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

If gil were no object..
Perfect augs vs apogee
Head: double merlinic (it comes down to the stat aug giving an edge for phys, apogee has no macc)
Body: 2 merlinic for DD pacts, D apogee for skill/idle/bp precast (acc/macc that apogee doesn't have, and the stat boost)
Hands: 2 merlinic for DD pacts, D apogee for macc
Legs: 2 Apogee, A and D, (too much BP damage to pass up)
Feet: 2 Apogee, A and B (The 2 BP Damage is a bit of an edge, but the more important issue is this being the second piece for set bonus with legs. it's both or none here)

i got bored.
Fast cast/quick cast capped for smn/whm. No cheater pieces like afterglow hver or weatherspoon ring. Values are 81fc 11qc.
Assume 7fc augs on all merlinic and grio.

ItemSet 340923

Nice set and thank you for sharing Frod!

13 3 0 0
15 5 2 2
13 7 2 q2
q4 3q3 7 12

Is what I can get if I never remove my sachet which I tend not to I'm not sure it affects avatar level for long or if at all if you switch it that fast but I just like to be cautious.

That's 9 Quick and 84 FC with capped quick if weatherspoon.

The only two differences I'd make is:
The Meebles neck I like b/c I can use it on any job and is 5, but it is a pain to get.
The legs, you can skip the random aug process, psycloth legs can have 7 FC.

I haven't played in over 2 months now and all this new crafted gear is making me sad lol. Where was this good stuff whewn I played!? (Not that I'd have had the gil for any of it.....)

What are you getting 13 fastcast on weapon with?

would be 11 you're right :) can supposedly get 7 FC on it too, mine is at 6.

What Verda said and also prolix ring same FC, less of an hassle to get. (It's on Auction House)

Alright I know someone has to have tried this by now or I hope so, but has anyone tested how pet: breath works on telchine for SMN? You could have pet mab 20 and pet breath 8. I'm guessing pet breath is a separate term multiplied which could end up making it really strong. It would be a set for only two pacts for sure but maybe up to 4, nether blast was something often used at one point in time it's just very weak damage now. Conflag strike is good now, just not merit pact good quite. It does have that huge int down though and also the ability to bypass MDT which can be very important for a lot of fights as most mobs don't load up on MDB if they are magic resistant, they load up on either evasion or MDT. Conflag then bypasses it so a way to make that stronger would be really good. Offhand, there's vinipata's 50% mdt stance, yakshi's cordon of apathy, and the AA galka in escha sky. So before I spend a ton of gil on an experiment wanted to know if anyone else did it first, it could very well be worth it if conflag can be that strong. The other thing I see it good for would be odin. The last would be perhaps death from pavor nocturnus death is considered breath but not sure it'd help proc rate at all. This has been on my backburner a long time, anyone who knows anything let me know thanks.

Just a tip for who wants to farm Vulcanite Ores, make sure the blessing "Justice" is up.
If it's not, it might be worth to kill Azi Dahaka until it's up.

I noticed a HUGE difference between going with Justice and without.
I went from roughly 40/50% drop rate to a much lower one (1/8 on Behemoth, 1/4 on Fleetstalker).
I suspect the bonus from Justice is not just TH+1 but something bigger (the same applies to "Courage", the "Rare enemy+ one. It makes a HUGE difference as well)


If you really can't be bothered with farming Justice, then make at least sure you have some form of Treasure Hunter or you're gonna regret it just like me.

With the Apogee +1 body as a static refresh piece, am I the only one that is having issues with blood agro every time I use a blood pact or cast a pet? If not, has anyone found a logical solution to this without losing too many attributes?

I was doing some merit farming on ol' ramuh and noticed sometimes my 12k to 15k thundersparks were hitting for 5.8k instead. I thought well weird got a resist I guess. But then it was happening to everything I hit, and a lot. So I think there's something to that bug SE posted, especially if like me your internet isn't the most reliable thing in the world and will get 1000ms latency randomly.

I managed to fix it in my lua doing something I have been wanting to do a very long time and I can share it for others. Basically when you do a blood pact this is the series of commands Gearswap will go through, along with gear changes, all this takes place in about 1.5 seconds:
1. precast for job abilty for blood pact, change to precast gear
2. aftercast for job ability blood pact, change to engaged/idle gear
3. pet midcast for blood pact, change to ward or rage gear
4. pet aftercast for blood pact, change to engaged/idle gear

So you're swapping gear 4 times in 1.5 seconds, and sometimes the game just gets confused, especially if like me you have latency.

I simplified and improved it to this, by telling gearswap for blood pacts that events are handled:
1. precast for job ability for blood pact, change to precast gear
2. pet midcast for blood pact
3. safety check for pet_midaction in aftercast, if midaction then wait 1 second and equip gear based on player status

This has not only resolved consistency but seemed to have upped my damage as well.

Below are the things I added to make this happen:
This is for removing going to idle gear after you use bloodpact job abilities because we know we're going to pet midcast right after and it could confuse the client if doing so much swapping plus it's just nicer on SE's game and makes more sense (removes #2 in the first list):


this is for the pet midaction check in step 3:

this is for then send_command I use above, I tried coroutine.sleep but it caused stack overflows:

That last just enables the aftercast equip to be delayed if your pet is still mid doing something.

That's it, now most of your lua probably already have these functions defined so you'd have to copy the contents into those functions but I'm gonna assume you know that if you're messing with it.

I'll release this update on my lua soon as I test it out some more. The end result is you're swapping gear 3 times in about 2 seconds so it's a huge improvement since you're only switching to gear you need in the sequence. Blood pacts are a pretty special case, so I can see the need for special case rules for it.



My friends tease me for always going in the yellow hp and any new whm has to be told about it >.> There are things you can do but it comes with tradeoffs. You can put +hp in your midpact set which lowers damage, or you can put hp to mp gear in all your other sets, lowering their effectiveness. I do hate I lose so much max mp, and was gonna try to fix it, but I chose to just have as much refresh with perp capped as I can most the time instead. I do think though for conduit max mp can be a very beneficial thing to worry about, maybe even turning off idle sets while its activated.

To any SMN needing gil, sparks farming during gain exp, ambuscade spam are both ways to make good gil an hour. To make the best gil you need to team up with people though. Skirmish is still good gil actually and smn does well in both of them. BCNM is great gil also, but you're gonna want to pair with a very well geared DD. If you do, Earthen Armor and backup healing and other buffs, along with added damage make SMN great for avatar fights on VD. I've duo'd with both THF and BLU using nothing else but trusts. If those aren't for you or you don't like doing lower difficulty if your gear isn't there yet, try just spam farming silver sea remnants II. It's great in that your gear doesn't really help you get much better at it, as the best way to farm it is usually just get your ammo then kill the bosses. In fact someone posted an amazing guide on how to farm salvage on SMN that doesn't really get enough attention.

Also I hope you come back :)

My problem with gil was not obtaining it. It was keeping it long enough to get anything meaningful with it! Fern Stones were my bane when I returned months ago.

If you were lazy like me and wanted to make a BP - recast set with the least gears possible, what would you use?

xD Trying to get 3 characters smn ready for enrinys xD

With the new BP timers I think you can get by with just 2x SMNs

I don't use gearswap, so that part doesn't really apply, but I did however try to use the hp to mp items with unusual results. Whenever I would do that my hp would end up lower than it started sometimes being 300-400 lower. I am not sure why but it seems like part of the gear sets don't process when they are supposed to. Lag perhaps?

You'll need two SMN with 22-second timers, or 3 SMN with 30-second timers. Or one 22-second SMN and two 45-second /SMN. Basically you need a Lullaby about every 10-12 seconds. If the gap is larger than that, he can get a TP move off.

Getting timer down to 30 isn't very hard anymore. You need -15 to timer1 and -15 to timer2. Each BP gift will reduce that requirement by 5 seconds, meaning you don't need -15 of each anymore. Glyphic (relic reforge) armor is a good way to cap timer1. Espiritus, augmented Conveyance Cape, Glyphic Doublet +1, Glyphic Pigaches +1, and Sancus Sachet all reduced timer2. I'm probably forgetting something there. Sancus is Su2 but you'll want at least 100 job points anyway for the first tier of BP timer gift.

The other factor besides BP timer reduction is Avatar's Favor tier. You need Favor up, and the higher your summoning skill, the higher your favor can be. So you'll want Beckoner's Horn +1 in your BP timer set, and as much summoning skill as you can muster while still capping BP timer reduction at 30 seconds.

As you can see it's actually quite a bit of work to cap BP timer. :(

I have Aeneas but I have a feeling I'm always going to be SMN for Erinys. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;

My group did Erinys last night and we only had my smn (22 sec) and my cor/smn mule (60 sec), and the nm never got a tp move off. You just have to skip trying to do a lot of dmg in addition to removing tp.

That's a messy quote on your post lol. And there is this which you can put in your job_precast function:
Which I also use. It prevents you from equipping precast gear for blood pacts (in case you're the type that likes to spam keys or something) if your bloodpact is on timer. There is an edge case this will not equip your delay gear if you use your pact just as it comes up but it's really rare and was thinking of a way to prevent that. Perhaps setting 0 to 1 would work.


Here's what I could come up with assuming no job points and that you only care about 30 second recast since you said cheaply:
ItemSet 345231

Requires seraphicaller and relic but you can buy the hat off AH. This is 35 second delay, with summoning skill capped and favor and just leaving the avatar out a long while you might get the last 5 seconds. It's ugly though and definitely not 22 second but is definitely minimum effort. If you want to go further get empy horn +1 and glyphic legs +1, and 100 job points.


That's weird :< I always used only two SMN for Erinys. Sometimes a support would go sub smn but not all the time. We'd have the tank stay disengaged and melee weren't allowed to auto attack.
I have a vid up with just 2 smn and a whm/smn, but the one subbing smn isn't timing with us just doing it randomly and we've done it with only 2, and this was when 30 second recast was the best you can do:


It is safer to use three and I'm all for more SMN but it's just we always used 2.

It could be lag maybe, you're putting the hp to mp items in your set that you're yellow hp in right? If you stack apogee with those, then you'll end up with even less hp like you said, can I know what kind of macro you're using to end up with that and what equipsets it goes through? That'd help me figure it out.

I was thinking that might be possible now :D

On our last Erinys clear (which was right after the BP Timer change) we just used 1 SMN and 1 /SMN.
But we had 0 white damage from THFs, so that makes a difference on the TP move frequency.

THF THF THF SMN COR GEO
RUN WHM GEO GEO/SMN COR

Nice Nocki :)

We use BST to clear the adds, I once cleared it main healing on SMN too... lol. Was
PLD GEO SMN SMN
GEO THF THF THF BLU COR
BST BST

If a WHM is on we use it though. After the adds are down the PLD might not even need me but was able to heal him the entire fight anyways.

It probably has to do with the number of people we were using. We had 18 people in the alliance, with 4-5 THFs. We had one SMN at one point screw up his Lullaby and went like 14 seconds without one, and Erinys used a TP move. After that, we always made sure we could do one every 12 secs at least.

If you have a smaller group with only a couple of THF, I could see how it would work with less frequent Lullabies.

It's a juggling act.

We also do T4's with 18 so the dynamics differ from smaller groups. More people = more opportunities for crap to happen. In the case of Erinys, inevitably, you generally have a THF or two TP'ing on accident, or swinging way more than they should. This can throw off the Mewing rotation and cause a wipe/exit.

Our solution to those moments involves the entire show stopping immediately. No WS, no anything. The Mewing rotation starts from scratch and timers thereof are reset, and life goes on.

That being said, in our group, it's usually me on main SMN and 2 other members subbing SMN (GEO/SMN and COR/SMN). Our Mewing Lullaby range is 15 seconds for each person. Latency, lag and other factors can warrant a second or two earlier cast but a Mewing done too soon can screw the 60 second /SMN'ers. Conversely, you also have to play it by ear. If the THF's (DD's) aren't WS'ing at the very moment it's your turn, you may get away with waiting longer than 15 seconds before you do your Mewing.

Overall, it's better to be safer than sorry - and accurate with your rotation.

Hello All,
I just returned to the game for my XI fix ^_^

Does anyone have a good Myrkr set they can share?

Welcome back, Paulu!

Just heard there is a free login period coming. Maybe I'll play then!

Thanks for the replies and sorry for the confusing, I didnt meant that I bring 3 smns, simply that I have 3 characters with smn that I wanna get gear for.