BST on the short listFollow

1) yes, the straight reward+ gear caps at +50% however, MND is also a mod for it, so after you hit 50% the mnd will still stack it up, and that looks like a decent reward set.

2) you also have the stout servant trait, which w/ ferine quijotes +1 or 2 will give another 9% damage reduction. Anwig Salade is reward for finishing Moogle Kupo d'Etat, and you can get 10% pet damage reduction from this. Thats 39% physical damage reduction w/ the axes. 2% from shepherd's chain and 3% available from oneiros cappa, so grand total from gear can get up to 44% so far.

3) 3rd atm ais alwayws situational. All of them are really, but for solo work RR and DG are pretty standard.

4)Yes, Yuly can stick th3, die and be replaced. However if mob goes passive for a time, you'll lose th. Also, Yuly can often tank most mobs w/ better damage. EVA tanking is fantastic. Slug wins over yuly when there is alot of non-wind magical spam, especially water or darkness. Slug has fantastic physical and magical resistance, great tp moves, and WEAK melee hits. I think you only need slug for those specially hard to tank NM's. Shucks, I don't even need DG for many abyssea NM's anymore. I kill alot faster w/ RR and Apoc, or VV.

5. The most standard one is probably Call Beast, since we are so dependent on jugs at high levels.
You will hear lots of disagreements about the rest. Some will swear by Beast Affinity Merits, though I am not interested in them, they are useful. Some go for reward or sic/ready recast. I like my killer effects merits. I also use both feral howl and killer instinct. However, you can universally say tame recast merits are worthless.

Welcome to BST :)

1) Answered perfectly by Xilk (tho remember AF body just adds different debuff removal not an increase to the heal. Sometimes you would want to use relic body as well for different status removal, wiki will have the list)

2) 2x Magian axes (-20% physical or magic), Anwig Salad (-10% all), Oneiros Cappa (-3% physical), Shepherd's Chain (-2% all), Ferine Quijotes +2 (-7% all total from Stout Servant) and Selemnus Belt (3% magic) will give you the -42% physical

3) As you stated, Ducal Guard + Razed Ruins will be your bread and butter. However with 95 and ladybug/slug you rarely will need Ducal Guard outside of Heroes zones. But as a good rule of thumb it will always probably be 2 offensive atmas and 1 defensive, with the ratio changing depending on the mob's difficulty.
Offensive: Razed Ruins, Apocalypse, Sanguine Scythe, Voracious Violet
Defensive: Ducal Guard, Future Fabulous, Savior/Demonic Lash/Aquatic Ardor, Stronghold/Vicissitude/Mounted Champion, Zenith. As for the elemental resistance atmas, I would probably still use Vicissitude over them until you get Future Fabulous.

4) Slug is good at tanking but kills EXTREAMLY slowly. As Xilk said, Ladybug will probably be your go to pet in anything with a hint of difficulty (If a Ladybug soloing Vrtra tells you anything about how good Ladybug's evasion tanking is) Slug would be your choice when things cast non-wind, and you can use DD pets like rabbit or tiger on visions/scars mobs.

5)Call Beast and Reward x5 are pretty much standard. The tier 2s get murky though with all of them being pretty bad. I did 5x Beast Healer (for obvious reasons) and 5x Feral Howl (to have a ranged pulling ability on a 5 minute timer). At 99 Beast Affinity may be viable again. I also heard Killer Instinct is worth having 1 point in though I'm not 100% on the resoning behind it as I've never found it particularly useful.
The talk of merits should be postponed atm tho since SE is doing so much Merit overhaul soon.

All in all though you seem to know what you are doing and should do well. Good Luck

I only use VV for lulush or hobs. Because when you have rr and maybe SS on also, footkick spam is very good. The kill style for normal mobs is similar to being a war/sam in that, you enter the fight w/ alot of tp, slam a big WS and you don't take many hits to finish it off.

for bst, its you send lulush, tell her to footkick for 2k, by the time that's done you are engaged and hitting rampage for 2.5~3.5k. (usually in visions zones)
and any normal mob has maybe 20% hp left. you are not doing alot of melee tp when you kill that fast.

Problem with using GH over Sanguine Scythe is on probably all Visions and Scars and most of Heros, you should be hitting the crit hit cap. I see GH actually being a replacement for RR when more defense is needed, not a replacement for Sanguine Scythe when more damage is needed.

I would decouple that into two macros for several reasons.

1. You may need to Snarl at times other than right after your Rampage. That means you'll want a separate Snarl macro anyway, so you're not saving yourself a macro slot.

2. You may want to Rampage without Snarling your hate at times. For instance, you may want to hold onto your hate for an impending jug pet swap.

3. Having a /wait line in your macro means hitting any other macro will disrupt it. If you want to swap in WS gear, and swap back to TP gear (which may include some -PDT stuff for your pet), you have to wait several seconds until you're sure that Snarl has fired.

I do have a /wait line in my WS macros. But it's only there so that I can echo my TP return so I can judge how my accuracy was for the WS. But seeing the TP return isn't critical. If I miss it because I had to spam some other macro immediately after the WS, it's no big deal.

Ok, got my bst to 71, and I'm in abyssea.

Thank you for suggesting decoupling snarl and ws, it has made a huge difference. I've picked up my ogre gloves and bison warbonnet.

Got the relic hands and feet in my bag (got the hands years ago just in case I would level bst, I still think that was one of the best random ls point purchases I've ever made, and I didn't take them until I was sure that no current bst wanted them).

I don't have the gil for the reward axes yet. Going to have to find a way to raise about 750k to pick up a pair of them.

Something I've been wanting to ask: Pet Poultice seems to be losing some of it's luster at these higher levels, both due to small hp gain and the fact that it makes reward recast timer gear useless. What pet foods do you all actually use on a regular basis?

Pre-thanks.

Zetas 80% of the time, etas 20%

Sound like you're on right track. Really, the biggest difference you will see in terms of how effective you are will probably be Call Beast + Reward merits and Magian axes + AMK head. You will get much more bang for your buck going after these things first.

Thanks for all the help in this thread. I've got a few more questions, please:

1) Is Dawn Mulsum affected in any way by reward gear? I'm guessing no.

2) Is there a preferred DD pet? I'm thinking either the tiger or the rabbit.

Pre-thanks.

Edited, Dec 7th 2011 9:49am by Thydonon

Bst 78, and I just wanted to let my follow leveling bsts know that as you are leveling your crit is not even close to capped. Gnarled Horn is your friend.

From what wiki seems to say, it gives a 5% boost to def. and not a 5% -pdt. Someone better at math in this game can chime in and state which one is better, but I remember reading that 5% -pdt is a whole lot more damage reduced than a 5% defense boost.

Every bit helps though, so unless you lose much by using these gloves compared to other gloves bonuses, it can't hurt to wear them in place of other pieces with no immediate bonus.

I don't think bazubands gives a 5% boost in def. It seriously needs retesting. However, I don't have them, so I won't be testing anytime soon. I did chat w/ one collgues who was doing some testing where it seemed they were action like 1 or 2% -pdt.. but thats not confirmed. It would be easy to test however. -pdt is much easier to test that def bonus. for def bonus, I would want a partner in ballista to test.

oh, and 5% -pdt is way better than 5% boost in defense in all but the most extreme situations. You won't find a situation where +5% def is better

A quick 'n' simple test would be to fight Sabotenders/Cactuars in Altepa Desert, with and without the Beast Bazubands. :D Just gotta copy down the 1000 Needles damage.

Defense and VIT have never had an impact on 1000 Needles. Otherwise, 1000 Needles wouldn't consistently do 1000 damage. That's the entire reason 1k Needles is used for tests like this.

Another bit for the leveling bst, meet my good friend, Lucky Lulush. He is available at 75 and caps at 95 (or maybe 99, we won't really know for certain until it goes live), which is a good deal higher than the sheep which stops at 86. Lucky Lulush has, among other abilities, Foot Kick and Wild Carrot.

And he is cheap to make, just like Gerard is. Don't pay 20k on the auction house if you have cooking leveled at all.

Water Crystal
1 Snoll Arm
3 San d'Orian Carrots

If you buy the carrots at a vendor and the snoll arms and crystals off the AH, you're looking at (on Asura) about 18k for 12 synths. This recipe caps at around cooking 34, and yields 4/6/8/10 jugs on NQ/HQ1/HQ2/HQ3.

So, if you just NQ all the synths you get four stacks of jugs for 18k, figure 4.5k/stack. If you buy it on the auction house you pay 20k for one stack.

Edited, Dec 12th 2011 10:40am by Thydonon

9k/stack on bahamut... I don't think rabbits have low hp at all. Def, I don't have any comment on. I haven't tried to measure that, but the hp values are known and rabbit is solid, not low, not high, but there is a groups of many pets that have the exact same hp at all levels. Rabbit is right in there.

the tp moves are really great and versatile. I use lulush as my default pet. A radial AoE that does good physical damage. A single-targed physical hit that Crits (hallelujiah!) wild carrot which is a a very nice curaga. caps at 1/8 pet (so usually 400~600 hp restored), and even a conal radial paralyze move for kicks.

very nice, versatile pet.

Edited, Dec 13th 2011 12:45pm by Xilk

Hey, just wanted to say I got Pet: -3% damage taken as an augment on the Bestia Helm. Wiki says you can only get -2%, but... wiki's wrong. For those of us without the ASA head needing a straight Pet: -DT.

Happy Holidays.

Not sure exactly whn this turned into a blog, but...

BST91, Ducal Guard, and 2x -pdt+2 axes. Took a bunch of time to get the axes and atma, but I just went and took out five toughs in abyssea at the same time, followed by Sirrush with a linked lizard. I was using RR/MC/DG.

Monster. Truely insane. I guess I knew, mathematically, how much damage reduction I could get. But seeing it for myself is something completely different. Wild Carrot was almost enough to keep up with the NM; I used two zetas just because it was my first NM on bst and I didn't want to play with calling a new rabbit and snarling until I got a win under my belt. And all I have is the free and easy to get stuff: Bestia Helm (-3% damage taken), Ducal Guard, 2x -pdt axes, and Mounted Champion.

I think I'm going to speed to 99 and start soloing up the rest of my empy armor. Good times. d('.'d)

Cap is at 87.5%, I believe.

Just curious, care to share some DD combos ? now that I've completed my -DT gear, I regularly use no Reward on NM's & have been thinking about best Atma/Pet combos to speed up some fights.

I've finally gotten Future Fabulous also, which should open up even more possibilities... but its kinda mind-boggling trying to think of all the pet/ready possibilities & how they may or may not shine with certain Atma etc.

Sweet, thats what I was looking for, Thanx ^^