Ternary Flourish uses: Anyone found one?

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10-16-2011, 01:19 AM
Motenten

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

Quote:

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.

Quote:

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.

Quote:

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.

Quote:

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

Code:

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).

Code:

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.

Code:

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.
10-16-2011, 04:10 AM
Asymptotic

Quote:

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."
10-16-2011, 07:54 AM
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.
10-17-2011, 02:30 AM
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.
11-12-2011, 01:13 PM
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.

Code:

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:

Code:

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):

Code:

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.

Code:

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.
11-14-2011, 05:52 PM
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...
11-14-2011, 09:40 PM
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?
11-15-2011, 05:20 AM
Motenten

Quote:

Originally Posted by Byrth

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.
11-15-2011, 05:59 AM
Byrth

Quote:

Originally Posted by Motenten

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.
11-15-2011, 06:56 AM
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.
11-15-2011, 08:12 AM
Byrth

Yeah, you need to be wearing the head to get the damage bonus. Wearing it at activation gets you the +1 forced crit, so you actually have to wear it both times to gain the full benefit.

With that change, it seems that Climactic Rudra's beats Ternary'd anything in every situation even without considering the additional forced crits.
11-15-2011, 09:21 AM
Motenten

Have done a complete rebuild of the probability table. Looks like it's all working properly; adding Saber Dance to a Ternary'd weaponskill doesn't change the average damage. Uses up far more space, but it looks like I can use the same tables on any weaponskill and just change a single number for the number of secondary hits in the weaponskill, and it'll all work fine (previously had to build separate tables for every weaponskill that had a different number of hits).

Actual difference in the numbers produced is fairly small (eg: 1833 down to 1809 is the highest shift I saw), but it's good to get improved numbers regardless.

Now the work of copying this to all the other weaponskill pages....
11-15-2011, 10:01 AM
Motenten

Uploaded a new version with the modified distributions. The more bits I fixed, the more variance there was from the originals. I left the original weaponskill sheets in place, in case anyone wanted to compare (and maybe find anything I've messed up).

At present, it looks like Ternary is a decent to good option for everything except Rudra's, where Climactic blows everything else away. How well that evaluation will hold up on further review, will have to see...
11-15-2011, 01:44 PM
Motenten

Another upload, more bugfixes. With Rudra's, the gap between flourishes is huuuge (like a 20% gain from one to the next). Climactic trounces Striking, which stomps all over Ternary.

For the other weaponskills, the difference is far less pronounced. With Kleos there's very little difference between any of them. With DE and Evis, Climactic is the weakest of the bunch, while Striking and Ternary are pretty close to each other, Ternary generally having a bit of an edge.
11-15-2011, 02:04 PM
Byrth

Awesome! Really getting complete now!

I'll try to bring some less common weapons into Dynamis tomorrow so I can get an idea for EP enemy Defense. Considering Dynamis is probably Dancer's "main event" at the moment, that's probably pretty relevant.
07-05-2012, 07:00 AM
Byrth

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bayohne

As we have explained before, we hope you understand that Ternary Flourish was implemented with future growth in mind. We plan on strengthening this ability through equipment and merits, and we appreciate your patience as we do so.

We plan on adjusting all jobs, but our highest priorities right now are adjusting puppetmaster, corsair, scholar, dragoon, and warrior’s firepower. We will be working on these job adjustments in order of priority.

In response to a comment asking for Charis Casaque (+1 and +2) to apply to Ternary Flourish as well... if Charis Casaque (+1 and +2) also increased the effects of Ternary Flourish, they would be too powerful as gear items, so we do not plan on implementing those adjustments.

Also, Flourish-type abilities are not separated by rank or effectiveness, but are separated so that they are useful in different situations, so even if an item were to increase the effects of Ternary Flourish, the effects would not be exactly the same as "increasing the effects of Striking Flourish."

Please continue to offer up your feedback on how you want dancer to shine and we will use them as reference points when we think of support abilities for dancers.

Okay, so this was 9 months ago now. Ternary Flourish still doesn't have a real use.

Carry on.
07-06-2012, 01:37 AM
tyrantsyn

LoL also see enfeebling magic thread, same story over there.
07-06-2012, 06:51 PM
Eri

Quote:

Originally Posted by Byrth

Okay, so this was 9 months ago now. Ternary Flourish still doesn't have a real use.

Carry on.

Its acutually not that it has no Real use. Its that you can't use it all. In which world you would want 2:30 recast on your Flourishes 3 vs. 1:30 recast Climactic?

It would be intresting to know how much you would have to reduce the recast of Trenary to outmatch Climatic.

thats without force critical WS of course.
07-06-2012, 08:36 PM
Byrth

If they reduced the recast to 30 seconds, I'd consider using it.
07-06-2012, 10:24 PM
Eri

Pretty much Byrth unless you wanted to force Crit Rudras lol.
Other than that i'd vote for removeing it and give Dnc something worth its recast on F3.
02-18-2013, 09:08 PM
Byrth

Bump again.

Ternary got a slight buff from Exenterator being added to the game, but simply using Climactic Flourish is still competitive in terms of overall damage due to the fact that it gives you 4 crits for 3 FMs. Also, though it wasn't mentioned earlier in the thread, Wild Flourish is probably Ternary's real competition in situations where you'd one-shot the monster with a Reverse Flourish self-skillchain. Wild Flourish -> Tier 1 skillchain does 61.5% of our closing WS damage when unresisted (which it frequently is), and Ternary can't compete. It also costs fewer FMs.

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