[dev1010] Spirits

[Krisan]

Spirits don't need adjusting. Avatars are supposed to be the mainstay of a summoner. Spirits are able to do two things and do these things well:
-Give you MP with elemental siphon
-Cast very quickly to enable you to get a monster off your arse

I don't understand why people want "good" spirits so badly. They shouldn't be better than the avatars, they're just generic elementals. Outside of the uses described above, the only reason the exist is that so people who didn't get the zilart expansion would have more than one spell (carbuncle) in their spell list, as Summoner does not require zilart but all of the avatars require zilart or a later expansion.

Oh, small note about banish: Light spirit actually had Banish III before WHM was able to learn it, as well. But outside of this oddity, the spirits are not learning new spells, and almost seem as if they're level capped at 75, as they take more damage too. It might be a sign of tier II elementals.

No one wants them better than Avatars, I don't think. They just want them to be practical in their use.. In all my days, I have never used an Spirits to "get something off of me" like you mention - it simply doesn't work that way. Just summoning one generates sizable hate, which is bad enough, but Spirits are also prone to not reacting the way you want them to, sometimes doing the complete opposite thing you need of them. They also aren't particularly good tanks either, so I'm not sure where you're getting this from. The extremely high perp costs also makes it so that in a real emergency, where you're probably low on MP.. you're going to likely lose the spirit remarkably fast. At the absolute most, it can be used as a distraction for a couple of seconds so you can run away, which is a complete and utter disgrace if you consider that as the only thing they should ever be good for.

Likewise, we didn't always have siphon, so I again don't know what these things were meant to be good for prior to that skill being implemented.. The spirits seem wholly worthless in every other regard than using Siphon.

However, If I had to chose between a buff in Avatars, and a buff in spirits, I'd chose avatars :|

I don't see why we don't deserve both, really. SMN is such a ridiculously high MP costing job, and we really don't do much of anything that everyone else can't already do (and better). We at least had some advantages with buffs for awhile, but SCH pretty much replaced us entirely in that regard when they were introduced. We can potentially deal some good damage, but it seems unreliable compared to every other job just how much damage we're doing. And besides being tied down by our exorbitantly high MP costs (outside of Abyssea, anyway.. this doesn't matter to anyone in Abyssea anymore) we're also crippled to what we can do by our recast timers..

SMN as a whole never seemed as though it was designed especially well, they had interesting ideas for it but it never panned out in such a way that made it extremely useful. It was nice when we got auras awhile back so that we could refresh a whole party or what not, but the fact those auras crippled the Avatar's usability and promoted doing nothing so that you'd get the most out of the buff is just an insult if you ask me, really.