SMN In Sinister Reign.

Just curious about recommendations or strategies others may have for doing this content. From my personal experience so far, Acc plays a big part so I tend to use Shiromochi. An Impact from Fenrir MAY deal over 10k damage with over 2000% TP. My Flaming Crushes are mostly between 3k~4k damage, with occasional misses, and very rare spikes up to 7k~12k.

Rosulatia

Meteor Strike is best choice for Rosulatia. Dealing typically 8k damage with very little Pet TP anywhere up to 9k~12k depending on Pet TP.

Kill the adds that Rosulatia spawns, they die to 1-2 flaming crushes, and don't respawn. Besides that, I think they have regain, and they're generally annoying.


I'm planning to expand on this thread once more input is provided. I didn't want to cram all this into Summoner's Guide.

If you have someone who can make darkness skillchains, Night Terror MBs work really well on pretty much everything in there. My lowest was 13k, highest was over 40k on Morimar. I think my lowest Night Terror without magic burst was maybe 6k, so even without skillchains it isn't bad.

Flaming Crush worked decently on most things too, I was getting anywhere from 4-6k on the low end up to 10k+ on the high end. Some of the NMs have crazy high evasion, others don't. I bounced back and forth between my acc builds and never quite settled on what's best since it seems to vary wildly based on the NM you get.

Rakshaka and I tried various approaches and ultimately settled on the Night Terror MBs as the best one all around. COR & PLD made the skillchain for us. Afraid I can't recall how Impact did compared to Night Terror.

Yeah, we also had a SCH make the SC for us using Immanence (aero -> noctohelix), which is nice, because then the person(s) making the skillchain aren't in range of the nasty TP moves.

Kill the adds that Rosulatia spawns, they die to 1-2 flaming crushes, and don't respawn. Besides that, I think they have regain, and they're generally annoying.

Put up earthen armor for Sajj'aka, he has an arena-wide aoe that does i think 90% of your hp in damage.

Sajj'aka and August melt to dark magic BPs. I think tier 3 Arciela resisted magic, so we used phys pacts. For tier 3 Arciela, make sure to have shock squall ready for when she summons the Naakual. I think she does it every 20%, then can do it any time under 10%, not entirely sure though. Command shock squall on the summon as soon as they start to ready their tp move. Make sure you have max magic acc gear on too, as Yumcax and Hurkan can resist the stun.

Teodor resists dark magic. I think we used phys pacts on him. Also for him, try not to leave your summons on him if possible, as he does an aoe drain, which basically make your summons health batteries for him.

Morimar and August have deadly frontal cone abilities, so don't stand in front of them. August's is called No Quarter. This has a long charge time. We didn't test if this was stunnable. It does 10k needles damage. He only uses it when his little gold wings are out, which appear after he uses daybreak, which I think is a very quick ability, so you probably wouldn't have time to stun it.

Darrculin has a move called Stalking Prey which is aoe damage terror hate reset. So, just resummon as soon as you see this move go off.

Like I said in the other thread, unless you're magic bursting, your damage will be poor. Any competent melee DD or BST will crush you in damage output. Summoner is quite poor in this event unless we're providing support, because any mage should benefit more from those magic bursts than we will, and if you're not magic bursting, your damage over time is quite low. With magic bursts, SMN is adequate.

When I talk about this, I'm looking at parses with various compositions and gear levels of players, not just eyeballing a random 15k Volt Strike and going "oh man we must be doing good damage, look at that number."

I've never seen a reason to use Flaming Crush on the bosses. It's not consistent or reliable here, and even Volt Strike ends up being better. Sometimes it spikes a little higher, but not enough to be worth it. It might be decent with proper support.

If you don't have Nirvana, then you will have to solely rely on magic BPs, because I feel like the ATK/ACC loss from not having it is too great, unless you have GEO+COR buffs going on.

Either way, thankfully, this event only drops one item that is important to us (Enticer's Pants). A couple of the other caster items are alright, but nothing that doesn't have a better option already, especially from Escha.

I wonder if the SMN superbuff strategy would work in Sinister Reign?

Talking about:
1x healer
1x SMN
1x RUN
1x GEO
1x COR

Make that even 2 GEOs if we want to go all out.
Deploy the usual buffs, RUN tanks for a bit until he has TP, then uses Gambit and SCs with the SMN using Flaming Crush.
Would that work on these NMs or not?

I'm inclined to believe that this is a poor choice of event for it, but I suppose with enough brute force (support) it could work.

There are some things that stats can't fix.

If you'd like a great example, I had an Idris GEO with me and a COR and we fought the Cerberus Zi'tah NM. That thing has about 90% MDT and takes very little magic damage. Flaming Crush did worse damage than Volt Strike despite all the buffs.

Now, that may not be the case here, but Flaming Crush fails on a lot of the battlefield NMs because of their PDT. Flaming Crush relies on doing a good amount of physical damage in order for the magical damage to scale. The more physical damage you deal, the more magical damage. If you do 100 physical damage and then have like 10x multiplier to magic damage, that's still only 1000 magic damage under that extreme scenario. No amount of ATK can fix that if you're already PDIF capped. The same goes for MDT; if they have high MDT, sure you might hit hard physically, but the magic damage it deals will be scaled down greatly, and then you're left with a bad physical BP.

Flaming Crush just doesn't work on everything very well even with tons of stats. I'm out in Zi'Tah hitting most of the NMs for 99999 + 99999 Light, but the Cerberus said no.


I consider it such when we are attempting to overcome unfavorable conditions for the ability. Like I said, I don't know the NMs in Sinister Reign as well as I'd like to, but from personal experience so far, I'm inclined to believe such a strategy would not be as effective as it was in the past.

It could very well work just fine though, but like I said, it will require a good amount of support because Sinister Reign has a pretty high stat hurdle to overcome on top of these potential damage reduction stats.

Side note, all 3 bosses in phase 2 have a WS that erases all debuffs, which would include Gambit, Dia, etc. Fire generally does fine, though several of the bosses have magic defense and a certain spoiler dude appears to have MDT/blink aura.

My normal setup is PLD/WHM/SMN/NIN/GEO/COR, and we clear in about 14-15 mins, with the NIN spamming self darkness and magic bursting with impact, doing around 30k+(54k is my highest atm) to most nms. But we've also gone with PLD/WHM/SMN/BST/GEO/COR with the pld opening light for me to close with Flaming crush, and does very well on most of the nms.
The only NMs I run into issues with are the 2 Arcelias and Teodor. Teodor I normally just spam Holy Mist for about 6-10k.
I much prefer building around Smn over Bst and Rng, even with well geared jobs I haven't been too impressed.

Sinister Reign's NMs don't have any particuliar PDT or MDT traits but Flaming Crush rarely works correctly on "very" high level monsters. It's especially noticable in Escha, Flaming Crush does easily 99k on almost every T1s, more like 50~70k on T2s and drop to something like 20k~ (at best) on T3s.
That's being said, I wouldn't say SMN is a bad choice in Sinister Reign.

Another video, with a setup more centered on SMN dmg but it's only a 11 min win. It was one of our first runs after the update, I didn't even knew I could Stun mobs or about Arciela Light/Dark Stances.

In end, a lot of different setups work.

I've outparced BSTs in Reign. Saying SMN isn't a good fit for this event is silly.

SMN damage is poor for this event for damage without magic bursts, yes. Like I said, just because you do a good Volt Strike once every 30 seconds doesn't make it good. Any melee DD or BST will beat you if they are even competently geared, and I'm assuming it's a Nirvana Summoner. It would be more fair to compare that Nirvana Summoner against a mythic DD, but I don't even have to.

If you don't believe it, parse it. Eyeballing random Volt Strikes means nothing. In the end, a melee DD could be closing those skillchains, or a magic DD could be doing those magic bursts, and that would be better.

I'm not saying you shouldn't bring a SMN; I'm just saying it's flat out worse than other options unless you're actually using it for its support or are setting things up special for it to be good (Magic Burst).


Then the BST you are with is either really bad, you used conduit, or things are stacked in your favor (skillchains, magic bursts).


Of course, it's an easy event.

I personally don't care if it's worse. This thread is about figuring out how to get sinister reign done as a smn. Sure, we may have to pull in other jobs like PLD, but it's not about figuring out what exact jobs make the best combination for the event. This is the smn forum, and we're summoners; we're figuring out how to get this event done for ourselves, using all the tools at our disposal.

Really want to try this setup myself.
RDM in place of WHM because fights shouldn't last long (if they do, something is going wrong) and RDM should be more than able to handle cures for that.
Plus sticking Frazzle3/Distract3 which doesn't hurt.

GEO buffs:
Torpor
Frailty
Malaise
Languor
Entrust Focus on RDM maybe

COR buffs:
Pet Mab+
Pet Mac+? Or Pet Att, not sure here.

RUN gonna use Gambit on first NM, then Rayke on the second, then Gambit again on the third wave.
I'm really curious to see if this can work! :D :D :D

Pet: MAB and M. Acc. are both on PUP roll.

Did 2 test runs with the setup Sechs suggested and took some screenshots. Got Darrcuiln > Teodor > August and Arciela > Rosulation > August.

Darrcuiln (killed with a single SC)


Teodor (only 40%~ per SC I think? these shadows didn't help)



Arciela V1 (killed with a single SC)


Rosulation (pretty much dead with a single SC and I think one Bubble was missing)


August (rather resistant or maybe we were a bit slow to set everything before Daybreak)






For too long I had underestimated the impact of Languor/Frazzle on Flaming Crush thinking the poor damage were due to a too high evasion or the lvl's difference (when it wasn't the PDT/MDT/MDB/fire STD/blunt resistance), I didn't expect these results. We were at something like 26:30 time left when August popped on the second run. I'm still missing Ingrid, Morimar, Arciela V2 and Sajj'aka data but I'm almost certain they are defensively weaker than Teodor/August.

Morimar should drop about as easily as Darrcuiln, as his defenses are equally poor (Darrcuiln is easily the weakest boss). And yes, you're correct in assuming that Teodor and August are the hardiest of these bosses. You might have some resists with Arciela do to her unusually high magic evasion (which more recent reports claiming that it varies by element along with her light/dark mode), but physically she's not much hardier (if at all) than her round 1 version. Ingrid will likely be about the same as Arciela.

So basically it's easy peasy but kinda nasty on Teodor and especially August.

Looking forward to see results on Saj'akka.

So it is as I predicted a while ago but ignored, magic evasion plays into Flaming Crush.

Not necessarily. See: Meteor, Nether Blast, and Night Terror

I guess Rolanberry Daifuku must be worthwhile then.

I'm in the same boat, I was under the impression Flaming Crush's magic hit either couldn't be resisted (a la Night Terror) or its magic acc was through the roof.

Did you try the same setup without Languor/Frazzle and find the damage to be much worse?

Both are magic.
Neather Blast is like Atonement, "breath-but-not-BDT-affected". MAB increases the damage, but MDB, MDT, and BDT don't reduce it. (This is why it was the most consistent and "best" damage back in the day when it was the largest dark "nuke" SMN had.)

Night Terror is just a "Lv76~80-fake!Merit-BP". It has a damage multiplier term to enemies who are asleep, similarly to Thunder spells. It's affected by MAB, MDB, and MDT.
It's Diabolos' equivalent BP to the Celetial's Merit BPs added in the 80 cap increase. (Carbuncle's is Holy Mist and Fenrir has Lunar Bay... Cait Sith has no Lv76~98 BPs... smh)