So I have all of these servitors now: bears, cougars, reapers, soulless, nightshade, spectral lord. In what scenarios are each of them most effective (solo grinding, solo kartia, group kartia, raid bosses, etc)?
Use demons only. Spectral Lord for melee dps, Soulless for ranged physical AoE, Nightshade for Transfer Pain and tanking (but almost no one uses Nightshade in pve). Kinda like the cougars, reapers and bears trinity (the demons also have similar skills).
Some builds may allow for +10 reapers to be used in pvp, but it's for 99 stacked Wynns.
also if you are using a dual Tanky pet set up, use one Bear, and one nightshade. this way you can use their skills individually instead of at the same time. same applies for melee and nuking, although probably not as much so.
the pets and shades have different stats.
the stat differences are mostly negligible, but there are subtle differences.
i think cute bear has more hp than nightshade.
subtle things like that.
also if you are using a dual Tanky pet set up, use one Bear, and one nightshade. this way you can use their skills individually instead of at the same time. same applies for melee and nuking, although probably not as much so.
the pets and shades have different stats.
the stat differences are mostly negligible, but there are subtle differences.
i think cute bear has more hp than nightshade.
subtle things like that.
cute bear has less HP and a little more DPS but still bad DPS
For the most part you are going to use the ranged Wynn Soulless attacks PVE. I'm not saying don't learn how to use some of the others, simply that this game by necessity makes it faster to level with ranged attacks that hit like a ton of bricks...as opposed to watching the non-ranged summons glide over the same distance to hit a mob like a ton of bricks. Too much time wasted.
I have an 89 Spectral Master and it is awesome!!! The Soulless are ranged attackers so they eat your beast soul shots quickly...luckily we have the skill that allows us to create/summons beast soul shots with r grade crystals and the ability to crystalize r grade stuff to get those crystals. The ones we summon have 0 weight so you can carry hundreds of thousands of them without a weight penalty. If you look at the skills of the summoner you will see that we are primarily magic users while most of our servitors are primarily physical attackers (Reapers have a +22K m.attack with full buffs and wizards harmony) so we tried different buffs on my summoner and servitors. If you get the wizards harmony and have the buffer give your servitors warrior (must click on each respectively to do so) then the summoner hits harder and so do the servitors. If you use Cute Bears or Grim Reapers make sure to have some beast spirit shots as well...it increases their crit rates and generally makes them even more bodacious than normal =)...just talking about it makes me want to go solo some sh2 with my girls...tata
I have an 89 Spectral Master and it is awesome!!! The Soulless are ranged attackers so they eat your beast soul shots quickly...luckily we have the skill that allows us to create/summons beast soul shots with r grade crystals and the ability to crystalize r grade stuff to get those crystals. The ones we summon have 0 weight so you can carry hundreds of thousands of them without a weight penalty. If you look at the skills of the summoner you will see that we are primarily magic users while most of our servitors are primarily physical attackers (Reapers have a +22K m.attack with full buffs and wizards harmony) so we tried different buffs on my summoner and servitors. If you get the wizards harmony and have the buffer give your servitors warrior (must click on each respectively to do so) then the summoner hits harder and so do the servitors. If you use Cute Bears or Grim Reapers make sure to have some beast spirit shots as well...it increases their crit rates and generally makes them even more bodacious than normal =)...just talking about it makes me want to go solo some sh2 with my girls...tata
If you're using Grim Reapers with Wizard Harmony, you're gimping yourself quite a bit compared to using the Physical pets with Warrior Harmony.
In a party, their AoE will outdamage the Reaper's AoE, because MOBs receive a lot of P.Def debuffs.
They also have ridiculous Crit Rate while the Reapers have like almost no crit compared to them, so you're losing a metric ton of white damage in between the AoEs.
What you gain on your summoner from using those buffs/weapons doesn't even began to make up for what you lose on the pets.
The M.Atk on the Reapers is high, but their skill power is not that great so you don't actually gain much. M.Atk also scales poorly so lower levels of P.Atk are equivalent to much higher levels of M.Atk in the amount of damage they add to attacks.
They do more damage but in many cases the disparity isn't really that great, since the Ranged Pets have higher P.Atk and a higher base P.Crit Dmg for being Archer/Bow Damage.
On a single target raid I'd definitely switch because the MOBs last longer. On something like Kartia I typically don't bother since it doesn't make that huge of a difference in kill speed, anyways. Those MOBs barely outlast BR and both pets will cap attack speed with that up, giving the edge to the Ranged Pets (easily) on "Raids" that die really fast.
For raids I meant stuff that generally takes longer than 30 seconds to kill.
Like Istina, Octavis etc.
Not Zellaka/Pelline/Kalios/Spicula.
For anything contested (not in an instance) it doesn't matter. We cycle in boxed Isses for BR. When you have 4+ BRs it doesn't matter that the melee pets have a higher base attack speed.
The difference isn't enough to really matter.
On bosses like Istina and Octavis there are valid reasons for favoring the ranged over melee pets.
Those instance bosses don't matter cause they die fast. It isn't worth the hassle of switching on them, that's the point of what I said.
And like I said, they still do benefit from extra DPS buffs the melee pets don't, and they still have a higher P.Crit power than the melee pets, so judging how good they are based solely on their slower attack speed is a pretty short sighted way to examine the differences. The attack speed is balanced that way because the P.Atk and P.Crit power is higher. If they had the same attack speed as the melee pets, they'd be ridiculously OP.