Enmity System Explanation and Planned Adjustments

[Yinnyth]

The AoE Bar- spells were removed from the scope of our adjustments due to the fact that the amount of enmity is very low. While the enmity depends on the amount of party members, the effect duration is quite long and is normally cast before battle, and if you need to it cast during battle, it's something you can use when Provoke and other front-line job enmity generation methods are being used.

I neglected to bring this up earlier because I thought for certain someone else would, but bar<element> spells don't last nearly as long as they used to.

For those of you not currently in the know, barspells used to last 3-5 minutes depending on your enhancing skill. After the release of SoA, barspells last 150 seconds (2.5 minutes) seemingly regardless of enhancing skill.

I'm not sure if anyone has submitted a bug report on this yet. I'm not sure if it was an intended change or not. But I am sure that the average boss fight lasts slightly longer than 2.5 minutes.

Edit: Thank you, Calintpso. Clicking the link associated with your "Every GM ever" signature showed me that they are aware of the problem, and hopefully it will be addressed soon. Barspell duration, not how much trouble you have in reives.

[Revati]

Can they nerf warrior's berserk? I'm concerned that a redmage might be able to raise their attack stat with this ability and outdamage blackmages with claustrum.

[THD]

Blood Pacts, Retreat, and Release do not generate enmity, and as such were not included in the list.

I believe you are incorrect. Initiating blood pacts (at least RAGE) WILL generate enmity, which is an issue, more so for soloing.

EXAMPLE: I cast Shiva. I assault, the mob won't attack me, but I'm added on the hate list. Shiva misses the mob with a melee attack. If I use Blood Pact: Rage-Heavenly Strike, that mob WILL turn on me and attack me, until Shiva pulls hate back off me.

I've been soloing on SMN since 2005, so I've adapted my strategies to compensate for the shift in hate. So I know at least the Rage Blood Pacts store some sort of enmity on me.

P.S. When will Cait Sith be released?

[Asymptotic]

I suppose I must post this here too!

It's a fundamental misunderstanding of how things work. Enmity is divided into two categories

VE (Volatile Enmity or Time Volatile Enmity) and CE (Cumulative Enmity or Non-Decaying Enmity)

VE decays rapidly but CE only decays when taking damage. When you are on the enemy's hate list, every action you perform generates at least 1CE. Avatars do not build enmity very well because they do pisspoor damage (since damage enmity got nerfed) and (I think) have some odd HP mechanic they use for calculating enmity loss when taking damage. As a result, avatars are generally sitting at very low enmity so using any job ability or spell will send the mob on a rampage toward the summoner. When they say "these abilities do not generate any enmity" they mean "they do not generate any enmity beyond the absolute minimum systematically possible."

Ultimately though, this is what we, as a player base whole whined and complained for them to do for quite a while. We asked them to make holding hate by auto-attack harder, and they gave it to us! So it's left to us to adapt our playstyles and figure out what we need to do to compensate. (Same goes for the defense update - when I find out who the f*** complained that defense actually needed to be an important stat...)

That aside, it's unlikely that SE cares because SMNs soloing alongside their avatars is probably not their vision of the job.

[HimuraKenshyn]

So basically new system equals death of pet tanking period if the player pretty much looks cross-eyed at the mob which is the most f up game design on hate ever. No wonder shit is whacky and super tanking blows chunks lol... Seems the damage taken lost of enmity is out of whack by a long shot...

[Infidi]

Avatar's auto attack needs to be redone seperatly or something. Even if they don't want us meleeing beside our summons, we need to be able to keep them on an enemy without having to worry about getting hate from a job ability, when that's the only Emnity generated. I think even just upping the Emnity the avatars get from the BP's damage or buff itself would go a long way. Example: The same hate casting Haste would generate for us, Hastega would generate for the summon. Or do you guys think it would be simpler to have the avatar's auto attack calculate hate a different way? I think both would be awesome. The only time I ever meleed with my summon was in Abyssea for a staff trial or something. I know some people enjoy attacking alongside their chosen summon, so it would be up to SE's vision for the job, I suppose.

Suffice to say SOMETHING has to be done seperatly for pets. As for BST, I'm not sure the vision for them would be either. Having to spam Snarl I guess gives them some kind of hate control. At least in new areas. I've had a couple BST friends say the Emnity is still fine inside Dynamis. Maybe they just got lucky.

[Siven]

I'm inclined to agree with the rest of the people in this post, thus my original comment. Whether or not the summoner abilities 'produce no enmity', some byproduct is causing summoner hate to be completely unmanageable and it sure isn't summoning magic - usually the pet is already out by the time an enemy is engaged. Please look into this further, ESPECIALLY with the new defense changes, a summoner's pet is the only thing between them and certain death.

[OmnysValefor]

For the summoner issues, here's a precise scenario.

Ochain PLD/DNC in 43% DT, with phalanx (my solo ohshi set) + smn with Garuda

I did all of my own healing. While I was getting hit for 0 or low numbers, each hit was draining 29~ hp from me, so much of what I was doing was healing. Ameretat never even looked at Garuda.

Due to a drain tp move, the drain samba effect, and I don't know what, we concluded we couldn't win. I put on twilight and told smn I was going to die, and I'd raise him if it was necessary.

I died, Ameretat turned and went for summoner. Never bothered to touch Garuda even for a second.

[Camate]

Greetings,

The information mentioned yesterday about summoner's abilities and Blood Pacts not creating hate seems to have raised some questions, so I'd like to follow up on it.

To be precise, Blood Pacts have a non-volatile enmity value of 1. It's been arranged this way so that some enmity remains on the summoner when having a pet perform an action against a monster. If we were to make it so enmity was not placed on the summoner, once the enmity from the avatar is gone, it would cause bugs to occur (such as monsters becoming unclaimed). It's very similar to the way linked monsters don't come after the summoner once the avatar has vanished (except it would happen to the monster you perform the Blood Pact on).

In the case that the avatar's enmity has a minimum value of 1 for both non-volatile and volatile enmity, when executing a Blood Pact, the summoner will receive +1 to their non-volatile enmity, making a total of 2 non-volatile and 1 volatile enmity. When this happens, the target will go after the summoner.

As an adjustment, we are looking into the below:

• When the summoner has enmity, they will not receive +1 to non-volatile enmity when executing a Blood Pact. (The +1 to non-volatile enmity will only occur when the summoner's enmity value is 0.)

The above adjustment is not a job ability adjustment; it will be a change to the process occurring in the programming, so please give us a bit of time for this.

We had looked into taking another approach by adding an enmity+ stat to avatars like beastmaster's familiars have, and to ease up on the enmity lost when taking damage; however, this was geared more towards solo play and there are times when it would be best for avatars not to take hate during party battles, so we decided to adopt the adjustment mentioned above.

[Annalise]

In another Dev post awhile back, Camate told Beastmasters that they couldn't zone with their jug pets because Summoner's Avatar's don't zone with the summoner, and that BST and SMN have shorter recasts than PUP and DRG and thus that is why they (PUP and DRG) can zone with their pets, and SMN and BST cannot. Clearly, the bolded part is false.

Saying that bloodpacts don't generate enmity is clearly another case of the development team being clueless about a job in their own game. Assault -> successful hit -> bloodpact would not give the summoner enmity if that were the case.