[renowner]

Not to mention most youkai are GARBAGE. and I like to RP using a few that are genuinely unusable in actual battle, so having them actually contracted fits that IC, even allowing me to justify the mechanics of me having a hard cap on the amount of Youkai I can use by never using those particular ones in battle.

And Youkai don't heal between battles either. Sometimes its nice to be able to swap all your defeated ones out for healthy ones.

I frankly agree with everything SolandLuna said. . .

But also, Dev intends to rework summoners eventually. . .I hope its something cool. I imagine contracts will be reworked. I'd at leat assume so.

[Miller]

I actually don't understand why this is really that big of an issue; you can already do what's proposed by OP and your active youkai is restrained by your base faith regardless.

The number of hard counter youkai is fairly small and with even eight slots you can keep a decent chunk of them if not all for hotswapping if you really wanted to. If there's anything that needs to be addressed, it should be the fact that these sync mind effects are strong enough to hard counter someone. But this isn't really the thread for that.

So I'm all for the suggestion, it's a nice quality of life that would make summoner more accessible; no need to gatekeep it behind arbitrary stat requirements.

[Autumn]

I actually don't understand why this is really that big of an issue; you can already do what's proposed by OP and your active youkai is restrained by your base faith regardless.

The number of hard counter youkai is fairly small and with even eight slots you can keep a decent chunk of them if not all for hotswapping if you really wanted to. If there's anything that needs to be addressed, it should be the fact that these sync mind effects are strong enough to hard counter someone. But this isn't really the thread for that.

So I'm all for the suggestion, it's a nice quality of life that would make summoner more accessible; no need to gatekeep it behind arbitrary stat requirements.

I like to equate youkai slots to skill slots, the amount of active skills you can equip increases your versatility and flexibility in any given scenario, but you are not disabled from being smart and equipping only what you need if you anticipate needing it too. Though Skill Pool or "Available Skills", unlike Skill Slots or "Equipped skills", is limited to Skill Points. You are still only allowed a finite amount of these according to your skill point allocation.

I think the maximum amount of active contracts at any one point is pretty fair when tied to a stat requirement, every 5 FAI is just '1 youkai skill slot' in terms of equal amounts of power, at the current moment you are allowed a maximum number of 21 youkai slots on a 5 base FAI race and investing 80 FAI, though more normally people will arrive at 20 max youkai slots. (Vorso Versos also increase this amount but lets cross that out for a second)

While technically it is never possible to get every single youkai in the game anymore, it is so close to the truth we can ignore that little bit of inaccuracy here.

I think 20 maximum number of youkai slots would simulate the aforementioned skill pool, while active contracts being increased by FAI is preferable to skill slots (still being capped at 12)

This cap of 20 youkai would not be tied to FAI, I should note out, just in case it isn't clear I am agreeing.

[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?

[renowner]

Faith is way less useful than skill if you're going to equate them to skill slots. And Youkai evokes don't use your weapon, making most of them useless against evasives. So its really the sync mind stuff.
And if you're going to tell me it wasn't an absolute pain in the ass to get 21 youkai to level 60, even having gathered several hundred cypelle (Which took MONTHS) then that's ridiculous. People have le'd more than 5 times in one day before in korvara. (During dev's birthday.) YOukai training is much much more difficult.

To not go on a big tangent. . No. No it does in fact not sound fair. Especially when that wouldn't even work in mainland. Everything about that I disagree with.

[FaeLenx]

On one hand, the change sounds like a strictly QOL thing. On the other hand, summoners are one of the most overtuned classes in the game already.

And any argument that follows along the lines of, 'This thing should be more powerful because X' where X is some lore reason, difficulty to level, etc, are arguing for imbalance. If you feel like it's too hard to level, make a suggestion that would make it easier to level. You can already summon youkai pretty much freely every combat if you build right, and there's no reason not to do that if you're leveling them.

[Raigen.Convict]

How about we leave it as is but instead we add a feature to BASE summoner that BENEFITS FROM FAITH as an offensive spell or skill maybe so we have REASON to build faith? Hm? Sound good?

[Fern]

This hard-derailed into a Balance Fu when it was just a QOL suggestion to skip a step on something that you can already do in-game. It doesn't make a difference to get Youkai faster, balance-wise.

You can already get most of the Youkai in the game without the QOL I was suggesting, so I'm not sure what "worsens" for being able to just do that faster, since it's not stopping people from doing it regardless. I like having a bunch of Youkai because I like switching them around for fun, because not all of them are useful to put it lightly. Some of them have the hard counter, not all, and you can just pack those particular Youkai without going over 10 or 12 contracts anyway.
 
It doesn't really change anything balance-wise to be able to get Youkai faster. The problem is with Sync Mind skills, not with the Youkai amount, because the amount of hard counter Youkai that are worth the contract slots doesn't go past 12.

Limiting the amount of Youkai slots affects the people that want to screw around with unoptimal Youkai more than it does the ones that want to hard counter people. With less than 12 contracts, you can get:

Suzaku (Hard counters Evade)
Sazae Oni (Hard counters Water and Evade)
Drowned Woman (counters physical)
Chun (counters fire)
Hatsu (counters acid)
Haku OR Yukionna (counters ice)

That's 6 Youkai and you don't really need other ones if you just want to hard counter people. Everything else is extra. There's more good Youkai than those 6, but keep in mind that not all of them are necessarily worth the slot.

[Autumn]

This hard-derailed into a Balance Fu when it was just a QOL suggestion to skip a step on something that you can already do in-game. It doesn't make a difference to get Youkai faster, balance-wise.

You can already get most of the Youkai in the game without the QOL I was suggesting, so I'm not sure what "worsens" for being able to just do that faster, since it's not stopping people from doing it regardless. I like having a bunch of Youkai because I like switching them around for fun, because not all of them are useful to put it lightly. Some of them have the hard counter, not all, and you can just pack those particular Youkai without going over 10 or 12 contracts anyway.
 
It doesn't really change anything balance-wise to be able to get Youkai faster. The problem is with Sync Mind skills, not with the Youkai amount, because the amount of hard counter Youkai that are worth the contract slots doesn't go past 12.

Limiting the amount of Youkai slots affects the people that want to screw around with unoptimal Youkai more than it does the ones that want to hard counter people. With less than 12 contracts, you can get:

Suzaku (Hard counters Evade)
Sazae Oni (Hard counters Water and Evade)
Drowned Woman (counters physical)
Chun (counters fire)
Hatsu (counters acid)
Haku OR Yukionna (counters ice)

That's 6 Youkai and you don't really need other ones if you just want to hard counter people. Everything else is extra. There's more good Youkai than those 6, but keep in mind that not all of them are necessarily worth the slot.

Sounds to me like this thread should be moved then, you are suggesting bringing in an unintended mechanic that was a relic leftover from the shift of pre-GR to GR1, one that has been abused by players who knew of it's existence quite a few times, I am not exempt from having used this technique before for my own Grand Summoner at the time. One mechanic that I am agreeing to make more accessible, but also suggesting that perhaps having access to every youkai in the book is a little ridiculous too, don't you think? It is almost akin to having over 100 skill points spent in something like VA, where you have access to a plethora of options at any given scenario, with skill slots limiting how much skill pool you can actively equip at once.

Aside from only a couple incorrect summaries of the youkai you have listed, I have never taken into account their immunities in this thread either, as they still remain contentious to current youkai balance and I acknowledge they will change in the most likely future, instead I believe that the number of youkai accessible to any given player should be regulated, there should be a cap on how many total youkai you can have in your possession, and as Trex brought up, being able to contract a youkai, level it up, and be able to dismiss it and re-visit the statue later to re-obtain the very same youkai seems like a good idea. You can equate this action to being a storage box for youkai.

Unintended behaviors should first be put under inspection, then evaluated, and then be decided upon whether they should be removed, or become more accessible to everyone else. In this scenario, I believe that making them more accessible to everyone is not exactly a reversible change, especially given now you actually cannot obtain every youkai in the game, with only 20-21 max slots being available on Korvara, 24-25 available on Sigrogana, and 28 total youkai being available. This moves the suggestion beyond a quality of life since no, you cannot actually already do this in game, and in my suggestion, 20 max youkai slots future proofs the concept and prevents us from having to re-visit the subject later due to a haphazard QoL change, since 20 youkai slots in game is more currently available than unlimited youkai slots.

[K Peculier]

I think the amount of grievances people have with summoner especially regarding how easily it is for them to hotswap counter any situation should be discussed about in another thread.

Things seem to have derailed a huge amount from the OP precisely because of summoner being at this current state with certain popular youkai.

Lets get back on the topic of what is largely a QOL thing that they're suggesting rather than go off on huge tangents about balance talk.

Personally I don't see any issue at all with just getting rid of the cheese step of maxing faith and then immediately LE'ing when its done.