As with any pet class, it’s almost expected for part of the gameplay to be wrestling with an awkward AI, there are problems with the pet AI that outright cripple how effective the summons are, making their damage, which already scales poorly compared with other players, even worse due to their time spent waffling instead of attacking.
- Their first attack after they stop moving is not aimed. At all. When they stop and attack, their first attack is always shot in whatever direction they’re facing instead of at an enemy.
Along with their tight follow range, this ends up with summons spending the majority of a fight either ceasing their attacks to follow, then missing their first attack, then ceasing their attacks again and again, spending large amounts of time missing or running.
- Salamion is always getting lost. He has no leash, and while this helps sometimes because it doesn’t suffer the wasted time doing no damage that demon summons have, it also ends up with him being lost or left behind very frequently, especially if he starts hitting mobs that you intend to just run past.
He can even be outrun and lost with nothing around, due to the rather lengthy time he spends not moving or attacking immediately after being summoned.
- Summon servant can easily be outrun. While the cat buffs are very nice, neither the cat can run fast enough nor are the auras big enough to be able to buff you if you’re moving. This basically forces you to stop moving any significant distance after you summon the cat if you don’t want to miss any of the buffs at all.
- Summons are targetable. Not sure why in the first place. Perhaps to let you keep track of their HP? However, with the summon’s tight leash range, and the summon’s enormous hitbox, it basically guarantees that if you’re trying to interact with objects, the summon will sooner or later get in your way, leading you to either unsummon or waste time running back and forth every time you need to interact with something.
- Summons have a very short leash. By leash, I mean the distance you can move away before they drop everything and chase you. This has been touched upon before, but this starts to become enormously annoying when they frequently move and cancel their attacks, and then miss their first attack after moving. In boss fights this quickly becomes apparent, regardless if you or your summon is tanking the boss. Either way, it often runs on top of you midbattle, leading both of you to be cleaved and overlay AoEs on top of you, or if you spend your time dodging, the summon runs constantly without dealing damage.
You can see in this video if you look at the summon, if you move around even a reasonable amount to avoid attacks, the summon ends up dealing next to no damage, spending his time running and missing.
- Summons don’t follow you through ‘warps’.
Any map where there’s a warp ends up with you losing your summons, as they don’t follow you. Even on maps without warps, summons often get caught and left behind on stairs, corners, etc.
Suggestions:
- Whatever is causing the summon to miss (I suspect it aims before it is finished moving), fix it so their first attack doesn’t fire at nothing.
- Make the distance when the summon stops everything and follows you larger.
- When salamion or the summon is too far away, teleport them to your location.
- Attack ground is unequivocally agreed on as useless. Replace it with a command to focus attacking on a particular mob, and another command to recall your summon.
- Have summon servant either follow you at a tighter distance and run faster, or the buff centered on the caster instead of the cat.
Some other suggestions I have, but aren’t strictly mechanical, are:
-Keep the SP drain, but allow SP recovery during summoning.
Most agree that the SP restrictions are too heavy handed. Due to the % drain, most sorcerers actively avoid spending points in spirit. This, however, makes it even more difficult to cast any other spells while summoning, and it’s already been established that summon damage lags behind other options. Not only that, but it renders SP recovery and spirit moot. Allowing SP recovery lets putting points in spirit and stacking SP recovery on your gear actually mean something when it comes to your summons.
-Move the summon commands to C1, and make them not need skill points.
I really can’t comprehend why being able to control your pet needed your skill points, let alone needing to invest in c2, let alone being moved from c1 to c2 previously. Being able to control your pets as a pet class is integral, and I’ve never ever seen a game where you didn’t have have basic, vital commands unlocked as soon as you got your pet, let alone need you to spend your resources and invest your circles to unlock them.
-Introduce two skills: one to cancel commands and recall the summon to you, and one to command the summon to attack target, even if you move away from the summon.
