Offhand for almace

[Tashan]

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.

No

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.

The Mode, Median and Average melee hit for the Khanda test was:

+ 34: 352 ^ 37: 88 M+0.Avg: 47.11

The Mode, Median and Average for the STR Shamshir Test was:

+ 66: 143 ^ 68: 111 M+0.Avg: 69.94

By swapping to the Khanda the Mode was reduced by -48.48%; Median -45.59% and Avg: -32.64%. I'm not sure how you got to 1 point of damage difference.

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 don't see this. The Khanda test did 31.44% more CDC's than the Shamshir test, but only increased WS damage by 4.03%.

And to add further insult to injury, even though WS damage increased by 4.03% the following took place. The Khanda test did 72.01% more melee hits, it lost 3.39% of it's melee damage.

I'm not sure it can be explained anymore simply than this. The increased frequency is incredibly unbalanced.

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.

In regards to personal feelings, I don't warrant them out of data but if I must humor it I'd disagree completely. The fights were not harder, they were longer. While there's no way to justify this idea that the majority of crawlers were of higher level there is something in front of us that can. It's elementary. Less damage was being dealt and thus it took longer.

There's nothing on there to accurately dictate the resting times on the parse.

Any bad pulls meant having to logout of the game because I'd be fighting Puks not Crawlers. While it's possible to link the crawlers, there are only 3 in the camp area. They were rarely all spawned at the same time.

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.

Actually there is another possibility. It used other TP moves.

This data is under Defense but I must apologise, it looks like I saved recovery data as this for STR Shamshir one instead. You can view the Khandas one from the Defense page, and the STR if you can open an SQL file. Here's the TP moves used in the STR parse:

Ability Usage

Ability Used/Prepared
Cocoon 32/34
Poison Breath 35/34
Sticky Thread 29/30
Total 96/98

And for the Khanda:

Ability Usage

Ability Used/Prepared
Cocoon 39/40
Poison Breath 55/57
Sticky Thread 32/35
Total 126/132

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.

To be honest, this would have been irrelevant had I chosen my own criteria for the parse. But to meet your arguements basis, I did as you requested on monsters higher than Abyssea Merit Party targets. As such, the parse was always going to be susceptible to the uncontrolled variable of Level-Correction.

However, this arguement still doesn't hold much ground because the idea of having a large sample for test is to work to the effect of minimizing random effects. Rather, the smaller the sample the greater the effect of randmness. This is precisely why I opted to do 100 monsters per test rather than say 10 or 20.

Has this worked? Certainly. The Offense Detail pages support this.

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.

I'm British, but sure.

If I had to be inclined to take anything from this, what I would take from this is that you are not aware of how to evaluate correctly. This is kind of what I was saying a few weeks back in my first post on this thread.

And had "epeen" been the basis of any arguement in this thread I would have mentioned that the STR test pulled off a CDC that did 2130 damage as opposed to 1894.

However that would be stupid as it only happened once. It's unreliable data.

[Demonofhunger]

No


The Mode, Median and Average melee hit for the Khanda test was:

+ 34: 352 ^ 37: 88 M+0.Avg: 47.11

The Mode, Median and Average for the STR Shamshir Test was:

+ 66: 143 ^ 68: 111 M+0.Avg: 69.94

By swapping to the Khanda the Mode was reduced by -48.48%; Median -45.59% and Avg: -32.64%. I'm not sure how you got to 1 point of damage difference.

The Weaponskill and TP rates page lists the mean damage per hit at 21.3 and 22.15 respectively.

Also, why did you not remove the Cocoon from the Khanda set 8/40 times? Failing to do that is going to bring down the Khanda numbers.

As for the two sets, an explanation for the 58,702 extra points of damage that it took to kill the Khanda set is that they were overall higher level and thus had more HPs. Being higher level, the level-correction that takes place in the damage equations would have forced down all damage numbers and lead to longer fights as compared to the Shamshir set.

Of course, you might have just been wasteful of TP and/or MP on the Khanda set and that extra damage comes from wasting the damage on mobs that were close to death. Wasting damage like that would be a different reason for why the fights might have taken longer.

From the spell usage it doesn't look like the fights were too much longer if we assume you used the spells as often as possible, so the extra 50Kish WS damage had to go somewhere.

That being said, a sample size of 100 is not large enough for the very small numbers we are pulling out of the data. This was always going to be a very rough estimate and it's ambiguous enough to resolve the matter for me.