Gimme my pupdate!

[hakrev]

What happened to that post about making the valoredges def almost on par w/ a paladins?

With atmas and gear you can get your automatons to take 0 dmg and even has access to 2% more phys dmg resist then beastmaster...although bst has more hp, which makes the zone to take 0-5 dmg larger and therefore better at tanking lots of monsters for a longer period of time and the fact that bst pets can aoe, personally i would like some way to do some sort of aoe ws on VE. The main problem is that the frame can't hold hate off of other people's attacks. Ventriloque is awesome and I abuse it alot, but I wish there was a few more ways to hold hate better as in a party situation, where it is hard enough for a normal tank to hold hate, let alone a puppetmaster (who's hate disipates so quickly it's not even funny).

Because I can already see the trolls getting ready to pounce I'll show you the max dmg reductions (smn gets the most and since i've never played the job I wont bother talking about it, but it is much easier for a smn to reach the 0 dmg barrier):

Puppetmaster Physical Damage Reduction Set:
Atmas:
Winged gloom: -30% (Slip dmg sucks but can be counteracted with oil spamming I guess, although with the perfect setup it's not really needed. on bst this can be counteracted by simply keeping a stack of regen pet foods handy which add 50hp/tick, thus counteracting the effect completely)
Ducal Guard: -50%
There's several other choices to get -10% more on top of this, go look them up there's a few.

Gear:
MKT Head: -10%
Magian Trial H2H weapon: -10%
Shepard's Chain: -2%

Misc:
Stout Servent: -5%
Hidden Natural Damage Reduction (Valoredge): -12.5% (estimate)
Merits: Optimization increases 5% defence per upgrade to +25% more defense

So we end with: -129% physical dmg reduction and -25% more defense making us take 0~5 dmg (depends how hard the enemy was attacking to begin with. I don't feel like breaking down the actual calculations, but -129% is decieving in the fact that it isn't a solid -129%, each thing enters into the calculation at different points, so essentially the more you add the less likely that your going to see any dmg at all). Attachments of course add alot more defence increases and can even negate dmg altogether if you spam earth maneuvers with shurzen up. For versatility sake alone Pup WAY outdoes Bst tank in a 1on1 battle, but due to lack of aoe it's impossible to keep hate against more then 1 enemy unless you disengage, target second monster and deploy your auto, which is very annoying and I personally wouldn't enjoy tanking multiple monsters and accidentally screw something up by overloading, bst is the chill way to tank.

This of course is an abyssea build, outside of abyssea is completely different :P but in abyssea all pets break the -50% dmg reduction cap.

Honestly Ducal guard + Gear + x2 regen atmas would probably be best, but it all depends how you want to play and honestly the dmg output on VE is so lame it will take forever to kill anything, which is kind of why bst kind of beats pup in the -dmg tanking. For starters bst hate doesn't deteriorate to 0 when it's not provoking all the time like automatons seem to do (this is just an observation after doing nothing but tossing maneuvers out extremely slowly, if my auto doesn't provoke the enmity will eventually hit 0 and the monster will come at me even if i haven't done but a single manuever...). Bst pets seem to get a TON of enmity every time it first attacks (like the first hit enmity experienced when a normal player attacks a monster, bst pets seem to wake up in a new world everytime they get spawned and the monster treats it as first hit enmity, even if you've been attacking it a long while). Anyways, back to the subject, here is the Bst dmg reduction set:

Atma:
Winged Gloom: -30% (slip dmg counteracted by the roughly 50hp/tick regen pet foods (1% of 5010 sheep hp is 50/tick))
Ducal Guard: -50%
Another -10% atma if needed

Gear:
Shepard's Charm: -2%
Ferine Pants +2: -2%~5% (I'm unsure if the Ferine +2 pants increase the amount of stout servant from +2% to +5%, which is what I suspect is the more likely as most of the +2 pants double the thing in the +1 pants, I don't have them yet so I just don't know, maybe someone can tell me (and yes I realize that -2% is not half of -5%, but in actuality the 2% is 2.5% and is rounded down, as is everything in ffxi calculations, to 2%)
MKT Head: -10%
Magian Trial Axes x2: -20%

Misc:
Stout Servant: -5%

Bst gets a grand total of (insert cheezy drum roll): 127% (unless the stout servent upgrade on +2 ferine pants is +5%, then it would beat pup by 1%, but I just don't know). There is possibly a defence bonus attached to the level increases by the bst gloves and the beast affinity merits as well, simply corresponding to the level increased, but I've never seen this tested, maybe it's just to be assumed. By how much it would be increased is anyone's guess, but I highly doubt it would come close to the 25% increase from puppetmasters Optimization trait. I'm not a diehard bst, so if there is anything I missed, please correct me, just trying to show people what's possible.

[KorPoni]

One thing left out is you can have your automaton engage a second target while still engaged to a previous. If you are out of range, it'll return to you as if it were "Disengaged" instead, which isn't that big a deal. It's always worked for me, even in situations of some pretty beefy monsters. (In my case, manticores when 75 was cap.)