Can we have a Light Spirit adjustment soon?

I don't work for SquareEnix so I don't know what the roles planned for ALL spirits when compared to avatars. However, when playing a summoner up to lvl 80, my own personal wish was a division of utility. What I mean is, I always felt the "role" of spirits was as a nuking pet gear to specific elemental types. While an avatar would be the tank/melee role.

It is this poor nuking capabilities...I think, that gets summoner mad with spirits. Debuffs are important. But not. In the same sense as straight nuke or cure is. With an "average build" spirits fail horribly to cast nuke enough time to warrant the perspiration cost. Even with an elite, all summon skill build Summoners can get the casting cycle down to 22ish secs but the elemental fails to cast a nuke and will always debuff first.

I don't get where people say NPC are dumb and automatons are dumb. For 95% of things both cure and buff appropriately. The other 5% requires just better planning. Spirits are the opposite. They cast inappropriately 95% of the time. Why? Because of so called "casting cycles".

I still cant for the life of me fathom why summoners even would want to summon spirits, I mean come on they're fricking spirits let them sit and be useless. Ask for carbuncle to get better curing options if you want something to cure for you.

Asking for useful spirits is like a DRK asking for useful nukes, the rest of the DRK community would berate that DRK for upgrading the wrong part of DRK. DRKs want magic that is supplemental to our meleeing, not nuking

Why would a summoner want to be summoning spirits as opposed to fenrir or garuda or diabolos? Go ask for improvements to blood pacts, new spells for the avatars, something, something that is not lolspirits

Well maybe if spirits had some sort of function, such as having low MP cost so that summoners could have a pet out while main healing (during the period that avatar perpetuation cost is still high before end-game gear) and then sending an avatar out to go all-out with damage and utilisation of blood pacts.

This is just one idea. The point is that with the right idea they may be able to play some role. Obviously in their current state we can't see why anyone would want to use them. Well, that's the point really. Why are they there if they have no role?

And it matters for summoners because spirits are unique to summoners, are somewhat difficult to obtain and are one of the two lines of summoning magic the job has. Dark Knights and elemental nukes are different because they're not job-exclusive or job-defining spells for DRK. Those spells work properly for other jobs. And really, that and similar problems for other jobs are the problems of said jobs. Balance in mind, yes, but not to the point where we close down discussion for individual jobs.

Again, if spirits aren't going to be improved then at least sell them cheap from NPCs so they're something for new summoners who don't have avatars to play around with. Then there would be a proper summon hierarchy. We'd know that they're for newbie summoners who can't summon avatars yet, so we wouldn't care so much that they're bad.

I think the issue I have with them is more about overall job design. I'm not too interested in spirits being made to compete with avatars or be incredibly useful, but having spirits there for no purpose makes SMN look like an unfinished job with a few implemented concepts that failed, were never cleared up and were forgotten about.

As I also said in my previous post, Siphon does not equal a role for spirits. It's just a nice gimmick JA thrown in there. I may as well be summoning my pet rock for an MP boost.

It may not be a top priority issue in the scheme of things, but that doesn't mean things can't be changed somewhere down the line.

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Originally Posted by Tsukino_Kaji

That is not the mark of a great brd, it's only a sign that a person had time to finish an instrumant trial.

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How many Bards do you know that has an emp harp? Having one is a mark of an accomplishment because not only are they one of the very few to take it to 90, but also spent enough time to get that harp also. I respect any Bards doing that, because that will be the absolute last thing I would do in this game, short of overall quitting.

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Originally Posted by dzero

As I also said in my previous post, Siphon does not equal a role for spirits. It's just a nice gimmick JA thrown in there. I may as well be summoning my pet rock for an MP boost.

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I don't know about that. With the best gear you can get for Siphon, you can rock out as much as 552 MP from an Elemental Siphon (granted, day/weather bonus implied).

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Originally Posted by Korpg

I don't know about that. With the best gear you can get for Siphon, you can rock out as much as 552 MP from an Elemental Siphon (granted, day/weather bonus implied).

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Oh yeah I totally get that the MP boost is good, what I was saying is more that it's function is gimmicky, i.e. summon useless pet, hit MP boost macro, dismiss useless pet and never let it see the light of day again.

It's a good JA that's meant to make a bad line of summons useful, but really the only useful thing is the JA. Hence I may as well summon my pet rock and hit Siphon for all I care.

It is nice to see that dzero gets it.

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I still cant for the life of me fathom why summoners even would want to summon spirits, I mean come on they're fricking spirits let them sit and be useless.

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If SE can waste time on fishing, hot and cold, chocobo racing, pankration, synergy, they can surely fix spirits too. All those things are useless and yet get attention. I don't even see people complain about them, and yet someone must be asking for those updates.

I got an idea, how about asking SE to make it so we can actually control the spirits rather than having them be random and mostly useless

Spirits are mostly useless because you don't have direct control over them in an actual fight where healing actually matters no way could a smn main heal with a spirit.

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Originally Posted by Zumi

Spirits are mostly useless because you don't have direct control over them in an actual fight where healing actually matters no way could a smn main heal with a spirit.

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exactly, we know for the most part what the spirits have for spell sets....but we cant tell them what to do, giving us the ability to tell the spirits what to do would change them from mostly useless to something kinda nice

note: that actually might not be true, they use their spells so randomly we might never see some of them

Soooo elemental siphon is for noobs/medi core players...? Is that what I'm getting?

nah, elemental syphon is a pretty nice feature, but it doesn't change the fact we still have no control over the spirits, they are totally random, unlike the Avatars which are supposed to be small portions of gods and you have control of, at least with Pup you can do suggestions

The problem with being able to control spirits is that you'd just be hitting Quake and other Ancient Magic all the time for nothing other than the perpetuation cost.

Spirits costing less than avatars to keep out while keeping their spells random could be somewhat of an improvement, as long as this isn't exploited in anyway for cheap ancient magic spells.

the spirits AM spells are not all that great, it relies almost entirely on summoning magic skill and it will never be as good as BLM with full MAB sets so if someone wants to be moronic and try that then they will just be being foolish

thats kinda like trying to use the elemental IV spells from the Avatars, those spells rely on your summoning magic skill and TP, and overall are sucky except in certain situations and those situations are very few and far between

I think the uncontrollable nature of the spirits is the main thing which differentiates them from avatars and which needs to stay there so that they don't become more useful than avatars. I know I'd rather be using Light Spirit than Carbuncle if I could directly command it to use Cures, Haste, etc.

Edit: At least I'd use spirits situationally if they cost less than avatars to keep out.

Only thing SE could do is make the spirits more DPS oriented (faster attack speed/stronger attacks) than avatars in order to complement avatars emphasis on the big sparkles of instant high damage attacks.

Allow the SMN to pick what spell they want cast from a list when the pet has TP.

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the spirits AM spells are not all that great, it relies almost entirely on summoning magic skill and it will never be as good as BLM with full MAB sets so if someone wants to be moronic and try that then they will just be being foolish

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That isn't how they work. Trust me that when you have 50 skill over cap, and you still get resists on stuff BLMs land nukes on with 20 skill over cap, it is something different. I'd bet my money on spirits having their own BLM level worth of elemental skill, worthy of a DC elemental. So about 5 skill less than a naked and unmerited BLM.

I wish SE made their elemental skill as high as your summoning magic though. It would help a lot in avoiding the 120 damage AM nukes on level 100 monsters.

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Edit: At least I'd use spirits situationally if they cost less than avatars to keep out.

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No you wouldn't. Mine are free, and I gain MP over time thanks to siphon. Still useless because they won't do anything else than suck MP. Nukes? Be happy if you get one 33% of the time. At those times, be happy that it isn't interrupted. When it goes uninterrupted, hope that it won't get a 90% resist and do meager 100 damage.

Example:

Abyssea, Minkin atma, 100% damage reduction bug atma, some MAB atma don't recall which. Light Spirit vs DC bomb. 20 minutes later, bomb has 80% HP left. Light spirit has 100% of course, due to 100% damage reduction, but being invincible and still only do 1% damage a minute, with atmas?

I'm sure using Fire Spirit or so would have been twice as good, and I'd surely done 40% in 20 minutes.

I don't know if I'm asking for too much if I want a DC monster to die in 5 minutes from a spirit. Is it too much to ask? I mean an Ukon WAR kills them in 2 seconds.

Then by all means, make them stronger. I just think main healing as a SMN would be a lot more fun if you had a Light Spirit out there who actually manages to help you out a little to make up for your not-so-great healing ability. But then, it's not all about Light Spirit is it.

Give Spirits some kind of niche. Allow them to cast decent-powered Enspells on party members, give them unique elemental resistance debuffs, add more abilities and traits which provide an actual synergy with spirits rather than the Siphon route of summoning the spirit merely because that's a prerequisite to the ability and not because you actually want to have spirits active to use these abilities... (If that made sense.)

There are surely plenty of things that could be done with them rather than them sitting around like some unfinished job concept - come on SE, do something with this wasted spell line!

Without going into the whole TP strength of avatars, if I had to have guess... originally, SquareEnix thought that "Bloodpacts" would be so powerful and useful that they require a 1min timer for all of them across all avatars to share. They did not give us this "exactly". I say this, because up to lvl 60 Summoners received Tier II and Tier IV nukes before Spirts and blackmages. Usually, they received it nearly 10-20 level before a BLM. Then came along Ancient Magiks and things went to he'll for Summoners.

Back to what I thought was the original division of avatars and spirits. Perhaps SE thought that in-between these really "powerful" Bloodpacts while react timer was down, a summoner could summon a spirits for 1min at a time to get off a few nukes and a few swings. They were given increasing mp perpuation cost do to "free nukes" and increase lvl of nukes. While avatar were pretty much stuck with a few "powerful" Bloodpacts.

Are they powerful and have the kept up with modern Vanadiel? My answer is no. Have the spirit kept to the average nuker role? no, they have not. Should an average player have a very low return, while an exceptional player have a medium return? No, they should not.

My fix of which I posted on Summoners thread is to rewrite and lock in both avatars and spirits. Update the nuking AI and physical damage down effect for spirits. Create new and powerful Bloodpacts and wards for avatars(or create another branch called "blood magic" that allows magic and physical attacks to be on separate timers. Or, seperate weak attacks from multi-strike and merit magics.

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Originally Posted by Finuve

I still cant for the life of me fathom why summoners even would want to summon spirits, I mean come on they're fricking spirits let them sit and be useless. Ask for carbuncle to get better curing options if you want something to cure for you.

Asking for useful spirits is like a DRK asking for useful nukes, the rest of the DRK community would berate that DRK for upgrading the wrong part of DRK. DRKs want magic that is supplemental to our meleeing, not nuking

Why would a summoner want to be summoning spirits as opposed to fenrir or garuda or diabolos? Go ask for improvements to blood pacts, new spells for the avatars, something, something that is not lolspirits

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For the answer to your question please look at the post above as this person (i believe is the same elvaan anyway) made a full research and conclusion thread on KI and explains how it all works. The main use was for 22sec Thunder IV procs back in the lv75 era provided someone stuck a shock on the mob before hand.

That's pretty powerful.

Many of us simply want to use the forgotten summon path that's been laid out sorta like breath builds on blu or nuke builds on nin.

*edit* many things about many jobs have been forgotten or not properly supported by both players and SE around the time abyssea came out. Sadly the amount of time players spend researching has declined twice as fast. There are many good ideas and role/style changing ideas that are overlooked due to the ingrain mentality that you must use X build or quit or to stop talking about something that won't help abyssea. lol.

I blame PS2 limitations.

All Malamasala is asking for is creative solutions to the problem. Though I've only lvled SMN to the mid 50's range, I recall the frustrations of yelling at my sluggish Spirits to get with the "Doing" instead of the "Floating". Without having to change the system from the ground up, enhancing methods to their performance seems like the easiest solution. These enhancements can come in a couple of different methods, but the end goal would be the same. I would opt for them being paired together to gain the most effectiveness out of using the Spirits.

Performance Tiers:

If SE wishes to keep the spirits performance random, simply implement Job Trait performance tiers that greatly enhance a spirit's effectiveness on all fronts including Melee damage, Spell potency, Reduced interruption rate, Frequency of casting, and Spell accuracy. Base the performance on Summoning magic skill levels so those with max skill numbers or higher will see drastic improvements in a spirits performance compared to SMNs that have the highest performance tier unlocked but lack the necessary magic skill (ex: An Abyssea Leeched lvl 90 SMN with super low Summoning magic skill levels wouldn't hope to see much changes in a Spirit's performance even though each performance tier was unlocked). If all the right conditions are met, a SMNs Light Spirit would dish out cures at a much more efficient rate to all that need them. Pop out things like Regen 3, and focus less on buffing if summoned during battle. Cure distances could also see improvements based on these tier as well, but that could be something the Devs decide to adjust based on the game mechanics.

New Suggestion methods for Spirits:

Fellow NPCs are great at curing in my personal experience in terms of choosing the right tiers of cure based on how much HP I've lost, and the timing of when to cure so long as you have "Soothing Healer" assigned to them. Spirits could follow a similar suit. PUPs have a nice thing going with being able to suggest what automations "should" be focusing on, so that's the next suggestion.

While maintaining the random factor of a Spirit's behavior to some degree, include new JA's that allow a SMN to suggestively "alter" the performance of a summoned spirit. Once used, for example, a Light Spirit could be suggested to focus on Curative spells at a much higher rate over Enhancing spells. So too could the JA's suggest the use of offensive spells over any thing else so even a Light Spirit would cast Divine magic in the heat of battle at an increased rate.

Possible New Suggestive JA's:
• Soothing Spirit: Bolsters Curative/certain enhancing magic/and status removing spells.
• Raging Spirit: Bolsters Damaging and enfeebling spells.
• Shielding Spirit: Bolsters Protective spells.
• Assaulting Spirit: Bolsters Melee and Defense

I don't believe that simply because a job starts at level 1 with a spell, JA, or WS that it should equate to meaning that it's utterly useless at high levels. It should be in fact the very opposite in my opinion. As skills continue to grow past the 300-400 mark, the effectiveness of those same level 1 tools should see vast improvements in performance. There are some Abilities that remain useful all throughout a jobs career, and spirits should follow the same example. They should be very much apart of a SMNs toolset that partners their effectiveness alongside Avatars instead of shunning them.

Time to show off a new sig for this week kingfury?

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Possible New Suggestive JA's:
• Soothing Spirit: Bolsters Curative/certain enhancing magic/and status removing spells.
• Raging Spirit: Bolsters Damaging and enfeebling spells.
• Shielding Spirit: Bolsters Protective spells.
• Assaulting Spirit: Bolsters Melee and Defense

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I'd suggest a "Casting Spirit" as well, since it is annoying to have them run in to melee always, when sometimes they'll just run in and die or get silenced. It would just make them stop and cast around max distance (like how avatars attack at max distance).

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Originally Posted by Malamasala

1) Let it cast cure V or curaga IV even if someone has a lot of HP left. I'd say cure everyone below 70% HP, instead of the current, everyone below 30%.
2) Prioritize healing over protect/shell/haste/regen
3) Give it regen III. It makes no sense to have WHM spells, but not the regen line.
4) Expand cure range. Make it heal from 25 distance. (Currently it can't see very far, so it won't heal from safe distance like other healers)

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Agreed!! This is something I was going to touch on once I got more familiar with the forum i.e. who I could expect to troll it (Seen a few... some in this thread)
/trollface >...............................>

People seem to have become so obsessed with "Spike DMG" that they only feel more BP's should be added and forsake everything else.. but this isn't the case for SMN, while spike dmg has always been a factor of the job its not the "only" factor that should be considered. People seems to neglect Spirits in general however having spent a great deal of Gill on procuring them and not having any aspect of them altered in a long time I feel it should at-least be up for some minor tweaking.

Also... this is a thread about the "possible" improvements that could be made on the LS, however i see a lot of people "QQing" because the want something else upgraded first... Go start your own thread.

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Originally Posted by Raxiaz

I blame PS2 limitations.

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I agree.

Superfluous text.

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Originally Posted by Malamasala

I'd suggest a "Casting Spirit" as well, since it is annoying to have them run in to melee always, when sometimes they'll just run in and die or get silenced. It would just make them stop and cast around max distance (like how avatars attack at max distance).

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Yep, that would be the "Raging Spirit" JA ^^;, sorry if my "Damaging and enfeebling spells" description didn't explain that in detail.

But yeah, this JA would suggest "Nuker mode", as in stay away from the monster and start bombing the crap out've it. If any enfeebles are necessary like silence or paralyze etc., it would pop those in while reloading it's next nuke.

God i wish there was a rate down button for all the trolls in this thread.

This whole "your suggestion is not as important as what i want fixed right now" attitude is just ignorant, and rude.

The OP has a good point. Spirits are all effed up right now. There spell list is stuck at 75 instead of being upgraded to 90 like it should be. There A.I. is dumb and there action restrictions are strict and suffocating.