Recent WAR Gear Endgame Sets QuestionFollow

Full Perle is your baseline set for high level. As its practically free, there's basically no excuse not to have that or better.

On a piece-by-piece basis, it's good, but there's better. For example, even common items like Dusk Gloves or Walahra Turban are better TP items due to higher Haste%, on an individual per-slot comparison. With Perle, the pro/con (as a TP set) is the set bonus. On the one hand, the extra 5% Haste you get from wearing the full set makes it rather competitive with much harder to obtain mix and match sets. On the other, you have to wear the full set for that bonus, and so when you inevitably get better pieces, you kind of need to have a plan for some of the other slots too.

Happily, for WARs, the Empyrean +1 armor is a very nice boost over older items, and the seals for it can all be obtained from relatively easy quests (though you may need to repeat them a lot, burning many a traverser stone in the process). The head is a nice WS piece, and the legs/feet are very good TP items, topped only by the +2 versions.

For a TP set, you can easily complement the Empyrean legs/feet with your choice of 'berk (or Store TP body if necessary), a Walahra Turban, and Dusk gloves to net a better overall set than full Perle. Other slots would likely be similar regardless. This is what I'm currently using for /SAM, but several slots will get juggled if/when I get some other items to drop.

WS, Perle remains solid - it's not quite as good as Hecatomb, but the hands/feet are solid surrogates. Head you have Empyrean, but that's basically just a better version of Perle.
This is my current KJ set.

'course, if the trends follow, the next Abyssea expansion will bring us the Empyrean body and hands, which will likely become the preferred item for one of those sets.

I don't have an Adaberk, or I'd use that. Otherwise, 'berk+1 is going to be better if you need the accuracy, but Perle is marginally better if you don't due to the crit rate and slightly bigger STR boost. I have a Hauberk+1 as well, but have been defaulting to the Perle lately. Not a real big deal either way, IMO.

Einherjar has a lot to do with that.

Maybe, but even then, Nidhogg only pops every 5 days or so, with a chance for the abjuration. No matter how easy he gets, that'll still be the case.

If enough groups are doing Einherjar, you could see several abjurations introduced to a server in a given day. In a month, you could have more E. Body abjurations introduced than would have come from the Aery in a year. Combine that with a wider variety of shells/people who do Einherjar versus camp kings, and you have a much greater number of people walking around in body abjurations.

so for the most part, wah/adaberk/dusk/byakkos/aurum is still the best layout?

all good points, ty. does ares trump adaberk though?

Depends on what for.

There are usually three basic concerns with a TP set for 2h builds: ACC, Haste, and Store TP

You ideally want to be parsing at capped accuracy, which is ~95%.

You ideally want to have 26% Haste in gear listed. The actual cap for gear haste is 25%, but the math that the game uses is fractions of 1024. While the cap is 256/1024, the description on most items is actually slightly exaggerated from what the actual percentage is. An example from the Wiki would be the Walahra Turban, which is 50/1024 or (4.8828125%) haste, not the full 5% that the item says. The long and short is that honest-to-goodness capped gear haste means 26% from item descriptions.

Your overall damage over time benefits greatly if you can cut an attack round off of your trek to 100% TP, and so, STP can be very relavent.

While certainly beneficial, things like STR or ATT are less important during TP'ing than those things. Ares' Body is heavy on those, but lacks basically any of the real key stats that'd make it truly valuable for TP'ing in. If you have all your other bases covered? Maybe. But the body slot tends to be pretty key. You can get some of the biggest chunks of accuracy or STP there, or even Haste now.
It's better use is solely as a WS piece, though likely not Raging Rush (at least). Perhaps, in a past life, the Refresh could help keep a Rune Chopper latent going...but the base damage on that is falling further and further behind, with more and more available Haste gear.

Most Salvage gear really needs an upgrade to keep it more than a much-harder-to-get sidegrade to something else, but SE seems to have forgotten about updating pre-Abyssea content/items except Mythics and (most) Relics.

With RR Atma WAR is sitting at 54% crit rate, more with various gear. Add to that a 3 hit crit WS with an even higher chance to proc, as well as new traits and gear affecting how much damage crits do... no, Pole Grip cannot keep up.

STR and ATT are still nice, just not the first concern. Adaberk has a very nice mix of everything, at a nice level. Haub +1 is a little less, but still along the same lines. They're balanced pieces, as opposed to something like Nocturnus for ACC, or things like Ares or Grim for STR/ATT.

Askar or Aurum are good if, and only if, you need the STP to make an x-hit build work. This may become more relevant over time given that the majority of Magian weapons have lower delay than had been typical - though more STP gear has also been put in.

To a point, it's not the slot to worry about. AH options - Perle, Haub/+1 - are solid, and very cheap these days. Making anything else really work well in the slot takes having harder to get gear in a number of other slots.

Timarli or Dusk +1 would be the top end at the moment for TP'ing. Though again, with the stats on Ravager's +1/+2 so far, there's a fair chance that the hands will wind up replacing something too.

Dusk isn't hard to work around. Macro in something else when you run. NQ is very cheap now. Perle is alright, but the extra percent of Haste on NQ Dusk is preferable.

You're right in that Relic aren't good for TP'ing. They're pretty much not worth using for much of anything now, once you can use Perle.

try checking rolanmart from time to time, someone might have, but it will cost a few mil.

So whats the current hot set for WS's?

Yeah Claymore is the grip I was thinking of. I just barely dusted off my WAR long enough to get 85 and haven't changed any of my gear yet. Having looked into what's out there a little more I'd say some kind of 5 hit with one of the Magian great axes would be best, while trying to maintain high Haste. At this point it's probably best to just keep trying to upgrade af3 and Magian weapons while waiting for the next update.