[Kaparu]

Raparee Harness

[BuGGaTon]

Dusk +1 is only better than homam hands with at 92% accuracy and max haste in all other slots (excluding body) with bard songs and haste (spell) and I then Dusk pips the post, but the lower your accuracy the more Homam is doing for you. Due to the fact that the dusk is only useful situationally I don't think it's worth the 20mil.

Rap, as i've shown time and time again (in numbers... shocking), is only better when you have very high accuracy and every other bit of haste under the sun and that's assuming corazza has only +1% triple attack. That's assuming you've got 6% haste coming from your belt and you're using homam legs, not skadi legs. It's a toss up but the lower the acc and the lower your haste the better corazza is. I'm embarrased when I see people fighting high level NMs in a rap harness... it's a good piece but stop fucking full timing it (certain people). Times are that a fucking scorp harness is better. I'm lacking a rap harness from my equipment atm and i'm damned sure I want one for certain things. But don't ever assume that you don't want a corazza.

In optimal setup i'd be wearing 3 bits of homam when i'm doing anything but farming capped acc mobs.

In optimal setup i'd be wearing this:

[Kaparu]

For the record, I'm speaking solely in regard to Greater Colibri. Nothing I've said (likely) is a reflection about how I feel regarding any other situation. I mean, obviously Crab Sushi is silly against Mamool, for instance.

As for the comparisons between Homam and Raparee, they all seem to be taking the accuracy loss into account, which isn't even remotely relevant in this case. I flat-out do not see the mathematical justification in a thief(or any other job that cannot get 92+% Acc on their own) using meat against birds. For that to be a good decision, again, food that gives much, much more attack than a sub or kabob can provide would have to be involved.

[treelo]

For the record, I'm speaking solely in regard to Greater Colibri. Nothing I've said (likely) is a reflection about how I feel regarding any other situation. I mean, obviously Crab Sushi is silly against Mamool, for instance.

As for the comparisons between Homam and Raparee, they all seem to be taking the accuracy loss into account, which isn't even remotely relevant in this case. I flat-out do not see the mathematical justification in a thief(or any other job that cannot get 92+% Acc on their own) using meat against birds. For that to be a good decision, again, food that gives much, much more attack than a sub or kabob can provide would have to be involved.

Um... I hate to tell you this but it's a fairly simple task of hitting your magical 92% accuracy. Without losing any Haste. Expensive, but doable. Completely capping accuracy against Colibri would require losing a few % of Haste, but again, it's still possible.

[Kaparu]

Um... I hate to tell you this but it's a fairly simple task of hitting your magical 92% accuracy. Without losing any Haste. Expensive, but doable. Completely capping accuracy against Colibri would require losing a few % of Haste, but again, it's still possible.

A 75 Mithra Thief/Ninja with full dexterity and dagger merits wearing X's Knife/Blau Dolch/Fire Bomblet/Walahra Turban/Ancient Torque/Brutal Earring/Suppanomimi/Homam Corazza/Homam Manopolas/Toreador's Ringx2/Cuchulain's Mantle/Velocious Belt/Homam Cosciales/Homam Gambieras(as high-accuracy as you can get without dropping crucial haste, and dipping into AV-items) only has 86% accuracy against level 82 birds. Drop that to 84% if you're a Hume, Galka, or Tarutaru, and drop it to 83% if you're an Elvaan. Again, this is also including full dexterity merits.

And regardless, compromising that little bit of haste is what makes it the wrong decision.

[pathwriter]

It's so cute watching you spaz out about completely irrelevant shit like having capped Haste and Accuracy for Greater Colibri, especially using shit like Velocious Belt as part of your argument. Treelo at least remotely drew my attention pointing out that Thief's WS rate is tied slightly more to their SA/TA timers than to their TP gain rate. It's not the most compelling or fool-proof argument I've heard, but it works.

[Kaparu]

In what way is capping your accuracy and attack speed irrelevant? How fast and often you're hitting things is what matters the most when you're talking about increasing damage in this case. And I was clearly using perfect(sans relic and AV) equipment for the sake of an example.

We get it, you don't think meriting is important, that's a-okay. If you don't want to be part of a discussion about Greater Colibri, don't be a part of the discussion about Greater Colibri.

And our definitions of spazzing must greatly differ.

[Yhelothur]

Guys, give up. Just stop it. This is pointless.

[Kaparu]

Why would we stop? This is a discussion forum, and I'm having a discussion with Treelo. Other people insulting each other really has no baring on my desire to learn and/or educate.

[treelo]

A 75 Mithra Thief/Ninja with full dexterity and dagger merits wearing X's Knife/Blau Dolch/Fire Bomblet/Walahra Turban/Ancient Torque/Brutal Earring/Suppanomimi/Homam Corazza/Homam Manopolas/Toreador's Ringx2/Cuchulain's Mantle/Velocious Belt/Homam Cosciales/Homam Gambieras(as high-accuracy as you can get without dropping crucial haste, and dipping into AV-items) only has 86% accuracy against level 82 birds. Drop that to 84% if you're a Hume, Galka, or Tarutaru, and drop it to 83% if you're an Elvaan. Again, this is also including full dexterity merits.

And regardless, compromising that little bit of haste is what makes it the wrong decision.

Funny, I got 88% using identical equipment but using a Swift Belt instead of V.Belt.

[EDIT] Fixed an error.

[Shamaya]

That is an intense optimal build buggs.

Fortunately on birds we've got cheap kabobs and sushi, but for everything else, there's MarinaraPizza(+1). Just wanted to throw that out there for anyone that may still be out of the loop though I imagine most of the people in this thread know about it by now. A 4 hour food that costs 5k and gives me 2/3 of the effect of sushi and 2/3 the effect of meat? Seriously if I didn't know about the food and someone told me that I'd swear they were fucking with me.

I'll have to agree that Rapp isn't a piece you'd never melee in. I remember pre-pizza that I had a build for meat with homam, etc, and a build for sushi (rapp, etc). The difference between 80-85% and 95% acc is easily noticeable, as for the marginal 9% increased attack speed from rapp harness after all other haste was factored in. Nevertheless, my sushi build and meat build always parsed fairly similar at mamools. In the end I chose meat because I felt it was more likely the ever slightly better build, and plus big WS's made me feel like a pimp. Note that this is for Mandau. Pre-mandau I would usually prefer sushi. Let's not forget that DE/EV are multi-hit and are heavily improved by higher hit-rate. Fortunately pizza came along. It is like burger king, you can have it your way. It is like McDonalds, I'm lovin' it.

If you have Mandau: Save SA/TA for MS, use only one with MS, do a DE every 3rd WS.
If you do not have Mandau: Separate SA/TA, do not equip swap for them, fire off DE/EV (since supposedly EV is capable of usefulness? I haven't looked into this much) as soon as you can.
Eat meat. Use Homam body.

The most important factors in merits are effort and efficiency. You want to waste as little time as you can out of range, out of combat, with 100+ tp and with SA or TA up. At any point you're not about to WS or position yourself for SA or TA you should be positioning yourself so that the next mob is in front of you so you auto-target it. If it's slightly off center you want to hit enter and tab over and switch target to the next mob before the current one dies. Stay in combat. Doing this will do far more for the damage you deal than love torque vs ancient torque or sushi vs meat..

While the concept of not having sa/ta builds is worth a nice loud facepalm, I'll have to agree w/ most of the rest. It's not just thieves, but many other DD's lose lots of DPS by being lazy. The manual switch-targets is a great idea for anyone that doesn't do that and I do it to. Like if I Sa+ws a mob to death and I know I'm not going to be lined up for the next one, I'll hit that switch target if I can. For mandau any sort of "stack x # of ws, unstack y # of ws" mantra is just not gonna work and I'm sure you know what I mean eagle. I bet your parse is good largely because your playstyle is good. Maximizing time is key.. if the next mob is far enough away, I'm wearing my striders. Get sa/ta builds though; not doing so is like telling everyone "I'm a shitty thief" which I doubt is really true.

[Cyprias]

A 75 Mithra Thief/Ninja with full dexterity and dagger merits wearing X's Knife/Blau Dolch/Fire Bomblet/Walahra Turban/Ancient Torque/Brutal Earring/Suppanomimi/Homam Corazza/Homam Manopolas/Toreador's Ringx2/Cuchulain's Mantle/Velocious Belt/Homam Cosciales/Homam Gambieras(as high-accuracy as you can get without dropping crucial haste, and dipping into AV-items) only has 86% accuracy against level 82 birds. Drop that to 84% if you're a Hume, Galka, or Tarutaru, and drop it to 83% if you're an Elvaan. Again, this is also including full dexterity merits.

And regardless, compromising that little bit of haste is what makes it the wrong decision.

Skadi legs! 1% isn't too crucial is it?

[Eaglestrike]

In what way is capping your accuracy and attack speed irrelevant? How fast and often you're hitting things is what matters the most when you're talking about increasing damage in this case. And I was clearly using perfect(sans relic and AV) equipment for the sake of an example.

We get it, you don't think meriting is important, that's a-okay. If you don't want to be part of a discussion about Greater Colibri, don't be a part of the discussion about Greater Colibri.

And our definitions of spazzing must greatly differ.

What I like is your seeming obsession with completely maximizing attack speed and hit rate without any worry about average damage. Have you done the math on how much an increase it is to drop 2% haste and 3% hit rate for 5 more damage on each hit? And what about for SA/TA/WS's? Sushi can potentially do nothing for those (depending on ws and your ws gear) while meat helps them plenty.

And I never had SA/TA swaps, at least at 75, because I was poor as hell. I got my mandau, I got heca harness+1, I went -3/29 on heca feet+1 and I didn't really have much else left over to get all the other nice stuff. I was happy with my thiefs damage and I was looking more into alternative play styles for my PLD (I was someone who helped bring PLD out of its turtling ways, btw) and leveling other jobs than getting an extra 30 damage out of SA every 54s. Mandau killed my farming motivation, and not just in FFXI either, heh, I couldn't farm in WoW at all. I beat a couple Ridill warriors before Mandau, no one got close to me with my Mandau. I play my thief almost like it's a WoW character that has a move to do every second as opposed to most FFXI characters that do something every 10s and wait for their next move, adding in extra equip swaps seemed like it was more trouble than it was worth.

[Shamaya]

I hear ya. Idk one can make a pretty cheap sa/ta set though. Bomb core (if using bomblet), heca cap, dragon harness, heca hands, dex rings, Warwolf belt, dragon subligar, dragon leggings. That's probably gear you already had and if you didn't that'd be like...50-300k worth of stuff to buy for an SA set? The rest of the gear you'd have in your TP set would remain on. And with heca cap hands etc that means you wouldn't have to buy anything new for those slots. That's just for sa. Ta might be a little bit more, but still one can get a decent ta build fairly cheap.

[Eaglestrike]

Yeah but by the time you get a Mandau a SA/TA set is worthless as you should be using SA and TA with MS =p I never saw the THF af+1 items drop (I think I have the Limbus one...haven't seen Temenos) for gloves, which is probably the only "big" items for a switch. But I wouldn't really want to switch in Heca for Homam, that'd be like a 30-40% attack speed switch. And just so you know, I do have WS sets (DE and MS sets) so it's not like I don't gear swap, not sure if you thought otherwise or not, heh. I just don't specifically get something out for SA and TA, wasn't worth the hassle as I'd have to have worked in a way to change macro palettes as I used all 20 in one line for my THF/NIN setup.

[treelo]

What I like is your seeming obsession with completely maximizing attack speed and hit rate without any worry about average damage. Have you done the math on how much an increase it is to drop 2% haste and 3% hit rate for 5 more damage on each hit? And what about for SA/TA/WS's? Sushi can potentially do nothing for those (depending on ws and your ws gear) while meat helps them plenty.

This I agree with.

If you do not have Mandau: Separate SA/TA, do not equip swap for them, fire off DE/EV (since supposedly EV is capable of usefulness? I haven't looked into this much) as soon as you can.

This I don't. Copying this straight from a PM since it covers both issues rather well.

5TP/Hit with capped accuracy and 22% Haste works out to about 100tp every 41 seconds.
4.8TP/Hit with capped accuracy and 18% Haste works out to 100tp every 47 seconds.

My SA timer is 54 seconds, my TA timer is 56 seconds. Waiting 13 seconds for SA to come up is out of the question. A 7 second gap can take into account missed hits, time to position, waiting for a mob to die, etc, etc.

Adding Haste and 2x March only serves to further distance the gap between my timers and TP rate using a full haste build. It actually works quite well with my own setup, meaning I'm able to alternate SAWS and TAWS every time they are up. Using sushi lowers my WS damage, which is what I'm using to power my way through mobs. There is a noticable difference between Evisceration with sushi and Evisceration with meat.

The accuracy does little for me. At least 25% of the hits will be crits. The sheer volume of DEX I'm throwing at the mob gives me about an 88-89% hit rate, taking both of these into account it's rare that I'm going to miss a hit. I'm already well over the "cap" for crit rate based on my DEX. All I'm lacking is STR and Attack, which is precisely what eating meat gives me.

Yeah but by the time you get a Mandau a SA/TA set is worthless as you should be using SA and TA with MS

I've never understood the obsession with MS once you get a Mandau. Obviously I don't have one so that might go some way to explaining this. I'd still be spamming the shit out of EV, using MS to double darkness if the opportunity presented itself. Clearly this wouldn't work everywhere, but as far as merits go, I'm fairly certain you don't need to limit yourself to MS just because you've got it.

[Eaglestrike]

I don't "limit" myself to MS, but it does an average 2-2.1k damage with SA+MS in my terrible terrible ws gear (pat helm, heca harness+1, heca gloves, republic subligar, homam feet still) and I imagine someone in actual STR gear could up the average to 2.3-2.4k. I've spiked for over 2.6k on birds, you do 2.8k with EV but I imagine with your gear it'd be about even, with MS having excellent consistency.

From the sounds of your rotation you sit around with SA or TA around occasionally. Now, I play in a more variable playstyle, sometimes I wait sometimes I do not, but that's more of a decision to be made based on timers and something you just need to get a feel for. I don't care to explain all the details when giving generic playstyle advice, so I stick with that line. If timers line up, excellent, if timers do not line up, fire whatever you have off anyway.

However my opinion comes from having an excellent TP set but a weak WS set, which isn't your case Treelo, so we see things a bit different. For me, I focused on having a strong TP set as melee damage is about half of the damage you do overall so my focus is on keeping that high and maximizing it. I work on not "wasting" anything. I'll wait about 5s for SA or TA with tp, but not more than that. Colibri play into my style a lot better because they can steal tp from you, if I'm sitting there waiting for SA or TA I just might lose my tp and it throws me off completely.

An added bonus to the meat way of thinking is that you feed the mob less tp. Sometimes it makes a difference sometimes it doesn't, but I must say the less a bird steals tp/food, or a troll uses stoneskin, the better. Sushi makes sure you're constantly streaming a mob tp, meat you still do because of accuracy gear, but it's slightly less and your DMG per hit is increased, making your DMG per tp given much higher with meat than sushi.

[Eaglestrike]

Maybe it's not that high then, I thought it was. I haven't merited in a couple years, I don't remember 2k impressing me back then, so it must not have been too uncommon for me to break it. MS has a good chance to get an added hit in though that it spikes higher than a "normal" hit fairly often and unless you use it late in the fight will always do a certain amount of damage since it always has its hits connect. It has a high "base" damage and can spike to be a lot more, unlike other WS's that don't always guarantee a certain amount of damage. Unfortunately my account is back to retired so I can't log back in and attempt to merit to see just what my MS's average is/was.