The 6th Ministry's Secret: A Summoner's Guide

And with the favor update in mind this is exactly what I am expecting, them not actually flatly increasing the duration of the wards themselves but increasing the skill ceiling beyond 500.
Which for Blood pact: Ward duration is noticable immediately because every point of skill you have over 300 equals 1 extra second.
And even if it is the other option; Flatly increasing the duration, whichever way they pick, this one we get to notice right away.

Unlike Avatar's favor, which works in skill tiers where they flatly added another tier which at this point in the game cannot even be reached with the best gear around.
Which was indeed, a HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE move. And trust me, they've got plenty of backlash from that one.

I'm assuming the only relevant BP will be Fenrir's impact.. Diabolos and Cait Sith i dont have high hopes for any good dmg...

because well, SE.

It really just depends. They can make the physical BPs however strong they want in damage, but there are some other things we need to consider as well.

If either of the physical BPs are piercing, that would be nice. Diabolos BP might have like a bonus effect/damage on Blinded enemies (Blindside) to go along with the update to Blind, and it would also play in with how he works (bonus damage on sleeping monsters).

We could use some better physical options, so these could be useful. Volt Strike ended up being good, so we'll just have to wait and see.

Hmm... Taking Blindside a bit more litteral, it could also have a "Sneak Attack" effect, doing more damage if used on the mob's rear end.

I guess we'll just have to test it after the March update.

This is true as well. :)

Even if it's just like a single hitting BP that hits as hard as Spinning Dive, that will be useful, because it will give Diabolos a better offensive option to maintain favor with.

Cait sith needs treasure hunter!

Been doing some mathy stuff to figure out the best arrangement for magic BPs now.

My main goal going into it was to determine the best weapon between Keraunos & Nirvana, the best body between Helios & Convokers, and the best boots between Helios & Hagondes.

My assumptions:
10/10 avatar MAB merits. Perfect augments (Keraunos has 10 BP damage, 130 MAB. Helios all has 7 BP damage, 30 MAB. Hagondes Sabots have 50 MAB total. Diamond Earring has 2 MAB.) Ignoring the 10 INT from Nirvana. Enemy has no MDB. I know this is a big assumption, need to come back and re-do the math for various MDB values later. It's possible MAB could be more valuable than I'm giving credit for, although MAB gear already wins in almost every case anyway.

The base set:

Item	BP Damage	Pet:MAB
Native	0	40
Merits	0	10
Vox Grip	0	0
Seraphicaller	0	0
Helios Band	7	30
Eidolon Pendant	0	5
Diamond Earring	0	2
Esper Earring	2	0
Helios Gloves	7	30
Evoker's Ring	0	0
Globidonta Ring	0	0
Conveyance Cape	5	0
Caller's Sash	0	2
Caller's Spats +2	0	0
Total	23	117

So without wearing any weapon, body, or boots, we have an ideal bonus of BP Damage +23, and Pet:MAB+117 including merits and the avatar's native 40 MAB. This gives us a base multiplier of (1.23 * 2.17) = 2.6691.

Here are the various combinations of weapon/body/boots that I tried and their resulting multipliers, in order from strongest to weakest. Note that I didn't try any Convoker's Doublet + Hagondes Sabots combos, because Helios Jacket + Helios Boots will always beat it.

Keraunos, Helios Jacket, Helios Boots
Bonuses: 24 BP, 190 MAB
Multiplier: 1.47 * 4.07 = 5.9829

Keraunos, Helios Jacket, Hagondes Sabots
Bonuses: 17 BP, 210 MAB
Multiplier: 1.4 * 4.27 = 5.978

Keraunos, Convoker's Doublet +1, Helios Boots
Bonuses: 29 BP, 160 MAB
Multiplier: 1.52 * 3.77 = 5.7304

Nirvana, Helios Jacket, Hagondes Sabots
Bonuses: 47 BP, 80 MAB
Multiplier: 1.7 * 2.97 = 5.049

Nirvana, Helios Jacket, Helios Boots
Bonuses: 54 BP, 60 MAB
Multiplier: 1.77 * 2.77 = 4.9029

Nirvana, Convoker's Doublet +1, Helios Boots
Bonuses: 59 BP, 30 MAB
Multiplier: 1.82 * 2.47 = 4.4954

Just for fun, if I take the best performing set and swap the Conveyance Cape with BP Dmg+5 for an Argochampsa, I get:
1.42 * 4.19 = 5.9498

If I swap it for a Conveyance Cape with Dmg+4, I get:
1.46 * 4.07 = 5.9422
So a Conveyance with +4 actually loses to Argo under otherwise ideal conditions. However, this only holds true as long as you have perfect BP damage rolls on your Keraunos and all your Helios, otherwise the line gets murky.

Similarly if you have some low rolls on some Helios gear, it can lose ground to other pieces. If your Helios Boots only have 5 BP damage and 28 MAB, then they would provide:
1.45 * 4.05 = 5.8725
This is lower than what you'd get with Hagondes Sabots that are augmented with 25 pet MAB, shown above to produce a multiplier of 5.978.


TL;DR: With perfect augments, Helios is unbeatable. With less-than-perfect augments, it's beatable. The givens are: With all the added sources of BP damage Nirvana has lost even more ground on magic BPs, and a Helios Jacket with semi-decent rolls pretty much always beats Convoker's Doublet for magic BPs. Hagondes Sabots vs. Helios Boots is a fine line but if the enemy has any MDB at all then Hagondes Sabots probably win.


Edit: Also just for fun I calculated how much BP damage a reforged Caller's Doublet would need in order to beat Helios Jacket with perfect augments on everything. Came up with 18.69. I can't see them giving it more than about 15, so it seems that making a BP Damage & MAB Helios Jacket is a pretty safe bet even without knowing what stats the reforged empyrean will have.

what about the helio spats?

Helios spats even with less than perfect augments is unbeatable.
The native +6 BP damage on them before any augment made sure of that.

Yet Pergatory didn't use them in his tests.

Don't mind me, just having some fun~


[edit]
Missed one:


An Idris Geo was involved in this by the way.
Apart from that 10/10 on Astral Flow JP's and 2/10 on Conduit.

Been running my own Yorcia parties. There's more damage somewhere, like a 92k Flaming Crush before skillchain (he died), but I didn't save them all.

Can't wait till I finish that Nirvana for sure now!

So I've been having the great debate of body pieces:



Which one is better for Flaming Crush? Obviously the Helios Body isn't perfect, but we should be able to get a pretty good idea based on this which one is better, right?

Well, I *tried* to do some testing.

http://i.imgur.com/acNnSno.png

The Data
Here we can see some data off of Flaming Crushing many Orobons and Mandragoras in the face. (C) means I was wearing the Convoker body. Deaths are one hit kills that were much lower than normal, which means that the physical portion of Flaming Crush killed the enemy before the magical part could even trigger. Misses were extremely low damage hits that the enemy survived, which means that the primary hit of Flaming Crush missed. All tests were done with Warcry.

Observations
So, as you can see, there's quite a large range of damage. The issue here is that I'm sure within the samples, there are both critical hits AND Flaming Crushes where the second physical hit missed (I wear not wearing any Double Attack gear for this). However, it is extremely difficult to tell which these are. This makes the data go all over the place, and ultimately, I can deem that these are not large enough sample sizes to even get a good idea. We would need a least 100 Flaming Crushes, on each scenario, but even that probably wouldn't be a good sample size.

Mandragoras
From this small set, it looks like Helios Body wins on Orobons, but loses to Mandragoras. The issue with the Mandragoras is that there are many cases that are automatically just thrown out, because they die from the physical damage of the Flaming Crush and the magical part never triggers. This means a lot of potential data is missing, so their data is a bit flawed... but how flawed? How would that affect the data? Ultimately it means high damage physical hits ultimately get ruled out, which means the data only represents low damage physical hits, which affects the magic damage, which affects the worth of MAB gained from using Helios. However, it is difficult to draw conclusions. We can also see that there are no hits on the Mandragoras that were under 20k, unlike the Orobon. What is the reasoning for this? Is it because they die from the physical portion if that were to happen? Are we really teetering on the edge here of the physical portion doing enough damage to kill that there are still many cases of it not finishing them off?

Orobon
What about the Orobon? I imagine they have more defense than the Mandragoras, also affecting the data. Notice the average damage of Flaming Crushes on the Orobons is lower than it was on the Mandragoras. However, the maximum damage remains roughly the same, so we can assume those hits were criticals, because the boost in pDIF could bring them up to roughly equal level. The Helios body is doing more damage here; perhaps due to luck and the low sample set? Or is it because the MAB is getting its full chance to shine, not only going on low damage physical hits on Mandragoras?

Magic
We know that the Helios Body wins on magical pacts (if using Nirvana) due to the increase in MAB, so we automatically know that the magical part does more damage over the Convoker. However, the issue here is that the Convoker increases the physical damage of the Flaming Crush higher than that of the Helios. You can see this under "Deaths", which were Flaming Crushes that killed the Mandragora only with the physical portion; the magical hit never got a chance to trigger due to the low HP pool of the Mandragoras. This ultimately means more magical damage itself, because more physical damage equates to more magical damage on Flaming Crush. Is it enough to matter? Which does more damage in the end?

Conclusion
So which is better? I don't know still. I spent around 2 hours Flaming Crushing things outside, and I got pretty sleepy after a while of doing it. I want to get a more conclusive answer, but Flaming Crush is just difficult to work with because of how random it is. There's so many factors to consider, which means a large amount of Flaming Crushes to get a good answer. I want to say that the Helios is the winner due to the Orobon data and the fact that the Mandragora data is highly flawed due to getting one shot by the physical portion of Flaming Crush, but is that a fair assumption? I don't know. It may even be the case that one is better than the other depending on the pDIF.

I might spend more time Flaming Crushing some Orobons later tonight, depending how I'm feeling.

GEO only! Go work on your Idris and you'll be set for life.

Would be nice if SE fixed it to show the full damage :p

I'm not sure if my + Damage Augment on Keraunos counts in the math, but I've been doing some testing my Helios body which has less than the desired augments (BP Damage +5, MAB +23) on some Fodder outside Adoulin and it wins over Convoker's +1 by ~150 damage.

Looking at the Flaming Crush tests, I'll keep using Convoker's +1 for that until we know what Empyrian will look like.

If you have Keraunos with BP damage, it increases the worth of MAB similarly to Nirvana, so, that would probably help Helios body pull ahead of Convoker.

I don't have a Keraunos with BP damage. It would be stronger than Nirvana for magical pacts, at a large magic accuracy trade off. Still probably worth it, swapping in Nirvana based on magic accuracy needs, just have other priorities.

...which leads me to my next point! Anyone know the cap for Pet: DT on Telchine and if it can roll evasion/magic evasion/defense with snow?

My Keraunos doesn't have perfect augments (atm it's BP 8%, Crit/DA 4%, Mab +18).
But despite having 2 less mab than Frazil, I think it's going to be much better than the latter.
Currently using it for my physical BPs as well (previously I used to rely on an Attack-augmented Tumafyrig)

For physical BPs I used to have 3 different sets in my Lua: Physical, Magical and Hybrid (which was very similar to Magic in the end).
Now my three sets are almost identical. Think there's only a couple of differences here and there.
I don't even use Caller's Spats +2 anymore and currently saved an inventory slot (altough they still have an use, if anything for the Blood Boon +10)

Not sure that Helios Spats can beat Callers+2 at low TP values, but without mathing it out I assumed so, given the huge amount of stats you can get on Helios Spats.



Going by memory, my noob SMN set atm is the following, with some variations according to the type of BP. Not sure on all the pieces.

Personally I think that for BP damage, Helios is gonna rule supreme at least in Head, Hands, Feet and especially Legs even after the release of reforged Empyrean.
Don't know what to say about Body, but given that Empyrean should be "more or less" the same power as Reforged Relic/AF, I think it would be dumb for us to expect Empy to be much better.
In other terms: I doubt the BP damage on body will go above 14%. (it will also have some skill though, hence magic accuracy, hence less resists for Magical BPs on high level targets? But in all honesty I feel that doesn't matter that much in the end for magical BPs as far as I can tell, it's more something useful for debuff BP Wards, from my experience)

Speaking of Keraunos, is Pet: Haste on the leaf slot?
If so using Snoworb + Leaforb + Duskorb could bring to a nice Perpetuation staff to use in place of Gridarvor for people who don't own a Nirvana.
I'm kinda mad I had to give up my Perpetuation-6. In hindsight... I should've kept it and get a second Keraunos for BP damage.

Perp and haste are both leaf slot for the keraunos

You sure? It's been reported from Duskorb. At least for Armour.
Dunno if for weapons it comes from the Leaf slot.

So far Weapons and Armour are pretty consistant with their slots, aren't they?


Edit:
Yes, wiki reports it as Leaforb for Weapons.
So either:
1) Wiki is wrong
2) Guy who reported Duskorb is wrong
3) Armour has Duskorb for pet haste, weapons have Leaforb.

Number 3

ok so iv pimped up my smn with skirmish gear and weapon an im still using af 119 body iv ended up with bp +53% and pet mab 219, I did kamihr drifts wkr and got 10-20k crushes average on boss but now and then got a huge spike to one point I got 43k, whats causing that spike double att or crit hit and is it worth auging gear towards that

Note to Self, just toss more Crevox at every contents.

It was almost certainly crits that caused that spike in damage, probably the rare occurrence of every hit being a crit (much more common with Pred Claws than with Flaming Crush). Crits are essential for high damage on Blood Pacts. A double attack proc wouldn't add more than a few hundred damage. And yes, it is absolutely worth gearing toward crit rate on the leaf stat of your BP gear. I do Pet:Crit on my BP gear, Pet:DA on my idle gear.

The other factor is that the damage for the magic hit is derived from the combined damage of the physical hits. So spike damage in the physical half gets carried over into the magical half as well, multiplying the bonus.

You're not wrong technically, but avatar pDif will pretty much never be that high against anything that matters. By "matters" I mean even old pre-Adoulin content you probably won't be anywhere near capped pDif without bolstered frailty. Avatar attack is hard to boost in meaningful quantities. You're taking theory crafting, or a scenario set up specifically to get an epeen 99k screenshot, and trying to apply it to everyday summoning. If what you said is true, we'd be using Pet:Attack augments for Crush instead of Pet:MAB in order to help cap pDif.

It's very easy to test this for yourself, just go sic your avatar on a mob and let it melee the mob for a bit. If the crits are doing more than the regular melee hits, then your pDif isn't capped.

I like to build my sets assuming I'm not going to have a full party of supports with 1hrs up to make my SMN do 99k damage everywhere I go.