Giving Carbucle more to do (an easy to implement SMN change)

[AlphaXXI]

Something I've seen few people talk about when it comes to current summoner discourse is how little carbuncle currently has to do during fights, which I think is a shame. Since it doesn't even cast searing light anymore, it's essentially only there to shield us occasionnaly and be a pain to summon after dying.

So my idea to remedy that and maybe bring some nuance to the job without needing to completely rework everything or even create new assets (more of patch change than an expansion change) would be to take yet another page from FFIX's book and allowing it to have different abilities based on its different gemstones, that would change alongside your own elemental phase

Currently, Carbuncle is always there in between summons, when we're using the elemental gems to cast spells of a specific element. And its gemstone / color variants only exist as a visual change. With all these gems it'd make sense to reconnect these elements.

So, I imagine that it could be elementally infused by whichever summon you last called, and change gemstone and colour accordingly, and get more of a purpose again. In addition to Radiant Shield which I think should stay, it could get a new action for each gem, Ruby Light, Emerald Light or Topaz Light , which would give the player a buff that caries out to the next elemental summon phase, creating synergy between them. It would certainly make the little guy feel more useful as well as giving players even more of an incentive to choose the order they use summons wisely.

Heck maybe the order could even then influence wether or not we get bahamut or solar bahamut as a summon at the end of the phase, if carbuncle's aether was more astral or umbral due to our actions or something.

I'm really not sure how balanced it would be, I'm no expert when it comes to that, but it could give Summoners new stuff to track and take advantage of existing assets.

[Flana]

Something I've seen few people talk about when it comes to current summoner discourse is how little carbuncle currently has to do during fights

Because it would be godawful for carbuncle to do anything. The rat is dead literally half your rotation and constantly blinking in and out of existence. The reason it doesn't get to do anything is because Demi-Summoning broke pet commands in this game. If you want carbuncle to do anything, demi-summoning has to go. Until that mechanic is scrapped, your pet cannot be allowed to do anything without getting run over constantly.

[AlphaXXI]

It lingers around the whole time you use Garuda, Ifrit and Titan actions as soon as they've used their big move. That's plenty of a window for one more carbuncle action, or else radiant shield just wouldn't be a thing already. But my suggestion should actually probably be something it does automatically when it disappears actually, taking advantage of it popping in and out is the whole point.

If it makes my concept make more sense, think of it like Bard's "Enhanced Army's Paeon". You choose the order in which you summon one of the basic three summons so you can have the right debuff for the right phase (like, summoning garuda improves spell speed, so you use it before the ifrit phase, something like that).

[Payadopa]

The *least* it could do is auto attack. But this is XIV we're talking about, where Physic still exists, SMN and SCH are still linked and Undraw on AST took literal years to be removed.

[AlphaXXI]

If they were to bring back auto-attacks for it I think they should all be ranged, because the current timing doesn't really support it needing to move around and get close. It could be fun if it mimicked the summoner when it uses the ifrit gap closer though. But I don't think they'll want to make it too close to the old egis.

[rawker]

The least they could do is to completely decouple Carbuncle with the Primal summoning and have its own mechanics. Give a near-Resurrection amount of cast time for each Primal and while casting it, we have control over Carbuncle to do its thing.

[AlphaXXI]

Near-Resurrection cast times sound like a total pain and would completely alienate anyone who's more used to the current mobility, and be a lot worse than what the job was like prior to Endwalker. Standing around is BLM's thing, and even they get ways to circumvent that. I agree that decoupling Carbuncle from the other summons could also work better, having it around all the time would allow it to be more useful.

On the other hand I know it's tempting to just throw the baby out with the bath water, and every other thread already discusses big changes, but we also need to discuss ways to fix SMN that fit the current vision the dev team has and wouldn't doom us to two to three years of the current job.

[Ggwppino]

The least they could do is to completely decouple Carbuncle with the Primal summoning and have its own mechanics. Give a near-Resurrection amount of cast time for each Primal and while casting it, we have control over Carbuncle to do its thing.

But apparently they are incapable of doing so, given that the problem arose at stb and they did nothing to solve it, but they made the decision to remove the problem from the root instead of solve: making the carbuncle a mascot

[rawker]

Either that or it didn't fit their criteria of "stress" free

[Raikai]

Since the gemstone summons literally just pop in for a move and then out, I honestly don't see why they need to be an 'entity' that replaces the Carbuncle. If they were suddenly converted into animations it could have absolutely the same practical result.

Demis are more complex since they linger around for 15s, but at the very least it would be more or less a minute of the carbuncle actually being able to be involved in something else.