Summoner

Starter Quest

I Can Hear a Rainbow

Quest works as per retail; however, players do not need to collect ALL of the elemental weathers–just a few until you receive the cutscene with Carbuncle. Rarer weathers count for more credit.

Players will start out with all of the avatars without needing to do the Tuning forks or Prime avatar fights.

Main Job Only

The following abilities are only available when summoner is the character’s main job.

• Avatar’s Favor
• Astral Conduit
• Apogee

Non-working Abilities / Traits

All abilities are wired up and working at this time.

• Avatars: Alexander, Odin, Atomos
  • At this time, we have no intention of adding these three summons as they have very little use/viability in the modern 99/99 environment.

Avatar Levels

Several of the summoner “Avatar: i119” and “Avatar: Lv.+#” gear are wired up and the functionality of scaling avatars beyond level 99 is functional. For many players, this means being more strategic with gear choices and, frankly, actually caring about your gear a bit more than some private servers.

From level 1 to 99, all avatars gain scaling buffs similar to those applied to players and monsters. This includes adjustments to HP, MP, attributes, and secondary attributes (attack, magic attack, evasion).

From level 100 and beyond, avatars still gain additional base stats with the above formula, but also gain three additional ‘bonus’ advancements for each level above 99 they achieve–capping at level 122 (for now).

• Defense = 10 * (avatar's level - 99) * 1.15
• Magic Attack/Accuracy = 5 * (avatar's level - 99) * 1.15
• +Attributes = (avatar's level - 99) * 1.15
• Regain = (avatar's level - 99)
• e.g. At level 122 (sancus sachet +1, nirvana i119 III, and campestres’s cape), an avatar would have a level difference bonus of 23 level, granting them:
  • DEF: +265
  • MATT/MACC: +132
  • Attributes: +26
  • Regain: +23/tick (plus server bonuses)

Currently, updated avatar level items that have been wired up include:

•     Eminent Sachet 
•     Sancus Sachet 
•     Sancus Sachet +1 
•     Seraphicaller 
•     Campestres's Cape 
•     Nirvana i119 III 

These bonuses allow avatars to be much more combative against level 120+ endgame encounters.

Abilities

Avatar’s Favor

A customized version of Avatar’s Favor has been added into the system. This short-ranged, AOE buff allows summoners to provide the party with varying buffs depending on the avatar they have summoned. On retail, these buffs are fairly tame; however, they have been bolstered to match our community and provide more utility in small group situations.

Apogee

• Apogee’s recast has been reduced to 30s to allow players to skillchain their avatar abilities more easily.

Astral Conduit

• Astral Conduit will only reduce your Blood Pact delay down to our fixed cap of 10s. It will not reduce it to zero as per retail.

Fenrir: Heavenward Howl

Rather than a varying, fairly weak endrain/enaspir, Heavenward Howl is an upgraded version of Ecliptic Growl providing anywhere from +10 to +60 to all attributes and restoring party health based on the moon phase. Unlike Growl, this does reduce values for some attributes at different phases, simply adjusts how much buff players get.

Summoner and Avatar Effects

Unlike retail, Avatar’s Favor does not decrease the Blood Pact Ability Delay as it is already reduced 50% by the server’s configuration. The additional avatar perpetuation cost is set to scale and caps at +5 mp/tick cost while the ability is active at level 99.

Party Effects

The following effects will apply to players who are nearby the avatar (within 10 units). In addition to the favor bonuses, most also provides a bolstered attribute and an elemental alignment that increase attack, accuracy, defense, and resistance to the element.

If there are multiple summoners in the same group, multiple version of this effect can run in parallel–e.g. one with Ifrit, one with Garuda, both using Avatar’s Favor grants the party both buffs.

These bonuses are based on the Summoner’s summoning skill in the formulas below.

Carbuncle

Carbuncle provides a very powerful regen and refresh skill to the group and can be used to quickly recover or sustain through damage over time effects.

• Regen skill * 0.05
• Refresh skill * 0.05

Fenrir

Fenrir provides a potent magic defense and evasion bonus along with a bolster to all attributes. With enough summoning skill, Fenrir can provide a whole group with some of the best magic defense in the game.

• Magic Defense (skill * 0.05)
• Magic Evasion (skill * 0.05)
• All Attributes (skill * 0.05)

Ramuh

Ramuh provides players with an alignment and resistance to thunder with a potent critical hit, critical damage rate increase, and DEX bonus.

• Thunder Accuracy/Attack/Defense (skill * 0.05)
• Thunder Resistance (skill * 0.10)
• Critical Hit Rate (skill * 0.05) + 5
• Critical Hit Damage (skill * 0.01) + 1
• DEX (skill * 0.05)

Ifrit

Ifrit provides players with an alignment and resistance to fire with a potent Attack %, Ranged Attack %, and Double Attack bonus. These are percentage gains, not flat values!

• Fire Accuracy/Attack/Defense (skill * 0.05)
• Fire Resistance (skill * 0.10)
• Attack +% (skill * 0.015) + 1
• Ranged Attack +% (skill * 0.015) + 1
• Double Attack (skill * 0.015) + 1
• STR (skill * 0.05)

Shiva

Shiva provides players with an alignment and resistance to ice and a heavy hitting MAB, Magic Damage, and Magic Accuracy bonus for players.

• Ice Accuracy/Attack/Defense (skill * 0.05)
• Ice Resistance (skill * 0.10)
• Magic Attack Bonus (skill * 0.10) + 5
• Magic Damage (skill * 0.10)
• Magic Accuracy (skill * 0.05)
• INT (skill * 0.05)

Titan

In contrast to Fenrir, Titan provides players with a tremendous physical damage taken reduction–allowing summoners with enough summoning magic skill to provide massive damage reduction to the party along with an alignment and resistance to earth.

• Earth Accuracy/Attack/Defense (skill * 0.05)
• Earth Resistance (skill * 0.10)
• Physical Damage Taken -% (skill * 0.01) + 2
• VIT (skill * 0.05)

Garuda

Garuda provide an alignment and resistance to wind along with a powerful evasion, accuracy, and ranged accuracy bonus.

• Wind Accuracy/Attack/Defense (skill * 0.05)
• Wind Resistance (skill * 0.10)
• Evasion (skill * 0.10)
• Accuracy/Ranged Accuracy (skill * 0.07) + 5
• AGI (skill * 0.05)

Leviathan

Leviathan provides an alignment and resistance to water along with a powerful (and rare) Cure Potency bonus for players.

• Water Accuracy/Attack/Defense (skill * 0.05)
• Water Resistance (skill * 0.10)
• Cure Potency (skill * 0.015)
• MND (skill * 0.05)

Cait Sith

Cait Sith provides an alignment and resistance to light along with magic damage taken reduction–an excellent choice for heavy magic damage fights.

• Light Accuracy/Attack/Defence (skill * 0.05)
• Light Resistance (skill * 0.10)
• Magic Damage Taken -% (skill * 0.01) * 2
• MND (skill * 0.05)

Diabolos

Diabolos provides an alignment and resistance to dark along with resistance to Sleep and a bonus Refresh effect.

• Dark Accuracy/Attack/Defence (skill * 0.5)
• Dark Resistance (skill * 0.10)
• Sleep Resistance (skill * 0.10)
• Refresh (skill * 0.01) + 2
• INT (skill * 0.05)

Siren

Siren provides an alignment and resistances to wind along with resistance to Silence and a significant bonus to Subtle Blow.

• Wind Accuracy/Attack/Defense (skill * 0.05)
• Wind Resistance (skill * 0.10)
• Silence Resistance (skill * 0.10)
• Subtle Blow (skill * 0.10)
• AGI (skill * 0.05)

Avatar Skillchains

The avatars can skillchain with players and other avatars. The following physical and hybrid damage blood pacts have had their skillchain elements added:

!togglebpws

Allows summoners to toggle on and off whether or not their avatar’s automatic blood pacts when they perform a weaponskill.

Regen Caps

• Avatars now have a base 5% max HP/tick regen cap. This is increased to 10% for Titan.
  • For example, if Ifrit has 5000 health, regen caps at +250/tick.
  • The Regen Cap has been added to !petstats.

Avatar Jobs and Traits

Avatars now have their job traits for their jobs and now have unique jobs based on their skills and general role (some Avatars had unique jobs to begin with, such as Fenrir, while all others were BLM/NONE by default).

• Carbuncle: WHM/BLM
• Fenrir: DRK/BLM
• Ifrit: WAR/BLM
• Titan: PLD/WAR
• Leviathan: BLM/WHM
• Garuda: BLM/RDM
• Shiva: BLM/WAR
• Ramuh: BLM/RDM
• Diabolos: BLM/DRK
• Cait Sith: BLM/WAR

Similar to jug pet ready moves, avatar and automatons now benefit from multistrikes. Players can now optimize their pet damage output in new ways by gearing to certain skills (such as maximizing multistrikes for Shiva’s Rush or Sharpshot’s String Shredder). Similar to players, the maximum number of hits any skill can do is 8.

Stat Considerations

• For magical blood pacts, consider your pet’s MACC and MAB. These determine the base damage that then gets multiplied out by the Blood Pact Damage+ bonuses. If these are too low, stacking BP Damage has little to no effect. For farming and AOEing lower level mobs, you will likely need less MACC and MAB than when fighting one-on-one with higher level mobs–gear accordingly.
• For physical blood pacts, now that avatars can multistrike and crit, have a much wider damage span based on how well players can gear those secondary stats. Shiva’s Rush and Ramuh’s Volt Strike are both heavy hitters if you can proc a double attack on each strike. In addition, Ramuh’s Volt Strike has a naturally high crit rate, leading to a higher pDIF for every hit. You can use the Members Portal to find items that have Pet:Double Attack on them.

Using Ashitacast with 76+ Skills

Due to how the private server code handles pets (as monsters), only skills that monsters have show up properly in the logs. This causes abilities like Ifrit’s Conflag Strike to show up as ‘Special Attack’ as there’s no correct mob skill to tie to it.

This can cause issues with Ashitacast macros and requires a bit of a workaround. Thanks to Equilibrium, Serivanna, and Zaes for various troubleshooting to come up with this workaround.

Adding these to your <jobability/> and <petskill/> nodes will allow you to swap as expected for

<jobability>    <!-- Forces BP delay -->
	<!-- IDs for skills that don't show up in the battle log correctly. -->

	<if ad_id="1066"> <!-- Conflag Strike -->
		<setvar name="BloodpactID" value="1066"/>
	</if>

	<if ad_id="1292"> <!-- Regal Gash -->
		<setvar name="BloodpactID" value="1292"/>
	</if>

	<if ad_id="1145"> <!-- Shock Squall -->
		<setvar name="BloodpactID" value="1145"/>
	</if>

	<if ad_id="1146"> <!-- Volt Strike -->
		<setvar name="BloodpactID" value="1146"/>
	</if>

	<if ad_id="1113"> <!-- Fleet Wind -->
		<setvar name="BloodpactID" value="1113"/>
	</if>

	<if ad_id="1114"> <!-- Hastega II -->
		<setvar name="BloodpactID" value="1114"/>
	</if>

	<if ad_id="1081"> <!-- Earthern Armor -->
		<setvar name="BloodpactID" value="1081"/>
	</if>

	<if ad_id="1082"> <!-- Crag Throw -->
		<setvar name="BloodpactID" value="1082"/>
	</if>

	<if ad_id="1097"> <!-- Tidal Roar -->
		<setvar name="BloodpactID" value="1097"/>
	</if>

	<if ad_id="1098"> <!-- Soothing Current -->
		<setvar name="BloodpactID" value="1098"/>
	</if>

	<if ad_id="1050"> <!-- Heavensward Howl -->
		<setvar name="BloodpactID" value="1050"/>
	</if>

	<if ad_id="1179"> <!-- Blindside -->
		<setvar name="BloodpactID" value="1082"/>
	</if>

	<if ad_id="1178"> <!-- Pavor Nocturnus -->
		<setvar name="BloodpactID" value="1178"/>
	</if>

	<if ad_id="1477"> <!-- Chinook -->
		<setvar name="BloodpactID" value="1477"/>
	</if>

	<if ad_id="1481"> <!-- Wind's Blessing -->
		<setvar name="BloodpactID" value="1481"/>
	</if>
</jobability>

<petskill> <!-- Cleans BP Delay and puts on Blood Pact DMG+. -->
<!-- IDs for skills that don't show up in the log correctly, and thus do not swap. -->

<if advanced="$BloodpactID=1292"> <!-- Regal Gash -->
	<equip set="BPD"/>
</if>

<if advanced="$BloodpactID=1066"> <!-- Conflag Strike -->
	<equip set="BPD"/>
</if>

<if advanced="$BloodpactID=1145"> <!-- Shock Squall -->
	<equip set="BPWard"/>
</if>

<if advanced="$BloodpactID=1146"> <!-- Volt Strike -->
	<equip set="BPD"/>
</if>

<if advanced="$BloodpactID=1113"> <!-- Fleet Wind -->
	<equip set="BPWard"/>
</if>

<if advanced="$BloodpactID=1114"> <!-- Hatega II -->
	<equip set="BPWard"/>
</if>

<if advanced="$BloodpactID=1081"> <!-- Earthern Armor -->
	<equip set="BPWard"/>
</if>

<if advanced="$BloodpactID=1082"> <!-- Crag Throw -->
	<equip set="BPD"/>
</if>

<if advanced="$BloodpactID=1097"> <!-- Tidal Roar -->
	<equip set="BPWard"/>
</if>

<if advanced="$BloodpactID=1098"> <!-- Soothing Current -->
	<equip set="BPWard"/>
</if>

<if advanced="$BloodpactID=1050"> <!-- Heavensward Howl -->
	<equip set="BPWard"/>
</if>

<if advanced="$BloodpactID=1179"> <!-- Blindside -->
	<equip set="BPD"/>
</if>

<if advanced="$BloodpactID=1178"> <!-- Pavor Nocturnus -->
	<equip set="BPWard"/>
</if>

<if advanced="$BloodpactID=1477"> <!-- Chinook -->
	<equip set="BPWard"/>
</if>

<if advanced="$BloodpactID=1481"> <!-- Wind's Blessing -->
	<equip set="BPWard"/>
</if>
</petskill>

Summoner Blood Pacts Research and Tuning (March 2019)

Summoners and Avatars are constantly being evaluated and tuned… they’re VERY fickle between “extremely overpowered” and “unable to do anything”. Our goal is to make summoner an amazingly fun class, but still keep a balance between it and other classes.

In late March 2019, we sat down and reviewed every blood pact, every damage calculation, and every avatar modifier. Here’s the results of that deep dive.

What We Learned

1. Avatars, by design, do not have a level correction when calculating damage like player-based weaponskills do. This makes them extremely powerful against higher level mobs [source].
2. Avatars do not necessarily gain more physical damage by adding a great deal of attack to them as there’s a hard cap to the pDIF formula for avatars [source], however, their cap is extremely high and attributes help.
3. All physical blood pacts were wired up to also calculate in the magic attack bonus of the avatar. This is systemically wrong [source] and was causing physical blood pacts to receive upwards of 10-20x their attack damage and THEN apply the Blood Pact damage increase added to it.
4. As coded, all physical blood pacts are being passed in as fire damage, not the correct element for the avatar. This is causes unexpected damage results against mobs strong/weak to that element and/or on the elemental day.
5. As coded, all blood pacts (physical and magical) compare the INT of the avatar to the mob. Most physical blood pacts rely on DEX, VIT, STR, or even CHR [source].
6. As coded, many of the damage type modifiers no longer exist or are spelled wrong (H2H instead of BLUNT, SLASH instead of SLASHING) causing these physical blood pacts to do less than or incorrect damage against monster families strong/weak to the type.
7. Several blood pacts were not providing their correct additional effect.
   1. Rock Buster and Mountain Buster inflicting Bind.
   2. Megalith Throw not inflicting Slow.
   3. Geocrush not inflicting Stun.
8. A couple of blood pacts were wired up as physical, but should have been elemental.
   1. Burning Strike should be fire elemental magic damage.
   2. Lunar Bay should be dark elemental magic damage.
9. As coded, Astral Flow abilities are, overall, useless. The base damage for them is 48-78 damage. 😕
10. As coded, the damage multipliers and subsequent hit multipliers (for multihit blood pacts) are significantly lower than they should be [source] and [source].
11. As coded, the methods that handle elemental resists and damage mitigation for avatar abilities (physical and magical) completely ignores the DMG, DMGMAGIC, DMGPHYS, and the uncapped versions of those mods. This means a monster designed to take -70% magical damage would still be hit for 100% of an avatar’s magical blood pact and, the reverse, that a monster designed to take 130% physical damage would still only take 100%.

What We Changed

Whoo! Wow. Okay, so, in that same order as above, the following updates have been applied to summoner blood pacts.

1. Nothing to fix regarding Avatars not having a level correction and that’s, honestly, a real benefit to summoners. Having a pet that’s essentially “120+” vs. the target’s level means higher crit changes, higher rates of hit, and higher damage overall.
2. This has been addressed by better allocating attributes to avatars throughout the leveling process. As fixed in No. 5 below, now that blood pacts are using the correct stats, having those stats increased helps.
3. This was fixed. Yes, this will greatly reduce the damage of multi-hit physical blood pacts like Rush, but back down to reasonable levels and provide a proper growth gain for players to gear up (no more naked summoners with Nirvana; sorry).
4. All blood pacts now have their proper element and elemental day bonuses applied. Carby gains bonuses on Lightsday and weakens on Darksday, etc.
5. All blood pacts have been updated to use their proper attribute comparisons as stated in the source. This means that avatar blood pacts that compare INT are likely stronger against mobs with lower INT (like non-casters) and ones that compare STR are likely stronger against mobs with low STR (like casters).
6. All blood pacts that had the wrong damage type have been fixed.
7. Rock Buster, Mountain Buster, Megalith Throw, and Geocrush (poor Titan!) now have their proper additional effects.
8. Burning Strike and Lunar Bay are now their proper elemental damage, not physical.
9. Astral Flow abilities have had their base damage formula updated from 48 + (level * 8) + (dINT * 1.5) to math.random(4096,5146) + (level * 8) * (dINT + 5.5).
10. The damage multipliers provided by the sources have been applied to the physical blood pacts.
11. The methods for handling blood pact elemental resists and damage mitigations have been fixed to account for a target’s explicit damage resist or weakness modifiers. For example, arcana “weapon” type mobs have an intate family resistance to magic; slimes and oozes have an inate resistance to physical. Blood pacts now properly account for these when calculating damage. Keep this in mind when you’re fighting certain targets and using certain elements and physical vs. magical damage.