Maximizing Sneak/Trick Attack Dmg (mathy)

[eva00r]

6 acc, 3% haste. 6acc is of no concern to us since the sa/ta round will have 100% accuracy.

Since you based everything on double attack, triple attack and /NIN, you have to concern about accuracy since the 2nd/3rd/off-hand attack could be missed.

btw new sky augment things are really great for SA/TA, especially ruby ring with 4 agi on it

[Eaglestrike]

Since you based everything on double attack, triple attack and /NIN, you have to concern about accuracy since the 2nd/3rd/off-hand attack could be missed.

btw new sky augment things are really great for SA/TA, especially ruby ring with 4 agi on it

During a normal SA or TA there is 100% on all attacks during the entire round. That includes double and triple attacks. You will not miss even with a triple attack from both daggers while using SA or TA.

Note: This applies only to a normal attack round. WS additional hits can still miss, obviously.

[Kujatasoze]

I feel like I just found out Santa Claus isn't real.

[Eaglestrike]

And another note: Double attacks and triple attacks on the main hand original hit and offhand hit during WS's when stacked with SA or TA also hit 100%. This is from personal testing against mobs that use flash/obfuscate (spiders in sea or puks)

[Deadgye]

This is from personal testing against mobs that use flash/obfuscate (spiders in sea or puks)

And from meleeing kirin on thf with maybe 30% acc back when I failed horribly.

[Toxictaru]

Maybe I'm missing something, but what relevance does a suppanomimi have in a sneak attack build? That said, what causes a genin earring to be ranked lower than a suppanomimi?

[Raen Ryong]

Suppa is -5% Dual Wield which is like losing x amount of haste in a way ... not exactly though.

[Soily]

I understand strider's/trotters for TA (only lose 1-2AGI and some attack, movement speed may come in handy when repositioning), but for SA it doesn't really compute. Maybe when you ready it between mobs it's helpful, but otherwise there's usually no reason to not be on a mob's ass *before* your SA timer is up.

I don't really understand that part either. What is it that makes movement speed+ better than everything else for SA/TA?

Anyway thanks a lot for that post, I'll try to make good use of it. I'll be changing a few things on my macros pretty soon

[Xanthe]

Suppa is -5% Dual Wield which is like losing x amount of haste in a way ... not exactly though.

I believe you mean +5% Dual Wield which reduces your base delay by 5%.

[matt4684]

Where would Voyager Sallet rank in comparison to AF2 head? DEX +5 vs STR +3 DEX +4.

VS marginally better, or more or less the same

[Knyghtmayre]

Suppa is -5% Dual Wield which is like losing x amount of haste in a way ... not exactly though.

I think he was more referring to how haste or movement speed ends up in a damage calculation when not talking about sheer melee damage over time (or in movement speed's case, ever). I don't understand it either, honestly.

[Dooom]

I don't really understand that part either. What is it that makes movement speed+ better than everything else for SA/TA?

If you read his blog post on it, he states that it's on of those "YMMV" things, which is hard to account for in a strictly mathy sense. If you're already in position before you use SA/TA, it won't do much for you at all; if you use it and then move into position, it does more. It's something which you have to decide for yourself, depending on how you play/the situation you're in/etc. etc.

I'm gonna assume Knyght quoted the wrong post

[Mirya]

I was crunching some numbers using my own gear to see how some of it stacked up. However, since I'm a Blau/SK user I was wondering how valid these ratios are for me to use? I'm assuming the general concepts remain the same so it will be safe to fudge... (I tried to look at the Excel to see if I could modify it, but Excel spreadsheets and my brain tend not to agree.)

Anyway, answering a previous poster's question about how the Voyager Sallet stacks up, it is slightly better than AF2 head for SA. Voyager's weighted value is 13.83 and AF2's is 12.75.

I also think that the TA belts are ranked out of order. By my math, Scouter (15.16) is better than Swordbelt+1 (9.72) as is RK Belt (10.36). And Grenadier's belt (17.97) is better than all three of those and situationally better than Speed Belt. Or, am I not understanding how to assign the weighted values and the previously listed TA belts are in the right order?

[Baha]

If you read his blog post on it, he states that it's on of those "YMMV" things, which is hard to account for in a strictly mathy sense. If you're already in position before you use SA/TA, it won't do much for you at all; if you use it and then move into position, it does more. It's something which you have to decide for yourself, depending on how you play/the situation you're in/etc. etc.

If that's the explanation it makes no sense to me. You do all this crazy numbercrunching to optimise, but you can't stay glued to a mob's behind and time your SA so you can ditch the SA set for tp gear asap?
Between mobs, perhaps movement gear is useful for SA, but when you're already engaged it just seems useless. I'd love to hear the reasoning though.

[Mrsbungle]

Hm. During merits, where your calculations put damage with time into consideration, there should be no instance where you are using SA or TA without a WS unless it's the final hit in which case delay is of no consequence. That occassion is pretty rare as you should be getting 100TP at a rate where neither SA nor TA can keep up alone. That would result in alternating SA WS and TA WS every fight as it should be.

There really shouldn't be a reason to use SA or TA unstacked with a WS outside the initial battle in merits. At least from my experience, that is the case. Under practical application, what is your justification for using SA or TA unstacked with a WS? I ask because I am always at the threshold where using SA/TA without TP would be a large loss in damage not to mention that using SA unstacked with a WS is a comedy of horror in a dynamic setting.

Uh what? I think you got this all wrong dude. If you want to have maximum dmg output on your thf you should use everything when it is up. SA TA WS all at different times. If you have TP, use it, if sneak is up with under 100 TP, use it, same with trick. I am not sure why people think that separating them is detrimental to your total dmg when waitting for TP or timers would be the thing that is gimping dmg. Doing a SA then a WS 10 seconds later will roughly add up to the same amount of dmg as if you had waited. The difference being is that the person not waiting gets to do it again 10 seconds earlier than you did until eventually they have done an extra SA TA and WS than you have and it just goes up from there and the other thf is lapping you. You should never be holding tp or waiting on tp to use a SA or TA unless it is just a few seconds away from being up.

Even if you are waiting 5 seconds, and another person never waits on anything, after 12 rounds they have done an extra round of Job abilities than you have. Of course that is just using a static number to illustrate a point and the actual number would be a variable that changed every round.

But to keep this going further using just the static number of 5 seconds of someone waiting on timers/tp in a merit party of say chain 300 vs someone that doesnt wait at all you are looking at roughly 20 extra SA and TAs from them over time which is hardly a large loss in damage and would actually be kicking your butt in a parse I would imagine.

[Shamaya]

Been busy. Don't mean to keep this thread alive longer than necessary but didn't wanna have it seem I was hiding. On vacation atm. I kinda wanted to edit my LJ before posting here but w/ vacationing I can't be f'ed to do it really. I'm concerned myself about the waist ratios for TA as well and how attack is valued for TA. Trust in the ratios though, not the rankings I've provided, as I was dead tired and didn't manually calculate all of those and it was one of the last things I did before posting.

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For the thing about movement speed (strider, skadi, dusk), Dooom is right in that it is definitely a playstyle thing and YMMV.

I'm kind of alone in my stance on this amongst other thieves. But I feel that it's something you can "feel out" better when actually playing than on paper. For example, the "just stack your sa/ta w/ ws" sounds ok on paper but doesn't work at all in-game. It's the same w/ this movement speed thing. Even if you're behind the mob when you're prepping your sa/ta, it only takes 1 exp party or similar situation for you to be able to see my point exactly. People pull hate. Mobs spin. This happens all the time. This aside, it's a good idea to prep sa/ta's before fights when effective. For both of these situations, increasing your movement speed and landing a clean (reliable) and quick sa/ta is going to improve damage more than extra stats. It's a matter of balancing probability against raw stats.

For HNM's, it's also convenient to have them in your set. If you really want, you can make a separate set for HNM's ( my /war /drk sa/ta builds don't have suppa, for example). On some HNM's, they don't want you meleeing. They want you sa'ing and (sometimes) ta'ing. When I went thf/sam to khimaira the other day, I would dart in and sa/feint between tp moves. Sometimes I'd make it out just in time b4 another tp move went off. Ever done dark ixion? Don't even need to go there, lol.

I can say that having been a long time user of dusk trousers, when I switched to dragon subligar / war brais+1, I never even thought about going back.
---

Just Curious on why rapp made the list but not enkidu harness?

Part of this experiment was to pit the best haste items against the best spike stat items. So naturally I had to include rapp. For TA I included less haste items in the mix because I saw how it had lost out a bit for SA, and I didn't want to make another 960 item spreadsheet, so I truncated my list.

I forgot about enkidu's totally though, actually. For sa it doesn't have dex so DH wins. I know for ta, denali is just intuitively better. For ta vs nq DH, I know without looking at the numbers that enkidu's would win simply because +5str (+1fstr and +2-3atk) > 1agi. 1fStr on the first hit alone = 1 agi. DH+1 should beat it for TA but you can use my reference ratios and a calculator to double check that if you want to.


Cuchulain's mantle, grenadier belt, etc.
These are things I simply forgot to include (it was a long and tiring project -.-). After my vacation when I'm not lazy I'll edit them in. For now though, the reference ratios can be used to approximate.

Thank you guys for your questions.

[Khajit]

Interesting. It looks like my thf might have to remodel itself.

[Baha]

Even if you're behind the mob when you're prepping your sa/ta, it only takes 1 exp party or similar situation for you to be able to see my point exactly. People pull hate. Mobs spin. This happens all the time. This aside, it's a good idea to prep sa/ta's before fights when effective. For both of these situations, increasing your movement speed and landing a clean (reliable) and quick sa/ta is going to improve damage more than extra stats. It's a matter of balancing probability against raw stats.

If it spins, you're not catching it, not with 12% movement speed, not with flee. Not with our low delay anyway, you might catch up once in a blue moon, but yeah.

For HNM's, it's also convenient to have them in your set. If you really want, you can make a separate set for HNM's ( my /war /drk sa/ta builds don't have suppa, for example). On some HNM's, they don't want you meleeing. They want you sa'ing and (sometimes) ta'ing. When I went thf/sam to khimaira the other day, I would dart in and sa/feint between tp moves. Sometimes I'd make it out just in time b4 another tp move went off.

You have a low delay SA and TA build and use it everywhere. Guess I can stop feeling bad about just having a max damage set and using it everywhere. ;p

[QuePsiXI]

Shamaya what's up man, this is Soz. I don't have an LJ and I don't love you enough to post there. I do love you enough to dust off my old BG account.

I saw this guide before on KI, and talked about it there. This is a little necro, but y'all will be alright.

I still think Strider's is rated too high, but it's all good, I'll just not buy it for the purposes that you would buy/obtain it.

Also, hopefully people have realized by now, but it looks like you're doing a combination of getting top damage on SA and/or TA, as well as getting yourself back to meleeing efficiently. I think a majority of people have figured that out, but it doesn't look like you pointed it out anywhere.

But this is a great guide, glad one of my good friends is the guy I can go to for Thieving, rather than reading a random's guide. Don't stay up stupid late anymore in an internet cafe, that's how Asians die and end up on the news.

[Sehrahin]

Wouldn't Skadi hands be quite good on TA? Maybe didn't think about it.