Seism just showcases how horribly broken banners are

I've been here a long time, and honestly, summons are so much weaker now than they used to be. They used to contest, have spell presence, could be buffed significantly more (see old Boost), had less counters, dealt more damage, had more HP, had more powerful synergistic interactions, etc. Summons have been directly and indirectly nerfed almost continuously in the history of this game.

And at every stage of nerfs, the only time Summons haven't been complained about is when the themes that have a lot of summons aren't popular.

Granted, some things have made Summons stronger too and of course you can argue some new summon runes are OP in of themselves, but I think, on net, summons as a mechanic are as weak as they have ever been, but continue to be seen as a problem.

It's interesting to note that the original Boost champion was Boost: Skeleton. The whole point of Boost was, originally, to buff Summons, and now we have come to a point where part of the discussion is whether Boost should affect summoned units at all.

 

I don't think it's something we can backtrack from, but in theory, if we could go back in time, one option would be to keep "Summons" as "Real." And not treat them as second class citizens and just price/design the abilities accordingly with the idea that they are as real as runedock champions.

This is not to say that the current direction is wrong, it's just that that is one direction we could take.

Fundamentally, it comes down to the fact that Pox is a tactics game, and not a card game, so "free units" is a whole different ballgame compared to say, tokens in MTG that can be massed killed/wiped off the board easily, and doesn't generate a lot of board presence the way our champions do, and so what has happened is a reasonable reaction based on the way Summon abilities were created/utilized.

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But so much of the game has been changed with the idea of Summons being "sub-Champions" that this view should be embraced (otherwise it's an extremely large shake-up), and a large number of themes do have this type of summons as their core identity.

 

That's because when HP buffs weren't global (which wasn't that long ago), it was creating a lot of situations where you had to meticulously move individual units in a specific order to avoid moving out of the AE or else killing your own champions. It was idiotic to play with. It was one of the specific issues players wanted addressed when we were revamping the stat buff abilities series.

I also don't think there's a particular compelling argument as to why it'll ALWAYS create problems - that's exactly the kind of argument I am arguing against. Nothing is without context.

But of course global introduces different considerations.

 

You misunderstand the point. The point of referencing how things used to be is to give us context of where abilities came from and provide comparison points and to facilitate discussions.

 

Of course there are more - the game is constantly adding content - there is, on average, going to be more of EVERYTHING.

Just because there are more doesn't mean they are better or more prevalent. Those things are on different axis. The question is whether summons are more effective than before, and whether they are too effective now and what that means. On the case, the point of mentioning Boost: Skeleton is that Stat Stacking with Summons was the original design - whether that was a good idea or not is another question, but I was asked about the historical context of Summons and that is the context - that was how the original designers of Boost intended it to interact with Summons.

That said, I DO think that a number of the new summon abilities are actually more efficient at generating summons than old ones, at least in terms of numbers (though I'd argue the summons themselves are still much weaker) - but the only reason they are allowed to do that now is because of the weaker nature of the summons themselves and the decreased ways of interaction.

 

In this context, it's important that abilities that interact with summons are generally specifically designed to do so, and assumed to do so - and abilities like Riftwalker would be stronger if it wasn't for the fact that it is intended to be able to be used on Summons.