Late stage automaton skilling guide.Follow

So I just noticed in laxes post, that some of you automaton weilders are below cap on ranged skill especially, so I have found a method that will get you tocap, faster than anything else I've seen. This method will work for Sharpshot, and stormwalker. It requires a few Atma, but none that are impossible to get. The atma are, earth wyrm, and mounted champion. The third atma is up to you. If you don't have earth wyrm, other MDB Atma MAY work.

For Sharpshot you are going to want to put on attachments; mana II, scope, turbo charger, steam jacket, optic fiber, (if your automaton accuracy allows also use drum magazine) and whatever else you would like to use. Try to keep attack attachments off.

After that is done go to Abyssea- Uleguerand, get your status, and the atma, as well as your cruor buffs. When that is done, conflux to 5 and you will be right next to worm camp Put up a wind and a water and set your automaton on one at range, the nukes wont be enough to beat the 20 regen from mounted champion. After the first few nukes you won't even need to use a water anymore. After the worm is dead, rinse and repeat. You can use burts for more ranged attacks but you will obviously have to deploy more.

This method will get you to cap.

To do the same with walker, just put your third atma as MM and keep up a dark maneuver as well as a water.
And instead of using wind attachments, use darks, to increase your refresh.

I thought stating melee was too obvious, but good method lax.

And if anyone wants to take my methods and adjust or tweak them, and find an even easier way, you can list it here. :)

Thanks Camwin for sharing this method. It's quick (as quick as skilling up ranged can be, ugh...) safe and relatively painless. Yesterday I went from 325 to 331 in 90 mins, which is pretty nice considering I was browsing alla while doing so. Not having to pay attention to the game while skilling up is in my book the biggest pro.

To knock it up another notch, now that you are in the final stretch, make sure you have your drum magazine on, and if you are being attentive enough keep up 2 winds all the time which will make your auto shoot 6 times a minute with burts on. The added acc from the wind maneuvers/scope should help you offset the drum.

Great post. I'll also suggest a couple good choices for the 3rd atma:

Future Fabulous (MDB: Superior, best MDB of any atma)

Ascending One (Snapshot: Minor, the only atma that gives Snapshot)

I just tried camwin's advice just now with Earth Wyrm + Mounted Champion and one water kept it well near 100 most of the time. it was crazy. Dagger dropped and now looking to see to kill it again maybe give the dagger to a passerby or something xD. Thanks for the idea!

I don't know why you would use snap shot atma anyways. As far as I know the timer for the next ranged attack starts when it starts the ranged attack not when it actually fires it.

Why would you assume that ranged attacks have a global recast timer, and not just a consistent delay? Maybe the natural weapon delay is the only "recast" timer, just as the natural melee weapon delay is a form of a "recast" timer (which CAN be altered by haste atma).

It's not an unreasonable theory that there's a set automaton timer, but I think it's equally reasonable to assume that it's just the natural delay of SS's ranged weapon which is subject to being affected by snapshot. Since there's no auto-ranged attack for players, if automaton does work that way it would actually be better than snapshot for players due to not having to manually do each new ranged attack. The automaton would just be able to shoot when the timer's up.

This is actually probably a good opportunity to test something that we had no way of knowing prior to atma. If there's no change in delay between ranged attacks with snapshot atma, it's a hard timer unique to automaton. If there is a delay reduction with snapshot atma, we know that it's just based on normal delay. I won't have the time to do this right away if anyone else wants to check, but I'll probably look into it when I have some time after the update for curiosity's sake.

And before anyone mentions Drum Magazine, it really tells us nothing at all about how automaton ranged attacks work. All we know is that it affects RA speed in some way. We should all know by now not to read too much into attachment descriptions, so Drum Magazine might just be operating by giving the automaton snapshot (ranged attack delay reduction) and R.Acc-. Or, it might alter a universal timer in the same way automaton spells work.



Oh, and now I see what BiggHowie was saying and I may have misunderstood a little bit before. Not that it really changes my answer.

I'm still not sure we can assume anything based on just the animation and when the damage is done. When the shot "goes off" for players using ranged attacks is something that is affected by rapid shot. If there's a rapid shot proc, damage is done instantly without a delay to ready the weapon (same for ranged WS by players, they are instant when used). That might just mean that, depending on how you think of it, either (a) automaton has 100% rapid shot, or (b) rapid shot just doesn't apply to automaton and there's no concept of delay between using a ranged attack and the shot firing (everything with automaton is more simplified and just an instant attack).

Regardless of the above, that's still a different issue than snapshot. It's still reasonable to think that the actual delay between those "instant-cast" automaton ranged attacks may be affected by snapshot.

Edited, May 5th 2011 1:29pm by Anza

It's an interesting theoretical question at least - is a ranged attack an "ability", or something else?

Even for players, it's somewhere in between. /ra requires its own special command and doesn't auto-attack, but it is affected by weapon delay just like melee weapons and has a haste-like delay reduction ability/gear stat in snapshot.

And we don't know for sure whether automaton works like players here. Spells obviously don't, with one universal timer. Guess it's now possible to figure out where ranged attacks stand.

If it was an ability it would be prevented by amnesia. And I assumed that for these reasons. 1 How it fires when slept or stun. 2. becuase no bolt has that much of a delay(yes i know an argument can be made it's a special bolt with a special timer.) 3. Becuase I presume that automatons are based on fellows which are based on beastmen's ai. And I am pretty confident their ranged attacks are on timers just like their spells.

Does no one here remember the old days of imp parties? Auto ranged attack is considered an ability...Amnesia stops your auto from performing RAs.

Agreed with your conclusion, but note that even if automaton ranged attacks were the same as player ranged attacks (which it appears is not the case from the testing here), haste wouldn't be expected to affect ranged attack frequency anyway. Snapshot would (hence the interest in Bennu's atma since it's the only way in the game to give Snapshot to an automaton). Same as a RNG - haste is irrelevant to ability to fire more frequent ranged attacks.

Turbo Charger, Anwig, Shaolin, Pantin gloves... doesn't really matter here.




I could never get IN to imp parties on PUP back in 2006-2007... I spent a lot of time soloing crazy stuff (Erucas!), or making my own parties in other places (Bibiki Bay!). Never did like imps on PUP anyway, with amnesia crippling us for many other reasons than preventing automaton ranged attacks.



If so, that's another point in favor of VV over GH in your atma selection. VV = STR = helpful for AP damage. GH = AGI = irrelevant for AP damage (though would help R.Acc, more importantly for ranged TP attacks).

Still, I think GH is more useful for the eva and counters anyway. The crit rate+ that gives some offensive power is more of a nice side effect.

Edited, May 6th 2011 3:02am by Anza

sadly no, i never got into an imp party. They only way i got merits was by leveling monk for bird parties then using the mopo on pup. So I never knew about amnesia blocking it.

I did notice some other things about our ranged attack that I am going to parse this morning.

Ranged attack depends directly on str. I noticed some 400+ ranged attack hits last night with 3 str atma on and they werent crits so here are my tests. On mandy in ter. n=20 on each average.

RA: no atma
205 dmg

with VV:
319

with sa:
377

sa+vv
420

sa+vv+roaring
450

About 4 am, that was my first thought as well when they wouldn't aggro to stay and heel, but then hit snarl immediately after and got aggro.

Well bite my tongue. I truely don't remember that at all or properly never noticed it. Then again I didn't level pup during that age anyways.(Greater Colibri pup)

How about a R.acc atma? Altough I can only think of Drifter, which also provides Ratt and we don't really want that.
Maybe something with AGI (Gnarled Horn?) will provide slightly more racc? Dunno if AGI>Racc works on Automatons too but I assume so?



Uh... why Turbo Charger? If you're deploying at distance (and you should, shouldn't you?) why does it matter to have Turbo Charger up? Haste does nothing for ranged attacks.
While instead to keep damage down I was thinking we could force some maneuvers to make him use low tier WS, or maybe Inhibitor. Would be good to see low damage stuff go off instead of Armor Piercer, no?

Think I'm gonna try it with Pallid Percy, wonder if his spells would do too much damage to my automaton :x Currently my ranged skill is uberlow, think in the range of 250.
Have a few +racc items (earring, necklace, uhm... ACP body too? Or was that Racc? Oh and AF3+2 legs of course)

I capped my magic skill using The Afflictor trick (took around 28hrs of AFKing, started at uhm 230ish maybe.
Don't think I have any PDT piece for automaton lol
Well I do have Ducal Guard Atma, but I don't see the point, my auto is gonna stay at range anyway so he won't get hit by physical hits but just magic, and no, sadly no MDT gear either.

Will try one of these days when I'm bored, I'm really underskilled and having issues skilling up in XP pts. Got like uhm 2 levels in a 4+ hours XP pt before last patch.

exactly, since the recasts are now separate, the puppet can cast enfeeble, gather hate and melee the mobs to death now.

For magic skilling, I recommend getting a percolator if you have a lot to go, and use the whm puppet then just farm and deploy it so it casts buffs on you and debuffs on the mob, while keeping water maneuvers up. You should get a reasonable rate of skill ups that way! Not afk skilling, but it's not a bad way to skill magic either.

so this is is the first time i thought of this and excuse me if i'm slow but, isnt this attachment the only attachment that becomes worthless once we are done with skilling up :/, i can't think about any other attachment that becomes complelty wothless, as in it has NO ABSOLUTE USE whatsoever. (excluding of course "the one attachment that shall not be named")

Edited, Jan 12th 2012 1:35pm by KaynofTitan

Just like to add here, while I was trying the beaudeaux skill up trick my automaton got down to ~100mp and from then on it only ever cured and cursna'd me so the crawler stayed on me until I capped out my magic, so try letting your maton run low on mp before keeping dark maneuvers up

it is defenetly a valid option, im just quite curious as the reasoning behind adding an attachment that so easly can become completly and utterly useless. i think the skill up part should have come as a side bonus, like "increases skil ups" and another entry with another use for it, so when you are capped you still may have a reason to equip it. just my humble opinion.

That's an interesting idea...

How about this: once you hit capped skill, Percolator gives additional automaton melee/magic/ranged skill. Say, 5/10/15/20 skill with 0/1/2/3 active water maneuvers. Would be kind of like player skill merits. Maybe it could only apply if you're also max level, or scale down for lower level players (just like merits obtained on another job do now).

It certainly would be a welcome change to have future updates change the attachment to have some use. Maybe it's not that far-fetched to believe S-E would do it too, since over time more and more players are going to exhaust the usefulness of the attachment.

I personally bought a Percolator when I scored one cheap, mainly because not having 100% attachments irritated me. Can't say I don't like it for working on capping &#^& ranged skill though.

Remember too that if you think it isn't worth the gil to buy a Percolator, getting the drop is really no different since you can easily sell the drop for gil. It's not "free" when you get the drop, since installing the attachment means you're giving up the opportunity cost of whatever the current market price of the attachment is.