For The Shinies! A Guide For Thief

Do Conspirator JP affect attack if used with the empyrean body? i.e. assuming 6 people with hate, +45 acc with capped JP, do you also get 45 attack (25 base with hands, +20 with conspirator JP), since the body augments conspirator?
That probably sounded confusing

EDIT: See Aerandir's posts at the bottom of this page and on the next page for information of how the body augment actually works.

The quirk about conspirator is that whoever has hate doesn't get the bonus though. I'm actually kinda hoping that's one of the job ability tweaks they make when they do the thief job adjustments pass. It would be nice if everyone recieved the bonus, and at this point in the game's life there's really no reason to exclude one person from getting the party buff.

I thought that that "quirk" was negated if you used the body? Maybe I'm thinking of another ability.

Thanks for the answer Melphina. I use THF (for now) for Omen swart farming, so with a tank I would get the bonus *5 I assume.

No, you're thinking of the same ability. There's just conflicting information between the two wiki's.

According to Oldwiki

https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Skulker%27s_Vest_%2B1


And according to bgwiki

https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/Skulker%27s_Vest_%2B1


They list completely different effects for the piece. Oldwiki is just using outdated information copied from the raider's vest page. That was the original speculated effect when empyrean debued in abbysea back before the actual augment bonus was figured out. I've been meaning to test the triple attack/triple damage effect sometime but i never get around to it. I really should do that some day. The testimony that the triple damage effect only procced on the second and third hits of a triple attack and prevented the offhand from swinging when dual wielding was never verified, and I'm skeptical that it's true. It was originally sourced from this post at bgwiki

https://www.bluegartr.com/threads/98420-Final-Magian-Empyreon-Armor.?p=4209071&viewfull=1#post4209071

and it just got added without confirmation. I don't see any reason the set bonus proccing would disable the offhand swng entirely, and the bg poster said it was from "visual observations". That could be confirmed 100% using the chat log with daggers using differing base damages, say a behemoth knife mainhand with bronze dagger offhand, because their damage ranges would make it easy to differentiate between the two. It's never been high on the priority list because skulker's vest is purely a macro piece right now. But now that we've talked about it it's on my mind again. I think I'll go play around with that when I get home tonight just to find out once and for all.


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EDIT: I have a series of tests I'm going to do when I get home tonight to confirm how the emprean body and its accompanying set bonus work. I'll report the results when I'm finished.

Test 1: While solo with no trusts, do a /checkparam, then engage a mob. Use Conspirator and then do a followup /checkparam. Since I'm solo that will confirm whether or not skulker's vest applies conspirator's effect to the person holding enmity.

Test 2: Similar to the first test. Call a tank trust and do a /checkparam, then engage a mob. Use conspirator and then do a followup /checkparam. Since the tank trust has the mobs enmity this will confirm the attack value bonuses I get from macroing in Skulker's vest.

Test 3: Equip the full 5/5 Skulker's +1 attire set. Using Twashter mainhand with bronze dagger offhand, wait for an empyrean set activation on the main hand with no critical hits involved. The sheer base damage difference between the main hand and offhand will make it easy to tell via chat log whether or not an empyrean proc affects the offhands swing from occuring. Likewise, the sheer difference between a normal Twashter non crit and an empyrean set bonus proc will make it easy to tell when the set bonus kicked in, and will concequently prove whether or not the bonus applies to all 3 hits of the triple attack, or just the last two swings. No food, buffs or aftermath will be used to keep the testing environment clean.

As far as not being able to proc on the first hit. I'm sure back in the day I saw some reallllllly high Sneak Attacks that couldn't have been anything other than a proc of the set bonus on the first hit.

Those were the days

Sa + empy proc + set bonus proc

Was amazing on dnc as well...

So like, I'm almost 100% certain that 2nd and 3rd hit only is accurate.

Really easy to see if you leave battlemod off and just melee for a minute. I don't have the set on current active accounts or I'd go look, doesn't get much easier.

It isn't. I have proof it affects all 3 hits of a triple attack. I have three distinct instances of set activation screenshotted and the results are conclusive. The empy set bonus triples the damage on all 3 hits. It also does NOT negate the offhand swing. It works exactly as I suspected it should. That testing is done, but conspirator is proving to be more difficult.

Empyrean Set Bonus Testing RESULTS
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As per the discussion we just had I went out and ran some tests to determine exactly how the empyrean set bonus is functioning and what Conspirator is doing. The tests were performed wearing Twashter mainhand, a bronze dagger in the offhand, and the 5/5 set of empyrean gear. No food was eaten, no buffs or debuffs were used, no weaponskills were used, and no accessories were worn. I'll begin with the empyrean set bonus since I have conclusive evidence for that one.


------The Litmus Test---------

The first screenshot is the litmus test. There are no empyrean set bonus activations in it. This is the baseline that we will use to compare the damage values to determine where an empyrean set bonus occurs. As we can see, Twashters average non-crit values are in the 130-200 damage range, with a crit hitting for 371 damage. Anything that vastly exceeds these values will be recognizable as part of an empyrean set bonus activation.



Empyrean Set Bonus activation #1

The first set bonus opens with a critical hit for 900 damage. The non set bonus crit value was 371. It's followed up by two more non critical hits for 534 and a 397 damage. These are immediately followed up by an offhand swing of the bronze dagger hitting for 21 damage, and it follows into the next round thereafter.



Empyrean Set Bonus activation #2

The second empyrean set activation opens with a non crit hitting for 485 damage, followed by a crit for 990 and a non crit for 480. This is once again followed up with the bronze dagger's offhand strike hitting for 8 damage.



Empyrean Set Bonus activation #3

The third empyrean set bonus activation opens with two non critical hits for 469 and 609, followed by a miss. But since we're most concerned with the first hit of the triple attack's damage, and it's already established that both the second and third swings triple their damage, we know that if that miss had landed it also would have been triple damage. And once again, the offhand swing chimes in with a hit for 19 damage before twashter gets another round in.




CONCLUSION: When the empyrean set bonus procs it triples the damage on all three swings of the attack. Furthermore, there is no impediment of the offhand swing. And really... come on. That would be just stupid if the set bonus made it so that your offhand just didn't work for a turn. The idea that the offhand didn't swing came from one person's "visual observation", and it was never followed up upon. That visual observation was a simple mistake, and this proves it was never the case.

Conspirator value testing ----Edited

Edited Conclusion Aerandir posted some follow up information about conspirator at the bottom of this page. There's some interesting discussion moving forward into the next. The ability is working as intended, and apparently my methods of testing using /checkparam were incorrect.

Oh neat, it's broken then. Shows how bad the JA is, it could've been broken for YEARS and no *** given by players at all.

Duo; alt checkparam > all 6 members have tagged enemy > main conspires > alt checkparam no change

----This post no longer relevant due to information below----

I vaguely remember that you had to do something to generate enmity. Aggroing wouldn’t work. Maybe try pulling with provoke and retest?

Edit: never mind checked again and you actually damaged it

Edit 2: follow up on set bonus, possible to proc offhand?

Two things.

One, help text says you only get the bonus if the mob isn't targeting you. So anyone who's testing with 1 character is doing it wrong.

Two, it is possible that the acc bonus is done on the mob's side, not the player side. You'd probably want to try checking to see if the 'low evasion'/'none'/'high evasion' changes with the buff up if you want to test it.

No one did one and two is exactly the opposite of the actual text, it would be impossible to "not give acc to the tank" if the mob had it's eva lowered.

--In lieu of Aerandir's information below this post is also no longer relevant---

Any way you can test subtle blow, perhaps on ballista vs a human? That may not be working either. That's really sad though, who knows how long that ability was not doing anything. Perfect reason why September needs to be thief and they fix all ja on the job. Nearly all of the abilities on thief are garbage besides 2

Thanks for testing

You could ballista the subtle blow yeah, it's 50 so it would be very noticable assuming you don't use any (or much) SB in your set to hit them as the baseline.

Really wouldn't even need to ballista it, going from 0 to 50 on a mob its really obvious. (if the values of SB are even accurate to begin with...)

Followup Test Results

I just got done with a followup test to see if the empyrean set bonus works in the offhand. I simply swapped the Bronze dagger to the main hand and Twashter to the offhand and looked for the same type of values.




Conclusion: The Empyrean Set Bonus CAN and DOES proc on the offhand as well as the mainhand.

Thanks for clarification on one, and two is not impossible. It can have a couple of lines of code that says if attacker has buff=conspirator and target ~= attacker, evasion rate-5% or something. Those parts of code individually are used with other nms in the game. It's not a big deal to flip them all on for this buff.

Now that I think about it, there's a chance that /check won't show that either.

I'd like to point out that Ambush doesn't show up on checkparam either.

That's good to know for whenever empyrean upgrades come out

Eh, realistically the only piece(s) you're likely going to use is legs and head. 2% set bonus. Not totally negligible but not enough to consider changing for either.

And even then the legs are going to need samnuha levels of xa and/or stp

I vaguely remember something years ago about a mod post on the OF saying that the accuracy bonus from conspirator would not display on /checkparam due to it not applying if you had enmity, but I cannot for the life of me find it now...


Edit -- The best I can find is hearsay about the Japanese side, written up here

I feel like that's a *** answer, because it doesn't decay and in one minute a thf would swing... a hundred or more times. That's quite a bit of unnecessary stress. But. If they said that's how it works...

It does make sense though, as whoever currently has the enemies attention can shift a dozen times in a minute. So Ihinaa was like half right.

It's not that they didn't think it should be deserved, it's because that's how it's coded on their end(which predates checkparam). It probably doesn't effect accuracy for counter either, and is just an event check when you swing.

It would be unnecessarily confusing for it to add 20 accuracy at all times, then later subtract it on time of hit. Either way, you need to calculate it at least once per attack round.

Mildly curious if it is checked for regal captain's gloves. Would be neat if you could be at 60% accuracy without conspirator, get a 70 accuracy conspirator, and have capped accuracy and a free additional hit on each swing. Likely is though, since that's probably also an on-swing event.

I never knew that's how they coded it, but I guess it kind of makes sense. In that case I'm curious to know if anyone can tell me where the augment's conspirator effect listed on bg wiki came from. Did the dev's state the augment added attack scaling in an official interview at some point too?

Either way I've had my curiosity about the set bonus sated if nothing else. It was never the biggest deal but I'm glad the empyrean aftermath thing won't occasionally pique at the back of my mind now. Dang mithra traits...

If that's how it behaves, how can you be sure of the exact accuracy and attack values when the hit lands?

I think you have to take their word for it.

Maybe a packet? Maybe the Gearinfo lua can spot it?

Nope to both of those. You could see if /check reflects it(likely doesn't), otherwise it's straight up parsing accuracy or measuring pdif for attack. Guessing the data is from an interview or something.