Nerf Beastmaster

[Inx]

Damn Ulth, there's so much wrongness in your post I really don't know where to begin.

First of all, THF is still a top-tier DD if geared correctly and buffed appropriately.

Secondly the numbers you cite regarding THF ws-damage are possible right now, post nerf. We have a lot of THF's in our shell and they all can put up those numbers.

You qualify a lot by saying "average" ws damage (as in counting non-stacked WS), but do you do the same when accounting for ready moves? There's a huge difference between readies delivered under familiar, spur, unleash and/or run wild over spammed ones you know. Not to mention Cor rolls and the benefits of fighting under an Idris GEO's bubble that also make a massive difference.

Its not misinformation to show how massively hq support and gear can increase performance for ANY job. This is what really sucks about nerfing generally - it doesn't help people who are struggling to get stuff done, it merely annoys and inconveniences those who were excelling already.

We may never use BST again, but that doesn't take away from the fact we've killed everything in both Escha zones multiple times at this point! So it may take us longer to kill with a different setup, we're still going to own it, the only difference is we have even less impetus and motivation to do so again.

That might sound like bragging, but having ground out 1200 JP's, spent millions of gil perfecting the augments on multiple gear-sets, I feel like I EARNED my role in that success.

So having to re-factor everything because of jealous babies who are gaining nothing for themselves by pulling other people down, is just a pointless thumb-in-the-eye...
Its offensive, and does nothing but give the sense that the dev-team has no respect and no understanding for their players' time and effort.

[bazookatooth]

If that's math I think you need to show your work.

There are spreadsheets and forums for every job as well as thousands of youtube videos and screen shots on every popular FFXI site just a google search away, but yeah.... you need someone to show you math. You play THF. I play THF. I can put up those numbers and you should be able to too. So my question is: Are you lying about not believing that thief can put up those numbers? or are you bad at THF? I suspect that you know thief puts out good numbers and you're just pissed because you hang out with some people who don't like thief as much as they like BST right now.

[Ulth]

When I say average I'm not talking about unstacked ws along with stacked ws. I'm talking about the deviation written into the formula for physical damage as well as the damage done by double and triple attack procs. And when I do my calculations for max damage I assume capped attack, capped accuracy, capped delta strength, as well as boost dex, and additional dex from brd empy. As well as the very best gear, gifts, and most important Mythic dagger and am3. And when I say best gear I mean it. I'm including +1 119 abjurations with their augments and the set bonus. I still get nowhere near where Dasva is claiming. I'm getting just under 40k at 3000tp. With the old ftp rudra's I get 57k. Are you doing your calculations with the old ftp?

On an unrelated note how little the difference between taming sari and vajra is sickens me.

[Zekander]

I only have one anecdote to add to this conversation, treat it as circumstantial evidence if you must, but for me it was a real eye-opener.

My linkshell decided to do sinister reign a few days ago, so we cobbled together a party out of whoever happened to be online at the time. We ended up with: WHM, GEO, PLD, SAM, BST, SMN. The SAM was decently geared and knew how to play his job. The BST was pretty casual, only plays once in a while, only has one gearset (much of it dated). The SMN was about as skilled and well equipped as I can imagine anyone being, Nirvana, max augmented helios, 1200 JP, gearsets for just about everything, etc. The run went fairly well, all things considered, and when we exited the SMN posted his parser data. The BST had out damaged the SMN by more then 10%. To me this was just outrageous. I knew this SMN pretty well and I know he can do some crazy damage, I have personally witnessed him do 95% of an Escha NMs HP with a single Flaming Crush -> Light skillchain. He can easily out DD SAMs in almost any content (the SAM in this case did less then half the damage the SMN did). To make matters worse, when he shared accuracy data, his avatars had accuracy ratings of around 85%, while the BSTs pet had an accuracy of 30%. Yes, I know this includes melee attacks that don't contribute much damage, but it shows that the BST had a lot of room for improvement, the SMN; not so much.

This damage was not a single instance of spike damage, it was damage over a significant amount of time, against the same mobs, with the same buffs/debuffs. This is not a theoretical calculation of potential damage, it is damage potential under real game conditions. I know that this is just one instance, and that there were many factors helping or hindering damage, but even if the BST had every random number in his favor I do not believe that any random casual BST should be able to so easily outperform what I believe to be one of the best SMNs to play the game. If an event like this does not indicate that there is a serious problem with the BST job, I really don't know what will.

[Kensagaku]

I am not normally one to jump on this, but I feel like that post is absolute BS, or there is a lot more you're not telling us. Given that your BST's accuracy was abysmal, they could not have been hitting the majority of their Ready moves. Now, my gear isn't exceptional, it's about mid-tier, and I average about 3000-4000 with Razor Fang. If they have dated gear without things such as Pet: TP Bonus, Pet: Attack, and Pet: DA, their numbers are going to be lower. I also land (and this is an estimate) about 80-90% of my Ready moves, depending on whether Torpor goes down at that time. Assuming he had roughly a third of that rate, there's no way he should have outparsed the SAM, let alone the SMN, short of your SAM there being absolutely crap.

If he were at 90-100% Accuracy and had up to date gear? I could totally see it. The biggest limitation to SMN is a 30-second timer for Rages. In addition, to skillchain with your pet you'd have to be in melee range, and hitting something in Sinister Reign is not the easiest task for melees who actually gear for their own accuracy. So if they're not skillchaining and they're just using a BP every 30 seconds, they're going to fall behind. We have a well-geared Nirvana SMN in our linkshell, and we see things like 11k physical pacts, 6-9k Impacts varying with the situation, etc. So let's use an average of about 8k/30 seconds, or something like 2.6k/10 seconds. My BST, comparatively, would do on average about 3.5k/10 seconds. Someone hitting with a third of my accuracy would do far less, and there is no way that they would have kept up with a competent mythic SMN.

Of course, this is all theory and I could be wrong, but your argument makes no logical sense with the situation you've given us.

[bazookatooth]

I only have one anecdote to add to this conversation, treat it as circumstantial evidence if you must, but for me it was a real eye-opener.

My linkshell decided to do sinister reign a few days ago, so we cobbled together a party out of whoever happened to be online at the time. We ended up with: WHM, GEO, PLD, SAM, BST, SMN. The SAM was decently geared and knew how to play his job. The BST was pretty casual, only plays once in a while, only has one gearset (much of it dated). The SMN was about as skilled and well equipped as I can imagine anyone being, Nirvana, max augmented helios, 1200 JP, gearsets for just about everything, etc. The run went fairly well, all things considered, and when we exited the SMN posted his parser data. The BST had out damaged the SMN by more then 10%. To me this was just outrageous. I knew this SMN pretty well and I know he can do some crazy damage, I have personally witnessed him do 95% of an Escha NMs HP with a single Flaming Crush -> Light skillchain. He can easily out DD SAMs in almost any content (the SAM in this case did less then half the damage the SMN did). To make matters worse, when he shared accuracy data, his avatars had accuracy ratings of around 85%, while the BSTs pet had an accuracy of 30%. Yes, I know this includes melee attacks that don't contribute much damage, but it shows that the BST had a lot of room for improvement, the SMN; not so much.

This damage was not a single instance of spike damage, it was damage over a significant amount of time, against the same mobs, with the same buffs/debuffs. This is not a theoretical calculation of potential damage, it is damage potential under real game conditions. I know that this is just one instance, and that there were many factors helping or hindering damage, but even if the BST had every random number in his favor I do not believe that any random casual BST should be able to so easily outperform what I believe to be one of the best SMNs to play the game. If an event like this does not indicate that there is a serious problem with the BST job, I really don't know what will.

That's very anecdotal. Any number of things could have gone wrong. I can tell right off the bat that you guys weren't using proper buffs, food etc. if your acc was that bad. Most of those NMs are highly resistant to fire, so that could have been your summoner's problem right there. That is in no way indicative of the current situation with BST.

Besides that, Summoner does a whole crap load of buffing and utility besides doing damage. They can haste, stun, buff etc. they are incredibly versatile. I don't see why they should have to be anywhere near the top of the parse to merit an invite ever really. Your anecdote points more towards SMN being overpowered than anything. When is the last time you saw a bst pet do anything but hit stuff?

[Inx]

That's very anecdotal. Any number of things could have gone wrong. I can tell right off the bat that you guys weren't using proper buffs, food etc. if your acc was that bad. Most of those NMs are highly resistant to fire, so that could have been your summoner's problem right there. That is in no way indicative of the current situation with BST.

Yeah its a fishy sounding anecdote too. Pets need a lot of accuracy to perform adequately, to the extent that the absolute most crucial gear stat for a serious player of the job is pet: acc/m.acc. You load it onto literally every slot possible or you'll find yourself whiffing readies over and over again against high level targets. Be interesting to see how that BST would fare against an easy Escha T3 like Shockmaw

[bazookatooth]

Yeah its a fishy sounding anecdote too. Pets need a lot of accuracy to perform adequately, to the extent that the absolute most crucial gear stat for a serious player of the job is pet: acc/m.acc. You load it onto literally every slot possible or you'll find yourself whiffing readies over and over again against high level targets. Be interesting to see how that BST would fare against an easy Escha T3 like Shockmaw

I mean anybody who's done that fight before would realize that to win with 30% accuracy, the pet had to be doing like 50k per ready move when they did land. The more I think about it, that's either a broken parser or a flat out lie.


EDIT: Got bored last night waiting on people to form for escha stuff and started reading the BG forums. Wouldn't ya know? People are burning through sinister reign in 8-15 minutes using nothing but mages (BLM,SCH,GEO). NO DDs. OMG guys. Better start breaking out your "Please nerf -_ _ _ _ It's too OP" form letters again.

[dasva]

I only have one anecdote to add to this conversation, treat it as circumstantial evidence if you must, but for me it was a real eye-opener.

My linkshell decided to do sinister reign a few days ago, so we cobbled together a party out of whoever happened to be online at the time. We ended up with: WHM, GEO, PLD, SAM, BST, SMN. The SAM was decently geared and knew how to play his job. The BST was pretty casual, only plays once in a while, only has one gearset (much of it dated). The SMN was about as skilled and well equipped as I can imagine anyone being, Nirvana, max augmented helios, 1200 JP, gearsets for just about everything, etc. The run went fairly well, all things considered, and when we exited the SMN posted his parser data. The BST had out damaged the SMN by more then 10%. To me this was just outrageous. I knew this SMN pretty well and I know he can do some crazy damage, I have personally witnessed him do 95% of an Escha NMs HP with a single Flaming Crush -> Light skillchain. He can easily out DD SAMs in almost any content (the SAM in this case did less then half the damage the SMN did). To make matters worse, when he shared accuracy data, his avatars had accuracy ratings of around 85%, while the BSTs pet had an accuracy of 30%. Yes, I know this includes melee attacks that don't contribute much damage, but it shows that the BST had a lot of room for improvement, the SMN; not so much.

This damage was not a single instance of spike damage, it was damage over a significant amount of time, against the same mobs, with the same buffs/debuffs. This is not a theoretical calculation of potential damage, it is damage potential under real game conditions. I know that this is just one instance, and that there were many factors helping or hindering damage, but even if the BST had every random number in his favor I do not believe that any random casual BST should be able to so easily outperform what I believe to be one of the best SMNs to play the game. If an event like this does not indicate that there is a serious problem with the BST job, I really don't know what will.

How exactly can any job out dmg another job that can do 95% of a mobs hp in one go? Only way I could see it is if your "great" smn wasn't doing great in that situation. Which sounds like a case of using the wrong buffs, debuffs, and/or bps or he wasn't keeping up with his timers.

Because with the accuracies you are giving that would basically mean that the bst was landing 1 ready move for every 1 bp landed and still won. Which either means those ready moves are dealing 200k dmg each (which given that the max dmg without extra bonuses for single charge moves is like 20k yeah no) or your smn who "can" do 99999 dmg was only doing like 5k at that time or missing a lot of bps

[Zekander]

I will admit, the BST was better geared then I made it out to be, I didn't realize that many non-item level pieces are still some of the best things to use on BST. I was not, however, exaggerating any of those numbers. The damage disparity was around 10%, the accuracy numbers were correct, and the BST was using only one gearset (again admittedly better then I made it out to be). It also just now occurred to me that the SMN changed avatars several times, that is not only lost time for melee damage to be dealt, but would also skew the accuracy numbers in his favor, since it would be counting landed bloodpacts as a higher percentage of the total attacks. Yes, that example of the SMNs damage was an incredible outlier, and yes the skillchain was for around 95k damage, I think we had a GEO (non-idris) at the time, the NM was Gestalt in Escha Zi'tah (so fairly low defense).

As I said, this is just my anecdote, it is likely somewhat of an outlier itself. However, given that these numbers were accrued over about 20 minutes of fighting, that would bring it considerably closer to an accepted average. Therefor, if the two pet jobs were at all balanced in power (not that they should be exactly equal) then the BST should have been much better geared in order to achieve those numbers.

The entire point of this conversation is ultimately not whether or not BST should be nerfed, it is whether or not BST is balanced with respect to the other jobs in this game. In my opinion the answer is that it is not, it is completely unbalanced in almost every way.

I do not play BST myself, so I can't really say what the job is capable of. However, one of the jobs I do play is WHM, and I have done various content both with and without BSTs. From a WHMs perspective, content done with BSTs is done stupidly easily and completed much more quickly then a non-BST party. Playing WHM in sinister reign with a party consisting of three players in melee range (one tank and two DD) is an absolute NIGHTMARE, I could not cure stats fast enough when I even had time between spamming Curaga to keep them alive, which inevitably led to me taking hate and dying. The same content played with BSTs led me to nearly fall asleep, the only thing I could even do to support the party was cast Dia II, there was no need to cure the tank as he took so little damage (since most of the time the pets had hate anyway) that he could easily keep himself cured, and most of the time would use echo drops before my silena would even land. From this perspective BST trivializes almost all content, this is UNBALANCED.