Contagion should be a SMN ability, not a pet ability

[Hiruke]

Honestly, I have a few points here:

1) Everyone always uses Garuda forever, because Contagion is the best, period. The fact that she's a caster type is icing on the cake.

1a) Pets should be made more useful in general. Other than adding auto-attack dps and not responding when I command her to use Contagion, I have zero cares about Garuda besides maybe telling her to stop standing in AoEs.

1b) Seriously, how come I have to press Contagion like 30 times before she feels like using it!?

1c) Pet abilities should queue no matter what. I understand that player abilities don't queue unless your GCD is almost up, but you really want me to watch Garuda and tiem my button press with where she is on HER GCD? If I give her a command, she absolutely should execute it at the next opportunity, not blindly ignore my command because hey, she's busy ok?

2) Pet abilities are slow to respond to input, depending on what Garuda is currently doing. She's currently attacking, and it's too long until her GCD is back up? Well, too bad then, she's ignoring your commands. This happens with Enkindle, as well. Every time I'm sitting there hammering a button that won't respond, my dps is facing a steady decline. This game punishes inaction, so making the system such that pet controls are unresponsive is... pretty questionable.

2a) Do you think anyone legitimately uses Garuda's push back ability? Because they don't. Mostly this just goes off because some poor guy has Sic on for some reason. In order for Garuda to push something back (which would be handy in Second Coil, Turn 4, to push golems) she has to a) acknowledge you even sent her a command (unlikely) b) move over to the monster c) finally push it back. Considering anything you'd want to push back (adds in Leviathan, for example) you need to push back VERY QUICKLY, the utility on this ability is basically zero (it would be questionable even if Garuda could push at range, due to unresponsiveness of pet controls).

3) Pets are very boring. Putting what should be base utility of SMN onto a pet is not very interesting when we should be making pets more diverse and interesting to use to begin with. Even tanking with Titan is very uninteresting, as there is very little you can tell him to do since he only has a couple actions to begin with.

tl;dr - Pets are boring, unresponsive, and should have base required SMN utility added to them - they should be unique, interesting, and... useful. Not to mention - fun to play with, instead of mostly ignored (except as a potential hindrance, thanks to them dying and lowering your dps).

[Bishop81]

1) Everyone always uses Garuda forever, because Contagion is the best, period. The fact that she's a caster type is icing on the cake.

To be frank, people are still going to use Garuda-Egi. For pets, Range > Melee.

1a) Pets should be made more useful in general. Other than adding auto-attack dps and not responding when I command her to use Contagion, I have zero cares about Garuda besides maybe telling her to stop standing in AoEs.

1b) Seriously, how come I have to press Contagion like 30 times before she feels like using it!?

Activated pet abilities need to be off the pet's GCD and activate immediately when commanded. That's the way WoW does it, works great.

[Sunako]

In pvp garuda push back is pretty useful and if you wanna use those skills instantly, you can use steady mode at first so u do not need wait that 3 sec before your pet is doing actions. It is like same than paladin stun, u need time your globals if you wanna stun in the right time.

[SelenaValariaux]

They should have taken a leaf out of Final Fantasy XI's book - pets are so much better to control on there... Don't get me started on how Egi's kinda suck to look at anyway... Never the less I'll always be SMN! <3

[Clarkamite]

Maybe this will change sometime in the future but right now our SMN in our static uses both Garuda and Ifrit on T11. Or maybe it's just Ifrit. When adds come out he summons Ifrit because it's a melee and it will stay on the weapons nodes as it rotates and can therefore split the damage of repelling cannons with him and the group while I blow up the gravity node. Or were the adds names the other way around? I don't remember. Either way you get my drift. My point was is that in that fight it seems to me that ifrit is just as useful if not more so than Garuda. Especially for the last phase. Being ranged in the last phase doesn't mean a whole lot when you're forced to stick close to the boss.

[Wolfenkritter]

1) Everyone always uses Garuda forever, because Contagion is the best, period. The fact that she's a caster type is icing on the cake.

There's more advantages to Garuda than just Contagion. For one, she's ranged, which means she's much more flexible with positioning than the other 2 pets. Secondly, her damage is affected by Foe Requiem whereas Ifrit is not. Ifrit IIRC only gets his damage buffed from Dragon Kick. Considering most team setups have a Bard and not always a Monk its an advantage in Garuda's favor.

1a) Pets should be made more useful in general. Other than adding auto-attack dps and not responding when I command her to use Contagion, I have zero cares about Garuda besides maybe telling her to stop standing in AoEs.

Pets are actually worth a sizable amount of your DPS and not just from Contagion.

1c) Pet abilities should queue no matter what.

This is my main peeve with Pets in general. Your commands should always supersede anything your pet does. Its really infuriating that Gaurda will just stand their and keep shooting instead of moving to where I tell her or using Contagion. I've made it a habit to always have her on Steady beforehand before doing either, its clunky.

2a) Do you think anyone legitimately uses Garuda's push back ability?

Most of the Pet abilities in general could do with a tune up. A lot of them are just there. Shockwave is very situational and as mentioned, its clunky to use effectively and is generally not worth bothering with. Ifrit's Radiant Shield is completely useless since Ifrit shouldn't be taking damage and if he does he's pretty much dead.