(Don't) Fear The Reaper: A Dark Knight Guide

Was assuming you were using Ioskeha Belt. It is possible, but you are making sacrifices for that build.

Was giving you +10/11 on every augment

If I'm tp burning Maju or Neak I won't use that setup. The accuracy needs are too high.

But anything less, its fine with COR/BRD pre-fight buffs. Also don't need the accuracy from Sublime Sushi, so I revisited carbonora and haven't looked back.

I've tested these sets day after day after day on Apex Crabs. I find one that is promising and test it against my rivals. We do anywhere from 10-50 runs sometimes. I look at the parses and check how I performed at the end of it, as well as if my rivals performed as well as they normally do.

The 3hit set is gooooold on anything below 135. It gives me 1140 base accuracy without any food, without any buffs, without endarkII, without ionis, without escha.vorseals.

For Maju and Neak I use my 4hit Emicho HQ body/hands, Carmine+1 mask/legs and a +46 accuracy augmented pair of valorous with Ios+1, mache earring+1 x 2.
Still a 4hit but about 1500 base accuracy.

Yeah, I didn't realize you were using STP food.

It is a 3 hit with +6 from food, +8 on head, body, feet. And the 11 you got on the legs.

If you see the vid I posted, there wasn't a single insurgency that gave back less than 380 TP.

I edited it. Since it is a 3 hit regardless. And, you had sam roll in the video.

Actually I don't generally bring a second or third DD, I have found it is much faster to kill things if I solo chain sc rather than have some jackass screw up the sc by just spamming their highest dmg ws. You can kill just as effectively and a hair faster if you solo chain your sc.

The lesson that needs to be learned, is not that "all drks are emo anger filled teenagers" the lesson is that you need to learn is that drk simply can NOT put the same numbers up as a rag war. Does NOT happen. I have been telling people over and over Apoc is just as worthwhile as Rag on Drk for a reason. I have both, I am a 2100 jp drk, I have seen them both in action on the same buff situation by the same player in the same level of gear. Apoc is not nearly as far behind of Rag for DRK as you make it seem.

You are a war, leave the DRK choices to the DRK's, reso is amazing on war, it can hit 40k all the time, but a DRK simply can NOT hit those numbers consistently with Rag. In fact DRK's best possible dmg ws is actually Lib Insurgency, that is where DRK sees their highest consistent dmg.

The only anger filled person is you, you come into the drk forum and scream "RAGNAROK" over and over as a war, that is the same problem people had with the bandwagon blus running around everywhere saying "Tizona" about everything.

"Hey anyone have today's date?"
"Tizona"
"Dude, I am hungry, wonder what there is to eat."
"Tizona"

Same crap different weapon.

War and Drk are NOT the same, I have played them both, War will always spike higher dmg ws especially with reso. I avg 20-25k if I play right, if I play the same way I can avg the same dmg on apoc with cross reaper. I have seen videos of Bloodlusty putting out 30k avg insurgency, I know what the BiS for gear is. I know I don't have it, but most people don't.

Coming in here and not supporting people and their decision because you know the fTP and ws mods does NOT mean you can apply them in every situation. Giving all ws perfect scenario elements will have reso winning. Will make Rag win, but too many things happen in the game for perfect play style, people are human, people make errors. People don't have the perfect 250 mil HQ abj sets for reso, people are playing Drk, not War.

Now, I fully respect your knowledge of the game mechanics and often look for your post to find information I need, but that does not mean it is always right, in fact you scream reso, but recently I have been getting more dmg on torcleaver like I used to, especially at 100% tp (I refuse to use the 1k system) Not only myself but many other people that actually constantly play DRK have had the same outcome. Just as so many people that actually play DRK get great numbers with Scythe. They have optimized specifically for it.

Myself, I originally optimized for Rag drk, but lately I have been heavily favoring Apoc, I see the near the same DPS on my 3hit + ws apoc set as I get with my 4hit + ws Rag, slightly lower in all the same situations, but more utility. Higher m. dmg that slightly helps with drains, hp replenish from catastrophe, JA haste when LR is down.

Honestly, I really do respect your knowledge and opinion, but please for the sake of less drama on the forums, please start respecting other peoples opinion and knowledge. Help them gear for what they personally want.

Now please don't take this as a personal attack, that isn't the case, I hold a very high opinion of your knowledge and skill in this game, in the same sense I hold a very high opinion of people like Bloodlustly, Blazed, Stamos, Nightfyre, Afania, Kylos, Raelia, Buukki, and many more on this website. I have watched people grow in the past few months from just learning and asking questions to being able to answer the questions and help others.

Currently awaiting a parse run with Bloodlusty, I am anxious to see how I hold up on both rag and apoc against his lib. I have reservations that I will lose, but in truth it will be exciting if I do, would give me something to aim for.

Amen. This is a person who plays DRK.

If you want to Resolution Spam all day, do it on a 1 dimensional job like WAR.

WAR isn't one dimensional. Some people just play it that way.

Aslong as we are all having fun ^^

stream that ***! I can't wait for it to be uploaded to youtube.

He said he will make a video for his channel, I am hoping we do a few fights so we can see how apoc and rag both stack up against his lib

Have to agree with Saevel here. Although my insurgencys do spike at some very high numbers, it still cant be exploited as much as resolution.

I have both Lib and Rag V3's, my resolutions are not as powerfull as my insurgency's but that is down to some gear choices which I need to upgrade and improve on... However I have ran some parses with my GEO mule, and when trust luck is on and you recieve lucky chaos roll, minuet etc etc Resolution pulls ahead of my insurgencys

What saevel means is regardless of if you are WAR or DRK, if the party set up is there to purely buff the melle as much as possible and exploit the dps, rag will win this. Mythics will always suffer from the 3000tp needed prior to the onslaught begins

Now I'm on asura ill stop making videos with trusts and build a perfect set up to demonstrate this :)

I agree that reso can pull ahead with the right buffs, I have personally hit 48k on reso, (my best was in SR vs dragon)
Freaked me out cause the dragon dropped to like 30% hp and that was above 90% hp when I did that reso. Was 2nd ws and I picked up a light sc off it.

I also agree that mythic falls behind due to both ACC and the need to build 300% tp for AM3 and voiced my concern over this several times.

Like you and I both said, people have optimized their gear differently, I very much highly hold Saevel's knowledge and opinion in high regard, I based my drk rag gear off what he has taught many people. I just feel it is time to help people gear on all of DRK's very powerful options.

I even want to see what is possible with empy scythe, I have some ideas for it, but I need to stop being lazy and start farming empy scythe and gs as well as get on liberator already. Just been really lazy in game as of late.

Thought it was just me Thorva, but glad you've confirmed that Torcleaver actually is pretty damn good. Not sure what the ftp is and why it occasiobally spikes high, but I have indeed struck some pretty nice numbers with it.

Of course, I'm still 242 skill rag so wtf do I know.

I hate to bother people, but putting DRK together again after a long long time, and I am looking for a spreadsheet, does anyone have a somewhat recent one (i do not mind inputting gear) unsure if i could fake the war one to work for drk or not. Thanks!

Do you mean gearswap?

I have an outdated drk dps spreadsheet. You would have a better chance of getting that to work then trying to force a war spreadsheet to work. Certain things would be different. Thorva just gave us a wonderful example of the differences. It is a bit long winded, I want a TLDR version.

This is the link to the outdated dps spreadsheet. It is in alphabetical order. Good luck. http://tinyurl.com/mvzbbw5

Welcome back Atig! Hit me up in-game, we can talk shop!

TLDR:
Experiment



Was really tempted to leave it at that, but you need to learn where your skills lie, learn what ws best suits the gear you have.

Top weapons are: Ragnarok, Liberator, Apocalypse, Caladbolg

Relic both have higher acc
The other 2 have a need for AM3

Top ws for drk
Cross Reaper, Torcleaver, Resolution, Insurgency if you have mythic, otherwise hard to get up there with other ws.

You will want to learn you xhit builds, reach that sTP, make sure you are capped haste and load up on multi-hit afterwards.

If you have one of those weapons, 2100 jp, xhit, capped haste and decent ws you will break 1.5k dps, if you top end everything you will end up breaking 3k dps.


edit: hard to say BiS gear because random augment gear

Keep the guide threads civil, please.

I would love to keep it on topic and relevant but we continuously have someone coming in here talking about war ability and not drk.

Can we have all that removed from the thread?

Thanks ill see what i can manage, as for weapon, I have AG RAg, workin gon getting currency for Apoc, just looking for advice, i dont like posting, but didnt see anything on a spreadsheet (to input custom augs etc) or much for rag gearsets yet. But i could just be blind

Thorva more or less covered what I would have wanted to say, sans the tldr: experiment part. Honestly there's a fair amount of pieces you can use and beyond just the get x-hit build / ws builds there's of course the utility sets.

While I may not be the best I can definitely sit down and show you some of my gear sets. You probably have most of the same gear I do anyway.

Given the Reisenjima gear augment system "Best in Slot" is most certainly a "your mileage may vary" situation. Hit me whenever bro.

This would be your best option because he can work with you directly, you will need about 67 sTP in tp gear for your rag. Coincidentally, depending on your ws sets for scythe, is damn close to what you will need for Apoc 3hit + ws. So if you do it right you can minimize the amount of gear you will need, of course it will slightly gimp your rag set, but personally I find it worth the invent now that I have cor, sch, rdm, AND drk gear clogging up my invent.

You and blaze brought up WAR, nobody else. I've been talking about DRK this entire time. I've made several statements and demonstrated, at length, something that makes DRK's feel uncomfortable, that Scythe sucks due to Weapon Skill mechanics. The weapons themselves are great but poor design decisions at SE prevent them from being fully leveraged into offensive power. People then use anecdotes and eyeballing as evidence when the math doesn't support them.

Again this has absolutely nothing to do with WAR so stop trying to deflect.

The original question was in reference to AGing Apoc or Rag, not Liberator, not WAR, not THF, not anything else. Between those two AG Rag would be more useful to that player as the area's where Apoc is strong are places where the extra accuracy and offensive power aren't really noticeable. In a highly buffed melee group, a DRK spamming resolution is going to yield more total damage then that same DRK spamming any Scythe WS.

If you ever want a demonstration just give me a shout, I'll hop on DRK and you can see for yourself how much power you can fuel into Resolution.

What I meant by my statement, is you make it seem as if drk can hit those same numbers a war can. Just not possible to hit 40k spams on drk with reso, there is no current evidence to support that, in fact there is no current evidence to even support 30k reso spams on drk with ragnarok.

There is however evidence of drks spamming 30k ws on liberator and apoc.

You made the answer seem like it was a simple "ragnarok only," option, that is never the case. Especially when talking about 3hit apoc drks. You horribly under value Apoc. This is coming from a guy that was all about Rag and reso, but now I lean towards apoc because I can do nearly the same damage with my new set up on apoc as I was getting on rag war.

You do realize you are literally the only person saying scythe dmg sucks, and you are also the only person that says it sucks without having an R/E/M/A Scythe.

The fact that Bloodlusty has made videos pounding out 25k-30k insurgency with less than ideal buffs, I have pushed out 25k-30k Cross Reapers with Apoc and I actually have AG Rag, yet I get more consistently better numbers with torc and cross reaper now that we have smite than reso.

Sorry but no matter how much about the fTP you know, you cannot put math against a variable outcome. Acc on a 5 hit ws is a variable outcome, especially when you go up against a single hit ws. That is +100 acc across the full ws of a single hit, vs +100 acc on only the fist of 5 hits. Apoc has higher base dmg than rag, insurgency gets a massive +dmg % on liberator. 7 more acc on scythe, not much but can adjust other slots when acc is needed. Reso still suffers a -15% penalty, even with smite, it still suffers a -15% penalty, so let's say we hit that 5k attack on drk, you literally lose 750 attack off reso while everything else is still 5k.

You have said many times over how bad torcleaver is to gear because it is a VIT mod ws, well, it really isn't that bad, I get quite a bit more attack on my torc set over my rag set because that -15% on reso. I get more than +40% ws dmg from gear alone, another 8% from gifts, and more than +240 Vit in my torc sets, that means even if I gimp it up at just over 10k torc, I still get 15k ws because all the ws dmg%. I can push out 16k-22k torc all day long at just 100% tp, but in order for me to get those same numbers on reso I need to hold tp to 175% that is assuming all my hits connect clean. At 100% tp, reso is just plain crap in comparison to torc. However 100% tp I normally get better numbers with reso over cross reaper, but as soon as I get to that 175% Cross Reaper starts pulling ahead again. The ONLY time I consistently have Reso beating all other ws is at 300%.

There is literally no point in holding tp that long unless you are building AM3 which rag does not need. There is no extra bonus besides the length of time that AM last on relic. Much less the fact that reso doesn't even trigger the AM.

I spam Torc's I break 3k dps with solid sc dmg, I spam Reso I break 2k dps and don't have light sc. I self chain scourge/reso/torc I break 2k dps and have decent sc dmg.

Running apoc with the same buffs I will get the same dmg as if I spam reso. So unless you are putting out 40k+ reso on every single reso ws on drk I see no reason to be telling people only make Rag. Apoc is just as capable of doing 25k+ ws, has more sc options, and has far more utility.

We all get the whole fTP and ws mod thing, we really do. We have heard it countless times, however we have all used scythe and we know what it is capable of. I highly doubt anyone that has AG Apoc is regretting it, if they are they need to learn how to gear it right. I know when I first made it AG I was pissed and extremely disappointed with it. Now that I have learn more about optimizing scythe gear and tweaked my sets (this included no longer gearing secondary stats in ws i.e. str/mnd ws i only gear str and saw a massive gain, I am actually more unimpressed that ragnarok doesn't seem so powerful anymore.

Major downfalls of reso,

-15% attack, no matter how you look at it, this ws will always have -15% less attack.
Does NOT benefit from ws dmg+% gear like other high end ws.
Play the acc lotto game on a acc starved job.
Drk does not run the massive +60% double attack to benefit from like war does. (it can get more than 60% after dumping 250mil gil very few people have for hq abj, and sacrificing a bunch of other good ws gear options for less than ideal options)
Spamming reso solo does not allow for self sc and you have to use lower tier ws option as well as sc option to build a light sc.
Has been seen to hover in the 10k range (however has been known to proc multi-hit on drk for more than 48k, extremely rare)

Major downfalls of other ws options
Slightly lower fTP on torc (but still gets +100 acc through the entire ws, can self light when connected with same ws, can both open and close dark sc, known to low end spam 20k dmg, and known to break 30k)
Lower fTP on Insurgency and bad ws mods (but is generally only used on a weapon that gives it a +30% dmg bonus, which seems to really make a big difference on it, and occ attack twice/thrice, and still has been known to push out 30k ws spams, can open/close light as well as open/close gravation which can also aide in creating darkness on a 3rd ws)
Lower fTP on Cross Reaper but has semi-decent ws mods, like reso limited on sc options (still has more sc options on the weapon choice solo than gs does, known to hit consistent 20-25k and spike over 30k)

FFXI is a variable scenario, nothing on there will ever be consistent perfect outcome. If, and only if, this were a perfect scenario case basis, would reso always have the upper hand. It is not the end all ws. There are plenty of ways to meet solid dmg that is on par, if not flat out beating ragnarok as I am slowly learning the hard way after being a rag/reso only drk. There must be a reason why I lean towards apoc now. Going from gung ho Rag wielder to favoring Apoc means I saw something while using that scythe.

I can tell you right now it has a lot to do with that 3hit build. Made a massive amount of difference in my dmg from when I first had apoc and only ran a 4hit+ ws, I was struggling to hit 1.2k like that. Now I am always ahead of the other DD in my shell even on scythe. I can pull hate spamming Cata if I wanted. I think you are severely under valuing apoc and over valuing Rag. If you had apoc or lib with your tier of gear I think you would have a much different opinion than the on you have now.

I think Thorv has pretty much posted everything a well rounded and experienced DRK would say about Apoc and Scythes in general at this point.

To those who asked if they should do Apoc or not, its a great weapon and it is a lot of fun. Both Apoc and Liberator evolve DRK. Be it through enhanced survivability or enhanced Absorbs and OAT/T mayhem.
You will find yourself investing a lot of time into mastering them.

If you want to just spam resolution, you don't need to get an AG ragnarok for those situations. But nothing in the game has an alternative similair to Liberator or Apoc.

Huh WTF.... That's not how a computer game works. It's running on a computer, meaning it's exactly and only math.



Wrong. DRK wears the exact same WS gear that WAR does, it see's the same depending on exact buff (SE is a helluva drug). When I'm referencing this I'm not talking about my experience as WAR, I'm talking about my experience as DRK. All my melee gear is equitable by both DRK and WAR, it's what makes playing both jobs so much fun. It's also extremely unfair to compare them directly because WAR has a +12% Attack +700 TP Bonus JA that lasts 60s, the length of most fights. This buff is how I hit obscenely high average numbers, not the extra DA. When doing comparisons for DRK's various builds I completely leave out stuff like Savagery WC because DRK can't do it themselves. This entire time I'm talking about DRK and only DRK with DRK buffs and DRK gear using DRK Weapon Skills, so stop trying to deflect then blame the deflection on me.


No you don't. If you did then we wouldn't be having this discussion. This game runs on a computer, everything is math. No amount of effort or "the power of friendship" will make a Scythe WS higher, on average, then a Great Sword.


No there isn't. 30K is the high not the average, insurgency at 1000TP sucks even with Liberator. Averages at 1000TP are far lower. You only get 1 OaX proc per WS while you can get 2 TA or DA procs. What's worse is that Liberator is only 330 DMG and the WS your using is 20% STR / INT, so base DMG is going to be really low. It's running the same "acc starved praying on Multi-Attacks" you criticized Resolution. The +30% bonus only makes it competitive with other Scythe weapon skills, not competitive with other super WS's like Resolution, Torcleaver, CDC, Vorpal, Star Diver, Rudra's and Last Stand.

Three hits and a WS is called a 4-hit, four hits and a WS is called a 5-hit. Don't arbitrarily remove a number to make it sound cooler. And under 4/5 hit you run into a wall due to the WS delay being greater then your per-round delay. (528 delay weapon would have a 1.76s round delay would the WS stops your attack round for 2s). When combined with lag what you get in practice isn't more weapon skills, but more TP overflow which helps some weapon skills better then others, I'll leave you to figure out which is which.

Like I said hit me up in game and I'll demonstrate. Scythe WS sucks right now, same with Great Axe, Hand to Hand, Archery, and Great Katana (SAM's awesomeness makes up for the WS's being weak). This isn't a problem unique to DRK, it's part of a much bigger balance issue the game is experiencing. No amount of "Hope and Dreams" will make up for SE's poor balance decisions.

At some point in time people are just going to do what they want to do regardless. If you want to run around with an Apoc or other Scythe then by all means do so, but don't say it's because it's "more damage". It's your $12.99 so you can play however you want, but when someone is asking a question comparing the various legendary weapons, don't blow smoke up their ***.