Melee as RDM

[Loren]

That RDM vs. MNK thread was a minor tragedy. Wrish was probably the worst possible ambassador for RDM potential so it didn't take any effort to knock him down. I appreciated Tyche's effort, but the RDM he played with had a seriously misguided setup. Trying to make offhand club work requires gutting your Haste gear for Acc. Blau/Joy with full Haste gear and a Suppa will be much different.

There's some confusion about the question. The question is not "what should a RDM do in a merit party?" Virtually any pickup leader is recruiting a RDM specifically for healing and support. It's an obvious point that nobody is disputing. The more interesting question is "if you give a DD slot to a RDM, how will they do?" and I'm claiming the answer is "possibly much better than you expect".

You can't talk about all of the cure/haste/debuff duties eating into his swing time because the party's healer is handling those--the only spell he would be casting is En-element. Is this a perverse party setup? Perhaps, but you can't claim the RDM DD question has been answered if the RDM is saddled with support duties. The other DDs are not expected to haste, dia, gravity, etc. as they fight.

There's nothing particularly wrong with a hybrid role either. If you're like me and merit mostly with friends list/shellmates then *gasp* once in a while you're going to have a WHM. Now, you can either Refresh them and pick your nose for the rest of the time or--IF you have the gear and merits for it--you can play as a melee who also serves a role keeping the WHM Refreshed.

You don't have the be #1 on the parser to make mobs die faster, that's all I'm sayin'.

[aurik]

Ok, so to sum this up...

OPs question

Q. The OPs question was "Can a naked MNK outparse a melee RDM (properly equipped of course) in a merit PT.
A. A naked MNK wins easily.

Wrish's interpretation of the OPs question after adding his own stipulations.

Q. Can a naked MNK (unhasted) outparse a RDM who gimps himself by choosing earrings that doesnt help his job(lolhollow), meritting abilities that make no sense(lolenhancing), is not responisble for doing any buffs(lol, someone dia this plz), has a 10 second head start in an exp party(plz wait, i need to cast enspell) that would do 3k exp per hour (cuz you know, the MNK is naked and has to wait for the RDM to get ready), and somehow, somehow, being so fucking noob, still manages to have 200,000,000 in gear.

A. Itd be kinda close lol.

Except that's not what happened, is it?

Actually that is exactly what happened. In a "real merit situation" -- a mob always waiting, rdm has to deal with his buffs at the expense of attacking, etc -- the monk slaughtered the RDM. If the RDM had time to fully buff/debuff prior to anyone touching the mob for each and every mob, it was about a draw.

[quote:e490c]The way were gonna do this is as controlled as possible. We'll call a time (eg 20:45) and at that point we both begin, he starts buffing, throwing on en-spells, etc etc...and i start punching. We both begin at the same time, and go til the mob is dead.

What kind of idiot goes into a merit party and starts punching mob before any buffs are up? Do you go as MNK and start hitting mobs before you have Pro/Shell on, or start casting Utusemi after you start hitting the mobs? Telling the RDM he couldn't cast anything before this "controlled time" had everything to do with why this test was fail.[/quote:e490c]

In a real merit party, there is a constant stream of mobs, so casting self-buffs is going to eat into fight time. That's what the first experiment simulated. I guess you're accustomed to 3k/h parties where there is plenty of time for buffs and a round of tea between each mob.

[quote:e490c]I also think it'd be more beneficial to the RDM not to cast dia 2. It takes time (albeit short), and it will benefit the MNK much much more than it will benefit the RDM whos primary damage isnt affected by dia.

-and a bit later-

We'll get haste, but the RDM is gotta dia and gravity, that affects his parse. Im not giving every fucking benefit of the doubt to a RDM. Im sure the OP expects practical uses, and care-bearing for the RDMs every need so he can keep up isnt practical.

They were fighting T mobs (Jnuns) in the mires. Requiring gravity on Jnun = instant fail, and probably helped Tyche more than it did the RDM. You can tell from the parse that they were both using Sushi. Tyche actually hit the acc cap thanks to that Gravity+Sushi - in short, it was the ideal mob for a "naked MNK" with STR+1 and H2H+8 merits to show off how powerful a Monk truly is.[/quote:e490c]

Way to contradict yourself; if Tyche is at the acc cap, then Gravity can't be helping him more than the rdm.

If my calculations are correct, the RDM spent roughly 73 seconds casting spell within that time period. That was the only way I could get my numbers to match up with what was provided in the parse. It was precisely because the RDM dropped spools of gils and the small sample of mobs that the parse turned out the way it did. His abysmal crit rate shows that he didn't even have crit merits, so most likely no STR merits either. My bet is that his STR was even lower than Tyche's (64+1+5) based on Taru RDM/NIN's STR (59+3+5) setup and Tyche's info bit on page 7.

This wasn't a RDM that knew how to melee. He spent too much time casting, under unrealistic conditions, against a meritted monk that was right at the sweet spot for the test. A RDM could cover all his own spell needs within 20 seconds every 3 min, and that would require less care-bearing than your average melee. The only thing this test showed that spending 200mil on an idiot RDM won't get you that far.

I highly doubt any reasonable changes you make will increase the red mage's damage by 50%. But go ahead and try, and let us know how it works out.

[Tajin]

That RDM vs. MNK thread was a minor tragedy. Wrish was probably the worst possible ambassador for RDM potential so it didn't take any effort to knock him down. I appreciated Tyche's effort, but the RDM he played with had a seriously misguided setup.

The seriously misguided setup was suggested by Wrish, so there

I highly doubt any reasonable changes you make will increase the red mage's damage by 50%. But go ahead and try, and let us know how it works out.

End of thread until somebody post pictures, parses and shit. IMO

[Bagel]

Not to nitpick, but wouldn't the RDM need to increase his dmg by around 20%, not 50?

[aurik]

Not to nitpick, but wouldn't the RDM need to increase his dmg by around 20%, not 50?

Nope. Consider they dealt 100,000 damage total. The RDM would have a share of 40k, the mnk 60k. In order to match the mnk, the RDM would have to deal an additional 20k in the same timespan, an increase of 50% over his current amount.

[Carnusty]

I think bagel's saying that if the RDM increased it's damage by about 25%(10k), it'd lower the monk's by about 18%~ish(10k)...thus evening the damage at 50k for each(considering we're all looking at the same 100,000 HP-span worth of mobs). If the Red mage does more damage to a mob, then the Monk would technically be doing less, because there's less HP to take care of.

If the RDM boosted it's damage by 50% for 20k, and the monk didn't lose any of it's damage off the 60k, then all the mobs just gained a fuckton of HP and I'm really worried about this game now :/

Edited because my semantics BLOW.

[Isiolia]

The main flaw with the test there, for the conclusion being drawn anyway, was that it's not a test of RDM melee in general. It was for that particular setup.
It's also not a part of a process to refine what an optimal melee setup for a RDM might be (which, I believe, was the inital purpose of this thread).

The setup they used would be better considered a heavy Enspell damage test. Hence the Kraken club and Fencer's Ring. Theorycraft would say that a RDM can do in the mid/upper 20s with an Enspell. So, again in theory, a Kraken club would mean an average of 100 extra magic damage per attack round. Which is true...against EPs.
Did they go back and see if more Enhancing skill would have provided better results? Did they try other setups like Blau/Joy, Justice/Joy, single wielded Justice or Joy? Nope. However valid and scientific you want to consider the testing done, there are simply a lot of other possibilities that weren't even explored.

[aurik]

I think bagel's saying that if the RDM increased it's damage by about 25%(10k), it'd lower the monk's by about 18%~ish(10k)...thus evening the damage at 50k for each(considering we're all looking at the same 100,000 HP-span worth of mobs). If the Red mage does more damage to a mob, then the Monk would technically be doing less, because there's less HP to take care of.

If the RDM boosted it's damage by 50% for 20k, and the monk didn't lose any of it's damage off the 60k, then all the mobs just gained a fuckton of HP and I'm really worried about this game now :/

Edited because my semantics BLOW.

Your math doesn't work, because you need to work with damage rates instead of damage totals. Red mage increasing its damage rate by 25% will not decrease monk damage rate at all, and would lead to a 5:6 parser ratio, or approximately a 45:55 split.

[aurik]

The main flaw with the test there, for the conclusion being drawn anyway, was that it's not a test of RDM melee in general. It was for that particular setup.
It's also not a part of a process to refine what an optimal melee setup for a RDM might be (which, I believe, was the inital purpose of this thread).

The setup they used would be better considered a heavy Enspell damage test. Hence the Kraken club and Fencer's Ring. Theorycraft would say that a RDM can do in the mid/upper 20s with an Enspell. So, again in theory, a Kraken club would mean an average of 100 extra magic damage per attack round. Which is true...against EPs.
Did they go back and see if more Enhancing skill would have provided better results? Did they try other setups like Blau/Joy, Justice/Joy, single wielded Justice or Joy? Nope. However valid and scientific you want to consider the testing done, there are simply a lot of other possibilities that weren't even explored.

Feel free. A baseline was generated from that test, and naked monk beat the baseline by 50%, so whatever you do needs to beat that mark.

[Isiolia]

Personally I'm not in the position to do a proper comparison as I don't yet have the merits in place. It's a rare thing to find full testing on. I've seen some elsewhere, which is promising, and am curious to see more.

At the very least, it's an interesting discussion, or could be. RDMs do like to push our job and see what we can get out of it besides playing babysitter to a bunch of melee.

[Septimus]

RDMs do like to push our job and see what we can get out of it besides playing babysitter to a bunch of melee.

That's not true. We babysit mages as well.

[Whatinthe]

In a real merit party, there is a constant stream of mobs, so casting self-buffs is going to eat into fight time. That's what the first experiment simulated. I guess you're accustomed to 3k/h parties where there is plenty of time for buffs and a round of tea between each mob.

You need to re-buff every 3 min as RDM/NIN. Takes less than 20 seconds to do that.

Or maybe you thought that just because RDM was meleeing the party suddenly took 3 minutes to kill one mob, so the RDM had to rebuff after every mob? Or a party where you are so gimp you have to ask the RDM to gravity a low-T mob?

[quote:416f7]They were fighting T mobs (Jnuns) in the mires. Requiring gravity on Jnun = instant fail, and probably helped Tyche more than it did the RDM. You can tell from the parse that they were both using Sushi. Tyche actually hit the acc cap thanks to that Gravity+Sushi

Way to contradict yourself; if Tyche is at the acc cap, then Gravity can't be helping him more than the rdm.[/quote:416f7]
Way to not read the whole sentence. Tyche was 368 acc with Sushi and full merits. Jnun is 360 or 370 acc to hit 90%+. 368 acc+10 eff. acc (from eva down) helped Tyche hit the acc cap, while wasting a few seconds off RDM's effective melee time. Ergo, it helped Tyche more than it did the RDM, because in what unrealistic merit party do you ask the RDM to gravity a T mob execpt if it was a pull-spell on an unsleepable mob or being kited for some reason.

I highly doubt any reasonable changes you make will increase the red mage's damage by 50%. But go ahead and try, and let us know how it works out.

Actually, I take my statement back. I think Tyche ended this whole she-bang in 4 min, since he went MNK/WAR. Of which the first 3 min he spent berserked and the last minute the RDM was busy rebuffing himself because all his spells ran out, at which point Tyche declared game over. If the test was set up so that it was at least 15 min, and the RDM allowed to layer his buffs, it would not have been this travesty where you MNKs show it off as "proof melee RDM sucks". The MNK did beat the RDM, but not by the margin you claim.

[Isiolia]

RDMs do like to push our job and see what we can get out of it besides playing babysitter to a bunch of melee.

That's not true. We babysit mages as well.

Well played sir.

[aurik]

In a real merit party, there is a constant stream of mobs, so casting self-buffs is going to eat into fight time. That's what the first experiment simulated. I guess you're accustomed to 3k/h parties where there is plenty of time for buffs and a round of tea between each mob.

You need to re-buff every 3 min as RDM/NIN. Takes less than 20 seconds to do that.

20 seconds that the monk uses to pull way ahead.

Or maybe you thought that just because RDM was meleeing the party suddenly took 3 minutes to kill one mob, so the RDM had to rebuff after every mob?

In the first test, RDM only buffed on the first mob. After that, the party was allowed to flow like a normal merit party.

Or a party where you are so gimp you have to ask the RDM to gravity a low-T mob?

Blame Wrish, it was his parameters.

Way to not read the whole sentence.

I did, you said that gravity helped the monk more than the red mage despite:
1) acc+ is more effective with lower accuracy
2) acc+ is completely ineffective beyond the accuracy cap, which Tyche obviously hit

You can try to spin your statement any way you like, it's still Wrish's parameters so blame him, and go do a parse without Gravity if you think it makes a 50% difference.

[quote:b786a]I highly doubt any reasonable changes you make will increase the red mage's damage by 50%. But go ahead and try, and let us know how it works out.

Actually, I take my statement back.[/quote:b786a]

Instead of backpedalling like Wrish, go out and repeat the parse if you think you can do better.

[Cadena]

I'm not picking a side, but aren't parsers not able to process the enspell damage?

[aurik]

I'm not picking a side, but aren't parsers not able to process the enspell damage?

They can pick up enspell damage fine. Some of them has attribution errors, but in Tyche's case they specifically attributed all enspell damage to the red mage.

[G-Rod]

As for the Paluwan body........ Idk, i ask myself that everytime i see a rdm in it. All i can think of is "too poor to aford a SH".

Quick question, just being nitpicky, but how exactly is Evasion +10 on a job with 210 natural evasion skill better than increased critical hit rate when it comes to strictly DD purposes?

Funny, I've always thought RDM's that wear SH's(save for +1 which I've never seen) or any kind of eva gear were complete idiots that don't know RDM. Even for /nin solo it's completely worthless to have eva. It's not even expensive anymore or even a worthy showpiece.

[Cadena]

Ok, thanks for clearing that up, Aurik. I just don't run parsers because either I don't trust them or they never have worked when I've tried.

[Septimus]

As for the Paluwan body........ Idk, i ask myself that everytime i see a rdm in it. All i can think of is "too poor to aford a SH".

Quick question, just being nitpicky, but how exactly is Evasion +10 on a job with 210 natural evasion skill better than increased critical hit rate when it comes to strictly DD purposes?

Funny, I've always thought RDM's that wear SH's(save for +1 which I've never seen) or any kind of eva gear were complete idiots that don't know RDM. Even for /nin solo it's completely worthless to have eva. It's not even expensive anymore or even a worthy showpiece.

Actually evasion is very nice for solo play if you have signet in the middle lands. Of course that applies to EM and lower, but you'll feel like a Ninja with how many times you evade mobs you are fighting now.

[Judai]

I just have to say, who cares if a fully buffed, fully merited, fully geared RDM can beat a naked MNK? Is that some sort of pathetic goal to obtain? It's great RDMs want to learn how to melee better but from looking at what most of the people said here, they don't understand meleeing to any degree.

I would love to let a RDM come merit/melee with me for 30-45m on G.Colibris. I guaruntee you won't come close to the damage output to that of a real DD in a regular merit party. Just make a normal merit pt(4DD, RDM, BRD) and replace one DD with the Melee RDM "DD". That way everything is fair. If you really want to see how you stack up, don't ask the MNK to wait for you to buff and all that shit, you are only trying to gimp the MNK more and more in order to get close. Obviously, the more you gimp the MNK, the closer you will get.

You can talk all you want but it just shows more and more how little you know about melee damage and how much you want to gimp the MNK. It's not hard to go make a freaken merit party with some friends and try it out. Bring a parse back when you are done.