SMN: Let's Try to Make Devotion a Good Skill

[mrln]

Summoner has a few problems right now that need addressing, and one of them is how awful devotion is. It increases damage, healing, and damage down for the single person that is closest to your pet by 5%. It's both weak and flavorless, and needs a rework.

The obvious solution would be to make this ability a 20-yalm radius AoE around your pet and be done with it, but it still doesn't solve the problem that... it doesn't feel like a summoner ability. So in addition to making it an AoE, I suggest that we separate the effects between all three pets:

• Garuda increases magic damage and healing
• Ifrit increases physical damage
• Titan decreases damage taken

The effects would last for 20 seconds and be a 10% boost. The cooldown would be adjusted so that it is not overly powerful, but it should feel significant so I believe 10% and 20s is appropriate. Melee characters are pretty much always in range of Ifrit, and casters can all hang out around Garuda. Stack under Titan for the raidwide damage. Oh yeah and while we're at it, change Titan's enmity boosting skill to a toggleable tank stance and increase its other damage to be more competitive with the other two summons outside of its tank stance. That way we can actually use it in team content.

What do people think of this?

[Pyitoechito]

It's a nice idea, but I think the best we can hope for from SE is it becoming an area effect, in all honesty.

[Galvuu]

I really like this idea.
But to make this work, you need a system in which changing your pet doesn't hurt you so much (especially in regards to mana).
This way, you can go into Titan to help the party soak a heavy aoe (like a super move in a phase transition), and then seamlessly transition to Ifrit/Garuda (whichever suits your comp more).