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

The REM update seems pretty fail for us unless you cared about more base dmg and staff skill.... or Afterglow.

For the low price of only 10,000 Beitetsu, Nirvana gains only DMG:51 Magic Damage+62 Staff skill+27 Parrying skill+27 and Magic Accuracy skill+14

But at least we can now get a Claustrum with Pet: Accuracy+60 Aftermath: Damage taken -20% "Refresh"+15 and a Hvergelmir with "Fast Cast"+50%

Quite a slap in the face for Summoners.

Im looking at the silver lining here. I can sell all my beits for shitloads of gil.

Its not like they hid the fact they were changing very little to the weapons other than upgrading Dmg/Skill and possibly adjusting some of the shittier relics. Plus Nirvana is still a beast of a staff... its not like, say Guttler, who was ***tier and finally got something kinda useful for the Aftermath.

I mean most of the ones that actually got a good bonus were the ***tier relics like Gugnir.

There's a use for my Claustrum now.

As for Nirvana, I just died a little..

Welp, that's one thing I won't have to worry about for a while. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Someone with the Oboro weapon for SMN should go augment it. Seems alot of the weapons are getting fantastic augments.

That's Rank 7. After 60 boulders.

Gridarvor is 70acc/att 15 DA at rank 15
Does it make it worth it for anything?

Avatar Melee, I'm pretty sure Nirvana will only beat that when you have a form of Aftermath up all the time.

The 70 Acc/atk trumps the av. level +2 and the +40% bpdmg?

+40 BP damage? For Physical Blood Pacts on anything we can actually reliably land them Nirvana remains at the top.
For Magical pacts we have had competing staves for a while now.
Also note how I only mentioned avatar Melee, by the way.

+70 ACC/ATK? yep, albeit barely I must admit. It's the DA+15 that really puts the cherry on top.
Also keep in mind that Gridavor outside of its augments already has +25 Pet Accuracy totalling it at a whopping +95, and not to forget +3% Pet Haste if you haven't capped that in other slots yet.

Having Aftermath in any level up will put Nirvana back on top, but that means that you'll have to be able to melee alongside your avatar at all times.
That said, there are few situations where you leave your avatar out to melee for longer periods, so it matters very little in the end anyway.

All that said, they made the Gridarvor a beast of a perpetuation staff for non-Nirvana owners.
Heck, I really feel sorry for Claustrum owners now that they saw their weapon going from finally having some use after years of neglect to being trumped by a JSE weapon in a single day.

Avatars do not have the health to melee for extended periods of time on any current endgame content. It is a nice alternative though.

I was hoping that there was going to be a different avenue for us to get AM sadly there isn't. Nirvana could be 3x as awesome but you have to be /SAM to make it work properly as there is no way we can get the Accuracy needed to melee along with our Pets. Both the upgrades to Claustrum and Nirvana are not useful on today's endgame IMHO.

Now if its true that the attack and damage cap were raised for Avatars like Pups and BST pets we might have some/any reason to our physical avatars more assuming you can hit the target.

Aren't there multiple paths for the augment or am I wrong? I thought it depended on which item you gave him (Pluton/Beitetsu/Boulder).

I don't know what content you're doing but skilled and geared SMN's are being used for some of the Reisenjima T4 NM's.

Nirvana is quite useful in today's endgame.

I think it's the upgrades that aren't as useful. Not the actual weapons.

Any word on the different paths for JSE yet? It'd help me decide if I want to bother with it or not.

Every JSE has a single path, SE said it themselves.
Multiple ways to achieve it (different required mats), but single final path for each JSE.

Hmm, I think my point was missed. There is no need to upgrade Nirvana unless you are going to be able to melee with it. Its totally useful I know I HAVE ONE and use it all the time. I am also top geared. What I was bemoaning is there is still not a valid path to AM3 on any endgame content. I would very much like to Garden of Bliss the ***out of things but ACC caps out at about 1k before food songs rolls or /SAM to get the TP needed to really make things like Ifrit obliterate things with AM3 up.

I mean I will still probably make them cause I have them and like to complete. Or I could make a ***-ton of money off others that actually got a true buff to their R/M/E.

Okay good. People kept putting Pluton path or Boulder path and I was scared I would have to choose. Might actually make the SMN JSE now since I hear that the GEO one is garbage and no word on the BST BLU and RDM ones yet.

I'm glad I kept mine. I did some spring cleaning a few months back and almost /toss'd it.

Just saw this on Dev Tracker on BG


Blood Pacts (2016/2/10)

Do blood pacts have an accuracy adjustment? How much does summoning skill affect it?

There is an accuracy boost for Blood Pacts, and it is the same +100 as Weapon Skills receive. Summoning Magic Skill does not increase Blood Pact Accuracy. Avatar: Accuracy and Pet: Accuracy can fill this function instead.

EDIT: When did SE remove the bonus accuracy to Rage pacts for each point of Summoning Skill over the cap?

That's upsetting a bit actually. Since it's way easier to get SMN skill and SMN skill from gifts now are really only useful for wards. I'm wondering if it also applies to magic pacts :( Top that off with now a lot of slots have zero use for physical and maybe magical pacts, what so ever. It also probably never was removed just misunderstood by players.

As far as the Nirvana update :( Ya not really useful at all. Melee DD and Ranged DD will now have the same caps as pets and are getting accuracy and attack boosts. SCH staff got 10 melee and magic accuracy and 10 MAB, meanwhile, we didn't even get the 10 melee accuracy someone at SE must hate SMN right now, I feel at least the 10 melee acc on nirvana and another 10 bp dmg would put it in line with sch staff updates sigh. And if to keep up with the new numbers for combat skills, prob around 20 avatar accuracy and 27 avatar attack as well. I'm not sure if this update was meant to balance mythics or balance jobs, but it essentially does both and I think sch and blm will still be using sky staff over mythic but could be wrong and sch still a stronger soloist than smn so I don't know why, I love sch's just seems unnecessary to not keep nirvana's update in line with the updates to other mythic staves.

No misunderstanding at all. There was an update back during ToAU that clearly stated that Physical Blood Pact:Rage received an accuracy bonus for skill over cap.

Where did this originally come from?
I'm failing to find the actual Dev response. :x

BG tracks and translates the JP OF. That is where this came from.

Source? Because if they changed that this update that is terrible news. I found the source actually:
http://www.playonline.com/pcd/update/ff11us/20061017UJ0a71/detail.html

So either that post is wrong or they ninja changed it at some point, I'm trying to see if this was changed recently or not. I was thinking I used volt strike vs old shuck with bolster geo frailty and topor. Sitting in reisen with no buffs I'm 1133 acc on Ramuh. Akamochi I uses is 75, 100 acc from what that post says, 150 from topor. I'm pretty sure 100 to all stats for AF is to attributes only and if so that'd be 75 accuracy. I had am2 up so... Shuck is CL 135, which is the same as the death bunny who I know has 1400 accuracy requirement about. So assuming that:
1133 + 75 + 100 + 150 + 75 = 1533 so I wouldn't be able to tell vs him based on that fight. If no topor then I'd know if I started missing more than 5% (not sure if there is cap acc for avatars tho). In my current physical blood pact set I am 131 smn skill over cap, which 31 acc can be a big deal but not end of the world. But it removes the option of swapping out damage gear for smn skill gear on hard targets :(

Despite players arguing about it, it was commonly accepted that SMN skill converted into accuracy during Blood Pacts, at a certain rate (not necessarily 1:1, it was never tested that thoroughfully).

Turns out though that all the tests I can think of, were testing for pet MAGIC accuracy.
That JP post talks specifically about PHYSICAL accuracy.


At this point we have two different possibilities:

1) SE is wrong, SMN skill converts into both physical and magical accuracy, wouldn't be the first time they give us wrong information in one of those posts. Happened recently with the stat mods for debuffs.

2) SE is right, SMN skill does convert into Magic Accuracy, but does NOT convert into physical accuracy.



Kinda hard to test for 2) on our own since this doesn't show on any log and only activates during BPs in theory.
I can think of a few scenarios to test it, against someone with high evasion, completely naked and with SMNskill gear only, using a multihit physical BP and then checking TP return on the avatar while someone else tanks the target (so that the avatar doesn't get hit and doesn't gain TP).
With a large enough sample we should be able to see if SMN skill makes a difference or not.
Still, it would be annoying to do.


What do other famous SMN have to say? Crevox? Papesse? Prophecy? Did you guys ever test this?

Prats with nirvana finished:

He was already the first one getting glow nirvana some months ago, not very happy with this update.

I was always under the impression that Summoning skill was for both accuracies and damage types, physical and magical. There was never really a time where my skill was underleveled. But I always thought that "Astral Burned" Summoners would miss their BPs and deal significantly less damage due to their Lv20 capped summoning skill. So yeah, the only thing I can think of is power leeching a mule's SMN from 1 to 99 in Escha. Have 0 Summoning Skill, Gain Pacts with Celestial Avatars in Lv60~ Battlefields, pick up equipment and weapons with Pet/Avatar: Accuracy, such as Empath Necklace. Incarnation Sash, Regimen Mittens, Psycloth Boots, Gridarvor, etc. Wow, this is starting to sound like quite a hassle just to prove a point for testing...