner]

They're not saying anything about changing the 12 cap. They're just saying we should be able to contract every youkai instead of having to game the system by LEing to put 80 points in faith, and then LE again to get your real build back.

[Trexmaster]

They're not saying anything about changing the 12 cap. They're just saying we should be able to contract every youkai instead of having to game the system by LEing to put 80 points in faith, and then LE again to get your real build back.

My understanding of their suggestion is "Remove the limit on total youkai contracted". Which currently is tied to your faith and limited to 12, resulting in the mentioned gaming of spending a stat reset or LE on maxing Faith to get all the possible slots.

I'm all for removing the need to game the system like that and just letting people have 12 youkai total with the current restriction on active Youkai.

What I'm against is the removal of the limit on total youkai in reserve, which is what this suggestion, to me, appears to be asking for originally.

[renowner]

There is no limit to youkai in reserve. I myself have 21 total. The game only allows the top 12 to be active at any time, however.
Currently what people do is legend extend and put 80 points in faith so that they can contract every youkai. . Then legend extend again to go back to their normal build, retaining their contracts.

You still retain the 12 limit regardless, which requires I believe 35 base faith to achieve.

[Trexmaster]

Oh, yeah, then no, it should be adjusted that you can only contract up to 12 total regardless of your base faith.

I'm all for not needing to have the 35 base faith to get to that 12 cap but I don't think it's healthy for people to run around with nearly if not all Youkai in the game.

[Autumn]

Oh, yeah, then no, it should be adjusted that you can only contract up to 12 total regardless of your base faith.

I'm all for not needing to have the 35 base faith to get to that 12 cap but I don't think it's healthy for people to run around with nearly if not all Youkai in the game.

Being able to contract 12 youkai without any FAI requirement might be a little too powerful, that's a lot of youkai for no stat requirement, I'd say the total contract amount would have to go down a little bit to justify no FAI investment, down to like 10.

[SolAndLuna]

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.