GIVE CARBUNCLE SOMETHING TO DO/GIVE 90 SUMMONS GLAMOUR

[Flana]

There are various other summons from past games that didn't become Primals in FF14 (thus, won't have an Egi/Trance/etc. made out of).
Such as Kujata, Siren, Diabolos, Mist Dragon, Eden, etc.

The funny thing is the lore for egi glamours means any of these are on the table for glamouring over the useless carbuncle and pre-90 gem summons. Since the glamour is just shoving the aetherial construct into a new appearance it doesn't matter if that's a primal's image or just something built to look different (like carbuncle). Still be funny to see Leviathan poop fire but it's a completely valid thing for how the system was described.

[lilmoon]

I don't know what's the point of having to summon carbuncle at this point. It doesn't do anything anyway. Yet, we have to summon carbuncle FIRST, can bring it around if we want to combat.
Please at least make carbuncle be auto-summoned when we switch the job to the summoner. That would be a great quality of life right there. So I don't have to summon carbuncle each time I get rezzed.

[LauraAdalena]

The funny thing is the lore for egi glamours means any of these are on the table for glamouring over the useless carbuncle and pre-90 gem summons. Since the glamour is just shoving the aetherial construct into a new appearance it doesn't matter if that's a primal's image or just something built to look different (like carbuncle). Still be funny to see Leviathan poop fire but it's a completely valid thing for how the system was described.

Which I’m glad you brought up. Thank you and continue to say something! It’s 2 patches without them where they could have fixed this but they still haven’t!

[LauraAdalena]

ACKNOWLEDGE THIS FLAW SQUARE. SAY SOMETHING.

[LauraAdalena]

A CARBUNCLE THEMED SUMMONER BOOK WON THE DESIGN CONTEST BUT WE CANT GLAMOUR THE SUMMONS AT 90 TO CARBUNCLES? SERIOUSLY?!

[MercuryD]

A CARBUNCLE THEMED SUMMONER BOOK WON THE DESIGN CONTEST BUT WE CANT GLAMOUR THE SUMMONS AT 90 TO CARBUNCLES? SERIOUSLY?!

This is cute but I'm sad my partner's entry didn't win. The entire book was carbuncle themed, not just a single clasp.

[LauraAdalena]

This is cute but I'm sad my partner's entry didn't win. The entire book was carbuncle themed, not just a single clasp.

That is a shame, but I’d have said the same thing there :<

[DarkMasamune]

Just started an alt and decided to go for arcanist.

Gotta say, back when I started (when the Shiva update just came out) it was neato. Now it's just strange. Carbuncle dosen't do anything, it just stares at you until you can summon the other ones.

If only he could at least do some autoattacks, it would be better than... nothing.

[LauraAdalena]

I just want some acknowledgment. I paid so much shit just for Carbuncle stuff because of my fanaticism. Seeing this just feels like I’ve been punched in the gut. I love Carbuncle.

[Eorzean_username]

The problem with letting Carbuncle "do anything" is that you will immediately enter the territory of Cursed Optimizations where you lose potency because you activated a Summon at the wrong time, unsummoned Carbuncle in the middle of processing an auto-attack, and thus caused Carbuncle to lose an auto-attack. Over the course of an entire encounter, this would potentially add up to a lot of "swallowed" Potency.

So then you'd start seeing people running third-party Carbuncle Auto Attack add-ons, and so on down the rabbit hole we'd go.

Of course, the first logical response to that concern is "Stop deleting Carbuncle when another Summon is used", but it's probably reasonable to guess that the FFXIV yarn-and-Scotch-tape game engine simply cannot handle a single actor owning multiple subordinate actors at the same time during combat — ie, trying to give you 2 active pets simultaneously will make the servers crash or something. That's probably why summoning one thing always replaces another, even if only briefly, like the Arcanum Primals.

The problem is, almost any potential "Carbuncle improvement" that I think of, also ends up having some potential issue:

• Just learn to deal with creepy silent Carbuncle quietly staring at you. Always staring. This is admittedly lame, and does not solve the problem, but it also doesn't break anything in the current "house-of-cards" that is Summoner.

• Just give up, and make perma-Carbuncle a cosmetic spell that can only be summoned outside combat. Low-level Arcanums then exclusively summon the temporary Carbuncles, which eventually get replaced by Egis. This is kind of a "Monkey Paw" sort of "solution" though.

• Allow Arcanum Primals to be Egi-Glamoured into gigantic Kaiju-buncles. The problem is that this is tacky-looking and gives SE yet another thing they need to double-check and QA whenever they make design changes, because now they have to support a superfluous parallel design.

• Remove passive Carbuncle, add Carbuncle to the Arcanum rotation (somehow) as another "GCD Summon phase". But this would be really awkward to fit into the current 1-3-1-3-1 Demi-Arcanum rhythm without taking a wrench to the entire rotation structure, something that I doubt SE has much motivation to do right now.

• Remove active combat Carbuncle entirely, add Carbuncle as an OGCD summon animation that provides a raidwide buff "Ruby Light", along the lines of Red Mage "Magicked Barrier". This is another "Monkey Paw" kind of solution though, because it effectively just deletes Carbuncle entirely except for a "cameo appearance" every 60 or 90 or 120s.

• Don't try to make Carbuncle work offensively. Instead, embrace the FF series typical identity for Carbuncle as a support summon, and have it behave like a Scholar fairy, throwing various minor support spells on allies, such as 50 potency Barriers, 50 potency Heals, magic damage reduction, etc.

That would mean that interrupting Carbuncle's "work" to summon something else wouldn't be a loss that actually mattered, but you would still get to see your Carbuncle "being alive" and "doing stuff" in the background during combat.

However, it still has potential to be cursed in encounters being cleared at the margin — ie, "ahhh, I can't summon Bahamut until Carbuncle puts a Barrier on the MT", etc. It also has the severe potential to confound Summoner balancing with way too much free healing contribution over the course of entire encounters.

• Turn Carbuncle into a cooldown like Dark Knight Living Dead, Machinist Queen, etc, which just shows up and auto-attacks in the background, then vanishes again. But since Esteem / Queen Automaton / even Bunshin behave like pets, this may be a "no-go" due to it potentially still clashing with Demis and Arcanums at a game-engine level.

• Add an "Egi-Assault"-like 3-charge cooldown GCD that causes Carbuncle to attack. Put the keybind on Gemshine/Precious Brilliance since those buttons aren't doing anything while Carbuncle is out right now, anyway.

This way, you have control over its attacks, it becomes a part of your rotation again, it actually "does stuff", but you're not at risk of having to track your pet's auto-attacks in order to not throw away Potency accidentally. You could use this to fill those slight annoying gaps between Summons.

However, has the potential to become "cursed" really fast when trying to fit all of the charges into buff windows within Summoner's current structure, or simply become an extraneous "uh, whatever" filler key like Ruin 4, so "buyer beware" this kind of addition.

• Change Ruin 3 to "Shining Blast" or "Carbuncle-hame-ha" or etc, so that your "filler spell" actually triggers Carbuncle to shoot lasers at your foe(s). After all, real lasers and lightsabers alike use gems as focusing elements, so it's logical for the glowing aether-dog with a gem embedded in its forehead to also shoot lasers.

But this has potential for all sorts of cursed nightmare "ghosting" — ie, oops, you Shining Blast → Summon Bahamut and the actual damage of Shining Blast got deleted. Also the perennial issues with "Pet Potency", so I don't really recommend this, but it does sound kind of entertaining.

...I think that in general, what I'm understanding is that there's actually just a sharp divide between players that like being a classic FF Summoner with a wide variety of Summoned beings to call upon, and players that actually like being an FFXIV Arcanist, with a more specific selection of just Carbuncles to play with.

The previous Egi-Glamour system allowed each of those personalities to just kind of do their own thing without changing the end result, but EW Summoner has firmly decided that everyone will be Classic FF Summoner.

This honestly makes more sense from the perspective of the FF franchise as a whole, but I can see how it would be upsetting for the people that went all-in on Carbuncle during the long period of time where SE was shuffling their feet in confusion about whether FFXIV Summoner was actually a Summoner or not.

The best adjustment, for that purpose, is probably just to give Carbuncle something inoffensive (ie, not part of your DPS rotation's Potency) to do in the background during encounters, so that it still has a presence and a personality, but there's no need to stress about whether you interrupted it by triggering a more important Summon. But even then, you run into potential problems like old Egis and Demi-Phoenix used to have... things like "my Demi lagged because Carbuncle didn't want to interrupt its hidden cast" or "Carbuncle ran out-of-position to cast something, and now my Bahamut is located in the wrong spot".

...thinking this all out, I kind of feel like the current Summoner design has boxed Carbuncle into a corner, where almost anything that it tries to do will have a knock-on effect that's annoying or disruptive to another part of the rotation.