Best DD Job now?Follow

What you are discounting is that this game is not that hard and ultimately the only differentiator is the hardest to obtain pieces. By the time you have a 99 R/M/E, you better be dusting others with the same "skill" if they can even be said to have that.

"Player skill > gear" is an excuse used by people who don't have the gear.

Are there exceptions? Sure.

Does this mean the exception should become the rule because Mr. Charity Case wants it to? No. (Although if you want to gimp yourself because one parse did not reveal a complete demolishing, by all means, gimp yourself...it is far easier to teach someone to play a FFXI "job" than to go from AH weapon to 99 R/M/E.)

Edited, Nov 30th 2012 12:50pm by TheBarrister

You should stop kidding yourself. Just because someone invests time doesn't mean they are actually good. Building a R/M/E really takes no skill at all, it takes time, you continually farm easy content like dynamis, or dreadfully easy content like abyssea and earn your tokens to get a weapon.

These weapons are not some glorified status symbol of ability, they are symbols of "I put in X time and got my reward" they are not hard to obtain, just time consuming.

And I would hold greater respect for an AH WAR who parses anywhere close to an R/M/E WAR, and denying that this does not take place on a daily basis is blatant ignorance, id wager less than 10% of R/M/E weapon holders can actually poses the skill set to hit the mathematical potential. That leaves a large portion of the population who are replaceable, and that includes by folks with AH or equivalent items.

You can call it gimp, but I will call it an investment, because when those "gimp" AH players who parse as well as those elite R/M/E folks get an R/M/E, they will blow them away because they actually know what the @#%^ they are doing.

Edited, Nov 30th 2012 1:05pm by rdmcandie

I agree with you that these weapons are not some glorified status symbol of ability. They are a symbol of time put into a job.

Where we disagree is that I believe it takes less time to master a job's level 99 concepts than it does to get these weapons yourself.

Where we also disagree is that if an AH WAR is parsing anywhere close to an 99 R/M/E WAR, there is probably a logical explanation besides: "Most 99 R/M/E are idiots so most of the time I'll chose the AH guy". It's far more likely that the 99 R/M/E player is AFK on auto-attack than because they somewhere were a blithering idiot that managed to do nothing but invest the time getting a level 99 R/M/E without learning simple aspects of their job.

This game is really not that complicated.

Eh, because I was being lazy and only dealing with 99 relics, so had Spharai in place. Spharai needs slightly more haste to fully cap. All I checked was whether DPS changed when I added Samba.

Optimizing for Vere, though, shows that I made a mistake in using Spharai as a basic comparison. Vere ends up almost 25% ahead of Spharai when pushed to the max limit. However it also requires a higher def down effect in order to be fully effective. At 10% def down, Vere is 15% ahead of Spharai; At 20% def down, Vere is 25% ahead of Spharai; if the mobs have significant crit evasion, the lead drops down to less than 10% (8% for my quick check).

So there's more variability there, with mnk pushing ahead of drg more than I initially figured. However it's a bit more difficult to make sure it's viable on the support side.

I agree that even many 90 Empy weapon holders (not just 85 ones) who are top 3 DD do this. However, I run into this less frequently with 90 R/M/E DRK/SAM/WAR than I do with AH weapon holders. I have counted the times I've seen that happen with a 99 R/M/E holder of these jobs and it's zero. So my disagreement is that if you are going to go with a general rule of thumb, generally 99 R/M/E will be the wiser choice than AH holders. Therefore, it's retarded to choose AH weapon holders over 99 R/M/E most of the time because in one situation out of 1,000 an AH guy came close (within 5%) of a 99 R/M/E holder.

It is far easier to write a sentence: "Hit your WS macro 1.5 seconds before you fill up to 100 TP and watch that bar" a few times for 99 R/M/E weapon holder (among the other basic job functions such as gearing for task) than it is for a AH weapon holder to acquire 200,000,000 + gil, buy the materials for a 99 R/M/E and get the other parts of that accomplished. One takes a lot less time. That's really all there is to it.

You all can keep arguing the exception exists. I agree to that. The rule exists far more often.

You shouldn't need 200,000,000 + gil to be able to play top content. That's asinine. Crikes, I play games for fun, not as a second job. People are really out of line to expect that. And the developers are really out of line to create content that leads players to expect that. Maybe for 1 ultimate epeen fight or something, sure, require that, but for multiple events? It should be doable with reasonable to obtain gear and weapons.

There should be more of a point at which there is a declining returns on ridiculous amounts of effort time, but it seems like it is opposite. The game shouldn't punish people for not playing like a full time job. I'm okay with there being some edge but 20+ per cent is way out of line. 2% more base damage and a shiny glow? Sure! Yeah go ahead - farm 300,000 iron giant farts for that, I don't care.

But having that much spread between a weapon that a casual but good player can obtain and a weapon that you need to spend all your year's allocation of vacation time doing mind numbingly boring things to obtain? (no thanks)

I might think differently if getting one of these weapons actually took some kind of skill but all it takes is the ability to do repetitive, mind-numbing tasks over and over and over and over and over again.

So, it is a little grating to have folks assume you're an idiot because you don't have one. Some of us just have other stuff to do. If we're at cap and have some decent weapons/armor we should be able to log in and play 98% of the content -at release- with minimal effort (not wait until it's outdated)

Extreme maybe? I don't know. But this game has enough problems as it is without continuing down this path of dividing the casual/hardcore playerbase so much. I mean it really doesn't encourage people to resub for new content if they know that they will be snubbed by people if they want to do it because they didn't feel like logging in daily to farm dynamis for endless months... it's like "oh yey, new content, I can't wait to do that 8 months from now!"

I'm ranting here but one of the reasons I like to play casually is because I get bored doing the same thing over and over, so making it so I have no choice but to do old content over and over if I ever want to play new content is a good way of discouraging players like me to give the company money.

I'd rather have a lot of different content that (at least at the lower tiers) is welcoming to casual players. So anyone can start to farm any content, instead of having to go through some torturous labyrinth of repetitiveness for content you may not want to do at all to even get in the gate. That way if you want to start your R/EX journey with legion instead of farming abyssea seals, why the ffff not? The amount of content at any one tier should more closely follow the actual percentage of players on that tier.

1% of content for the 1%.

80% of content for the 80% etc.

Edited, Nov 30th 2012 5:00pm by Olorinus

I agree that current event requirements are a bit ... extreme. SE figured they could artificially extend content life by making it super hard, they listened to all those asshats on the OF who complained about wanting "more challenging content" or "for skill to mean something". Well SE, being who they are, did exactly that. The results were the EXACT same people complaining about "its to easy" choosing to use the least difficult / easiest method possibly (method with highest chance of success). You can't please those people, they will always ***** about stuff being "too easy" while simultaneously searching for the easiest method to beat it.

Anyhow content should be designed around the 80~95% of the games players, not the 1~5%. That will ensure maximum enjoyment is obtained by the most people and thus generate the highest subscriptions.

Sure is circa 2008 bard love in here now!

IDK about you but I absolutely love my back line support crew. The most powerful DD in the game, absolute best gear, perfectly made spellcast XML, perfectly played, becomes a weenie without a good support crew behind them. A crappy AH DD can be made passable with a godly support crew. If my support guys are awesome I make sure to compliment them, too little credit goes to those guys in this game.

1) cRatio is a term used to mean "corrected level ratio", not critical hit ratio. It's calculated by taking the monster's level against yours and then factoring in what kind of weapon used. Given the significant difference in cRatio for a h2h and a two-handed weapon, a two-handed weapon is going to have a higher damage potential. Then take into account that the Dark Knight will likely have Last Resort + Haste + Marches and capped haste gear, and the attack speed for the Dark Knight is going to be considerable, closing the gap on the Monk's attack speed.

2) No, even with Focus, Accuracy is going to be a big issue. In areas like Legion, two-handed weapon jobs, for the aforementioned reasons (the cRatio for higher level content) , are going to be the primary jobs brought as far as meleeing, and even they have to gear more for accuracy, despite having significant accuracy boosts in one form or another (Accuracy traits, Aggressor, Diabolic Eye, Acc from relic weapons, etc). Monk, having far less accuracy to work with, would be far behind accuracy wise.

3) That's tough to say. It's going to depend on weapons, buffs, how well the automaton stays alive, etc.