Personal temper findings

[Crimson_Slasher]

The moderators are quick! ill have to remember that next time a topic is usurped by unrelated posts! I hope they start watching here more often!

[scaevola]

Orly? cause i coulda sworn it gave us access to all of our missing sword skills, fencer, defender, provoke, all of which are great supplements to defense.... when im sitting at 800-900 defense, Haste cap, PDT cap, a decently high shield rate, fairly decent Magic defense, Casting speed and recasting speed caps, yea those are all totaly horrible things for blood tank to have right? just a FYI ive been Main PLD and Off NIN since the game started in north america lol.

last i checked war was the standard for ninja tanking, and /nin is pretty meh these days for paladin when packing an Ochain.

Why wouldn't you use /BLU over /WAR for this?

I mean, Cocoon's more useful than Defender for jobs that DON'T have native MP pools or fast cast.

[Greatguardian]

All of this "SAM can't tank" and "MNK can't tank Pil" stuff is hurting my head...

Anything could tank Khimaira at 75. Corsair could tank Khimaira at 75 (seen it, not even kidding). Red Mage could easily tank anything, sure, but it becomes a waste when other jobs are able to deal damage and thus tank while doing more damage.

Red mage can deal damage, sure. It wont' deal as much damage as literally any pure melee on the planet. But it can deal damage. For reference, let's list the jobs that can deal more damage on "High tier content" (Let's say Kaggen, Akvan, and Pil) than RDM:

Monk - duh
Warrior - duh
Samurai - duh
Corsair - duh
Dark Knight - duh
Ranger - duh
Dragoon - duh
Thief - hm
Ninja - oh
Dancer - oh dear
Puppetmaster - uh oh
Blue Mage - ... this won't end well
Beastmaster - ... shiiiiiiit

And the jobs that don't do as much damage as Red Mage?

Black Mage
White Mage
Bard
Summoner
Paladin
Scholar

Okay. You will outdamage the ... well, hopefully nonexistant Paladins. And the Bards. And the White Mages. And pretty much anything that's reliant on nuke damage. Omedato-daysuuuuuuuuu~~~~

[saevel]

Why wouldn't you use /BLU over /WAR for this?

I mean, Cocoon's more useful than Defender for jobs that DON'T have native MP pools or fast cast.

And both are equally useless in reducing damage. Monsters Ratio floor being what it is and all. /WAR is used for another VE hate tool (1800 VE voke), 10% DA, Berserk and access to Vorpal Blade (RDM).

[Neisan_Quetz]

Can we please stop counting voke? Please? Please. I'm tired of people trying to use voke as an example for anything but hate reset > mage just pulled hate and you're too far away to melee.

cocoon is better than defender for the simple fact it doesn't reduce your attack.

[scaevola]

And both are equally useless in reducing damage. Monsters Ratio floor being what it is and all. /WAR is used for another VE hate tool (1800 VE voke), 10% DA, Berserk and access to Vorpal Blade (RDM).

Provoke is useless and while my RDM and BLU are level 1 and my sword skill is exactly as high as it needs to be to use Seraph Blade, there's no reason I can see why RDM/WAR would have access to Vorpal Blade and RDM/BLU wouldn't.

As for Berserk, if you can bloodtank something while under the effect of a defense-reducing ability like Berserk and be fine, /MNK is going to beat pretty much everything, Vorpal Blade or not.

That I am a level 1 RDM and am telling you this is unsettling.

[saevel]

Provoke is useless and while my RDM and BLU are level 1 and my sword skill is exactly as high as it needs to be to use Seraph Blade, there's no reason I can see why RDM/WAR would have access to Vorpal Blade and RDM/BLU wouldn't.

As for Berserk, if you can bloodtank something while under the effect of a defense-reducing ability like Berserk and be fine, /MNK is going to beat pretty much everything, Vorpal Blade or not.

That I am a level 1 RDM and am telling you this is unsettling.

Provoke is exactly 1800 VE, its not useless but it's not the greatest for tanking. Melee damage is CE, a different stack of hate. VE degrades at the rate of 60 units per second, CE is only degraded whenever your smacked around. Interesting note is that the amount of hate from voke is match's exactly with the rate of decay, thus spamming voke every 30s will prevent any VE generated from flash or other abilities from degrading.

Defender is useless as monsters attack/defense ratio can't go under 1.0 if the monster is above your level. This is just SE doing their usually and screwing over the players.

That being said, REDUCING your defense to 50 is a very bad idea, incredibly bad. Monster ration caps higher then ours, something around 4.0. And while their attack isn't high (they don't eat food, and rarely use buffs), artificially putting your defense at rock bottom is auto-capping their ratio which would result in them doing ridiculous damage. Only reason MNK can get away with it is they have WHM's spamming Cure V on them for when the NM's use physical damage aoe's.

Plus if we're talking -RDM- here, then /WAR will beat out /BLU for offense and cocoon will be useless in general. Better idea would be to look at /DRK, LR, SE and Attack Bonus II for the melee side, Stun, Drain, Aspir and Absorb-TP for the mage side.

[Neisan_Quetz]

Time spent voking is time spent not meleeing. Spamming voke every 30 seconds lower your damage dealing and conversely, your tanking. That's why we call Voke useless.

Defender is useless because reducing your damage output is counterproductive. If you're not dying with Zerk up there's no reason not to fulltime it.

[tyrantsyn]

Wow, what happen here? I thought this part of the discussion was dead after last week. Yesterday when I check the thread it was back on track and we were done with this nonsense. Sadness.

[saevel]

Time spent voking is time spent not meleeing. Spamming voke every 30 seconds lower your damage dealing and conversely, your tanking. That's why we call Voke useless.

Defender is useless because reducing your damage output is counterproductive. If you're not dying with Zerk up there's no reason not to fulltime it.

JA's are instant use that insert 60 delay units (1 second) into your attack round. That's not going to be noticeable by anything other then a parser, and even then barely.