Dual weild

[scaevola]

With the pattern of both DNC and NIN getting a new DW trait every twenty levels, it is extremely unlikely either will get another tier at 99. If anything, THF is more likely to get one than they are.

[Kaeoni]

I was hoping that this was just one big troll. But here we are ....

Any way you cut it, unless the dual wield is higher than what /nin currently gives us, it's worthless because it's our end all subjob. If you're subbing war i hope its for red procession, if you're subbing dnc i hope you're farming.
No other reason exists to not sub ninja on thief.

Thief is a multipurpose masterpiece which will always have a party slot, It can Evasion tank like a boss, It can deal massive amounts of Damage (Huge Triple attack values now strengthening our Offense, making it far more valuable than say saber dance as an example) It can manipulate hate freely, It has the 1 job ability that unlocks and successfully perpetuates what all MMO's are based around, Gear. We could only have TH and we would still be invited endgame, however we have the entire package, any thief worth their weight can tango with the vast majority of DD's out there. I know i can, and that's against a fully upgraded Verethragna friend of mine, all i'm using is an Evasion Kila+2 and a Triplus, in fact i tank more often then he does because my thief hits far faster then him, when you're at hate cap it just bounces to whoever hit it last which is usually just me. I know i don't deal as much damage as him but i cap hate closely behind him.

Dancer as a job is designed as a survivalist and it does it very very well, however Haste samba is no longer needed in an optimum setup because all forms of haste combined cap at 80%, and its healing ability in party is sub par due to it's limitation to waltz3 and basically healing waltz for itself. Why? It has unreasonable timers on all waltz's above 3, healing waltz included.
I'm a 90 dancer so It's not like i don't know what i'm talking about, If you need a healer you're better off getting a white mage or any mage who can sub white mage. A blm/whm offers more grellow opportunity a brd/whm has grellow haste marches elegy mambos. A Whm is just pure insanity in the curing aspect with light grellow. A smn/whm has additional DD, favors and the like. These all offer more utility. Dancer is just not a party specialized Job because it offers what exactly? It can't do anything a Thief can't already excel at in terms of a 2man or higher. Thief just does it better because when the NM dies it actually drops stuff. I'm not saying dnc is useless but they are not as highly valued in my book since haste samba dropped off the map. It's an excellent low man job but offers nothing but abilities that can be performed better by other jobs. Usurper is the only thing i like a dancer tanking because of its high impact Monk piercer ability and dnc gets fan dance for that. If any job needs to be fixed it's dancer's waltz timers.

The game has changed everyone, the days of an entire LS needed, or orchestrating an event are dead and gone.
Everything can be killed with 1-6 people regardless of your gear and if you have some type of relic or not.

Brought to you in part by: Atma, The god slayer.

[Laphine]

With the pattern of both DNC and NIN getting a new DW trait every twenty levels, it is extremely unlikely either will get another tier at 99. If anything, THF is more likely to get one than they are.

My point was not whether or not they will get new tiers of the trait otw to 99, but atually if they do get any new sources of DW, it will be a bigger boost to their dps compared to the small amounts of crit damage (or straight sa/ta damage) we get. If we didn't get anything in terms of DW we really wouldn't be able to keep up. So getting DW3 is indeed nice, even though it will hardly change anything because chances are we will use /nin most times. But at least it does opens up sub job options, since we wouldn't lose 10% DW by swapping /nin out.

The biggest balance issue is not really the trait itself, it's on the item selections we have. Both dnc and nin can get up to ~50% DW without many sacrifices. The most we get without sacrifices is 33%, maybe 36% by counting mirke, although that doesn't sit so well these days, since the best melee set combinations we have involve using the af3 body.

This 17% extra DW it's a an increase of 34% to melee dot tied with an also respectable increase to ws frequency (which means ws damage). SA/TA can increase both our melee dot and ws damage too, sadly, not this high. And more, if we use SA/TA to increase our ws damage, we lose dot. We don't lose overall damage, but the damage that would be used as melee damage is transfered to ws damage. It's like a balance, transfering weights them from one plate to the other.

But the biggest issue is that SA/TA it's a small fragment of our overall damage, and the more haste/dw/multi hits we get, the less it contributes. We can still only use the JAs once every minute, if you can do more damage inside that 1 minute then SA/TA becomes less prominent. So in a situation we already do high damage inside this window, increasing sa/ta damage by a small margin it's even less prominent in our final damage. Say SA/TA compromises with 20% to our damage, melee dot with 40%, ws with 40%. If we increase only the SA/TA part by, say, 20%. This is a final 4% increase to our total damage. If by adding haste/dw/multi hits SA/TA becomes only 10% of our total damage, that 20% boost represents a mere 2% increase to our damage.

I'm still in favor of ideas that fix SA/TA. The reason for that is because they go back to the very foundation of our job, which is a job that makes use of the perfect oportunity to strike, dealing massive damage. This is the reason i like rogue like classes, and the reason i fell in love with the job. But right now, we do lack the "massive" part...or maybe the "perfect"...we do lack something.

We have 2 jobs that make use of daggers to do their thing. Thf and dnc. Dnc is clearly a support role job. A support role that started getting too close to damage dealing role. What is thf? Certainly not a support job. A DD then? But why is it that thf is not on the same tier of the so called "big" ones? And more if dnc is support and thf is a DD, why is it that dnc can deal the same damage thf can? Makes no sense at all...

[Atomic_Skull]

Any way you cut it, unless the dual wield is higher than what /nin currently gives us, it's worthless because it's our end all subjob.

This is why I would have preferred a trait that reduces 1H weapon delay like Martial Arts does for H2H. Because it would still be useful while subbing NIN.

[scaevola]

We have 2 jobs that make use of daggers to do their thing. Thf and dnc. Dnc is clearly a support role job. A support role that started getting too close to damage dealing role. What is thf? Certainly not a support job. A DD then? But why is it that thf is not on the same tier of the so called "big" ones? And more if dnc is support and thf is a DD, why is it that dnc can deal the same damage thf can? Makes no sense at all...

Define "tier". I generally do a bit less damage in Abyssea on THF than I do on my DNC but both completely destroy my 5-hit Hagun 2.0 SAM. The best DDs are the ones who benefit the most from RR and other crit Atma; to say that THF isn't among these is totally insane.

[Laphine]

Same tier (rank) of damage capability. The thf damage is still far from those that are considered heavy dds. This mostly means thf vs mnk or war by today standards.But i didn't mean to say we should be able to deal the exact same damage of those jobs. Instead i think there should be some kind of parameter which would define game balance.

On my previous post i used utility as the parameter and compared both dnc and thf. And then i threw the question which could also be read as: if dnc has more utility what is that thf can add to the table to balance that? Certainly not damage since both jobs are pretty much tied. One could say thf has TH. This doesn't make the job better tho, only necessary. And this is why that ppl with resources have a TH mule. It's a mule because it simply doesn't add much else. Many jobs are better at that other things we can offer.

If we think of war vs mnk it can be quite reasonable. Both can deal crazy damage. War can deal more tho, but it trades damage for an inability to survive. Meanwhile, mnk is undestructible. Of course, given some exaggeration, but still, this makes sense for me.

What i'd like to see on thf is a better mastery of a trait (be it damage, survivability, hate management) that's not related to treasure hunter. Otherwise the job will always be relegated to mules because the player really doesn't need to be active to set th.

[Frost]

Idk, I seem to have no issue keeping up DD wise with most of the "Heavy Hitters". Granted, as I said earlier my Dnc seems to do even better. Personally I'd put thief in that "Top Tier" slot, but I have seen way too many pink thieves that I cannot. One apple spoiling the bunch is one thing, but jeez... There's a lot of rotten pink apples...

That being said... A "Dagger Mastery" of some sort would obviously be a nice addition. If anything just because we have NO alternative weapon. Most jobs have at least one other weapon only one tier down, but all of thief's are two tiers lower.

But what would it add? Accuracy? I don't have accuracy problems. Haste/Reduced delay like Martial arts? Maybe, but that's kinda the void Dual Wield fills (And if you ask me, any "One-Handed" weapon user should have this natively anyways)... Attack bonus? Possibly, I'd go so far to suggest a level of "Ignore Defense". Then there's things like Crit Attack Bonus, or Crit rate that could be added, etc.

What are thief's actual deficiencies though? What coudl the trait correct WITHOUT putting it so far ahead that balance would be upset. Especially when it comes to soloing.

[Laphine]

I for one believe our deficiency lies on sa/ta. Most changes proposed over here to these JAs would be quite significant too. Currently SA/TA adds a fixed amount of dps to our final dps, and if for example, this extra damage were to be more dynamic and able grow with our melee dps things will change quite a bit. Lol look at me talking about making JAs be affected by haste. And of course, if this was the case, it would just add more balance issues. Maybe only a select few JAs could get this bonus? haha I know dncs would also love their big waltzes with lower delays.

And i still love the idea of adding dex/agi bonus to the base ws damage lol. This would be an indirect increase to SA/TA damage because it would get multiplied by ftp. Say inside abyssea we solo a SA for 1250, and SARudras for 3500. With this little boost we would SARudras for a bit under 6k, not too shabby~.We would have no reason to stack SA with a multi hit ws too (due low ftp bonus), but that's something i can live with hehe.

[scaevola]

What i'd like to see on thf is a better mastery of a trait (be it damage, survivability, hate management) that's not related to treasure hunter. Otherwise the job will always be relegated to mules because the player really doesn't need to be active to set th.

Oh, you mean like having close to a flat 20% greater chance to dodge an attack than the next most evasive job, or the ability to plant hate from a large attack on another player, or even take hate from the same and redirect it to itself? And perhaps having these advantages ON TOP of Treasure Hunter, a totally unique advantage that by its mere existence makes THF a necessity?

Yes, I suppose that would compensate THF for not having the undisputed highest damage output in the game.

(ps complaining that you can't outdamage a WAR or MNK is pretty silly when there are seventeen other jobs that can't outdamage WARs or MNKs either)

if dnc has more utility what is that thf can add to the table to balance that? Certainly not damage since both jobs are pretty much tied. One could say thf has TH. This doesn't make the job better tho, only necessary

DNC does the damage it is capable of doing by shutting off all utility other than Haste Samba. A DNC that cures is a DNC that is not using Saber Dance (to say nothing of TP spent), and is not at all competitive with a THF's damage; if you're proceeding from the assumption that DNC and THF are neck-and-neck damage-wise, then you have to basically write off DNC's ability to heal something more than once every three minutes.

Lol look at me talking about making JAs be affected by haste. And of course, if this was the case, it would just add more balance issues. Maybe only a select few JAs could get this bonus? haha I know dncs would also love their big waltzes with lower delays.

There are a lot of jobs, DNC included, that are already very powerful thanks to their JAs; allowing their recasts to scale with Haste would be just dumb.

I guess my SAM/DRG would be happy...?


(pps JA recasts reduced by haste, and suddenly THFs start crying about needing to sub NIN all the time because it turns out THF/COR with 30 second QD cooldowns is pretty loller)

[Alaik]

A flat 20% better evade rate? Dude, you really have to look up how evasion works. There's an evade cap and THF and DNC both hit it on most NMs easily. Trick Attack doesn't do anything after 20 seconds if your DD/tanks are any good cause of hate caps, look those up as well; at that point trick attack is just a dmg boosting ability. !!! > TH on 95% of all items in abyssea and outside isn't exactly important for most players.

THF and DNC are neck in neck dmg wise when DNC isn't giving up their utility, if they go balls to the wall they pull ahead. The exception being when twashtar comes into play, DNC can't utilize that NEAR as well as THF can.