A Summoner's Gear Guide

It wasn't the rage I tested, it was the ward. I initially had both the precast and midcast...using precast for the ability delay. However, when I swapped in summoning skill feet into the midcast, I saw no change. When I slid it into precast, I saw the buff duration increase. Made me wonder if midcast was really accomplishing anything. I use Sel's lua.

If you're using 2 or more empy in that set you could have just saw a set proc and thats what caused the increase

Which ward pact

You actually still need to be in your summoning skill / recast set during midcast. Midcast is what matters for BP recast. Precast is fine too, as long as you keep it on for midcast.

Pet_midcast is where you swap your BP damage gear (or swap Beck Horn to Baayami for wards)

I've been discussing this in the past, even in detail in private with Byrth, because for the longest time I've had pretty consistant issues with the pet:midswap thing on Gearswap.

My BPs were being executed in the wrong set, instead of the correct one, they were being executed in the aftercast set.

Basically it seems that not always but often and consistently, Gearswap was returning to my aftercast set too early, with the consequence that BPs were executed in that set and there was a noticeable difference in damage.

How I solved this? In two steps.
Initially I removed my aftercast automatization.
My gearswap was stopping in the pet_midcast set (the correct one to executed BPs in) and NOT returning to aftercast. I had to do that manually.
Either by executing another action or by pressing a hotkey connected to a custom "return to aftercast" function that I made myself.

This worked flawlessly, never experienced the issue not even once, but it was a bit annoying of course.
So after a while (a long time because I'm lazy) I changed to a "timed" function.
Basically the "return to aftercast set" custom function I made to be executed manually with a hotkey, is now executed automatically, but after X seconds.
If the BP is not interrupted and gets correctly executed, after X seconds it returns to the envisioned aftercast set. Basically the same Gearswap would do normally, but with a slightly longer time.
This doesn't happen if Astral Conduit or Apogee are active.

Never experienced the issue not even once since then, and I don't have the "annoyance" of having to remember to press a key to return manually to the aftercast set.



To summarize this in other terms:
In my SMN lua I had to make some exceptional rules so that the regular gearswap "aftercast" doesn't get executed at all when successfully using a Blood Pact JA.
This means that I would get left in my pet: midcast set instead of returning to whatever I'm supposed to (idle or engaged etc)
To avoid that I built a custom function that does for Blood Pact JAs pretty much what aftercast would do (returning me to a specific set) but does so with a longer delay, completely avoiding the risk of BP being executed in the aftecast set rather than the pet midcast ones.

share you smn lua?

Yeah I thought this was common knowledge.
You precast in BP recast timer gear.
You don't do anything in midcast or aftercast if it's a BP.
You use pet_midcast and pet_aftercast for BP DMG and then returning to whatever you need to idle in

Job abilities and weapon skills don't have a midcast just fyi. It's precast and aftercast

This is how i do it. It has the added benefit of handling dropped action packets, which can happen often in instanced zones.

I definitely had similar issues when developing my SMN Lua, it requires some unique behavior compared to other Luas if you want it working correctly. There are a number of ways to solve it, mine has something in aftercast() which aborts processing aftercast if pet_midaction() returns true. That way if your client receives the message about pet readying BP before Gearswap has the chance to go into aftercast, it doesn't even try.

However, if you have a lot of lag or unstable connection, even that doesn't always work. That's why I added a lag mode to mine which sounds like it's somewhat similar to your approach. Instead of waiting for server packets, it just waits half a second and then goes into pet_midcast gear.

This approach is rock solid for me, it always lands in the right set. I've never had to use the lag mode at all, but I guess I'm blessed with a reliable connection.

Edit: By the way this approach also works in precast & midcast to prevent other actions from taking you out of pet_midcast gear before the BP lands. For example if you start casting a spell or hit Assault right after your BP, before it goes off, you don't want it doing swaps for those actions. You want it to stay in pet_midcast even if it results in a gimpy spell cast with no fast cast.

It's actually precast that JA/WS don't have. They have a midcast and aftercast.

I know logically what you said makes more sense, but in practice, there's no difference between the two because nothing happens during precast. It's only midcast where things start to matter.

My SMN Lua swaps BP recast gear in the midcast, not the precast. Works fine.