Jadeite Summoning Stone

Took a trip to the deep and saw vendor selling Jadeite Summoning Stones... Is this actually useful ?

It's as useful as the rest of the stones.

Gaki's are the only useful ones.

or siege turtle...
the siege turtle can unleash all hell in dungeons heavily populated by ranged enemies

Some of the summoning stones are definitely worth using. I wouldn't say they are vital or anything, but they are a little more useful in general than minions or pets, except for the fact that you can only have 1 at a time.

Some of the more useful are:
Siege Turtles
Juggernaught (good for caster teams anyway)
Oni
Dream Rider
Most of the Celstials in my experience
Gaki (WTB pants for it though)
White Rabbit (hard to get)
Black Beast of Aaaaarrrrrrggghhh (also hard to get)

Still, the hour long summoning sickness tends to make these stones not great. It would have been nicer if they got rid of the summoning sickness and just kept the one at a time rule. Doesn't seem like that would be OP that way, but not my call.

Gaki is nice for support healing, but I find it strips my splinter weapon a bit more than I'd like.

I really like the Celestials. Looking forward to stocking up another couple dozen.

Think of summoning stones as a free skill slot. Just remember you have no control over them. I agree to tone down the summoning sickness.

Tend to agree about the summoning sickness.
Not a problem with more than one player as they can keep one summon up all the time.

Solo player has one an hour seems a little unfair as they are a great way of giving you an edge when you mess up or if a player disconnects mid mission.

Summoning stones are not essential but they add a little fun.

Jadeite SS gives you a siege turtle, which is one of the great ones.

I'd love to hear somebody's reasoning for Oni being a useful summon. I rolled one out of a mysterious stone in FoW the other night in the middle of the forest and it didn't survive one encounter.

Don't forget the merchant summoning stone. Always great for those times when you get loaded down with a ton of crap to sell during a dungeon/long set of vanquishing.

The Black Beast is...well, a beast. I got that during a failed UW attempt (five of us, and half the group not with the right builds and no healers...don't ask. It was fun, though, and we still cleared most of it with few problems), and we were cracking up over how the damn Black Beast tanked and killed pretty much everything on the mountains while we ran.

Siege Turtle is awesome in terms of power, but I tend to get annoyed at how big it is, I have to zoom all the way out to be able to really see what's going on because it blocks so much of the screen.

The Frosty Summoning Stone doesn't get enough respect.
It can keep up daze, which is probably (one of) the most useful condition(s), on a whole bunch of enemies for a long time.

Go Snowman!

Oni comes with the following abilities:

2 self heals (neither are great), 100% chance to double strike in melee, causes bleeding (good for teams requiring a condition...like discord for example), a KD skill, and a snare (short duration though). That's a lot of stuff for one summons. What it definitely lacks is blocking, but otherwise has a nice array of abilities. When I've used summoning stones in HM, the oni is one of the ones that tends to survive a bit longer than average... just my experience though. I doubt I would go to any special trouble to get an oni stone... but since they come from mysterious stones and you get them from the deep, they're not so hard to get. I personally would much rather see an oni come out of a mysterious stone than a grentch or a golem, etc.

One more I forgot to mention is the Smoke Phantom... those have some nice damage too, but its still elemental damage (which means it sucks in HM). And of course the merchants are useful, just not in combat

I'll have to give my vote to the Merchant Summoning Stone. Most awesome summon ever!!!!!!

The merchant summoning stone is the only one i pay attention to have when i'm going to do caravan vanquishes/dungeons. I rarely use the others so i can't say..

I dunno.... The fact that he follows you around means he'll often get involved in combat anyway. He can be quite the badass at times.

Fixed it for ya!

*LOL* True, true. When I first started using him, I'd freak out. "Dammit, Merchant, stop fighting everything!" But the little bugger can actually live through some abuse.

I'd like the merchant summons better if, when he died, he dropped one of everything he normally sells