Random questions

"Increases the damage done by summoned pets from the magic trees". That implies to me that it applies to the elementals/phoenix etc, but not to pets summoned from a taming necklace - that can't be true, can it? I hope it is, I'd love to make my water elemental a badass.

 

No, that's how it works. Summoned creatures suck next to tamed pets, so this was an attempt to make them better. But, even with the summoned skills trained up, summoned pets still suck, compared to tamed.

 

I also want to point out that having 80 water specialization will double the amount of healing that you receive from your water elemental. It will also make your water elemental nearly immune to fire damage.

 

Would I be correct in thinking that having Provoking Shout and Taunt getting the villains focused on me would increase the frequency of the water ellie's heals since he's not defending himself as much? If not, are there other advantages to taking the enemy focus away from the ellie?

 

Even the phoenix??? I've been looking forward to being able to defeat Riei so I could summon a phoenix for months - does even the phoenix suck compared to tamed pets?

 

I can't say for certain. It might be okay with sun spec. But I would think if they were, you'd see more people with them. Usually it's Nightmares for DPS, or bears/boars for tanks.

You'd probably need to get a tamer to weight in here; I don't really bother with them.

 

Right click on the pet and set it to "passive".

 

In general only the Water Elemental has any advantage of not being the target, so it will heal you. The rest of the elementals would rather take the damage in your place if they get attacked, which is fine.
Taming pets, on the other hand, are arguably the strongest tank in the game (when high level).

 

The Phoenix pet -looks- really cool.
Damage on most of the summons was still pretty underwhelming when I last played - but much better than they used to be. The pet is more like a weak damage-over-time effect on whatever you're fighting, but they take too long to engage, do low damage, and pathing is generally bad. They also sometimes go haywire and pull more mobs that otherwise would not have aggroed. I'm a sun/earth specialist and the earth pet is significantly better than the phoenix in all regards - it does more damage, it has to melee the target so is less likely to fly off in a random direction and pull stuff, and it can take more of a beating. Unless they've done something fundamentally exciting to the Phoenix very recently I'd say its mostly just for looks.

 

I'd just like to say that pets did receive a noticeable buff in the last release or during a patch following it. With specialization, most elementals started doing 120+ hits.

Is it better than tamed pets? No, obviously not, because tamed pets can attack faster, and when you are using your specialization on taming, it's not helping anything else out, compared to the other specs that buff your spells and what not. This was a design choice made by Chris. For those who have stopped using Summons because you found them useless/weak, try them again today, they won't be destroyer levels strong, but they should be better than a month or more ago.

 

This doesn't seem to be the case with the air elemental. I appreciate that they fixed it and it now actually does damage but it's a pretty unremarkable summon.

 

Most of them are.

 

Yeah so far the Earth Elemental is basically the one summons that’s actually useful. Was hoping the changes to wisps (the debuffs) would be good, but they are just still not even remotely useful.... at least for me when I tried a level 81 wisp.

 

Water is good too.

 

If all the elementals did some special effect, they would appeal more to players. Air elemental stunning enemies, for example, would be a great addition.

 

Or casting gust on enemies, especially melee-only enemies like Ebon Cultist Champions.

EDIT: Or/and the Ice Elemental cast Ice Field

 

The earth elemental can stun things sometimes. I’d rather each one can do different things for different circumstances. Like the wisp is actually handy to distract creatures that actually do cast magic damage. Wisps have very high magic resistance.

 

How about Air Elementals giving focus to master

 

Yeah, it would be cool if the air elemental restores focus like the water elemental restores health.

 

Are the five random paintings harder to find online than offline? I swear I found at least 40 total of those by the time I had 7 million XP offline. I now have about 22 million XP online and I have TWO - not two total sets of 5, TWO of the five paintings!

Are there better places to look for the full set of forged paintings online?