Demi-Summoner Idea

[Grimoire-M]

Please, if you're going to write fanfiction, keep it out of actual discussions.

Nowhere in the lore are Egi's relevant to Carbuncles and our ability to summon them.

The only "Upgrade" is a mechanical one to just simply remove the ability to summon Carbuncles and "Replace" the Summon I and Summon II skills with Garuda-Egi and Titan-Egi.

It's not fanfiction, that's actually what happened. Ludonarrative is still narrative.

[Grimoire-M]

It seems solid to me. I’ll mirror the carbuncle complaint too. Not because I dislike Carbuncles, but because this progression directly conflicts with the ARR and HW summoner quest lines. You’ll have to go with the Demi-egi route as a result. To clarify, I mean Demi-egi during the DWT window, regular egi during the interim.

The direct hit buff on Ifrit is also problematic. Part of what keeps the current Contagion and Radiant shield in line is that the debuffs are mutually exclusive. Because of that and their respective damage contributions Garuda’s contagion is allowed to be stronger. Ifrit’s direct hit buff is strong enough to beat that iteration of contagion due to being universally applicable. I understand the pet auto attacks attempt to address this somewhat but you’d have to make Garuda’s potencies equal or stronger in some cases to balance it out. A better approach would be to stick to the current phys/magic split.

Beyond that I wonder about filler and the aetherflow lockouts still as they weren’t addressed but given you’re trying to emulate Bahamut I assume that’s the intent. I do agree that the pets need distinct filler, so some idea of what you had in mind after the DWT window would be appreciated too. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to put forward some ideas there. And it gets at some of what Rollout’s after (different things to do based on your pet) without being a Bard clone.

[Dyvid]

K, so I think you need to take lore with a grain of salt. The gameplay is always developed first, always. After that they write the lore to fill in the gaps. In HW they wanted to focus more on the Summoner, not pet and didn't know how to add a fourth pet. They added Dreadwing Trace at the gameplay then wrote the reasoning after the fact.