The biggest problem with smn at the moment is that when it was nerfed so the T2 nukes wouldn't do full damage as if casted by a blm, magic attack was lowered across the board. To the point that its not worth using Astral Flow over a physical blood pact. The merit blood pacts are also significantly weaker than they should be and not worth wasting merits on atm. This is why you only see smn using physical blood pacts on anything.

I feel like we can all agree regardless if blm is stronger than it should be we'd all like to bring melee to things to spice them up. Having the same strategy for every endgame mob isn't ideal and looking into physical defense could be a step in correcting it.

_________________
Warycatalp
Jahruru

The merit BP's were nerfed as well; they were doing like 2-6k depending on target back in the day. That was not entirely just SMN though, back then elemental resistances for almost all mobs were significantly lower, it was just more pronounced on SMN than BLM because BLM did not have access to higher tier spells until much later. Certainly a lvl 10 SMN with Ramuh coming close to oneshotting pugils in dunes or bubu was a lot more noticeable. SMN got overnerfed in that fix and has not really been addressed since.

Weren't physical BPs generally better against things that didn't resist them for one reason or another? What is the actual damage on a 5/5 merit blood pact? Is it a matter of magic accuracy making you resist on anything worthwhile? How is the damage vs. a high level target compared to a low level one?

I'm all for checking defense, I hate how little melee is used on everything besides merits at 75, but we can't just jump to conclusions as to why. We should just provide more info & numbers (and information about the circumstances of the numbers ) i.e. the exact numbers, the stats had at the time of the numbers, and the debuffs/buffs on the mob. I could probably get some really amazing numbers on SACA CB here if I had 3 bards all using SV, but those numbers wouldn't be useful to compare to unless everyone knew the context. Vik, do you happen to know the gear, food etc. (or exact ranged attack, str, agi etc) that you had for that Slug? Did Kirin have Dia as well as defense down, etc?