Being a Summoner can be disheartening these days :/

[Alhanelem]

I prefer to strike a balance and keep just enough of that gear on such that I can keep an avatar, usually ifrit b/c of its Ward buffs and double attack favor, up indefinitely. You see, the problem here, which I'm trying to address with my original suggestion (getting back to that...), is that having found everything else that buffs your pets, the only way to further improve your performance is to melee- with a strong staff, the master is more powerful than their pet, and I see this as a problem on a caster class that's supposed to command powerful beings. Given the limited gear available, and the fact that absolotely NONE of it increases your avatar's DPS except for the odd piece with a tiny bit of pet haste, having the avatar recieve a damage buff based on the staff you're using will help the avatar at least keep pace if not be always better than you are.

Part of this is because, lets face it- Summoner rarely even gets to participate in content where melee really isn't an option (e.g. Delve NMs since the time limit was added). The least SE can do is kill two birds with one stone and make the RME weapons and the other non-magey staves out there have more meaning to a wider portion of the playerbase. This suggestion allows them to do that without even changing the actual base stats of the weapons, also producing the first items that actually increase the avatar's damage over time and creating an incentive to keep them up (remember, Avatar: increases attack items have been show to only be effective during a blood pact)

Obviously I won't convince you it's not necessary to get the maximum amount of -perp, that's fine. But I would like to see options avialable that most players would find attractive- especially ones that are effective at all times, so they don't have to switch them constantly- something you can't do if you're meleeing, as you will lose your TP (which is why I am quite happy with the Skirmish staff, which offers both high DMG and up to +50 pet MAB; no myrkr but you win some, you lose some)

[Mokeil]

I can definitely respect that. I always find it annoying that I must choose between a melee staff or a staff to boost Avatar performance. Getting the best of both would be nifty - even more so if they do, indeed, allow the WoE weapons to unlock the empy weapon skills. Myrkr with any staff would be mighty fine by me.

(remember, Avatar: increases attack items have been show to only be effective during a blood pact)

This has always been a minor pet peeve of mine. Some stuff... sure, OK. Even melees have stuff that only boosts damage during weapon skills. But all of our Avatar: Attack gear? I call shenanigans at that.

[Alhanelem]

Yes... Literally, the only thing that affects avatar's melee attacks are atmas in abyssea.

[RAIST]

Using favor has virtually no penalty whatsoever, reduces perp cost, and gives you a potentially useful (but slight, because you'll be using BPs) buff.

hate to be nitpicky...but not sure I'd say it's virtually no penalty.

Initially, Avatar's Favor was suspected to be around 10% from people just eyeballing it. Through lots of testing, it has been mathed out to be -20 MAB for magic attacks and -10 ACC on physicals. Last I looked at tests for ATT values, it hadn't been hammered down, but it had been shown to be a penalty to physical damage output (and yes, that included melee). It may be a flat -10 ATT to be in line with the ACC penalty, which is why it may be hard to hammer down I guess, as the calculations for avatar damage have been shown to be pretty funky and they hadn't figured out how to math them out properly--but parsings showed it to be roughly a 5% reduction to just meleeing.

That may not sound like a lot when just looking at those values, but you have to put them into caclulations over time. It can mean as high as around 10-13% reduction on the magic side (depending on gear and such, it could be lower if you have lots of boost), but it is still a big chunk to the MAB bonus, just the same. At the very least it has been shown to have a -5% reduction on all the physical damage--this would apply to both melee and BP's. It could be potentially more if the accuracy penalty causes extra whiffs on both melee and BP's (epecially if it causes more misses on the first hits on multi-hit BP's....where most their damage comes from). Apply that to a session where you are doing damage in the thousands (or tens of thousands) over time and it can add up to have a pretty noticable impact.

[Alhanelem]

hate to be nitpicky...but not sure I'd say it's virtually no penalty.

Initially, Avatar's Favor was suspected to be around 10% from people just eyeballing it.

On physical attacks, I can't even see the difference- granted physical BPs can vary a lot so its not easy to eyeball.

As far as I'm aware, the magic penalty is -20 MAB. It's visible, since magic damage is more consistent, but it's still small and there is a large amount of pet MAB available now that counters that and then some.

[RAIST]

On physical attacks, I can't even see the difference- granted physical BPs can vary a lot so its not easy to eyeball.

As far as I'm aware, the magic penalty is -20 MAB. It's visible, since magic damage is more consistent, but it's still small and there is a large amount of pet MAB available now that counters that and then some.

You can notice it on the multi-hit's when they start whiffing more though. Especially if they start missing more of that first hit, output drops considerably--sometimes to the tune of 1k or more. And the difference is there in the melee's, may not be seeing it because the min/max range is so wide. The increased crit rate for avatars at 99 probly helps to mask it more now too, but if you run the parsers on them and put the results side-by-side you should still see it. It was a pretty clear distinction when they ran them a couple years ago. It's all sourced out at the wiki's, and the numbers are there for all to see. They found a definate drop in the physical output, even though they couldn't pinpoint exactly what was cut and by how much, but it is there and it does add up over time.

And -20 MAB is significant. It's even significant for BLM. Even if you are able to get your avatar to the 200 MAB point, you are still getting a 10% reduction at that point in the formula, which is one of the last elements in the calculations:

(floor[512+1.72*(TP+1)] + floor[(Avatar's INT - Monster's INT) * 1.5]) * MAB(of avatar)/MDB(of monster) * Day/Weather

Another way to look at it is that it can more than negate your merit bonus for your magic BP's (it's twice the cap for magic attack). Or, it counter's a base Nirvana's MAB bonus, half of a completed one, or potentially nearly 30% of the bonus on a maxed out Skirmish staff (assuming it follows the BLM augments, a bigger chunk if it doesn't get to 67 MAB). So, yeah....-20 MAB is a significant impact to your merit BP's.

[Herby]

So... why don't you stop arguing and just use grips (like SE probably wants it to do anyway) for exactly the same thing alhanelem suggests for the staves? Then you can keep your perp staff or melee staff if you want and still increase the dmg of the Avatar. You are way more flexible this way, too. It's not like we have any really good Grip anyway (smn skill+3? MP+? not really needed). I like the direction that SE wants to use grips since it's a slot we don't really needed until now. Implement lowlvl to highlvl grips so SMNs on lower levels can already benefit from it and it's done.

If we use Grips instead of weapons you can still use your highdmg Staff if you want to melee alongside your avatar but you aren't tied to a high dmg staff without perp cost if you want your Avatar perform good. That way you have WAY more options of gearing because noone will let you gear in perp staffs except Nirvana if it's tied to staves with high dmg, it would kill a whole line of staves and that isn't favorable. Just think about this for a moment.

[Jerbob]

I don't know why SE can't just give our avatars the same benefits in gear as other jobs receive in theirs. Ultimately, any "fix" they make with grips/staves and so on is going to be temporary, and slowly diverge from the direction other jobs take as the game progresses. Is it really that difficult to put half-way decent "Pet: X" effects on new gear as a matter of course? A set like the Orvail stuff exchanged for bayld has no utility for summoners (save for Shattersoul - but, honestly, aren't we entitled to a bit more than that?) and I simply cannot see why, after all the fuss we make -every single time gear is released- that someone at SE couldn't just have a bit of thought as they plop that "/ SMN /" on the bottom of gear description.

Caster gear is already badly designed enough for the jobs that can make decent use of it - having INT+14 on the Orvail Corona to match the MND/CHR+14 is NOT going to break it, simply because spellcaster stats work differently to melee stats - just as having Ice Perpetuation-7 and Thunder Perpeutation-7 on the same staff is no more powerful than two separate staves. Having "Avatar: Magic Attack Bonus +10" on a hypothetical pair of MAB gloves doesn't make them any more powerful for BLM, nor does the MAB on them have any relevance for SMN.

Honestly, I think half of the developers must still have converstations along the lines of "INT affects cure potency, right guys?"...

I think it's also worth reiterating that having more "Pet: X" gear does depend on the prerequisites of a preceeding general "all pets" fix, a SMN job overhaul, and a general revisitation of existing "Pet: X" effects (eg. Avatar: Attack being terrible). "Pet: X" gear should be keeping us in line with other jobs as they get new gear, not used as a desperate scrabble up to something approximating the same general tier.

[RAIST]

The bigger point that seems to keep getting forgotten is that the fix should not be coming from gear.

The fixes should be going directly to the pets first, regardless of what gear is equipped.

Whether that is a direct boost to the pets base line stats, or tweaking/addition of a trait to either the master or the pet's own native traits gained from their job class can be open to debate. What NEEDS to happen is for something to be done that is native to either the master or the pet that gets an adjustment first, and then gear adjustments can follow as a finer tuning.

Tying the adjustment to weapons, grips, armors, or accessories is the wrong approach to what plaques SMN. DRG is hurting in much the same way too, and I know it also applies to other pet jobs as well. So, it isn't just a SMN that needs to have it's pets tweaked directly, it's just a much bigger issue for SMN (and DRG). Just because BST and PUP have had some better scaling for their pets, that doesn't mean they don't deserve some adjusting also.

Pets simply need to get some sort of improvement natively, before any gear bonuses are applied. If they want to add the gear adjustments to give us more flexibility/potential, that's fine. But gear should not be released under the guise of "fixing the job", as that by definition is not adjusting the job, but adjusting gear.

[Duelle]

The bigger point that seems to keep getting forgotten is that the fix should not be coming from gear.

The fixes should be going directly to the pets first, regardless of what gear is equipped.

Quoting for emphasis