My Concern with Summoner: Aetherpact (Devotion)

When the Job Actions trailer launched, I was hyped for Summoner. When the media tour happened and I saw the abilities and changes, I was even more excited. However, there is one ability that really concerns me, something that Square should give another look at before Stormblood launches, and that is Aetherpact (Devotion).

As it stands, the tooltip for this ability lacks key features like a duration, but I'll state what we do know:

It's sic only
It's a 5% damage, healing, and resistance up buff
And it's only to a single target.

The english tooltip for this ability is wrong. The Japanese tooltip is more accurate--being a single target ability almost makes Devotion worthless, and here's why.

Compared to other buffs in 4.0, Devotion is underwhelming, let's start with the other DPS:


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Dragoons have new ability called Dragon Sight which buffs their personal damage by 10% and a party member's damage by 5% for 15s. This is much better for opening rotations than Devotion as it buffs two people, the Dragoon and the target, while Devotion only buffs one person for 5%. If devotion was, say, a 10% buff, then I can understand why its single target.

Monks get a new ability called Brotherhood, which increases the damage of all party members by 5% for a 15s duration. This, once again, is better than Devotion because it's a raid buff. Imagine if Devotion really was raidwide. Stacking Brotherhood and Devotion would have a 10% damage buff to the entire raid, making the raid shit damage!

Ninja has Trick Attack. 'Nuff said.

Black Mage doesn't have any raid utility exclusive to them as far as I know


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Red Mage has embolden, which buffs the Red Mage's magic damage by 20% and the physical dps of the party by 10%, with the percentages dropping every 4 seconds. Once again, it's a raid wide damage increase, and much better than Devotion in its current state.

As for Bard and Machinist, I don't think it's fair to compare as both are support/utility jobs anyway, despite changes to that utility in 4.0

All in all, Devotion is rather pathetic compared to the unique utility the other DPS get (with the exception of Black Mage). Not only that, but it requires sic in order to use, meaning while you're buffing a party member, Garuda could use its new contagion during an inopportune moment, and your overall DPS could drop significantly, or Ifrit using radiant shield during a burn phase where doing the most DPS is required. These possible sitautions make me disappointed with Devotion.

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What I want to see changed with devotion, is one thing or another. Have it be active only while the pet is in sic and effect the entire raid. Or, give it a duration, allow its use during obey, all while keeping Aetherpact's 90s cooldown.

That being said. I'm well aware that everything I've said about all of the DPS' raid utilities are subject to change, and I'm well aware that I haven't set foot into Omega or done a lick of any 4.0 content. But this is just a gut reaction from learning how Aetherpact really works. I know Summoner has Contagion and Radiant Shield as part of its utility kit, but if you're going to give a job another piece of utility you should make it worthwhile, and I don't feel like Devotion is worth it. Maybe someone can sell Devotion to me, I dunno.

For those that agree with me and want to see it changed, how would you change Devotion?

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Here's a source of the translated japanese tooltips. Take a look:
https://www.bluegartr.com/threads/13...88#post6907488

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Originally Posted by Katsu78

Monks get a new ability called Brotherhood, which increases the damage of all party members by 5% for a 15s duration. This, once again, is better than Devotion because it's a raid buff. Imagine if Devotion really was raidwide. Stacking Brotherhood and Devotion would have a 10% damage buff to the entire raid, making the raid shit damage!
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To be fair Brotherhood only buffs physical dps. and for what it's worth the tooltip I saw for devotion was in english and was party wide.

This is the pay off for potentially having 3 damage buffs on one role.

You can have ifrit pre-pull pop radiant shield as you're summoning garuda and still have access to contagion since radiant shield and contation aren't in the same ability slot. Both pet buffs are on a really low cool down as well and they aren't weak by any means. Embolden is also on a 2min CD and it gets weaker over time. It's good but I think you're over exaggerating its power. Just wait and see how it plays out.

First you can edit your post to get around the 1000 word limit.

Second for the main post I think you might be confused on Devotion. It works similar to Enkindle were you use the Aetherpact ability to command the Egi to perform Devotion. This ability will increase the attack and healing potency of any party members in the 30y radius of the Egi by 5%. It will also reduce the damage taken by those party members by 5%

You state the English tooltip is wrong but what makes more sense, Egi would buff one random player in the 30y area or buff all members in that radius? Just because it's in Japanese doesn't mean that it's right.

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Originally Posted by Dyvid

You state the English tooltip is wrong but what makes more sense, Egi would buff one random player in the 30y area or buff all members in that radius? Just because it's in Japanese doesn't mean that it's right.

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Originally Posted by Raionx

To be fair Brotherhood only buffs physical dps. and for what it's worth the tooltip I saw for devotion was in english and was party wide.

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I would've brushed off the Japanese tooltip if the person playing at the event didn't use the ability. They used Devotion, and stated it was single target.

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Originally Posted by Katsu78

I would've brushed off the Japanese tooltip if the person playing at the event didn't use the ability. They used Devotion, and stated it was single target.

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Not sure which person you are referring too. I just looked on the JPN side of the DPS boards and they are as confused about the tooltip as we are and the videos they reference are Mr. Happy. I'm going to go with my gut on this one and think it's party members.

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Originally Posted by Katsu78

I would've brushed off the Japanese tooltip if the person playing at the event didn't use the ability. They used Devotion, and stated it was single target.

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Also adding onto this that some of the English tooltips are wrong atm [most likely fixed by early access but for now a couple are wrong]. If devotion was indeed party wide it'd be a lot more acceptable, but I feel like it's a pretty meh ability overall, don't get me wrong more damage is great, but summoner as a whole feels like a rollercoaster of both good and bad right now so all we can do is wait and hope, though the whole concept of it is pretty neat. I just hope it was party wide to begin with lol

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Originally Posted by Minseo

Also adding onto this that some of the English tooltips are wrong atm [most likely fixed by early access but for now a couple are wrong]. If devotion was indeed party wide it'd be a lot more acceptable, but I feel like it's a pretty meh ability overall, don't get me wrong more damage is great, but summoner as a whole feels like a rollercoaster of both good and bad right now so all we can do is wait and hope, though the whole concept of it is pretty neat. I just hope it was party wide to begin with lol

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I should've talked about the english tooltips in my original posts. That's my mistake, and yeah a lot of things about Summoner doesn't make a whole lick of sense (How is Fester going to be 200 Potency and do more damage than Painflare lmao). I just wanted to share my concerns with Devotion, and if Square is checking out these threads they can see another person wants to know what it is up with this ability.

I really want it to be raidwide, and I'm hoping the Japanese journalist had their words misinterpreted or mistranslated. And yeah, early access is in 12 (!!) days so I know it's best to wait and see, but still. It sucks not knowing how abilities change, especially since there's hearsay on certain reddit threads the past few days about how even the builds the NA/EU/JP media got to play were different from one another

Chances are Devotion is single target. Summoners have a way to buff raid damage in Stormblood through Contagion (which can have 25% uptime), and to a lesser extent Radiant Shield.

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Originally Posted by Semmi

Chances are Devotion is single target. Summoners have a way to buff raid damage in Stormblood through Contagion (which can have 25% uptime), and to a lesser extent Radiant Shield.

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Yeah that will be a problem...

Right now SMN is looking at a 30% or more single target DPS loss as it stands, Ruin 3 nerf, Tri-Disaster and DoT Nerf, Shadowflare Nerf. AoE DPS loss is even worse and in some areas a good 60% or more DPS loss like the Bane and Bilz 2 combo.

The contagion replacement will only give 10% DPS for a raid, which isn't going to make up for the mass DPS loss from SMN's nerfs.

So likely not only, will SMN lose major Single Target DPS and AoE, but will also not really benefit any raid much.

When I started looking around at other Videos I can already see the Red Mage DPS is putting it to shame.

Granted they have directly stated, all things can change prior to launch so obviously we'll have to wait to see the way things play out, And I am hoping they reverse course on this stuff before the game launches.

EDIT: Its almost like the person who was responsible for the SMN thought it was some kind of White Mage or support class and not an actual DPS class. So really hosed up and confused it with the SCH side and didn't realize SMN side is pure DPS, SCH is pure Support so confused them or didn't realize the SCH side was the Support class side of SMN.

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Originally Posted by Semmi

Chances are Devotion is single target. Summoners have a way to buff raid damage in Stormblood through Contagion (which can have 25% uptime), and to a lesser extent Radiant Shield.

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Not necessarily, As everyone has already said, SMN did lose some dps but gains some dps through party buffs. We gave on direct damage but gains through indirect damage. I'm happy with this trade off though I suspect some Hardcore SMN players will move on to something with more visible DPS. I do see them "Contagion" though to something like 5%.

These threads are becoming meaningless in my opinion.

None of us knows yet how SMN will look like in the end. And until that happens, all these topics are worthless.

Wait and see before throwing a tantrum.