Couple questions id like answeredFollow

Don't forget Justice sword in your list of swords that have a place for PLD.

Joyeuse wins over the ugly Mach specifically because of the 45% double attack rate. More hits = more tp = faster Atonement spam = more enmity gained than the +4 will give.

Yes, +4 is a decent chunk, but when you look at how much enmity a PLD can have already, it becomes a smaller piece of the puzzle.

Really, the only place I'd use a Mach +1 is in a kited fight where I wasn't going to be swinging at all. And even then, if I'd ever stop to deal with the mob at all, I'd prefer my joy.

Thats what I wanted to hear. Thanks.

Especially with fights where you get a sh*tton of support, Joy wins out. When I used to do Omega(I quit in April) the other PLD and I would be double SV Marched and with our haste gear we were hundred-fisting basically so that we were able to Atonement every 8-12 seconds or so. The extra damage from melee swings(were doing 20-50~ on 2leg) and the extra atonements on 4 leg(range from 300-750 depending on Colossal Blows/Pile Pitches) the PLDs were actually generating a great amount of damage. Our Limbus shell had very few melee, we basically mana burned it with BLMs,BLU,SMN with maybe like 2 melee and 2 pld.

So yeah the enmity on the chainsaw doesn't compare the the eztra damage and TP generated from Joyeuse. Only time i'd say Mac+1 would be more useful is perhaps something where you arent meleeing but aren't kiting either, like Khim, or JoL.

Excal is worthless and should never be used outside of farming and even then I'd still it's questionable whether Justice/Joy beats Excal/Joy due to the mad TP gain, Hauteclair is probably best for something where you know you'll have shadows down a lot due to AoEs(Khim for example.Omega with elegy and slow2 attacks about once every 6-8 seconds) otherwise Joy wins.

Joy is probably the best all around sword for a PLD that has Atonement other than Burtang. Justice eliminates an ammo slot.

Edited, Oct 16th 2009 3:33pm by TheHolyDragoonSeraphus

I meant Justice sucks for tanking if you have Joyeuse because of the ammo. Sword-Chucks is amazingly fun for ballista and farming however.
And I totally brain farted I.R Lance.


As for Excal endgame, if I'm single weilding I'd rather have Joy for added TP and by extension hate than an extra 200-350 damage from 10% of my hits. For most HNMs considering you're in a competent LS, damage is hardly ever an issue, but hate management can sometimes be since DD's should only be doing damage in relation to how firm the tank's hate level is. Sure you WOULD do more damage with Excal but you wouldn't have as solid hate control as if you had joytoy, and the more hate a PLD has on him, the higher the threshold for other people to dish out damage can be. The only caveat,which you pointed out,though I'm clarifying for the OP, would be timed fights with balanced parties such as Assaults,Battlefield type fights,Missions,lowman NMs etc, where hate is usually a non issue.

Joy may appear to beat Burt on paper but keep in mind most PLD's don't have capped acc on HNMs, and usually don't hit above 0 on some cases unless mega buffed/debuffing. Also Joy is only a 45% DA rate which doesn't translate into every swing DAing, or even landing,granting you tp even. So while the extra TP from Joy IS more groundbreaking than any other sword, against Burt i'd have to disagree because it has so many other benefits outweighing the DA rate. Although Burtang can't have all 3 Aftermath effects, it does have the added benefit of +10 enmity,-10% phys dmg taken and decreases enmity loss as if you had higher max HP, since CE loss from taking damage is calculated as a function of how much damage you sustained in relation to your max HP.This is definitely a boon for fights where hate becomes an issue due to enmity reset. So Burang's other benefits outweigh Joy in my opinion. Besides if you or I had Burtangs you know we'd use them for epeen. I mean come on. It's easy to say you won't use something cuz you don't have it but if you did I'm sure you would use it because of it's other features. 10 enmity is effecitvely +10% hate per action stacked on with loosing 10% less hate from phys damage AND taking 10% less phys damage. Too useful.

Edited, Oct 16th 2009 6:01pm by TheHolyDragoonSeraphus

To clear things up, the PLD in question didnt just sit by and swing at genbu, he knows how to tank. He has the correct gear to do his job and he knows how to do it.

Secondly why you keeping bringing him into the debate is beyond me. This is about you understanding that mac+1 is pretty much a kite only sword and that you should be useing a joyeuse. I'm more worried about a PLD that doesnt understand why he should be useing atonement instead of wacking a way with chainsaw.

The reason I use him as an example of why you have to change your strategy on how there is no one specific rule of play. If you can't get TP fast enough for Atonement and mages are being chased after, obviously the idea is to change your strategy and use some enmity generating tools (Flash, JAs, etc).

My whole debate is this: If your acc is so low that you get one, maybe two WS off and it is clearly not enough to hold hate for more than a few seconds since you're missing every other hit, you may want the bonus 4% from mac+1. It might not sound like a lot but thats 4% to every action you do and it adds up.

On a mob like Ultima, I've used Atonement and plenty of haste to get the job done. This is not Ultima. In sky we like to be as efficient as possible and blitz through the pops. If you want to be the tank for it, you have to come prepared to hold our own. If you don't have the acc for atonement, just use the slow and steady stacked enmity of other stuff.

You may think he's doing everything to be the perfect paladin but he's got a little growing to do, we all do. Couple of pointers: cure those around you to gain enmity. He does not do this at all. In fact we get tells asking why he's just sitting around whiffing like mad without trying to cure DDs.

As far as kiting in Mac+1, I don't. I kite in earth staff and other damage reducing gear (and/or elemental gear for magic damage reduction purposes) and I have macros that gear swap in that generates more enmity for all my enmity actions. Only when I stop kiting do I stop with the gear swaps on the top row equipment list.

Not all players are equal. In fact everyone's gear setup and merits are probably different. Your spam tells debating the atonement > all stemmed from your friend the PLD running off upset when the leaders of our shell agreed to have him change to what we normally do instead of let him continue with his obviously failing experiment at the cost of our hard work.

The debate I'm trying to address is this, while Atonement is a great enmity generating tool, if you aren't generating the TP fast enough nor are you generating the enmity that makes Atonement great, it might be a good idea to use the pre-atonement strategies and just stack that 4% as much as you can.

Most people I know (including myself) open with a 300tp Spirits Within and then just kite the thing around. I don't even full time a paddle. If I'm kiting, I'm using an earth/IR. lance and macroing in the paddle for JAs/spells. Flash every 25 seconds. JA when they're up.

What was his sub? /nin? If so, he should dump his Turtle gear and geared for accuracy/haste. Macro in shield skill, turtly stuff for recasts or when they're down IF you decide to straight tank him. (Which is more trouble than it's worth)

ANY time you're swinging for the purpose of TP gain and/or damage overall, Joy will destroy Mac. Destroy. There is really no argument here. It's not even remotely close for total enmity gain given a good TP build.

Idling/swinging in +4 enmity does next to nothing.
+4 enmity from the sword during JAs/Cures is minuscule compared to the damage output/tp gain of a 45% double attack.

As a frame of reference, 1280 flash with (estimated) 30 enmity = 1644 VE. With 34 = 1715 VE... a 71 point difference. Or 1-2 sword swings, depending on damage per swing.

Sure, if for some reason you can't build TP on the mob, (and you still need to face it) Mac may be a better alternative.

If you're having ANY problems with the turtle (the mob, not the pld), there a problem far, far beyond a joy/mac debate. But... back to that debate.



Quoted for reference. I agree with what you're saying. Just elaborating.

If you aren't generating TP fast enough, and you're TRYING to generate it...
Change your gear/support. With the mob in question, Genbu... you can gain TP on his sluggish ass incredibly fast with just about any weapon with decent gear/support.

Mac has it's place... but again NOT for TP gain and/or damage. Ever. Ever.
If you happen to get 100tp with your paddle and you DON'T do 700+ Atonements (barring mob's resistances), you're doing something incredibly wrong.

Now you're turtling up, stacking on enmity.. and STILL not capping hate.



If that was the case, he should have been able to go into the fight with NO weapons and still held hate, unless other members of the party WANTED to strip it. People hold hate with nothing but an Earth Staff all the time.



Edited, Oct 18th 2009 2:58pm by johnnykrysys

Why is this still being debated? It should be one of those no-brain issues thats immediately obvious to everybody.

This was genbu. GENBU. We're debating HNM tanking methods over some blm being killed by genbu.

And saying excalibur sucks is one of the most ignorant things you can say. Excalibur will beat out joyeuse for damage hands-down on any HNM that's not mostly immune to the add effect (ixion for example). The extra hate becomes mostly irrelevant because unless you're getting constantly hate reset by something, your hate should be capped within the first 4 minutes with either weapon. After that, joyeuse extra hate stops having any effect (you can keep capped with capped flash recast and meleeing with a non-joy sword) and the only comparison between the 2 is raw damage which Excalibur wins.

The main part is "atonement spam." When I tank Genbu I do Spirits Within to start and by the time the second Atonement goes off, there isn't time to get a second atonement before the mob is down. One atonement is far from spam. Not having an issue with hate is exactly what I'm talking about. Most of us do not have any problems holding hate in Sky. Bankim did. It was clear that him as main tank did not work out. Having him throw a fit saying he did all the right things since he used his joyeuse while the other paladins who held hate are in the wrong is retarded. You can claim you're the best paladin out there with your awesome Joyeuse atonement strategy but at the end of the day you couldn't hold the mob, you couldn't tank it and it was like you were invisible. You basically wasted everyone's time and could've wasted our pops. Alobont, you don't seem to care about the pops that could've been wasted or the EXP that was wasted due to "testing." Guess what, your theories work on paper or on forums but in the end you get an F because your theory failed and he couldn't hold hate.

Alobont: I was trying to leave peoples names out of it since I assumed this is why you strayed from the main forum that Quetzalcoatl people view but since you've already named names, there is no need for me to hold back.

Bankim trying to tank with Atonement to start and thinking that would generate the amount of enmity he needed when that was simply not the case. Atonement is based on enmity and when you do such low damaging atonements and generally slow building to it anyway, it's not working the same way that everyone else is talking about. For the most part people use it on mobs that you have plenty of time to build hate. If you don't realize that by now maybe you should try to join more endgames and take a back seat to how things in game instead of just reading forums and thinking you're a god. Like I said prior, you need to figure out why something works and not just preach that it worked from some forum. It's the same way you preached for Einherjar where your shell lost wing 1 for months on end. People were jumping ship to go to other shells because you wouldn't see reason. Losing wing 1 several times with 30+ people is a bit of a wake up call that even now you refuse to see. You still blame it on people not having come as WHM when you have PLENTY of people with 75WHM that you had come DD. You say that people just moved to other shells and it wasn't because of you or the fails from the shell for months but just that they wanted to switch. Hm, does that sound delusional at all? While that fact is a little off topic it brings light to the point that you have to realize how certain strategies will work for certain players based on skill, gear and merits. Just like in the work place, the good managers learn to deal with the strengths and weaknesses of their employees. Not all employees are equal, all have strengths and weaknesses. The same applies to players in an endgame event. You have to harness their strengths and downplay their weaknesses. That would get you the most efficiency from your team instead of just complaining you didn't have enough of x or y. Just throwing bodies at something is a very poor way of "leading."

Regarding the BLM and DD holding back in sky, when I tank it, or any of our main PLDs for that matter, we do not lose control the way the DDs/BLM chose to handle themselves. On the rare event that a BLM does however pull hate they do kite until the PLD gains it back which usually happens in the next 10 seconds. Bankim never got hate back once he lost it. Obviously our shell is unwilling to waste any more pops on his attempts to try to make a 1xx damage atonement work with his <70% acc and nearly no haste setup. Obviously he is a friend of yours if you want to defend him to the death and spam me in game to prove his 50% acc was the right way to go but most of the Sky shells on our server agree that it's insane to go that route if he's doing that so poorly. That's the real reason you brought this to this forum and PMed me on the Quetzalcoatl server forum to check this one. If you want to convert your shell to do sky, feel free. You can then have all your PLDs do Atonement only and skip Spirits within. You can wait a few minutes for Bankim to get hate capped while everyone just waits around. Our shell however, will stick to the way we do things because it works for us and allows us to clear a dozen pops of different NMs in much less time and with far fewer KOs.

Yes Einherjar didnt work out. I kknow why it didnt work, we only had 30+ people 4 times the entire time we ran. Also we never had more then 3 WHMs that could actually come WHM. I wont go in to the details but dont speak about things you dont know. I kept a roster I know who came and what jobs people had. Most everyone in that shell was new to Einherjar/End game so there was tweaking that I had to do. As said before lots on Einherjar shells struggle in the begining. Our problems where on the bosses, I tried some stuff and it didnt work or we didnt have enough DD. What we were doing was working 10+ min on bosses, but either not enough power to kill the boss, or were missing key jobs (blms on the marid).

Enough of this, if you want tod rag my name through the dirt do it on QCDN where someone will give a damn.



I know what ive seen, but once again this isnt about your shell or bankim or whatever beef you have. This post was to make you see that the Mac+1 is not a better sword over joyeuse unless your kiting really. Thats all I care about it. Is that you whom apparently have superior PLD knowledge knows what hes talking about. I dont care of bank equips bells, runs around naked and tanks /pup. I cre about you udnerstanding that atonement is a good weaponskill and your not utilizing your job to a 100% because you think 4 enmity on a chainsaw is better then a sword with a 50% double attack rating.

You could probably be partway done long prior to the quest coming out, but I'm going to talk specifically starting from scratch.

Burtgang requires getting Captain rank before you can start working on it. That requires completing EVERY Assault just to start. Assuming you win every run you do, that's still 50 missions/7 per week, or just over 7 weeks. Sure, you can save up and do 4 at a time (since you're captain), but that doesn't speed up anything but the very start. You're still roughly 7 weeks out.

Now that you're captain rank, you can start the quest.

Part I: You have to climb Nyzul and get a runic key. Getting from floor 1-100, especially if you're inexperienced, is taxing. Assuming you can clear 5 floors reliably, it'll still take 20 tags to go from Floor 1 to Floor 100. That's almost 3 weeks there.

After this, you must defeat the following mobs:

Odin. Require winning at least once in each of the three wings. Since there's a 3 day waiting period between Einherjar, this requires 9 days.

The four salvage bosses. Requires points from Assault to buy salvage permits and Nyzul specifically works against this, so you're probably not doing this at the same time as your Nyzul runs. In addition, you can only acquire one pass at a time, which means you need to go over 4 days. (Yes, you can do two in one day, but you still essentially have to wait even to do that.)

The three ground kings for ToAU. Biggest hold-up here is that you have to kill them when they're outside of Besieged. Competition isn't that fierce, so at most, you'll have to wait a few days for each one.

The assaults, the climb up Nyzul, and the 8 NMs are all time requirements. At least you can have the titles obtained from previously, but you still have a lot of time to put in.

Part II: Repeat most of the previous events to gather points to purchase items.

Balrahn's Eyepatch - Einherjar. 100,000. Assuming 2k ichor reward on average, that's still 50 Einherjars or 150 days. Assuming 10k, it's 30 days. Mileage may very greatly here according to the LS you're in.

Wyrmseeker Areuhat - Nyzul. 150,000. Assuming 1500 tokens per run (being somewhat generous here, as the one who purchases the floors gets less and it depends on how fast you can get in/through Nyzul), that's 100 Nyzul runs, or 100 days.

Assault Mission records - Repeat all 50 assaults and record status. Another 50 days that can't be done at the same time as the preceding venture.

Alexandrite - Salvage. 30,000. Mileage may vary here as well. This is also the only one you can buy outside of doing the event yourself, so you can possibly speed this up depending on the Alexandrite economy on your server.

Part III: Collect the trophies from the ZNM system. This can be a royal pain since you have to work your way up. And they're the ONLY trophies that aren't guaranteed to drop. No idea on an estimated time as I never got above Rank 2 ZNMs before I retired.

Fight Balrahn for the right to use the weapon. Easy enough task, but can only repeat once a day (I think - not really relevant given how easy this is).

Part IV: A simple walk/CS.

So, considering the different aspects of what you have to do, if you're starting from scratch, the fastest you can do it is 229 days, give or take maybe a day or four (50 (Captain rank) + 20 (Climbing Nyzul) + 9 (Einherjar to Odin) + 150 (Nyzul+Assaults)). That's close to half a year right there. Sure, cost wise, it's a LOT cheaper (just what food/gear you need for it + however much Alexandrite you buy), but the time scale is incredibly ridiculous. They also expect you to do everything End Game related to ToAU to get it. If you're not already in a shell doing some of the big things, you've got a REALLY rough road ahead. This is assuming perfect runs for everything from the beginning, and we know how likely that is.

Compare to Excalibur. The biggest thing here is the cost. Wiki lists the cost at 170-200 mil. You also need certain crafting materials and Fragmentations/Attestations to get it.

To be fair, for time requirements, you have to win each of the four Town dynamis going at best every 3 days, so 12 days. Then the climb through to Xarcabard for another 6. 18 days, and you're just missing the currency/R/E items. Much less time is required for this. And there are a lot of shells that can help you get "just the win" if you need it.

Of all of this, though, you only need a LS for wins and for the Attestation/Necropsyche/Holy Fragment. This is no different than needing shells for the ground kings/Salvage/Einherjar components, so it's mostly a wash.

The big thing is time vs. cost. For me, it was a no brainer: I had the ability to make a lot of gil in a short period of time. I had 50 mil already to go for purchasing purposes AND had a lot of people who told me they wanted me to fund their Dynamis shells (I get currency, everyone gets relic, we split the money drops). The opportunity cost for me was much lower than Burtgang was. And anyone with a Gil source has that opportunity (until SE bans them or stops the source, of course).

This is, of course, just my opinion. I really don't see Burtgang being worth the effort whereas I saw Excalibur to be much more manageable.

Short blurb on Einherjar: The final straw that I left was the day you said just bum rush the boss from the start where the week prior you pulled the zone and killed us all within like 10 minutes. Other factors? Maybe. Poor judgment on your part? Probably.

Mac+1 vs Atonement: I understand that if you have rediculously low Acc you shouldn't be using Joyeuse. Missing 1.5 times as fast won't generate the enmity you think it will. In fact I wouldn't be surprized if on one mob or another he actually only got the initial WS off from tping prior to pop and didn't even get enough TP before the mob went down. I don't know who told him it would but it's simply not the case. In fact, another pointer free of charge: if you don't trust the mages to hold back, you probably don't trust them to stun agas. Therefore if you don't have an elemental resist set, it's probably not a good idea to have an anti resist elemental set (sounds weird right? it boggled my mind too) since he was using a jelly ring and other -to elemental gear. In fact if you want to even attempt the joyeuse route, use some pizza and acc rings next time, except have him do it in your shell. No more freebies in ours.

He's pretty easy to straight tank, we've done him countless times with 7-9 people. A setup something like PLD/NIN, RDM, BRD, BLM and RDM THF and 2 random DDs. Just have your BLM Stun the Agas, and he should go down easy. You can always resort to kiting if the proverbial sh*t hits the fan, but it does make the fight go much faster if you don't kite it.

Well ZNM T4 Trophy is pretty low drop but you'll probably have less of an issue of getting that than the 30,000 alexandrites. On our server it averages around 3k an alexandrite for a total of 90 million gil. In my old ZNM shell we were seeing a trophy every 4-5 pops so it's not terrible, just a change up from 100% drop in T1-3. If you really wanted to farm trophies, you can do a low man T1-2 and then pop a T3 without issue. Most people want gear from the T3s so you could probably find a shell to help if you let their members free lot all but trophy. Then just try to T4 till you get it. If you work at it, you should be able to do it in under a year. The 90 million gil is what will stop most people. You could just farm it in salvage but generally salvage produces very low alexandrite to member distribution.

For most players though, Aegis, Excalibur and Burtgang are pretty unattainable. On that note most players would probably pick the Aegis.

As far as derail goes, it started from talking about how Atonement doesn't work if your acc is that low. You decided to make it personal which I can't say I didn't see coming since you tried to throw a s--t storm my way for telling a new recruit to change up when his setup was obviously not getting the job done. Lock this topic or not I told you since day 1, you won't convince me that having someone with 50% acc should be using Joyeuse as his only means of enmity. You also stated something about the double atonement, even other people here say you start the battle off with Spirits within and NOT atonement.

I don't usually use Joyeuse on Genbu because he counters like a mother@#%^er, and even when you do connect you can hit frequently for 0. However, in 90%+ of the cases where I'm engaging a mob, Joyeuse is the way I go.

Edited, Oct 20th 2009 10:44pm by Spoonless

Yes general blanket statements ftw. I never said using atonement as a sole means to generate hate was a good idea. I said using mac+1 for none kiting fights was a dumb idea, learn to read.

EDIT: I didn't catch the utter derail of this topic before I replied. Oops. ^^

What I got out of the whole thing...
LS, trapped in 2005 time warp, rags on 2009PLD n00b and uses his example of why 2005 tactics are superior. And Burtgang takes too f*ing long so I should probably stop saving Alexandrites...

Edited, Oct 29th 2009 7:48am by NatePrawdzik

The time sink is just insult on top of injury.