(06-29-2017, 09:57 AM)Maia Wrote:(06-23-2017, 06:26 PM)Silmanos Wrote:(06-22-2017, 12:55 PM)Maia Wrote: I'm curious about this question as well.
One of my FC mates brought up that there are now Summoner NPCs speckled into the Grand Companies, which implies that every GC NPC Summoner has encountered a Primal in some manner and survived.
Does this impact the implied rarity of your average soldier (and, by extension, adventurer) being able to take down one or more Primals? All evidence up to this point indicates that an average adventurer (or soldier) would be very lucky to survive against a Primal, but I'm wondering if having these new NPC Summoners changes things.
(I don't think it's a spoiler to comment on random combat NPCs, but if it is I'd be happy to use a tag.)
So here is the response to this. Since it does contain spoilers to the SB SMN quests I'm sticking it in a spoiler tag.
Thank you for this response (and apologies for my late reply.)
I run a comparatively "low powered" LS, with a premise that's akin to "ordinary people overcoming extraordinary circumstances," so I wanted to take a closer look at this to ensure that the road to becoming a Summoner was still fairly extraordinary/rare/lucky/WoL-esque. I'll keep this thread in mind in our upcoming post-Stormblood deliberations!
I actually spoke about this very thing in a post about lore explored personal stories. Since the emergence of summoners as a job in the game, and the very beginnings of understanding primals, I sought out a loophole to allow my character to take up this job ICly. The above loophole that has been mentioned, where each City-state sends forces out to dispatch primals as they crop up over time, is the one I used myself, and one which is mentioned directly in the Ul'dah storeline dealing with Ifrit.
Jump to current expansion, we have that story that I used for my character, directly validated by the summoner MSQ. What I found to be the rarer thing, was not the survival of members necessarily, but rather the proper aetheric ability in those survivors making them rarer. Which was fine for my character, as he was a Paladin who was sent afield to help against Ifrit and so he gained the ability of a summoner.
The harder part of playing a summoner during the earlier community? When one managed to work out a story, one had to convince others that it was plausible, and after that, one had to reign in their own abilities and not be overpowered with them. Having all the summons doesn't make a lot of sense, because of the amount of ability and battle one would have to see to accomplish that or the number of ways you would need to figure out to work towards that would be a little ridiculous unless you put a lot of time into it. Having bahamut isn't out of the question, but is too OP imo, and of course certain primals aren't available period which requires an extra bit of imagination on everyone's part to make work.
Is being a summoner hard because of MSQ? I would venture in my experience: not really. Is it being a summoner made harder because there are a lot of people who either don't accept the job well in a low powered world, or RPers who can't handle reigning in their own power believable? Yes, much more so.
