A Fresh Look on Old Pacts : Part IFollow

i've been using Somnolence on Dea fights, the gravity sticked quite often, speeding up the kill.
dmg was about 200, not bad for 30mp "ward BP" besides Nether Blast.

Very neat info.

I'm not a summoner myself but it seems like alot of pre-70 blood pacts are often reguarded as weak and limited by most people. Which is far from the case for a large amount of them. Though there are those that are still lacking, most notably Earthen Ward and Noctoshield which used to serve as the standard of AoE Stoneskin and Phanlax simply because there was no other job who could use them in AoE form, until scholar came and shattered the standard. I would say that Earthen Ward and Noctoshield are due for a tune up in potency.

Fenrir's buffs and enfeebles probably serve as the best example of what ward pacts should be, as they're strong enough without being overly strong. (though highly dependent on moon phase)

When it comes to using rage pacts, most people see them as rather ineffective before 70. Although they have no lack in power (ignoring defense and level corralation), they're accuracy seems to be the greatest issue. Both physical and magical rage pacts pre-70 seem to suffer badly in the accuracy department when fighting anything of IT levels. To take an example, the celestral avatar bloodpact nukes, tier II and tier IV elemental magic, all possess the same base damage as their black magic counterparts and avatars gain the same MAB and similar INT as a Blm, but they're resist rate is through the roof on any substancial enemy.

I maybe just talking out my ass since I have little serious experience with summoners (don't hurt me), but these issues seem to be the pervailing ideas holding summoner back nowadays (especially in parties).

Most of it suffers from lack of game content where you can actually use it.

Healing ruby is nice... but the recast is too long to have any use out of it except a little extra cheap cure when no wards are desired.

Slowga having 5% more slow does not quite warrent use since it also has a shared BP timer. RDM slow II will make it pointless on anything hard, and on anything weak normal slow is just fine enough.

Sleepga has too low rank so it can't overwrite anything, and because it takes longer to cast it really is only worth it if nobody else can sleep. (good for depopping links though)

Nightmare again won't really land on anything meaningful. Perhaps you can use a helix + nightmare on a mission like Sandoria 9-2, but most big fights have sleep immune enemies. Also for exp parties it is rarely worth DoTing a mob to death for exp/hour.

Thunderspark is probably more like attack bonus. I've seen it work wonders on weak monsters, but I've never really debuffed a NM that actually got paralyzed to trigger on them.

All in all it is like the whole SMN job. Full of potential, but no place in FFXI for it to be used.

I have always, always, and will always love Summoner.

When I first started playing the game, I have not seen a Summoner and their avatars until I was a good level 30++. Summoner are so beautiful, I wanted to level mine after I played with my BRD.

I am and will always be pro-pet. Even before I actually started to level my own SMN, I had seen others summon avatars, and dismiss them as soon as they pulled off a BP. I was like 'wtf?'

Anyway, when I started playing SMN, I pretty much understood. A Summoner really cannot afford to be pro-pet! Their MP pool will dry out faster than one can say 'I am out if MP!'

When I started playing SMN back in '04 or '05, SMN were only able to perform a single BP, whether it was a ward or rage. I was told what BP the party expected out of me, and that was it. Ontop of running out of MP very quickly, I was not allowed to keep an avatar out anyway, because that avatar would add TP to the monster, and no one liked it. (C'mon, as if that would have made a difference. It never did and never will. You can have 6 MNKs with Subtle Blow +20 wail on a mob, and it would still pull off it's TP attacks.)

Anyway, back on point. I would have loved to just Thunderspark, Tail Whip, Claw, or nuke away with magic, but I was never given the chance. An avatar out spamming something like Shock Strike or Tier IV magic would be able to last for quite a while, but the parties I was in expressed such discontent over a SMN doing anything but Earthen Ward, or Hastega, that I would not even DARE do anything else. I had a JP drop and ditch a party in the Boyahda Tree because I was doing rages instead of wards.

Now SMNs have it better than ever, they have the Siphon ability, and seperate BPs. A SMN keeping out Garuda or Leviathan spamming Claw or Tail Whip (both piercing, along with Poison Nails from Carbuncle) would over time do some nice damage to birds while healing, and be able to keep it up for a while. And now it will be easier to do since avatars now give out an idle buff when the ability from the SMN is activated. (Still not sure how weak avatars will be supressed.)

But that is not what the parties want. They recruit the SMNs only for buffs, and because of that, we will never have the MP we need to simply keep out an avatar just to use the older BPs. That is the reason I don't use rages at all. I don't want to get kicked from parties because I ran out of MP doing rages. (Trust me, plenty of people out there like that.)

However, I no longer join PTs with my SMN anyway, and now with the 'buff' addition, I will refuse to. I can rage with any avatar whenever I want, doing whatever I want, in campaigns... PT exp be damned, unless it is an Astral burn, or a SMN burn. A SMN is truly beautiful when allowed to unleash everything it has got, not just by being a PTs mere buff wh•re.