Offhand for almace

[Prothscar]

The only situation where increased weaponskill frequency is more valuable than the loss in damage is when you're trying to proc with multiple weaponskills, say a sword or club hint in Voidwatch. If you have multiple people on that job, the value is diminished. Overall I wouldn't bother.

[Tashan]

^

That.

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OA2-4 Khanda is fun to watch, but also extremely painful. Fights took longer, I had to recover more often and number of additional TP moves used by the mob was frustrating.

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I have to really update my builds. Haven't even worked out the new damage tiers for Physical BLU Skill.

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Delta Thrust is godlike.

[Prothscar]

Most effective damage tier for BLU right now includes Mirage Keffiyeh +2, Mavi Tathlum, Magus Jubbah +1, and Mavi Tayt +2. Pushes you from 107 to 109 D with a small decrease in WSC on STR/DEX and pure STR spells and a small increase in WSC on STR/VIT spells.

[Tashan]

Yeah, that's what I just got with my calculations, but thanks Pro.

Hm that Keffiyeh +2upgrade is nice. I really want it, even more than a 95 Almace.

Completing that trial's going to be difficult. Unless the drop rate is decent.

I'll have to ride 108 D for the time being. Or 107 if I can get my hands on Aias Bonnet.

We're still can't break 600 BLU ATK though .

[doctorugh]

We're still can't break 600 BLU ATK though

Sure you can, 482 from skill + 8 base + 220 str = 600 blue attack

Also spells like QC, VD, and GR get a bonus % to attack, and in the case of VD or GH, you'll be over 800.

[Prothscar]

Would be more around 750. I still have 0 evidence to suggest that any of our spells posses a 35%~40% attack bonus, high as they go is 25%.

[Tashan]

How do you get 220 STR?

My STR build sucks sitting at 191 STR with full merits and /WAR but like even with +2 Mirage instead of NQ, +4 Earrings instead of +2, +7 Rings instead of +5 I can't get that much. Unless it's like cruor buffs/food/something.

[Vagrua]

The average for all forms of damage is lower on the OA2-4. This was predicted by us all.

Maybe I'm not seeing this as clearly as y'all, but doesn't the parse read as this?

Shamshir
Melee Damage: 246,478
#Weaponskills Performed: 133
Weaponskill Damage: 151,132
Total: 397,610

Khanda
Melee Damage: 228,356
#Weaponskills Performed: 195
Weaponskill Damage: 199,436
Total: 427,792

Doesn't that seem in favor of Khanda?

Edit: throwing in spell damage also:

Shamshir
Melee/Weaponskill: 397,610
Spell: 531,199
Total: 928,809

Khanda
Melee/Weaponskill: 427,792
Spell: 557,930
Total: 986,532

[Tashan]

The total damage is flawed. Fighting 100 of the same mobs shouldn't leave such a large gap overall but it does. You can read through the past two pages and find that discussion.

Why it does not favour the Khanda is because when you lookat the percentages of damage dealt the increase in WS damage does not make up for the loss in WS and spell damage.

I'm on the road so I can't look at the data atm, but roughly you're looking Spell damage 50% and WS damage 16% in the Sham parse. The percentages for the Khanda parse was roughly 22% WS and 50% Spell with spell averages being lower.

Ergo, losing damage from spells was unfavourable as they still contributed to most of your damage even though it increased the WS damage up a few percent.

[Demonofhunger]

Based on the total amount of damage it took to kill the same number of mobs, the Khanda set were obviously higher level by a substantial amount. This average higher level is going to push down weapon damage, WS damage, and spell damage.

That being said, the per strike damage is nearly identical (about 1 point of damage different). This means the more frequent ODD strikes are heavily skewing the averages up even if you are getting a huge number of small Khanda hits, as I expected.

After looking at WS fequency and numbers of hits, I think Khanda comes out as the clear winner because of the level correction working against it.

I expect the Khanda fights felt harder because of the slightly higher level that pushed damage down and monster HPs and damage up. The number of Dream Flower casts also indicate twice as many bad pulls during that period, so that probably led to longer resting times because of MP spent and more damage that had to be healed.

Interestingly enough, the number of Blank Gaze casts is almost the same, so either the mob used Cocoon a lot less on the Khanda set or the TP feed was not as bad as expected.

I think the take-home lesson is that the Str and Att aren't giving people substantial damage increases at 99 even if the numbers look very big. You can barely see the effect in this parse before accounting for level-correction, and it might not even be empirically provable after taking into account level-correction, and that's pretty damaging.

After looking at this raw data, I'm more inclined to look at other stats as a way to increase combat efficacy for this one slot. The stats that NA players focus on seem designed for high-damage epeen screenshots to put in their sigs and don't reflect overall effectiveness or usefulness to the party.