Can we have a Light Spirit adjustment soon?

[Covenant]

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".

[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

[dzero]

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.

[Korpg]

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

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.

[Korpg]

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.

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).

[dzero]

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).

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.

[Malamasala]

It is nice to see that dzero gets it.

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.

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.

[wildsprite]

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

[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.

[wildsprite]

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.

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