OAT or OA2-3 GreatswordFollow

Or am I doing it completely wrong and should be going for Caladbolg or Espafut?

Yep, I got one Eye and gave up. 2550 extra kills is quite a bit. Also: GDI, I already have 6 nuggets from Mikey kills.

But yet, it would be nice not to have to deal with Krabkatoa.

Edited, Aug 22nd 2010 2:29am by Paskil

Yeah, we did Vert twice and it dropped one each time. Was a royal pain even though we had 12 with 2 PLD and pretty much everything else RNG/SMN.



Or 13, guess I lied kinda.

Edited, Aug 22nd 2010 2:32am by Paskil

Just a note, the split is not 30/50/20, it is 50/30/20 as tested.

Somewhere on BG, I think.

I've seen way too much bullsh*t spread around based on poor/no testing or people "misremembering" to not ask though. :x

brb in 2320 kills with parse.

The occasionally attacks twice version of the Great Sword is the best of the three, since it still offers a relatively high base damage to it, but you gain TP quicker with it than you would the double attack. It sits between the two as far as what it offers in terms of balance between rate of TP gain and base damage, but because of that, it pulls out ahead of the other two.

I dropped and forgot more in my three years of quitting than most people have achieved and learned.

Edited, Jun 27th 2012 9:22am by lolgaxe

OAT got a huge damage boost at 90 or 95, I forget exactly, that put it back into the limelight.

But you're underrating 2-4 weapons per a pre-merit-WS paradigm, when you might have been correct. The 100% mods on both Resolution and Entropy ~

Fun fact: DRK can get just as much INT as STR btw, but then end up in more attack and accuracy with Scythe.

~ make a very staggering difference in the effectiveness of the 2-4 weapons. What neuters them in current content is twofold:

1. Proliferation of buffs in Voidwatch, wherein your 'hit build' is practically meaningless and even vanilla weapons are WSing after two rounds anyway, which exacerbates #2.

2. WS saturation at delay reductions past nominal Haste, which for DRK is already 65% (Haste spell, Gear, LR+DB)

Factor 1 compounding Factor 2 actually hurts OAT pretty drastically too, which is why Ragnarok steals the show in Voidwatch.

But outside of Voidwatch there is definitely a lowman niche for 2-4 weapons where they just shine. When your targets only have 2-3k HP in older content it becomes a matter of efficiency (instead of blowing a 3k WS on a mob with 500hp left and spending the whole next mob TPing again). The rate of WS output is staggering compared to vanilla weapons, and the WSes spammed are still 75% of the strength of Vanilla's but easily more than twice as often.

Put Endark on top of this and you're talking about a very competitive weapon.

Saying that 2-4 is 'inferior' in any way is being ignorant of the mechanics and situations where it works, or in fewer words being a "DURR VOIDWATCH IS THE ONLY EVENT IN THE GAME DURR MULTIHIT SUX" sort of player.

In the end, 2-4 Scythe is superior to 2-4 GS due to hitbuild and a huge average-rounds (aka "effective hitbuild") drop and INT being just as prolific as STR for DRK, while also powering the value of DRK's spells in lowman.

Derp harder?

If anything, not reaching fSTR cap is better for the lower base damage, if that's what you were attempting to refer to.

Otherwise no, Defense has nothing to do with Base Damage. Zilch. Nada.

The value of OAT GS is that it doesn't WS saturate nearly as much when you have Haste+Marches or Embrava, while still cranking out obscene numbers of Resolutions. Base damage is even less relevant with the obscene amounts of WSC being stacked by these WSes. What may look to you like a 50% loss in base damage is actually only a 25% loss or less after WSC and fSTR are tacked on (even fSTR caps have a base value, +8, that remedies much of the loss).

Just for kicks, with 170 STR, which is 144 WSC, OAT GS has 19 fSTR capped, for 267 base damage on Resolution. 2-4 still has 14 fSTR capped for 214 base WS damage, there's your mere 25% loss in WS damage. Ratio is a non-factor. Problem is OAT->2-4 is only a 42.8% increase in hits over time, and WS Saturation easily eats the rest even at nominal haste.

This is why you chose OAT as your GS: With Resolution GS is your better 'raw damage' weapon, especially meaning you're more likely to encounter the high haste situations that neuter 2-4.

2-4 Scythe has a different hook: 5-hit with 4-hit round potential makes for a sharp drop in effective hitbuild. Even still it averages 2 hits per round for 2 rounds per cycle when you don't get that ~12.5% single-round proc.

So yes, you're derping pretty hard. The reason you don't bring 2-4 to Legion or Voidwatch is a matter of WS Saturation and the ridiculous buffs giving pretty much any weapon an effective 2- or 3-hit build, not somehow because of low base damage It is a matter of mechanics, not stats, but some or most people only understand stats and only want more of them. People use Ragnarok because of Resolution being sexy, the non-Aftermath Occasional 2.5x Damage, Base Damage (fairly irrelevant for reasons given), +40 Accuracy, and +14% crit rate (nice, but it's only ~+36% damage when you crit at capped 2-hander attack) and because Voidwatch favors vanilla weapons so much. Watch Voidwatch die off and OAT will start topping Rag easily because of how Reso's WSC overbalances base weapon damage and Attack+Accuracy fall off in need.

Really though, people are using Ragnarok because it's the f*ck of the month and can be practically bought these days, while OAT actually takes work. The era of 'Buy a DRK' (when LS-abusing RDMs would snatch up DRK gear and it was a gamble if they'd show up in Adaberk/Homam or 5/5 Abyss to MJSP parties) has returned.

You're stuck in the pre-Merit-WS era when Base Damage was a much larger component of WS output. Protip: It isn't anymore. 2-4 isn't just for 'fodder' mobs, but any lowman content with limited buffs and/or multiple targets.

OAT GS, 2-4 Scythe. A DRK with only one weapon is retarded and/or useless.

Edited, Jun 28th 2012 5:33am by Raelix

Your statement is not just 'not entirely accurate', but completely inaccurate, misrepresentative, and misleading. Base damage has nothing to do with nor any interaction with any mobs' stat difference, between a 'hard' mob and a 'soft' mob, at all.

I don't care what your position around here is, making a blathering and false statement and then admitting you know nothing of the context just make my guidance harder to express.

As it stands I can't tell if you're responding to the single-post User's necro from a month ago or to a two-year-old thread, predating Resolution and the upgrade to 2-4, because the basis of your statements seems to better match the latter...

You might find I'm a little defensive of this little corner of the site, so I'm sorry if I come off a little vicious. There are a lot of moron DRKs out there to deal with, and we've done well to keep out the braindead cookie-cutter Ragnarok+/WAR Voidwatch-ONRY mentality so far.

It's no relation to the mob at all*, but instead of the buffs received. You don't describe the mob as 'high defense' because really every weapon of a type should have the roughly the same STR and Attack, so the mob has the same relative defenses to any of them. What differs is two things: Delay, and Hitbuild. By this I mean final Round Delay after Haste, Dual Wield, etc, and Hitbuild as in Effective Hitbuild and is excluding the WS hit.

*Execpt when it has less HP than your WS deals, but that's an efficiency concept I've yet to pen an editorial on.

Round Delay and Effective Hitbuild (EHB) are very specific concepts that are the difference between a Vanilla weapon and a Multihit weapon within my sphere of concepts. What it boils down to is: A low EHB is actually damaged in effectiveness by a reduction in Round Delay. The lower your EHB, the more your Round Delay results in you eating more WS delay.

A 2-4 or OAT weapon serves to reduce EHB directly without affecting or really requiring a reduction in Round Delay. Multi-Attack Traits and Gear serve the same purpose, albeit smaller reductions due to probabilistic influences.

Additions of Haste, Dual Wield, or Martial Arts serve to reduce Round Delay.

What this boils down to:
EHB * Round Time + 120 WS delay = Cycle time

What happens is the ratio of your 120 seconds of WS time delay to your EHB * Round Time gets smaller and smaller but can only ever approach 120 Delay (two seconds). It's a mathematical limit; oh the rant's I've dropped about the difference between a 'cap' and a 'limit' in this context. When fSTR, Attack, and Accuracy are capped, you then increase damage by decreasing Cycle Time per the factors of Round Time and EHB.

What Multihit weapons do, OAT and 2-4, is trade a portion of their Base Damage for a reduction in Effective Hit Build. They're already playing this game of reducing Cycle Time to increase damage at the minimalized penalty of Base Damage due to the high WSC of Resolution or Entropy. Exactly in the vein of stacking Double Attack, this game can only go so far (approaching the flat WS Delay value of 120). It's a 'diminishing returns' concept: the more you reduce EHB and Round Delay, the less effective doing so is because it has a valued Limit.

You probably already understand this concept as 'WS Saturation', but there's more to it.

The EHB of a 5-hit 2-4 weapon is something like 2.63. Naturally you can't be WSing after '2.63 rounds exactly', this comes from a probabilistic set of completing a cycle in 1, 2, 3, or 4 hits when 5-hitting. A vanilla weapon 5-hitting with no multiattack traits or gear has an EHB of 4.0, naturally, this means that 2-4 is a 34.25% reduction (1 - 2.63 / 4) in EHB over a Vanilla weapon, but this does not correlate directly to WS rate due to WS Delay. Instead you get

528 * 2.63 + 120 = 1508 delay
528 * 4 + 120 = 2232 delay
1 - 1508 / 2760 = 32.4% reduction in cycle time from EHB.with zero haste.

Now is when the problem starts. Let's just throw DRK's native 50% haste at both.

264 * 2.63 + 120 = 814 delay
264 * 4 + 120 = 1176 delay
1 - 814 / 1440 = The cycle time decrease from EHB is only a 30.8% reduction in cycle time.

And the extreme, capped 80% haste:

105.6 * 2.63 + 120 = 398 delay
105.6 * 4 + 120 = 542 delay
1 - 398 / 648 = EHB now only contributes a 26.6% reduction in cycle time.

So from 0% to 50% haste, 2-4's EHB effect on cycle time loses only about 5% of it's effectiveness, but from 50% to 80% loses another 14% to about 18% just being wasted. The problem therein is you're now spending 30% of your time WSing and hardly have time to swap gear (I can attest to this).

Now let's say you have +45 Save TP from Discipline and COR (I wasn't looking forward to this part when I started this diatribe). This was much worse when it stacked with your WS return, literally anything had a 2-hit build,

Excuse me while I recalculate EHB of 2-4 (40/30/20/10 distribution)...

1 round - 0.3 (4 hits or 3 hits)
3 rounds - .4 * .4 = 0.16 (can only be with two consecutive singles)
2 rounds - Difference of 0.54 (easy way to work out single->double and double->single permutations)

1.86 EHB, 4-hit (or +45 Save TP) 2-4 weapon. Notice it's nothing like 2.63 - 1.

50% native haste:

264 * 1.86 + 120 = 611 delay
264 * 3 + 120 = 912 delay
1 - 611 / 912 = 33% reduction in cycle time from EHB. You can already see where high buffs are starting to hurt.

80% capped haste:

105.6 * 1.86 + 120 = 316 delay
105.6 * 3 + 120 = 437 delay
1 - 316 / 437 = 2-4's superior EHB is now only a measly 27.7% reduction in Cycle Time.

All told, with the the native 50% haste, a 30.8% reduction in cycle time from EHB results in 44.5% more Weaponskills (1 / (1 - 0.308)). Get full Voidwatch buffs and you're now only getting 38.3% (1 - (1 - 0.277)) more WSes, 15% less 'gain'.

That is actually a big-ass change, because consider that 70%-80% of the 2-4's damage is going to be from WSing. It actually loses 10.5%-12% (0.15 * 0.7 to 0.8) of it's total damage output automatically from gaining buffs! (Yes, that is the post-buffs damage that is being affected by that amount, I had to chew on the concept for about an hour to be sure)

That is why bringing a 2-4 weapon to 'hard' mobs is a bad idea: Interaction of extreme buffs with the advantage of a multihit weapon It has nothing to do with the mob being attacked, but the buffs received! It is incredibly detrimental to 2-4's advantages to so greatly reduce Cycle Time with other EHB reductions or reductions in Round Delay, let alone both at once as with Voidwatch buffs.

So again, it has nothing to do with the mob, but buffs garnered via the event and situation.