
Originally Posted by
RabidSquirrel
Not sure if anyone will care, but I figured I'd post some ideas I had a while back anyways.
So...WALL O TEXT GO
Think of the summoner and their avatar as "connected":
- No cooldown on avatars recast times. Because cooldowns are always the poorest and easiest balance solution.
- No perpetuation cost of any kind. Players like keeping their pets out.
- 8 or so second cast time to summon. This allows the summoner to switch avatars in group settings if needed, but make the proposition a little risky because it's effectively the summoner switching their role, which is explained below.
- Each avatar specializes in a role, such as tanking, damage dealing, crowd control, healing, etc. The summoner is basically a jack of all trades, but master of none. So a summoner won't be quite as effective as jobs that specialize in a certain role, but they'll be adequate.
- While an avatar is out, the avatar will gain access to their own specific abilities as well as ones set from other classes. The summoner doesn't use those other abilities, the avatar does. Meaning yes, the summoner themselves can't really do anything except run around and cast through their avatar. But if there is no avatar summoned, then the summoner can use those abilities. There will be some restrictions on avatars casting another class's elemental abilities, though.
- While an avatar is out, it's HP and MP percentages are linked to the summoner's. So if Titan gets down to 1000/2000 HP (50% HP), the summoner's HP will also match 50% and vice versa. This is used to prevent "kite anything forever" techniques, which is why summoner was so hard to balance in FFXI. This also means that if a summoner and their avatar get hit with an AoE, it's effectively double damage. So it's key that summoners stay as safe as possible.
- The summoner can be healed while an avatar is out, which will also heal an avatar, but the percentage of HP gained is relative to the larger max HP. So if your avatar has twice as much HP as you, and you're healed for 200, the avatar receives the full 200 HP back while the summoner receives 100 HP. Once again, it's to keep percentages the same.
- When an avatar is summoned, it will have the same percentage of HP and MP that the summoner currently has. It will also have any buffs currently on the summoner.
- If the avatar or summoner receives a buff, the buff is applied to the other party. So if an avatar receives stoneskin, so will the summoner, and vice versa.
- No other job/class can summon avatars. That should be pretty self-explanatory.
And that's about all I can remember for now. I don't think I've ever said "vice versa" this much in my life.