A Summoner's Gear Guide

Has anyone bothered to see if the legs give an extra favor tier? If delay goes below 20 seconds? You can do it with the NQ. Otherwise, is there any value in the new limbus armor? Only body looks close, but I'm not sure. Is the +1 to avatar level worth anything?

I can't comment on the bp delay because I don't have this gear, the lowest I've personally gotten is 21 seconds. But what I can say about the level +, I believe the calculation for I-level pets is each level+ after 119 is +10 to all stats, with the amount for acc, evasion, attack, magic acc being roughly double that.

Tested the new Bravery tonban legs from Limbus, the +1 Avatar's Favor does NOT reduce the BP timer down past 20 secs.

I suspected as much, but confirmation saves me from having to buy a pair myself.

I guess the only outstanding question is if the HQ body is somehow a BIS for some kind of damage type.

It shouldn't be. Convoker's Doublet +3 is 16 bp and 45 acc, +4 is still 16 bp with 60 acc. so 12 and 72 won't be better for physical bp's. and for magical, apogee +1 is 8 bp and 35 mab. and using the generally accepted formula that 1 bp = 2.5 mab, then in theory it would have 8+14(35/2.5) vs 12. the set is not good for summoner, especially when you consider that magical BP's already get a boost to magic acc and fully buffed summoners were already hitting capped damage regularly with the very few BP's that are worth using (flaming crush, volt strike, hysteric assault).

This set is for Summoner to Shell Crusher better, so real DD can do their job. Please stick to your lane peasants. /s

I think it can be potentially better than Apogee+1 A for magical BPs.

Apogee+1 : BPD+8, Mab+35
Indomitable: BPD+12, Mab+32, Macc+72, Crit+8%

Now, we all know that 1BPD = 2.5mab is an approximation, but most of the time it works.
The problem here is the set bonus on Apogee. More likely than not, you're gonna use Apogee+1 together with other Apogee pieces.
If it's just 2 total, it's 4BPD, otherwise it's 2BPD.
How do we want to account this number? Split it in 2 between 2 apogee pieces? Tie it to a single one?
Whatever, we can simplify the numbers in this
Indomitable: 62
Apogee+1 (worst scenario): 55
Apogee+1 (beste scenario): 65

Now either way you want to look at it, the difference surely isn't huge. But then there's the Crit and the Macc.
Macc difference alone is massive.
Now I'm not really sure on which content where you use Magical BPs it would even make a difference, but still, it's there.


If you ask me this body option looks like it can be potentially better, but probably not really a huge amount better, in those limited scenarios where it actually can.
Worth all the money, effort and time?
Probably not, or at least not before other pieces for other jobs.

These calculations might make sense if it were Pet: MAB+ but I'm not too sure that's the case... on BG wiki the statistic reports MAB+ without Pet:

I agree...
I don't think this set can bu usefull for smn (except for acc/macc BP set).

0 Pet mab
0 pet atk
0 pet stat

We maybe needs confirmation of the exact augments lines but it seems MAB is for the player

You're right!
I actually went by the very first datamine which was wrong, it's just master mab and not pet mab.
Meeeeh.

Eitherway I'm not sure about you guys but I wasn't particularly interested either lulz

This is known. They stated the cap was -10 decades/years ago when they implemented it.

SMN/SAM can melee pretty well and SMN/SCH can magic burst very funny numbers, you just don't know how to play! /s

idk about the sarcasm tag, I'm pretty sure smn/sch can MB for your choice of either 69 or 420, the funniest numbers

That's what I remembered too but no one could come up with a citation and I had a lot of people telling me they never heard of it.

I've done Acuex magic kills on SMN/SCH in sortie. You MB for a lot more than 69 or 420.
I was doing SMN/SAM for exemplar but now I do SMN/WAR for DA and berserk. Oshala does good dmg for a SMN at least. Usually I'm beating ifrit in DMG or about tied.

This is with BRD COR GEO support not solo

the set seems like a viable flat nuking set for Blm Sch and Geo, but as usual, Smn gets shafted.

Finally got the motivation to recheck Ifrit's DA and the last Favor tiers.

575 skill and Favor +6:
Ifrit: 22% DA

670 skill and Favor +7 (horn, legs, gift):
Carbuncle : 32 HP
Titan : 122 DEF
Garuda : 52 EVA
Shiva : 54 MAB
Ramuh: 25% Crit
Diabolos : 9 MP
Cait Sith: 36 MDB
Siren: 26 SBII

735 skill and Favor +7:
Carbuncle : 33 HP
Ifrit: 23% DA
Titan : 127 DEF
Garuda : 55 EVA
Shiva : 57 MAB
Ramuh: 25% Crit
Diabolos : 9 MP
Cait Sith: 38 MDB
Siren: 27 SBII

Double Attack parse:
[1-hit] 77.86% (3502s), [2-hit] 22.14% (996s)
[1-hit] 76.83% (3004s), [2-hit] 23.17% (906s)

Critical hit rate was tested in Abyssea with Ramuh’s Favor (25), base rate (5), merits (5), dDEX (15), Razed Ruins (30) and crit gear (19-20)
Subtle Blow II was tested with Charm and <pettp>

i dont know why they even bothered putting any BPD on the augs, they dont really replace anything SMN already has access to.

I know, it's a bit confusing. I know people were hoping that the mab applied to the pet as well, and if that were the case, it would be solid, but in the absence of that . . .

I think it's an absolute trash set of gear (both in general, and also specifically for SMN) but...you could argue that while it's not BiS for damaging BPs, it's a *** safer than some of the current gear ahem Helios, Merlinic, Apogee, Enticer ahem so...it's not totally useless, if you're at risk of being hit during your BPs.

It's a very questionable decision, but it could be a great alternative for hybrid/DT sets.

Worth spending hundreds of millions of gil plus months of your life grinding? Hell no. But I think looking at it purely from the perspective of "is this BiS for damage?" is a bit short-sighted, especially in a game like FFXI where the answers to those questions are almost always "for what situation?"

So, to your point, I'll elaborate on different scenarios. For enfeebling BP's it would be BIS because of the accuracy bonuses, but people generally do not use smn for enfeebling with how strong rdm is. For enhancing, it brings nothing to the table with 0 smn skill or any kind of buff duration trait. aside from the single favor +, which would help your favor bonus slightly, there's no enhancing or buff benefit to the gear. it's worse than every BP damage piece available individually, and when you factor in mab or atk, they just don't stand a chance. without a tp bonus trait, it won't eclipse anything for AFAC, and from the magical side, the magic acc is nice sure, but since smn already gets an innate magic acc bonus for all pet spells, it's unnecessary, and the only viable food for smn largely buffs the accs. from a defensive stance, the empy set has -35 DT, so you could technically sub in these for the hands and feet for a couple extra points, but most people already have the D ring and now murky. it doesn't have any perp - or bp delay, or refresh or even regen. to me, it feels like they didn't know where to put smn, so they slapped it on here and just have them nyami level BP damage as the r 30 augment and called it a day. it's not even good for melee outside of the high acc, which again, if you're having to melee on smn, then you have other things to be concerned with. barring unlocking the mythic WS or nirvana trials. even then, you'd probably wear nyami for the DA

Experimenting with SMN based Exemplar Point party and I found this has worked very well doing my testing in Bibiki Bay.

SMNx3 GEO COR RDM

SMNs must have about 20s BP recast. Create Skillchain with Fenrir Eclipse Bite > Ramuh Volt Strike > Ifrit Flaming Crush. If mob is still alive RDM can burst finish.

GEO pulls with pretty much any thing. Geo-Frailty / Indi-Malaise.

COR does BST / COR rolls. That's it.

RDM Heal/Refresh/Magic Burst step 3.

Can also rep a SMN with a BRD and have a SMN/SAM melee for the SC Shattersoul/Oshala > Flaming Crush > Flaming Crush.

Faster way it seems was to do Volt Strike > Flaming Crush > Meteor Strike MB, Was doing about 50k Volt Strike > 99999 Flaming Crush > 99999 Meteor Strike. Super easy and fast kills.

Hey now, prime staff opens whole new melee smn abilities!

To share a bit of my own, I have stage4 staff. I've been 2boxing limbus on 119 with smn/sch and geo/whm, sch sub for sneak and invis and whm sub for banish on ghosts and corpse lights. I use arciela 1 as she will haste 2 my smn, monb and Cornelia.

Oshala > Flaming crush doing 40-90k with a fragmentation kills most things, if it doesn't I have my geo burst aero or thunder 4/5 for 30k+ to finish it. Oshala also does 10-23k depending what tp it gets used at. Bubbles frailty and malaise, tag with dia2.

I haven't bothered to see at what level break it becomes more hassle than is worth, maybe when I have time I'll test it out, but for now I've been trying to squeeze in as many chests as possible not caring about my capped points (nothing to spend on yet)

Yeah Oshala is actually good for damage. I usually save TP till 1.5-2k since it seems to scale well. It opens up some fantastic SC opportunities with ifrit too

KoH would make you more durable with phalanx II and use Dia III as well. Why not just use Hastega from Garuda on yourself? You don’t need to tag the mob you cast a debuff bubble on btw, but you will have to tag mobs after or just heal your SMN once with a cure.

King of Hearts has ruined my sc on more occasions than I care to count, so he has been fired. Arciela will also spam dispel once she's finished her buffing which is very helpful on the anticans/quadavs/sahagins as they notoriously have shell up.

I'm trying to reduce the amount of actions required by me to make it easier/I can walk away at a moments notice and not constantly be rebuffing etc

I'm aware, what I meant by "tag" was really just to say I was applying dia2 on every mob with frailty to give people an idea of what the def down value stood at.

But all of how I run this 2box is because I remote access my PC with a tablet or my phone to play while at work, so I have my geo as the "driver" doing all the pulls etc and I am actually tagging each mob specifically with the geo as I use <bt> macros for my smn (before anyone chimes about <tid>, it doesn't work on the JP client for whatever reason! <bt> works just fine so I don't care to dig deeper to find out why! lol)

As requested from many of you SMNs who wanted an updated BiS gearset guide.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-VlQcJ47iI