Post your Grand Company Weapons!

[Frein]

Your brain is being severely limited by your intense belief in min/maxing. You have to understand that min/max isn't law, and min/max doesn't define games. In fact, games aren't even designed nor balanced around min/maxing, which is precisely why your niche argument falls to pieces.

Of course min/max defines games. Fighting games and competitive RTS games are designed to be balanced at top levels of competition, not in the noob league. The same principle is used in MMO design when making the hardest end game content: The devs have to consider all the options the players have available, and assume they're going to abuse those options to the fullest, to guarantee a challenging encounter.

This is why alchemy was eventually toned down in WoW. With liberal use of potions you could push the overall power level of the raid group very high, which forced the devs to design encounters with juiced up groups in mind. This then lead to people unwilling or unable to mass produce potions to face nearly insurmountable challenges and, if not forced, encouraged everyone to spend a lot of time on farming alchemy materials.

More or less you are creating niches, which you are perfectly allowed to do; you just need to remember that the niches you are creating only exist for yourself, and whosoever happens to agree with your perception.

My niches exist within the game's mechanics, not just in my head. It is not my subjective opinion that 100k gil is less than 200k gil and that a weapon that outparses another weapon in situation X actually does so.

Since niches are, in fact, completely made up outside of the level of content they were designed for...anyone can use any weapon they choose so long as it is designed for the content which they will be facing. It is safe to say that due to the weapon's level, and raw stats, it was designed for current content. Thats about as far as this "niche" thing goes in FFXIV. SE gives you a bunch of weapons released with content, you choose which to use for what. He chooses to use his GC lance, and he is making a good choice because that lance was designed for current content. Again, it doesnt need to be the best in any one category to be relevant or useful. The point is that it is viable, and it definitely is. No party will fail current content because they were using all GC weapons...with the exception of maybe Garuda. And that is an honest maybe, since Garuda is actually a gear check in a lot of ways, and requires not just viable gear, but superior gear. Still, I could very well be possible to succeed even with all GC weapons. Other than that one possible exception, I fail to see the problem with his gear choice...other than the fact that it doesn't fit into your min/max belief system. Different strokes for different folks, let him be.

Unless you define success as something else than beating game content as flawlessly as possible (RP perhaps?), this is a mentality of mediocrity and failure. My belief is that you should do everything to the best of your ability and not voluntarily handicap yourself. It is my advice, not my decree, to follow this belief. Everyone is free to play the way they want and the purpose of my posts is not to demand but to inform. However, as much as everyone have the right to play the way they want, I too, have the right to choose the people I agree to play with and I consider things like this when I make that evaluation.

[Reinheart]

Am I the only one that wants to see more GC weapon pics on this thread other than the lance? lol

[Fingerbox]

Am I the only one that wants to see more GC weapon pics on this thread other than the lance? lol

No you're not!
Also, I was a bit curious as to what the -refresh on the THM cudgel does?
Would be amazing if it took 3 seconds of the recast of every spell XD

[Lux_Rayna]

Of course min/max defines games. Fighting games and competitive RTS games are designed to be balanced at top levels of competition, not in the noob league. The same principle is used in MMO design when making the hardest end game content: The devs have to consider all the options the players have available, and assume they're going to abuse those options to the fullest, to guarantee a challenging encounter.

This is not entirely true at all. Devs do have to consider all of these things, yes, but the content will not be balanced around the assumption that all players will be min/maxing. You have to take maximum into account in order to deliver challenging content, but you also have to balance this content around the averages and the minimums. In other words, games are balanced around what players can obtain and what players are likely to have. There is no content that can withstand a party full of quint melded blms. None. This more or less proves my point. Devs consider its existence, but also recognize that no party will likely be 100% efficient. Thus you scale the battle to aim at a particular level of play, and anything beyond that wont' see much of a challenge at all. If you remember the gear swapping in FFXI, it was easymode until the devs balanced content around min/maxing. Games generally aren't designed around min/maxing, as min/maxing usually makes things easy.

My niches exist within the game's mechanics, not just in my head. It is not my subjective opinion that 100k gil is less than 200k gil and that a weapon that outparses one weapon in situation X actually does so.

You convinced yourself they exist within game mechanics but they exist entirely in your head. Niches are made up; something has to be given a niche in order to have one, and SE never gave niches to any weapon they have ever released. They release different weapons, with different stats, and it is the player that will look at the weapon and give it a niche. Yes your niches are based off game mechanics, but they are still made up. You and I can look at the same weapon and give it different niches, because we perceive its utility differently. Take a weapon with high acc and high crit attack. You might look at it and see critgoon, i may look at it and see high acc for high eva mobs. My equips would focus on acc, your equips would focus on crit rate/power, and the same weapon would have two different niches according to two different people.

Its is not your subjective opinion that one weapon outparses another in a certain situation, but it is your subjective opinion that that weapon's niche is the situation you parsed it in. There is room in a niche for more than one thing. In nature many animals fulfill the same niche, some not as well as others. Regardless, there is a place for them there, as likely they are able to fulfill other roles while exist within that niche. Again, let us return to the high acc and high crit attack power weapon. It can exist in many different setups, used well in many different situations, purely because it can fulfill multiple roles at the same time. There might be another higher acc weapon that would be more beneficial, but maybe I decided to take the lower acc for a good bonus to my crit attack..or my attack..or whatever else it has. It still fills that acc niche, but also gives me something more.

This is a mentality of mediocrity and failure. My belief is that you should do everything to the best of your ability and not voluntarily handicap yourself. It is my advice, not my decree, to follow this belief. Everyone is free to play the way they want and the purpose of my posts is not to demand but to inform. However, as much as everyone have the right to play the way they want, I too, have the right to choose the people I agree to play with and I consider things like this when I make that evaluation.

Thats ironic in a way. When you're min/maxing, you are only doing one thing to the best of your ability and doing nothing about anything else. You are essentially handicapping yourself by limiting your mind to a tiny box and not learning how various combinations and varieties can be used in different situations. You become ignorant of a lot of things in this pursuit, but if that pursuit alone makes you happy then follow it all the same. Min/Maxing is only a small part of gameplay. There is a lot to learn by taking an "all-rounded approach," or a different approach for the sake of simply exploring options and learning more about how to play. You lose out on the discovery of potentially lethal combinations because you pigeonhole your focus to one thing. You may say I am aiming for mediocrity, but I could just as easily say the same of your approach. To ignore 95% of the game's equipment, builds, playstyles, etc., is severely hampering your progress as a player. To follow one road is to ignore all the rest, so while you would be quite knowledgeable about that one road, you'd be entirely clueless about the roads around you. Thus when an opportunity comes along, you'd be unable to perceive it. You would not know what you were looking at because your belief system blinded you to the existence of anything else.

Its like with Garuda weapons. When I saw Garuda weapons I saw opportunity. When other saw them, they saw garbage. Imagine the irony if/when parse results show that they were indeed superior, and that a number of awesome builds were possible with them. If you spent all your time obsessing over pebbles, you wouldnt know a gem when you saw one. You'd just declare it wasnt a pebble, making it garbage, and chuck it in the river. A few centuries later someone finds it and sees value, jewelry, accessories...the list goes on. IMO its better to broaden your mind than to lock it onto any one thing. Specializing never hurts, but always leave room for flexibility and openness.

[SunZhi]

No you're not!
Also, I was a bit curious as to what the -refresh on the THM cudgel does?
Would be amazing if it took 3 seconds of the recast of every spell XD

I have the cudgel and, while I have not done any real empirical testing, anecdotally it would seem that the amount of MP that I get back with each tic is slightly lower, but insignificant overall.

[Frein]

If you remember the gear swapping in FFXI, it was easymode until the devs balanced content around min/maxing.

I believe you just proved my point here.

You and I can look at the same weapon and give it different niches....[cut to save space]

Your entire argument seems to be based on the idea that character builds are like the unexplored final frontier where all kinds of wonders await. That if you skew your stats towards something unconventional, something completely unexpected will happen and only by testing every single combination will you know how those combinations perform. This is simply not the case. We have a very good idea of how most stats work, which allows us to make educated conclusions about various character builds without having to actually test every one of them. The potential for powerful enough synergies simply do not appear to exist.

In the MRD/WAR forum there was speculation about the potential of a massively self-healing Rampage/Crit build but turns out your crit rate is very difficult to significantly modify with gear, so the thought experiment didn't lead to anything. Similarly in the THM/BLM forum a crit power build was proposed but after a parse was ultimately abandoned as inferior to a traditional INT/MATK/MACC build.

Let's take the much debated Garuda weapons as an example. They allow you to AA with a very low delay. Then what? How do you propose we take advantage of that? You seem confident that there is potential for something miraculous, yet you cannot explain why the fast AA would matter. For instance, you could make the argument that assuming the wind/fire damage proc rates and power are equal on Garuda/Ifrit weapons, the Garuda weapon will proc more wind damage over a given period of time. This, however, is clearly not enough to bridge the gap assuming what we "know" about WS damage calculation is true.

[Lux_Rayna]

I believe you just proved my point here.

I actually proved mine. If content was balanced around min/maxing FFXI would have never been easymode ever. It would have always been very difficult, but it was not. Devs recognized that everyone was min/maxing, and so changed the content to reflect that. By and large, and in general, games do not do this. FFXI was an exception, due to its peculiar mechanics and circumstances.

Your entire argument seems to be based on the idea that character builds are like the unexplored final frontier where all kinds of wonders await. That if you skew your stats towards something unconventional, something completely unexpected will happen and only by testing every single combination will you know how those combinations perform. This is simply not the case. We have a very good idea of how most stats work, which allows us to make educated conclusions about various character builds without having to actually test every one of them. The potential for powerful enough synergies simply do not appear to exist.

Any tester worth their salt will tell you that an isolated test can only tell you whatever it was testing. If I test crit damage and find it difficult to raise, and then I test crit rate and find the same thing...that does not tell me that crit rate+crit damage is inefficient. What you are doing are making base assumptions based on isolated data. These assumptions are not necessarily correct until they are tested. Sometimes a combination makes something that is greater than the sum of its parts. This exists in nature as a constant reminder. 2 Hydrogen and one oxygen make the incredible substance of water. Neither by themselves is anything particularly useful to us outside of their limited use. But water is infinitely useful for a variety of things, and is far greater than anyone would have supposed looking at hydrogen and oxygen in isolation.

In the MRD/WAR forum there was speculation about the potential of a massively self-healing Rampage/Crit build but turns out your crit rate is very difficult to significantly modify with gear, so the thought experiment didn't lead to anything. Similarly in the THM/BLM forum a crit power build was proposed but after a parse was ultimately abandoned as inferior to a traditional INT/MATK/MACC build.

This more or less proves the point. You have to parse the builds in question in order to pass an accurate judgement. Leaving anything as a thought experiment without putting it into practice is just folly. Thats not science, it is assumption. There is no harm in testing any build before assessing its validity. Failure to do so is just laziness. There are a lot of builds in XI that never would have seen the light of day had someone not said "fuck you" to the community and tried it anyway. Both War/Nin and Nin/War come to mind. I'm sure there are more though. Once Garuda weapons and GC weapons are fully parsed, you might be surprised at the results. Every patch means the game has changed, thus everything that was tested needs be retested as new equipment becomes available. After all, the devs are not required to tell you anything regarding dmg formulas. They could change them tmrw and you wouldnt have a clue because you're too busy assuming instead of testing.

Let's take the much debated Garuda weapons as an example. They allow you to AA with a very low delay. Then what? How do you propose we take advantage of that? You seem confident that there is potential for something miraculous, yet you cannot explain why the fast AA would matter. For instance, you could make the argument that assuming the wind/fire damage proc rates and power are equal on Garuda/Ifrit weapons, the Garuda weapon will proc more wind damage over a given period of time. This, however, is clearly not enough to bridge the gap assuming what we "know" about WS damage calculation is true.

Methinks it is infinitely wiser to test the actual weapon instead of assuming an old and outdated parse still holds water in a constantly changing game. This is no offense meant to the tester, but they will freely admit they do not know all the nuances of dmg calculation, and can only hypothesize. That being the case, assuming anything about new weapons and new releases is foolish, as SE could change a number of things to make those new releases viable for the content they were released with. Parse the GC weapons, parse the Garuda weapons, and you might be *shocked* that your assumptions are...in fact...false. You can only know this if you throw away the old belief in your head and approach every new release with an open mind. There's already one parse you have seen comparing GC lance to Ifrits Harpoon. And you have seen, like I have, that some of the assumptions regarding WS dmg and stat caps appear false. Numbers dont lie after all, and the numbers speak for themselves. Though it is a preliminary test of a rather small sample size, it does prove that there is dmg progression at stat levels similar to Ifrits Harpoon. If you looked at some of the dmg calculations, dmg was even higher on the lower dmg weapon than on Ifrits harpoon. Thus it is something that warrants further testing, and it is painfully clear that a lot of the old assumptions may not hold water anymore.

You know what they say about assuming after all. Its worth testing. One small test is already enough to raise eyebrows, so clinging to old data and making assumptions based on old data is just a silly way to go about anything.

[Frein]

FFXI was an exception, due to its peculiar mechanics and circumstances.

I just posted an example of the exact same thing happening in WoW.

If I test crit damage and find it difficult to raise, and then I test crit rate and find the same thing...that does not tell me that crit rate+crit damage is inefficient.

Yes, it does. Please explain how it possibly could not tell you exactly that.

2 Hydrogen and one oxygen make the incredible substance of water. Neither by themselves is anything particularly useful to us outside of their limited use. But water is infinitely useful for a variety of things, and is far greater than anyone would have supposed looking at hydrogen and oxygen in isolation.

This is so not the same thing. You can calculate the exact DPS increase for for added crit power if you know your crit rate and vice versa. There is no potential for new elements here.

This more or less proves the point. You have to parse the builds in question in order to pass an accurate judgement.

I think it's pretty self explanatory that going from 5% crit rate to 5.5% crit rate isn't going to suddenly let you heal a ton more with Rampage. No parsing needed.

[Lux_Rayna]

I just posted an example of the exact same thing happening in WoW.

I never played WoW for any reasonable amount of time so I will not address it. That makes 2 exceptions..woo.

Yes, it does. Please explain how it possibly could not tell you exactly that.

If you use a crit dmg/crit rate build on DRG for example, it will give you much different results than using it on..idk..WAR or ARC. Our skills are designed with inflated crit rates. Our traits help our crit as well. Crit may be hard to raise but on a DRG a few percentage points may be enough to maximize our crit potential. If dmg is more important than stats for dmg calculation, sacrificing attack power for crit attack power could yield favorable results. If I can even get an extra 15% in crit damage thats already quite a nice dmg boost given that at least half of my WS's have an increased critcal rate proc. Well it might be 3/8..but close to half. And in a party, against a boss, you are looking at 3/5 skills youll mainly be using have increased critical rate built into them.

But also, discounting class context, combining the two could yield something serviceable whereas not combining them would be garbage. It really depends to what degree you can be successful raising both crit dmg and crit rate. Since the two have not been tested together, we really can't be sure of the possibilities...or how well they work in tandem parsed against something else. Assumptions are assumptions. I dont see why you are so against testing something first...its almost as if you are afraid of seeing your assumptions as incorrect.

This is so not the same thing. You can calculate the exact DPS increase for for added crit power if you know your crit rate and vice versa. There is no potential for new elements here.

It is quite the same thing. Both hydrogen and oxygen are entirely identifiable and quantifiable elements. You can find all of their exact details in a periodic table. Yet combining them yields a compound that is greater than the sum of its parts. Water isn't even an element, but a combination of elements, otherwise known as a compound. But I digress. Back to the larger point, you can't calculate the exact anything, because no one knows the exact dmg calculation and how it precisely works. No tester knows this, you can ask any of them and they will shrug their shoulders and say "all we know is dmg is the biggest influence". You pretending there is exact knowledge where there is none, and assuming that which you do not know and have not tested. As I've said billions of times, parse results may surprise you. I fail to see what is so unreasonable about testing anything before making a claim to its validity. You seem more interested in holding onto your assumptions than in discovering truth. Of course no one likes being proven wrong, which is likely why a status quo is extremely hard to change. In any case look at the preliminary parse results so far, and I think we can agree that certain assumptions may not hold water anymore.

I think it's pretty self explanatory that going from 5% crit rate to 5.5% crit rate isn't going to suddenly let you heal a ton more with Rampage. No parsing needed.

Assuming the calculation is indeed 5.5%. Most of these tests are estimates and hypotheses. You would need an insanely large sample size repeated over months and months to come close to anything like an exact number. Even then, there's nothing to say there aren't threshold numbers where it jumps beyond the normal linear increase. These are things we cannot ever know for certain, because we do not have access to the exact formulas. This is why I say you test everything in context. In order to fully understand anything, to quote the philosopher William James, you need to see it both within its environment and outside its environment. To not do both is to leave one side of the problem unresolved and unobserved, which is contrary to both science and mathematics. Please explain what is so unreasonable about testing before claiming to fact? I cannot understand it for the life of me. For some reason you are much happier assuming than seeing the results in practice.

[Gunslinger]

Mods, please change name of thread to "Post your wall of text about min/maxing"

Srsly though, stop posting about min/max stuff and go grind Toko-Rak like the rest of us so you can post some gear screenshots.