Random Question Thread XII: Don't Believe Advanced's Lies

[Benevolentone]

Not a pinning spot, but I always fought it next to the Martello just SW of the adamantoise area. Really you're best off treating it like Suzaku and just straight tanking, using long-casting spells to get a bit of distance. Outside of Drain it's not a particularly difficult mob so long as you don't get unlucky with Final Retribution. Its Drain is cheap as fuck honestly, and there's nothing you can do about getting unlucky with an insta-cast from time to time. It's kind of the new Rapido.

Ah well sweet. I suppose I can just suck it up if I die. I am swimming in stones anyway thanks to EXP parties. I have dodged all the -ga's because they are easy to get away from, but does anyone know how much they hit for? I love how I got slept and then double crit for 350ish each. I will probably try it again in the morning when I am more awake. How about the Brooder NM? I suppose it can be pinned in the same spot that Dathus just posted?

[drwaffles]

They're not particularly strong at all. Didn't do much damage past 380 Stoneskin iirc with a good MDT set. Really the only things that should be able to kill you are Drain and Retribution, and I've not been killed by the latter before.

[drwaffles]

Ah well sweet. I suppose I can just suck it up if I die. I am swimming in stones anyway thanks to EXP parties. I have dodged all the -ga's because they are easy to get away from, but does anyone know how much they hit for? I love how I got slept and then double crit for 350ish each. I will probably try it again in the morning when I am more awake. How about the Brooder NM? I suppose it can be pinned in the same spot that Dathus just posted?

Only solo'd Brooder once, and I didn't pin it; mainly straight tanked and sucked up getting hit with Plague a lot. It's not a dangerous mob by any means (its only TP move is wussy and it doesn't hit particularly hard), it just takes bloody ages because of its high HP and near-constant Plague. Boring fight, but not really challenging.

[Shizoku]

I have been soloing Roc on 75 DRG/WHM (around 20x) parsing at 80-93% acc each time using Taco/Rabbit Pie. I finally decided to level up to 76 and my last two fights I have parsed at 43% and 50% acc with 700 damage less average on Drakesbane. It seems really odd that I fought it 21 times at level 75 with out encountering this.

I also have been camping Simurgh and for the first time in 7 solos it raged while fighting on 76 DRG/WHM. My acc was 65% with Sole Sushi yesterday and 75% today, which is not nearly as excessive a decline as I had with Roc, but it's still odd considering I picked up 5 levels in polearm. I parsed 85-87% on him the previous 7 attempts at lv75.

Note: Roc didn't use Barrier once today and I used Eye Drops/Blindna.

It seems really weird unless they vary in level/strength (besides rage). Does anyone else have experience with this?

Edit: I went for Round 2 with Squid Sushi and had 94% accuracy on the Roc I parsed 50% acc with the Taco.

[drwaffles]

Pretty sure most time-spawned NMs can pop at a range of 3~5 levels, which many believed accounted for the varying difficulty of Bind/Grav-centric NMs like Zip and Faust in the old days of Sky soloing.

[rog]

I pinned mict on the rock against the wall in between the corse and turtles. Not the best spot ever, but it works well enough. Plus it's right near where it pops, which is always nice. The corse can sometimes get close enough to hp aggro if you're on that side though, so be careful of that.

Only solo'd Brooder once, and I didn't pin it; mainly straight tanked and sucked up getting hit with Plague a lot. It's not a dangerous mob by any means (its only TP move is wussy and it doesn't hit particularly hard), it just takes bloody ages because of its high HP and near-constant Plague. Boring fight, but not really challenging.

I pinned it on a fence, and averaged around 20 minute kills with rdm/sch. A pair of powder boots help for pulling it, but you may not even need them depending on where it pops.

[Yugl]

Dia III:1
Bio III:4

Or

Dia III:2
Bio III:3

Or

Dia III:1
Para II: 4

Or

Dia III:2
Para II: 3

Edit: Convert/Ice/Wind/Earth ACC? No salvage.

[rog]

ice/vert onry, unless you absolutely never cast bind/bliz on something that you'd need extra macc for, then go earth.

Bio isn't really worth meriting, unless you do absolutely nothing but solo, and even then it's hardly worth it. I'd go 2 dia, 3 para.

[Yugl]

ice/vert onry, unless you absolutely never cast bind/bliz on something that you'd need extra macc for, then go earth.

Bio isn't really worth meriting, unless you do absolutely nothing but solo, and even then it's hardly worth it. I'd go 2 dia, 3 para.

Glad I asked. Almost went the Vert/Earth + Bio route.

[rog]

Earth merits are nice for slow for some hnm, but yeah, the uses are very few and far between. Even just occasional soloing/nuking will make ice far more useful.

Bio is kind of meh. I suppose it's ok for someone who does absolutely nothing but solo, but you really need at least 4 merits in it for it to be useful over bio2, and even then it's only an extra 2 damage/tic anyway. I guess that adds up eventually, but i would never use merits on it either way.

[Konda]

has AV been killed yet? Kinda out of the loop atm

[rog]

Av has been killed probably a few hundred times i think.

Unless you're asking if the extra 5 levels somehow made such a huge difference that av became easier enough to actually kill? Then no.

[Konda]

the second one...


and that sux

[Terravcota]

Depends how low you are talking, RDM BRD MNK/NIN could probably trio it. Additionally BLM + RDM can duo with a mnk to clear the room. It hits really hard to a subjobless melee.

3 man if possible sounds good - should be easy enough to wrangle one person into coming. How good of BLM + RDM are we looking at? Guy who needs the 15 has MNK, I have BLM RDM BRD, then the third is up in the air. I have some average AH-geared friends who could easily help, just not sure if it would be better to have them on RDM or BLM.

Also, bind/grav land and how long do you think it would take to burn down?

[Atoreis]

Ok since I got many different statment about this I ran a test.

Evasion+ vs Evasion skill+ gear

job: DRG/RDM
lv: 78/39
AGI: 62
Evasion skill: 243
mob: Mourioche (same mob for all 3000+ hits)

base equip: Evasion +0, Agi +0, Evasion skill +0
parse: 1026 hits taken, Evasion 30,81%

evasion skill equip: Evasion +0, Agi +3, Evasion skill +22
parse: 984 hits taken, Evasion 40,55%

evasion equip: Evasion+22, Agi +0, Evasion skill +0
parse: 1003 hits taken, Evasion 44,13%


I think results are clear.

[Thorny]

Not clear in the least, really. 22 evasion = -11% mob hitrate, this is more or less accepted as fact when doing accuracy calculations. If you apply it to your test, adding 22 evasion should have brought your eva rate to 41.81%. Using same sample with skill, if you were to call them the same, expected is 41.81%(1.26% off). If you were to say 1 skill = .9 eva to mirror accuracy, expected is 40.71%(.16% off). If you were to say 1 skill = .5 eva like was theorized last time I saw this brought up, you'd have an expected of 36.31(4.24% off). You can pretty safely eliminate the last option, but the other two are both within margin of error and you can't really draw a conclusion from that. The effects of AGI are widely unknown, but again, a factor that can screw with your test.

You can't even reliably prove the old 2 acc = 1% hitrate through this, as the evasion equip result is so far off. You need a much bigger sample size to quantify it, though it's a nice start as it shows they're very similar in potency.

[Tambor]

I just got my DNC up to 79~ and I'm looking for some info on merits+weapons for it. Geared towards party/lowman stuff mainly, doubt I'll solo anything on it seeing as I have RDM already. Doing 8/8 Dagger.

Merits: 5/5 Haste Samba, 5/5 Reverse Flourish, 5/5 No Foot Rising, 5/5 Saber Dance.

Do these look okay? Also this might seem obvious to some people but can you cancel Saber Dance manually if I needed to toss out a couple of Waltz dances?

Dagger wise: I don't mind doing any Magian Trial except the Empyrean one - will probably do WHM or Sword if I do one of those.

Auric+OAT Parazonium, Auric+OAThree Parazonium? Some other main hand+off hand combo I'm not seeing D

[Byrthnoth]

I just got my DNC up to 79~ and I'm looking for some info on merits+weapons for it. Geared towards party/lowman stuff mainly, doubt I'll solo anything on it seeing as I have RDM already. Doing 8/8 Dagger.

Merits: 5/5 Haste Samba, 5/5 Reverse Flourish, 5/5 No Foot Rising, 5/5 Saber Dance.

Do these look okay? Also this might seem obvious to some people but can you cancel Saber Dance manually if I needed to toss out a couple of Waltz dances?

Dagger wise: I don't mind doing any Magian Trial except the Empyrean one - will probably do WHM or Sword if I do one of those.

Auric+OAT Parazonium, Auric+OAThree Parazonium? Some other main hand+off hand combo I'm not seeing D

I would get the following Daggers:
* Acc Kila <--- Main hand if your Hit rate is bad (<90%), which hasn't been the case for me yet really.
* 2-3 Parazonium <--- Offhand for situations where you're most of the healing
* Auric Dagger <--- Mainhand if your Hit rate is good (90-95%).
* STP Fusetto <--- Offhand if you want to keep your TP gain up but want to do more damage. Better for /WAR. I'm actually less impressed with this dagger now that Auric has been found and tested, but it's so easy to do...

If you have the capability of getting 10 Verthandi Eyes, it's a little bit of a harder decision (10 Chukwa Eggs and 20 Cuerbre Horns are a joke). The OAT high damage dagger is a much stronger DoT weapon, but it falls behind a little on the TP gain front. Auric/OAT has 17% more DPS for DNC/SAM, but Auric/OA2-3 gets 11% more TP/sec.


And yeah, you can cancel Saber Dance manually. I'm 5/5 on it right now, and I have to say that it's pretty great for soloing these Magian trials. I'd grind out 25 merits in Abyssea before you start these trials really so you can cap it. I'll add that 5/5 is also pretty fantastic for DNC/SAM, as it makes Saber Dance's recast match up with Meditate and No Foot Rise. Assuming you're DDing (no real other reason to use Saber Dance), that gives you a 50% DA rate on two weaponskills. I'm trying to figure out now if a 50% DA rate makes it worth using Shark Bite.

50% DA with Dual wield:
Evisceration essentially DEX30%, crittable, 7.1 fTP
Dancing Edge essentially DEX30%, CHR40%, non-crit, 7.2875 fTP
Shark Bite essentially DEX50%, non-crit, 4.1 fTP <--- lolfail
Pyrrhic Kleos essentially STR20%, DEX30%, non-crit, 6.6 fTP (and gravity)

Looks like Shark Bite can be safely ruled out. I'm going to dick around with this later and see how the others do, and maybe test Pyrrhic Kleos because it has huge verification tags on ffwiki.

[Atoreis]

Not clear in the least, really. 22 evasion = -11% mob hitrate, this is more or less accepted as fact when doing accuracy calculations. If you apply it to your test, adding 22 evasion should have brought your eva rate to 41.81%. Using same sample with skill, if you were to call them the same, expected is 41.81%(1.26% off). If you were to say 1 skill = .9 eva to mirror accuracy, expected is 40.71%(.16% off). If you were to say 1 skill = .5 eva like was theorized last time I saw this brought up, you'd have an expected of 36.31(4.24% off). You can pretty safely eliminate the last option, but the other two are both within margin of error and you can't really draw a conclusion from that. The effects of AGI are widely unknown, but again, a factor that can screw with your test.

You can't even reliably prove the old 2 acc = 1% hitrate through this, as the evasion equip result is so far off. You need a much bigger sample size to quantify it, though it's a nice start as it shows they're very similar in potency.

the results are clear on answering the question which one is better even if they are close (that what I meant). As for exact formula it's not realy that far from evasion+22=mob hitrate-11%. 30,81+11 is indeed 41,81 and 44,13% seems to be a little high but If you think that base 30,81% could be also a little off, all will fall below 2% off the expected which on this sample is fairly possible.

I know 3k is low but it took close to 2,5h and I slept 3h

Anyway main reason to ran this was to check if evasion skill is much better then raw evasion and this test was very clear on this for me. Evasion is at least same potency and much likely a little better then evasion skill+.

[Thorny]

It was common knowledge they're very similar. The only point of a test like that is to quantify for gear selection, and that would require a much larger sample. Off the top of my head, the only things that come to mind are emissary boots vs dance shoes+1 & evasion torque vs ritter gorget.. neither of which has a clear cut solution from your data.