A Summoner's Gear Guide

Yes, it's fine and more than quick enough. BPs take a while to go off because the pet is doing the animation to get ready to do the thing.

Source: I've been using this style of macro for SMN for years.

New Summoner Augments on the Bravery set

Bravery
M.acc+30 (all pieces)
PEt: Acc/M.Acc+30 (all pieces)

Head: MAB+28, BPD+10
Body: MAB+32, BPD+12
Hands: MAB+30, BPD+11
Legs: MAB+28, BPD+10
Feet: MAB+30, BPD+11

Hands look fantastic. They should actually dethrone Merlinic for physical multi-hit pacts (unless Nirvana AM3 is up) although they're lacking in pet:attack which is unfortunate.

They should roughly match a Merlinic with 10% augment starting at around 8% BPD if you use Nirvana/Opashoro, and 10% if you use Gridarvor.

Body also looks promising. Should easily beat Apogee+1 for magic BPs. Whether it beats Convoker for Flaming Crush, I'm unsure. I'm going to guess it does not, but the pet:crit on the base piece could surprise me.

Those are the pieces that jump out at me damage-wise.

list just seems wrong. head/legs <-> hands/feet augments need to swap most likely. don't know why the dats have them out of order, but not like they haven't been listed out of order before.

I believe the mab is player and not pet.

What are people using for their VS and FC sets these days with Nirvana AM3 up?

Flaming crush doesnt benefit much from double attack. The prime staff is better. Fc should get its own set with slight gear differences

Volt strike, hysteric assault and predator claws are da/ftp.

The MAB is for the player, not the pet, so I don't think Merlinic Hands have been topped yet. I do wonder of the body can urk out a lead for multihit. The only other interesting piece are the legs. Since the NQ have favor level +1 this could be an easier way for people to hit 20 seconds without having to break the bank on Baayami.

I recall somewhere that SE said the cap on the reduction is 20 seconds, but I can't find it explicitly stated. Does anyone have it?

Opashoro Stage 5 testing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcQl5KK6tjg

I'd be pretty surprised if you actually need a wait 1 here

Um...you do. That's how equipsets work.

What I mean is, if you injected chunks directly and did equipset -> action (BP) -> equipset and they were all sent in the same packet, you'd be wearing your BP damage gear when the BP went off. The `wait 1` forces the second equip command to be sent in the next packet, but if SE just sent the chunks in the order they were generated then it wouldn't need to be delayed.

I mean, sure, I guess in a different game that would be fine. If you're using gearswap you probably don't need the wait at all, and your lua probably automatically sends all these commands as a single packet. I imagine a gearswap macro for a BP is just one line:
/pet "flaming crush" <t>

I don't really understand the value of saying that though, since the guy asking said:

I went to test it out and didn't realize that equipset locked you out of generating another equipset command for two packets.

Wrong.
Me and some other users (not all, alas) have been experiencing issues with GS and SMN for the longest time.
I don't remember the exact source of the problem (it's here in the thread somewhere) but the result is that BP action were being executed in the wrong set.
If I recall it was a matter of idle gear being processed a bit too early and as a consequence BP firing out with Idle gear instead of pet midcast.
This only happened "sometimes", but still was extremely undesireable.

I don't know how other people solved this issue, which I know is not present if you use in-game equipsets functions.

Personally I initially solved it by removing the "return to idle" part in aftercast and related, so that if a pet action was performed, the Aftercast was completely ignored.
(then I bound a "return to idle" command to a hotkey/macro).
After a long time with this solution and never experiencing any issue, I slghtly modified with a custom return to idle that happens automatically, but delayed by a couple of seconds compared to what would happen in the "regular" aftercast.

Haven't played SMN much since then but, to date, didn't experience the "BP firing in idle gear" issue again.

Ok, so what does your macro for flaming crush look like then?

This is an issue with how userfiles are written, not with how macros are done. The crux of the matter here is that there's TWO separate actions taking place: your JA usage of the Blood Pact, and after 75 delay the Avatar doing its thing. Both of these things have a midcast and an aftercast!

So:
Player presses macro -> precast is equipped -> JA executes -> AFTERCAST IS EQUIPPED -> avatar initiates action -> pet_midcast is triggered -> avatar ends action -> pet_aftercast is triggered

That's the entire issue.

The most reliable way to fix this is to do what you did: make sure that your gearswap userfile does not equip any gear in the regular aftercast if the action was a blood pact, AND THEN do the "regular" aftercast stuff in the pet_aftercast() event instead.

This has the unfortunate side effect of leaving you in blood pact gear if your avatar is unable to conclude the action (stunned paralized dead...), so a button to put your Idle gear back on manually is a good idea.

No logic based on timing or delay is needed, really.

/equipset 41 (precast smn BP delay gear)
/pet "Flaming Crush" <stnpc> <wait 1>
/equipset 51 <wait 4> (Hybrid set)
/equipset 47 (idle/refresh)

I have gearswap issues in Omen type zones I so I tend to just disable gearswap when I have issues and use equipsets.

Absolutely, but in my case (and several other people in my LS back then) the source of the issue was NOT player's aftercast.

Can read it the three pages thread here, dated like what, 2015?
I didn't fix it, but the way my GS logic was behaving, player aftercast was being ignored regardless if the action was a BP, so that wasn't the cause of my BPs being fired off with the wrong set.

I remember in another thread (which I couldn't find) Byrth suggested to change the millisecond timer of a specific value in gearswap, manually. That did nothing to me and the others.

I simply ignored the issue for years because I wasn't playing SMN enough for me to bother (lol, I know, shame on me). I know /equipset weren't producing this issue, and a mixed Lua (handling player actions though GS and pet actions through equipsets) was working like a charm, iir Perg was using a similar solution back then.

I then came back to the issue in like ~2018 where I simply disabled pet aftercast, with my "new" logic of the cycle stopping at pet midcast (I would return to idle manually with a hotkey/macro).
Can read some details/discussions/tests in the 2 pages here.

Since then I never had any issue but recently, like last year? I went to SMN again to update a few things with Nirvana and whatnot and simply "automated" my return-to-idle hotkey/macro with a coroutine.
Again, haven't experienced the issue ever again. Now I get stuck in pet midcast like for a few seconds more than I should, but no manual action is required and I return to the intended set that the pet aftercast would get me to.
Of course there are exceptions for Astral Conduit, different logic when that buff is up.


All of this to say what? Well, that things SHOULD work in theory like you said Lili, but in reality they were not, for whatever reason (some hypothesys made by Thorny and Comeatmebro in the second thread made a lot of sense to me though).
Now I don't know if this "issue" was solved by Gearswap already from 2018 until today, maybe? I haven't tested so I wouldn't know.

For who's wondering on what is the "issue" I mentioned, described in the other two threads.
Sometimes BPs were being fired off in the WRONG set. Not the Pet BP one but another.
Could easily notice that with the damage being very off from your average, too big of a difference for being a miss, a resist and whatnot.

So yeah, it wasn't happening every single time but a minority.
Yet, while a minority, it was way too common for people not to notice or not to bother.
I mean I do get "casting in wrong set" on other jobs as well occasionally, especially when there is a lot of lag, packets are getting lost. I mean nothing you can do about it, right? But those are extremely rare situations.
The one with SMN was still rare, but way more common and, appearently, not simply derived from extreme lag.

That sounds like a setup issue based on that descriptor Ie: youre doing volt strike but its using your flaming crush set

Turn on debugmode and see what its doing

I did, back then, and found exactely what was happening.
Now I don't remember anymore lol.
I *think* the pet_aftercast set was sometimes being equipped too early, and as a consequence the pet BP was shot with that set.
But I could be wrong hey, don't remember anymore.
It's still here on the FFXIAH history, probably in one of those two threads I mentioned.

Oh and btw it wasn't an issue specifically with my lua because I built it from zero and multiple people with different luas were having the same issue.

I think I remember that discussion Sechs, and I believe it was lag-related if I'm remembering the right thing.

I believe what was happening is that it was going to aftercast after the BP JA (so after using your BP recast set), and your client wasn't receiving the "pet readying XYZ" packet fast enough to trigger the swap into pet_midcast before the BP executes. So it was still in your aftercast when it went off.

I ended up trying to solve this in my own Lua by making a toggle for high-lag situations where instead of waiting for the packet that says the pet is readying the move, it just waits 2/3 of a second from issuing the BP command and then swaps into the pet_midcast set. It also removed the swap to aftercast after initiating the BP, so it just stayed in BP recast set for about 2/3 of a second and then swapped to the pet_midcast set with nothing in between. I haven't had cause to use it much, but supposedly it helped people who were having that problem. (Again, assuming that's the same problem.)

My finding on Stage 5 Opashoro using Diabolos Netherblast for accurate damage readings.

Nirvana: 13454 / 14791
Griovolr: 14610 / 16245
Opashoro: 14204 / 15619
Opashoro w/AM3: 17229 / 18944

Netherblast was always giving 2 different numbers per weapon, possibly crits and non-crits.

Nirvana being the weakest option for Magical Bloodpacts, followed by Opashoro(no AM), Griovolr (+10 BPD, +20 petMAB) takes the high spot usually but with Opashoro(AM3) it beats Griovolr by 16.6%

I'm curious which would win a Flaming Crush competition between Nirvana(AM3) and Opashoro(AM3)

In my opinion it's a shame Opashoro didnt give the avatar any MAB outside of the Aftermath, after all BLM and SCH benefit from the +80 MAB at stage 5 but none of it was added for the pet. Opashoro could have then easily replaced Griovolr for best pet nukes on SMN.

opa wins.

There's another clarification that needs to be made: pet_midcast is not, and really cannot be, a reliable event to equip gear in. This is because it's a "reactive" event: it fires off the server telling the client that the pet has initiated the action, and there's really no guarantee the equipset packet will arrive in time in that event.

Everything I stated in my post still stands, with the addition that, for maximum guarantee, you want to equip gear in the normal midcast event, and ignore pet_midcast entirely, only using pet_aftercast to return to idle gear.

I tested this very thoroughly back when I was on smn a lot, and I have never had a wrong BP set unless a) i had a buff/debuff event firing off between the pact JA and the avatar activating, which is another issue entirely and common to other thing, or b) heavy packet drop situations making the pet_aftercast never triggering (tho packetflow mostly resolved that, for me).

Yeah it's quirky but gearswaps for pet jobs for the most part very much are.

I'm looking to upgrade my Physical BP set, but it feels a little lacking and I am wondering what easy upgrades I can make are right now. I'm working on my Nirvana right now, but here is what I got:


Would the Physical Apogee feet be better than a good Aug Helios piece?