Revamp Summoner idea

[Ghanbaatar]

I think the idea of having the summons do various things is a good one too, you just need to flush the ideas out more. The idea of DoT's is good but sadly status effects don't seem to do much in raids/dungeons so I would stay away from those. Maybe each summon does its own debuff with attacks? This would make a multi-SUM party have to figure out which order to do their summons in. So for instance Ifrit does really good single target damage and lowers the enemies armor due to heat, Titan does AoE and lowers their earth resist, Shiva does targeted AoE like the Freeze spell, and Garuda could speed up allies attack/caste speed? These are just what jumps out at me to make sure all the summons would have a place and still be at least a bit unique.

[IveraIvalice]

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That sounds cool, currently it was either a debuff on the target(s) vs normal attack damage and they all give some sort of buff to the party, but if dots aren't as useful as an enemy attack/debuff they could all add an elemental vulnerability to that specific element along with a party wide buff. The idea behind that is based on your mention of ifrit heat lowering armor or defense and Titan lowers earth resist. Since there is no actual elemental damage benefits in this game like previous FF games, this might be a cool way to make elemental vulnurabilies a thing through the Smn job. I like the idea of using spells based on the element they become weak to but there's the problem that some elements used by other jobs aren't really used as strong offense spells such as water. But it could still be useful for the smn themselves to increase their own damage.

I like the idea of a party haste buff for using Garuda and I haven't given much thought as to which moves would be aoe vs single target but I think all the summon openers (the one that gives the party buff at the same time) would all be aoe and then as you control the primal for its duration you would have a few aoe or single target attacks to use as you want.

I also like the idea of gaining a Crystal as you fill a bar to max that would eventually lead to summoning bahamut, in that way you don't need all bars full at the same time to summon him, you just need all crystals at one time and that would incentivize using all the primals at least once just to gain the crystals.

Very cool ideas, the more it gets fleshed out the more I wish it was real lol