The Last Dance: Gearing Paradigms For A New Age

That's really interesting, so it looks good that if you have horos feet/+1 you can take off No Foot Rise and add to Closed Position for STP, huh?

No foot rise is still nice to have for instant TP gain and finishing moves so I wouldnt completely drop it.
I've been running with 3/5 No Foot Rise at a minimum because 3 finishing moves is sort of the sweet spot for a couple things:

*) 3/5 NoFootRise with Horos gives 15tp return on activation, so you'll have just enough FM's and TP for Wild+Violent Flourish+Step starting from 0 TP and FMs for 3 attempts to JA stagger a dynamis mob starting from scratch.

*) non presto'd step + 3/5 NFR wont overflow your finishing moves and you can reverse those 5/5 FM's, and have presto freed up for your next FM buildup stage.

*) 3 FM's for use with stacking building+climactic flourishes for rudra's storm that doesn't use excessive FMs.

*) 3/5 NFR with horos and Reverse'd with charis hands+2 gives 72TP return so you can get close enough for self sc reliably. Plays rather nicely with /sam and meditate too if you only needed a tick or two of that for your preceeding ws.

Sorry if those points might sound a bit confusing, but i'm trying to illustrate that you could back down from 5/5 NoFootRise and steal 1-2 merits from it for closed position merits and not really hurt your normal finishing move reverse flourish/step/nofootrise usage if you tweak your JA routine alittle.
You'll be able to leverage the +STP bonus on the horos feet and still be able to easily self skillchain and pull enough TP+FMs out of thin air with NFR for useful burst TP building.

Yeah, if I ever went back to actually playing DNC I would probably go 5 Closed Position, 3 NFR, and 1 of each stance. The reason I have not run out and remeritted is because AF2+4 legs will come out next patch.

Oh Byrth how do you handle your extra finishing moves you get with terpsichore when stepping?

I absolutely love getting 4 or 3 now with Terpsi myself instead of 3 or 2 beforehand, but its really easy to overflow past the FM cap of 5 now. So far its turned my old JA rotation/flow completely on its head.

I'm alittle puzzled trying to figure out how to the extra leverage FMs in a useful manner. I feel like I should be working building/climactic flourish into my rotation more so the extra FM building rate doesn't get wasted.

I merit dnc a little different than most. I 5/5 no foot rise, 3/5 closed position and 1/5 in both dances. There are a few ways you can spend the extra steps. I usually run a cycle of skillchains depending on what flourishes are up at the time. If you find you have extra steps you can always use building flourish to prepare for a ws/skillchain ahead of time.

-Step (4) > Evisceration > Reverse Flourish > Pyrrhic Kleos > Darkness (every dancer should know and use this one.)

-Step (4) > building flourish (1 step left) > climactic Flourish (will give you 2 crits with af3 head) > No foot rise for 5 steps +25 tp > Rudra's Storm > Reverse Flourish > Rudra's Storm > Darkness

-Step (4) > Pyrrhic Kleos > Climactic Flourish > No Foot Rise for 5 steps +25 tp > Rudra's Storm > Darkness > Reverse Flourish > Rudra's Storm > Darkness.
this one reqires 5/5 no foot rise for the reverse flourish and the 25 tp bonus helps to get 100 tp fast enough to land the skillchains. It is easier to pull off /sam so you have meditate to fill the gap between the 2nd ws faster.

DNC/SAM can get crazy will skillchain spams using both meditate and the free 25 tp from no foot rise augment on af2 body.

-step (4) > Sekkanoki > Exenterator > Pyrrhic Kleos > Distortion > Reverse Flourish > Evisceration > Darkness.

-Step (4) > Sekkanoki > Exenterator > Meditate and immedietly Pyrrhic Kleos > Distortion > Evisceration > darkness > Climactic Flourish > No Foot Rise > Reverse Flourish > Rudra's storm > darkness.
You could possibly fit in another ws in there if you get tp quick enough for the last rudra's storm and save your reverse flourish, but its not possible to make a skillchain from it since you already made double darkness.

Depending on how you are playing dnc you can spend the extra steps on Violent flourish and Animated Flourish if you are tanking, and still have 3 steps for a 55 tp reverse flourish. Terpderp is amazing for tp gain and makes playing support a lot easier for DNC. Pretty much allowing us to spam cures nonstop as long as you keep up your reverse flourishes. I been taking Dancer to Ra'Kaznar Skirmishes lately and between all the AoE damage from everything there it is a great support instantly cure bombing the party.

This is probably not the answer that you're looking for, but the solution is to use fewer steps. Presto -> Step once every 30 seconds is enough to keep up a Reverse -> WS rotation. On longer fights where you're trying to maintain a Daze, just build and maintain the most important Daze and alternate between building and letting the other two important dazes wear off.

Lately i've been sticking with 5 Fan 3 NFR, 1Sabre, 1closed - i'm addicted to tanking everything.
AM3 indeed does do wonders for tp gain and the ability to waltz spam even while fandance'd.
If I had a time machine I would use it to tell myself to make this Terpsi ages ago haha.


I've been bringing mine to Ra'Kaznar skirmishes as well and i've been subbing /run , tanking and covering alot of the healing burden. Flash/Runes/Swordplay/Barspell/Vallation/Pflug are an amazing toolset for tanking and having extremely solid elemental resistance versus some of the NMs in there too.

The ironclads are just terrible time wasters so we avoid them and go after other NM like the marolith/yztarg/cerb on the low tier runs.
The yztarg are kinda evil and has that move to drop you to 50% max hp awhile, but we are evasive enough, able to turtle in fandance, and waltz spam so much with the splitup timers we can power through it and keep everyone else alive.

That sort of makes sense, I had always pondered that trying to burn more JA and use the extra FMs up could maybe not be wise due extra JA delay versus just autoattacking.

Random question about DNC/RUN. If you have runes up it blocks samba for yourself, but does it still work for party members? Dancer can easily cap delay with marches, but non dual-wielders still benefit from haste samba. I have played around with DNC/RUN a few times solo, but never payed attention if it still procs samba through the enspell or not.

Noone else gets samba if you have runes up which is why I defeault to fandancing for preemptive defense and lower waltz recast, usually if i'm /run then the other dd are also /run for stuff like shark.
Also for the new skirmish I had the mnk also come /run.

Honestly, I wish they'd buff Flourishes and reduce JA delay so that it's worth keeping a more aggressive step rotation, but as it stands I do not see how it could possibly be justified.

One more thing on /run sub, if you plan on taking dancer to the upcoming marjami delve, I would highly recommend picking up these 3 items up in advance.

ItemSet 320505

I've been playing around with Hurkan tanking more lately and these pieces work amazing for Dnc/Run.

This is theorycrafting for unreleased content, but the items should translate well to a gearset for the delve fracture boss as well (using my tanking experiences with hurkan and its moves/damage as an estimate of what we can expect).

I'm able to get 180 lightning resist on my own with /run barthunder+ 2 earth runes as a base, and there is a noticable amount of absorbs on all the lightning magic TP moves when you pair up the sachet and the cape.
As for the icecrack ring, while I was skeptical about it, I found myself not getting stun/paralyze locked for long durations after Reverse Current/Static Prison so I have been able to healing waltz off the status effects and also heal myself up without much outside help.

The only main danger we may face versus the delve boss is losing shell and then getting slammed with a lightning damage move. As long as you have a whm on point to put it back on you asap I think we should fare pretty good in marjami delve at least as a piercing damage/dd slot that can eat alot of thunder damage and keep everyone else alive.

Don't worry, no one plans to.

Given the recent return to rangers, I kind of doubt people will be hurting for a piercing DD that has to stay in AoE range.

Its entirely possible and even expected that most people will just throw bow/gun DD at the boss if they can.
Thankfully there still exist some players and a linkshell here and there that enjoy the doing things with non bandwagon/easymode setups.

I know people like sylow and others have done delve as a dancer as well with success, the job is just always going to have an uphill fight for being included and people want the most risk-averse strategies always.
Even when the job can prove itself impossible to kill alongside monks and can solo a number of fracture NMs or hold them indefinitely just like a paladin if a run goes terribly wrong, the bias is always there.

I've beaten every other delve zone so far as a dancer, and I plan to beat and farm the new ones on it while enjoying pushing the limits on what the job can do.

The point of this thread imo, and my enthusiastic posts has always been to help find a way for the dancer job to shine and be included in all the current and upcoming content.

Sylow was usually BLU the few times I went with him.

The biggest issue is just that DNC doesn't have anything it can do specifically that another job can't do better, so it's at a pretty insurmountable disadvantage for 18-man content that naturally favors specialization.

The only thing that could begin to mitigate this is the DNC-main step potency buffs they're talking about. If bringing a DNC means a higher overall Def Down for the alliance than not, then the foot's in the door, and from there we can talk about all the ways DNC can operate. But until then, it's a pretty uphill battle.

Remind me again, how do you get Icecrack Ring (other than the AH)? Don't see it listed on FFXIAH, DB, BG, etc. If nothing else I wouldn't mind messing around with it on Hurkan...

I got mine from the AH, but note that they added 4 SKC10 fights and 4 of these dual element rings in the same patch.

The Icecrack ring most likely comes from factory rejects since the dolls have shockspikes, spam thundaga and paralyga (which the ring is designed to resist, so it seems the logical place to get it).
Wuji ring comes from steamed sprouts II (charm/sleep resist ring - and you fight mandies that can sleep you)

Where does it say "exactly" what the augment to closed position when using Horos Shoes +1? I've looked everywhere.

For the original augmented etoile+2 shoes back in 2012, the following information was given out about the augment effect in a JP gaming mag
C・ポジション：正面にいる場合、ストアTP+3

Which translates to an extra +3 storeTP per closed position merit, as long as you are face to face with the enemy (not attacking from the flank/behind)

Our new horos+1 shoes have the same augment carried over to them.

I know I'm quoting from a conversation in January, but Cambion, I was just curious if you ever got the answer you were looking for with auto-presto. I tried to use the same code and was also getting errors:

wcmatch for that is silly.

Second, you need to edit the Finishing Move entries in plugins/resources/status.xml. The default versions don't include the move number, which makes them useless for testing against.

For Finishing Moves, how do I edit them? Would I change this:


to this:


and then 2, 3, 4, 5 for id's 382-385?


*Edit* I made the above changes to get auto-presto to work in my gearswap.

*Edit* Auto-presto working perfectly. The only *slightly* annoying part is that it makes my Windower console window pop up which, after playing Dancer for a while, just looks like a big block of red saying something like "Presto timer set to 29 seconds"

Interested in using my Dancer for low-man Delve against Muyingwa. Last time I went as BLU with 2 other BLU and I was thinking it would've been faster if one of us had brought a piercing job. However, I've sorely neglected my dancer for months. Recently just got my spellcast gearswap updated and I have a lot of extra chapters to use for reforging new AF/Relic gear.

First question, am I losing a lot of damage if I don't have Rudra's? If so, maybe I should just stick to BLU.

Second, which is better? 5/5 Exenterator or Evisceration (disregarding Unfettered Twitherym)?

Third, have the new recast timers made Anwig Salade more desirable for curing/divine waltz, or is it strictly healing waltz only now?

Dnc piercing, high attackspeed to burn down its shadows and and have it as a healing/tank safetybuffer is certainly a viable alternative if you were already taking more than 1 blu.

The only time you really want to drop rudra's on the bee imo and have it be worth it is if its shadows are down and you can stack it with climactic because you just happen to have FM's sitting around.

Barring that you can just go with exenterator spam, or Phyrric into evisceration to make dark SC's if you have phyrric unlocked.

I think you'd find a dnc in the mix makes runs pretty smooth (an occasional divine II is quite nifty for countering aoe damage/poison and gives your backline some slack if you care to drop out of sabredance to help in that capacity if things get rough).

ItemSet 320691

So far this is all I got for Exenterator. Trying to save plasm for more bee stingers so I'd rather not buy Nahtirah Trousers or Manibozho Jerkin. I guess another good body option would be Maxixi +1?

What about legs? Out of what I have sitting around, are any of these better than Quiahuiz?

Kaabnax Trousers, Manibozho Brais, Horos Tights, and Maxixi Tights.

I'm sorry for the simple spreadsheet questions. Work won't let me access storage file-type websites like pastebin, google docs, etc. So I can't download Mote's spreadsheets.

This is exactly what I was thinking. I played the hell out of dancer in Dynamis (pre-SoA gear) and really enjoy the job. In SoA, it's just always been more valuable for me to be on Vere Monk or Daurdabla Bard. However, Ceizak Delve happens to be one event where Monk is pretty crappy for low-man. So thought I'd show my LS buddies what Dancer can actually do (they are all skeptics).

Given that the next update is right around the corner i'd probably hold off on any big purchases until we see what the next batch of loot goodies does for our gear options.

That being said, you really can't go wrong making a Maxixi +1 body, its going to always be useful for its solid waltz utility and it is a step-up from espial for all other situations.

Your gearset is mostly on target, the other exent/evisceration sets on the previous pages are good alternatives if you have the pieces.

I think the most important thing to keep an eye on when you bring dnc to delve is make sure you are beating everyone else in the accuracy department, especially for bee because sweating your ws damage set isn't as important as aiming for capped acc in tp phase and helping knock out its shadows so everyone else can get their damage in.

That's pretty much what I'm working with right now. It's probably a little overboard for Bee though. Considering it's only 24% haste, I'll probably use Lithelimb Cap over Whirlpool Mask or toss out the Buremte Gloves for something else, or I could swap Anguinus Belt to Hur'chlan Sash.
I can probably afford to drop a little accuracy by swapping helms. Pick up a few PDT that way too.

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+15 Attack for all the Oatixur Monks!