Summoner post Shadowbringers

[Vulcwen]

Something that would be cool would be to introduce more Egi Glamours and maybe even Trance Glamours. That way they could introduce, for just an example, something like Demi Ultima (High Seraph, not Weapon) without actually adding more mechanics to the job. Just let us glam over Bahamut or Phoenix. Or something like Bismarck-Egi to put on top of Garuda.

Instead of mechanical changes, cosmetic ones. Let the individual player decide which Primals they want their SMN to use.

Although it'd be nice, I think in that case other jobs also would like skill animation customization.

[ChaoticCrimson]

Another thing to consider is that we have a direct pact with the current iteration of Titania. Perhaps there might be a way for them to allow us to temporarily call on a demi-proxy of Titania to aid our fights later down the road? After all, Feo Ul can do something similar already by providing us contact with our retainers while we're on the first, so I don't think it's too much of a stretch. Although gameplay-wise, I'm not sure how Demi-Titania would fit in along with Bahamut and Phoenix, but that's a separate discussion for a different thread I think.

[Atamis]

Something else I've been pondering. Is all this summoner lore just ascian propaganda to cause more strife via primals?
Bismark is alive and well in the first. He does not temper people, he does not run amok trying to fight everything that flies, he isn't after more and more aether, and judging by the greenery growing on him, he isn't sucking the land dry by simply existing.
Primals as we know them on the source do. All of the primals were summoned by ascian means as all the beast tribes learned from them supposedly and we have no idea how long bqck this started. The waring triad is by far the current oldest known case.
They call Bismark a fae i stead of primal, but maybe they don't have a word for them. We haven't heard of any other primal like being on the first before eden showed up nor has there been any mention of summoners.
So i am lead to believe most of the summoner lore about aether, demis, egi, and everything else is flawed. its build off a.meams of summoning that exists solely to imbalance the aether for calamities.

[TinyRedLeaf]

Bismark is alive and well in the first. He does not temper people, he does not run amok trying to fight everything that flies, he isn't after more and more aether, and judging by the greenery growing on him, he isn't sucking the land dry by simply existing.

No, that's a fundamental misunderstanding. Bismarck on the First is indeed a living thing, insofar as we can consider the fae living creatures. They — Bismarck, that is — is most definitely not a primal. But, it could well be that the Bismarck we met on the First was the original inspiration for Bismarck the Primal that we fought, on the Source, moons ago.

You've confused something very important, and that is that all the primals we've encountered on the Source are "thoughts" and "ideas" given physical form through a summoning ritual. And this is where the distinction I brought up earlier, between Creation and summoning magic, is crucial. The key distinction is that Creation magic is far more challenging, involving the creation of an entirely new idea or concept from scratch, and fuelling it with an enormous amount of aether, to create something new, from nothing.

Summoning, on the other hand, works on "second-hand" ideas. The beast tribes on the Source all have existing religions; they all worship gods that were possibly inspired by historical persons or heroes from their past (including the Vanu Vanu's primordial memory of a sky whale, ie, Bismarck). So, in times of trouble and distress, the beast tribes turn to their gods for salvatation. The Ascians manipulated this fear by teaching the beast tribes about summoning, and showing them how to channel aether into their "idea" of a god who would save them from their enemies.

So, in other words, the beast tribes weren't thinking of a completely new concept — that would involve knowledge and discipline that was way beyond them (even the Ancients, with all their wisdom, could fail a Creation project, let alone lesser mortals!). Instead, they relied on their (often very skewed) vision of their god and saviour, and used the Ascian summoning ritual to turn that idea into physical reality.

The mechanism is essentially the same: Channel and shape aether around an incorporeal idea, and turning into a corporeal reality. That being the case, the end-product — ie, the summoned or "created" entity — would require phenomenal amounts of aether to take shape. The Ancients were able to fuel this process entirely through their own aether — that was how much more powerful they were, compared to sundered mortals today.

No one alive today in the sundered worlds are capable of fuelling summoning magic through their own aether alone. And that means that summoned primal will always need to absorb environmental aether to sustain itself. Once created, any "living thing" will have that fundamental instinct for self-preservation, and that is the case here for primals as well. Once summoned, they will seek to stay around, but in so doing, they will bring about environmental disasters on the Source.

That's precisely what the Ascians want. They are constantly sowing chaos in the Source, so as to create conditions for a Rejoining. They've been trying various means of doing, through the ages. Primal-summoning is merely one out of many tools they use.

[ObsidianFire]

We also see that the Ancients have a database of Concept schematics in Aamarot that all Ancients were able to access and use themselves. We see that Concepts were held up to some criteria before they were added to that database. So there's at least some kind of "quality control" going on with shared Concepts.

There's even one quest where we're told to go get the schematics of a Concept someone else made so that we can Create that Concept ourselves. Only our aether levels can't manage it. It's not that hard to see the parallel between us getting the Concept schematics to recreate the Concept and us getting the aether of a Primal to create an Egi. It's just that we don't have a good way of "storing" Concept schematics (yet), so when no more Primals are summoned, there's no way for Primal/Egi schematics to be passed on, and Summoning dies out. Probably the biggest hurdle Summoning has to overcome to be more viable long-term is figuring out a way to "store" the aether patterns of Egi so people no longer need to be around for Primal deaths to summon Egi in the first place...

[Zohar_Lahar]

Tomestones might be able to archive them.

[ObsidianFire]

If Tomestones would be able to archive primal geometries, I'd expect the Allagans would have already done so. They have way better computing power and data storage methods then we do, and yet Siri (one of the major developers of the art) was concerned that Summoning as an art form would die out without any Primals being summoned. Even the defense node that he developed towards the end of his life still needed to kill us to get a hold of our geometry...