Avatar's Favor still lackluster

[Herby]

I'm not at home yet so i have to trust my friend on this, who told me this but you all can test it out easily yourself so listen to what i have to say about this change.

So from what i heard Avatar's Favor now gives Perp cost +3, that's all good and dandy, i have enough gear to compensate for this mor than enough BUT the Potency reset still seems to be there! That's the entire point why Favor was lackluster in the first place... now we have to pay more mp for a buff that still resets every few seconds to a lower potency unless we stand around doing nothing...

At this Point I just give up... SE got me excited the last time for something that is essentially NOTHING...

[Zeargi]

I'm not at home yet so i have to trust my friend on this, who told me this but you all can test it out easily yourself so listen to what i have to say about this change.

So from what i heard Avatar's Favor now gives Perp cost +3, that's all good and dandy, i have enough gear to compensate for this mor than enough BUT the Potency reset still seems to be there! That's the entire point why Favor was lackluster in the first place... now we have to pay more mp for a buff that still resets every few seconds to a lower potency unless we stand around doing nothing...

At this Point I just give up... SE got me excited the last time for something that is essentially NOTHING...

So, here's what I've found thus far:

Test with Garuda:
Base EVA: 465
Max Boosted Eva(For my Skill):487 (+22)
Used Fleet Wind
Resetted Value: 481 (-5)

Test with Titan
Base DEF: 541
Max Boost DEF(with my skill): 613 (+72)
Time To Reach Max: ~1'40"
Used Earthen Ward
Resetting Value: 603 (-10)
Recovery Time: ~17"

Not really the Boost to favor I was looking for at all...
u_u

On a plus note, I didn't see a change to my Prep cost at all and that's without the use of the Caller's Bracers 1/2 prep from weather/day (Callers -1 from weather)

[Sasaraixx]

They need to remove ALL penalties from Avatar's Favor to make it viable. That includes the potency resetting upon blood pact usage. That absolutely needs to be abolished. It will be hard enough keeping up the favor when avatars are defeated or need to be released. I would love it if they could program it so that you maintain the potency level upon resummoning the same avatar. I'm not sure if that is possible though.

The Japanese forum has a post from the dev team saying that they are planning to increase the potency of favors in the November update and that they are testing whether they can change the blood pact usage penalty and that they want to make an ability that is easier to use. We'll just have to wait and see. I understand that they are making changes one step at a time, which makes sense, but it gets to be a bit tiring when you've been waiting years for those changes. I think it will take a few more version updates before we get the favors working the way we all hope.

Fingers crossed.

Also, I know this is a shot in the dark, but could you also consider granting the avatars the favors as well?

[Zeargi]

I agree, the favors' caps are based on your skill, so it should be automatically at it's MAXIMUM upon summoning. No build up, no reset, nothing of that. But we can only hope that there will be some results next month, but until they do, we still won't get a spot in a party over some other Support roll. Apogee, though, is really nice. I like it, even with the extra MP cost (Still wish it didn't have a penalty... u_u)

[Camate]

Just as Sasaraixx has mentioned, we are planning to make adjustments in the November version update that will increase the effect of Avatar’s Favor. To coincide with this adjustment, we’ll also be looking into making Avatar’s Favor an ability that is easier to utilize. One idea the team is looking into is to change how Blood Pacts reduce the effect of Avatar’s Favor, but we’ll announce more details soon.

In the meantime, I will forward your feedback to the development team!

[Zeargi]

Just as Sasaraixx has mentioned, we are planning to make adjustments in the November version update that will increase the effect of Avatar’s Favor. To coincide with this adjustment, we’ll also be looking into making Avatar’s Favor an ability that is easier to utilize. One idea the team is looking into is to change how Blood Pacts reduce the effect of Avatar’s Favor, but we’ll announce more details soon.

In the meantime, I will forward your feedback to the development team!

Thanks for spreading the word, always good to see you, Camate. The major problem isn't just the reset, but the build up to max too. If they increase the boosts, that's amazing, but still not that great if you have to wait a minute and a half for it to reach its max boost value. I switch my avatars a lot during fights, so I imagine I'm not the only one. So please pass that along to the devs too (I have faith that they've already thought of that too, though)

[Imakun]

Like a lot of people have been saying since the release of this amazingly inefficient ability, Avatar's Favor should be Job Trait which gives an automatic aura to the Avatar upon summoning. Like other traits, you can balance it up and make it scale with job levels.
I honestly don't see any other way to make this ability usable.
Why does everything a Summoner can do must have horrendous penalties?

[Frodnon]

a quick and to the point rundown of why favor is too poor to utilize.

A. the current penalty for using bloodpacts severely neuters the favor ability's buffs. a full 34 second bloodpact recast summoner can end up with favor's bonus being floored permanently. Penalizing us for taking action opposed to sitting there is very poor game design.

B. tying the charge up to having an avatar out opposed to having the buff on the player is a poor choice. avatars are too fragile and we have no way of recovering their health outside of dawn mulsums and a few AOE healing pacts. an avatar death or swap essentially resets this charge up and further lowers our enhancements. The charge up should be tied to the buff on the player(summoner) or should be eliminated entirely.

C. the favor AOE range is very small and very poorly tracked. at the bare minimum, the aoe range should be able to fully hit players on the other sides of large mobs. A bonus would be a geo-like graphic effect where we have a ring of runes or bubble around the avatar showing where it's aoe limit is.

D. Disable auto attack while favor is up. This is a huge weakness of mid and large group content. often the group is managing several monsters at once, with the summoner performing several side actions. having the avatar run off and smack something due to the player taking hate is a huge risk.

[Keyln]

a quick and to the point rundown of why favor is too poor to utilize.

B. tying the charge up to having an avatar out opposed to having the buff on the player is a poor choice. avatars are too fragile and we have no way of recovering their health outside of dawn mulsums and a few AOE healing pacts. an avatar death or swap essentially resets this charge up and further lowers our enhancements. The charge up should be tied to the buff on the player(summoner) or should be eliminated entirely.

D. Disable auto attack while favor is up. This is a huge weakness of mid and large group content. often the group is managing several monsters at once, with the summoner performing several side actions. having the avatar run off and smack something due to the player taking hate is a huge risk.

While I agree with points A and C, I'd point out that B will probably not be addressed. The whole design purpose of Avatar's Favor is to give Summoners an incentive to keep avatars out, as opposed to summon, BP, unsummon, and then pretend we're WHMs, as was common back in the days of '06.

As far as auto-attack, that's just normal avatar design, and I can't see SE changing that.

[Zekander]

Look at it this way, Avatar's Favor temporarily turns your summon (and by extension you) into a GEO, standing around doing nothing but providing a large buff to other party members.

Since GEO does exactly that, giving SMN a similar aura buff in addition to being able to use rage and ward BPs would be somewhat unfair to GEO.

Now don't get me wrong, I think Avatar's Favor could be more useful, but I think at best it should have no charge up time, but it would probably be set to a lower value then it's current maximum, at least for some avatars (Ifrit for example).