Dynamis Weakness Trigger Testing

[Rocinante]

I'm sure others have done more extensive testing, but while I'm farming I figure why not log down my success (or lack thereof) in triggering weaknesses. I really, really don't want to level Dancer for its admittedly stellar farming ability here, so I have a particular interest in triggering weakness via magic. I also doubt how robust the bg wiki's percentages are for triggers, or even whether it is complete in scope. For now though, I am assuming most of its information is correct, such as what time of day each monster is weak to magic.

So anyway, here's the results of my first day of recording, it will probably take a dozen or so runs before I'm comfortable with saying, "yeah, that's the percentage".

Day 1
bst/nin, Easy Prey funguar/manticore in Dynamis Valkurm
Full Moon 93% - 95%

212 ninjutsu casts
daytime - Manticores - 8 triggers
evening - Funguar - 4 triggers
midnight - didn't bother switching to sabotender, heh
daytime - Manticore - 6 triggers

Trigger 8.4%


Edit:
Current estimates at average rate to trigger weakness
Magic: 6.4% (208/3261)
Job Ability: 25.6% (428/1673)
Weaponskill: N/A - I dont have a job to test effectively

[Rocinante]

Day 2 (didn't test much, was mainly a run for the mega-boss with a little farming after)
bst/nin, Easy Prey Hippogryph/Manticore in Dynamis Valkurm
Waning Crescent 38%

118 casts
midnight - Hippogryph - 6 triggers
daytime - Manticore - 6 triggers

Trigger rate: 10.2%



Day 3 (also didn't test much, was just killing orcs for AF, and not many caster types)
bst/nin, Easy Prey Orc in Dynamis Buburimu
Waxing Crescent 29% - 33%

100 ninjutsu casts
6 triggers

Trigger rate 6%

[Rocinante]

Day 4
bst/nin, Easy Prey Goblin in Dynamis Qufim (so few casters ; ; grr)
Waxing Crescent 79% - 81%

67 ninjutsu casts
10 triggers

Trigger rate 14.9%

[Rocinante]

Day 5
bst/nin, Easy Prey Goblin in Dynamis Qufim
Waning Gibbous 81% - 76%

265 ninjutsu casts
9 triggers

Trigger rate 3.4%

[Rocinante]

Day 6
bst/nin, Dynamis Buburimu
Waning Crescent 21% - 14%

211 ninjutsu casts
Orc - 8 triggers (finally got both AF I needed from orc, yay)
daytime - Crab - 4 triggers
evening - Crow - 8 triggers

Trigger rate 9.5%

[Rocinante]

Day 7
bst/nin, Easy Prey Orc in Dynamis Beaucedine
Full Moon 90% - 95%

197 ninjutsu casts
8 Triggers

Trigger rate 4.1%

This one was anomalous, one of the summoners endured ~60 spells without triggering, so I eventually just killed it. I was the only person farming there, and while I had the summoner orcs in view most of the time, I can't guarantee that someone didn't come in and trigger it themselves then immediately die.

[Goliathreborn]

Unless they make magic on par with ja proc rate, dynamis will favor /dnc and overcrowd the camps during the ja time window.
Keep up the good work sir.

[Rocinante]

Yeah it's extremely unbalanced towards dancer, not sure why the rates are so different. Based on how it works, I would think job ability triggers should be a lesser rate than magic - because you're either consuming tools, or spending finite amount of mp - meanwhile job abilities are free and never require you to rest. So job abilities get the best of both worlds, high trigger rate as well as infinitely available. And with dancer the only job (that I know of, at least) with multiple <60 second job abilities, makes it so useful here. Plus all the self heals, haste, stuns, and other useful things!

After I get about 12-14 runs worth of data, I'm just going to join the bandwagon and use /dnc until it gets nerfed or whatever.

Anyway!
Day 8
bst/nin Easy Prey Demon in Dynamis Xarcabard
Last Quarter Moon 45% - 43%

330 ninjutsu casts
18 triggers

Trigger rate 5.5%

[Brytor]

Unless they make magic on par with ja proc rate, dynamis will favor /dnc and overcrowd the camps during the ja time window.
Keep up the good work sir.

I can see why they did the rates they did from a math stand point:

Compare /DNC:

Violent Flourish 20s = 3 per min and Steps @ 15s = 4 per min to give a total of 7 chace to proc each min

To /NIN and elemental spells and NO HASTE/FASTCAST:

Ichi = 30 second recast 4 second cast for 6 elemental Ninjutse.

Total: 12 per min

Add in Kurayami/Dokumori/Hoji

You've capped out at 15 per min at 4 second cast times if you could instantly cast the next spell. So in a perfect world /NIN has 2x or 100% more chances to stagger in the same time frame.

When you compare to say BRD main with 2 second cast time on Threnody and 24 second recast (NO HASTE/FASTCAST) When you add in Requiem and other BRD spells BRD has basically 30 chances per min to stagger. At a 5% rate a single BRD should on average stagger every 40 seconds.

Now that is in a perfect world with casting as soon as you can and not having to do other stuff. The reality is a bit different. The actual number of spells you can get off and coupled with mages needed to deal with other things and the lower kill speed basically cancels out any advantage they have for hitting the staggers.

[scaevola]

I think it's more likely they just didn't let DNC's huge swath of spammable JAs influence their decisions regarding relative proc rates, since DNC is really the only job with a bunch of JAs on short cooldowns but everybody with a spell pool can spam magic.

[Yinnyth]

When you compare to say BRD main with 2 second cast time on Threnody and 24 second recast (NO HASTE/FASTCAST) When you add in Requiem and other BRD spells BRD has basically 30 chances per min to stagger. At a 5% rate a single BRD should on average stagger every 40 seconds.

I think you're confusing practical and actual casting times. It's rough getting 30 casts per minute even with chainspell or maxed nightingale because of animation delays and the annoying way the game only accepts one command every half second or so. Even spamming the fastest spells and assuming no obligation to any other task, you're probably looking at about 15 casts per minute.

You're also only looking at the DNC's native abilities. Most jobs which go /dnc to dynamis have native JAs of their own they can use which adds to the 7 JAs per minute, war and cor being the 2 best I can think of right now.

There's also a primary difference between JAs and spells: JAs have no casting time. You can do other stuff while waiting for JAs to recharge. You can't do squat while spamming threnodies.

Overall, magic is the most screwed of the 3 proc types right now. To be fair, balancing the procs is a tricky topic though. I'd do it by making it so JAs with a longer recast timer have an increased chance to proc, spells with a longer casting timer have an increased chance to proc, spells matching the day's current element have an increased chance to proc, AoE spells and WSs have a decreased chance to proc on anything besides the main target, WSs with a matching SC alignment to the current day have an increased chance to proc, and make skillchains and magic bursts have a chance to proc any mob. But that's just me rambling again.

[Nala]

as it stands aoe ws's and magic can not proc a mob unless it is claimed, when neo dream lands hit people were abusing nightmare mobs by mass aggro and FC/AE procing the whole lot, very effective way to farm even if you don't proc a few you're killing them much faster = faster respawns and as long as you have TH you should get some currency, any case moot point as it's nerfed.

[Rocinante]

Day 9
bst/nin, Easy Prey worm and hornet in Dynamis - Tavnazia
Waxing Crescent 12% - 18%

315 ninjutsu casts
Hydra mages - 3 triggers (accidentally aggressed a whole group, whoops)

Daytime - Worm - 5 triggers
Night - Hornet - 0 (ZERO!)
Midnight - stayed at hornet camp and did JA triggers
Daytime - Worm - 8 triggers
Night - Hornet - 4 triggers

Trigger rate 3.6%

First time ever in Dynamis Tavnazia, didn't go smoothly, but I got enough currency to make it worthwhile. But wow, didn't get weakness against a single hornet on the first 16:00 - 23:99 window. That was about 120 ninjutsu cast during the time frame. An anomaly occured in the last ~30 seconds of lightsday, where I apparently triggered weakness on a hornet with a melee hit.

Screenshots:
log (http://i1017.photobucket.com/albums/af294/v876_bucket/ffxi/dynamisanomalylog.jpg)
further back in the log (http://i1017.photobucket.com/albums/af294/v876_bucket/ffxi/dynamisanomalybacklog.jpg)
what a typical trigger looks like (http://i1017.photobucket.com/albums/af294/v876_bucket/ffxi/dynamisnormaltriggerlog.jpg)

The backlog screenshot shows the most recent action that I or my pet took against that hornet (a Katon:Ni cast), and I got in 3 attack rounds (Something like 15 seconds?) before the trigger. Then in that last shot, a typical trigger is shown (a Hyoton: Ni cast), where you get the weakness message a moment or so *before* whatever the action that caused it. So even if in the anomaly screenshot, my Katon:Ni did cause the trigger and not simple melee hits, why is the event/weakness message happening 15 seconds *after*?

[Yinnyth]

There's a glitch with weakness triggering on nightmare mobs... I forget what exactly it is, but I remember seeing similar reports. People reporting that they used sleepga on a big crowd of stuff and then having one of them !! 30 seconds later when proc type changes.

[Tile]

think they did magic with a low proc rate is cause of how many and how fast you can cast them.

I like what your doing but you should put how Long it takes you to proc each mob too or the average time atleast


There's a glitch with weakness triggering on nightmare mobs... I forget what exactly it is, but I remember seeing similar reports. People reporting that they used sleepga on a big crowd of stuff and then having one of them !! 30 seconds later when proc type changes.

its not really a bug. it just a effect can kick in after the proc changed, I've proced a JA with Samba when the time changes to JA. i've also done the Magic proc with Sleep whent he time changes too

[Rocinante]

Day 10
bst/nin Easy Prey demon in Dynamis Xarcabard
Waning Gibbous 67% - 62%

257 ninjutsu casts
17 triggers

Trigger rate 6.6%

Yinnyth: Ah good to know it is an established phenomenon, and not just me losing grip on reality ^^

Tile: I'm not sure how relevant the time it takes to trigger would be, considering I don't just sit there and cast magic. I have to pull back to avoid links, do weaponskills, rest sometimes, and so on, and not every enemy I pull is a mage.

That said, you can calculate a theoretical "average time to trigger" based on my trigger percentages. For me (little haste gear, no fast cast gear), I can do a full elemental wheel of Ni level spells (1.5 sec each), then one Ichi elemental spell (4 sec each), and have ~2 seconds before I can start the Ni elemental wheel again. With some spreadsheet-Fu, after 224 of these cycles (6 Ni, 1 Ichi, 2 seconds wait), that will come to 1568 casts taking 3360 seconds. All my data thus far points to a 6.5% trigger rate, so 101 of the 1568 casts - would theoretically be a trigger.

101 trigger / 3360 seconds = 1 trigger / x seconds
0.030 trigger / second = 1 trigger / x seconds
x seconds = 1 trigger / 0.030 trigger / second
x seconds = 33.27

So in a world where I can just stand around casting ninjutsu 100% of the time, it would take 33.27 seconds on average. A more realistic measure, but still a bit muddled because I spent some time on a few Taurus and a Hydra Dark Knight, would be from my Tavnazia run: 20 triggers / 2 hours = 6 minutes per trigger on average. This factors in "reality", time spent hunting for time statues, time spent pulling/weaponskilling/resting/using pet abilities/getting camped on/opting not to target bombs/fish for the midnight hours.

Edit: if someone knows how much earth time corresponds to 8 vanadiel hours (the time I spent not pursuing magic trigger), that little Tavnazia calculation would be reasonably better.

[Yinnyth]

One vanahour is 2m24s in RL time, so *8 would be... 19m12s. Remember there's also an animation delay when casting magic, so you'd get a more accurate calculation by setting a stop watch when you start casting your first spell and stop it when you start casting the same spell again.

BGwiki has approximated proc rates of each type of proc, and have magic proc rate listed around 5%, JA 20%, WS 15%. BST/DNC gets steps (once every 15 seconds), violent flourish (once every 20 seconds), and feral howl if they merit it (once every 5 minutes, though I'm not sure how accurate it is). Assuming 95% accuracy on all steps, flourishs, and feral howl and 20% !! rate, that puts BST/DNC at 7.2 proc attempts per minute, *.95% = 6.84 landed proc attempts per minute, *.2 = 1.368 procs per minute or an average proc time of 43.86 seconds (slower than you estimate your proc time with magic to be). But proc time isn't everything. Again, you can't do anything when spamming magic because you need to stand still and wait for the casting to finish. JAs are instant and then you're just waiting on their cooldown timer.

Personally my favorite is large group of players with SJ restricted and strong buffs rampaging through a large group of WS proc mobs though.

Edit: ah, I thought of a better way to compare. /dnc gives you 7*.95*.2 or 1.33 procs per min, so assuming BGwiki is right about proc rates, you would need 1.33/0.05 or 26.6 spells cast per minute to match that proc rate. Or 1.33/0.15 or 8.87 WSs per minute to match.

[Tile]

I've gone in Dnc/war afew time when im with a group.

4 steps in a min.
3 Violent Flourishs
2 Wild Flourishs
2 Provokes
Samba (only the hit that lands the Daze counts)

can proc at a pretty fast rate. but that being said still find it faster to go in a City zone grab 3-4 WS mobs (you can find groups like that if you know where to camp) and spam Cyclone and AE. but like I said I only do this when im in a group

about magic procs though, has anyone else gone in as Smn and fought magic mobs? I was using Free Diablos and was getting about 80% proc rate with Nightmare, happened on more then 1 run. Was fighting Yags in windy and it was crazy. recast is a pain but going but procing the Smn NM with just 1 move was pure love. got a few hundred to show for it

[Yinnyth]

Samba (only the hit that lands the Daze counts)

Every hit from the DNC who used Samba lands a daze and refreshes its duration. I think you've been confused by the CoP timechange glitch or by the old glitch where it would sometimes report the wrong person who procced. If landing daze via sambas worked, you wouldn't need to use any other JA, just hit stuff an average of 5 times.

All reports indicate that only JAs which get used by a player directly onto an enemy count for proccing purposes so you'd need to bring some pretty decisive evidence. I normally go thf/dnc when I duo Dynamis with my friend, and try to keep up samba the whole time. I've never procced with haste samba, nor have I procced with feint (a JA which works in a similar way), so I'm going to have to ask for some proof on this before I accept it as fact.

[Tile]

can't proof that i did it, but has only been in Safehold on Tauri. happened afew times, and it would only happen on hits where there was no daze before. at start of fight or Mid fight while using a new samba. maybe its just a Tauri thing

[Rocinante]

Day 11
bst/nin Easy Prey stuff Dynamis Valkurm
Waning Gibbous 88% - 83%

530 ninjutsu
daytime: manticore
6 triggers

evening: funguar
3 triggers

midnight: hippogryph
7 triggers

daytime: manticore
8 triggers

evening: funguar
4 triggers

Trigger rate: 5.3%

This was a "good" run in terms of data collecting. I got time extends relatively quickly, and since I'm done AF farming, my only targets were magic-weak, and the only downtime was the 1 minute walk between camps during time changes.

So 28 triggers in 2 hours comes to 4m 17sec average time to get a trigger, at very aggressive casting + ideal conditions (no competition, no resting, no deaths, etc.). I'm amazed at how bad this practical maximum is.

[Rocinante]

Day 12
bst/nin Easy Prey stuff in Dynamis Valkurm
Waning Crescent 29% - 24%

419 ninjutsu
evening: funguar
7 triggers

midnight: hippogryph
2 triggers

daytime: manticore
6 triggers

evening: funguar
2 triggers

midnight: hippogryph
9 triggers

Trigger rate 6.2%

A little competition on time extends, and and no Doton tools for sale today so one of my spells was locked haha. I unlocked dancer last night just for this one game mechanic :-(

Will do one more run with /nin and then move over to recording job ability trigger rate.

Also can confirm that you can trigger weakness while the enemy is under the effect of stun and/or terror (not sure if I ever read anything about this, just thought it was interesting).

[Rocinante]

Day 13
bst/nin Easy Prey stuff in Dynamis Valkurm
New Moon 2% - 2%

240 ninjutsu
daytime: manticore
6 triggers

evening: funguar
8 triggers

midnight: hippo
5 triggers

Trigger rate 7.9%

This run was basically just to get rid of the rest of my ninja tools and some final data collection. Farmed JA enemies after tools were gone, my inventory space says thankyou. Oh and I can also confirm that you can trigger weakness during enemy TP move.

Probably will be a week or so before I start recording runs with /dnc.

[Rocinante]

Day 14
bst/dnc Easy Prey stuff in Dynamis Valkurm
Waning Gibbous 87% - 81%

258 job abilities
midnight: fly
11 triggers

daytime: hippogryph
12 triggers

evening: manticore
16 triggers

midnight: fly
14 triggers

daytime: sheep
9 triggers

evening: manticore
11 triggers

Trigger rate 28.3%

Only 8 enemies did not trigger. Note that this was with very heavy competition (so sometimes standing around waiting for spawns), and I still netted 145 currency - which is double that of my "perfect" run with /nin where there was of course no competition and nonstop combat. Working as intended though, right? ;-P

[Rocinante]

Day 15
bst/dnc Easy Prey Orc in Dynamis Buburimu
Waning Crescent 24% - (forgot to record moon phase)

51 job abilities
17 triggers

Trigger rate 33.3%

More of an AF farming run for a friend (no drop, of course >.<). Oh by the way, from now on I'll be updating the first post with the rates summed together across all runs.

[Rocinante]

Day 16
bst/dnc Easy Prey stuff in Dynamis Qufim
First Quarter Moon 40% - 45%

272 job abilities
daytime: weapon
10 triggers

evening: tiger
14 triggers

midnight: roc
3 triggers (only 3 roc... moving to kraken)
midnight: kraken
6 triggers

daytime: weapon
14 triggers

evening: raptor
10 triggers

midnight: gaylas
9 triggers

Trigger rate 24.3%

[Rocinante]

Day 17
bst/dnc Dynamis Windurst Easy Prey Yagudo
Waning Cresc. 12% - New Moon 7%

39 Job abilities
9 trigger

Trigger rate 23.1%



Day 18
bst/dnc Easy Prey stuff in Dynamis Qufim
Waning Gibb 81% - 74%

314 job abilities
midnight: kraken
5 triggers

daytime: weapon
16 triggers

evening: tiger
11 triggers

midnight: kraken
14 triggers

daytime: weapon
17 triggers

evening: tiger
4 triggers

Trigger rate 21.3%

[Rocinante]

Day 19
bst/dnc Easy Prey stuff in Dynamis Qufim
Waxing Gibbous 24% - Waxing Crescent 29%

255 job abilities
evening: tiger/beastmen
10 triggers

midnight: roc/beastmen
6 triggers

daytime: weapon
15 triggers

evening: tiger/beastmen
16 triggers

midnight: roc/beastmen
7 triggers

daytime: goblin
1 triggers

Trigger rate 21.2%

[Rocinante]

Sorry for the lapse in updates... Diablo 3 happened.

Day 20
bst/dnc Easy Prey Yagudo in Dynamis Windurst
Waxing Gibbous 62% - 64%

174 job abilities
40 triggers

Trigger rate 23.0%

[Rocinante]

Day 21
bst/dnc Easy Prey stuff in Dynamis Buburimu
waning gibbous 71% - 65%

310 job abilities
midnight: crawler
10 triggers

daytime: mandragora
16 triggers

evening: scorpion
14 triggers

midnight: crawler
16 triggers

daytime: mandragora
15 triggers

Trigger rate 22.9%