Valor SurcoatFollow

I am amazed, albeit happy, that a discussion on body pieces has managed to so far progress without resorting to childish comments or anything of the sort. ^^

Refresh has increasing returns, the more Refresh you have available, the more MP per minute you are gaining, and obviously the more curing you can do. I do not really think that is up for argument.

Regarding food, I do tend to eat Dorado Sushi for the ACC and Enmity, and that helps a lot in mitigating the ACC loss from using a non-acc body piece. The attack and subsequent attack gain from STR on Ares does help in not hitting anything for 0s.

I cannot really say anything beyond what HanktheTank stated, that was a very good summation of Ares in my opinion.

Just some musings that I can think of are below:

I have only had mine for a few weeks, but I have to say that I consider it worth the effort that I put into it. (Which was considerable, I am not rich in this game by any means and it took a lot of effort on my part, and a lot of help by my friends, to upgrade it.) This does not even account into the amount of time that my Salvage group and I put into doing Assaults, learning Salvage, and doing Salvage over and over three to four times a week.I would not have put all this effort into something that I consider no better than something I can buy off the AH for 500-600k. (Going price for VCloak last I checked)

Carrying meds is certainly something that I would expect of people, but to play devils advocate here, personally I find myself pretty full, inventory wise, by the time I grab my MDB gear, Idle gear, Enmity gear, Shield gear, Food, Tools, Warp, Reraise, Sneak/Invis, pop items, etc. Being able to have plenty of Refresh (which Ares helps with) without needing to leave important pieces of gear at home to carry MP meds helps in that regard.

As an LS, we ensure that our tank PTs are well supported. This means plenty of Refresh and Haste, and proper healers. As part of that, our tanks make sure that they are managing their MP smartly, and another tick of Refresh just lets us use that much more MP for Enmity gain, no more and no less. Burning up all of my MP with no means to get it back quickly would be pretty ineffective.

I do not think that Ares is by any means a required piece of gear. It is a very useful body piece for PLD, and it does allow you to change up your gear and playstyle. Personally, having tanked the things that we do about four million times, we are at the point that it gets boring, and being able to move from a traditional tank role to a tanking damage dealer has really helped keep me interested. Ares helps in this role because it is a large chunk of DD stats in one slot, allowing me to use another DD slot on my head. (versus using a VCloak).

And that's all most gear in this game is, a small upgrade or sidegrade, or the ability to alter your gear slightly for small improvements or slightly different strategies.

Well put NCC, I would agree that Ares is not a bad piece of equipment. It's just of my opinion that it's not all quite that amazing as some posters made it out to be. So much in that they are throwing out other pieces of equipment? Which was my orginal gripe. At least as far as larger NM's are concerned.

Sub-events, or diffrent style of events such as Dynamis, I could see wearing it almost full time. I feel on larger targets, you can get your accuracy and enmity out of something like Avalon, if you can't break 0, eat something like a pizza (attack with a accuracy bonus) or meat. MP can be maintained through preperation.

Coming prepared with situational gear is good, but try and keep in mind your target, and instead of bringing the swiss-army bag of stuff, bring what you're going to use. Fill up on those meds and pop them if you run yourself out.

Aye, really it boils down to playstyles and had some of the original champions of Ares had said. "This is my playstyle, I eat sushi, I have support that is steady,I don't quite have room for alot of meds, the +1 extra MP a tic is all I need, plus I spent alot of time and effort getting this." I wouldn't have had an issue to begin with!


I felt some of the newer guys were curious as to what options there are and for what situations and some posters flat said: It's all trash when you have an Ares body and I couldn't disagree more. I apologize for seeming pointed about it originally, but to me it will always be a glorified Byrnie +1!

Thats just how I work though.

Just a few distinctions I wanna point out.



I don't think cost has an impact on how good a piece is. Something being expensive doesn't make it bad, the same way it being cheap doesn't make it good. At some point we all get to a point where there is nothing more than little upgrades and we shouldn't hold the price of these small upgrades against a piece of gear.

If the rest of someone's gear is sub-par obviously they should spend that gil on upgrading their other pieces before they upgrade an ares body. But this doesn't make ares body a bad piece. It's value in helping you tank is the same no matter if it is free or if it costs 100 million gil. The order in which you upgrade things is influenced by its cost, but I don't think the value itself is. Ideally we'll the most cost effective things first, but at some point it's all lots of gil for minor upgrades.



This is incorrect for meleeing HNMs. For merits you can get a Acc heavy setup and eat meat, this will better your DoT which increases your overall damage. The focus for a DD Paladin in a merit party or limbus is DoT because that's where the majority of our damage comes from. So eating meat and taking a small hit to acc is ok, because we more than make up that loss with increased damage on our DoT which is the majority of our damage. The trade off here is worth it.

For HNMs this is not the case, we say DD but the method in which we do it very diferent from how we do it on XP mobs. In a melee HNM situations DoT is going to be very very minor part of our damage and WS is be the vast majority of it, this is the complete opposite of meleeing in a merit party or in something like Nyzul Isle. As such taking a huge hit to acc we cannot make up for thru gear options is not the best choice. When meleeing a HNM my only concern is TP gain with no consideration for my actually DoT damage. My only concern in terms of DoT damage is not hitting zero so I get TP.

The second important thing is you cannot wear Acc gear and eat meat while maintaining a decent hit rate on HNMs. I have +47 Acc in gear in addition to full sword merits and while eatting sushi I still hit around only 90% which is not capped acc. Sushi gives far more Acc than you can get thru gear.

Eatting meat and wearing Acc works for Merit parties because the mobs are lower level and sushi itself will be over kill on Acc with a good Acc setup. On level 90-95 mobs this isn't the case.

Even if I could stack enough acc gear to allow me to eat meat, it would only boosts my DoT and DoT isn't what increases my hate holding ability.. The WSs do so the focus is that.



I carry meds, and they are great in an emergency. Things like the refresh on ares body is something that makes those emergencies occur less often. If you telling me you do run into MP issues, then you should understand how valuable the refresh is. The more MP i have commign in the less likely I am to run into MP problems. Besides just because you have an ares body doesn't mean you don't carry meds and having meds doesn't mean you won't benefit from the refresh on an ares body. There is no reason why you cannot have ares body and carry meds. Neither one means you shouldn't have the other.

Then from a practical standpoint, the times I am going to need MP meds is something like the 8 man Tiamat we did the other day, and in a situation like that how many meds can you really carry? For that tiamat I was already 67/70 with my fire resist and my standard med load out. This fight took us hours, there is no way I could have carried enough meds to make up for all the MP I got from my Ares body.

Ares body like just about ever other piece of gear is an upgrade you can do without. There is nothing you can't tank in AF if you have proper support and know how to tank, but it doesn't mean we discount other gear options.

What these small upgrades do is make your life easier, make the fights safer, or allow you do it with less people. The cost may be prohibitive to you, and that's perfectly acceptable, but once again the cost has nothing to do with how good the item in question is.

Aegis is very expensive, and there is nothing I need an Aegis to do, but I still want one, I am working on one, and I don't consider it a bad piece of gear just because it cost an obscene amount of gil and doesn't allow me to do anything I couldn't do before or has cheaper options that aren't as good.



I really think you should try it. You would be surprised at how little MP you really need to keep your hate capped once you get there. Then you won't need your meds as often and you'll even kick in some damage as well to speed up kills. This opens the door to more small man kills. If you can combine a tank/Main healer/DD into one slot there is a lot of things you can do with a much smaller amount of people.

For me that's the big draw of pushing the limits of my gear sets. I don't need a great tank set to tank Cerberus in an alliance, with a full alliance we have had Dark Knights tank him. I push my gear sets cause sometimes we want to claim/kill with 6. These are the situations where all the gil and work our members put into these minor upgrades for their gear sets really gets a chance to shine and make a difference in what we can accomplish.

Sincerely,
Hankthetank

Quoted for emphasis.

To elaborate, while I will agree with Asdrabael that using Meat is unacceptable for PLD on HNMs, there's no reason to bash people for tanking Sky Gods and ZNMs. They drop gear that people can put to good use, hence there is a need for a lot of players to fight them to this day.

Just because you don't, doesn't meant nobody does, and doesn't mean that they don't need some advice or tips about DD tanking them.

I agree with just about every technical point that you make about PLD, but you come off as a real douche most of the time trying to get your point across, compared to posters like HanktheTank and several others who manage to convey their thoughts maturely.




Edited, Mar 14th 2009 7:47pm by NCCoda

Basically this. I usually eat sushi on HNMs. Esp on cerberus, where atonement is actually providing a great deal of damage to him. The times I dont eat it are if Im low manning with 4-6 ppl and I cant guarantee that ppl are going to be on the ball with cures at 4am in the morning, which Ill pop a carb and see how it goes. Generally from experience however Ive seen that sushi would of still been the better way to go, unless I have a bunch of DD on it.


I have a problem with this, because it feels like if no one had said they eat sushi, Ares wouldnt/shouldnt be considered a piece to use. Yet the discussion is between Ares and Surcoat. Surcoat is not in any better position in accuracy(2only) than Ares is.

If you have to bring meds, obviously the refresh on Ares is going to help you more than the enmity on surcoat is. The enmity is nice to have at the begining of a fight, but once your hate is establish, the enmity on it isnt as potent as it was at the begining and chances are, its going to waste after a few minutes into the fight.

Ares is even better when low manning events where youll really want every tic of mp, not only that but if you enjoy soloing, chances are Ares is a better piece to have for it. Imo there are many places and events where Ares is a much better piece to have vs Surcoat. This is why many are saying that Ares is a better piece to idle/wear over most if not all body pieces.

Imo people are just underrating Ares because it has a big price tag. As hank already said, this shouldnt stop you from bettering yourself/gear.