The Soboro debate thread, formerly @#$% it. I'm leveling SAMFollow

The Soboro is really only good nowadays if you use Sam/Rng, and that isn't as big as it used to be due to the boost that two-handed weapons got, the boosts to Yukikaze, Gekko, and Kasha damage wise, and the boost Penta Thrust got (which makes /Rng less spectacular on Colibri, so it wouldn't gimp you to not have one by any means, as long as you made sure to stay on top of your other weapon upgrades.

As for an augmented Rindomaru, the consensus is, is that one with around +15 store TP and weaponskill damage +2-3% can outperform a Hagun if you have the proper gear to support it (the Rindomaru with sufficient store TP can allow for a rather effective five-hit build).

If you're able to get Soboro, it's suggested to get one. It's great GK to have while solo/campaign/whatever when you go SAM/DNC. I did use Soboro all the way to Hagun. There's nothing stupid about letting SAM using Soboro in EXP PT assuming the SAM knows how to play. Personally, I have more fun using Soboro than Hagun.

As for /DRG, it's definitely great to have. It's part of the reason why I like Soboro too. I can go SAM/DRG with Soboro having multi-hit and Jump/HighJump and generate TP like crazy if needed to, plus the very valuable Haste 5% of course.

For what Great Katanas I'd recommend, I'd go in this order

Magoroku (where you're at now)
Koryukagemitsu
Amakura / Daihannya (Daihannya is better, but for its price and abundance, the Amakura is a very close second)
Zanbato +1
Kazaridaichi
Hagun

This is correct, Soboro is definitely strong as a weapon, all the way to 75. In merits, it's possible for it to beat Hagun. Please see this thread for math.

This is more correct in best weapons. If used right however, it will definitely generate more hate by you. Keep that in mind. Also, by used correctly, I mean WSing as soon as you get to 100+tp. This is the best way to use Soboro(and Gtkn in general) for SAM.

Edit: be =! beat

Edited, Oct 14th 2009 11:34am by Souji

Soboro is king imo, really is one of the bes6t weapons in the game from 50 > time you put game to rest



Edited, Oct 14th 2009 12:22pm by Fluffysnowball

If you can tell me how to pull that one off...

Anyway, regarding getting a Soboro think a pick-up group would work?

I'm not sure why multiple checks would even be necessary (nor do I see how it would make a difference if it did) because all the hits, and therefore all the TP bestowed, are essentially calculated all at once. My brain might just be oozing atm though; if someone could clarify what this would mean...

I know that there is some sort of distinction that can be made in the middle of a multi-hit attack, but I don't know if that applies to mob TP checks, and like I said, I'm not sure how it would ever matter. (For instance, RDM's Fencer's Ring gives you +5 Enspell damage on an attack as long as your HP is <76% and your TP *following the attack* is <100. If you're 2 hits away from reaching 100 TP, and your Joyeuse gets a double attack, your first hit will have the +5 Enspell damage but your second hit will not.)

I forget what the exact % is, but say for instance above 25% hp, a mob has a 50% chance of wsing any time it has over 100% tp. If every hit could possibly cause it to tp then a 2-hit round would cause a 75% chance of tping, a 3 hit round would cause a 87.5% chance of tping, etc... Maybe it really is nothing, I have always felt that when soloing with soboro, mobs toss a lot more ws's even above 25% hp but that's more a feeling than anything.

TP feeding doesn't matter. you're just one party member; if you hit twice as much and live, you should. if the tank can't live through 1 out of 3-4 melees hitting twice as much, the tank and/or healer suck. as for the whole check thing, having a MNK or a THF doesn't suddenly set off a barrage of TP moves on tanks (nor does having a NIN instead of a PLD tank), so obviously soboro won't either.

at 50, the damage increase of soboro over all competitors (except polearms vs birds) is giant. if you choose not to do it for any purportedly principled reason, you don't know what the hell you're doing. also, zanshin is, has always been, and shall always be irrelevant.

Edited, Oct 14th 2009 8:26pm by milich

Yeah, after I wrote the check thing I thought about dual wield/H2H jobs some more and the logic there seemed kinda funny. There's always a possiblity that multi hit is treated differently than dual wield and H2H but it's probably not very likely, hehe. It was mainly based off observations from soloing but it could just be the difference in speed of getting the mob to 100% TP. That aside, pretty much all the jobs you mentioned above do have subtle blow (THF subbed most likely) so if the check thing were in place, they would simply set off tp moves more often without actually generating as much TP as soboro. The multi check thing probably doesn't exist though after I thought about it more anyways so I think we can just ignore it.

I do wanna say though, that in xp parties, mobs aren't really gaining tp as fast as people think. It's not merits where everyone has a bunch of haste, at least one march, guaranteed haste spells. You probably won't have a brd, not much access to haste and I'll say 50% of DD's getting haste from a healer. And it's not always about dmg, crabs will def up more (and no matter what, there's the casting time of dispel not even taking into account rdm/brd can be doing other stuff), imps will amnesia more, etc... It's not just about keeping people healed up, it can slow down the party in other ways.

I dunno about at 50 either, at 50 the dot should in theory be about 19% more than a koryukagemitsu (40x2=80 vs 67, correct me if I'm wrong) but you don't have access to the super boosted 3 WS's yet so you can't really improve the dmg as well but just stacking on str making the base dmg on WS's more important. Jinpu also has the elemental dmg bonus which is based on the base physical dmg if I'm not mistaken. Soboro will probably pull out better in the long run but it's not really the huge gap you make it out to be. And of course, poelarms -> flyers anyways. I would personally say Soboro really starts to shine more at 60 when you get yuki.

And zanshin is not irrelevant, it used to be trash but it's quite useful after they upgraded it, you can reference one of my posts above.

Edited, Oct 14th 2009 9:00pm by TarowynXI

Oh, you're talking about if the mob hasn't gone below 25% HP yet.

Then yes, I do believe that the chance for the mob to WS would most likely be checked for each hit. Unless the hits end up taking it to 300 TP, in which case the chance would be 100%.

poor Zanshin... Always being laughed at, except when it procs.......

haha this brought back so many memories of the game XD

*Shrug*, 40% chance of redoing a hit with increased accuracy is nothing to sniff at, but I guess in your world you always have capped acc on everything. (Where zanshin still benefits you) Technically zanshin will be one tier lower at lvl 50, but it's still something to take into account.

Again, *shrug*, can't make you care about it, lol. It's there though, but noone seems to care so eh.

So what then, you end up fighting colibri or birds where guess what, gonna use polearm anyways so we don't need to worry about soboro.

Seems a little high offhand, as an elvaan sam/war at lvl 50, I'm seeing a base str of 57. Only str gear for tp I would probably be wearing at that lvl is voyager and rajas so 64 str. 8 fSTR would mean the mobs I'm fighting would have 36 vit? I'm reading fSTR bonus is at 8 fSTR at +28 str on the mob so correct me if that's wrong, but still seems a tad on the high side.

Gonna punch the numbers for ws in a little bit, should try and do some work though, lol.



I'm hesitant to do it just because it's seems such a brute force hack to just matrix out the whole thing, lol. Gotta be a better way of calculating it.

I'm pretty sure I've heard someone point out that soboro tends to get better the better your gear is, pretty much the more str you can jack onto it for ws, the better it stacks up. At lvl 50, you don't have that much str, you don't have an super easily str boosted ws, and the ws itself is not atk boosted like YGK which means stacking str isn't even neccesarily the best option at that lvl for dmg. Like I mentioned above, post 60, once you get yuki, it really starts to play towards it's strengths, but at 50, it's simply ok.

Edited, Oct 15th 2009 5:44pm by TarowynXI

Would love to hear where you're getting your information on this.

Did a bunch of math on analyzing the WS portion of koryu vs soboro and afterwards realized everything cancels out and it's actually really simple, lol.

Sample mob I used was the middle range (LVL 56) beetle in quicksands which has a 76 vit, pretty much making fstr exactly 0 for WS and actually negative for TP but I'll ignore that. WS came out to 45% stronger for koryu so assuming the 70% tp rate of soboro, soboro does about 17% more ws damage.

So overall, seems like soboro doing about 18%ish more dmg than koryu at 50 since the WS/TP ratios are more even at that lvl. It is a pretty significant dmg increase, moreso than I would have expected originally. So it just comes down to whether the individual person cares about the additional TP or not (Yes I know you don't shinta) and whether the person will actually lvl on regular mobs or just lolibri it all the way up.

Currently trying to look into how zanshin actually affects it but even you had to resort to using matlab to calculate it so I dunno if I can do it in spreadsheet, lol. Never did like this kind of stuff in college.

Btw, if you do still have the calculations you were doing, would it be easy to change the number of hits? Almost noone will have a 6-hit at lvl 50 and just wondering how that actually changes tping. Just for reference, using an elvaan sam/war with fairly decent tp gear, foodless acc w/hasso is at (225-193-(6*4)) = 79% acc. Sushi will cap, dunno about pizza.

Edited, Oct 15th 2009 8:20pm by TarowynXI

Well, out of that bunch, defoliators not too bad though their poison breath is actually a bit stronger than classic crawlers. Don't Date Eruca's incinerate also? Ziz is pretty harmless, diremites... the aoe dmg is kind of annoying, spiders are both dangerous and annoying with sickle slash/spider web. It's not just pure dmg, like spiders for instance, the extra tp means you're more likely to be slowed all the time, crawlers more likely to be cocooned, etc. As for polearm, I'm not so sure about yuki being able to match up to polearm on flyers. I've always felt that yuki's atk bonus isn't as strong (I think there was testing on this but I've been too lazy to read through it). Acc/Atk difference shoudn't be too huge and I dunno, I just don't see soboro being able to close that free full time +25% dmg. Maybe I'll try the math on Monday, done enough for today and gonna be gone all weekend.


I never said it was worthless, I just it's not as easy to make up for the low base dmg as it is once you have the 75% mod ws's. Mob VIT is not really that important to what I was referring here since I was mainly talking about WS mods and not fSTR.


Well, my original response was to someone who said it's the best at 50, so the whole comparison came out of that. Once you hit TOA, the first mob you fight is colis at which point I I would say polearm and that becomes a totally different comparison.



At the same time, I could say I don't think you realize how disrupting giving that much TP can be too. Soboro only increases your dmg but it can potentially have a negative effect on the party as a whole which is very difficult to measure.

As for Hagun, I kind of think the price tag is not so much because it's good in merits (though it does hold it's own obviously) but because it's good in a lot of other things sam does like HNM where the TP/WS dmg ratio is even bigger, the most extreme example being tping on outside mobs and only SAWSing stuff.


Well I mean yeah I could do it eventually, but it doesn't sound very fun, lol. I do prefer being able to automate as much as possible. I dunno if I feel like bothering anyways, since most people don't seem give a crap about zanshin.

I really think you need to move away from the whole 'giving mob tp' argument for exp pty's. Also, the more DMG you do, the quicker the mob KO's meaning the less tp moves it gets off. Aside from that, we're nearly in 2010, and exp pty's can handle mob tp moves.

There are times to worry about feeding mobs TP, but those times are not during exp pty's. I mean, BRD is generally a requirment in exp pty's, and they can slow the mob down by 50% turning most exp stuff into pansy's.

That's actually harder than it sounds since you have to make sure everything's the same, noone lvls (or at least the lvl sync in most cases), no party changes, etc... Easy when you're meriting but that's really quite different from the scenario I'm talking about when you can lvl in under an hr.


Never quite sure what people are talking about when they talk about optimal ranges for zanshin, there's no such thing as far as I can tell. Colibri if nothing else is a great place for zanshin because most people just eat meat there so you'll tend to wander a little farther from acc cap (not talking about meriting, only xping). It's not like I'm saying oh yeah, take off acc so you can zanshin more, zanshin will always help you, how much may vary on your acc, but it always provides something.


The quick the mob dies the less tp moves thing is not quite actually true since it can just do the same amount of tp moves in a smaller span of time but whatever. I dunno if people really can handle mob tp moves better or if they just use lvl sync to not have to deal with anything with nasty tp moves truthfully, lol.

I'll admit I haven't seriously lvled in parties in a while, probably since just before lvl sync came out so I dunno how that affected party setups, but I think I had less than 5 parties with brds in them in the trip from 50-75 on pld...


I was mainly just quoting him because people were asking where I was getting the activation rate for zanshin from. The original thread on ffxiah was more of a proof of theory on what zanshin can do, rose strap just takes askar out of the equation, zanshin will always remain though. I just don't understand how it can not matter at all, looking even at 95% acc, zanshin gives you essentially 1.9% acc which also happen to kind of break the acc cap (it's more complicated than that with DA and stuff but it's sufficient as an example). Sure it's not much, but it's always there and it always has some effect, how much just varies on the situation.

As for TP feeding, I dunno, I just don't see it the same way, haste/march are both very gradual methods of feeding TP. Soboro is sudden very large bursts of TP (especially 3 hit rounds). Those can cause increase the chance of accidents happening because it makes it very easy for a mob to WS twice in a very short span of time. There's also the matter of the whole TP/DMG ratio. Haste, while you attack faster, you still have the same ratio of TP to how much dmg you deal. Soboro on the other hand trades in more dmg for greatly increasing the amount of TP you do so over the course of the life of the mob, it will definitely have more TP. Whether this actually leads to more WS's or not will depend on your luck.

Edit: Forgot to add this, what exactly do you consider realistic examples? Most of the examples I've given I consider very realistic, but you don't see it that way so I dunno what to do with that, lol.

Edited, Oct 16th 2009 5:07am by TarowynXI

You don't need to make sure everything is the same, you just need to control for the obvious. If someone dings, you start your comparisons again (which is easier than ever now, since most parties are level synced, so there's only 1 person you need to monitor). Get a rep? Start your comparisons again. If soboro damage is better than TP moves at 63, it's also better at 64. And 65. You won't be getting wildly different results, just a bunch of smaller samples instead of one big sample (which you would be getting in merits). You're obviously an intelligent guy/gal, so you'll throw out the ones where the tank is chaging his toddler's diaper while partying and dies 17 times.
Will I do it? No, because I have enough confidence in the answer already. If you want to challenge the general consensus on this (which is fine, I'm not implying that you shouldn't), above is the way to do that.


Optimal range describes when the effect of zanshin has the most benefit on damage. If you are at 95% accuracy, there are far fewer opportunities for zanshin to proc than if you are at 85%, 75%, etc. Eventually you get to some point where your accuracy is low enough to make zanshin procs happen at a rate that is favorable to world harmony, but if you get any lower the moon won't line up with mars when it's in ascendance and the dark god will rise from the abyss again or something. Don't know or care much about the details, because zanshin is so meh, but someone did the math and can surely provide a link. No one is saying zanshin is bad - of course swinging again when you miss is good. But when you don't miss much, it's mostly irrelevant. And when you do miss a lot, you have bigger worries than zanshin.

Yeah, but if you think about it, in the 50's you don't even need 10k xp to lvl, that's like, hour maybe, half an hr on each weapon is not really a very big sample size. The other reason it's actually hard to do nowadays is I'd actually have to find a party that isn't lvl syncing to a non bird camp at a post soboro lvl, lol.

I am actually relevelling sam on my 2nd char, so I may get to try it, but it probably won't happen any time soon, don't really have time to lvl much nowadays unfortunately.


I dunno, the concept of optimal range doesn't make sense to me, it's not like zanshin can ever in ANY case allow you to have higher acc then if you'd higher acc to begin with.

It's ancedotal, but I've had SAM's that thought mobtp would be an issue switch to soboro with me halfway through a Mamool Ja Meritpo w/o telling anyone else, and the backline didn't even notice the difference in mobWS/dmg taken.

That actually makes sense, merit mobs will tend to die MUCH faster than xp mobs so there the extra tp is not as noticeable. The only xp spot I can think of where you kill mobs at a comparable speed to merit would be syncing to colis which ends up being a polearm situation.


I dunno, we're talking about a game where we spend 3mil gil for +7 acc rings which has a lower benefit to acc (vs +5acc rings) than zanshin at it's proc rate at 95% acc. I guess the concrete example in this case would be, soboro has a 70% chance of not being a single attack, so in theory, your acc bonus from zanshin at 95% base acc goes from 1.9% to .57% so it's equivalent to about the loss of 2 acc at capped acc. This is a general approximation of course, again, DA tends to mess with the actual value. I'm just not sure at what point we're supposed to not care.

As for TP building, I can't really give numbers simply based on the fact that I don't know the statistics for mobs doing tp moves above 25% hp and I don't know for sure about the one thing I mentioned way back about multi hits causing a mob multiple chances to proc ws on one attack round. If I get a chance, I will try and parse the difference and see how it is but don't hold your breath on that, hehe. Unfortunately, it's hard for me to get the solid 2-3 hrs in a row to do xp on a regular basis.

at exactly the point where a stat never influences gear/strategy/merit comparisons. hence everything i wrote in the last post...

as for the TP thing, again, it's foolish to mention it re: soboro. even if every strike is a chance to hit, you're just one party member and not a particularly oft-hitting one (compared to, say, MNK) so it doesn't matter. also, you're exaggerating the mob TP thing in your mind, but that one is just "take my word for it" (the first point is a principled argument).

Like I pointed out though, at 95% acc, it already has a greater effect than upgrading to a +7 acc ring from a +5 acc one so does that mean toreader/sniper+1's are inconsequential? Than how much acc becomes enough that we have to care about it and who decides that?

For TP, eh, we both have no real proof, we're both kind of just saying, but this is what I believe, so we'll just agree to disagree. Without any sort of parse or anything, there's no end to it.

And it's semi moot anyways now since the OP has already gotten it, grats btw, hehe.