75 Summoner, now what?Follow

No I did not summoner burn.

I have a few ideas of what I'd like to do with my first 75 (summoner) and have been reading a few guides.

After reading through the "Spirit guide by Spira" on the FFXI wiki it made me very interested in the possibilities of spirits. I have come to these conclusions without extensive testing:

Thunder Spirit and Fire Spirit are the only spirits worth using as pure DD.

Each has 3 spells it will cast at 75:

Thunder Spirit: Burst, Shock, Thunder IV

Fire Spirit: Flare, Burn, Fire IV

From what I've seen my spirits pretty much always cast the DoT first. Then they proceed into casting ancient magic. Then after that they cast the DoT again.

Has anyone followed his guide and tested spirits true powers with the 17 sec cast time/ higher perp vs 25 second cast time / lower perp setups?

Where can I read a guide about merits for summoner?

Thanks!

If you want to play with spirits, i have found that thunder spirit casts ancient magic more than any other spirit. This may not be true for you, but it is for me. Here is something you can test out.

go smn/blm, and head to some weak mobs. Target one with thunder spirit out. cast shock on it and watch the fun.
It is known, that spirits won't cast a DOT, if the mob has it on allready. It is also known, that the spell timer is reduced when you get aggro. casting magic on a mob works the same way. It comes after you, and your spirit attacks, with a nice timer reduction. It will most likely cast burst on the first shot. Have fun watching lil bunnies go boom.

Spirit Summoner should merit the following:

8 summoning magic skill
5 spirit perpetuation down

You won't really get any good results without it. In my opinion they end up situationally useful WITH the merits, and even less useful without.


The choice between casting time and perpetuation is also up to the user. I don't like resting so I attempt to balance out perpetuation against siphon return. 300 MP return would cover 3 MP per tick.

This kind of attitude is what's wrong with FFXI these days. It's why people have 10 jobs levelled and mope whenever you ask them to bring a specific one instead of whatever they feel like. It's why people have their good gear spread across 6 different jobs with no single job having amazing gear, and need 3 drops from every single event in the game. If people instead focused more on job completion and not "well that's one more 75, time to start the next" then there would magically be more loot for everyone.

I think xariol's suggestion was only half-serious, but your little rant is unfair and stupid.

People like to try out and play different jobs.

One day, you might want to play healer, the next a melee... the next day you might want to nuke or sing songs.

Part of makes FFXI so special in comparison to other MMORPGs is the job change system and being able to level up and play so many different jobs; not limiting yourself to just one profession as you've suggested.

In an end-game Linkshell it's usually going to come down to points anyway.
If a member wants gear for multiple jobs them they need to work to get the points for each specific item just like everyone else.

I don't see how players having less jobs = MOAR DROPS FOR EVERYONE.
Just seems like a Linkshell can be less effective because a player can't hop into different roles as necessary.

but continue being butthurt

Edited, Jul 2nd 2009 2:06pm by Poubelle

So what's next after 75 summoner?

1. Merits trial: this is where you want to look at everything you can merit as summoner and decide what you can and can't merit because of other jobs. Based on the events you do, or want to do in game you should probably hang out with fully merited summoners for a while and ask them their merits, watch them play and note the difference in your performance vs theirs based on merits. You may have to place and drop a few merits trying them out. I don't know any serious summoner that didn't end up changing something about their merits after they were done.


2. Merits final: Once you get an idea what you want you just have to merit merit merit, until your brains fall out. Once you're done meriting you can really bring your playstyle into its own.


3. Master the job: At this point you should try to bring summoner to as many events as you can where its viable to do so. The key to mastering any job is actually using it. This is where you can test if your merits are actually benefiting what you're doing or if you need to change them up a bit. Playing around one or two other summoners helps as you can once again compare yourself to them. This step 1-3 is a cycle for a main summoner.

Gear

As far as gear you should be looking to get anything that enhances the avatars, with mp gear being a secondary stat to look for. You should put together mainly a perpetuation gear set and an hmp gear set to prevent and minimize resting time. Level Sch sub it's a very useful sub when you're not expected to do any erase or anything like that. Drain and aspir help out a lot and with some magic acc gear and dark arts they are very reliable. I won't completely go into gear, but remember to spam crimson, amber, and ivory keys in ACP for pet bonus augmented items which can't be found anywhere else in the game. There is a summoner gear guide in the sticky if I remember correctly.




Spirits

As for spirits the game has changed a lot since I did my initial tests and experimenting 4 years ago. Its in a really old thread on KI summoner forum called "Project Spirits". I'm wanted to do a series of updated trials with all the new pet magic acc and magic attk gear that has been added into the game. Spirits generally have a casting cycle and my theory for a long time has been that the cycle is based on the resistance of the monster and the summoning skill of the player. I often notice a spirit casting something like WaterIV > Flood > WaterIV > Drown or Posion 2. This may be due to the recasts of the damage spells preventing them from chain casting their tier IV spell back to back. they are good for gaining mp back while doing damage if you have the correct perpetuation gear and merits, but without those two things i think they'd be unusable except for the light spirit which has been the easiest one to figure out.

I don't think its elitist nor unrealistic to expect fully merited and well geared jobs from players who want to join. There are plenty of shells that will take you without asking about your gear or merits, but always keep in mind that a shell's quality becomes that of the members that it accepts. So anyone setting up an endgame shell where you take any and every person without examining their playskill, gear, or merits is setting the shell up to be either weak or mediocre.


I'm glad the shell i'm in now has very strict gear and merit requirements as well as wanting multiple jobs. Most players don't get into top notch endgame shells right off the bat anyway. You work your way up to them after gearing yourself through limbus, dynamis, and other stand-alone activities and lesser NM's. After you get all that stuff and your merits then you go for the big time shells.

...and I'm saying plenty of people enjoy playing many different jobs, and it shouldn't be a crime for them to do so?

And, I think that a player with many jobs at 75 and just "decent" gear for all of them is more useful to any LS than a pimped out WHM75/SMN75.

Sadly it is just plain random.

For example I had orange HP and gotten shell IV over cure V. I've had 8 shocks in a row (when only about 3 of them were resisted). I've had an Earth spirit not cast a single slow, but a lot of rasp and stone IV in campaign.

Additional info about the shocks run is that I only got about 1 or 2 resists (50%) during like an hour of using it. So it probably doesn't matter if your nukes would be resisted or not.

Again, just plain random.

Yep I was mostly joking. I leveled smn to 75 a long time ago and it was my main job for about 5 years. This year I took blue mage to 75 too for a bit of a change.

I experimented with spirits for quite some time. My favorite is still light spirit. In an emergency it's the one I cast before I start running.

Sometimes when my alliance/party was in trouble and I was weakened and had very little MP I'd pop out light spirit and use my 2hr. Light spirit has this knack of firing off high lvl cure spells when people are in red. :)

I have a bunch of random merits that I can't recall for smn. I never meritted much on smn because my LS schedule made it so I mostly just kept enough of a buffer to stay 75 for the majority of the time. :) I did get most of smn afv2 early on though because I was one of 3 people in my LS that had smn levelled and one of them had other more desired jobs.

Fire spirit is my favorite one to get to cast ancient magic though!
Go out somewhere that the target won't kill you too fast to test this. Put the spirit out and wait until 100-200 mp is drained and then cast a spell on something so your spirit auto attacks it. In my experience the vast majority of the time an ancient magic spell gets cast.

To give you an idea of how often I messed around with spirits >.> On approximately 10 separate occasions (give or take) I managed to magic burst an ancient magic spell from a spirit. It was mostly by just watching people announce their TP in fights and a tonne of luck. :D lol


It does, sadly, mostly come down to points as to determine what gear you get. Also, depending on race, there's almost nothing in a large portion of the end game activities for smn. I'm looking at you sky and ground hnms!




oooh: a side note of elementals not recasting spells. light spirit still loves to cast regen on you even if you already put it on yourself.

---------------
trega of titan
smn 75, blu 75
Tarutaru power!