Best Dagger For Thief

Soooo back on topic. Why isn't Vajra a good choice for thfs? is Stacked MS still that bad with a 30-40% dmg bonus and a... what is it now? 25-30% bonus to SA and TA?

Yea, then that was poorly expressed on my part then.

I only tried to say that you simply can't "master" a job right away, even if you are super-smart and have played all jobs, etc, as it was implies by Minjo.
Something along the lines "I've seen a whm and read something on wiki and now I know everything there is to know about WHM".

we had a conversation about this in game last night about /twashtar and /coruscanti and i had checked up all the math even with coruscanti's effect, and it seems to match up more or less. twashtar is amusingly better than coruscanti. just wanted to let you know i stand corrected.

Haha yeah that conversation got me thinking about it last night, then today this thread came up, so thanks for having me really consider it :)

Pretty much. You didn't show anything, you just pointed at a number and expected that to answer a far more complicated question. Empty assertions hold no argumentative value. If you want your claim to be believable, you have to both show your work and have other people review it for mistakes.


Claim 1: Weaponskilling at 300 TP for tier 3 aftermath, then weaponskilling twice more before building back up to 300 TP
Claim 2: Weaponskilling as frequently as possible and just riding tier 1 aftermath.

Buffs and whatnot remain constant between the two estimations. SJ is /war, target is lvl 106 fake Qilin (used so that accuracy doesn't factor heavily into gear choices).

The basic claims use Rudra's Storm as the weaponskill in all cases, though the overall argument varies if other weaponskills are allowed, and when/whether SA/TA is stacked.

Claim 2 is simple, but the parameters we'll be setting depend on how Claim 1 is set up, so leaving it for now.

Claim 1 involves aftermath duration, which means we have a ~90 second window to work with. There are two weaponskills performed during the aftermath, so 4 seconds deducted there. From the timing, you can just get a SA/TA in for each weaponskill (and would want to with Rudra's), so another 3 seconds. And another 2 seconds for the 300 TP weaponskill (may place it at the end for calcualtions).

So 6 seconds of interruptions during the aftermath, plus a few seconds of spare time after the aftermath wears off before putting it back on. Will put TP time at 90 - 6 + 6, so just a flat 90 as a base estimate.

Average TP for the middle ones, I'll take a typical value of 115 TP. So in 90 seconds of TP you need to accumulate 115+115+300 = 530 TP. Add a bit extra for overage, so 540 TP in 90 seconds = 6 TP per second.

Using 90 Twashtar/Fire Thokcha, TP per hit in melee gear is 4.7 for my current selected setup, and 2.8751 hits per round. So overall average TP gain is 2.8751 * 4.7 = 13.513 TP per round.

Given a needed TP rate of 6 TP/second, 13.513 / 6 = 2.252 seconds per round (135 delay). Just Haste gives 147 delay per round. Adding marches drops it to 86 delay per round. Will work with 147.

For the target and buffs I have, basic melee DPS without aftermath is 118. 30% aftermath (used in Claim 2) would give 136 DPS. 50% aftermath (Claim 1) would give 148 DPS. Since SA/TA will be stacked with weaponskill, they won't be affected by it.

Standard cycle time for the 100 TP stacked weaponskills is 1290 delay. Two of those makes 2580 delay. Given 5400 total delay for a 90 second aftermath, that leaves 2820 delay for melee that's affected by the aftermath.

Given 13.513 TP per round, and 147 delay per round, 2820 delay allows for 259 TP, plus the ~10 TP from the second weaponskill, leaving 31 TP to be gained without aftermath, or 2.28 rounds ~= 335 delay (+5.6 seconds). Conveniently matches up with the initial guesstimate of 96 seconds.

That works out to 5040 delay at 148 DPS and 335 delay at 118 DPS, giving a total melee damage during the cycle of 13,091.

There's enough time between weaponskill uses that SA/TA should always be available for stacking (should be a few seconds leeway for each). So you have one SA+Rudra at 100 TP (2483), one TA+Rudra at 100 TP (2196), and a 300 TP Rudra that will vary between SA and TA (3272/2965, average 3119).

Total weaponskill damage during the cycle: 7798

Total damage during the cycle: 13091 + 7798 = 20,889

Duration of cycle: 5400 + 335 + 180 = 5915

DPS for Claim 1: 211.892

DPS for Claim 2 using standard spreadsheet modeling with stacked weaponskills, and assuming constant 30% aftermath: 200.343


So a basic look at things makes it seem like Claim 1 (holding TP to 300 for the aftermath) is the stronger option, by a good 5%.

Note that I had no idea what result I'd get when I started this. I had a fairly decent expectation that I'd be doing nothing but verifying the position of using weaponskills as frequently as possible, but at least doing so in a way that answered the question. The results, however, turned out rather differently.

Also note that I expect that there's plenty of factors to account for that could change the overall recommendation. Not being /war, for example, means less DA, which means slower TP gain, which means it would take longer to reach 300 TP to renew the cycle. That means more time spent without aftermath, which will degrade the overall average DPS. Same thing with promptness in weaponskilling with the two 100 TP weaponskills; holding TP there loses TP and time for the 300 TP buildup. I don't intend to spend the time to math it all out myself, though; someone else can work on it if they're interested.

You can master a job without having ever leveled it. It's called understanding game mechanics and writing a spellcast.

Sparkle > No Sparkle.

/thread

Ew, those sparkles are dumb.

I am now back home~ and to be honest, i wasnt trying to be rude or sarcastic, thank you for mathing that out Motenten. So from the math it seems that what I was doing does yield better damage output?

If SA and TA are down and i still have 100% tp inbetween the 300% i use AC + evis/ex

I think we have a different idea of what "mastering" means then.

Understanding what stats do and making appropriate gear sets for the actions you do are only small aspects of the job (nonetheless, important ones).

But all your knowledge and fancy, optimized sets won't help you when you don't know what to do in a particular situation, when you react too slow, because you didn't know what your job is capable of.

Unfamiliar, imperfect macros and some macros you didn't think of making or some that aren't needed, as you will only find what things you use the most while actually playing the job and not while sitting around in PJ, thinking about what this job could be used for.

With all your intelligence it a pity that you believe that you can be anywhere near perfect on a job you have never played, let alone understanding it fully, by only doing the theory for it.

If you didn't know how the ocean smells like and someone would explain it to you in the best ways possible, you would still never exactly know how it truely smells like.

Some jobs take no effort lol. Like thf. You can master the job in a day haha.

Only people who don't really know how to play the job, take no effort in the job. They all have enough JA's, abilities, macro swaps, etc to keep you busy if you're playing to the best of your abilities... otherwise you're trying to play like this silly gimp blu I know named Ninjie.

I read the mechanics of how to use a gun now I'm a master at them...

iloveyoumonteniloveyouiloveyou

god i love your posts <3

It seems that the 300/100/100 pattern works well if all you have is Haste, since it syncs up nicely with SA/TA recasts. If you added Marches, you could get 4 weaponskills done in between each 300 TP weaponskill, which would require a good bit more mental nimbleness in choosing weaponskills and spacing SA/TA use (eg: SA300, Exen100, TA100, AC-Exen100, SA100, TA300). If you get out of sync it can probably hurt your DPS a good bit.

Of course there's also the issue that that's the predicted value, on average. If you get a spate of 3x procs between the first and second 100 TP weaponskills, you can end up with 100 TP long before the SA/TA timer is ready. Likewise if your hits-per-round falls below average when building to 300 TP, you may spend more time than you'd like without any aftermath.

Simply spamming weaponskills is a bit less tied to those issues, though it's still dependant on SA/TA timers if you intend to use Rudra's for the aftermath.

While the above analysis should hold most of the time, you probably also want to look at pathological edge cases to see which is hurt the most if events don't proceed as you'd hope.

The correction is appreciated, Motenten. My mistake. The scope of assessment seems rather limited, though. It's excessively dependent on one's environment, one's fairly intensive concentration, and that whatever you happen to be fighting at any given moment in the cycle has enough HP remaining to make use of it. If a THF is killing older content for whatever reason, you're going to constantly run into issues of being able to take advantage of your next WS without breaking your timing. If a THF is in Dynamis, being /WAR, and moreover, relying on such fluid TP usage is unreasonable. If a THF is in Voidwatch, for whatever reason, one can easily see why this no longer applies.

You won't hear me say this often, but your assessment, while seemingly valid, doesn't seem to reach farther than theory.

If that's all you're doing with spellcast, you're severely under-utilizing the plugin. The gear sets are created along with rules derived from knowledge of you should be reacting in a given situation.


Or, you could, you know, develop basic reading comprehension.


Well, I could. If you can't, I'm sorry.


Unfortunately, smell is a matter of perception. Everything you need to know in this game is scripted based on mathematics and how to react to a given situation. The reflex needed for the latter is no matter of being on a specific job, though.

The irony of someone calling your bluff about ever knowing what you're taking about (aside from blind shots and attempts to start a food fight in every thread), and then you saying "yeah well it looks valid but you're still wrong", is astounding.

I think it's more he was saying "The math is correct but situations where it actually applies that way in current current ffxi gameplay either don't exist or are exceedingly rare."

First of all, I hate when people use "irony" incorrectly. Stop it.

Second, what Sylow said. You seem to be mad. :(

Nah. From my understanding on most forums and experience, str dagger will be the best offhand.

This thread shoulda died on page 1 lol. I'm reading about what now?

Next time I'll put "thanks for correcting my mistake" in bold letters. I'm sorry that I applied something that, with ample precedent, is appropriate for every other DD job(barring DNC, potentially). I'll never make a mistake again, I promise.

And learn what irony is, moron.

an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected.

ie - you getting corrected instead of slinking back out of the thread after your commentary. I don't even disagree with you that often. You just present things in an awful manner.
I have never once seen you try to help someone out by presenting a proper solution to what they're doing wrong. You just come in and drop a blunt "no, you're wrong" and then, when they get defensive, you insult the crap out of them. Who benefits from that situation; other than you stroking your ego at the expense of others?
I do get mad at you if that earns you a trollololol award. The entire mannerism with which you present yourself is abrasive, at best. Just show some common courtesy.

stubborn =/= ironic :|

I would love to know what kind of numbers I could actually hit on Mandalic Stab at 99. I think the main reason it's never mentioned is because no one has it, and no one can make any genuine assertions on it beyond 'that might be good'.

With the exception of this thread, the majority of my most recent posts are either cutesy-wutesy comments, direct suggestions, or reasonable objections. The latter seems to be what bothers you, and while they are the most scarce as of late, are no less legitimate than any other manner of correction. In other words, I don't need to have the answer to tell anyone that they're wrong. Highlighting incorrectness is the first step on the road to correctness. Sometimes I have the answer, sometimes I don't, and sometimes I think it's a bit too obvious to bother spelling out for people.

Regardless, I implore you to look for yourself. My posting history is public.

And that's still not what irony is.

As for Vajra, it requires AM3 to be viable.

Even then, the delay.. Eh.