Ifrit-egi is bugged.

[Gallus]

Pets indeed have different 'scaling' factors that come into play when looking at their potencies. This has been known for quite a long time, but I'll leave the technical explanation to someone who knows it better than me. But as you've found out for yourself, it's quite easy to see just comparing the numbers of something like ifrit's '100 potency' egi assaults to your own 100 potency ruin 3's (with no dots).

So yes, suffice to say it means the potency number you see on most pet related tooltips is a lie, and it's not real potency. In practice, garuda potencies are roughly 80% of 'player potency', and ifrit's are more like 48%. Demi summons use 'garuda potencies' so that 650 akh morn/revelation is actually 520, and wyrmwaves are 120 not 150. Those wonderful ifrit egi assaults that bloat up the rotation? They actually do 48 potency for your trouble making them even more pathetic than they look, heh heh.

This was the case even in Stormblood when summoner damage was just fine. So it's probably not like they're balancing the job around the wrong damage numbers or our pets are bugged without them knowing or something. It's just a very unclear game mechanic that is not explained anywhere.



Ifrit actually lost its autoattack going into Shadowbringers for some reason. It's true that ifrit used to have AA + burning strike spam, while garuda as a caster pet only has wind blade spam but no AA. Now however you will see ifrit only does burning strike and nothing else. That was one reason why (contagion aside in Stormblood), ifrit did more than damage than garuda even with a worse potency multiplier.
Several people have reported the loss of ifrit AAs as a potential bug since the launch of the expansion, and I'm given to believe it has been moved into the 'accepted bugs'. If ifrit's autoattacks are returned to him, that might indeed be one source of missing damage that would improve summoner numbers.

I was aware of that, but right before the expansion landed, when I saw Ifrit's autos tooltip showing 80 potency and garuda's autos showing 40 potency, as well as the fact they weren't targetteable anymore and how SE told us they changed the EGI system making it so that the commands would be issued by the SMN itself and not the pet, I thought myself, the 80 potency and 40 potency most likely are the real potencies scaled to SMN's damage now, it made perfect sense.

Well no, they literally halved their potencies and kept their garbage own scalings xDD. Oh dear...yeah...the 50 potency/2k damage Egi assaults...it almost hurts to see, especially when the MNK next to you is doing autoattacks of 4.5k xD.

Edit: As for the missing AA, if SMN is doing lower damage than intended on top of having an absolute mess of a rotation, for god's sake, the very first thing they should do is fix their glitched egis. As if dealing with this class wasn't painful already...