SMN Viable W/out Gearswaps?

Gotten some SMN pieces over the years, and finally motivated myself to get over 100JP on the job. Is it worth playing if I don't use gearswap? Not aiming to be a top tier SMN by any means, but would like to have it be at least useful. Appreciate any feedback.

Sure.
You don't need gearswap for any job. If anything SMN is one of the better jobs to play without Gearswap. Precast bloodpacts have 1s delay so changing for equipsets works perfectly fine for maximum potency stuff.

Only issue will be fast cast on enhancing spells if you ever use.

Ok thank you very much. Seem to have done ok w/out it thus far. Every time I try to use it I break something ><

In high lag situations like DynamisD Vagary & Omen,
equipsets works better for me than Gearswap cause latency issues.
So yes it works very nice, Just need a special macro for when you conduit zerg.
Which I use when I zerg cause I disable gearswap for conduit.

Thanks for help. Have a decent COR and GEO, but my group has a ton of CORs and I hate playing GEO, so wanted to work on something else useful for endgame stuff. I imagine I'm gonna have to go back to GEO though, but can keep working on SMN on the side.

This is vital if you use Gearswap.

Some gearswaps works with conduit, locking sets in or skipping precast. But I play it safe~

All Gearswaps work with Conduit... if you time your BPs correctly. ;)

Most people can't be bothered to do that, so they just spam the macro and it causes problems so they have to figure out a way to prevent gear from swapping. That's true even if you're using equipsets, as Wotasu alluded to.

I swear I'll convert my fellow convokers to manual BP timing during Conduit, one person at a time! Wotasu, will you be the next convert? Give it a try bro, you seem pretty serious about SMN. You can easily squeeze a few extra BP out of your Conduit this way, which often means at least 100k more damage.

Yeah Ive stopped spamming macro and noticed more BP's awhile back, still gearswap & my latency makes it unreliable in even slight lag situation sometimes.

Timing>spam for sure.

Timing beats spam if you have gearswap changing gear. If you lock your set, and use injected packets instead of letting the game interpret the command, spam at a rate of 4/second or greater will guarantee it executes at the fastest moment possible.

(Injected packets have no limitations, game-interpreted commands can only be sent once per second, so you lose time if you're caught in that 1s delay when you should be BPing, but if using packets(which I believe gearswap does by default) that won't happen.)

No job is viable without gearswap.

I hope you joking :) half of my ls play vanilla FFXI on various jobs and they are mechanically and strategically the best players I know (Many first time world/NA clears on various top high end content in past several years)

well "half your ls" is either lying through their goddamn teeth or you're heavily exaggerating your linkshell's accomplishments.

It's not really that difficult if you're competent in your setup.

I know some really good players that I was shocked to find out they didn't use gearswap at all. It's not for everyone.

yeah and I know a bunch of people who claimed to have beaten Neo Nyzul back in 2012 with an "over 90% rate without windower or the use of third party tools" that turned out to be total frauds.

Theres nothing that cant be beaten without even changing gear. it's just slower.

You can put on a full acc hybrid, and literally never change and still accomplish basically everything.

We got 15 pieces of gear in 14 runs (went 13/14 on wins, but everyone got 2 pieces from the boss) without any 'cheats' past ashitacast for gear swaps. Set group of 6, no voice chat, 20 pairs of powder boots on everyone to rotate. Adding an extra macro for each ws would not have changed that winrate, you were just bad if you saw it as impossible.

Facts.
This is shameful to admit, but I beat Iroha by disabling gearswap and staying in 1 set. Never even swapped to enmity set cos I was scared I would get nuked lmao. This was before I realised how godly /nin was for the fight.

Done the same thing too on Sealed Fate lol.

So if them can be beaten without swapping gear, anything can.

Can they be done with no one swapping gear, and not just the tank? That's what I assumed he was talking about.

Maybe if DDs stay in WS gear and WHM in cure set? idk lol.
Be cool to try.

Don't need to cheat to swap gear though, equipsets are only worse for precast/preranged swaps. Everything else is negligible.

Beating 2012 NNI with 6/6 vanilla player then claim to have 90% win rate wasn't the same as doing 2019 endgame successfully with equipsets.

NNI in 2012 was meant to ***with players with RNG mechanics to artificially prolong the content. It's designed to make playerbase try countless times unless they use tools to speed up the process.

So yeah, if someone claim to have 90% win rate in NNI when it was out(before nerf) using vanilla I'd think they are either lying, got REALLY lucky with small sample size, or not a 6/6 vanilla pt.

Endgame in 2019 has relatively low difficulty if setup is optimal and everyone has max gears. Even if everyone only play at 50% of their performance ceiling it's still possible to get a win. Equipset can perform way above 50% of their max potential.

Think about it, full wave 3 clear can be done with 1hr to spare, and ambu VD has 30 min time limit.

So claiming an alliance beating endgame content with vanilla players makes a lot of sense. The game is just too easy with the gears we have now.

Kinda been a while, I think there's a pretty big difference between early NNI and later ones. When it was out you can get past F100 or something, which made it very very hard to beat. Community at that time certainly wasn't beating it at 90% win rate.

Then SE nerfed it at one point(or maybe there was multiple nerfs? I can't remember)so eventually it became merc-able with everyone selling gears/had NNI gears.

Was post-stopper, pre-embrava/floors per jump change, which is the largest era of it's relevance and the most likely it was referred to, don't think even straight up perma flee++ cheaters could get 90% win pre-stopper. Good catch/clarification, though.

First nerf was the immediate month after release and let you select a floor to not go past, otherwise your 2-9 had to land on 100 or you rolled back to 1-10. Second nerf was years later in conjunction with the embrava nerf and significantly changed the floors per jump and probably something else I can't remember.

Ah, I don't think you need perma flee to win consistently post nerf. We didn't use that, nor most people that I know of. Nor I think voice chat makes that much difference.

I do think fill mode helped a ton and it was windower build in function? So most groups used it back then since it was readily available. And that qualified as cheat.

Yeah I hear this a lot, but I do okay with out it. Usually only finish 1-3% behind people similarly geared who use it on parse. IS it a difference? Yes, for sure. Enough where other people in my group care and we aren't able to finish content? Not at all. I try to stay away from jobs where it's "mandatory", which is why I was asking. I'm not against it by any means, just don't choose to use it my self.

Don't even use windower here... Every job is viable without gearswap or 'close your eyes' tools :P

If you check this~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVRzvUHsJuM

Probably the hardest fight in the game (especially without mewing don't think anyone else has beaten it this way) The BRD isn't using gearswap, neither am I. The other 3 are though, I'm not sure if Piko was, but he doesn't need to.

So everything, technically, is viable to beat without GS.

^ I don't really hit my macros in these fights that swap me into ja specific gear. Not smart to do, u can get caught.

I've parsed with a lot of serious DD with GS, from what I've seen, aside from lag/human error the only situation that I'm consistently behind is the situation heavily favor ws disengaged: ranged attack setup with tons of adds(I got into animation lock way too often compare with windower people that can just shoot and ws with less animation lock), or SP zerging on dnc, or escha open with soldiers drink and such.

If I'm just melee spamming WS at 1000 TP against the same target, have no lag nor human error there are no noticable difference on parse outside of luck factor.

Fail to WS as close to 1000 tp as possible count as human error btw. If I over TP a round for 3 ws and the other guy never over TP he will win the parse. That's not quite a GS advantage though. Unless GS used also use auto WS they suffer from slow WS speed as much as vanilla player.

That being said, for longer raids such as Dyna D it's much harder to stay focused for 2.5hr and not making any mistakes. At one point Id usually forget to equip the right weapon or fail to pay attention to haste levels. So there's a little bit higher risk to lose parse I'm longer raids without GS too.

Edit: Btw, if you are consistently behind GS users on the same job with the same gear by 1%-3% in every situation you may need to look into it. It's probably not because of your choice of using equipset, but because you are doing 1 or 2 things less than another guy.


I can't think of any job that needs GS. Not even mage jobs which many people claim GS or bust.