TVR Rings

I don't know the formulas on pdif specifically, but I know the attack cap does vary by weapon, so daggers and swords(low delay) will more easily hit the attack cap when buffed with geo/rdm, brd and cor. Considering savage blade is the go-to weapon skill for most content, especially when you want to avoid skill chaining (bumba, sortie basement bosses).

2 handed weapons have a higher threshold, and are less likely to be near the cap, so what jobs you play, and more importantly, which weapons you're using, should factor in. Naegling, with its upgrade buff, quite easily hits attack cap, making pdl more desirable, but that being said, you still need a balance of wsd and pdl. Over stacking either, without testing is likely to nerf your damage potential.

Do any of the other rings offer a 10% increase on weaponskill damage?

Though I advocated against it for myself and for my own reasons, the pet ring increases all pet damage by 10%, which is arguably stronger than 10% more damage on only weapon skills. (if you primarily play pet jobs)

The PDL ring will give you a boost when attack capped, where the weapon skill ring will not, (highly circumstantial, but it's the only way to improve your damage when fully buffed). This should be something each person who's conflicted between these 2 rings should experiment with. If you spend most of your time playing solo, then the wsd ring will likely benefit you more, but if you do more end game content, then the pdl may be for you.

This being said, if you mostly play healing and supports, you may find that the refresh 2 ring better suits your playstyle.

There simply is no "best" ring that all players should use.

Weaponskill damage offers diminishing returns when you stack more and more of it. If your weaponskill set already includes 5 pieces of Rank 25 Nyame, a 10% WSD cape, and epaminondas's ring then you already have 68% WSD. Adding Cornelia's ring on top of that would raise your WSD to 78%, which is about a 6% increase in actual damage. Here's a simple example to show the math

--If your weaponskill would do exactly 10K damage before WSD then 68 WSD would raise it to 16,800
--That same weaponskill would do 17,800 if you added cornelia's ring on top of the other options

17,800 is 6% more damage than 16,800

Stacking epa ring with cornelia's comes at the expense of losing regal ring, so the net gain of upgrading regal to cornelia's is actually closer to 3%. Alternatively, you can simply upgrade epa's ring to cornelia's ring and keep the regal, meaning the difference is a net gain of 5% wsd, which is again about 3% damage (17,300 versus 16,800).

Additional popular WSD options like Knobkierre and Ishvara/thrud earrings, as well as having R30 nyame over R25 further compound this effect. WSD is also less effective on multi hit weaponskills because it only works on the first hit. And crit based weaponskills would prefer Lehko's ring. All in all, Cornelia's Ring, Lehko's Ring, and Ephramad's ring each have their pros and cons. There are situations where each can overtake the other options. The differences between them aren't nearly as big as some people are making them out to be.

The WSD ring will still increase your damage while fully buffed, just not as much as the PDL ring. Just a small clarification.

When it comes to WSD vs PDL rings specifically, I'm looking at it as WSD will provide a solid damage increase at all times. However, when able to make use of it, the PDL ring will provide a larger increase in damage over the WSD ring. Even outside of PDL scenarios, you're still getting a Regal Ring equivalent (minus the +10 VIT...) with the PDL ring. Not terrible.

I'm looking to ensure my damage can be as high as possible when it matters, which is when I expect to be above attack capped, as I'm likely receiving full buffs / debuffs. This will be during situations like a zerg. High PDL = faster kills = higher efficiency. Though I see the alternative too, where you won't always be attack capped but still zerging.

There are so many caveats that it really comes down to what jobs you play, what weaponskills you use (hybrids are going to slightly favor WSD ring over PDL ring), what content you participate in. The list goes on. Don't get too caught up on it. It's literally free to change the ring.

So, just to be sure...

Has anyone tested whether Cornelia's WSD applies to all hits of a multi-hit WS (like DRG's WS Damage Boost trait)?

I would assume it does not and is simply normal WSD+ gear, but crazier things have happened. That period of time that all WSD was affecting every hit of all WS, weird item descriptions that are unintuitive (e.g., Fotia Gorget/Belt), etc.

Also, I think I'm about to grab Medada's Ring (INT/MAB/Macc) for my secondary character who plays mainly support/mage jobs (WHM BLM RDM BRD SMN COR SCH GEO). It's an upgrade over either ring in common Freke/Metamorph +1 nuke sets, and based on the current game content I'm more likely to be using this character to nuke on things of consequence (e.g., GEO SCH in Sortie, BLM or SCH on a handful of Odyssey NMs like Ongo or Marmorkrebs, etc.)

I could make use of other rings - WSD or STP for COR BRD RDM, Flickbix for SMN (which I would likely swap to temporarily if we ever did something like a SMN-burn set of HELMs for an Aeonic run), even Gurebu-orebo's for the idle Meva/resist/regen/refresh on the mage jobs would be useful. But it kinda comes down to what you're doing more often.

With probably every job having multiple rings that would be BiS for practical situations, it's at least nice to see that it's easy to swap rings out weekly and can adjust to better accommodate your own areas of focus at a certain point in time.

My comment was more facetious than serious.

Can still make more use of WSD ring in more situations than either PDL or dex/crit rate/stp/haste.

PDL is situational. WSD is not.

The increase is not insignificant compared to either epa or regal rings for the jobs I use it for. YMMV.

And not everyone has R25 Nyame just yet.

My mostly mage jobs alt has the refresh/meva ring though.

I hate this use of diminishing returns. This is a linear return. 10% WSD adds the same amount of damage to the total no matter how much you have. Its only compared the the arbitrary previous value of WSD that this concept of diminishing returns occurs. But this is akin of trying to take a percentage of temperature in a degree scale (C or F but not K). 88 degrees F is not 10% hotter than 80 degrees F as its not an absolute scale. When the comparison is made to a reference that is in flux, the comparison becomes meaningless.

But this is easily visualized with a simple grapth. as WSD is a linear return it will be a straight line with some slope making a nice diagonal line. Diminishing returns will have a curve that curves toward 0 likely with an asomtope where any increase in value results in no return.
Returns that are increasing can be logarithmic or exponential, ppl often call them all exponential when most are logarithmic. They have a curved graph with the curve going up.

if the base damage of a WS was 1000 damage, adding 10 WSD will add 100 damage no matter if you have 4 or 4000 WSD already. This is the very specific case where a return is linear. All of math uses this term to mean this type of increase.

We really need to stop using this incorrect version of diminishing return as i am sure there are example of stats that truly have a diminishing return where adding X amount of a stat increases the output by less and less the more you have of it (although I cannot think of any offhand).

Reminds me of when people try to inflate the importance of numbers by saying ***like "this is a 100% increase over this!"

Well yeah, .1% being added to .1% is a 100% increase. It's still ***tho, you're just trying to make it sound more important than it is.

#mathpetpeeves

A lot of these posts seem like justifications to one self as to why they did not choose the obviously better WSD choice. (not a serious post)

WSD is just a good choice until you math out or heart out your reason that you want another one. As soon as you find a reason that you'd rather have something else, the ring completely falls flat because it offers 0 additional utility. It only does 1 thing, makes WSD go up.

I picked it because it makes the WSs I need to do more damage, do more damage. It's great. Success!

As soon as I fall in love with a pet job or want to make a mythic that is worth building around AM3 then it goes to the curb. I don't play with full parties/buffs so PDL is not for me, but if you do then it's definitely for you. Everything else is because you have different priorities on how you're playing a job or what you value being able to do with it.

You keep posting this over and over again. Just accept this naming here, because you wont change it. Especially that you don't provide alternative too and just calling it constant return doesn't touch the problem at all.

The problem is not that second +10%WSD adding less raw damage. The problem is that damage added by second +10%WSD is being lower input than damage added by first +10%WSD, because second +10% is calculated of ~90.9% of total damage, when first +10% was calculated of 100% total damage.

So yeah return from +10%WSD is constant, but that constant return is relatively weaker and weaker against new total value after adding another 10%, while first +10% of something else like PDL will be calculated of that new increased total value.

I will also quote Shadowmeld, because I really liked his post the last time this discussion resurfaced..

Adding another 100% WSD via something like Sam su5 path C if you already have a hypothetical 100% WSD may "only" increase your total damage by 50% instead of 100%, but you're still adding that dmg value regardless what percentage that dmg has over your previous value.

Should be looking at total potential dmg output, not percentage increases. This isn't math, just basic logic. What produces most dmg output.

Arguing "it only adds 5% not 10% because reasons" and not looking at the actual dmg it gives you completely misses the point.

Test it out if you really want and post some numbers here. What does fudo/Savage do with one ring vs another on Sheol C mobs and same buffs.

So in ffxi usually when people talk about diminishing returns usually they are actually trying to maximize the product of several linear or nearly linear terms. This is mildly confusing because there are a few places where we actually do run into real diminishing returns such as int in elemental magic or skill in a lot of things.

While I find it mildly annoying it does get the point across that you are usually better off stacking more than one stat even to people who failed math.

This is more or less what I was trying to convey. Cornelia's ring is very strong, but we already have a lot of good weaponskill rings. Regal ring, sroda ring, and epaminondas's ring are also very good. If you look at cornelia's ring in a vaccume then you just see WSD + 10, but you have to cut something to fit it in. The most obvious choice is to replace epa ring with cornelia's, resulting in a net gain of 5% WSD. Since WSD multiplies the back end of the formula and base stats are toward the front end it becomes a balancing act. The same applies to all the other rings too. The only real takeaway I was trying to get across is that they're all pretty good and the differences are a lot smaller than people are making it sound like.

Not definitive judgment or anything and this journey could see my land flat on my face, but just noticing that outside of high end sets that need enough defensive stats/sets for the high endgame content, Lehko's ring is opening up a lot of new gear calibrations for me. Primarily due to the 10% haste, but secondly due to the STP.
That's a lot of f'ing haste on one slot, and an accessory slot too.

Cornelia's ring is very big upgrade over epam ring. I think epam ring is overrated, the -10 store tp is a very poor stat even if its just for WS.

Why are stat mods not subject to the same diminishing returns based on the established definition?

Who said they aren't?

From my experience: Torcleaver DRK with Chaos+Minuets in Sheol C using Ephramad's Ring (PDL) often 1 shots the fodder. (It's possible to 1 shot without, but it was infrequent comparatively)

But on V25 Kalunga with similar buffs (plus the obvious Dia II+Light Shot, Armor Break) PDL ring seems to do next to nothing, whereas Cornelia's Ring improves output.

P.S: You can change the ring once per conquest tally by dropping it (do it before you zone into Xarcabard or else you have to run over to Beaucedine as well).

Pick the ring you're curious about and try it in your regular events. You will see the results yourself.

Odyssey A3 bosses aren't really made for PDL at all. They have massive def, huge geomancy nerf and they are sometimes immune or highly resistance to def down from WSs and with only 6 jobs and requirement to deal with adds, outdo Regen, tank etc. there is no room to stack various attack buffs and def down debuffs on most of them. I think it's still possible to cap attack on some, but in case of DRK you have "base" PDL on neck and earring already, so you would need to go above that first.

Yeah, that's exactly why I mentioned it. Situational stuff.

I also had 9999 attack in a few of those V25 runs (lucky+crooked chaos+SV minuets, Last Resort/Scarlet Delirium), but the ring did not improve my damage at all, where the WSD ring -did- for that particular instance.

Its the implication made by all the people who say anything akin to "Cornelia's is bad because diminishing returns" and then reference various other non-WSD rings, usually heavy in stat mods.

If you have run tank you can land armor break easy (rayke wind resist down). If you stack dia 2 light shot + armor break getting attack cap is way more likely. This also depends if you are using a geo who does a full time wide compass blaze eclipse fury.

i want both

Did i skip the part where the discussion pivots from "What's the superior opinion on what ring to pick" to "what's the most elegant gs/ashita solution so i don't have to change X luas everytime i change my superior opinion" or did it simply not happen?

It is such a nightmare on equipsets... unless you coordinate and assume... I suppose you could have different macro pallets ala mnk with impetus up footwork up on different rows etc.. the permutations start getting large though... and it doesn't really matter for most things... or at least not enough to get stressed about.

Are you suggesting people not have the absolute most optimized god tier dps possible for each and every possible situation that may come up?!? This isnt FFXIV, get your 8 wardrobes and use each and every item slot available for one job just so you know you have the best dps possible. If you dont, youre a scrub and you should quit ffxi life.

Git gud bro