Best Trial Weapon?

As a dnc you could solo almace at least to 85. Some empyreans aren't much harder than their WoE counterparts

It doesn't take money or connections to make an empy weapon. Just takes time.

May I ask which job?

This, gonna dualbox most of mine, easy nms <_>
Just gonna do these stupid NM trials first...

What swd? I ended up doing most the harder stuff on rdm. I solo'd most my WoE gun (and up to the cara stage of armageddon) too mostly on rng where I had to coins on rdm or thf or blu

Definitely worthwhile. Badelaire +2 as a weapon isn't particularly exceptional, but CDC is amazing - even if you're mixing in the occasional Sanguine Blade I'd consider it a very strong choice. Your mainstay for a non-CDC weapon is the STR Shamshir +2, with DA, DEX, VIT (PDT), and OA4 swords all having use in one application or another.

The thing to keep in mind about the WoE weapon is that the droprate on coins is fairly unimpressive without TH and it's also completely random as to which coins you'll obtain - in my opinion, it'd be faster on average to finish an 85 Almace than obtain a Badelaire +2 even with a duo or trio. It's also much more rewarding provided you keep up with trials. The 80 stage is soloable; all the T1 NMs can be handled by any of several methods and Briareus is reportedly soloable by BLU, among other jobs. Sobek is a bit more annoying, so that may be a cockblock if you have to go it alone and don't have a job capable of soloing him.

Wat.

Right... as such macc swds are more or less worthells since they only effect magical spell acc.

He might need advice but he needs good and accurate advice. Making macc/dex swds are a complete waste of time. In fact in the time it takes you to make those you might have been able to make the WoE or empyrean swd. Or at the very least make a significant dent in them or a str swd or OAT or OAT 2-4

Ok, let's review for a second...

This is what happened:


This is NOT what happened:



There was no request for the reasoning behind my answer, so it was not given. Upon request, I would have explained why Almace is optimal. Get the sand out of your vagina.

My reasoning for saying OA2-4 would be the better off-hand choice was that I thought it would give you the highest rate of tp-gain, but I also completely overlooked the DA sword, and was thinking you meant OAT. At the time I did my OAT sword, only Visions was out, so the two options were OAT+DMG or the easier path that didn't have the extra damage. Obviously I just followed along the harder path as they added to them, enhancing my OAT sword, and pretty much forgot about DA.

If I have the math right though, which perhaps I don't, even with 23% DA from gear/traits, OAT sword (assuming 40% DA rate) will still have a 30.8% proc rate, giving you a total of 15% extra swings. I've no idea on proc rate for OA2-4, but assuming the same base 40% proc rate, you're looking at 30% extra swings. Yes, damage is much lower, but 30% extra swings gets you to 100% tp 30% faster, meaning 30% more ws's. Considering the ridiculous amount of damage that CDC does, isn't it worthwhile to sacrifice melee damage for ws frequency?

If you're just standing there swinging and never ws'ing, I'm sure the DA sword is better due to slightly lower delay and MUCH higher base damage, but when you factor in CDC damage, I'd have thought more tp is best.

Obviously I haven't factored in ODD here at all, as I don't know how it works (does it only work on main hand? What's the proc rate?).

I fully expect you to tell me I'm completely wrong here, but I'm hoping you can tell me why, because, well, I like to know these things to maximise my own damage and efficiency.

I'd really like to see your math on all that. Cause I'm really unsure how you are only getting barely over 2 hits a round with 3% triple attack and 23% double attack. My math shows that to be around a 85% acc rating for that to happen...

***, didn't catch that. I'll fix it in a sec.

My numbers are more around 2.622 and 3.076.

Also you can't really factor in delay differences but not tp gain/hit differences. I mean to use an extreme you could compare a dagger to a scythe and show the dagger has a rediculous advantage

I was going to, but that gets into average rounds/ws and I didn't necessarily want to play with that since I don't have the exact hit distribution for OA4 on hand. I'll go ahead and plug it in though.

Yeah 1.9 average sounds kinda lame for something that can hit 2 3 and 4 times :(

My standard crosspost with a nice estimate on OA4 performance:

This is centered around multihit 2-handed weapons, but should be fairly applicable here.

The key is that the 2-4 sword will still more greatly increase your number of hits per round by a much larger factor than, say, a 7% DA sword. Though the OA4 with my estimated distribution gains nothing from DA, your mainhand still does. This is an advantage dual wielding has when applying these weapons. A triple attack proc on your OA4 is still greater than and thus increasing the average number of hits per round of the weapon, and that TA also procs on your mainhand.

For most purposes, and with my estimated distribution, an OA4 weapon can be considered to always be attacking twice. This distribution is sensible from a game design standpoint because a beneficial stat, Double Attack, won't suddenly be hurting your performance instead. As long as a multihit stat added is still greater than the average number of hits per round of a weapon it is still increasing that average, though possibly by slim to nonexistent margins.

So Nightfyre's postulate that having DA and TA gearing makes OA4 less than worthwhile or anyhthing more than marginally less effective is simply incorrect.


Everybody stand the *** back. Here comes the math:

OA3 was the 1.9 hits/round you cite. Can only hope that OA4 achieves better. Going to use 40/30/20/10 with 23% DA and 3% TA.

100 Rounds:
(The multiplied values are compensation for DA/TA override)
Almace - 100+23+6*.77 hits = 127.62 hits

Offhanded with Almace:
7% DA - 100+30+6*.7 hits = 134.2 and Almace increases to 134.2 = 268.4 hits
OAT - 100+40*.77*.93+23+6*.77 = 156.264 hits = 283.884 hits
OA4 - 100+30*.77*.93+40*.77*.93+30*.77*.93+23+6*.77 = 199.23 hits = 326.85 hits

Edit because sword goes to 10% DA
10% DA - 100+33+6*.67 = 137.02 = 274.04 hits

So Almace+OA4 hits 21.7% 19.3% more often than a 7% 10% DA weapon in the offhand. You have to be kidding if you think a few hits past 100tp is going to put much of a dent in that much faster TP gain. We're talking six WS to every five.

Awesome, thanks heaps for the math crunching guys. I guess for me, since I already have OAT, it's probably not worth changing at this point. If I were to get an almace, then that'd be a different story. The DA sword has a better base damage than OAT, and 9 less hits out of 100 rounds (<3% difference) is pretty insubstantial, meaning that (especially since those extra hits are spread out over main hand too) that for pure melee DoT, the DA sword would be the better choice. Unfortunately though, that's eyeballing, and I can't estimate that for OA2-4.

Anyway, I doubt melee DoT between DA and OAT is enough of a difference that it warrants me tossing my OAT and building a new DA.

So for off-handing to Almace, it's OA2-4 > DA10 > OAT? Outside abyssea I'm sure STR shamshir+2 would be the next best or even possibly better than one of those options, but that also leads me to my other question; how does aftermath work? Is it main-hand only?

Sorry for the wait on the revision, Super Bowl etc.
23% DA means Epona's, so don't forget 3% TA. OA4 has an effective value of 1.9 hits/round iirc, though I can't remember the exact hit distribution. I'll treat it like 90% OAT for now.

So, relative swing frequency:

Start with outside Abyssea. Both have a baseline 3% TA and 23% DA value, for 2.43789 hits/round at 95% hitrate.

Add 10% DA: 2.62219 hits/round
Add 90% OAT: 3.0764895 hits/round

About a 17% difference in hits/round. DA sword is 252 delay while OA4 is 264... combined 476 vs 488 delay before accounting for haste or DW reduction. Using /NIN (DW III) with Suppa, translate into TP/round (Rajas/Brutal for STP):

DA: 5 TP/hit, 13.11095 TP/round
OA4: 5.1 TP/hit, 15.6900964 TP/round

Plug in TP return from WS... w/ Loki's, Rajas, Brutal, Atheling, and Epona's on WS:

DA: 7.217 rounds/WS
OA4: 6.172 rounds/WS

Account for 2 second JA delay on WS. Total time/cycle (in seconds) for:

25% gear haste + Haste/Animating Wail: 26.1666667 vs 23.1666667

+ Marches: 17.4166667 vs 15.5

+ BRD AF3+2 hands: 16.1666667 vs 14.4

etc. OA4's advantage in TP gain (slowly) decreases as JA delay becomes a more significant part of the equation. Adding additional delay via spells/JAs would have the same result.

In addition to the small impact of the offhand's higher base damage, DA affects WS damage while OAX does not. Using an estimate of 2.25 fTP (from Studio Gobli), average fTP moves from 5.58353 to 5.76783. Combine with the increased base damage on the offhand for a 6.8% increase in WS damage for the DA sword.

DoT: Start without considering aftermath. Half of the hits with Almace/DA will be mainhand, half will be offhand. With Almace/OA4, it's a 40:60 split. Factor in fSTR (I used 6 for my example - mob VIT of 91 vs my normal setup) and accounting for delay differences, and Almace/DA comes out ahead by 17.3%.

Almace/DA has a 55:45 TP:WS split (again, not accounting for aftermath). Modify by OA4's advantages and disadvantages...

55/1.173+45*1.062=94.6783205

So yeah, 5.6% advantage for DA worst case. Without accounting for aftermath. Aftermath is estimated at 30% procrate (mainhand only) at 100 TP and would put DA further ahead of OA4.

Now, back to the fact that OA2-4 is, in fact, OA2-4 rather than OAT. You whiff, you get hit, you have variable TP return, you swing more than once per round. You are not going to hit precisely 100 TP every cycle. Some hits will be wasted. The higher your average hits/round (read: moving from DA to OA4), the more often you have "overflow". Same for increasing your maximum hits/round. These overflow hits should in theory contribute to critrate on CDC, but they're less valuable than the preceding hits than enable you to actually WS in the first place. There's also the fact that you don't always WS on the attack round that gets you to 100 TP. Every time this happens, DA sword gains a small advantage because it has superior DoT. Also, if you kill a mob with anything but the very last attack of a given round DA gains an advantage (or rather, OA4 suffers more since it's all about TP gain).

Abyssea yields autocapped fSTR (favors DA) and an altered TP:WS split (approaching 50:50, favoring OA4); DA sword is still ahead. STR is generally ahead of both (inside and out).

Also why the *** did it copy the old form. W/e, re-edited with the correct text.

Why not set store tp?

Also since you bring up the over tping thing you could bring up that you are less likely to have to hold your tp or overkill the mob with OA2-4 since you will get to 100% faster and doing less dmg to get there. And when you are dealing a good 70-80% of the mobs health you are gunna do one or the other semi often as is.

And well nms you tend to not to be continually meleeing on as a blu anyways.

Also I find myself using VV fairly often... I just can't seem to not use it for some reason :(. Probably because I haven't done a real xp pt on blu in forever and been using it to proc or in cruor pts so that slight down time makes the regain so much stronger

Honestly didn't even occur to me to do so, probably because I'm used to setting for spell damage rather than emphasizing melee (don't have Almace, won't for a while). Just going to plug it in this time rather than write it out all over again... 7.551775% advantage to DA, not accounting for aftermath (haven't added it to my spreadsheet yet, so I have to do that by hand).

Personally, if I'm that worried about overkill I just grab another mob as I approach 100 TP.

Increasing JA delay, worsening OA4's position aside from potentially upping aftermath frequency. If you're talking about actual engage time, meh... I'd probably be on a different job in that situation but that doesn't necessarily apply to everyone.

Yeah I've been trying to work on my melee build lately both in gear and spells just cause how awesome and fun CDC is.

Part of me has been considering going /dnc for haste samba... but god the difference between DW II and III is big. Hmmm another source of stun too though... wonder how good violent flourish can be as a blu/dnc

You could do that but why are you pulling on blu!?! And of course losing time to be dealing dmg. Just something to consider. You ruby your rooose!

By not constantly meleeing I meant usually letting the tanks get hate and minimizing NM tp gain while everyone tries to proc stuff and well you trying to proc. So not really trying to get tp for procs as fast as possible

So often find myself running in and running right out so higher delay ends up only helping me... as far as another job I often find myself being the only competent blu or the only one capable of dealing real dmg or only one with all proc spells... or often some combination of those 3 lol. Actually occasionally I'm the only blu that even knows what the proc spells are /wrist. So coming on another job isn't always viable :(

Also often deal with tanks that can't really keep hate off me doing much of anything if I don't have 2 and I go /thf lol. Though I must admit CDC into SACATAEFF benthic is friggin awesome sauce

Pulling? I don't EXP. If I'm killing fodder ***, it either aggro'd (who cares if I overkill) or I need a pop item. And I'm not losing time to deal damage because I'm still hitting the first mob while I'm moving towards the second one. *** worrying about ruby, the other guys accidentally kill with WS all the time due to raw damage potential so we stopped trying to avoid it.

Our other "tanks" are a Vere MNK and an Ukon WAR (when he's not THing for us). Not really worried about hate tbh. If I'm grellowing a T1 I don't even bother engaging (proc > start killing fodder mobs for more pops), T2+ I'll engage and haven't had any issues with procs due to TP feed.

Meh I probably don't run with the caliber of people you do so yeah lol. Also I will choke slam non-tanks that tp on the nm while I'm trying to land 1000 needles

You're probably the second person I've ever seen, after myself, actually incorporate WS saturation.

But there's something wrong with your hitcount with OA4. You're only getting 17% more hits per round than DA offhand where I got 19.3%

If OA4 only averages 1.9 hits per round, it's utter ***and a pointless upgrade because that's what OA3 was parsed to average (50/30/20 = 1.9/round).

So you're really skewing this hard towards DA from the start, though you raise good points about increasing mainhand swings for aftermath procs.

However, I can also disagree with your assumption that DA helps your WS damage so much. You're getting an extra 1.0 from offhand (despite lower damage, which is a teeny difference after WSC and fSTR), so it's more the difference between 3.5 and 4.5 or just 8.6% more WS damage, not the 20+% your numbers come out to., or a smidge past 5% more WS damage after split. You did cover that. It's 1am, sue me.