Fixing Avatar's Favor

[Sasaraixx]

Exactly, most the time the effects are never at full. I was just in a party, 3 out of the 6 had DNC subbed. So yes, most of them can use Haste Samba. And also, Enfire with +45 is nice, but that's IF the monsters aren't resistance to it. You people as so narrow sighted that you can't see the bigger picture of things. Enfire gives a boost to DMG up to 45, why don't the other avatars have a similar ability? Why is it that Endrain and Enaspir are so weak in comparison? Why can't we break up the abilities of Heavenward Howl to give Endrain, and give Diablos an Enaspir ability (Seeing how his favor restores MP) Most Melees have Double Attack, or even Triple Attack on some gear piece. I'm not saying that Double Attack is bad, It just doesn't help the party as a whole. When you go to a party, most Melees ask for a boost to ACC, they don't ask for Double Attack. The party can benefit from an Evasion, Defense, Magic Defense, Magic Attack, Regen, and Refresh bonus. And Rather than fighting over semantic, why not offer better solutions. I've already stated some myself: with things such as the Stay command like BST has, or an Avatar's Fury, as well as the Avatar's Favor. Think outside the box, people

I'm going to join everyone else and disagree with you. I think you're the one being short sighted on this one. Ifrit's bonuses are fantastic for a melee set up. I think you're fixating on the current preference for rangers on some of the more difficult content, and therefore you want our buffs to benefit them. There is still plenty of content where you will have Monks, Samurais or other melee jobs. We already have favors that would benefit mage jobs. You can't honestly think that Refresh, Regen, MAB, Evasion, etc. bonuses are what will get summoner a spot in a party. You are also very likely to have a Bard in your party to provide accuracy songs if needed, so I think it is in our favor to have unique buffs like Double Attack or Crit Bonus.

As others have explained, the reason why no one asks for these favors is not because of the buffs themselves, but because of how horribly implemented Avatar's Favor is. These changes could be a huge step in the right direction. Removing the penalties to the avatars is necessary and a huge step in the right direction. There are a few key points that I really hope the dev team changes.

1. The favor absolutely cannot be reset by blood pact usage. For me this is the main issue. If you want the SMN to be worthy of the party slot, they are going to have to be able to keep the Favor at full potency AND be able to use other Ward or Rage pacts to assist the party. This really is non-negotiable. With the increased perp cost, I don't see this being remotely overpowered.

2. Maintaining the favor after the avatar is defeated: I'm not sure if this is possible, but the avatars will be taking heavy damage because they will be in melee range. If the favor is reset every time the avatar is defeated, it will be very difficult to keep the favor at max potency. If this cannot be programmed, then the ramp up time needs to be greatly reduced OR the base potency of the effects should be raised. Another alternative would be to greatly increase the range of the aura so that the avatar can remain on the back lines with the Summoner.

With those two items and the removal of the negative effects on the avatar, I think we'll be a job in contention. There are a couple of additional tweaks, like increasing avatar subtle blow and allowing the avatars to receive the favor themselves that would be greatly welcomed. (The latter would also help to further specialize the avatars. Elemental correlation would still remain paramount, but I think allowing the avatars to have their own mini specialization would add great fun to the job.)

[Zeargi]

I'm going to join everyone else and disagree with you. I think you're the one being short sighted on this one. Ifrit's bonuses are fantastic for a melee set up. I think you're fixating on the current preference for rangers on some of the more difficult content, and therefore you want our buffs to benefit them. There is still plenty of content where you will have Monks, Samurais or other melee jobs. We already have favors that would benefit mage jobs. You can't honestly think that Refresh, Regen, MAB, Evasion, etc. bonuses are what will get summoner a spot in a party. You are also very likely to have a Bard in your party to provide accuracy songs if needed, so I think it is in our favor to have unique buffs like Double Attack or Crit Bonus.

As others have explained, the reason why no one asks for these favors is not because of the buffs themselves, but because of how horribly implemented Avatar's Favor is. These changes could be a huge step in the right direction. Removing the penalties to the avatars is necessary and a huge step in the right direction. There are a few key points that I really hope the dev team changes.

1. The favor absolutely cannot be reset by blood pact usage. For me this is the main issue. If you want the SMN to be worthy of the party slot, they are going to have to be able to keep the Favor at full potency AND be able to use other Ward or Rage pacts to assist the party. This really is non-negotiable. With the increased perp cost, I don't see this being remotely overpowered.

2. Maintaining the favor after the avatar is defeated: I'm not sure if this is possible, but the avatars will be taking heavy damage because they will be in melee range. If the favor is reset every time the avatar is defeated, it will be very difficult to keep the favor at max potency. If this cannot be programmed, then the ramp up time needs to be greatly reduced OR the base potency of the effects should be raised. Another alternative would be to greatly increase the range of the aura so that the avatar can remain on the back lines with the Summoner.

With those two items and the removal of the negative effects on the avatar, I think we'll be a job in contention. There are a couple of additional tweaks, like increasing avatar subtle blow and allowing the avatars to receive the favor themselves that would be greatly welcomed. (The latter would also help to further specialize the avatars. Elemental correlation would still remain paramount, but I think allowing the avatars to have their own mini specialization would add great fun to the job.)

The thing I'm actually thinking about is more than just SKCNM. Yes, There will be times where you'll be in a party with SAMs, THFs, etc. But the problems falls into a few other areas. With these changes It'll be great to have the effects boosted and without the decrease to the Avatar's overall stats. If the aura can be like GEO where the effect is 100% max the moment the avatar is summoned then we could be talking, but it also comes down to Party configuration.

As SMN, most of the content that we're going to be doing involve what's currently popular. We can be a DD, but most the time people don't see us as that(Even though we have 61 or so offensive abilities). We're most definitely not a healer to the caliber of SCH or WHM, and can keep people healthy, but there's still a high chance of death. Which leaves the support role, so that means we're basically competing against COR and BRD for slots in parties. Which sucks, because some of our buffs need desperate work.

Personal, I feel that the Avatars should naturally have Double Attack and ALL should have some ability to gain/bestow En-Spells, Their survivability should be taken into account, and our wards need to be fixed.

Everyone also keeps zeroing in on the Irfit thing, Does that mean you agree with me then on Leviathan and Fenrir?

[Damane]

So how often are you in those melee-burns? How often do people use enfire over Haste Samba(A weak enfire at that)? The only one doubling down on stupid is you. As a BRD, you should know very well, out of all the songs you have, which ones people actually ask for. Double Attack is nice, but only in select situations. a Boost to Critical hit DMG would benefit both Melee and Ranged fighters.

23% DA... THAT IS HUGE. If SE finally fixes Avatar's favour decently, as in you can have it up constantly without loosing its potency on any remote hard fight, and can bring it up instantly when you switch avatars shortly for a BP ward/debuff, i would definitly think about droping the cor spot for a smn.

[Sasaraixx]

Who said that I was focusing just on SKCNM's? This would apply to Delve and other content. As Damane said, if the changes are properly implemented, we may be able to rival corsair and geo for a 2nd support slot. In alliance content it is even more likely due to rotating bards and cors.

We zeroed in on Ifrit because you made a point of declaring the effect not that useful lol. I don't agree with you about Leviathan's favor. Magic accuracy could be a big deal for mages on harder content. Fenrir. . . I might agree. I don't know how much meva it gives and if it could really help resist rates. If it could actually help resist things like doom or charm, then it might be useful.

Just looking at the list we seem to be fairly diverse.
Mages: magic attack, magic accuracy, refresh, Eva down or attack down wards to help the party, mab ward
Melee: double attack, crit hit bonus, accompanying enspell or warcry and stun
Tanks: def, mdef, Eva and earthen armor, cait sith's wards (if they land)
Ranged melee; nothing

The last one is the only area we're missing. Perhaps Fenrir could be changed to ranged attack or WS damage.

[Karbuncle]

Ranged attacks do gain benefit from Ramuh's favor, and Warcry effects ranged attacks as well. We also have Fenrir's stat buffs, though small.

While melee and mages gain the lions share of benefits from Avatars, we do have ways to benefit RNGs, and Ramuh's favor is no slouch, especially in situations where one might use Jishnu's, let alone their white damage, which is a decent portion of RNG damage.

I'll be the first to say a re-haul of SMN needs to happen, our Wards don't scale with level and are all laughably mediocre at best and Favor is a good idea with horrible execution. Right now I'm thankful our damage potential has been significantly increased with the Melee DPS boost to pets... but our support abilities need to be readdressed (The mage ones being far and away the most pathetically underpowered).

Now I'm not saying we couldn't use a few more ranged buffs, I'm just saying don't try to undersell what we do have, both Ramuh's favor and Warcry are good-to-great buffs for RNGs.

Also, Earthern Armor and Earthern Ward really help all classes... even RNGs can get hit if enmity goes awry.

Edit: And on yah, Ifrit's Favor is almost without a doubt the best of them all, if we're to change any of should be one of the more crappy ones... like say, Fenrir.

[Zeargi]

Very well then, I accept defeat. Apparently, the rest of the community finds a more effective use of double attack then I. So I, the benevolent Zeargi, have deemed that the double attack shall stay. All joking aside, perhaps we should get a little bit back onto topic. So, it's already been established that the wards and the favors need to both be fixed, but this conversation has got me thinking. Geomancer was basically created from avatar's favor, and I have already said that it'd great idea to add avatar's fury... perhaps we could lean towards the realm of having negative statuses on enemies within the area of effect.. (ehhh? EEEHHH?)

I would still like to see each of the avatars have their own particular ability to give their matching element to the party. Not to mention, we could even expand upon our current abilities with the use of job points. we could make it so things like: Diamond Storm could also incorporate having magical evasion down as well, or Tidal Roar having magical attack down. Eerie Eye is a great combo when it works, making great use of nullifying enemies' magic and job abilities

[Underpanties]

Good news from this thread I never would have thought the dev's would allow us to fulltime Favor with such a small penalty. -Perp cost gear is plentiful and easy to cap with just a few pieces, and a few more per tick wouldn't hurt to make smn more viable in parties. SMN has always been a hybrid-role job, able to do many things at once, and very adaptable.

Given some of the new / more common stats on ilvl equip, we can bring about some really good ideas for favor/wards.

Things like +magic damage, high +magic atk bonus, %-based haste (stacking with hastega).

SMN might also really benefit from an overhaul to its recast timers - atm since all like abilities are grouped into a single timer, why would anyone in the right mind use any ability but the highest level one?

What if you could use a tier 2 nuke on a 6-second recast like blm/sch can, or Carbuncle's healing ruby on a 4-sec cooldown alternated with his aoe erase to help your healer during a tough fight? Keep the high level abilities on a decently high timer, but give smn a reason to use lower level abilities as well. Also, let's expand on skillchain potential, instead of abruptly stopping at level 50 abilities. SMN gets access to some great weaponskills, especially with /whm, and being able to solo skillchain would really help.

Finally, lets increase the potency of fixed-number ward pacts. So many of them were designed with lv 75 mechanics and were never updated. Diabolos' ward offering +12 magic atk bonus, or 15-damage phalanx, or most healing abilities capping out at ~500-600. -Spikes abilities also cap out low, and Elemental Spirits are still useless, almost a decade after they were introduced.

But amidst all this, smn right now is in a much better position than it has ever been - its damage half has become very potent with the huge surplus of +magic atk bonus staves and equipment, along with ilvl satchels. SMN Solo is truly a force to be reckoned with, and leaves its supportive half in the dust.

[Nemn]

Can we please also have the auras extend the avatars themselves? That would also be step in the right direction.