The Chocobo Thread! My R20 Chocobo out-DPS' pugs

[BerenTebogo]

Starting a general information Chocobo thread. Now that we can raise Chocobos to R20 they might turn out to be fairly useful. Stealing Seravi's formatting because I'm lazy.

Chocobo Basics:

There are three types of Chocobo currently:

Attacker
Tank
Healer

Achieving rank 10 and spending 10 ranks worth of points in a single skill tree will earn you the one-time reward of Job Specific barding. Resetting a Chocobo's skill tree via Regan Pepper and leveling another tree to R10 will not net you a different barding.

Chocobo Stance Basics

There are 4 stances you can choose from for your Chocobo:

Free
Attacker
Healer
Tank

Attack, Healer, and Tank stances will restrict your Choco to only using skills learned in the respective tree and may restrict even auto-attacks depending on the stance.

Free stance allows your Choco to use any abilities that they have learned, though seemingly less effectively. An example of this is if you have a healer Chocobo in Free stance it will still use Choco Surge / Choco Cure / Choco Regen, but it will wait until you are at a lower HP% to start casting. It also seems to prioritizing attacking over curing you while in Free.

The upside to using Free stance is that you can receive light cures while your Chocobo still has access to more powerful attacks / dots (Attacker Tree) or a small amount of tanking ability (Tank Tree).

Rank 10 abilities are mostly useless. I suggest bringing your Chocobo to R10 once for the barding you like and then spending 20 Allied Seals on a Regan Pepper. Once reset you can level your Chocobo to back up to R9 in your main tree and R4 in another tree, or I believe you can also do R7/R7 split at R10 cap (I haven't tried, I use R9/R4).

Training Your Chocobo

Food-------------- Normal Effect------------------------- Favorite Effect
Curiel Root--------Companion EXP Up----------------- Companion EXP Up II
Sylkis Bud---------Companion Attack Up --------------Companion Attack Up II
Mimett Gourd---- Companion Healing Up------------- Companion Healing Up II
Tantalplant ------ Companion Maximum HP Up ---- Companion Maximum HP Up II
Pahsana Fruit----- Companion Enmity Up ----------- Companion Enmity Up II

It takes 10 food to get your choco hooked. Its also my understanding that feeding your choco gives it 1% of the current max xp for that level. This likely varies based on stable conditions, but unsure as to what degree.

The Exp-Up Food II is +15%

At R10 feeding my Chocobo a Mimmet Gourd yields ~13,120 EXP.

Any more data on EXP by rank would be appreciated.

Random notes chocobo tending/training (whatever it's called):

• Chocobos can be trained once per hour by you
• Chocobos can be trained once per hour by someone else

These two timers are entirely separate. When you stable your chocobo, you can train it immediately (assuming you didn't train it <1hr ago). However, when you stable your chocobo, the 'someone else' timer resets to 1hr, meaning other people cannot train your chocobo until it's been stabled for at least 1 hour. There's only one 'other people' training timer per chocobo, so only one other person can train your chocobo per hour. This means you can't have 20 people all shovel food into your chocobo just because they're all different people.

Training other people's (i.e. your chocobo doesn't count) chocobos 30 times(I think?) earns you an achievement and a barding that looks like a blue frilly hat that belongs in vegas.

When other people train your chocobo, it doesn't affect their favorite food preferences at all, so just use the cheapest shit if you're doing someone a favor and/or going for that achievement.

A chocobo cannot rank up via training. You must go out and kill something with your chocobo to rank it up. You (and others) can still train your chocobo if they're in a state like this where they cannot receive any more exp, and the food is still consumed if this happens. Unfortunately, the game does not indicate to you that the chocobo is at maximum exp until after you've already finished training it. If the chocobo is at maximum exp, after training it'll give a message like "[Chocobo Name] cannot receive any more experience points." Someone once told me that if your chocobo reaches maximum exp during training, you can rank up off a monster that doesn't even give you exp (just walk outside and kill a low-level marmot), but I cannot personally confirm this.

R10 And Higher

If your chocobo is Rank 10 or higher, you will need to give it Thavnairian Onion. Each Thavnairian Onion increases the maximum rank of the chocobo by 1.

Thav. Onion being fed as a reward yielded the same EXP as I get from Mimmet Gourd.

Using a Thav. Onion will not automatically level your Chocobo up to R11, it merely unlocks the 1,485,000 EXP you need for R11.

By breaking R10 cap you open up the ability to receive bardings from other trees. I have not tried resetting my skills since using a Thav. Onion, but it was mentioned in an interview that we are supposed to use the AP we get at R10+ towards ranking up other skill trees aside from our main R10. Achieving a 2nd and 3rd R10 tree will allow us to get the respective bardings.

Quick mental math suggests R18 would be the earliest we can be R10 in every tree (please someone check to make sure I'm not retarded).

R18 is correct.
Total choco levels: 3 x (1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10) = 3 x 55 = 165
Total earned levels @ R18: 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13+14+15+16+17+18 = 171

I highly suggest making Curiel Root your Chocobo's favorite food once you're trying to reach R11+. The healing potency is obviously very nice, as is DPS increases, and will inevitably be the goal. But leveling up is just so fucking tedious, any bit helps.

Preferred Actions

At R6 in every tree there is a Critical Hit Rate +15% skill. I believe they stack, but short of an in-depth parse I'm not 100% sure.

For good DPS from your Chocobo I suggest going after the STR+X% that are available in each tree as well as the Attack Speed +X% available to attacker. These buffs seem to persist despite the stance (testing needed for confirmation).

[Sigmakan]

It takes 10 food to get your choco hooked. Its also my understanding that feeding your choco gives it 1% of the current max xp for that level. This likely varies based on stable conditions, but unsure as to what degree.

R18 is correct.
Total choco levels: 3 x (1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10) = 3 x 55 = 165
Total earned levels @ R18: 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13+14+15+16+17+18 = 171

The Exp-Up Food II is +15%

[BerenTebogo]

Thanks, quoted you in there. Only thing I am sure is wrong is that feeding it is not 1% of the TNL. Current TNL is 1,458,000 and I just fed again and received 13,120 EXP.

Which seems to be ~.9% EXP TNL (which is a weird number).

[Sigmakan]

Whats your stable condition? I think there's Good, Fair, Poor. Perhaps its 1%, 0.9%, 0.5% respectively. I'll test it out a bit when I get home, I'm pretty sure our stable is currently covered in shit.

[BerenTebogo]

Whats your stable condition? I think there's Good, Fair, Poor. Perhaps its 1%, 0.9%, 0.5% respectively. I'll test it out a bit when I get home, I'm pretty sure our stable is currently covered in shit.

Mine is in Good (glowy with stars all floating about) currently. Cleaned it yesterday.

[jwang]

Plz SE, give us a chocobo companion dungeon. Anything to not have to deal with piddly shit xp in the overworld.

[BerenTebogo]

I'd just like to be able to queue up for dungeons and shit with my Chocobo so I can exp (even if slower) without dealing with potatoheads.

[Raldo]

Random notes chocobo tending/training (whatever it's called):

• Chocobos can be trained once per hour by you
• Chocobos can be trained once per hour by someone else

These two timers are entirely separate. When you stable your chocobo, you can train it immediately (assuming you didn't train it <1hr ago). However, when you stable your chocobo, the 'someone else' timer resets to 1hr, meaning other people cannot train your chocobo until it's been stabled for at least 1 hour. There's only one 'other people' training timer per chocobo, so only one other person can train your chocobo per hour. This means you can't have 20 people all shovel food into your chocobo just because they're all different people.

Training other people's (i.e. your chocobo doesn't count) chocobos 30 times(I think?) earns you an achievement and a barding that looks like a blue frilly hat that belongs in vegas.

When other people train your chocobo, it doesn't affect their favorite food preferences at all, so just use the cheapest shit if you're doing someone a favor and/or going for that achievement.

A chocobo cannot rank up via training. You must go out and kill something with your chocobo to rank it up. You (and others) can still train your chocobo if they're in a state like this where they cannot receive any more exp, and the food is still consumed if this happens. Unfortunately, the game does not indicate to you that the chocobo is at maximum exp until after you've already finished training it. If the chocobo is at maximum exp, after training it'll give a message like "[Chocobo Name] cannot receive any more experience points." Someone once told me that if your chocobo reaches maximum exp during training, you can rank up off a monster that doesn't even give you exp (just walk outside and kill a low-level marmot), but I cannot personally confirm this.

[Seravi Edalborez]

I would add that Healer Stance makes your chocobo "engage" out of melee range, essentially removing its autoattacks. At least was my experience like 6 months ago.

Follow (that 5th "stance") is also like the only way to make it disengage.

[Sigmakan]

In healer stance the choco just follows you, which is pretty terrible against mobs like Morbols.

[Sigmakan]

Tested out Poor and Fair choco food exp and its 0.6% and 0.8% respectively. Will confirm the Good 0.9% in 50mins.

Tested out Good condition and got 1.0% Maybe this changes after level10?

[BerenTebogo]

Tested out Poor and Fair choco food exp and its 0.6% and 0.8% respectively. Will confirm the Good 0.9% in 50mins.

Tested out Good condition and got 1.0% Maybe this changes after level10?

Weird, I haven't gotten any deviation either. 13,120 each time out of 1,458,000

Edit: If it goes down every rank above 10 I will choke a bitch.

[Rocl]

Well it's definitely 1% at Rank 9. I feed FC chocobos often enough to know that!

[Niiro]

Handy OF post I bookmarked ages ago, has a lot of info.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post1486352

Also, if anyone was wondering how the Crit+15% traits worked, it's a multiplier to the chocos Crit Rate stat. I tested it before/after I unlocked it myself (can't find the parses I did unfortunately).

So you can expect a ~3.5% effective crit rate increase with each trait.

[Diomer]

This may be already known, but judging by OP, it isn't: You only get 10 points to spend on skills for hitting R11. Not sure if that trend continues when hitting R12 and I probably won't know until sometime next week.

[Almalexia]

For the thavnairian onion to work, you must reward your chocobo only after you hit the cap for that rank. Feeding any sooner grants training XP only - no cap raise.

[Niiro]

The fact that they even allow you to do that seems like a cruel, cruel joke in itself.

[Diomer]

The fact that they even allow you to do that seems like a cruel, cruel joke in itself.

Gotta cut SE a break on this one; they can't retard proof everything on the first pass.

This may be already known, but judging by OP, it isn't: You only get 10 points to spend on skills for hitting R11. Not sure if that trend continues when hitting R12 and I probably won't know until sometime next week.

You get 10 points for R12 too so I'd expect that trend to continue until R20 where you probably get 20 points to be able to cap all trees.

[Korialstrasz]

I made a spreadsheet with my own information to try and keep track of it (I initially wanted to see if I could make a graph and get a rough estimate at R20 exp requirement).

Edit: Here's a much better spreadsheet I found via reddit https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...sharing#gid=10

Some things to note:

• EXP gained per feeding is NOT a static 1% like originally believed, even in the lower ranks.
• So far you do NOT gain additional skill points beyond R11. I'll be R12 in an hour, and will update if it begins to give more than 10.

Edit: Just saw the R12 info above. Guess we'll have to wait and see if/when we get extra points to cap all 3.

[Niiro]

At R9 you get 12,000 per feed at 1,200,000 tnl so it doesn't drop below 1% until R10.

(choco just hit 10 yesterday)