The 6th Ministry's Secret: A Summoner's Guide (v2)

Cheers!

Question, since you can now achieve the 670+4 tier of avatar's favor, can someone show me what that actually looks like gear wise? Do you have to have Baayami +1s to hit it?

one piece of baayami +1 or stikini +1

You say or, but I'm having a hard time finding a set that doesn't need both. Can you show me?

I already asked before and Frod answered me "yes" but asking again just to be sure.
For the 575 skill favor tier, is having exactely 575 skill enough or do you need 576 and onward?

staff +15
cape +5

ItemSet 351294
IIRC, this puts you at 670 exactly w/skill merits and job master. swapping stik+1 for a baayami +1 puts you at 673.

edit: puts me at 671

Skill merits are what I was missing...

Another question. Is Dex+8, Attack +16, and Double Attack +4 better on Merlinic hands than BPD+9, Str+7, Attack +28? I'm trying to replace the latter but I'm not sure if the former is good enough.

lolno.
one point of Double attack is worth like .5% increase in damage on certain physical pacts.

one point of BPD is worth like .35%.


There are calculators in this thread that will help decide, but in your case it's pretty clear, the 9 BPD piece is far superior.

Ah, okay, so I should give up on the double attack then, since at best it would only add up to like... 8 BPD. Thanks.

vs

So your saying the apogee should pull ahead for physicals. But the other four pieces of gear should be helios with those augments if your going for capped damage, where accuracy is not an issue.

Right, Perfect Helios beats apogee in some slots. Offhand those slots are head, feet, and body. it doesn't beat apogee legs, i don't think it beats them even without set bonus. And this is only for 3 hit pacts that i know of, according to that calculator, so only predator claws, volt strike and chaotic strike.

Exact values from before~~~~

Something else to consider is that while you add BP, each incremental +BP add becomes less valuable, while the more BP you have makes Double Attack more valuable. This is important with builds over 200 BP, but relatively small amounts of Double Attack

So I came up with this for my final set, Still missing the Incarnation Sash.

ItemSet 363294

All Helios: 7BP, 30ATK and 8DA
Summoner's Collar +2: 25/25
Apogee Slacks +1: Path D
Nirvana 119: 15/15
Job Points: 2100
Cape 30Acc/R.Acc and 20Atk/R/Atk

Set = 43DA, 1274Acc, 1265Atk and 203 BP before food/buffs/aftermath.

I'd also recommend adding those Double Attack sets to Eclipse Bite and Rush as well.

I have a really hard time taking AF+3 body off - so much accuracy you are giving up.

I'm with you on that one. I don't use Helios body, or hands either for that matter. Helios has to offer a clear advantage for me to pick it over other pieces, and in those 2 slots it's just a really marginal upgrade despite ignoring the Pet:Atk and such that you lose. I've always been the type to pick consistency over spike damage, so it's just personal preference really.

My main Volt set (without AM3 up) looks like this:
Helios Band (BPD+7 Pet: Atk+30 DA+8)
Convoker's Doublet +3
Merlinic Dastanas (BPD+9 Pet: STR+10 Atk+24)
Apogee Slacks +1 (D)
Helios Boots (BPD+7 Pet: Acc+28 DA+8)

If I have AM3 up, I change both of the Helios pieces to Apogee+1 path B.

rush is 5 hit, so i suspect the value of a single DA proc is much less than the 3 hit pacts.

Someone else would have to figure out if it's more or less based on 2 hit or 5 hit vs 3.

I just purchased Apogee+1 legs today. What are everyone's thoughts for Flaming Crush. +1 Path D, or the NQ 30 MAB Augs? No other +1s.

is there an a gearswap for smn where it does not change gear while spamming BP on AC? I notice with GS unloaded the total damage is significantly higher than having GS loaded

i have a friend trying to work that into mine, but i also still need to sort out pact gear missing swap in high lag situations for thunderspark.

Personally, I just have lines in my AC macro that lock me in my AC BP set and then another macro that enables swaps again when I'm done. I'm lazy though.

If you don;t know how to write rules etc. in your lua, I suppose you could just add idle/engaged modes that use your BP set for idle/precast/midcast/... everything. and cycle back to normal sets when AC wears.

I did a combination of macros to place me in bpdamage and disable slots along with setting up 2 binds. One bind enables all, and the other enables all but main, sub and ammo. This way, after a AM3/AF/AC, I can still maintain AM3 if doing physical bps.

//gs disable all after equipping a set.... I have a macro setup as

Line 1 /equipset #
Line 2 /console gs disable all

I might be completely off the mark here but I wanted this question answered myself so no better way to get the right answer but to answer it wrong!

Since, I'm not sure exactly how Hybrid Pacts work this math might not be remotely close:

Apogee +1 D: 9.35 BPD w/o STR mod; 12.35 BPD w/ STR mod (15%STR transfered to Flaming Crush)

Apogee A: 16.5 BPD

So, maybe NQ path A?

Damage should be the same either way because you should not be spamming your BP during Conduit. You should be timing every BP so as not to get the JA lockout from trying to use it before it's ready again.

If you're just spamming the BP macro over and over, you'll be lucky to get more than a dozen BPs off. A good SMN can get 18+ consistently (20+ in low-lag situations).

Where is that number coming from? Apogee+1 path D have 21 blood pact damage on them alone, without the set bonus.

I've never been able to figure out which is better for Flaming, between path A or D. I think it's path A, but that's comparing HQ to HQ. If you only have one HQ, I suspect it might be the HQ pair, but I'm not super certain of that.

For Apogee+1(D) I did (21(.35))+(4(.5)) = 9.35. Then I just roughly did 15% of STR mod for ~12.35. My "BPD" is the actual percentage of damage you get from gear BPD + DA + STR mod.

These are the numbers I've seen posted in these forums:
.35 for every 1 BPD
.50 for every DA
.4 for every MAB

Which should lean NQ A but, I'm not sure how STR mod is transferred exactly as I doubt it's a straight 15% of the STR is added to damage %.

Ah I see. Those numbers really aren't very useful when talking about Flaming Crush.

Those numbers were taken from very specific gear sets, and vary quite a bit with different gear and for different BPs. When someone gives the BPD benefit to Volt Strike, you can't apply the same to magic BPs, because you'll likely have more BPD on physical than on magical which skews the comparison. Flaming Crush, nobody knows the formula for that one so it's guesswork.

So for example my current magic BP set has 122 BPD and 348 MAB from equipment. For my current set, 1 MAB ends up adding about 0.18%. 1 BPD will add about 0.45%. Very different from the numbers you're using.

However, if we look at physical BP, my current non-AM3 set has 153 BPD and 29 DA. Thus, 1 BPD will add about 0.39% which is closer to the number you had. 1 DA will add about 0.55%.

Flaming Crush is heavily reliant on the magic hit to do high damage, meaning the comparison should be closer to the magic BP than the physical BP. However, I've long suspected that BPD is particularly effective on Flaming because it increases the damage of the physical hits, which form the base damage of the magic hit, which is then increased again by BPD. Basically I think BPD is double counted for the magic hit. So it's really hard to put specific values on MAB & BPD for Flaming Crush.