Corsair role: a reflection

[Greatguardian]

Last Stand, bruddah.

If you have either attack buffs or are fighting something where your ranged pDif is high/capped, Last Stand can handily out-do Wildfire. It was easily doing better for me the other day on some Voidwatch NMs where I had Minuet 5 from the Daurab/Gjallar bard.

[Mirabelle]

Most upgrades are minimal in this game yet people spend hours of time and oodles of gil fussing about them. Reaver Grip vs Reaver +1. 1 million gil to 10k for 1 AGI. Novio vs Moldavite... free vs 3 million gil for 2 MAB. Game is full of this type of "minimal" upgrade for high cost.
And you could even be considered "gimp" if you somehow didn't have these items and did 50 less damage on your WS because of it. That's been FFXI for a long time.

So I'm sure at some point it will be O Bullet or GTFO for COR's just because of the epeen nature of the job. RNG forums were that way for ages with arrows even though they offered minimal damage upgrades compared to the Damage rating of the Bow.

Fortunately most players view COR as BRD 2.0 and don't care what gear you rock as long as you roll Tacticians and Miser rolls.

[Greatguardian]

I don't think anyone I know at all would be happy with a Corsair pretending to be a Bard. It's pretty common knowledge how strong of a DD it is.

[noodles355]

Is last stand really that good? I can't imagine anywhere where my ranged pdif would be close to capped as I'm never /War. But I guess I could try /War and RCBs on trash mobs. But I can't see that being worthwhile on anything "challenging" (read: not trash dyna mobs etc). Hell on Pil at 95 I was eyeballingly far off capped racc with over 110 Racc in gear, capped/merited skill and sushi. I can't imagine the new highest tier mobs being any different at 99.
I was never overly concerned with my damage on trash mobs. They're just that - trash. They always die long before repops anyway. I'm not fussed with jumping through hoops to make Last Stand better than Wildfire if it doesn't actually increase the overall efficiency of the event. I got over boosting my ego with big damage/parse numbers long ago. I'm much more interested in boosting my damage output on tough content that actually matters. And on most of that content you'll be very hard pressed to have a high pdif effectively.
And on most of those events the damage increase from Orichalcum Bullets will be minimal. The best yes, but expensive and minimal - hence my earlier Cerb+1 comparison.

[Mirabelle]

Last Stand is our best physical WS with Wildfire as the best Magical WS. There will be high MDB mobs where Last Stand will be your best WS over Wildfire. It makes sense to have a build for it and abandon Slugshot finally (or lol Detonator).

And I agree that I will not fuss over still shooting steel bullets (or maybe Oberon's) for Last Stand rather than Orichalcum. I'd just rather be able to shoot Orichalcum without feeling as if I'm pissing away gil with every shot. That's fine for certain folks that play alot and make oodles of gil. For some of us that only log onto FFXI for events and make our gil largely through logs and ores and NPC'd gear that drops in those events, these prices are ludicrous.

[Seha]

If you're serious about cor, merit Last Stand. Wildfire is amazing and all, but it's not reliable on everything you fight. Say you're fighting Ildebrann...you're awesome WF just goes down the sink. Last Stand is a very strong physical ws to make up for it in those circumstances, better than Slug(I don't know why people still talk about Detonator, as if making a Light skillchain matters)very close to WF(and sometimes better). Do it, it's good(and neat as hell).

[Greatguardian]

Is last stand really that good? I can't imagine anywhere where my ranged pdif would be close to capped as I'm never /War. But I guess I could try /War and RCBs on trash mobs. But I can't see that being worthwhile on anything "challenging" (read: not trash dyna mobs etc). Hell on Pil at 95 I was eyeballingly far off capped racc with over 110 Racc in gear, capped/merited skill and sushi. I can't imagine the new highest tier mobs being any different at 99.
I was never overly concerned with my damage on trash mobs. They're just that - trash. They always die long before repops anyway. I'm not fussed with jumping through hoops to make Last Stand better than Wildfire if it doesn't actually increase the overall efficiency of the event. I got over boosting my ego with big damage/parse numbers long ago. I'm much more interested in boosting my damage output on tough content that actually matters. And on most of that content you'll be very hard pressed to have a high pdif effectively.
And on most of those events the damage increase from Orichalcum Bullets will be minimal. The best yes, but expensive and minimal - hence my earlier Cerb+1 comparison.

I wouldn't use it on Pil unless you were rocking some fairly hefty Racc buffs, but I was using it to great effect on a lot of the Tier 4 and Tier 5 Jeuno NMs (which are about the same level as Tier 1 Jeuno really). Throwing on Pot-Au-Feu+1, Stalwart's, and getting Gjallar Minuet 5 brought Last Stand up to about 2k damage where Wildfire was sitting around 1.5k or less on the more magical resistant NMs.

I was literally pissing through Oberons doing that, though, so I highly recommend double checking your Ammo count before you go too crazy with it.

Edit: Was also /Sam, it's a more versatile sub in general unless you know you wont' be using Wildfire at all.

[noodles355]

I see, so it can still put up decent numbers with just some minuets and pot-au-feu? That's good to know. How is Racc on the T6 Jeuno VW at 99? As sketchy as @95 vs Jeuno/Zilart T3? Also I guess with it being much easier to proc and lights capping faster that you can keep stalwarts/aescetics up closer to fulltime now.

Note: My comments were never about the worth of meriting the WS. They were about Orichalcum Bullets, and the effectiveness of purposely building for Last Stand with food/SJ/buff choices. I didn't mention mobs with high MDB as I felt no need to state the obvious.

[Greatguardian]

Ranged Acc on T6 was a crapshoot, I missed a decent number of Last Stands entirely and just chose to stick to Wildfire. A lot of the T6 are total assholes about PDT anyways, so Wildfire would win out regardless. It's still the go-to WS for anything strong.

Ig-Alima is about as strong defensively as Pil, though he's less annoying about AoEs since most of his shit is Conic and he doesn't cast offensive magic. Botulus Rex is pretty much a matter of throwing Allllllllllllllllllll the Wildfires at it until it dies. I haven't done much of the others yet.

[Binahel]

thank you very much for this constructive and interesting feedback.

I gathered maybe the wrong impression from different thread and I am now more aware of the actual situation.
Leaden Salute is not a massive problem to make, even for a casual player so I will put my effort in doing it and find out if I like or not - still I like a pragmatic approach and I like to try out stuff by myself but some advice is always precious.

I did have the impression that COR is somehow still perceived to be a sort of Bard with regain and that wasn't a problem. I am not a massive epeen player honestly, I want to do my job correctly and nicely and I want to be useful in a party or ls events because that's most of the time what I do online.

For example I had the impression that COR is seen as very expensive, which for me is not a massive problem as I can make money somehow fairly well and really COR is my only other job but BRD which is notoriously quite cheap also the feeling that this job is expensive might somehow be nice as it makes the job a bit exclusive and keeps the not-so-nice people at bay...