[Kendo]

SAM & WAR have the same polearm skill. War has better acc/atk jas and whatnot and really, is tomoe much better than what war can equip?

[Byrthnoth]

SAM pretty easily gets a 5-hit with Tomoe, and it's a superior weapon to Engetsuto (1 base damage, 3 Acc, 5 Atk, some damage mitigation from Parrying+10.) It's not mind-blowingly better, but it is superior. I don't think Engetsuto +1 is a feasible weapon for 6-hit WAR due to the delay. (12.2TP/hit vs. 13TP/hit base according to wiki)

Leviathan's couse is a superior weapon to Tomoe imop, but I never saw one in my time in game. It's also kind of annoying to get a 6-hit without the 1STP from Engetsuto for WAR. The Carby Prime BCNM (and previous BCNMs) are overly pissy for the quality of drops they give, and no one does them. Before SapereAude was devastated by the bannings, we were considering doing them again and I was hoping to get lucky with drop/lot, but no one should ever assume they'll have it.

[BanetheBrawler]

Leviathan's Couse is a random drop from an 18 man BCNM that requires everyone to have beaten all the avatars (and picked them for a summon or w/e) 2x over in order to enter, if i remember correctly.

[Aragon]

^ All that which was said +Overwhelm. 19% is HUGE.

[Didopop]

YGK also gets the advantage of 1fold. Which kinda nullifys accurate parses due to the overkill effect of the weaponskill, which multi-folds dont have.

I guess that may not make sense but basically:

lets say mr.sam hits 100tp when the mob is at 7%. he can still gekko for normal damage. But if mr.war does this, only 1 fold of his RR is going to count on the damage which will be 33% of what it normally would do. Samurai gets a pretty large advantage in merit party simply due to that fact.
now the war can always hold his tp but hes going to be 1-2 hits over 100tp when he ws's the next mob, which overtime will also effect his parse.

[Hyriu]

dont ws when the mob is under 15% unless your pt sucks and you're about to lose the chain

[Requim]

Haven't merited with a Tomoe SAM, but there are a couple of decent polearms WAR can equip so it would be interesting to see how the two compare. Be interesting if anyone had a Leviathan's Couse and merits.

But another factor for WAR vs SAM is the setup because as mentioned retaliation could easily skew it in favor of the WAR if they were constantly holding hate. Several retaliation hits would be like adding a substantial amount of haste or DA gear. I would think that the smoother party it would lean in favor of WAR and a more choppy/down-time party would go for the SAM.

Either way it would probably be very close. It does seem that in normal setups the best DD actually tends to do less damage because they're constantly losing tp and using spells/JAs for avoiding hits, so just because someone is putting out more damage in the parse, it might just be that the better DD is suffering from decreased WS etc.

[byte.xi]

Haven't merited with a Tomoe SAM, but there are a couple of decent polearms WAR can equip so it would be interesting to see how the two compare. Be interesting if anyone had a Leviathan's Couse and merits.

But another factor for WAR vs SAM is the setup because as mentioned retaliation could easily skew it in favor of the WAR if they were constantly holding hate. Several retaliation hits would be like adding a substantial amount of haste or DA gear. I would think that the smoother party it would lean in favor of WAR and a more choppy/down-time party would go for the SAM.

Either way it would probably be very close. It does seem that in normal setups the best DD actually tends to do less damage because they're constantly losing tp and using spells/JAs for avoiding hits, so just because someone is putting out more damage in the parse, it might just be that the better DD is suffering from decreased WS etc.

Retaliation and riding hasso is the key to outparsing SAM.

[Saxonian]

Retaliation and riding hasso is the key to outparsing SAM.

& you wonder why you always die?
Stop trying to stroke your epeen so damm much and stop being an mp sponge -.-

[Requim]

I was in a brd brd whm nin rng/war and war/sam (me) party last night at bird camp and had hasso and retaliation up the entire time. Bards had /whm and /rdm subs with me voking the incoming mobs. Was an ls party where nin had just dinged 75 so I basically was tanking most of every fight.

Was actually using an Iron Ram Lance that has -10% damage taken (yes I know this was an odd weapon choice), but my hp was mostly in high yellow or above. Mp started to run a bit lower when I was voking the incoming mob and holding hate on the current one, but we never had to pause.

If a taru can do it, a galka or elvaan war should be able to easily do it.

Side note, 365 delay weapon with haste, hasso, march, and haste gear is a lot of fun!

[Treize Kordero]

I was comparing IR Lance to Engetsuto and I noticed that IR Lance has a better DPS than Engetsuto.. so maybe in the long run IR Lance is the better weapon to use on Lolibri

[RUebyy]

In a party situation where both war/sam and sam/war can focus on unrestrained DD i'd have to put a sam ahead of a war from my personal experience. PPL always bring up war's abilities but under-rate the usefulness of Sams. 140-180% free tp, Sekkanoki, and tachi: rana do wonders for sam.

2 step darkness is nuts. Especially after you've geared Rana to be comparable to Y/G/K. Being able to 2 step Darkness seemingly at will does wonders for your parse numbers where sam might usually fall behind. I've pretty much solo'd Mamools time and time again assuming the SC isn't completely resisted.

The real difference between war and sam is going to be the WS numbers. Eating the RiGhT meat a sams DPS won't fall too much behind a wars. But Wars main ws are kind of iffy at times(cept for KJ <3).
Sure you break consistency tiers once you're properly geared/merited but it can still be pretty hit and miss sometimes.

War and Sam are almost even but i'd put a sam who knows how to SC on top.

[byte.xi]

I was comparing IR Lance to Engetsuto and I noticed that IR Lance has a better DPS than Engetsuto.. so maybe in the long run IR Lance is the better weapon to use on Lolibri

This is VERY interesting. Not to mention, the damage taken reduction benefits the hasso/retaliation method. However, a lower DMG weapon is going to reduce the effectiveness of Retaliation which doesn't rely on delay but raw DMG. Also, obviously the WS numbers will be lower and high Pentas are one of the main reasons for Polearm as I see it.