Carraway's Guide to the New Archer: 1.18 and Beyond

[Murugan]

Carraway wont be back until after new year so sadly he wont be able to update the guide for a while.

On the topic of food we personally haven't even looked at food in any detail yet since its getting a major overhaul next patch hopefully so i personally have no idea what the most optimal food is right now, any suggestions would be nice since i still just use jerked beef even though it most likely does very little

If they haven't changed anything Shephard's pie is the best attack food.

Shephard's pie is a level 40 recipe, Jerked beef is level 15. Both affect attack. Deviled Eggs gives the same amount of attack supposedly, but I don't think they give HP making pie the best. If these are too expensive on your server a cheap alternative is Meat Miq'abobs which you can even buy from the vendor in Ul'dah.

It is very hard to test damage currently on anything but Whiskerwall because of the extremely wide damage window (such as the test above mentioning a 20-30 damage difference with str/dex rings should just toss all those results in my opinion as they mean nothing in the context of how damage seems to be calculated unless the person testing did over 100 tests on a unique mob), however food does seem to have a significant difference.

My LS has had the best luck parsing Whiskerwall to get a better idea of what actually works, and that is because his high defense reduces the upper limit of the damage window giving more consistent results rather than the wild high's and low's you see on most things people are using to test which obviously are going to skew results.

You might be able to piece together some coherent study of exactly how damage is calculated if you had a great deal of stable data (meaning unique mobs, no change in gear within datasets, no change in direction of attack) comparing multiple builds, and then ran it through a proper ANOVA to get rid of the wild outliers and actually prove something. However, I don't have time to get a sample that size and I think most people aren't going to bother until 2.0 hits (if we are all still playing).

Until that time people are best off in my opinion testing on whiskerwall with small samples to get a broad idea of what works best. He is the current king of the mobs, and in my opinion he is all anyone looking at min/maxing should be focusing on. Most parsers allow you to narrow your parse to a single target, overall stats like total DPS and damage from the fight are great for showing off but show very little useful information for those looking to see where they can improve as individuals.

[Penguin]

Erm ok thanks for that Murugan i don't really know what you are going on about now but thanks for the information.

[totallynotme]

But from what I understand DEX/PIE is much more efficient than STR/Attack, so wouldn't you want DEX food?

[TheFatHousecat]

But from what I understand DEX/PIE is much more efficient than STR/Attack, so wouldn't you want DEX food?

After looking through the list of foods, DEX is raw fish (after it's cooked the effect changes), so only Miqo'te would be able to eat that, right? You can only buy the fish from that vendor in the aquarium store in LL, too. And as for PIE, it's berries, the cheapest and most convenient being Pixie Plums, which you can buy for 201 gil from Gugudi in Ul'dah.

You get +3 PIE from eating any of the berries, and +3 DEX from the fish, so I'm assuming that you still would rather have the +17 ATK from Jerked Beef?

[carraway]

Jerked Beef and Shepherd's Pie give the same amount of attack boost; this has been the case since 1.19a, and will probably remain that way until 1.21.

All food of a given category (HP/ATK, DEF/ATK, etc.) confers the exact same bonuses.

Jerked Beef is the way to go.

[totallynotme]

Ok thank you both for the input!

[Zdenka]

Just to note carraway if it hasn't been mentioned. Quick Nock is using some sort of modifier even though on most things it seems to be using normal Light Shot calcs. (On moogles and random normal mobs each quick nock hit seems roughly the same as a normal hit)

On ifrit its pretty easy to see that it does not, infact, use a similar forumla. Barage -> 19 damage x 5. Quick Nock -> 140 damage x 5. Even on squisher mobs I dont think it gets much past 250, where Barrage/LSs start to get 400+ range.

If its modified the same I think it might just have a slower curve. On Ifrits I can get roughly the same damage as a THM in a non-burn set up, but if its a full THM burn with me as ARC I fall a little short of them (less jumps cooling off the longer WS timers). QN is about 25% of the total damage dealt on a "high defense" target like Ifrit it seems.

[knite23]

Pretty sure DEX and PIE are doing more for Archer than any other stat by a longshot as far as damage output goes - and damage output is all you need to care about on a class like archer. Only other thing would be MP for BRD, but that we already get from PIE.

and i would add vit/Enhancement Magic Potency to BRD as well

[NoctisUmbra]

and i would add vit/Enhancement Magic Potency to BRD as well

We'll be able to redo stats by 1.21 I believe. Even if not, jobs seem to be set to have their own stats and of course gear so I wouldn't worry so much about them. At least not so soon with all the info we don't have.

[knite23]

i have raptor skin harness with +82 crit, a normal crab bow with +24 dex / my ifrit bow +30atk, felt bracers +50 atk /felt bracers with +30 dex which bow/glove combination do you think will do the most damage?