bel wrote:Siegurt wrote:Fwiw i always combine 1 style play with melee attacks by the pc, it seems like by far the most effective way to play (treating the allies as enhancements of melee damage, rather than trying to tank with them by shoveling them by the bucketload at your opponents, which always feels incredibly ineffective, wasteful and tedious to me)
This is not clear to me. It depends on the character.
For instance, a DESu can play more or less as a pure summoner, especially in the later game. I find that typically I should just let the summons kill the monsters; my turns are best spent moving to favorable terrain, creating more summons, or ordering the existing ones around. Whatever melee damage I manage to inflict is relatively insignificant. For something like a MfSu with polearms, standing behind the summons or alongside them, a hybrid style can work.
It is less about the damage you inflict, then about giving the summons more time to do damage before being destroyed, generally the pc is much tougher than most summons, DE being one of the more fragile examples, but if you have a single target, and enough summons to attack it from the available directions, more summons are just shoveling more MP at something that is already fundamentally dead.
It is definitely possible to play that way (that is why a lot of summon strategy suggestions involve a lot of channeling) it might be safer (i dont usually feel that way, personally, as a summoner who is out of mp and cant do anything without allies is pretty exposed, but i can certainly see the argument for "if they never get the chance to hit me they can never kill me" ) but i guarantee it is 100% less fun to do so.
Plus by directly engaging the enemies with summons as support i can more directly control the motion of the bad guys leading them by the nose past clouds of summons to take a bunch of un retaliated damage. And if my hps ever do drop into the red zone i alway have a cloud of summons to drop behind to give me separation and safety.
It might possibly be that it is slightly less safe, but it is they way it seems most reasonable to play.