Thief's new job trait tiers at level 99 (including DW 3)Follow

I haven't seen much talk of this so I thought I'd put it here for you guys to contemplate over. According to Bgwiki Thief's new job trait tiers are as follows



Triple Attack II is a 1% increase over our first tier TA rate, boosting native triple attack rate to 6%

Critical Attack Bonus IV is confirmed 14% critical hit damage increase, another 3% stronger than the third tier

Dual Wield III --- we all know this one. Yeah, 25% native dual wield. This has significant end game scenario implications. Thief/war has a viable damage dealing edge over thief/nin once again. Particularly nice against HNM type mobs, but quite fun if you have some healing support also. It also has implications on the thief/dancer combo, as we can use haste samba by now and curing waltz III is about the same as a cure IV. Food for thought at the very least. And for the record I tested it myself. It's true. Native dual wield III.

It's also worth noting that among the top performing meritable weaponskills are Extenterator, and Last Stand. Both Extenterator and Last Stand have a 100% agility mod when fully merited, and outside abyssea extenterator is better than evisceration. The current "standard" weaponskill heirarchy is Stacked Rudra's and Mercy Stroke pulling ahead in all scenarios, with the exclusion of rudra/mercy Extenterator is the strongest weaponskill outside of abyssea stacked or unstacked, and inside abyssea Evisceration still pulls way ahead of extenterator (no surprise). Extenterator lowers enemy accuracy by 20 points. This is interesting to consider with the aforementioned dual wield information.

I find it interesting that thief can natively utilize Last Stand, although it's probably more of a cool thing than useful thing atm since x-bow and bolt is much weaker than an actual gun, but it's something to think about in the back of your mind for the future.

Edit: I just noticed I wrote extenterator lowers enemy evasion. I corrected it to read "lowers enemy accuracy" as it should have.

Edited, Dec 18th 2011 10:10am by Melphina

Meldi, I am going to try to explain to you the best I can.

There's a quest from the same moogle that gives you the final limit break quest that can be activated once you have level 96.

The moogle requires 15 merits from you to allow you to merit new weapon skills.

Each weapon skill has 5 tiers. You can only max out 3 of them. It's a total of 15 merits.

Tiers are as follow 10>15>20>25>30 merits. It's a total of 100 merits or 1mil exp to cap each weapon skill. Most people went crazy with the amount but I personally went 95 to 99 on 2 jobs and did 4/5 merits on dagger ws in a single exp party.

The description of the requirements for the weapon skill is level 96 and 357 skill or above in the weapon to utilize it.

All the weapon skills suck with 1 merit only but some are better than current with full merits on it.

It says that each merit increases the mod by 17% for a total of 85%.

The next part I would like someone to explain to me better. Please try to explain like you would a 5th grader lol. It's easier to understand the game that way.

Well by people's calculation and how the game calculates things people noticed that the dmg output made it look like that the mods actually add up to 100% mod.

I didn't understand much but that's because I wasn't keeping up with it since the start and I haven't tried to understand the damage equation in this game yet.

I wrote


It's not 100% agility mod until it's 5/5 merits. I believe the first eschelon is 20% mod at 1 merit, and each merit increases the mod by 20% capping out at 100% with 5 merits. It appears all the weaponskills are operating under this principle. Examples include tachi: shota. Blade Shun,Ruinator. There seems to be a translation error because I originally thought each merit increased the mod percent by 17%, but in actuality it increases it by 20%. It wouldn't be the first time the in game text translations were off (raider's armlets originally stated they increased trick attack damage and had to be corrected to read sneak attack is one example that to mind).

Edit: Alternately it's possible 5/5 merits isn't 100% like I've heard. I don't even know where the 100% stat modification discussion came from or how accurate it is. When people were testing them on the test server they said 100% stat mod, but truth be told I don't know exactly how high it goes. I'm sure it will be clarified better in the weeks to come after people get some more time to merit and test them better. All I know is there is a conflict between the in game text message and the general information I've heard/read on the wiki.



Each merit increases the agility mod by 20% (17% is a text error), 5/5 merits makes extenterator a good weaponskill outside abyssea but inside abyssea evisceration is still better. Severeal of the new weaponskills show promise but about half of the new weaponskills are pretty lackluster. You can only merit three of them to level 5 so while many of them are better than older alternatives, they're not a whole lot better. There are going to be pretty standard picks on which weaponskills get merited which is kind of disappointing because they're all so beautifully animated. Extenterator lucked out and and it's one of the "better" choices. That's about as simple as I can make things.

Edited, Dec 18th 2011 1:24pm by Melphina

That actually makes perfect sense to me Byr. It boils down to the playerbase's understanding of weaponskill mechanics being accurate, but calculating them in a slightly different way than the hard in game coding. Both calculations result in the same answer, but we're taking two different routs to get to the same finish. I understand alpha and wsc and etc perfectly well, so for all intents and purposes 20% agility mod for every wsc tier is accurate. Good enough for me then.

Edited, Dec 18th 2011 7:09pm by Melphina

That's what I meant by explain to me like a 5th grader melphina.

On one side, you have SE saying it's 17%. On the other side, you have people saying the mods is 20%.

Then you have people saying that both sides are right.

After reading here and looking at the "Calculating Weapon Skill Damage" on ffxiclopedia I understood what people meant.

It's kind of misleading. This is what I understood from looking at the calculation.

Basically every weapon skill has a fixed % for a secondary attribute that will make it stronger. However, SE has made that the impact that these attributes have fluctuates with your level. At certain levels they have less impact on the dmg and at other levels it has more impact. Of course the difference is very low. Basically it was meant to keep your weapon skill from growing dramatically since as you leveled up, your gear got way better and at lower levels there wasn't much option.

Now for the new weapon skills there won't be any fluctuation since they believe that they will forever stop at level 99. The weapon skill itself can only be used at level 96. So you have two options:

1. You can use 100% agility while maintaining the old damage calculation for weapon skills that uses an alpha value. The value itself doesn't change for any level after 96.

2. Or you can completely remove the alpha value from the equation and directly calculate your attributes using the given percentage that SE uses on the merit menu.

In the end, only 85% of your actual agility applies to the damage of the ws regardless if you use the old equation or not. It's confusing because you need alpha for all other weapon skills since they are calculated differently depending on the level but you actually don't need alpha for the ws you get at 96+