Originally Posted by
Theytak
However, dnc doesn't necessarily need to use its JAs for it's damage to be acceptable, I won't pretend that I'm a dnc nor that I know how they function when working in high haste, though. Our automaton's need maneuvers to add any significant increase to our damage.
To kind of emphasize how much damage we lose, let me put it this way:
At haste cap, subbing war, and with about 25% DA (between gear and /war, and TA), 3 maneuvers/minute costs us 24 attack rounds in 5 minutes, which translates to ~70 attacks after DA procs. That equates down to ~14 attacks per minute, and costs us just under 1 ws/minute depending on store TP. Now, looking at the TP alone is already is significant loss in damage, but it's further exacerbated by H2H's nature as a DoT heavy weapon. By this I mean that h2h damage is more evenly split between regular attacks and ws (more so for mnk than pup, due to the differences in ws availability, and because of kick attacks, and it has changed over the years but it still holds true). Of all the weapons that use 1h stat mods (ie: 2 str = 1 atk 2 dex = 1 acc), h2h has the highest damage, and the highest delay (effectively, h2h is the 1h scythe) before martial arts comes into play. Mind you, h2h is different from 1h weapons for other reasons, but regardless. My point is, our regular melee attacks are a sizable portion of our over all damage.
Let's say that against whatever you're fighting, you can get ~1k damage from ws, and ~80 damage/hit (So this would be a relatively high defense nm); losing 14 hits every minute costs you 1120 damage at 80 damage/hit, every minute. So over 5 minutes, you'll lose between ~420 TP and ~70 attacks, or a potential 9600 damage. Remember, this is against a high defense target. Meanwhile, against the same high defense target, your puppet simply won't be able to put out that kind of damage. Sharpshot's damage comes almost entirely from WS, and it will likely have trouble generating significant TP against this target, and valoredge won't have the oomph behind its hits to make up for how much fewer and slower they will be. That's even accounting for how pet's get a large bonus from level correction.
If you want to consider it against a somewhat less sturdy target, let's say you're averaging ~1500 from ws (about what a good pummel average should be with the right gear against tougher mobs, outside abyssea) and ~130 damage/hit (a bit lower than we can do, but still reasonable). In this case, the haste is the same, and so are the number of attacks, but the difference in the amount of damage lost is significant. This time around, you're losing nearly twice as much damage from your regular hits as you are from ws, for a total of ~16500 damage over 5 minutes, of which only 6k comes from ws. Again, while your puppet will also be doing better, it still won't be doing enough to negate the damage lost. In fact, it will be worse. Armor Shatterer will at least offset a good amount of damage each time it goes off in the high defense scenario, but here, armor shatterer isn't much ahead of pummel, and will barely scratch the 10k you lose from melee attacks.
Now, in theory, I would agree with spirit; given the versatility of the job, this would be a mostly acceptable trade off. The problem is that our versatility is negated due to the overpowering presence of whm, and how poorly our nuking abilities have scaled post 75, which pretty much just leaves us with our ability to evade shit and solo stuff. We can't support a party, we can't really tank very well, out side of evasion kiting, but that's not really ever used now. All we're left with is our ability to do damage. Thus, we're forced to pay a massive penalty for effectively no beneficial tradeoff in group play. It's more of an issue with the system and the dev's latest endgame creations than with pup itself, but that doesn't mean we should have to put up with it.