Summoner/Make Carbuncle useful again

[remiff]

Decouple the summons from the pet system entirely. It sucks trying to target a particular mob for AoE and having to wait for Carbuncle to transform and/or meander over there at low levels, meanwhile your target gets killed or the tank has re-positioned the pack and you only hit 1 target.

Then make Carbuncle 'useful' by having him do a party-wide spell that deals thorns damage when the boss uses a magic raidwide, similar to the Reflect skill he has in every other Final Fantasy. The Summon Carbuncle button can remain a pet for people who want their companion squirrel.

this spell existed during the stormblood period, and was so powerful that they completely removed it. Radiant shield.
Delivers an attack with a potency of 50 every time damage is suffered.
Duration: 20s
Additional Effect: Increases target's physical damage taken by 2%
Duration: 4s
Recast: 60s
radius 15 yalms (on every party members)
https://ffxiv.gamerescape.com/wiki/Radiant_Shield

[vetch]

Fascinating.

They do love to give us worse versions of abilities that they took away before, so if you ditch the phys vuln and reduce the duration to only fit one raidwide it sounds like a perfect candidate.

[Renathras]

Considering you cannot use Carbuncle actions whilst you have the demi summons out or when you have the summon 2 animations playing will seriously restrict when you can use them. Infact, this is the whole reason Searing Light was changed from a Carbuncle action to a SMN one.

This.

Me personally, I would just like Carby to have a (SCH) Ruin 2 type ability again. An instant cast attack it peppers the enemy with over time. Would give it SOMEthing to do, and still make it responsive to Radiant Aegis use since it would just be an instant cast spell so wouldn't block a quick oGCD use, mechanically. [EDIT: Saw some people mention auto-attacking doing this, so that could work as well. A ranged auto-attack in the form of a little magic ball/Ruin spell for the animation would do the same job. Just something it can peper the enemy with over time so it's not entirely just sitting around between summons. ]

I also remember some big fight once where the team won AS THE SCREEN WAS FADING TO BLACK because their SMN's Carby or Egi or whatever was still attacking the boss and got the last hit in. And something about that is hilarious to me and needs to exist.

[Flana]

Ok Everyone makes good points, But after reading get to ask how about a Wyrmwave style of attack for Carbuncle but its a single target attack? I would be happy with that, Thoughts?

Then if the player then cast "Fester" and if carbuncle is out he use "Poison nails" kinda like a added attack, and for Pain flare then carbuncle would combo with Meteorite


So you can still use Fester and Pain flare at any time but you can a bonus with Carbuncle?

Either its not worth doing because you are losing all the potency gain on using Fester/Painflare under 2 minute buff windows (because the rat is dead the entire time you have bahamut out and good luck getting one in the gcd it takes to summon your finisher gem) or the potency gain is so insane that it becomes completely unintuitive in that you never want to Fester in the 2 minute window to get the 'bonus' damage.

And this is ignoring that having the rat do anything when its despawning constantly isn't throwing the immediate threat of ghosting an ability back into your face.

As long as demisummonning exists as a mechanic the rat cannot be allowed to do anything. The job is infested with hard petswaps that cause ability cutoffs and ghosting problems. Until Carbuncle stops dying for other mechanics to happen it should not have anything to do. The fact your only defensive is still tethered to the rat is insane.

[SieyaM]

Carbuncle has to be some kind of weird code vestige that we just cannot shake, I cannot think of any real reason they insist on him being summoned in order to use the rest of your summoning kit.

[unjourneyed]

I'd rather Carbuncle to no longer be a pet for the job at this point. Making it into a stance-like buff that is required for using summon-based actions would personally be more palatable than having a pet that's barely does anything while constantly desummoning/resummoning on the field. Lore reasoning? Maybe Carbuncle persists in your grimoire/index because it's a "special arcane construct" that is unique in doing that and attuning to your weapon is now just that easy for arcanists. Who knows, lore doesn't feel like it has much importance for the job anymore anyway.

[Raikai]

Carbuncle has to be some kind of weird code vestige that we just cannot shake, I cannot think of any real reason they insist on him being summoned in order to use the rest of your summoning kit.

If I could speculate... it would probably having something to do about the game's code infrastructure only supporting 01 combat entity at once. Probably the reason why the Seraph was also designed like that.

I can imagine it simply because once they stated something like the fashion accessory taking the same slot as the minion, which is really weird to be just be a choice rather than working around a limitation. The game seems to be designed only with 3 available entities other than your cahracter: a combat pet (carby, fairy), a companion (chocobo) and a minion/mount/fashion accessory.

This might be so ingrained in the game code that changing could affect a ton of things (not that is an excuse not to improve it).

[SieyaM]

I'd rather Carbuncle to no longer be a pet for the job at this point. Making it into a stance-like buff that is required for using summon-based actions would personally be more palatable than having a pet that's barely does anything while constantly desummoning/resummoning on the field. Lore reasoning? Maybe Carbuncle persists in your grimoire/index because it's a "special arcane construct" that is unique in doing that and attuning to your weapon is now just that easy for arcanists. Who knows, lore doesn't feel like it has much importance for the job anymore anyway.

I wouldn't think lore reasons are keeping it around since before now once you got the egi summons you never saw Carbuncle again unless you glamoured it onto the egi summons. It would be that way again if they changed it to not having to be summoned at all to use the rest of the SMN kit, you would use carbuncle until you got the egi summons and then the final summons we have now at 90.

[Ggwppino]

I don't want to sound like an asshole and clearly my visibility is very limited, but on steam alone there are 36k paying players this month. 360k comes only from steam subscribers. Steam doesn't have the largest chunk of players, and each server holds around 5k players. European servers when you log in, whatever server it is, make you queue. 5k x 16 is 80k players. only subscriptions per month are 800k. I don't consider america and japan (but also china and korea) because they are not on those servers/games. In addition there is the shop and those too have entered. There are costs and everything you want, but with all the money coming in it's absurd that I read stuff like: it's not possible to have multiple pets at the same time.

how much will it cost to make an Array of pet threads with their skill queue? a week of work, 2 weeks, a month? With 800k per month is it not possible to cut out a budget in order to solve this problem of the useless pet?

[Raikai]

I wouldn't think lore reasons are keeping it around since before now once you got the egi summons you never saw Carbuncle again unless you glamoured it onto the egi summons. It would be that way again if they changed it to not having to be summoned at all to use the rest of the SMN kit, you would use carbuncle until you got the egi summons and then the final summons we have now at 90.

I always agreed with this option as well. If it's to be useless in combat, just make them optional to avoid visual clutter. And even better, they could let us glamour the Gem summons into them, so we would in fact get an actual 'fighting' version of a carbuncle.

I wouldn't summon them in combat, but I'd certainly keep them while chilling in cities.