Anyone try Apoc/RR/SS?

[Dfoley]

Okay add this disclaimer to my previous post xiozen, sense apparently its understood that of your posts are from your personal experience, but for some reason you think mine cover all pups...:

• Assuming you have VS/SP
• Assuming you macro a decent WS set (+50 ~65 str)
• Assuming you use rr/ss/apoc, rr/vv/apoc, rr/gh/apoc (all will give very closer numbers)
• If you sub war and keep temp item buffs/berserk up
• If you use atk food (curry, bison steak, pizza...something)

Then you will:

1. mostly be 1 shoting mobs (atk should hover around 750-900 with + 100~150 str on WS)
2. Very rarely get to SC with your pet (not saying never), since your pet will be doing 2300-2600 armor shatters if you geared it as mentioned above which is still possible to skill chain off of. VE however will be in the 3.5k range and chances are vs/sp will kill the mob before the SC goes off. The mob must have at least 1 hp and no one mut auto attack after VS/SP otherwise it wont proc the skill chain.

Empy weapon is only 5 more base dmg than the weapon you use, and if you are using SP with the right atma, than it should be doing very comparable ws and TP dmg.

However:

• If you are sub ninja/dnc
• If you are using inferior DD atma (yes you can use SD to skill chain more, but each ws also does less dmg)
• If you are gearing the pet to tank instead of DD
• If you tp/ws in an evasion set
• If you do not macro a ws set
• If you are not using atk food
• If you never use temp items in abyssea

Then yes, xiozen, you are correct. You will be able to skill chain much easier and will be able to do with 2 weapon skills+skill chain what you could be doing with one single weapon skill.

When i first started with Verethragna I scoffed at people who said they average 5k VS. Then i started keeping berk up, using food and temp item...and guess what I can VS up to 6.6k now on pup. Average exp mob has about 5-6k hp at IT, so even if I ws for the 3.8k range there is no SC off that when my pet does a 2300 dmg ws.

I am not trying to diss peoples gear/play styles. I am just saying that if you are going for a high DD play styles (which is most pups I have met), then what I have said above is true.

[xiozen]

Okay add this disclaimer to my previous post xiozen, sense apparently its understood that of your posts are from your personal experience, but for some reason you think mine cover all pups...:

• Assuming you have VS/SP
• Assuming you macro a decent WS set (+50 ~65 str)
• Assuming you use rr/ss/apoc, rr/vv/apoc, rr/gh/apoc (all will give very closer numbers)
• If you sub war and keep temp item buffs/berserk up
• If you use atk food (curry, bison steak, pizza...something)

Then you will:

1. mostly be 1 shoting mobs (atk should hover around 750-900 with + 100~150 str on WS)
2. Very rarely get to SC with your pet (not saying never), since your pet will be doing 2300-2600 armor shatters if you geared it as mentioned above which is still possible to skill chain off of. VE however will be in the 3.5k range and chances are vs/sp will kill the mob before the SC goes off. The mob must have at least 1 hp and no one mut auto attack after VS/SP otherwise it wont proc the skill chain.

Empy weapon is only 5 more base dmg than the weapon you use, and if you are using SP with the right atma, than it should be doing very comparable ws and TP dmg.

However:

• If you are sub ninja/dnc
• If you are using inferior DD atma (yes you can use SD to skill chain more, but each ws also does less dmg)
• If you are gearing the pet to tank instead of DD
• If you tp/ws in an evasion set
• If you do not macro a ws set
• If you are not using atk food
• If you never use temp items in abyssea

Then yes, xiozen, you are correct. You will be able to skill chain much easier and will be able to do with 2 weapon skills+skill chain what you could be doing with one single weapon skill.

When i first started with Verethragna I scoffed at people who said they average 5k VS. Then i started keeping berk up, using food and temp item...and guess what I can VS up to 6.6k now on pup. Average exp mob has about 5-6k hp at IT, so even if I ws for the 3.8k range there is no SC off that when my pet does a 2300 dmg ws.

I am not trying to diss peoples gear/play styles. I am just saying that if you are going for a high DD play styles (which is most pups I have met), then what I have said above is true.

Well said and makes perfect sense... you state your points very well here. I wholeheartedly agree with all of it!!! Thx! =)

[Zhronne]

Follow up for Theytak and Dfoley.
So, finally got a chance to play a bit with my PUP yesterday (or 2 days ago? Forgot sorry ).
The sample is still very small, but good enough to start talking I guess. I got around 100k xp (a bit more probably) and killed ~150 monsters.

Tried a good mix of SP and VS, but SP managed to pull better numbers than VS only a few times, like 2 or 3? Wrote it down at home. Not talking about averages here, talking about max damage.
Vsmite got up to 4,3k once, it was of course usually staying much lower, but it was always above SP except those mentioned couple of times.

This is the "strange behaviour" I was talking about a few pages ago. Looking at my spreadsheet I can see well that aside from a few strange setups, Pummel should perform always better than Vsmite (altough the difference is small), but when I go and use it on the field, Vsmite is always above Pummel.

Dunno, anybody want to make up more hypothesys? Want to see my gear? (altough it's nothing special, really)

[Jar]

Follow up for Theytak and Dfoley.
So, finally got a chance to play a bit with my PUP yesterday (or 2 days ago? Forgot sorry ).
The sample is still very small, but good enough to start talking I guess. I got around 100k xp (a bit more probably) and killed ~150 monsters.

Tried a good mix of SP and VS, but SP managed to pull better numbers than VS only a few times, like 2 or 3? Wrote it down at home. Not talking about averages here, talking about max damage.
Vsmite got up to 4,3k once, it was of course usually staying much lower, but it was always above SP except those mentioned couple of times.

This is the "strange behaviour" I was talking about a few pages ago. Looking at my spreadsheet I can see well that aside from a few strange setups, Pummel should perform always better than Vsmite (altough the difference is small), but when I go and use it on the field, Vsmite is always above Pummel.

Dunno, anybody want to make up more hypothesys? Want to see my gear? (altough it's nothing special, really)

accuracy its always acc

[Zhronne]

I'm not talking of missed hits of course, I can see that from the TP return. I think I never took into account WS numbers where I missed 1 or more hits (altough it happened only a couple of times, really, on those mobs I'm probably at the 95% acc cap)

Dunno why you took up the Accuracy argument. Maybe I gave the impression I wasn't considering missed hits in my very small and simple test? Sorry if that's the case, hope I clarified the situation now D:

[Jar]

on avrg you will miss more hits with SP and with ftp so close even that lowers avrg


also from what your posting you eyeballed it

[Dfoley]

SP: 6 hits, first 2 can da/ta
Avg hits in abyssea with apoc/rr/(ss/gh): 6+1
With 95% acc:
70% chance of landing all 7
77% chance of landing 5

VS: 4 hits, first 2 can da/ta
avg hits in abyssea with apoc/rr/(ss/gh): 4+1
with 95% acc: 77% chance to land all 5

You are only partially correct in that SP will miss more hits. It also has a higher average number of hits, so in total SP will average more hits. Your chances of landing 5 vs 6 vs 7 vs 8 hits in a row is the same for either weapon, however SP will average 2 more potential hits.

[Jar]

SP: 6 hits, first 2 can da/ta
Avg hits in abyssea with apoc/rr/(ss/gh): 6+1
With 95% acc:
70% chance of landing all 7
77% chance of landing 5

VS: 4 hits, first 2 can da/ta
avg hits in abyssea with apoc/rr/(ss/gh): 4+1
with 95% acc: 77% chance to land all 5

You are only partially correct in that SP will miss more hits. It also has a higher average number of hits, so in total SP will average more hits. Your chances of landing 5 vs 6 vs 7 vs 8 hits in a row is the same for either weapon, however SP will average 2 more potential hits.

base fTP isnt that different

say you ws 50 times
300 hits of SP
200 hit of VS

tho one is hitting so much more the damage differences are not that big at all so that +7% miss is huge <.<

[Dfoley]

You are correct
5 hits from sp = 4.75
5 hits from vs = 6.25

That is where the damage difference comes from. FTP loss due to acc in relationship to the odds of landing 7 consecutive hits vs 5. SP is more likely to hit its maximum potential while VS will rarely hit it because it requires 2x tripple attacks AND 8 hits, vs 1 tripple, or 2 double and 8 hits. SP has more chances to get the extra 2 hits, while VS has only 1 way to get the extra 4 (until they add quad attack for monks ;-p).

So in theory, you should see high max hits with SP, but on average see better ws with VS.

[Motenten]

@Theytak: Unfortunately you messed up right at the start of the math you posted (the first long post), in your calculations of TP per hit (you calculated TP from round delay and then divided the TP in half; you need to divide round delay in half and then calculate TP for a single hit). It's a common mistake, but it still means the values you use after that are invalid. Also, the manner in which you calculated the difference (whole number of weaponskills within a non-infinite timespan) is subject to fairly large amounts of error due to the short timespan you used.

2) SS increases crit dmg by a %, correct, however no buffs affect cirt dmg and it is a linear stat. A super simple example is this: Hit for 150, crit for 300 (+0% crit dmg, 150 dmg added from crit), crit for 450 (+100% crit dmg, 300 dmg added for cirt). Im sure someone will correct me on the math there but it really is linear.

Err.. Not quite. If a normal hit is 150, and a crit is 300, then when you add +100% crit damage the crit will be for 600 instead.

Anyway, my experience is that judging from the spreadsheet Stringing Pummel should always pull out numbers higher than Victory Smite, yet in-game (at least by eyeballing, never thoroughfully parsed) VS damage seems always more consistant than SP's, altough occasionally SP does more.

In the end I tend to use up VS for the Aftermath, but still this thing always puzzled me. More feedback from other users?

My initial guess is that you're setting up gear sets in the spreadsheet and then swapping between weaponskills to see which does better, rather than optimizing for each weaponskill.

Regarding your other concerns via fTP or accuracy and whatnot, such things are already accounted for in the spreadsheet. DA/TA with limits on max number of hits per weaponskill, proper probability distributions of the number of hits (with the above posts with 70%/77%/etc are not correct about), etc.

I don't play on pup very often, and my anecdotal evidence has lots of issues, but the last time I did a lot of melee/weaponskilling with pup and was messing with both SP and VS, I was doing substantially better with SP. I remember it as being vaguely annoying since SP wasn't doing just 'slightly' better, but a fair bit better. Only caveat is that at that time I believe I was using Rev Fists +2 instead of the Verethragna I later finished, and the extra str on Vere is more valuable to VS than SP.



I also have a long explanation of the effects of slow from Sea Daughter and TA from Apoc, but I'll refrain from the wall of text since the main argument is now a couple weeks old. Short summary: In order for switching from Apoc atma to Sea Daughter to be on par with using Apoc atma, one would have to prove that the 5/tick regain *by itself* can increase your total (melee+ws combined) damage by at least ~50%.

Given a 50/50 melee/weaponskill split (I'm actually hitting this range now with VS), a 50% increase in damage essentially means you need one extra weaponskill every weaponskill cycle. 5/tick regain means +100 TP every minute, therefor you would have to be weaponskilling once per minute for this to be comparable if considered strictly from the master's perspective.

In my experience, extremely high haste situations see weaponskills every 10 seconds. Completely unbuffed situations (but still capped gear haste) see weaponskills about every 30 seconds, including the occasional few seconds of switching between mobs. It would only approach one additional weaponskill per cycle with substantial amounts of time between mobs, though that in itself it not entirely unlikely (eg: have to wait 90 seconds between pops for Abyssea NMs).

If you add in skillchain damage, and assume mirrored damage amounts, that damage increase still has to be proportionately split between master and puppet. Unfortunately, that split varies wildly depending on many factors. Best case for SD's purposes is a split that's heavily in favor of the master, and that the master closes the skillchain.


Overall, modelling the effect is very complex. I'd say it's impossible for SD to beat Apoc for any standard DD, but could actually be feasible for a pup doing frequent skillchains (though difficult to manage given the relative TP gains between puppet and master). The big caveat is, of course, all the issues that Dfoley brings up regarding how much of that damage can actually be used.