Dual weild

[Laphine]

That idea came as an innovative way to increase our dps. SA/TA is still a very big chunk of our dps and increasing their overall use is a mean to increase our damage. Usually when i'm tanking i hardly use them, and this is really bad because they are an essential part of our play style.

I really don't mind that we need a tank to effectively use them, but being so, they are incredibly underwhelming as they are now. The way i see it we have 2 options: either decrease their damage and remove position requirements or increase their damage in some considerable way and keep the position requirements. My initial thought on removing position requirements was purely based on increasing our performance. I didn't want it just to make our job easier (how hard it is to line up anyway?).

So yeah, even though it would be nice to get more dual wield (and i do see DW3 being very much real otw to 99), this isn't going to change much. On innovative ways SE did give us crit attack bonus, which is completely synergic to thf game play. But then they went out and gave it to war and dnc as well. Sense much? Even worse, they went and gave crit attack bonus to a number of jobs thru af/items that puts our 8% in dust. I'm looking at war again (af feet), drg (af legs), nin (kamome), all of these giving +10% crit damage. Idk if there are any others, but this is completely unballanced imo.

Increasing sa/ta damage is something i would be very fond of. But not by the trashy amounts we have from both our af hands. It's got to be something meaningful! Something that would make ppl say: "ok, thf damage sucks solo, but it completely crushes things with a partner!".

lol just another something i just thought about which could help achieve that: placing SA/TA mods inside the ws calculations. Dex and agi would act as ws mods because they would also be multiplied by fTP. This way we would become epeen masters of the game, and it makes sense with our game play (that being based on oportunity attacks). Imagine a TARudras/Mercy for 5k outside abyss lol, talk about hate control! This would be a big game play change in a way too, we would probably become the only job that has to actually sit on tp to deal damage. How cool is that?! haha

Talking about reality though, i think the best JA we could get is that based seigan+third eye/perfect counter concept, which was also an idea thrown on these forums somewhere. DW3 + /war + something like that would make us very competitive. Without such JA we wouldn't have as many oportunities to use /war and things would just stay like they are now.

Anyway, don't mind me SE, gogo 5k TARudras outside Abyssea, (Yes, please.)!!!!!!

[scaevola]

For the record, wouldn't "optimal DNC" be a "Twashtar DNC"?

Yes, but Twashtar is substantially better for THF than DNC thanks to how Rudra's is designed. So there's that.

Notably, DNC gets a pretty solid response in the Double Attack Parazonium +2, but this is all beside the point because THF's damage is "balanced" around the assumption you'll be able to use SA and TA, which are undeniably very strong; if you increase THF's native TP damage through DW to the point where it's competitive with all the other MNK clones out there when they can't use SA or TA, they'd be totally unreal when they could.

THF doesn't need an increase in raw damage so much as it needs abilities that would make the use of SA and TA viable in realistic, 2011 situations.