PSA: Enmity And You

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I've noticed a lot of the newer Summoners (and other pet jobs) I play with these days simply don't understand the basics of enmity management. This is kind of a big deal for Summoners more so than any other jobs, and isn't really covered in either of the Summoner's Guides, so I decided to make a quick summary of what you, as a Summoner, need to know about enmity.

CE vs VE

There are 2 kinds of enmity in this game. Volatile enmity (VE) is enmity that naturally decays over time. Most things a SMN does, such as Blood Pacts and Apogee, fall under this category. That's why you'll notice that using Apogee sometimes causes the monster to glance at you but then immediately lose interest again. In addition to VE, some things add cumulative enmity (CE) which only decreases when you take damage. Things like curing or dealing damage generate CE in addition to VE, and that enmity will never go away until you take a certain amount of damage.

Avatars, unfortunately, generate much less enmity than players. This is why you can drop a 60k Flaming Crush and have a melee pull hate away with a few melee swings doing less than 1/10th of the damage. Compounding this fact is that we sometimes have to resummon a fresh avatar, which will of course have no enmity, and we need this avatar to be able to pull hate off us quickly. This means it's absolutely crucial for a SMN to keep enmity values as close to zero as possible.

Preventing enmity gain

Here's the meat of the post. There's a single tip that will save you endless troubles in your resummoning. Spells or abilities which target a player that is more than about 33~35 yalms from the enemy will not generate enmity. (The range varies slightly, I think technically it's 30 yalms plus the radius of the enemy's hitbox. For small enemies you may not generate enmity at 31 yalms, but for larger enemies you will. That's why I add a few yalms and make it 33 minimum.)

So say for example you're resummoning and you take a hit while waiting for your avatar to take hate away from you again. If you cure yourself immediately, you're just going to pull hate off your avatar and get hit again, beginning an endless cycle of curing yourself, pulling hate, taking damage, losing hate, and repeat. All you have to do is wait for your avatar to get hate, then run away past about 33 yalms before curing yourself. Now curing will generate no enmity and resummoning will be vastly easier. This also helps in party play with other pet jobs, because it helps you keep the target still rather than having it chase the party members around throughout the fight.

Similarly this applies to other people. For example if you're doing a SMN burn and have a COR doing pet rolls for you, if the COR does rolls on you guys and even one of the SMN is within hate range of the target, the CORs rolls will be generating enmity but if everyone the rolls hit is outside hate range, then the COR will generate no enmity either.

There's a caveat to this trick: The enmity is generated when the action is taken. For job abilities including Blood Pacts, this happens the moment you activate the ability. For spells however, this happens when you finish casting the spell. This is especially important when resummoning. If your avatar is the only thing tanking and you need to resummon it, being 33 yalms away isn't enough because the moment your avatar dies, the enemy will start moving towards you. By the time you finish your summon, the enemy will be close to you, and the summon spell itself will generate enmity and make it harder for the avatar to pull hate. Therefore when you're solo and resummoning, it's usually best to run at least 45-50 yalms away. Perhaps even further if you lack fast cast gear. The important thing is to finish your cast before the enemy gets within 33 yalms.

If you do things right, a fresh avatar with zero enmity should be able to take hate from you with a melee attack even if it misses. Those of you who were summoning back in the days of Carby-kiting bombs & snolls around will know this all too well, but it's a lesson newer SMNs aren't forced to learn anymore.

*Mumble mumble* Back in my day, you had to Carby-kite snolls back and forth through malms of snow to hit Lv60, and it was uphill both ways! You'd get 300 experience per kill and you liked it!

AOE Blood Pacts

This one is more commonly known, but I still wanted to cover it since it's relevant to the topic. Using a "Blood Pact" job ability generates a tiny bit of enmity on the target of the BP. However, the avatar's ability itself generates no enmity towards the SMN. This key distinction makes it possible to do some interesting things.

For example, let's say you're fighting a crab with Ramuh, and you aggro a second crab on accident and it's beating you up. You adjust your position so that crab #2 is next to crab #1, and you target crab #1 with a Shock Squall. The Shock Squall hits both crabs, generating enmity for Ramuh on both of them. However, since you targeted crab #1, your enmity on crab #2 does not increase. At this point in time, it's no different from if some other player had taken action on a crab that aggroed you. Ramuh can die or be released, and crab #1 will come after you but crab #2 will not come looking for you. It will return to a non-aggro state because you never took action against it to generate enmity. Only Ramuh did, and he's gone now. At this point crab #2 will either disappear, or after a few seconds (5 seconds?) it'll return to a state where it can aggro things again.

This trick can be used in other ways as well. It can be used to de-aggro things that have aggro on other people, or even just safely crowd control large numbers of enemies without worrying about them all trying to eat you if they manage to kill your avatar. This makes SMN very effective at getting rid of links and adds. The only limitation of course, is that no matter what, you have to actually directly target one of them with the BP, and you will generate enmity on that one target. So you can never get rid of everything this way, but you can get rid of all but 1 enemy.


So remember kids, stay out of harm's way and you'll be on the path to victory!

Nice post Perg. If 33 is an important distance then is the gaes fete battlefield size reduction a significant nerf to summoner? Will you risk getting kicked out of the battlefield to stand at 33 to resummon your avatar?

Yeah Hoshi it's possible, I haven't actually tried it since the update. However, I'm thinking the battlefield is 30 yalm radius now, not 30 yalm diameter, is that correct? If so it still leaves plenty of space as long as you move the NM when you pop it, and keep it away from the center.

It's not far enough to safely resummon without the summon spell generating hate (unless you get it at the very edge each time), but it is far enough to let you do hate-free cures which is the important thing. You can take a hit or two while resummoning, then hate-free cure it back up once you're at a safe distance.

That's how I did the final battle in RoV. The arena isn't very big and my trusts died pretty quickly. I'm not sure you can get 30 yalms from where he starts out at, but if you move him to one side and run to the other, I think you end up about 35-40 yalms away.

Yeah I think it's a 30 radius although I haven't had a chance to do any gaes fete since the update.

Afaik it's 25 yalms and I don't think the enemy's size matters.

Not quite accurate. CE is also reduced by being enfeebled(whether the effect actually lands or not)(-80 CE) and when Utsusemi shadows are lost(-25 per shadow.)

There are also partial and full enmity resets, JAs that transfer, or reduce enmity, etc which can reduce CE.
I have some doubts about avatars having different base enmity generation values than players. Certainly I've never seen any solid testing on such. But, admittedly, I haven't made a study of pet enmity.

I don't particularly doubt that your above example can occur. I just don't think it would happen for the reason you're attributing it to.

A missed melee attack generates no enmity. It will place you on the enmity list, and counts as an action though.

However this can still work. When any two entities have exactly tied CE and VE, the monster will focus on the one that acted most recently.

So if the Summoner had 0/0 CE/VE then when the avatar took a swing at the mob, and missed, it would still take hate.

This would certainly emphasize the importance of keeping low CE. <,<

Also, as Papesse said, the enmity range is 25 yalms. Though I admit I've never tested if monster size caused variance.

Yeah missed attacks only pull hate if you have zero enmity, but it's not hard to have that on SMN because like I said pretty much everything we do is VE only. The only reason a SMN would have CE generally is from Cure which should only be cast outside hate range.

As for the avatar hate generation thing, I just did some testing myself. (Thanks to the Rainbow Bear for helping me test!)

PLD pulled apex mob with Banish for 18 damage. Garuda used Wind Blade for 4387. Mob hit Garuda once for 251 dmg and it turned back to the PLD. I waited 30 secs (PLD still hasn't done anything but a single Banish) and did Apogee > Wind Blade 8611 > Wind Blade 8295 and again, it hit Garuda just once before turning back to the PLD. That's 21293 total damage dealt and it was barely enough to overcome the first action enmity bonus from the PLD's 18 damage Banish1.

Physical BP seem to generate slightly better hate than magical BP. We did same test on a fresh mob. PLD cast Banish, Garuda does Pred Claws for 12868. This time the crab hit her 6 times before she lost hate. The PLD cast Cure1 for 60hp, then went to cast Cure2 but got hate back before he cast it. Garuda took a total of 655 damage before losing hate to a first-action Banish1 and a Cure1.

Did a second Pred Claws for 11580, and it pulled hate for 5 hits this time (last two were crits, 889 damage taken total before losing hate).

I'd imagine the magical bps are classed as elemental weaponskills which only generate hate based on the base damage before MAB and tp multipliers and possibly BPD+. So Garuda would have gained as much enmity as a 2kish predator claws.

Going to address this part first. *And I see a got beaten to it cause I take too long to post, but I typed it, so I'm still gonna say it.

An interesting, and probably not well known fact about player used magical WS.

The enmity gain from a magical ws uses the WS's "Base damage" to calculate the enmity gain. Base in this case meaning the damage before dSTAT, MAB,Weather,Affinity, etc.

So when using a magical WS souped up by MAB, etc you get a lot less enmity than the damage dealt would appear to indicate.

It's quite possible that the same mechanic applies to avatar magical(and the magic half of hybird) WS.

This exercise has largely managed to emphasize how much damage generated enmity sucks now. Which it does.

Here's the thing. Damage enmity has had multiple nerfs now and that change is even more apparent on high level mobs.

In case you weren't aware, the enmity generated by damage is based on the damage dealt, multiplied by modifiers for CE and VE. These modifiers are determined by the mobs level. The higher the lever, the lower the modifiers gets, and the less enmity you produce per point of damage.

As an anecdotal example, I've held hate off a 99,999 MB on WoC, having done nothing but flash the thing. <,<

Normally, this is the part where I'd get into the math, and go through the numbers for your test scenario. But unfortunately there's a rather vital number missing. To my knowledge no one has retested the damage enmity modifiers since the last nerf. So I can't calculate the enmity gain from those bloodpacts.

Since the enmity values for both player and avatar damage enmity are currently incalculable, to compare the two you'd need to have similar damage player control sample.

Probably the simplest test would be to have both an avatar and a player deal similar amounts of damage to the same mob at the same time, and see who gets hate. Unless you'd rather try to find the current dmg enmity modifier. Note that a third party would need to pull the mob, and enmity altering gear on the part of the damaging player would need to be avoided.(much the sam for the SMN really, regarding pet enmity +/-) Would probably also avoid magical/hybrid bloodpacts. Possibly have the avatar deal slightly more damage, that way if the player has hate, you can tell something is off instantly.(reduces issues caused by taking damage and losing CE. The faster the test, the easier it all is.) If multiple tests are performed across different mobs, be certain to get monsters of the same level.

Simple right? <,<;; Not exactly easy to do though. I'm well aware that controlled enmity tests on high level mobs are a ***

Hmm that's a really insightful post, thanks Martel, I'll try to think about how to do some more detailed testing like you mentioned.

Base damage is pretty low on merit BPs, I believe my overall multiplier from BPD & MAB is almost 8.0 so the base damage on those 8k Wind Blades was probably barely over 1k and even that is after dSTAT/TP.

Update: I was playing in WoE a bit due to the campaign, and I think Martel is right. Avatars generate the same enmity as players. It was the lack of enmity from magic BPs that threw me off. Also, I believe Flaming Crush counts in this category and doesn't generate proper enmity either, but purely physical BPs seem correct.

I was doing conflux 4 with a bunch of people and using purely physical BPs (Volt Strike) and Ramuh was tanking basically fulltime over 8-12 other people and their trusts. It was quite satisfying. :)

I've actually been a little curious about the enmity of Sanguine Blade. Sometimes while an SCH is doing his thing, I'm limited to non-interfering WS's and the self heal is nice.

My curiosity was "Do I get the enmity for the damage and the heal?", but it's not something I'm really concerned about enough to test.

But reading what you wrote here, I see that the already-reduced damage enmity is further gimped by base numbers.

As for damage's hate generation, you can see it in any content where healers are nice to have around. I helped a friend farm plans in Salvage yesterday and he'd aoe ws (Spinning Attack) and negligible healing would pull hate.

It's nice that tanking is functional again (vs Aug 13 when I quit), but damage's enmity really really sucks. makes super-casual mobs kinda suck.

Pretty sure Cata, SB, etc only gain enmity based on damage dealt. Don't have a source on hand, but I believe that's something that was tested previously and/or I looked into personally at some point.

Considering that Kaeko tested the drain spell as only yielding damage enmity, i doubt that sanguine gets credited for the recovered hp enmity-wise.

And man did that suck to type on a tablet.

The player who commits the first action on a Mob gets a very large enmity boost, I believe it's something like 700 though can't be sure. This is why it's important for people to let the tank "gate hate" first, and why it's important for the tank to immediately do an action of the NM when it's poped.

It's 200 ce.