Ok I got the unicorn boxer. I found it very useful for my mp. Downside is when he goes away you have to wait forever to summon him again. Is there a way to make him stay out and keep feeding him crystals? Or is this just how it works?
Below level 40, this is how it works. It is so you can find out how the summons work, and help you decide if you want to become an Elemental Summoner. Upon becoming an Elemental summoner, this restriction is removed.
should also note that the reuse time on the unicorns are cast speed based
if you have dev set (+15% cast speed) and acumen and zerk you can greatly reduce the resummon time
oh nice. I didnt even think of going summoner. But it might be cool. care to educate me a bit on the play style of a summoner?
Elementar Summoner has a very different play style as a Spellsinger.
Per higher level you come you will fight more and more on the side of your Unicorn in mellee. You heal and buff your unicorn.
With the price to share your experience with the summon and have to pay the high crystall costs you never have downtime again.
oh nice. I didnt even think of going summoner. But it might be cool. care to educate me a bit on the play style of a summoner?
Elementar Summoner has a very different play style as a Spellsinger.
Per higher level you come you will fight more and more on the side of your Unicorn in mellee. You heal and buff your unicorn.
With the price to share your experience with the summon and have to pay the high crystall costs you never have downtime again.
in my experience, with the added DPS from the summon (assuming you fight with it rather than making 1 party do all the work) will make enough profit to account for crystals. most summoners i see lately use a bow between heals with the boxer tanking, i prefer duals on mine. and then again a friend advised straight nuking untill around 52 for best exp.
if you choose spellsinger however, you will be either A) spending cash on spirit ore for a mana saving self buff and /walking while you hunt or B) suffer more downtime than actual playing... that is assuming you do not have a recharging SE/EE at your disposal 24/7
the Spellsinger kills things(including other players) VERY fast, but he must pay for it by sitting to recover for 15-20minutes every time he is empty.
the Summoner kills things decently and can make quite the nuisance of himself in pvp, but he can keep going and going and going almost indefinitely without rest
There was a PS on Hinde who went all the way to 75 without using shots.
He, however, was insane.
It's got to be something like duoing with a wolf. You get the extra added bonus of a "party member," but without the bonus of having to share your loot, if you choose not to.
ok now im really interested in going summoner. I wasnt sure if I would still be nuking at all after 40. So basically you guys are suggesting that a summoner would be best to of course keep his cubics alive and to fight melee also?
With my PS (L52 now) I melleed all the time, playing with aggro management to avoid downtime.
Now with ES (L43) I have three options all are working fine for me.
1. I ignore my unicorn and just nuke the mob. The unicorn recharges me after.
2. I send the unicorn, cast 2 nukes. Heal the unicorn and let it recharge me
3. I send my unicorn. I run with it to mellee and cast two auraburns to speed it up (playing with the aggromanagement sometimes too). Later I heal the unicorn and let it recharge my mana.
Because I like to melee I prefer the 3. point albeit it is slightly slower.
We have all 3 summoners in my clan and when we party together it's pretty massive. Summoners rock solo or in a party. We can solo well in places that other players really can't do as well in. Also, you will find that your Unicorn Merrow (lvl 40) does very well in both solo and party situations. Later (lvl56) you get Unicorn Seriphim that when you want to do party support, will get you parties with nukers.
All in all, I think that this is one of the most fun classes in the game to play, and I've played just about all of them. Your nukes will help you level faster, but really only for the first few levels after 40, then you get to the point where your really not doing all that much damage with them. So switch to a fighters weapon and have at it. You will find that with both you and your summons whacking on the mobs plus the DOT you get from the Aqua Cubic, you will be killing and leveling fast. Our ES, is a friend from work, he uses dual Kats and he is telling me that he's getting great xp and kill speed on Aligator Island in the mid 40's.
The only real downside of the class is the cost. All of your skills are D & C Grade crystal based. But you can make up for that. Then there a few nerfs that we've been hit with that sort of suck. It wouldn't be fair for me not to tell you about these things if your thinking of going that way. The most recent nerf is them hitting our attack power in pvp. Also, they made a change so that when someone targets your summons, they get to see his health and level as if he was a mob. There are some other small changes but these are by far the worst. Oops! Almost forgot, you can't do the sin-eater quest, it's a summons and you can't have 2 summons up at the same time. So if you PK and need to do the quest, you will need a friend or 2 to help you out. At this time your summons can't received Overlord Buffs or clan hall buffs. They are working on the OL buff problem. It will get BD/SWS/WC buffs though. Then of course there are the new skills added in C5, Erase and Betray. Nasty, but fun. Necros will hate us as they don't get Betray and we do. We will all hate the Support Mystics classes as they get Erase!
The main thing I can tell you is that we love our summoners and have a great time playing them. So, which ever class you decide to go with, good luck and I hope it's ES!
Im pretty sure Im going ES. Im having alot of fun with my wizard now only in his 20's. The mp regen is terrible and really do we need more nukers out there? lol. Im set on summoner. Now I just need to get to 40. Cant wait. Finally I think I found a class I can stick to. Oh one more question though. You say your friend levels fast. So using the cubics and them taking xp isnt to bad then?
and lol Elro. Thanks for reminding me of charlie! I said hello to you in Gludio yesterday when I was on my Wizard. Some reason I have a feeling every time you port into a town someone says hello to you.
Bows are a huge adena sink and not worth the cost at all. You'll miss a lot and do subpar damage at best, while blowing through far too many 'shots in the process.
Summoners do not get parties, they are parties. You'll likely not find many people willing to go out of their way to take you into their party, so be prepared to find yourself some friends who don't mind you being the tank and healer of a small group.
Nuker groups died with C4. Don't expect anyone to want you using Seraphim unless it's for PvP/Raiding. Now, if you can find some other ES 'round your level, you can have some uber AoE parties; but that's a topic for another time.
I've never found the cubics to be worth the cost at all. If you don't box a buffer-type and want to solo, you'd likely stick to 1x HP mobs. They'll die before Aqua really has a chance to do much, if it lands at all.
Well, remember that the cubics don't take xp, just the summons and Merrow only takes 10%. It's true that if your doing 1x mobs then the Aqua cubic isn't worth the cost, that cubic really is for party use or when your up against 2-4x mobs. Our ES reports that he does see a difference when using it, the mobs are going down faster and he is getting better xp over time than without it. This doesn't really show up until you look at your over all xp per buff round, then you see the difference. He reports that as of last night he was moving 20% per buff round solo at level 46 on Aligator Island. That's really not to bad.
This is the edit.
And yes, aya is quite correct, we are parties, this is the main reason that we do well soloing. When all 3 of us get together, it's like having a 6 person party. Then when we go to an area where a 3 person party gets good xp, we kill like crazy cause there's 6 of us! or we go to a place where normally 6 people might go and then we get crazy xp cause there's really only 3 of us!
20% per buff round is nice. I was doing 8-10% on my 46 abyss walker solo. Im thinking of a set up with light armor and duals. As far as a buffer and nuker friends goes. I have that covered. There are 3 of us right now that rerolled together. Been fun so far!
You most definately should use light armor, especially when you get to B grade. BW light is the way to go. I have seen summoners in this forum that have reached +7x state that you can stay in BW Light all the way to S-grade. As for the duals, good choice. You may even want to get a set that increases your attack speed, as there are those that will tell you that the more often you hit, the more often the cubics will fire.
Also, please be aware. I did not report this in my earlier post. The ES in our clan does have a lvl 60 SE, so his ES has pretty good buffs, though not as good as it would if they were PP buffs, like haste!. I'm sure that has some effect on his over all XP per buff round. But you get some pretty good self buffs for your summons, so it's not all bad. He tells me that he has very seldom had to heal the ES from the SE, so I guess he's doing alright.
Some of the spellbooks can be a bit of a pain to get.
Your level 40 summons book (unicorn Merrow) drops in the second floor of Cruma tower, mob named Liangma. Take friends with you when you go there for it, second floor cruma can be nasty. Another of your spellbooks (summon Aqua Cubic) drops in the beehive, from the Hatu Windsus mob there. There are also Servitor buff spellbooks that drop from the Liele and the Fline Elder in EV. ALso, in EV if I remember correctly, the Summon Life cubic spellbook drops from the Satry. I've found that many mobs that drop one of our books, drop all 3 for the 3 classes. The Mass Summon Aqua Cubic Spellbook drops from the Gigant Raider in Heretics Catacomb and Pilgrims Necropolis. I know that one cause that's where I got my mass summon spellbook, and this mobs drops all 3 of them.
oh, and as a warning, your lvl 56 summon (Seriphin? for an ES, Queen for me, of course) spellbook drops from a level 40 mob. so if you wait until you need it to go hunting for it, you can't actually get it to drop, as the mob will be a nice shade of dark blue.
b'lieve it was a mob near alligator island that dropped it, not sure what it was atm.
Rather than light, I'd go with robes. With Beast Soulshots, you pretty much won't pull from the servitor. So if you're not going to be getting hit, you may as well get yourself a good MP pool for what things turn south. This holds especially true if you don't box a buffer.
Far as buffs go, Prophets are pretty much useless to summoners unless you just really, really want 'zerk. ES already get Shield, Empower, Haste, and Magic Barrier. With the SE you get VR and Recharge (quite useful if you use Merrow all the time).
(It's always funny to see a Prophet run up, haste a servitor, and then go "Why isn't it attacking any faster??")
Not a bad idea really. I suppose it depends on your play style. I still have too much Bladedancer in me to just let the servitor do all the work. So I get in there and whack on the mobs too. It's true that I don't pull aggro very often so I don't take a lot of damage, but when I do it's nice having the extra Pdef from the light armor. I do like the bonus's from the light armor, but for C grade you might be better off in robes for the MP. I even used an acumen weapon (it was handy, already had it) to help cast the heals faster. I switched to a +7 Damascus w/focus when I hit B grade though.
He's right about the buffs to, unless you don't have the spellbook, the PP's haste isn't going to be any better than the one you get for the servitor once you get to level 48? I think? Others might disagree but I do find that the other buffs like Focus and Deathwhisper help, and I do like the BTB from the PP. My Kai had a lot of extra hp for when I had one of those "Oh Crap!" moments.
Also, the Summon Unicorn Merrow book drops from the Farhite (lvl 39) on Aligator Island. I just remembered that. That's why my friend was out there in the first place, and he was almost to high level when he first went out there. The mobs were light blue for him and it took a while for the book to drop.
I'd just like to add that partying with a summoner can be a very enjoyable experience, but usually it'll be friends who'll agree to it. I think more people need to give them a chance in parties -- assuming you don't prefer soloing, which summoners are known for. Personally my dagger and my friend's Warlock make a great team with a SE out of party, although even without a buffer we still do well. Kai is a powerful little bugger and Binding Cubic is awesome when tackling 4x mobs.