Animator's Workshop: A Puppetmaster's Guide 2.0

Any recent changes to TP sets to optimize master/pet dps with Xiucoatl or KKK? Looking to update old PUP sets :)

PUP hasn't received any noteworthy new TP gear since Tali'ah+2/Su3. Optimization for REMA remains the same as before, i.e. cap Accuracy/Haste for both master and maton, use Martial Arts gear to cap delay if not using KKK, and finally stack Multi-Attack/STP with STP becoming more lucrative under mythic AM3.

Xiucoatl, for example, will (very slightly) overcap delay with Martial Arts+12 after JP/gifts. Considering how badly KKK overcaps, a Mache Earring+1 with MA+13 is basically a non-issue.

I personally favor Master-heavy gear more (particularly regarding accessories) as typical DD buffs won't apply to the maton and it'll lag behind your damage no matter how you gear. But a lot of other PUPs prefer more hybrid (master+pet) approaches presumably because PUPs don't get DD buffs very often.

Also, for what it's worth, I predict that Karagoz hands+3 are very likely to become our new BiS TP hands once Empy+3 releases, simply going by its current stats. They'd already be somewhat decent as a starter 119 piece if they had any sort of Accuracy attached to them.

Well we got kyrene earring for pet tp phase. We also got relic +2/3 armor since the taliah +2/3 era, and relic body is bis for a lot. It lacks TA of talia but has attack and better stats for master and pet. Hands also add +10% ws dmg which is nice.

Xiucoatl is purely a pet ws piece, your are still better off using ohats for tp build, then switching over for ws at 900tp.


Master/pet/hybrid sets will all depend on target and buffs. If you have sam roll + companion roll you should both be WSing at the same time anyways If not you just need to swap to w/e gearset is lagging at that moment.

I think the question was specifically for TP sets when both the master and pet are TPing together. Relic and weapon switching are all not really useful to that end. An argument could be made for Kyrene's due to the Acc and DA, but personally I don't think it'd be a great choice. The problem in a non-pet only group setting is always that the Automaton is the weaker link.

And I've honestly never seen a party buff SAM + Companion's roll unless you have a personal COR mule. But the maton can usually keep up with your TP gain despite SAM roll anyway, if you're 5-stepping.

Ok, test done in dyna sandy.
Set turtle for the pet : strobe for voke (not needed in fact) and max HP/armor/Mana jammer.
Set Pet hp (rao) + max DT for the rest.

so, for roll, i got comp + bolter (for flee).
Deploy on the fetter, after retreat and run (let your tank take the ??? disjoined).
Basicly 2 possibility here :
- you run run run (be carefull with bolter roll sometime some mob lose aggro) and desactivate when fetter down, with this your pet stay always around 95-100 with 3 light mnv.
- you go away a little and then deploy on a mob, spam a repair + 3 light and you can hold them for 3/4 min i think without dawn.

with these you can save a lot of time to skip mob and focus boss.

Eh i didnt read it as hybrid sets only, i read it as any sets (master only, pet only, or hybrid sets during tp phase. Since he asked for sets with KKK or xiocatl.

And i do have a pocket cor because of how much stronger it makes pup its ridiculous. Its taken the #of things i solo way way farther.

Unless you are tanking, kyrene earring is bis DD earring. I very rarely need to take it off unless im going turtle.

I didn't say Kyrene's Earring wasn't good, it's definitely BiS Pet DD earring along with Enmerkar--but again, that's only if the maton is DDing without the master, which I assumed wasn't the question. Maybe I misinterpreted it.

Since getting Pitre fists i have been testing auto ws interactions alot with stats/attachments.

Testing against porxies and frogs

Anyone else notice that attuner and tenspring4 does nothing for Armor Shatterer? Neither does tp bonus or attack.
using 1 fire,1 light,1 wind
It does 8500 with or without them.
Special attack damage up works fine however, boosting damage by 20%. Flame holder also boosts damage.

Daze and Arcuballista plummet in damage by comparison. Arcuballista more so. Armor Piercer drops a smaller amount

Unsure if this is a bug or not.

Tp bonus shouldnt do anything to begin with, but eiryl pointed out attuner/spring4 doing essentially the same for AS so it might simply have a very high atk bonus natively

Bgwiki has it listed with a 125% atk boost so yeah, capped off that or it might be higher?

The bg.wiki states dex as the modifier for most of sharpshot's weaponskill but often str will increase damage more then dex does. For some reason armor shatter is the exception.

The bg.wiki guide String Theory also suggests to go for VIT herculean set for Bone crusher. Which was awful advice (that i tried.) Attack,Accuracy pieces are alot more consistent in producing higher numbers.

Yeah, I'm not sure if it's broken either. Very weird that they did the exact same damage on something that an Automaton shouldn't be capped on.

There was a difference on apex mobs, but things in reisenjima were identical. (for reference this is with no vorseals no cor no geo and zero petattack+)

+18% attack shouldn't end up identical to -15% Defense (when you only have 1000 attack)

Not saying wiki is always right, just that it showed it having an atk boost which if its actually higher than listed, might be why.

As for vit on BC over atk/acc, thats obviously herc gear with vit/acc/atk/da.

Does anyone have a pup GS that has working functions for like enmity gear swapping for flashbulb/voke?

Think I'm using kinematics? But no matter what setup my puppet is in it's always using the default pet idlemode gear.

Most of my play is focused around the snips tanking and me doing the deeps

That lua in the pup gs thread might do it, otherwise you just got to use equipsets to swap into enmity set before the ja goes off, once it uses voke/flash itll swap into whatever your default set was at the time.

So I just did this ocal petInfoString = pet.name..' ['..pet.head..']: '..tostring(pet.status)..' TP='..tostring(pet.tp)..' HP%='..tostring(pet.hpp)..' snips='..tostring(pet.mode) and in game it will display HP % etc but petmode is just saying nil. Would that mean that its not recognizing the mode its in?
Even though it recognizes what head is on and its mapped at the top that X head = Y mode

Someone more lua savvy could probably give you a better answer but i beleive i use that lua and scrapped as much of that mode stuff as i could

They all have dex mods and dex also mods base dmg of ranged attacks (though not as much as agi or changes in fstr can). The reason AS is likely stated to be different is because it's listed as 100% dex mod while others are 50-60%....

Only 1 problem though. We got the stat mods and ftps from SE and well there is something seriously messed up with automaton ranged attacks. Pretty sure it's still in the accepted but we're ignoring it bug section on the OF. The tl;dr of all that is AS is mathing out to the same dex mod as the others and increasing ranged dmg results in about only 2/3s the increase in ranged ws dmg based on the ftps they gave us for the ws AND flameholder

Even when I was new to lua, I don't recall it stating which mode it was in but rather would base it's mode on whichever head you had attached. That caused me to take out some codes to fully dictate which gear swaps in and out.

Had an interesting conversation with another PUP today about automaton WS gear and was wondering about everyone else's thoughts.

Do we know exactly why Skill + is good for WS? It can't be about the Atk and Acc you get from it or else surely there would be better options other than Gnafrons (outside of Su), Karagoz Pantaloni +1, and Naga Kyahan. Is it something about the WS formula itself? Why would Herc with DEX+ and Atk/Acc+ work better?

Similarly, many PUPs use Karagoz Guanti +1 in WS/OD sets. I always accepted this as the Auto swapping WSs to SC during OD and therefore needing different stat mods but really wouldn't Herc the same augs as above be better?

I'm genuinely too dumb to do any empirical testing but would love to set up the conditions if someone could point me in the right direction. Or is there actually no need, like we know for a fact these pieces are best?

Armor Shatter does very consistent damage. So its a nice tool to test stuff with :).


From personal testing AGL and STR also increases WS damage. So Herculean gloves will never boost ws as much as Karagoz Guanti+1.

Simple test I just did now-While wearing maneuver + equipment.
3 Wind maneuver AS does more than no Wind or 3 Water maneuver AS.

What does a full Master TP set look like these days? This is what I currently have .

Xiucoatl/Godhands
ItemSet 362291

Kenkonken
ItemSet 362292

Herculean Gloves: Acc/Att+19, MAcc/MAB+15, QA +3
Herculean Boots: Acc+24, Att+5, TA+4
Visucius's Mantle: DEX+30, Acc/Att+20, DA+10

Any recommended changes or upgrades other thant Moonbow Belth +1?

P.S. I don't now how to post the gear image ;-(

str adds to fstr if not capped just like most physical ws. agi is a weird one because it for some reason adds to the base dmg of ranged attacks which also translates to the ws (so does dex but to a lesser extent). A long time ago there was some testing on it on bg to find exactly what and how much added to the base dmg but from what I remember skill not only also added to it but seemed to effect how much base stats added to it or something

if you look at the link above to the ranged ws data being borked from more recent testing you can see how agi was to compare changes in base dmg to what you should and what actually got in changes in ws dmg. Which can give you a rough idea of about how much agi does

ItemSet 362300

This was mine before I switched to Xiu. Haven't mathed it out yet but tbqh I presume you'd be better off without all of that MA (could be massively wrong though). This set assumes Kenkonken and that your are building 3k TP in it, iirc it allows something like a 32.5 attack round build to 3k tp? With which how often you are swinging I usually got that in about 30-40 seconds if not stopping to pip maneuvers.

Main difference is my set focuses on STP while minimizing the hit to multi-attack. All Ryuo aug'd for max STP, otronif gloves and boots are interchangeable (I like my Herc gloves Aug better) and the cape is double attack not STP. I don't often see H2H users building for STP so I'm not positive if it's something you just don't do or not but I had good results with this. Unfortunately I think I'm going to retire my master/hybrid builds as I'm finding myself either ODing when solo or tanking/pet set up in a group.

EDIT: Deleted the set but it basically came down to 3/5 Ryuo and high STP accessories

Not sure what you are talking about as Maneuvers haven't stopped melee attacks for quite some time now. Also your set seems pretty light on Accuracy overall, even taking augments into account.

Personally, I build a healthy mix of TA and STP rather than just one or the other (valuing 1 TA at about 2 STP). STP-enhanced hits benefit a lot from multiattack procs and vice-versa, after all. Herc Hands+Feet have excellent base stats even before augments and Tali'ah Manteel+2 is pretty much peerless in my opinion, because it doesn't neglect the Automaton completely while you are building TP for AM3. But the good DEX/Acc and +6% TA alone are already amazing.

That's very fair. I've only ever used it to build initial TP or catch myself back up to 3k when AM3 was wearing so when I built the set (a whiiiiiile back) I had prioritized STP over everything trying to minimize the amount of hits necessary to a "perfect" point. The accuracy I was never too concerned about (out of blind-sightedness, not intent) because the biggest thing I would use it on is T1 Reisen NMs or Sinister Reign/other random NMs. With a /checkparam I have roughly 1083 (I've reaug'd my Otronif Boots) and after food would be closer to 1200 which was "enough" for what I was fighting.

I agree though; I made sure to let him know it was a set I didn't use anymore and that I put it together by myself without any input about "best practices" assuming STP was going to matter most when trying to build 3k TP. Just providing options, most sets I see downright ignore it.

EDIT: Also had nooooo idea about Maneuvers not interrupting AA rounds. I don't use any meters or timers or anything like that so I just took the visuals to mean that I was slowing it down or something? Or I'm crazy haha.

A couple of years ago, Maneuvers still used the full JA animation (like Deploy still does) whenever you used them, which basically paused your melee attacks for 1 second. It really hurt our overall DPS (an issue DNC still has with Steps), so SE removed the entire animation and just made our hands glow.

And there's nothing wrong with building a low Accuracy, high STP set if that's all you needed for your purposes. In my case, I don't bother with low Accuracy sets at all, because anything with such low requirements is usually just faceroll content to begin with.

That's almost my default master-focused TP set, except that I use Ryuo Somen +1 (path A) for head, Brutal/Cessance for ears (I actually don't have Telos, but think I'd prob default to Brutal regardless), and +1 belt. If acc is more of a concern, swapping Samnuha Tights for Heyoka is my first change.


To revisit this, as my group is really liking the idea of bringing a PUP+PLD for our Divergence tanking needs...

Can someone clarify what you've found to be the most efficient wave 3 fetter killing method that includes a PUP? If I deploy the puppet on a group of 4 Volte mobs, then retrieve, deploy on the 2nd group of Voltes, retrieve and hold all 8 of them away from the group:

1) Are you finding that the puppet is sturdy enough to handle all 8 mobs in a full turtle build with light x2 (or even light x3 once you have the group of mobs)?

2) When the group is done killing the fetter, what happens to the mobs? Do the two who were voked/flashed by the puppet remain "active" and need to be killed (and therefore it's wise to deploy onto normal mobs instead of the named Voltes), and the other 6 will return to their positions and stay idle unless acted upon/aggroed by the party?

3) How are others handling the fetter and Disjoined ??? boss? 2nd tank (in my case, usually a PLD) grabs hate on both while the party kills the fetter?

If there's a different optimal PUP tanking method for wave 3, would love to hear what others are doing that is working well. We've also considered that, with enough time, we could straight up kill some of the voltes by deploying PUP on each group of 4 and picking them off one at a time... Straightforward enough approach, but the named mobs tend to take too long for us and we don't have enough time to take out a sufficient number of fetters to adequately weaken the boss (might just need some additional DPS optimization, but this seems like it probably isn't the most efficient path anyway).


Bonus! Wave 2 questions:
What about wave 2 bosses, any PUP-specific tips?

Bastok - I think I have this one down well, tank it near the bottom of ramp at wave 1 NM pop spot, on the west wall, while party kills. Puppet is never in serious danger. We tend to bring a couple DDs opening SC for a couple backline mages to add MBs (though if there's a significantly faster way, would be nice to hear that too)

Windy - is this one even viable due to doom? Maybe better off just switching to a non-tank puppet for this one if you really wanted to bring PUP due to its usefulness on wave 3?

Sandy - I've always come NIN or RUN, but whatcha doin on Halphas with PUP? Does automaton survive the big <50% moves to tank it reliably?

Jeuno - Any special tips? I have no idea, I've only even attempted wave 2 boss once and won, but barely remember the fight and I don't think I was on PUP. Seems like this is a pretty standard PUP tanking fight though and the automaton could straight tank it with no real unique considerations - is that accurate?

The trick to sac pulling wave 3 as PUP is to deploy directly onto the fetter/circle, and nothing else. I run SoulSoother/Valoredge with a hyper turtle defensive tanking setup. Barrier Module, in particular, is great especially for this.

The Volte monsters have an alarmingly low aggro sight range, so you can usually creep up at an angle and deploy onto the fetter. Once your Automaton aggros the fetter, it'll spawn the Disjoined ??? who will go for your automaton, and every volte monster will link alongside it. Retrieve your automaton and run to the designated pull area. I usually triple Light maneuver as I am running. Once you get to the spot target the Disjoined ??? again, buried within the pile of monsters chasing your automaton, and re-deploy your automaton on him (this is when Barrier module will do work for blocking 9 monsters hits). This will cluster all the monsters in a single remote location, and give you (the master) an opportunity to move away, back to your alliance.

During this time, your PLD or RUN should have flashed the fetter at range and your entire alliance just demolishes the circle. The reason this trick works is because once the fetter dies, the Disjoined ??? will despawn. This means your Automaton will begin running back to you, and also means you can Deactivate safely. During this whole sac pull you've only initiated an enmity giving action onto 2 targets, both of which no longer exist (the fetter which was killed, and the disjoined ??? which despawned), so this is why Deactivate will give you no aggro to the 8 volte monsters, and they'll just slowly waddle back to their spawn positions, and by that point your alliance has already moved on.

The only dicey part of pulling this way is the Volte RDM's using AoE enfeebles which can seriously mess you up if you are unlucky -- Bind, Gravity, Sleep, and Paralyze being the worst offenders. Have your erase/panacea/remedy/-na's/maintenance ready.

Maybe I'll record a video of how to do it next run I do?



EDIT: and to answer your bonus question, for most of the Wave2 bosses I simply run a standard tanking automaton who has both Disruptor and Regulator, cycle Fire/Light/Dark, and just stand far away. Many of the bosses have really strong self-buffs (the Yagudo in particular), and one of the most useful things I found I could do outside of tanking was to dispel/absorb these buffs immediately. Plus if ever things get messy there is always the Automaton to fall back onto.

The outlier for this is the Jeuno goblin, as he has never posed a threat for my group. I just go full DPS during this, and lock my automaton into Armor Shatterer for the defense down.