ACN Newbie SCH/SMN Pets

[Galataya]

Are there any good ways to manage pets when it comes to the PS3? Even if you are on PC and using a gamepad with Cross Hotbars do you have any suggestions that might work for PS3 users. Any tips that I can try out would be most welcomed.

Thanks in Advance!

[Galataya]

I already know about R1 to cycle use it all the time for other classes too. However, I only do the bump and tap usually. I really hate that when you enable the pet hotbar you have to choose which hotbar you want manually by holding down R1 each time. Since using R1 will only cycle you between say hotbar 1 and petbar and back to hotbar 1 =( oh well.

[Sanctus]

you can put all pet actions that you need onto your cross hotbar and disable the pet hotbar

[Galataya]

So basically it's just back to doing what I have already been trying to do. They really need to let you cycle past the pet bar that would help alot.

[Thaliss]

Hi,
you can set another crossbar to appear by :

Hold R2 then L2 and Hold L2 then R2

By default it is not activated you have to configure it. It is a good place to put spells you don't use often (like Resurrection, cleric stance etc...)

Otherwise I use macros to reduce the number of slot on main crosshotbar.

As side note I have put "place" in a X slot or sometimes it bugs and uses spell that is on the X slot.

[RobinAnntork]

This is what I ended up doing for SCH/SMN (and all jobs actually) is go into Start Menu > Character Configuration > Hotbar setting. Under the first tab i unchecked all my shared Hotbars then under the next tab "cross" i unchecked "Use pet hotbar", then under Set selection enable both Enable customization for when weapon is sheath and for when weapon is drawn and also auto hotbar switching when drawing/sheathing weapon.

For Enable customization when weapon is sheathed (out of battle) check boxes 1 & 8 and set those to all your out non party uses, sprint, teleport, homepoint and also a macro for each one of your summons, I also set a cure and stoneskin as a just in case and very quick way to draw weapon w/o having to attack or us the L3

For Enable customization when weapoon is drawn check boxes 5, 6 & 7 (I only did 6 & 7 myself) and these will be for your pets, DPS, curing macro's and all that fun stuff.

Now for user macro's you'll want to set one up for each of your summoms, the basic macro is (I'm only writing for SCH but in the macro text just replace SCH with SMN):

/macroicon "Summon"
/ac "Summom" <me>
/crosshotbar copy SCH 2 SCH 7

/macroicon "Summom II"
/ac "Summon II" <me>
/crosshotbar copy SCH 3 SCH 7
(For SMN 3 just change macro according, "Summon III" and add SMN 4 SMN 7 to last line in third macro)

I saved all 2 or 3 of these to my main sheathed Hotbar 1 (triangle on PS3) then each one of them, SMN 1 Hotbar 2/Circle button SMN 2 Hotbar 3/X button and SMN 3 to hotbar 4/square button, and you wont see or clcle thru these hotbar sets until you cast a pet and have your weapon drawn, plus where they are all set to copy to the same weapon drawn hotbar they will rewrite themselves each time they are used so remember any adjustments you make need to made to the original hotbar location (2.3 and 4) this will save hotbar 6 for your curing and most used DPS and after you get used to it, which took me a good 3 weeks to remember all my setup, it makes a world of difference.

Also like said above with the 2.1 patch

Hi,
you can set another crossbar to appear by :

Hold R2 then L2 and Hold L2 then R2

By default it is not activated you have to configure it. It is a good place to put spells you don't use often (like Resurrection, cleric stance etc...)

Otherwise I use macros to reduce the number of slot on main crosshotbar.

As side note I have put "place" in a X slot or sometimes it bugs and uses spell that is on the X slot.

This has added a whole lot of extra spaces and can be used for your less used pet commands, place, heel, stay, away and any meds food you use and will really clear up your main hotbars for a lot of new stuff!!! I hope this helps and that i've written it easy enough to follow and not just confused the heck out of you all of this I got from a youtube video a few months back but can't find the link or i'd have just sent that, if you do want to look for it though i'm almost 99% sure it's by Epic Reset

[Alice_89th]

Going to ask a couple of more questions.

I used to leave my pet free in whatever it wanted to do. But that seems to be some sort of sin, so for a while now I have been trying to improve my pet management. But that leaves me with a lot of questions. How much should I be managing, which stances, what to put on my crossbar, etc?

So for the already-pro-summoners out there:
- what stances do you use?
- how much do you micro manage? and what?
- what abilities are on your hotbar/crossbar?

[Slowburn]

I use garuda 99% of the time so ill keep it in Obey and keep contagion on my main hotbar. Keep heel and sic on your secondary hotbar. sic to switch it to different targets and heel to move it to the right spot. I also keep rouse and spur on my main hotbar and enkindle on the secondary since the cooldown is ridiculous. It all depends on the situation, i use sic a lot for ultima magibits and wp adds.

[xxalucard]

Garuda + Obey in PvE. The only skills I micro manage are Contagion & Aerial Slash (very occasionally Shockwave).

Aerial Slash is an extra AoE burst that you can use simultaneously as you bane + miasma II, and I don't see a lot of summoners take advantage of it.

I also use Sustain a lot more frequently in extreme primals since they changed it to MP rather than HP. I never expect a healer to heal Garuda outside of general AoE heals, so I'm always watching its HP.

The reason it's a sin to put Garuda on Sic is because, aside from being considered a noob, it will pop all its CD's (like contagion / shockwave / aerial slash) before you want it to. For example it'll use contagion before you can even get all your dots up, it'll shockwave an enemy out of the group so the tank has to go chase it, it'll AoE aerial slash and wake up a group of mobs or pull hate when you didn't want it to (or just do less single target DPS because of it).