Best SAM gear set up

[Cream Soda]

If you want to bring Colibri into it though, you also have to factor the feather tickles (which I eat a lot of). That, plus the fact that I'm already already doing 65-75% on average in TP damage as compared to ws dmg, according to my parses anyway. I would personally call most torques sidegrades rather than upgrades or downgrades, but very very far from "Shiny pieces of shit"

[SamanosukeShiva]

i'm <3in Futsuno for rana, makes my sam even more of a beast

[Cream Soda]

Possible to do a 4-hit with a 3-hit ws with futo?

[Arthars]

there is no best

shit is situational

[Hakamaru]

I am gonna call bullshit on PCC over Jtorque if 10~11 attack is worse than 3.7 acc, why the hell isn't cuch. manlte better, since I think by your reasoning 8 acc should be better than 16~17 att from amemet/foragers.

I would go with Cuch mantle too on mamools or PLM birds. It just sorta slipped my mind. SAM does WAY more damage on WS than during TP. Landing more hits and generating more WSs is more important than hitting a tiny bit harder.

If you're gonna use GKT on birds, you can get away with builds that aren't so focused on ACC. Almost any thing else of interest, you're better off with the ACC.

[Pikarya]

there is no best

shit is situational

Should be the Newbie forum subtitle imo.

[Drex]

J-torque has 5 str on it, it's ~10 attack and 1-2 base damage on weap vs 3acc. I don't even see how it's a comparison, no matter what you're fighting. Even more pronounced in an ideal gear situation where shit like ace's/askar head, usu feet, /drg, amano, etc. come into play.

If your gear is really good, you probably benefit more from the attack than the acc.
If your gear is bad, use the torque, sell the charm, and buy good gear.

J-Torque for TP, gorget for WS

[SamanosukeShiva]

Possible to do a 4-hit with a 3-hit ws with futo?

with samurai roll only

[Hakamaru]

J-torque has 5 str on it, it's ~10 attack and 1-2 base damage on weap vs 3acc. I don't even see how it's a comparison, no matter what you're fighting. Even more pronounced in an ideal gear situation where shit like ace's/askar head, usu feet, /drg, amano, etc. come into play.

If your gear is really good, you probably benefit more from the attack than the acc.
If your gear is bad, use the torque, sell the charm, and buy good gear.

J-Torque for TP, gorget for WS

First of all, it's a low probability that J-Torque will give you 2 base damage. It's 1 base damage in 75% of all configurations. Second, it's more like a 4 ACC hit in many cases... but I'll play the game here and give you the benefit of all doubts. Let's suppose you're getting the best cases from boths sides here. Can 3 ACC measure up to 2 base damage and 10 ATT on TP?

First, a little lesson in a SAM's damage characteristic. As a SAM, you're damage looks something like:
http://i77.photobucket.com/albums/j7...Screenshot.gif

Ok, now let's think here for a second about which part of this pie chart you're growing when you choose STR/ATT for TP over ACC. When you choose STR/ATT, you are growing the blue slice *ONLY*. When you choose ACC, you are growing the blue slice by landing more hits AND the purple slice because you've generated more TP for increased WS count. The result is that you need to scale DoT contributions by something between 0.30 and 0.35 for a decent SAM. Whereas ACC contribution you can scale by something much larger because it's contributing to a much larger portion of your overall damage (i.e. your WSs). It won't be 1.0 because some of those WSs come from Meditate, but it'll be quite a bit higher than 0.30 to 0.35.

Ok... enough pretty pictures, let's do some math.

2 Base damge added to a SAM using a Hagun (75) with ~90 STR before JTorque (fSTR=8 on 77VIT mamool) results in a 2.4% increase in base damage.

10 ATT at ~500 base attack on those same mamools (~341 DEF lvl 82) will raise pDIF roughly 2.6%.

Net DoT gain of: 1.024 * 1.026 = 1.0506 -or- 5.06%

Adjusted total increase in damage (assuming 33% of damage is DoT) = 0.33 * 5.06 = 1.67%


Let's suppose you have a base ACC of 85% using JTorque on the same mamools from the previous example. 3 ACC increases hit rate by 1.5%, which results in a:

.015 / .85 x 100% = 1.76% increase in landed hits.

Ok, so what percentage of WSs come from TP generated by Meditate?.. is really the only piece left out of this puzzle. 10%? 20%? 1 in 5 WSs coming from meditate seems little rich to me, and 1 in 10 seems a tad low. Let's split the difference here and say 15%. So ACC won't grow 0.15 * 0.66 = 0.099 -> 9.9% of that graph I posted. The other 90.1% of it should grow linearly with added swings.

So the damage increase from the ACC on PCC equates to: 0.901 * 1.76% = 1.60%

Ok... so the 2 pieces are EXTREMELY close in this back-of-the-envelope example, with JTorque winning out just barely. But remember, I gave JTorque all the benefits of any doubts. If you lose one of those fSTR points, PCC wins. If you lose a point of ACC because of skill truncation, PCC wins. If someone Dia's the mobs you're fighting, then the % contribution from the ATT goes down... probably pushing PCC ahead.

I didn't say one was always better than another. I simply stated that JTorque is a downgrade from PCC in many situations (which is true).

[Lebzile]

My head hurts now, but god I <3 Haka when he does those sexy maths.

Still won't make me detour from wanting to get my J.Torque;

[KSDI]

It feels strange pointing out to someone what the best gear for a job is. I've always felt that there should be a correlation between being able to obtain certain gear and knowing how and when to use it but that definitely isn't always the case.