Dev Tracker - Discussion

I sometimes wondered if it was language barriers too though. He wasn't able to communicate what he meant and got frustrated when people jumped on mistakes.

Didn't he also have insight about hitting the spell interruption rate cap? Or was that corroborated from others info?

I'm not arguing that DRK was in a great spot, but a well-timed Absorb-TP could get you half a WS during an era where DRK's TP speed was subpar at best. The whole reason they even added Absorb-TP was because they took pity on DRK's struggles, but they didn't think to give the job Auto-Refresh because obviously Aspir works super well on everything.

And really, nothing compared to SAM back then. The job has always been good, but at 75 cap it was by far the best out of the box because it was designed around the one thing that was meaningful in terms of damage. And then SE added fun toys over time like Soboro, Hagun, Tomoe, Zanshin etc. to set SAM apart even more. Other DDs had to farm for years to get their big ticket items, while Hagun came from the AH for most.

Was also the fact i think great katana's big 3 all had varying levels of atk bonus in a sea of ws' that maybe had 1 per type, in a meta where many mobs werent being def debuffed, or DDs atk buffed, so you got both high frequency and stronger overall ws' because of that, that along with the fact 1 hit WS' were all fairly similar in dmg back then when similarly buffed and not atk starved to hell.

Good point, I forgot about that. SAM's major weakness should have been the lack of Attack buffs, but they completely sidestepped that by giving their main WSs an innate bonus.

At least these days that weakness is actually apparent and gives the other heavy DDs a situational advantage. Now if only they buffed Katanas, GAX, maybe Scythe and Polearm and nerfed Naegling then we might have an interesting DD meta again.

SAM's biggest boon was access to penta thrust coupled with the rest of its kit. GKT wasn't as strong most of the time

Feel like until we could overcome the def gap the gkt was the go-to for most nms, once we did though yeah same as most ws back then if you multi-hit and werent floored that was the way to go vs a 1 hitter

You guys are reminiscing back to the days when 1 handed jobs had an innate advantage over H2H and dual wielders simply because they got far more accuracy and attack from dex and str. It wasn't until post abyssea era that all weapon types benefitted from 1 str= 1 attack and 1 dex = 0.75 accuracy. Monks, pups, and DW jobs were stuck with the 1 = 0.5 ratio for about 3 or 4 years before s-e changed it. That alone factored into which jobs were favored. The great 2 hander update was a huge deal for the jobs it affected.

Was 3:4 ratio for both STR and DEX. They broke it initially and did the 1:1 ratio.... That was such a great time to be leveling SAM and DRK lol did SAM from 65-75 in a party of RDM + SAMx5

MNK/WAR full-timing counter stance with a DNC healer out damaged SAM at birds.

One of SAM"s biggest strengths was it didn't have to sub NIN all the time.

Did someone say Pchain? I hope this works lol.

Apoc DRK/SAM ruled XP for a while there after the 2hand buff and before the haste cap. It was also one of the better Salvage jobs with self healing really helping.

Relics broke a lot of rules for jobs. Almost every well-geared Relic job was significantly above its peers. Some more than others, of course, but still.

I always remember once in a discussion about bots or addons/plugins he pulled into the discussion the concepts of O and O2.

Im not sure why i kept this concept with me. Many years has passed, i started an IT university and just recently i was formally presented to the big O notation concept.

Yeah, i guess P-chan does have a background that many insisted to deny. Its not surprising though, people like whatever ***someone says because its the popular one, and hate every single correct word of another just because hes the hated one.

Anyway, i digress. Back on topic, slobs, keep those discussions coming.

This is just not really true, the big 2h jobs did substantially more damage with their access to Hasso, significantly higher accuracy/attack, stronger WSes, faster TP gain, etc. Monk had niche defensive utility that probably peaked in Salvage, although many salvage groups completely got rid of Monk once the starting chest was added in favor of stuff like Sam/War/Drk. Things like Rune Chopper Warrior, Tomoe/Hagun Sam, and Apoc Drk were the true winners of post 2h DD era. You can go look at pservers even and see Monk has almost no place in their meta except the one time one of them decided to give "If hand to hand +30% damage" and it was....pretty okay. Not to mention how is Monk having to sub Ninja for defenses when other jobs could sub offensive subs and switch between defense/offense a pro for Monk?

Yup, that's exactly what I was talking about, we had no refresh to actually support it. The easy issues were with 'well-timed' and actually landing it. MJSP was basically the only place it could be utilized to any effect beyond 'lmao, it worked for once!'. The only truly consistent usage was casting after your second swing at a fresh mob, and then you'd have your RDM complain endlessly about having to refresh you, hence the Plastron discussion.

DRK, even non-Apoc, was actually in a great spot around WotG launch, after 2-hander buff and Desperate Blows was added. We were DRK+RDM+COR combos tearing up MJSP at rates to rival pulling all three levels of colibri without any stuffy entitled BRDs to even bother convincing of it.

Let's be real. Pchan was a douche and earned all of that notoriety along with saying some really stupid ***. Let's not rewrite history now.

I'm pretty sure haste cap was before Hasso came out (which is when /SAM overtook /WAR for DRK). The 80% haste cap was implemented during CoP, while I'm 90% sure Hasso/Seigan was during ToAU.

It was after.

43.3 magic, 25 gear, 10 hasso, 15 desperate blows. They later swapped DB to 25% with merits. You also needed Apoc or a Rune Chopper to hit these values. /drg was used with Kclub to hit the gear cap. (earring)



Here is a link I dug up:
https://www.bluegartr.com/threads/64427-Job-Ability-Haste-has-a-cap!

https://www.bg-wiki.com/ffxi/Attack_Speed#Caps

I mean, yeah. but he was a douche because his instinct was to get defensive rather than be aware of and compensate for the fact that he was speaking about specific, unconventional things in a second language.

Ironically he could have dunked on the lot of you by responding to nitpicking with "Oh, I'm sorry, I misspoke" and then writing three paragraphs in French.

Never argued that MNK beat SAM. Rune Chopper needed proper Refresh support to even be viable and was often relegated to zerging.

And bringing Relics into a discussion to argue that a job was stronger than another... how many of those were actually around? Did every DRK have one back then? No? Then it's obviously not a good argument. That's like comparing a R15 REMA DD with one stuck using an unaugmented Odyssey weapon—and even then REMA are orders of magnitude more common these days than back then. The average MNK was sufficiently competitive with the average 2H DD. The majority of the playerbase was not great, so it was impossible to fill an alliance with above average players. And iirc they only changed the STR/DEX/Acc/Atk ratio after several years because 2H jobs were struggling a bit, but my memory is a bit fuzzy on the exact details.

As for /NIN, raw damage isn't the only thing that matters. It was generally a better defensive tool because it protected consistently as well as against nukes in an era where DT practically didn't exist, so the higher survivability was important to keep your healers going. Finally, while Seigan/TE was good, you'd lose the Haste that let you keep up with MNK's total haste.

Also private servers? Half of their ***is usually broken and their damage formulae are likely different from the retail 75 cap era.

Then Perdu Voulge, or Byakko's Axe, Martial Bhuj even, Warrior was way strong at 75 cap. If you are talking about Hagun Sam and Tomoe Sam, you are obviously talking about post 2h buff so idk why you'd bring up times from before the 2h formulas were changed. I did Salvage with an Apoc, Taint posting here had one in era, wasn't common for sure but it's not like some mystical weapon that didn't exist, and Spharai certainly didn't help Monk come close to it.

Other jobs could sub Ninja too, but Seigan/TE let them not have to do that and have a strong middle ground between offense and defense that Monk just didn't have. It's purely a con that Monk had to rely on Ninja sub when playing defensive.

Pservers can be hit or miss, but some of them are very well programmed at this point as far as damage formulas go.

Why are we even discussing this? We all stuck in the past!



P servers are garbage, we are still learning things about the game all these years later, I highly doubt some backwards engineered garbage has it all figured out. Especially given most that I've seen.

I was talking about the period where Apoc DRK could surpass 80% haste back in the CoP days, before SE added the global haste cap as a reaction to this. I had thought you were talking about the same thing.

Pretty sure Hagun existed for quite a while before the buff, but as I said, I recall that the 2H buff happened first and foremost because those jobs were struggling with high delay weapons feeling too punished by Acc issues.

I'm also not saying any of the other jobs were weak—Perdu Voulge WAR was indeed very powerful. All I'm saying is that MNK wasn't completely outshadowed by those other jobs that would warrant avoiding them for parties. That was what PUP had to deal with.

And yes, other jobs could sub NIN, but as I've been saying the other jobs needed Hasso to actually have the same levels of total haste. Haste has always been incredibly powerful and losing 10% of it when switching to Seigan made a big difference.

They could surpass it well into ToAU. If you look at the BGwiki page UNCGTG is fighting a Marid outside whitegate.

If we are talking pre-2h updated then yeah this is completely different. All 2h jobs were asscheeks before 2007 and Mnk was a top DPS with DW War. I just figured if we are talking about Hagun/Tomoe Sam we mean when it became actually relevant.

I'm not sure how it was on other servers, but on Asura in the main HNM LSs of the server you had to be a big friend of the officers to be regularly called on MNK and prioritized over other DDs.

I'm talking about the Pre-ToAU days.
MNK back then more often than not was considered mostly for Chi Blast rotation.
Chi Blast Rotation was... ok I guess, because it was "different". But it was frustrating seeing all those 11+ boost go to waste because some party leader was so dumb they couldn't even invite you in time.

For everything else back then MNK was "perfectly viable" but not favoured over other DDs. I remember I had to struggle so much to find PTs for pretty much anything. And yes, I did manage to get invites, but it was quite the frustrating struggle each and every time.


ToAU didn't really change much at least early on and nothing really changed with the 2H stats ratio adjustment patch, until MNK become quite desired for Salvage.
MNK was the key to victory before they added the initial chest.
And at least in my experience MNK was still favoured as a DD there even AFTER the chest got added, because it still meant that the two Incus cells you got at start could be given to other jobs and you as a MNK could still function decently while waiting for more Incus Cells to drop. Was quite the convenience if you ask me.


Through high and lows my experience is that MNK didn't really shine out wide on my server until Abyssea arrived.
Then again during early delve, and then we all remember the recent history I guess.

His presence and argumentative nature on the boards was definitely confrontational.

As someone on his server who purchased some salvage loot from his group because it was a good deal at the time... his group was susceptible to failure just as any. I have a few screenshots of them because I thought they were funny.