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

I can't give you numbers but Flaming Crush is THE blood pact where Nirvana will make by far the largest difference among all available (useful!) blood pacts.

Nirvana isn't even the best for Magical BPs (stuff like Espiritus and Grioavolr/Alluvion with the right augs are all better than Nirvana for magical BPs) and for stuff like Volt Strike it can occasionally go behind Gridarvor (when in need of acc).
Even when there's no acc needs, the difference between Gridarvor and Nirvana isn't really that huge for BPs like Volt Strike and similar ones.
(I'm assuming AM3 down of course, with AM3 up it's a different story).

For Flaming Crush though there is quite a noticeable difference, favouring of course Nirvana.
Not even factoring AM3 here because it doesn't really make a huge difference for FC (but of course it all adds up).


Think Espiritus is pretty bad for FC anyway, or at least there are several better options like:
1) Grioavolr (with 9+ BP damage)
2) Alluvion Skirmish staff (with BP damage on it!)
3) Was / Was+1

Was is probably the best non-nirvana option for Flaming Crush.
As it was said in other threads recently FC is a hybrid BP composed of 2 physical hits and 1 magical hit.
The magical hit base damage is calculated according to how much damage the physical hit does.
Simply put the highest damage the phys hit, the highest base damage the magical part will do.

This means that gearing toward pet: mab will have a marginal effect on Flaming Crush and will affect only the magical part of it.
Whereas stuff like Attack and STR will affect the phys part damage and, as a consequence, the magical part as well since it's calculated based on the phys part dmg.

As a consequence of this, it's usually better to get a staff with Att/STR/BPdmg stats on it, rather than the typical staff you would use for Magical BPs.

From my observation from meeble spamming, i tried all types of combination to beat on VD with a single geo (entrust torpor-frailty-bolster malaise/entrust languor-malaise-bolster frailty) and overall its average was 32k with one or 2 spikes of cap dmg. When i added 2 geos for indi languor/torpor and bolster frailty/malaise, it dropped like a rock. So with one geo prob either i was lacking att/mab or in the worst case, acc/macc.

That sounds really low. I own no nirvana, my gear is only slightly above average and I was hitting 99k around half of the times. Guarded FCs were around 25k iir and some occasional ~77k ones.

Only one GEO in the pts I was, Idris of course. Indi-frailty, Geo-malaise. Didn't really notice differences between entrusted torpor or languor.
Was using akamochi nq as food.
Bolster every round but once we won without bolster and we didn't notice until the GEO said it after the run lol


Make sure stuff like dia2 and gambit (with the right runes!! Watch out for noob Runs!) are applied very fast.

Which rolls were you using? Think I had drachen and beast, not 100% sure on those.
Also make sure to use astral flow before pulling! And warcry too

Had similar situation to Panta last night. I was GEO and it was my first time as Geo on VD:

On D the two Nirvana SMNers would hit 99k nearly every time. On VD however, they would be hitting for 32k~ like Panta stated. Same bubbles each time (indi-frailty, Bolstwr GEO malaise, entrust Torpor). Wouldn’t even get the Meeble to 75% but would blast through D in 30 seconds. So, we lost a SMN and added a COR to do Beast and Drachen (non 11) and same result.

So, we just spammed D but, the difference between the two was astonishing to say the least.

Truthfully, it looks like the magic portion is getting resisted for both of you guys. Nirvana SMN's shouldn't be having that problem but perhaps they're not gearing for it properly or not master smn's (hopefully not, lol).

And Sechs, I think you're really underestimating how much of the dmg from FC comes from the magic portion. I would argue that espiritus is actually the best staff short of a really well augmented grio.

The 40 BPD gets added (twice?) to flaming crush.

But I've done VD many times with espiritus and won parses. Other gear matters too (more).

I really don't think BPD gets counted twice, FC with nirvana is stronger, but it's not THAT much stronger.

Yeah but if it works anything like wsd and player hybrids it's going to get counted twice and OA2-3 is going to really help too

I don't think WSD is actually getting counted twice either, just that it's getting counted at the end rather than at the physical stage.

Also, a lot of damage is from the first hit and FC is not FTP carrying if I recall, so extra hits actually don't add all that much dmg. And you're not gonna have AM on for ambuscade anyways.

It does

Also super easy to see it gets counted on physical stage just shoot anything that dies from just the physical

If it dies at the physical stage, that's the end and it would count.

But yeah, I'd never seen that particular testing before though, will have to take a look at it tomorrow since I need to sleep soonish.

I guess that's one way of looking at it.

The tl;dr of the wsd part was going from 0 to 10 wsd took full dmg from 4643 to 5450 which is a 17% increase so definitely counted for more than just normal and mathing it out works out to being counted at the end of each part.

There's some testing on the nin/sam forums here on multi hits and hybrids

OA/Multi definitely doesn't benefit Flaming Crush much due to ftp not carrying across hits on that BP.

BP Damage definitely does benefit it massively though, and I agree it seems like it gets double counted. The magic hit usually accounts for 70~80% of the damage of Flaming Crush, so Grioavolr should beat Nirvana just by looking at the numbers but it doesn't.

As for the step from D to VD, a RUN can help a lot in this regard, particularly Fire Rayke to prevent the resistance from building as you heap on the fire damage. Definitely not necessary though if the SMNs are good enough. I've won with PLD WHM GEO COR SMN SMN, although we both used every drop of our Conduits on that one. Shout out to Jackii for being a boss SMN!

Some ppl in my LS were doing VD and RUN was using Gambit instead of Rayke first. They lost most of those VD runs due to lack of dmg. When they switched to Rayke first, the won most of the time.

Oh yeah jps did their skillchain/resist testing on it and it has fire at 60%. So somewhat resistance to fire but not in sdt range yet.

Tbf i think more effective 2 geos instead 1 geo and 1 cor.

I think Papesse showed it with detailed numbers some time ago, how multiattack procs are surely nice for Flaming Crush, but nothing particularly astounding really.

He also showed why it's so much important to primarily boost the physical part because doing that not only the phys part will do more damage (duh!) but it's also gonna boost massively the magical part.
If you just focus on MAB stuff the magical part surely is gonna go up, absolutely, but the basic/core damage of the magic part (which is dependant on the physical damage part) will be "meh" if the phys part hits for "meh".
It's why Frailty is so important, in conjunction with Malaise, for Flaming Crush.

I can't really explain math-wise why things are like this, but it's sorta like Pergatory said, if it was just a matter of Mab you'd see much higher returns from mab-focused staves, just like it properly happens with magical BPs (where other staves >>> Nirvana). Yet it's not the case for FC, which clearly confirms things are different here.

I'm sure if you dig through this thread (or maybe it was the old one?) there's a detailed explanation by someone with attached tests (was it Papesse who tested it thoroughfully or someone else?)

Take it as a grain of salt and hopefully someone else will correct me, but I think this is an approximate hierarchy of staves for SMN according to BP type

Magical BPs:
1) Godly augmented Grioavolr (INT/Mab/BPdmg etc)
2) Capped Keraunos (Mab/Macc/BPdmg)
3) Espiritus (Path A or C)
...
4) Nirvana?

Physical BPs (TP transfer)
1) Nirvana (AM3 up)
2) Nirvana (no AM3)
3) Gridarvor (this arguably shares the spot with #2, but on the long run Nirvana should win despite Grida winning in a couple of situations)
4) Godly augmented Grioavolr (att/acc/BPdmg/whatever stat for the right BP)
5) Capped augs Keraunos

Physical BPs (no TP transfer)
1) Nirvana
2) Was / Was+1
3) Godly augmented Grioavolr (see above)
4) Keraunos (max augs)
5) Gridarvor

I think Flaming Crush tier list is sorta like the noTPtransfer physical one.
Curious to see how everyone's opinion differs on this!

It's not really a this or that. Physical side is weighted a little higher due to also effecting both sides but really would come down to amounts.

Helpful flaming crush info from early in this thread, January time frame. Verda's damage calculator is still relevant for this unless I'm mistaken. You're going for the highest damage multiplier just remember BPD is actually more valuable than indicated as it is used to some extent for physical and magical portion. Magical portion scales with how much dmg the physical portion does. There is lots of good information on this you can find just by searching this thread. Flaming crush properties haven't changed with the relatively recent bp adjustments with ftp and such.

cant figure out this one. trying to add a flaming crush set but .... for some reason, it always equip the magical set and not what I defined. anyone care to help ? (tried multiple of sets name, etc...


sets.midcast.FlamingCrush = set_combine(sets.midcast.Pet.MagicalBloodPactRage, {
main="Nirvana",
legs={ name="Apogee Slacks +1", augments={'Pet: STR+20','Blood Pact Dmg.+14','Pet: "Dbl. Atk."+4',}},
back={ name="Campestres's Cape", augments={'Pet: Acc.+20 Pet: R.Acc.+20 Pet: Atk.+20 Pet: R.Atk.+20','Pet: Haste+10',}}})

One problem is searching a huge thread like this on ffxiah is sometimes a headache. Sometimes wish there were separate testing threads or stuff was added to OP with links to the testing

I never said to just focus on MAB but you have to look at things in proportion. Depending on your gear, Was will be something like a 11% increase on your physical and about 23% on the magical side assuming the double count. 150 MAB on the other hand is something like a 50% increase to the magical side (possibly slightly less due to BPD but close enough) plus a tiny bit of BPD. Even if physical/magical parts did equal damage, that would win, but in actuality, the magic dmg accounts for a larger chunk of the total damage making espiritus the clear winner.

Throwing some rough approximations together in excel, I get espiritus slightly better than keraunos for magic pacts and slightly worse for FC. But I would find it hard to advise anyone to make a keraunos at this point in the game. Grio will be better if you can get the augments of course, but I think espiritus is really a pretty solid staff for FC and magic pacts. Just because it's relatively easy to get doesn't make it bad.

This is actually really good advice I think. The thing that has always held FC back against strong targets is resists on the magic portion. So the resist reduction on Rayke is probably far more important than the extra dmg from Gambit.

When I was on RUN most of the times I didn't even have time to get to use 3x fire and Rayke that the NM was already dead lol
On RUN I was usually doing this combination

3x Fire pre pull > Vallation on pull (after aggro) > Gambit > 1 fire > Odyllic Subterfuge > 2 Fire > Rayke.
Not sure Odyllic is necessary now that we found out that Barblizzard completely screens you from Paralyze.

Do you get a lot of resists with all subsequent FCs? I *assumed* the lower numbers I was occasionally getting were a matter of the Phys hits being guarded (hence furtherly reducing the magic part as well) more than resists.

This hardly matters when you have 3x SMNs with at least average gear and 2100 JPs, but I guess it can make a lot of difference if you only have two, and if your GEO doesn't have Idris.
The damage reduction behaviour seemed to be pretty different from what you can see/experience with subsequent volleys of Spells. There Gambit vs Rayke makes quite a noticeable difference, which is kinda why people assumed the occasional lower FC numbers to be dependant on other factors like Guard or missed phys hits, I guess?

I'm talking about regular resists, not damage reduction due to repeated casts. Does that actually apply to WS/BP's even? Like if a bunch of COR's leaden something at the same time, you won't get dmg reduction will you?

I mean, the one time I did it with SMN, it was with a pld tank so no gambit/rayke, the nirvana smn's were doing straight 99999, but the non nirvana was doing like 20-30k, obviously all with the same buffs.. I think gambit/rayke is most important for smn's that aren't properly gearing for FC and/or not mastered.

No clue! Sorry :( Don't think the cumulative reduction thing is active for anything other than spells though, so I think it shouldn't apply to stuff like magic WS and the magic part of hybrid BPs like FC?
Not sure what happens with completely magic BPs like Astral Flow ones or Merit ones, hmmm...


One time is not enough to tell!1!one!! /pointfinger
On a serious note though what kind of gear did the non-Nirvana SMN have?
Can you believe me if I tell you that multiple times I won parses with my SMN friends?
I have no Nirvana and my FC gear, while better than average, was nowhere close to being as good as theirs.
The reason I won some parses is mostly because I managed to get one/two more BPs than they did (started earlier, got lucky, etc)
With that said, damage reduction on this NM is also very relevant on the avatar facing the NM or not (no guard vs lots of guard).
If you do a lot of runs this tipically evens out, but with a single run it's hard to tell, right?


Anyway for reference due to lack of gear and me being a not very dedicated SMN, my physical BP and magical BP sets are very similar, mostly the same aside a few swaps. Basically I swap cape, neck, belt and hands, the rest is the same.
Oh also I use Path C on Apogee+1 gear because I'm cheap and can't afford multiple pieces lol

For FC I use my Magical BP set, but I swap the cape (use the Phys one) and the Staff.
My physical Keraunos is not perfect, I think it has:
Att/Ratt +21
Crit/DA 5%
BPdmg +9%

Pure magic pacts definitely get cumulative resist, I was looking into Rayke and the initial testing about it breaking resist wall was using Meteor Strike.

It's not a matter of the overall parse, the per BP damage was significantly lower. The PLD never lost hate either so guarding wasn't a problem. I didn't actually look at the non-nirvana person's gear since I didn't wanna act like I'm judging them or anything, but they did mention they weren't mastered, somewhere in the 500 range if I recall correctly.

Your gear sounds perfectly fine for FC, heck if you have HQ apogee, that's probably better than a lot of smn's out there, haha.

I only have 2x HQ Apogee pieces, head and feet.
For legs I'm supercheap and use perf Enticer's, which suck compared to even NQ Apogee but hey, #InventoryMatters!

Actually saying they "suck" for FC is an exxageration. They're a nice piece, but they're also clearly inferior to Apogee NQ/HQ and possibly more stuff as well (perf Helios?)


Edit:
Also wow at your PLD keeping hate! Was that without Invincible?
On RUN, even on the longest/slowest runs where I was able to do more stuff, I never managed to keep hate for the whole duration. Few seconds after the FC spam starts, I eventually lost it despite having Crusade up, a pretty good Enmity swap sets and spamming all my enmity generation stuff (Vallation, Battuta, Flash, Foil... Gambit and Rayke themselves generate good chunks of enmity).
I'm a bit of a noob with PLD, guess Sentinel makes a big difference there?

I just nanage to hold the mob 100% of time as a run with elemental sforzo (the enmity generated by this is insane) so i guess its with invincible at start. And as the astral cond will need reset, there is really not a point in saving it. About odillyc subterfuge, i didnt see any noticeable diference in dmg taken so i stopped using it.

About the resist part, idk if is that the actual reason for the low dmg fc, but considering my own situation, with avatar with 1180 ish with food, i dont see it any renotely close to hitting acc cap on VD though if i can have a full indi torpor i can still manage doing dmg. But thats a question i had. Fc has acc varying with tp. Anyone knows an estimate how much acc is gained and if that acc bonus is transfered to subsequent hits?