Phoenix and Bahamut Summons

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Originally Posted by Jordache

Like you invented a gun that cures cancer. >.>

Instead of taking the time to stop and analyze what is written and critique and improve upon, or preferably, enthuse with (you kinda did, but ruined it without critical thinking being scarcastic), instead you: take a quote I quoted from myself and try to make the post about your victim hood.

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Well literally anything is better than what you proposed, because what you proposed is so flawed from the start. You're suggesting that we take some of the most powerful things that already exist and combine them into one ability (and, as noted by someone else, render one of those effects irrelevant).

I admit the only reason we have this problem is because Cait Sith stole what would otherwise be Phoenix's signature ability. If you want to take that and make it better or different in some way, it needs to be in a way that's balanced. I could see Arising someone without weakness and giving them some powerful buffs at the same time. But not the entire party whilst also nuking the enemy. That's just too much stuff packed into one ability. As noted. If it was just one person and particularly strong? I could see that, as it would have different use cases from Cait Sith's ability.

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See: phoenix is a huge model so I don't want it to be out for like logistical/lag/framerate reasons. I like the Odin/Alex type of smn, but it should be closer to Siren in execution/reality.

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The framerate issues in this game don't really have much to do with how big or how many polys a model has (in any normal case, it's the latter- scaling something doesnt really affect performance much). I would much rather have a regular summon than an astral flow one I will hardly ever see.

I do respect and share the desire to make pacts with the remaining avatars, but going nuts with crazy powerful ability ideas is not really the way to go. I doubt SE would solicit ideas from us on something like this, but if they did, I'd rather we put our best foot forward when it comes to ideas of how these summons would work.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

I would much rather have a regular summon than an astral flow one I will hardly ever see.

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That's really not a great way to approach Phoenix, I'm afraid. To start with, consider the design space: We're not seeing new blue magic because the game is allegedly running out of room for spells; if pet commands take up the same kind of space, even two abilities might be asking a lot. Having autoattacks and blood pacts would mean having to make new animations, which may not be possible with the composition of the remaining dev team. Even lore-wise, having Phoenix be something that only works because you're pouring as much power into it as possible makes sense because Phoenix is always depicted as being weakened, diminished, almost half an avatar. Everything about this says "astral flow super-summon."

On top of that, consider... what would a Phoenix moveset look like? We've only seen revival, so is it just going to be cures and raises? A couple of fire spells? You could risk making Carbuncle and Cait Sith nearly obsolete, though I imagine Ifrit would be just fine. Absolutely nothing about Phoenix says "physical threat", I find it hard to imagine it having the usual basic physical blood pacts that tend to decide the difference between starting lineup and benchwarmers.

Now, Bahamut could work, if the limited space for new abilities weren't an issue. Already has a proven moveset, has the animations, no lore reason not to work besides being super uncooperative in general. Again, I think the one thing players would want most from that would be AoE Terror, which is the one thing I don't imagine the devs wanting to just hand to players (the blue mage equivalent being locked behind a job ability to keep it under control.)

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Originally Posted by Zenion

So, the thing there is, how do you think that works, mechanically? I can only think of a couple of zones where effects are applied to locations, and that feels very much like something that had to be baked into that zone specifically. To be able to do an area effect that can just be arbitrarily dropped anywhere, there would need to be a source. Whatever that source is will need to be attached to whoever created it, in order to handle cleanup - as fun an idea as it is to have an effect that lasts after you zone out, that would have all sorts of disastrous potential given the overall fragility of FFXI's code; your effect needs to be automatically culled if you zone out or are defeated.

There's basically one system presently in place to handle that sort of thing: pets. It would take up the pet slot. I don't know why a luopan counts as a pet (besides making it easier to fit multiple jobs on one piece of gear) but it does; this would almost certainly have to be the same situation.

You could wave it off by saying Bahamut is just that much, that you need to take time to recharge before you can summon again, but I just can't see a way that you'd get a lingering area effect without it having to eat the pet slot, in the game as it's presently structured. I don't know what the FFXI source code looks like so I can only speculate, but I think this is probably also the reason we don't have beastmaster or puppetmaster trusts, and the summoner and geomancer ones barely leverage their job features. Trusts aren't quite pets, but they tie themselves to their owner in such a way that having them generate a pet would probably make that pet count as the player's one and only available pet? Which is... a weird problem, on the surface, but programming-wise I can see exactly how it could happen.

Getting a little off track now but TL;DR I don't think Bahamut could have a lingering after-effect without either a non-trivial change to the game's code base (creating a new pet class that doesn't count as your pet, similar to your adventuring fellow, or copying Reisenjima's darkness spheres to every zone and instance where Bahamut could potentially be used just in case) or blocking the summoner's summoning.

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I can do the bahamut thing with a one-two-punch: 1) is the pet as a summon, then 2) is the summon as inert NPC, you're gonna pallet swap the model to a point model (lie a pixle sized bahamut or clear box) that counts as a pet until the effect timer is finished. Basically you can write a conditional to the summoned pet that silences of deactivates JA upon use like a stance, it's not conceptually hard:

summon pet
pet animation
pet transition to non-interactable npc aura
SMN cooldown timer starts
summoner silenced or unable to take further actions (silence and amnesia or something) until effect timer ends, say.

You're changing the smn pet model for a different smn pet model within the same set of animations, like a luopan.

or you reverse the summoning: the bahamut animation is not the pet that's counted but the loupan after effect, like a scripted npc like Atomos: the pet you summon is the after effect, but there's no pet commands, and what the player actually sees as the avatar is a summoning special effect animation. So the pet is the after effect and the bahamut is like tied into the summing glyph.

Also that flixblix ting: maybe just give me lots (500/ 1000?) of merits points to revive phoenix, lol.

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Originally Posted by Jordache

I can do the bahamut thing with a one-two-punch: 1) is the pet as a summon, then 2) is the summon as inert NPC, you're gonna pallet swap the model to a point model (lie a pixle sized bahamut or clear box) that counts as a pet until the effect timer is finished. Basically you can write a conditional to the summoned pet that silences of deactivates JA upon use like a stance, it's not conceptually hard:

summon pet
pet animation
pet transition to non-interactable npc aura
SMN cooldown timer starts
summoner silenced or unable to take further actions (silence and amnesia or something) until effect timer ends, say.

You're changing the smn pet model for a different smn pet model within the same set of animations, like a luopan.

or you reverse the summoning: the bahamut animation is not the pet that's counted but the loupan after effect, like a scripted npc like Atomos: the pet you summon is the after effect, but there's no pet commands, and what the player actually sees as the avatar is a summoning special effect animation. So the pet is the after effect and the bahamut is like tied into the summing glyph.

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Sure, that basically works, and you don't even need to silence or amnesia the summoner: if you control a luopan, you cannot summon an avatar, there's already specific code preventing it (as tested on geo/smn.) There would be an edge case where smn/geo would hypothetically be able to dismiss it with Full Circle, that would need to be addressed, but otherwise it's a relatively simple approach to implementation.

Which leaves the original issue: For however long the geo effect lasts, the user is not a summoner, they're whatever their subjob says they are. If that's not a deal-breaker, then problem solved; as I said before, just add on a snippet of lore that says the Bahamut summon is just that little bit more taxing and takes some time to recover from, maybe tweak the message the player gets when they try to summon up too soon, and you're settled.

Interesting sub-issue that this raises though, for avatars and luopans at least you get the pet HP bar glued to your message window. I wonder if it would be more helpful to find a way to hide that, or to use it as a visible timer counting down your summoning lockout: when this hits 0%, you can have pets again.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

Well literally anything is better than what you proposed, because what you proposed is so flawed from the start. You're suggesting that we take some of the most powerful things that already exist and combine them into one ability (and, as noted by someone else, render one of those effects irrelevant).

I admit the only reason we have this problem is because Cait Sith stole what would otherwise be Phoenix's signature ability. If you want to take that and make it better or different in some way, it needs to be in a way that's balanced. I could see Arising someone without weakness and giving them some powerful buffs at the same time. But not the entire party whilst also nuking the enemy. That's just too much stuff packed into one ability. As noted. If it was just one person and particularly strong? I could see that, as it would have different use cases from Cait Sith's ability.

The framerate issues in this game don't really have much to do with how big or how many polys a model has (in any normal case, it's the latter- scaling something doesnt really affect performance much). I would much rather have a regular summon than an astral flow one I will hardly ever see.

I do respect and share the desire to make pacts with the remaining avatars, but going nuts with crazy powerful ability ideas is not really the way to go. I doubt SE would solicit ideas from us on something like this, but if they did, I'd rather we put our best foot forward when it comes to ideas of how these summons would work.

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Yeah but you have to critique it like Zenion is doing, pretend it works then try to fix it or improve it so that something *CAN* exist in that better future we're talking about, not just fall into the: this sucks, you're dumb, stop thinking, cellphone user malaise.

If anything is literally better, then why aren't you sharing your wisdom with us into what is the anything that is better? Because you can't, so you try to demoralize everyone, because you didn't think of it, worse, you didn't share anything.

I'm saying it has to *BE* powerful, because they all are.

You make a good point about balance issues, which is kinda where the alex.odin/atmos style vs cait sith style avatars come from: maybe the solution is a timed summon: you get 3 minutes with phoenix that's it. This timed summon thing kinda fits cannonically b/c phoenix is weakened, and we can make jokes about 7 minutes in heaven with phoenix ;). It hasn't been done before, reasonably feasible to balance skills and abilities, then give it like an hour long recast or only under astral flow.

Said softly: Don't fear the possibility of being unbalanced, it can be refined. '-')-b

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Originally Posted by Zenion

Sure, that basically works, and you don't even need to silence or amnesia the summoner: if you control a luopan, you cannot summon an avatar, there's already specific code preventing it (as tested on geo/smn.) There would be an edge case where smn/geo would hypothetically be able to dismiss it with Full Circle, that would need to be addressed, but otherwise it's a relatively simple approach to implementation.

Which leaves the original issue: For however long the geo effect lasts, the user is not a summoner, they're whatever their subjob says they are. If that's not a deal-breaker, then problem solved; as I said before, just add on a snippet of lore that says the Bahamut summon is just that little bit more taxing and takes some time to recover from, maybe tweak the message the player gets when they try to summon up too soon, and you're settled.

Interesting sub-issue that this raises though, for avatars and luopans at least you get the pet HP bar glued to your message window. I wonder if it would be more helpful to find a way to hide that, or to use it as a visible timer counting down your summoning lockout: when this hits 0%, you can have pets again.

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Ooh I like that: it's like: a yes, with a short if *pun intended* lol.

"Um it's like an undispellable summon" we would just not give it a pet command menu like the spirits have. Maybe just apply a temporary weakness type of status effect[?], and when the effect wears the pet "releases", like an auto-script?

Maybe we have something lol

For that window thing:
I think that it's a player state or status: player in command of pet: ON/OFF

Which we could just have it be a pet called "Flare Residuum", give it no controls, and stick a bio effect on it until it dies, like you said, and slap the summoner with a weakness lol. I say weakness b/c other mobs like Tchakka can apply it as a temporary stats.

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Originally Posted by Zenion

That's really not a great way to approach Phoenix, I'm afraid. To start with, consider the design space:

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Abilities are not spells and are subject to their own set of limitations that are seperate from those of spells. Further, we should not use technical limitations as an excuse to not do something that would (debatably) bring more enjoyment to the player. To me, astral flow summons themselves have been a waste of resources. Alexander really isn't used that often and Odin probably even less. Atomos isn't even an astral flow summon but is never used because of how long it takes to do its thing, combined with the relatively niche cases where it is even useful at all- mainly because there aren't many buffs that can be taken from enemies that the player themself doesn't already have. Anything cool enough to justify its use probably can't be taken with it anyway.
To put it another way, I don't feel like the addition of astral-flow-only summons has contributed a lot to the job or the game- Despite being more heavily restricted in their use than normal summons, Odin and Alexander aren't better enough than other ultimates to justify being relgated to a once-in-a-blue-moon use case. Alexander is fine (to me) but I never see it used much for some reason; Odin is just not good enough. It only reliably executes a single target, and if you have a whole swarm of enemies, it might kill two or three, and against NMs, it isn't significantly stronger than other astral flow attacks. I can understand why they're so guarded with Death effects, but when literally any other AoE is more useful, they've erred too far on the side of caution.

The only issue truly relevant to what you're saying is that unlike the other summons currently available, there is no already existing set of abilities established for Phoenix (Bahamut on the other hand, does already have an extensive pool of abilities to draw from- and thus nothing new needs to be created). You did mention this and I concur to that end. But as far as what the move set would look like, we can look to other games in the series and adapt them for FFXI's play environment (With the only obvious issue being an ability to revive the party, as Cait Sith was given this role).

In short, I agree with you about Phoenix's move set, but that's a solveable problem. Although it may be the simple fact we already have a phoenix-like ability on Cait Sith that has kept Phoenix from being implemented.

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Originally Posted by Jordache

Said softly: Don't fear the possibility of being unbalanced, it can be refined. '-')-b

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Sometimes unbalanced things are easily tweakable with number/stat changes. Other things are inherently unbalanced and it is difficult/improbable to make them balanced- i.e. they're either obviously too strong, or not good enough and a waste of the effort spent on it. Put simply in this particular case: If raising an entire party and also giving them all reraise at the same time is good enough to be an ultimate ability (as it is one), then throwing in an attack and multiple buffs to the same is a step too far. I agree with you that we can throw whatever we can think of out there- but let's work together to refine our ideas ourselves as members of the community such that it has the best chance of impressing whoever might read it. Perhaps instead of dealing direct damage and granting buffs that would probably offer far too much, we can include something else that fits with the theme- like an AoE arise that also grants enfire II and a strong blaze spike effect (comparable to the substantial spikes that some NMs get). This would also be a bit more distinctive, at least to me, compared to rolling Arise, Embrava, and a nuke into one ability.

Thanks for the reasonable response, and I apologize for being too aggressive with my comment. To be clear, I want to see these summons as much as you do. I just want to make sure it's something that we would all want to use without being way too OP (or useless). Also I would greatly prefer something I can use regularly to something that's exclusively used as an oh-crap button that I will at best see once in a 45 minute period.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

Further, we should not use technical limitations as an excuse to not do something that would (debatably) bring more enjoyment to the player.

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Where we're at in the game's life cycle, technical and resource limitations are two of the largest driving forces behind the content being added. Voracious Resurgence teased a whole new dimension ripe for exciting new content, but what we got was Sortie because reusing Outer Ra'Kaznar was more feasible than creating a whole new zone. We can dream all we want about what something could look like in a perfect version of the game, but if we want to discuss this as something we have any hope of actually seeing, it is unfortunately necessary to bear in mind that the less we ask for, the more we're likely to actually get.

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Alexander really isn't used that often and Odin probably even less.

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On the one hand, yes, it's rare to see Alexander used. On the other, Alexander is the one thing that keeps Summoner relevant in content where you can't Astral Flow/Astral Conduit your way to victory. It can massively shift a group's strategy. It just isn't popular because Summoner is a relatively lackluster job otherwise - less damage slower than a Naegling DD, requires its own special buffs to scale up, and all those amazing unique buffs are abysmally slow to apply unless you use Conduit on them. That this is all put aside for the sake of a single ~90 second defense boost is a testament to how powerful that summon really is.

Odin can go climb back up in his tree and see if he can learn how to be useful, though.

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Although it may be the simple fact we already have a phoenix-like ability on Cait Sith that has kept Phoenix from being implemented.

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Yeah, that is the sticky bit. Altana's Favor is literally what you would expect Phoenix to do, which narrows the possibilities. You could give it Reraise V, but that steps on the specialness of the Pandit's Staff. "Altana's Favor but it also removes Weakened" would be a huge recovery tool, but it might not feel like enough to justify the whole avatar.

Maybe area fire damage plus a buff effect would be justifiable on a full-time avatar - Siren's Clarsach Call is just Aerial Blast with a side of major avatar buffs - though I can't imagine that being satisfying as an Astral Flow only summon's sole ability. I wish I could say "maybe have it reset job ability cooldowns", but then it's stealing from Wild Card's gimmick.

Altana's Favor really does make it hard to make a truly appropriate Phoenix SP ability.

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Where we're at in the game's life cycle, technical and resource limitations are two of the largest driving forces behind the content being added.

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Generally, I am of this mind, however when it comes to something like summons, I really don't want to see them do something if they can't put the full effort into it. That's why seeing any of these summons is realistically incredibly unlikely; but if they do implement them, I don't want to see them half-arsed.

I was actually surprised when we got Siren, and the fact that, at least in a relative sense, she's actually pretty good.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

I was actually surprised when we got Siren, and the fact that, at least in a relative sense, she's actually pretty good.

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Siren kind of made sense in the same way Bahamut does, though: They'd already done half the work for the fight in Rhapsodies, all that was left was adapting. Though, that said... it's still a bit of a surprise considering that they could have just not called Siren a terrestrial avatar and washed their hands of it.

Phoenix is still... having an in-game model makes it seem possible, but it's still creating everything from scratch basically.

Would making Phoenix multi-elemental - fire and light, like a Baelfyr - open up any interesting possibilities? Fire with the Banish effect versus undead? Ooh, or Cursna, you give Phoenix a Cursna with potency that scales to summoning magic and certain Doom-happy fights will become summoners-mandatory.