Ternary Flourish uses: Anyone found one?

[Motenten]

Hate that it seems I'm defending this JA, but I do want to defend my conclusions about it...

you should be using striking in the type of setup you're describing, not ternary.

I'll get back to this point later; I'd avoided doing any elaborate analysis of Striking Flourish in the original post due to the heavy comparison that was being made with Climactic in the overall discussion.

Even then the following scenario:

Presto ---> Step ---> Weaponskill ---> Reverse Flourish ---> Attack Round ---> Weaponskill + Skillchain

Should be more effective, as it only requires one round of JAs per skillchain, should be able to be used every time RF is up, and over time, will result in more overall damage due to lessened JA delay and more TP gained from attacking.

I'll note that I already agreed that Reverse Flourish should do more average damage over time (though I don't agree that a single Presto+step is enough to maintain skillchain suitability; 57 + weaponskill~15 + one round~15 puts you at maybe 87 TP before second weaponskill). I was making a point that when you want the highest possible *instantaneous* damage, Ternary works out as a good option.

Still, on just about anything where extended engagement happens, enemy defense begins to heavily favor forced Critical WS and the immense damage potential of a DoubleclimacticrudrasSC, and in general, our multi-hit WS drop heavily in effectiveness.

As I noted, Climactic wins for Rudra's in the vast majority of cases, and in the cases it doesn't win for instantaneous damage, it still wins for long-term damage. Since it's clear that no case can be made for using Ternary with Rudra's, I focused on non-Rudra's instead. Plus, not everyone has Rudra's.

Anyway, basically what I'm trying to say is that if you're not using Rudra's Storm, there's really no reason to use the Flourishes III category at all except for "fun."

Situational cases:

1) Standard mobs, 5k-6k HP. In most cases, you'd be hard-pressed to have the mob survive a self-skillchain, in or out of Abyssea. Becomes more viable as you progress towards VT+mobs, but there's no real case where it's worth spending the coordination on creating the boosted skillchain to bother with.

2) 'Easy' NMs (eg: Abyssea NMs that will die in about a minute after procs are done). This case lends itself strongly towards the boosted weaponskill since you won't have "long-term" averages to take advantage of. You do most of your damage in a short burst, and then spend time waiting for repops, during which JA timers reset. Can use the boosted weaponskill, but mostly just an e-peen thing, since the mob will be dead soon anyway.

3) 'Moderate' NMs: Will be spending a fair amount of time fighting them just to get through their HP. Gets most of the benefits of "long-term" averages, so weights far more towards the "Reverse Flourish and keep going" strategy.

4) 'Hard' NMs: Want to get as much damage done on the mob in one go as you can, as staying and meleeing is dangerous, and possibly detrimental. Also a high risk of death, so want to maximize damage output in the short term rather than the long term. In this situation there seems a reasonably valid case to be made for boosted weaponskill/skillchain damage.


In other words, the only situation it really makes sense to use this in is one where you're not going to be able to reliably melee the mob for long periods of time, but the mob is difficult enough that you want to maximize the damage you do in the periods you have available.

This being the only situational use I can think of where it makes sense to use Ternary, I do wonder what the dev's perspective on this is.



Now, back to Striking Flourish. First I'll consider the relative gain of the DA on the total fTP, as I did with Ternary:

Baseline: 6.0

                       w/o Striking     w/Striking   % Increase
Brutal:                6.100            7.050          15.57%
Brutal+Saber:          6.530            7.265          11.26%
Brutal+Epona's:        6.269            7.108          13.38%
Brutal+Epona's+Saber:  6.673            7.316           9.63%

Dancing Edge's % Increase is slightly lower since its base fTP is 6.1875, but close enough that I'm not going to redo the numbers.

The other half of SF's benefit is the 50% crit rate (assuming +2 body for best-case scenario).

The value of said crit is dependant on the existing crit rate (0 for DE, 10% - 25% for Evis) and cRatio (will consider a spread of 1.0 to 2.0).

Effective average +fTP for:
           1.0 cRatio   1.5 cRatio   2.0 cRatio
0% crit        0.5938       0.3959       0.2969
10% crit       0.4000       0.2667       0.2000
25% crit       0.2500       0.1667       0.1250

0% crit line uses the 1.1875 fTP of DE as a base; the others use the 1.0 fTP of Evis.

So now we have a range of values to add. To keep the table somewhat managable, I'll only use the 1.5 cRatio column.

                       Base     SF DE           SF Evis@10%       SF Evis@25%       Ternary Evis
Brutal:                6.100    7.446  22.1%    7.317    20.0%    7.217   18.3%     31.1%
Brutal+Saber:          6.530    7.661  17.3%    7.532    15.3%    7.432   13.8%     22.5%
Brutal+Epona's:        6.269    7.504  19.7%    7.375    17.6%    7.275   16.0%     27.6%
Brutal+Epona's+Saber:  6.673    7.772  16.5%    7.583    13.6%    7.483   12.1%     19.9%

At low cRatios using DE (0% base crit rate), IF you get a crit, then Striking is better than Ternary. However, for all practical purposes Ternary is better than Striking for DE and Evis.

Striking would likely be better in Abyssea where you have Apoc atma heavily devaluing the additional attacks. Don't feel like doing the math for it though.

[Asymptotic]

4) 'Hard' NMs: Want to get as much damage done on the mob in one go as you can, as staying and meleeing is dangerous, and possibly detrimental. Also a high risk of death, so want to maximize damage output in the short term rather than the long term. In this situation there seems a reasonably valid case to be made for boosted weaponskill/skillchain damage.

The problem here is that these targets also tend to have high defense, and dagger weaponskills basically do crap for damage (on average) unless you can force crits on them. Go do Voidwatch and use Dancing Edge. It's not pretty. It becomes one of those scenarios where "if you don't have Rudra's, then you should have come on a different job."

[Byrth]

My WS gear generally has about 28% DA and 3% TA in it, so any time I use a 6-hit WS I already have an effective fTP of ~6.65 (unless it's DE, where the fTP is ~6.84). Obviously I could swap out DA/TA gear to compensate for the fact that I'm using Ternary, but I can't get rid of Saber Dance which is the major source of it. That makes Ternary about a 20% increase in damage for 3 FMs.

Building gives about +20~25% Attack, some Acc, and some crit rate for 3 FMs, and it lasts for a minute (with a 10 second recast) which means you can stack it with opening weaponskills of skillchains if you're willing to delay one Step cycle. I'd argue that it would be better in situation 1 above, because we're hard up for attack and you note that they won't survive a self-skillchain. In Dynamis, which is especially relevant for Dancer at the moment, I still notice that adding attack has pretty substantial returns. /WAR and Red Curry buns push my Dancing Edges up a solid 50% over no sub and no food (eyeballed because my parser haets me). The harder the monsters get, the more useful it becomes, but the more viable it becomes to just do self-skillchains.

[Asymptotic]

In Voidwatch I tend to use Building Flourish to boost my damage during blitzes. There's little merit in attempting self skillchains at that point due to everyone using weaponskills at once. I'll get 5 finishing moves, Building Flourish, Climactic flourish, and then throw out 300TP Rudra's using an attack offhand. There's little reason to use a TP bonus offhand for Rudra's in VW as you're going to be WSing at 300TP most of the time.

I'd say /WAR is the best sub there because you can throw up Berserk/Warcry/BF to pump up your attack as much as possible for the 1-2 weaponskills you're going to get the opportunity to use during a blitz. Additionally, shadows aren't doing much to protect you against the higher tier NMs (most have AoE attacks) and anytime you're standing next to these mobs to trigger/search for triggers you should probably just throw on PDT/Fan Dance to keep yourself alive or use Fanatic's if you have it available. Enemies without AoE normal attacks don't really put you in danger aside from spellcasting anyhow.

In my experience, evisceration is the best non-rudra's performer, probably because of the advantages critical WS have against high defense targets.

[Motenten]

I added the different cat. 3 Flourishes to my spreadsheet, so wanted to take another look at how Ternary pans out compared to the others in a more comprehensive set of numbers.

First, setting things up to favor Ternary Flourish over the alternatives to as high a degree as possible:

1) Cap attack - higher attack makes crits less valuable
2) Lower level correction - higher level correction increases the value of crits
3) Outside Abyssea - Atmas increase the value of crits
4) Minimize DA/TA - Reducing these values increases the relative gain from a triple attack; this includes gear choices such as Vimukti instead of Atheling
5) Increase crit rate (for Evisceration) - lowers value of a forced crit
6) Use Building Flourish (helps with above adjustments)

Note: Striking assumes Charis +2 body. Arbitrarily set with Fire Kila + Thunder Kila (even for Rudra's), and otherwise all gear is the same.

                   No Flourish      Striking   Climactic     Ternary
Dancing Edge              1430          1791        1632        1806
Evisceration              1380          1684        1449        1755
Rudra's Storm             1118          1610        1705        1550

So, Climactic wins handily for Rudra's, while Ternary takes third. On the other hand, Ternary barely beats Striking for DE, and has a decent lead over Striking for Evisceration.

Add in Saber Dance to see if replacement against DA shifts things noticeably:

                   No Flourish      Striking   Climactic     Ternary
Dancing Edge              1474          1813        1675        1813
Evisceration              1422          1705        1492        1763
Rudra's Storm             1164          1633        1752        1573

Ends up being only slightly shifts in totals, and no real shifts in placement except that Ternary ties with Striking on Dancing Edge.


Drop Building Flourish and Berserk (allow pDif to drop substantially), but refine gear for max damage (broad, but not exhaustive adjustments, tuned for either forced multi-attack flourishes or none/Climactic where DA/TA still matters):

                   No Flourish      Striking   Climactic     Ternary
Dancing Edge              1131          1432        1322        1400
Evisceration              1087          1348        1164        1371
Rudra's Storm              899          1322        1463        1214

Ternary is still third for Rudra's, has lost some ground on Evisceration (but still ahead of Striking), and is now slightly behind Striking for Dancing Edge.

Shift target from Fodder to Bukhis to further reduce pDif.

                   No Flourish      Striking   Climactic     Ternary
Dancing Edge               647           873         822         796
Evisceration               685           897         758         882
Rudra's Storm              507           853        1003         692

Minor caveat: noticed that I need to update the chr stat in the gear listing for a bunch of pieces; only real effect is that DE is slightly lower than it could be. Fixed this and another minor bug and uploaded a new version, but not really relevant to the numbers above.


Overall, Climactic is still clearly the best for Rudra's, but Striking and Ternary each hold top spots for DE and Evis (with Ternary being the more likely winner). DE with Ternary appear to be the winner at near capped attack, while Rudra's with Climactic wins when cRatio is lower. Evis with Striking or Ternary appears the best option for non-Rudra's owners as the difficulty of the target goes up.

Most importantly, Ternary appears to be situationally side-gradish to superior for non-Rudra's owners, so it's not a complete waste of time.

Comments welcome, as well as criticism of any of the spreadsheet's math. If you have questions about any of it, just ask.

[Fyreus]

I could see this ability having some use if they removed it from the flourish category and drop the timer down to 30 secs with no finisher uses. That way it's a weaker meditate at best... idk...

[Byrth]

The Dancer job is complicated and there are situations you can think up where you might consider using Ternary, but the above post shows just how rare those situations are. For instance, if pDIF is uncapped (the no Building case) and you aren't skillchaining, you're still better off using Climactic -> Rudra's than Ternary -> Dancing Edge for damage.

If we're using Ternary to enhance the closing weaponskill of a skillchain (Evisc or Rudra's), it's better to use Climactic/Rudra's in all the above situations, I'd say. Assuming you spend 3 Finishing Moves on it (the same as Ternary), you force four critical hits. Ternary->Evisc has at most a 50 damage lead on Rudra's, so 115 including the +65 to the Darkness Skillchain. Three additional crit hits (all with Damage+20%) are going to more than make up a 115 damage difference.

You can pretty much apply the above logic to every situation and write Ternary off as useless, except that Climactic consumes all your finishing moves and Ternary only consumes 3. You could theoretically go Ternary -> Building -> Dancing Edge and spend 5 FMs. Again though, realistically it'll be better to go Building -> Climactic -> Rudra's in the same situation (it's best to just self-skillchain most of the time, but some situations don't allow it).

Random questions:
*Did you give the first hit of Climactic'd WSs the 20% damage bonus from AF3+2 head?
*Why does adding Saber Dance increase Ternary->Dancing Edge's damage? You allow for replacement of misses, I presume? Does that happen?
*How much of a Crit rate boost do you give Building Flourish?

[Motenten]

Random questions:
*Did you give the first hit of Climactic'd WSs the 20% damage bonus from AF3+2 head?
*Why does adding Saber Dance increase Ternary->Dancing Edge's damage? You allow for replacement of misses, I presume? Does that happen?
*How much of a Crit rate boost do you give Building Flourish?

1) No, didn't account for AF3+2 head. Forgot about that. Will fix.

Question: Is the +10%/20% damage multiplied after crit damage, or added to crit damage? IE: is a base crit 1.08 * 1.20 (for +2) or 1.28? Also, does it need to be equipped at the time of the weaponskill to get the crit boost, or is that granted at the time the flourish is used?

Going conservative for now and adding to crit damage, and requiring it to be used on ws.

2) Good question. It shouldn't allow for replacement of misses. Let me check again.

Hmm. Actually, you're right. The probabilities do allow for replacement hits. 1 hit in the first extra attack set could be a triple that missed 2 hits, but in doing so it allows for a double attack on the offhand to fill in the missing hits to the max of 8. I'm going to have to rethink how I handle the probability calculations.

3) Arbitrarily set to +10% crit rate. Also uses +20 acc, and the vaguely tested +25% attack.

[Byrth]

1) No, didn't account for AF3+2 head. Forgot about that. Will fix.

Question: Is the +10%/20% damage multiplied after crit damage, or added to crit damage? IE: is a base crit 1.08 * 1.20 (for +2) or 1.28? Also, does it need to be equipped at the time of the weaponskill to get the crit boost, or is that granted at the time the flourish is used?

Going conservative for now and adding to crit damage, and requiring it to be used on ws.

2) Good question. It shouldn't allow for replacement of misses. Let me check again.

Hmm. Actually, you're right. The probabilities do allow for replacement hits. 1 hit in the first extra attack set could be a triple that missed 2 hits, but in doing so it allows for a double attack on the offhand to fill in the missing hits to the max of 8. I'm going to have to rethink how I handle the probability calculations.

3) Arbitrarily set to +10% crit rate. Also uses +20 acc, and the vaguely tested +25% attack.

1) I seem to remember testing that it's separate from crit damage (twice), but here's the one I linked on bgwiki.

2) Hokay! I'm unsure whether misses are replaced on WSs, but I always assumed they weren't because I don't think they are for normal attack rounds. Like, I think that if you mainhand K-club and offhand an Axe, you can have attack rounds where K-club hits 8 times for low damage and the Axe hits 0 times even if one of those 8 swings with the Klub was a miss. My k-club has been gone for months though, so I can't test.

3) That sounds fine to me. I don't have any data related to the crit rate and was just wondering.

[Motenten]

Updated to use the multiplied form instead of the added form. Still requiring that the AF3 head be worn to get the damage bonus, unless testing indicates otherwise.