Summoner's Blood Pact Update/JP Categories

[Zeargi]

So it's been somewhat quiet, but I was really wonder, can SMN have a few things looked at?

We have a few Blood Pacts that are still underwhelming, and some that just fall off the radar completely.

• Noctoshield is still extremely under-powered for lvl 99+
• Earthen Ward - I'm sure if it even applies the 119 lvl because it's often times gone within 1 hit.
• Lunar Cry is somewhat useless unless you happen to be fighting something at the correct phase of the moon
• Dream Shroud is all about time of day
• Diamond Storm is -25 Eva when other jobs like BST can do -40 with Ready at a much lower level.
• Pavor Nocturnus might as well not even be, because most of the time it doesn't hit at all.
• Zantetsuken also fails so much when it comes to killing things, even when it's just 1 target.
• Regal Gash/Blindside are HORRIBLE, even more so when compared to the Lvl 70 Blood Pact: Rages of all the other avatars.
• Pacifying Ruby still causes more Enmity than it can erase for a SMN.

I'm not 100% sure how to fix all of these, but I do have a few ideas:

Noctoshield can be helped with a boost from 13 to maybe 20 ( I believe the max for Phalanx 1 is like 38?)

Earthen Ward at 119 should stop 288 of a Cap 350, so only a 62 point difference, but that's again if it actually does that.

I hate most of Fenrir's Blood pacts. I get it, he's a Moon Pup, but Either his BPs should have their cycle removed, or a higher base infliction. Because we gain Diamond Storm, We can't use Lunar Cry because of the -EVA effect it has. I personally wouldn't mind it just being a -ACC Blood Pact, but I guess that -1 EVA might be help at lower levels? And then there's also Ecliptic Howl/Growl, both of these could be FAR more useful it they weren't tied to the lunar cycle. Because a +1 ACC when you really need much higher is extremely unfortunate.

Likewise, Dream Shroud could do without the timer or an increase for the offset skill. Such as 10/5% and then switch at their respected times, or maybe like 8%MAB/7%MDB at all times.

Diamond Storm could really do a boost to -35 EVA, the same as RDM Distract I. This isn't so much to ask for because RDM gets Distract II at 85 which is -50 EVA

Pavor Nocturnus needs helps in a major way... It needs to either be useful with other forms of sleep besides Nightmare, or Needs to Add DMG if the Target has no effects to be dispelled, something....

Zantetsuken... This Astral Flow Ability and ALL Astral Flow Abilities need to be jacked to the extreme... It's a level 75 Ability and can't even kill most things outside of Adoulin. The Frontal Cone needs to be widened or changed to a True AoE. Also, at 100+ this ability should do more that 9999. If a non-Astral Flow move can, so should this.

Pacifying Ruby... I've got nothing.... I usually just end up being wailed on after I use it...

As for the Job Point Categories: Could we look at or clarify at least

Astral Flow Effect: I'm not sure how this exactly work, but I don't know if a +75 (Max JP) to their stats really helps in the long run. Most times you use Astral Flow, it's for Perfect Defense which is MP based, and ends the effect anyway. Maybe a 'Blood Boon' type thing might be better, where not all you MP is consumed from using Astral Flow? Maybe extend the timer for Astral so you can maybe get another one or 2 in.

Avatar's Favor Effect: Is there anyway that this could be looked at so that the value increase is 5 seconds vs 3. With the Value at 5, once you max this skill, you're Avatar's Favor would be at the zenith of its potential, which is both extremely reward for SMN that play this as their main job, and extremely useful for things that would require a quick swap of Avatar's (I.E. switching from Carbuncle to help front line jobs, to Diabolos to help support Back line jobs, or the need to switch from Titan to help with physical hits to Cait Sith so not to be nuked to death.)

These are just some things that I've noticed. There might be even more that I've missed too. But currently I'm having an extremely hard time landing some of the magic abilities anyway in higher level stuff. So I need to start a +MACC gear set at some point.

[Rakshaka]

Are you using Zantetsuken with 1188 mp? I've never had it miss a lone target, as long as I had the required mp for maximum accuracy (12 * level = 1188).

[AtrixWolfe]

Earthen Ward and Noctoshield: I totally agree they should scale, for something you can only do once every 30 seconds, Earthen Ward especially is very not worth while most the time and yet stoneskin itself is a great spell. It should at least be like Aerial Armor imo, which is very useful. Noctoshield, it doesn't scale either. It does have the duration on it's side however, and I rarely see a scholar apply phalanx to everyone. To me the idea of a lot of these wards are have a super strong, party wide buff, but if it's dispelled or you need to balance it with other wards for the situation you might not get the chance to use it. These two are very weak, but I do use them at times.

For fenrir and diabolos mechanics on moon phase and time of day, I believe that is fine. Fenrir can debuff, or buff or both to have the same effect, and I read somewhere that diamond storm is more that -25 but not sure where. -25 would be pretty low though for a lot of these debuffs/buffs for evasion/accuracy. I love fenrir and use him constantly, the + to all stats, the endrain during the right moon phase, impact, dispel-ga, and sometimes his evasion/accuracy buffs/debuffs make him one of my most used summons. I'm not sure the evasion downs don't stack, but if they don't then yah during certain moon phases you aren't gonna be able to lend near what you usually good to accuracy and evasion down.

Pavor Nocturnus deserves testing, if you have nightmare on a level 80 beetle and use it, it has a nearly 100% activation rate. Why use it? Idk, maybe you nightmare a group of low level stuff and then use night terror on one mob and pavor on another? It is a ward that can kill things. I tried it on level 100 mobs, but the activation rate seems to sink to like 25%. Meaning against high level mobs it'd almost never hit. I was going to try it with more summoning skill and pet magic accuracy and other stats to see if it had an effect.

Regal Gash/Blindside are pretty weak, though I was wondering if Blindside might have some mechanic like doing extra damage while the enemy is blinded or slept or something like how night terror does 40% more damage to slept enemies, and Pavor has a lot better chance of going off (pretty much doesn't go off without nightmare on it, even to a level 1 bunny) while slept/nightmare is on. Regal Gash just seems to be super weak and I doubt there's a way to help that.

What I'd like to see is Cait Sith finished out as an avatar, she's still missing about 2-3 pacts to be a full avatar and I really wish I could summon her more, she's fun and one of the cooler characters and designs ffxi has to offer! Her 1 hour is great for wipes or putting RR 3 on people, but I often only use her to prep for fights with RR 2, and when people died. As lucky as she is, she only seems to pop up when things went bad. Eerie eye seems to have great potential but is bugged, I use it and make sure they're facing Cait Sith and yet just after I use eerie eye and i didn't get any resist messages 2 seconds later the mob is using a TP move. Just seems wrong It doesn't even last 30 seconds so you can keep it up, maybe it doesn't work at all. Mewling Lullaby is a great light based sleep with a huge area and it resets TP. Very happy with that move. Level ? Holy, I wanted to test and see if lightsday would give you more 1s but the only use i found for it was pulling huge amounts of mobs, using level ? holy then mewling lullaby right after, and you can do decent damage that way. The problem is, the mobs it's prone to work on die pretty quickly and the ones that it has a lower chance to work on just there a long time until you roll enough low number rolls, usually 1s. So I'd like to see Cait Sith given 2-3 more pacts so she is a full avatar, that and Siren added as a summon as she was originally intended to be (I read that she was in the game files a long time before Rhapsodies came out and had abilities defined for her) But one can dream.

Having another hyrbrid pact or having other good pacts like spinning dive looked at or explained would also be good, having a list of the potency of all the favors by rank would also be good.

Astral Flow job point category: This is simply an amazing category, boosting stats and using it with astral conduit makes you feel like you are actually channeling Vana'diels most powerful creatures once ever hour please don't touch this

Avatar's Favor: Potency increases every 3 seconds your avatar is out, so 5 seconds is a bit weird number to suggest. There is currently 10 ranks to favor, if I remember correctly, one from gift and 2 from horn, I'll have to look up how things increase again but it doesn't take long now with an avatar out and a pact used and gift and horn to reach peak and when these job points go to 30 it might well be instant.

In other news however, we get a carbuncle hat very happy about that ^^

[Zeargi]

For fenrir and diabolos mechanics on moon phase and time of day, I believe that is fine. Fenrir can debuff, or buff or both to have the same effect, and I read somewhere that diamond storm is more that -25 but not sure where. -25 would be pretty low though for a lot of these debuffs/buffs for evasion/accuracy. I love fenrir and use him constantly, the + to all stats, the endrain during the right moon phase, impact, dispel-ga, and sometimes his evasion/accuracy buffs/debuffs make him one of my most used summons. I'm not sure the evasion downs don't stack, but if they don't then yah during certain moon phases you aren't gonna be able to lend near what you usually good to accuracy and evasion down.

I should clarify, I love Fenrir but don't like the Blood Pacts that are tied to the Moon's phases, Because Heavenward Howl would be amazing if it gave EnDrain because most Melees can use it. Giving EnAspir to job that don't need it VS something that doesn't have MP to begin with then makes it useless. The only Job that really benefits from Enaspir is BLU. RUNs can't take effect of it because of their Runes, and PLDs don't want either because it screws up Enlight. Lunar Roar, Eclipse Bite, Impact, Moonlit Charge, Crescent Bite, Lunar Bay are all great Blood Pacts, but only 1 of them is actually a Ward. Which sucks because his wards have the greatest potential. Eclipse Howl gives +26 to both EVA and ACC but divided between them: So New Moon, (Much like the Movie) sucks for Accuracy (Only giving +1) Where if they could shift the primary to still be awesome, but the offset to still be useful. Such as the lower Value for either to be +5, leaving the +21 for the other and doing a slower shift through the moon phases. Which is what I was also going for with Dream Shroud, It give a 1-0% increase for it's offset side. Where if the made it so that from 00:00-11:59 gave the same bonus and the inverse from 12:00-23:59, rather than a waning effect the closer you got to those times

Pavor Nocturnus deserves testing, if you have nightmare on a level 80 beetle and use it, it has a nearly 100% activation rate. Why use it? Idk, maybe you nightmare a group of low level stuff and then use night terror on one mob and pavor on another? It is a ward that can kill things. I tried it on level 100 mobs, but the activation rate seems to sink to like 25%. Meaning against high level mobs it'd almost never hit. I was going to try it with more summoning skill and pet magic accuracy and other stats to see if it had an effect.

I try to use this for Crowd control, where things link/aggro. But the problem is that if Apogee isn't ready, I can't use Pavor/Nightmare Back to back. Which sometime, you need to otherwise whatever you're fighting will wake up before your timer is ready again. :/

What I'd like to see is Cait Sith finished out as an avatar, she's still missing about 2-3 pacts to be a full avatar and I really wish I could summon her more, she's fun and one of the cooler characters and designs ffxi has to offer! Her 1 hour is great for wipes or putting RR 3 on people, but I often only use her to prep for fights with RR 2, and when people died. As lucky as she is, she only seems to pop up when things went bad. Eerie eye seems to have great potential but is bugged, I use it and make sure they're facing Cait Sith and yet just after I use eerie eye and i didn't get any resist messages 2 seconds later the mob is using a TP move. Just seems wrong It doesn't even last 30 seconds so you can keep it up, maybe it doesn't work at all. Mewling Lullaby is a great light based sleep with a huge area and it resets TP. Very happy with that move. Level ? Holy, I wanted to test and see if lightsday would give you more 1s but the only use i found for it was pulling huge amounts of mobs, using level ? holy then mewling lullaby right after, and you can do decent damage that way. The problem is, the mobs it's prone to work on die pretty quickly and the ones that it has a lower chance to work on just there a long time until you roll enough low number rolls, usually 1s. So I'd like to see Cait Sith given 2-3 more pacts so she is a full avatar, that and Siren added as a summon as she was originally intended to be (I read that she was in the game files a long time before Rhapsodies came out and had abilities defined for her) But one can dream.

I use Cait Sith all the time in Dynamis, she's my go to girl. I just wish that Mewing Lullaby and Eerie Eye lasted a little longer. But she's so weak, and it sucks that even with all the +ACC and Max Summoning Skills, I can barely break 5k with her lvl 99 Ability. She could definitely use a few more BPs, and then she might see the field more often. As for Siren, I'd LOVE to have her. She could perhaps even get Silencega which would be nice, because Eerie Eye is the only STFU Move we've got.

Astral Flow job point category: This is simply an amazing category, boosting stats and using it with astral conduit makes you feel like you are actually channeling Vana'diels most powerful creatures once ever hour please don't touch this

I have really put too many points into this, because I wasn't sure the utility of it, maybe I'll try it out some, and how much the effect really helps.

Avatar's Favor: Potency increases every 3 seconds your avatar is out, so 5 seconds is a bit weird number to suggest. There is currently 10 ranks to favor, if I remember correctly, one from gift and 2 from horn, I'll have to look up how things increase again but it doesn't take long now with an avatar out and a pact used and gift and horn to reach peak and when these job points go to 30 it might well be instant.

If they do actually increase them to 30 then this change would be mute, because it takes 1m15s to reach the max value, and a minute and a half, is way over. But if 15 is the highest they go to, the change to 5s means it starts at the 1m15s marker, but either is fine. Raise the limit to 30, woot!! (or change it to 5 so max favor if you're staying at 15 )

[Dekusuta]

Totally agree here. The implicit trade off between Summoner's raw solo potential vs. say a BST or PUP is our suite of support BPs, but sadly many of them haven't been reviewed since introduction 10+ years ago.

For the old-line avatars;

I'd also add Whispering Wind (Garuda AOE heal) to the list along with

Earth Ward
Ecliptic Growl/Howl
Notocshield
Dreamshroud

In need of scaling at 99/119. Base heal needs to 500+ for whispering Wind
All of these are IMHO easily fixable by extending the buff formulas to account for lvl99/i119 players without breaking the old formulas since we know SE still has a thing for keeping things as they were for players leveling to 75 for the 1st time
or exploring a job up the levels for the 1st time.

For the new avatars, Cait Sith needs a buff. Eerie Eye is so weak that it was embrassing a BLM silence outlasted Cait Sith's silence on an even match NM like Intuila,
Atomos I feel also needs a buff, one idea I have is allow it to 'remember' a party buff when initially summoned. So that when you summon it again for Chronoshift, it will reapply buffs.

This could actually be useful for instant reapplication of a long series of complicated buffs.

[Zeargi]

Just gonna throw a *BUMP* on this. Any thing for SMN and our BPs? Also maybe a that change to the Avatar's Favor JP Category? See how 20 is going to be the highest it'll go. Make it so the effect starts at max (4s instead of 3). Change to the 1200 gift!? Cait Sith's Other BPs, Siren, other Avatars? Anything??

[AtrixWolfe]

Glad to see this get a bump. Our heals and other pacts should treat ilvl as if it were an actual level, this really affects things like whispering wind and other healing pacts. Stoneskin and Phalanx should scale with summoning skill just like a lot of BLU spells got Blue Magic Skill to affect their spells lately Additionally I have one more thing: merit categories. No other job I know of has to switch out their merits so much, or at all. Yet if we are doing a magic burst strategy in escha sky for example, I might have to change my merits 3-4 times a night just so I can have merit pacts of the element needed for the fight. A lot of people say pick 2 and leave it, and you can use the tier IV spells avatars have access to, to magic burst. The problem is you're going to do about 30% of the damage you would if you had a 5/5 merit pact for the proper element. I'm not sure SE wants to address this, but while merit's are cheap... spending them just to change elemental pacts all the time is not the best design feature I have seen for smn :P

[Secondplanet]

This has been something i've mentioned countless times in the past as most of our 75- wards are still stuck in the glory days of 75 cap. It also goes along the lines of whats the point of hoarding summoning magic skill gear when the majority of skills that use summoning magic to calculate how well it does are capped? I would also like to see our 1200jp changed from -5bp as with just the first -5bp we got its easy to get to the 30second mark. I just hope we don't get another as our 2100 gift as it would be beyond useless for even a poorly equipped summoner at that point.

I think our 2100 gift would be nice to get some new summons like maybe Siren and chibi odin/alex but with our luck it will either be another -5bp or they will think its a great idea the neo-elementals but again thats up for debate as we have no control over elementals.

[Zeargi]

This has been something i've mentioned countless times in the past as most of our 75- wards are still stuck in the glory days of 75 cap. It also goes along the lines of whats the point of hoarding summoning magic skill gear when the majority of skills that use summoning magic to calculate how well it does are capped? I would also like to see our 1200jp changed from -5bp as with just the first -5bp we got its easy to get to the 30second mark. I just hope we don't get another as our 2100 gift as it would be beyond useless for even a poorly equipped summoner at that point.

I think our 2100 gift would be nice to get some new summons like maybe Siren and chibi odin/alex but with our luck it will either be another -5bp or they will think its a great idea the neo-elementals but again thats up for debate as we have no control over elementals.

Those Elementals as a Gift would be nice, and seeing how they have TP moves, controlling them with Rage and Even Ward Makes a lot of sense, but I'm hoping for a few pick me ups, and some new avatars to ring out the game for us with a bang! I mean SMN as a whole played a HUGE story element for Windy, not to mention, it's the only job that I know of that changes the 'Skyscape.' That Rainbow... I really wish I had taken a picture of it when I completed the quest.

[Grekumah]

While we can’t promise that we’ll improve summoner blood pacts, we’ll consider looking into this in the future.