Luck Of The Draw: A Corsair's Guide *NEW*

Still, numbers would be helpful for those of us who usually don't have "full buffs." Aka me :P

cor/sch no buff, belaboring wasp @ ceizak

Wildfire w/ orpheus point blank
DP 19254
Fomal 20745
Arma 23747
Arnarchy+2 17807

Wildfire w/ hachirin + fire weather1
DP 18414
Fomal 18041
Arma 22716
Anarchy+2 15482

edit: I forgot my lua prioritize orpheus if weather 1/melee range

People really overlook the fact that with good buffs and bis midshot set Arma can oneshot with ease for 1k tp where DP is abit shy unless your tripleshot is up and procing. Thats really noticeable diff for dyna wave3 ranged magic setups. The other cor if hes a DP purest isn't haveing his damage gimped as much either till you swap to DP for Fetters and Megaboss.

Never seen wildfire resist in there. Where as with leaden you'll see 30-50ks then the odd resists/same ws gimping for 10-25k. This goes away with rayke/gambit but runs usually favor Rngs i find so they get double lights where you get a single dark for gambit. Don't matter with rayke.

Wildfire hits 40-45k and are occ boosted by 25-50% with odd fire shots tossed in from either cor. Cors don't usually pull hate in dyna with magic WSs, its the rangers skill chaining off leadens for 99k with trueflight that i'v only seen get murdered and qq about my HQ stewpots, so i can get away with dnc sub and further boost the SC damage for when i do self dark by another 8%.

Ya'll making me wanna take the dive on R15'ing my Arma.

So a ~23% difference. That's actually quite respectable. Probably not respectable enough to warrant spending ~270mil for me, but a decent margin nonetheless (assuming this scales linearly into lv. 150 content).

I'd like to know at what average TP the Leaden crowd is using WSs at in wave3. Because every COR I've ever run wave3 with who claims leaden is "fine" there is typically firing at 2k+ TP, while the Wildfire crowd is spamming the hell out of it at 1k TP, resulting in significant differences in WS frequency.

[OPINION] used to be a 2k-er, tried 1k for a bit, found that waiting for one additional attack round beyond 1k is usually the sweet spot [/OPINION]

(mostly because 2k+ when you're well geared and debuffs are on... easily risks capping damage)

I want screenshots of capped leaden damage without R/G/threnody on a wave3 volte mob. I simply don't believe it.

oh no you're right that's not happening I misread thinking this was about the boss lol

Oh I'm completely in agreement you switch to leaden for the w3 boss- that thing's defense compared to the entire wave prior is a joke...the exact opposite of the wave2 and boss.

I'm never with enough other COR/RNGs to be in a party that'll ever get Magic-buffed anyway, so Savage Blading W3 while I buff other melee has always been the thing. Must be nice to have a party built around Wildfire/Trueflight though, can see many advantages

We were talking about volte, not boss...


You only really need 1-2 cor in an entire alliance to worth the malaise buff. You shouldn't bring more than 2 cor in the alliance anyways. Otherwise leaden dmg will drop.


Or eyeballing...leaden does spike fairly high on volte when resist doesn't happen. But avg isn't particularly high.

Melee and magical buffs aren't mutually exclusive.... Don't get why people insist it's either magic/ranged only or melee/physical only when doing both works so much better.


Don't need "a party built around WF/TF". More like 1/6 of a party.

WF does 45k on volte with just malaise. I don't understand why more melee parties aren't doing malaise in the alliance.

Almost everyone talking about COR+RNG for the primary source of damage in wave3 is talking about a strategy built around melee'ing for TP and magical WS's, not shooting for TP. Without tripleshot up, its without question a faster way of building TP, and since a full wave3 clear means 8 circles worth of volte mobs to kill, you can't rely on tripleshot to bring a shooting strategy up to the speed of a melee with magical WS.

To give you an idea of what that looks like:

BRDs go double madrigal, double march (if RDM present, drop 2nd march for AGI etude during the wave, and/or dirge during the boss)

GEOs give an array of torpor/langour/malaise enfeebling bubbles- offensive bubbles are a nice bonus, but far from "part of the strategy". Acumen of course on the parties where magical damage is prevalent, save the 2nd bubble/entrust for tank party to keep them alive.

a RDM present is a huge gift. Frees up that 4th song for offensive purposes via Haste2, and Frazzle3 certainly helps. I suggest having them be a capable melee RDM with a good Sanguine Blade build and join the fray-after all, they're getting buffed for it. Also Distract3 for those pesky NIN/THF/DNC Volte NMs.

In general, I'd suggest CORs if single in a party focus on SAM/WIZ rolls. If you bring multiple CORs in a single party (and as @Alfania points out, when you get to the wave3 boss assign some to NOT leaden but Wildfire instead) add warlock's/hunter's. Tactician's over hunter's if you feel ok with it.

Either bring a SCH, or have your healers /SCH. Firestorm2/Klimaform is a major asset during the actual wave. Of course storms aren't needed for the boss proper, except for your RNGs who will still want Aurorastorm.

Stewpots are also a major asset. The ability to get macc, racc, and melee acc all in one food is enough to sacrifice 10acc/racc from sushi.

The end result? All damage related buffs are geared towards the magical weaponskills, while still providing a situation with the Bards capping haste and providing the needed accuracy (with assistance from the GEOs).

A COR+RNG strategy does not mean they're shooting for TP.

That...and I completely forgot about RDM and hybrid WS jobs. Croc RDM should be competitive to a DP cor if focus on DD, so there's even less reason not to use malaise.

And hybrid WS NIN SAM too. Even all dagger job can cleave with AE which adds tons of damage. Without malaise none of these jobs can be played at max potential.

Really malaise should exist in every melee alliances.

If you're a DP COR and doing Wave 3 boss runs, and you're NOT cleaving the adds (barring COR add of course) with a solid Aeolian Edge set, you're gimping yourself.

Sanguine is old news man, all our supports for magic ws runs now are daybreak + seraph strike/blade fiends! It's maybe overall less Optimal™ but our supports have more fun with it that way lol

But yeah Cele got it, we clear with 1 rng + 2 cor as the DD of our run, with whatever our supports can add in via seraphs as bonus. Can normal melee DD strats do low man nowadays like that? I guess I should just try it myself...

I guess we have different strat here because our group doesn't even touch the NQ volte mob directly. 2cor 2rdm just targets the HQ volte, rdms aeolian edge, cor leadens, smn shock squall, and runs rotate gambit and rayke for every hq volte. In this situation we're almost always going to have either gambit or rayke on.

Yeah that's the point. I feel like there should be a mid tier set that doesn't require 100+ runs of Lilith.

I feel with the three most recently added HTBF's SE didn't want VD to be soloable with trusts as most of the pre-existing ones have become. Of course we as players find ways when possible, such as RDMs going enspell strat on Odin. SE wanted to give us some kind of group content.

And the Lilith battlefield even rewards those higher tiers with the most direct version of increasing GEAR drops I've seen in any of their battlefields via killing the spitewardens.

If the concept of doing 100+ runs on VE isn't your idea of fun (and honestly, I've never met a person who doesn't complain about just "putting in the runs" for Lilith), set up some D or VD runs with the intent of killing those spitewardens. Corsair is wonderful for it, as all 3 take full damage from either ranged, melee, or magical damage(magical WSs count) and severely reduced damage from the "wrong" types. Killing them (only possible during the Dark Lilith phase, they depop once she shifts to Lilith Ascendant) will add a potential drop slot to the pool, so VD runs where you actually kill them can result in up to 4 gear drops (possibly more? most I ever saw was 4, and that includes weapons/accessories).

It takes some practice with a group willing to fail a few times as you figure out positioning and effective measures, but it can be a really fun fight. Sadly, this is one of those places where voice communication is a huge help for groups able/willing to jump on Discord vs trying to handle survival, DPS, and positioning all while typing on top of it.

That's not the problem I find with it though. If you need to put that much work together to get the gear, I feel like it shouldn't belong in the in-between "mid-grade" gearsets.

Do you feel a COR with "Entry" level gear could do the fight at VD?

Was just hoping to see a good "mid-tier" set I can point other new CORs to that didn't have 5/5 Malignance.

No. But you needn't jump right to VD if you get a group who wants to kill the wardens.

N will pop 1 spitewarden, D pops 2, and VD pops 3. Take a group in, create a strat, and start on N. See how you handle all the gyve pops and their auras with only having 1 warden to kill (they pop sequentially, so the higher tiers take longer to get them to pop, thus more gyves).

Lastly, Malignance gear is far from "mid-grade"....its hands down the most versatile set for any job that can wear it.

By "mid-grade" I'm talking about the sets listed in the OP.

I'd wager they're listed there because it can be done solo, albeit slowly. So the actual level of skill/gear to acquire it is technically very low.

Now, if you want it faster, you gotta do it differently, and team up for those higher tiers/more dropslots. Nothing wrong with the game making us work harder to get faster results.

Took me a month or two with my gimp pup/thf and my cor alt during E. Was a stupidly easy fight though I could just stand there and let my auto do all the work.

Its all luck though. I'm 1200ish run in and haven't seen legs. (all mules 4/5 with all weapons)

First 1100ish with TH9+, last 100ish TH11+

Yeah....that's just not worth it in my book. Took me a total of ~80 runs to get all drops. 56 VE runs got me earring,sword, and 1 piece of gear...and 24 wins of D/VD to get all the rest. It took about an entire set of merits to really nail down a workable strat, but again, its honestly a really fun fight if you do kill the wardens.

*note: the reason people spam VE/E in my opinion is because you can't walk into a VD with well-geared people and just zerg it down like earlier HTBF's, and see any improvement in droprate for doing that difficulty. Its only worth leaving the VE/E grind if you actively kill the wardens.

Or you have enough competent people that can actually do the fight. I only duo it on E because I didn't know enough people that could do the fight and actually still wanted to do it.

Can't remember if I actually said this in the guide, but my thinking is:

Mid-tier sets are aimed at your run-of-the-mill, average endgame player. Probably COR isn't their only job, and they are geared enough to enter group play. The stuff shown is relatively affordable off AH or are relatively easy drops to obtain.

Lilith drop rate sucks, but it's easily spammable, so I felt like it was appropriate to put it in mid-tier.

Dream tier is reserved for ppl obsessed w/ min-maxing and white boxes. Not everybody plays the job that way. Think enough people are 4/5 or 5/5 Malignance by now that it's not really a dream anymore XD