Kinoki wrote:
At this point, imho, Magians are not optional, especially if you intend to keep up with the rest of the population. The longer people wait on their magians the more annoying it will be when they have to finally catch up. I'll say it to you again, were all in the same boat and you can't jump out of it just like the rest of us.(cause of the sharks. They like tasty adventurers.)
I spent a fair deal of time working on my WHM magians, thus I am just now starting on my SMN ones. However, it seems that all jobs got some pretty freakin amazing new weapons in magians, not just SMN. Also I tend to agree the job is not nearly as broken as many people on here make it seem to be. I enjoy playing the job a lot, and when I do play it I always feel like I contribute a lot to what I'm doing, more than most jobs. I may not contribute to the parser like the DD's do, but I always feel like I contribute more than my share to the battle via things like a carefully timed Chaotic Strike to avert a mob's 2-hour, or things like that.
HOWEVER, from reading your posts it's also clear you do not play Summoner because if you did, you would know how utterly worthless the Favor bonuses were. Since Favor was introduced, I've only found two uses for it:
1. Diabolos Favor for mage party. I'll say it up front, this SUCKS. This is about the single worst way to spend your time in FFXI. You literally can't do anything at all except stand there looking pretty. Any BPs you use will reset the favor, any Rage BPs will have about -20% damage. You can Dream Shroud but it resets your Favor as well, so it's probably only worth it during the night. I have turned down every request to play this role ever made upon me. I see it as an insult to expect me to do this.
2. Perpetuation -2. Note that this comes at a cost of about -20% damage (based on my observations) and fixed 60-second BP timers regardless of your BP timer reduction gear. So if you are using Rage BPs at all, this goes out the window completely. Why leave an avatar out if you aren't going to use Rage BPs? Kind of defeats the purpose doesn't it? It's almost like a cruel joke from SE. The only scenario I've found where this is useful is when kiting medium-difficulty targets. If they're weak, I just Pred Claws them down quickly. If they're strong, I have to Carby kite to avoid running out of MP before they die. However, there's a narrow gap in the middle where instead of Carby kiting, I use Fenrir to kite. With Favor, his perp is pretty low, such that I can deal more damage before running out of MP than I would doing Pred Claws spam, but it's much slower. However, it's faster than Carby, so it's still useful. There are VERY few situations where I find myself in this gap of Fenrir kiting without BPs, but this is the one true valid use of Favor that I've discovered since its introduction.
You have to recognize that in order for Favor buffs to be effective, we cannot do anything else. No BPs, no releasing and summoning other avatars. Just pop the avatar, and stand there looking pretty. Yes it gives us a way to keep our avatars out, but it's almost like a cruel joke by SE saying "here's what you get for bitching about being able to keep avatars out, now the joke's on you". The whole favor thing is hurting your argument more than helping it, and I suspect it's ignorance like this that is getting you rated down so much. Favor was a novel idea, but very poorly implemented and did not do anything whatsoever to address the job's shortcomings.
