sword/spell dark knight?

[eva00r]

Re: sword/spell dark knight?

Hey, stop comparing things at low levels. If you wanna do some testing, try it with lv 75. The game mechanism is TOTALLY changed. A taru dark depends a lot on absorb spells to make them stronger, not elemental spells. /BLM isn't working just because /WAR /THF or /SAM is much better. You need to think about defensive capability, not only offensive. DRK is VERY easy to overhate and as a taru, you can be dead within 3 hits. If you're happened to wear Plastron set and pop Last Resort and Diablolic Eye, as my friend does, you're very vulnerable for any damage taken.

Sword vs Scythe
1) 276 scythe skill vs 240 sword = 33 attack and 33 accuracy differences.
2) Guillotine, Cross Reaper, Spiral Hell > Vorpal, by far

MB?
225 elemental skill sucks badly while rdm, blm can push their elemental skills to 275-300. That's 50-75 magic accuracy differences. Thunder II cap is around 300ish damage so it isn't worth it at all. 2 swings from scythe can do more damage than wasting your swing time casting MB, or if that swing is a critical swing .. it's almost 300 damage per hit.

Other subs ?
/WAR
Double Attack = 10% more damage output
Berserk = roughly 20% more damage output
Defender to use when you're overhate

/THF
SA = Guarantee crit every a minute or 150 more damage with normal crit
TA = Guarantee safety

/SAM
Hasso = +10 acc, 5 str, 10% haste
Seigan = Roughly 200-500 damage dodges
Store TP 15% and Meditate = 1 more guillotine every 3 minutes

[ItazuraNhomango]

Re: sword/spell dark knight?

Hey, stop comparing things at low levels. If you wanna do some testing, try it with lv 75. The game mechanism is TOTALLY changed.

Taskmage was talking about his leveling plan; how should he get through "low levels" for DRK is the topic, I think.

[Shinhiryu_Kage]

Re: sword/spell dark knight?

In the low levels, I thought the regular premise was that you can try a bunch of different subs and it won't affect you too terribly much when it comes to any job you play. (Well, maybe the exception of WHM/WAR, but then would it not "really" work, like in dunes? XD w.)

Its just that after like, level 50 or so, when accuracy and mob evasion + defense come into play, its when you need to get more DPS and accuracy because the playing curve increases. Monsters get some kind of boost in their strength defense.

I think the idea of playing DRK/BLM is really sweet and I'd love to play it myself, but I think, just eyeballing figures and knowning how melee works from personal experience, it would really suck big time as far as dps is concerned. I mean, I know it doesn't seem like Scythe is that great of a weapon to most people, but, if you get enough accuracy+, those big hits are nice to bust out in a short amount of time. It reminds of me of like a short-term melee spike damage. It's really helpful in the short-term. Any big two-hander weapon is, I think. DoT is definitely cool though. Just, scythe has its uses too even if they aren't maybe visibly apparent.

Elemental Skill on DRK is B+ and 256 @LV75. They don't have terribly awful skill and imo it felt like when I bursted it was better than a RDM but not as powerful as a BLM, so their spellcasting is certainly usable to compensate and add to existing damage.

But to solely base the class off of this skill and go w/sword, I think is subpar. Any melee class struggles w/dps on weapons if their skill rank is less than A- and this is concerning both accuracy and damage. That's my opinion anyway. I mean, when it comes down to regular leveling, sure, maybe you can get away with a drk/blm w/sword/shield/nuking.... however, when emergencies come and you need to kill something quick... would DRK/BLM be up to the task? Not to mention trying to max out your XP / Hour factor that most ppl are fond of.

[Raydeus]

Re: sword/spell dark knight?

Did 20 drains each with whm/drk and whm/blm. Both had 63 dark magic skill; /drk had 43 int and no MAB; /blm had 45 int and 20% MAB. My drains with /blm actually did an insignificant amount less damage than my drains with /drk. Drain and presumably Aspir are not affected by magic attack bonus, so the biggest reason I wanted to sub blm to drk is based on a false premise.

I know it's a couple of days late, but I'm interested in this.

Can you tell me what were the days of the Vana week when you did these tests?

[Taskmage]

Re: sword/spell dark knight?

Regarding eva00r's post:

This is not a question of what subjob would be superior in merit parties or anything like that. My dark knight is only level 37, and I'm examining whether I could take a fun and different approach to leveling it and still be effective.

I think a lot of people read past the fact that I'm assuming full merits in sword skill for this experiment. I realize a drk's natural sword rating is much lower and that would become a serious hindrance at higher levels without merits. With merits, drk's sword skill would actually exceed its scythe skill until level 64 and its great sword skill until level 67. The primary difference between the weapons for most of a merited drk's life isn't a gap in attack and accuracy but a shift down in delay and base damage. The tradeoff seems to be, at least on paper, lower WS output vs higher Souleater effectiveness.

I will be the first to admit that drk MBs are largely decorative. Their damage can be comparable to our weapon, but at the cost of mp and tp. Not entirely a waste, but not entirely worth doing either. I mainly do them because it's fun to me. With a 20-24% increase in damage, they might be more worthy of use, but not at the cost of the tools other subjobs provide. The main reason I wanted to sub mage for MAB was to make Drain stronger, but since I've proven to myself that it doesn't work that way, it's rather a moot point.

What you said about elemental skill is largely irrelevant. Dark knight has a higher elemental skill rating than red mage. My rdm nukes with 220+32 = 252 elemental skill on Blizzard III outside of dynamis. Subtract 10 for any other element and add 7 if in dynamis. Drk's base elemental skill at that level is higher than that at 256, before even counting gear that enhances the stat. The real problem with drk nukes isn't our skill rating. It's our slow spell progression, lack of MAB, and our inability to swap in staves while still being effective in melee.

I pretty much understand the pros and cons of the more conventional subs you listed. I don't know if I'll use /sam for Hasso because I like my spells so much, and I don't want to add anything to their already painfully long timers. The detail of not having leveled it is also a deterrent. >_> From 37-60 I'll probably use /thf for any party that saddles me with pulling and /war the rest of the time for axe belt. After TA and better WS come into play, I'll probably go thf all the way.


Re: Raydeus

The tests with whm/drk were all done on firesday, and the whm/blm drains were all done on earthsday. All targets were Tiny Mandragora in west Sarutabaruta.

[eva00r]

Re: sword/spell dark knight?

Taskmage, You're wrong. Skill progression is really a problem for dark.

DRK's cap elemental skill is C = 225
RDM's cap elemental skill is C+ = 230 +15 from AF hat

While RDM can wield HQ staff which highly increase magic potency and accuracy (by 15%). DRK is nowhere near RDM in elemental nuking capability.

If you really wanna cast spell that much, do with a fighter sub. Swapping in INT bonus gear, Dark magic bonus gear and then cast Absorb type spells. You will run into a big mp problem after lv 45 because you have to spend 66 MP every 1 minute to absorb STR and TP. If you cannot Aspir the monster around you, you will need a RDM to refresh you also.

My friend's main job was BLM but he switched to DRK. He's taru by the way. But he de-leveled his elemental spell merits to dark magic skill instead. Right now casting time for absorbing spells are reduced to 2 seconds, and you can MB that with dark SC. So, do it to get even more TP.

[tdh]

Re: sword/spell dark knight?

DRK's cap elemental skill is C = 225
RDM's cap elemental skill is C+ = 230 +15 from AF hat

This is incorrect. DRK has a Lv.256 skill in Elemental Magic which makes that B+. RDM has a Lv.230 skill and equates to C+. The difference, as Taskmage has mentioned earlier in this post, and I in other posts, is that RDM gains a Magic Attack Bonus while DRK does not. (Even though DRK AF2 body does have MAB+10 on it, but at Lv.74 it seems a tad late.)

Taskmage:
I think we may need to retest Drain and Aspir, and scale it up a tad. Perhaps you, X and I could hit the Tunnel and test things. With Dark Staff, with out, me as DRK/WAR and then as DRK/BLM. You testing as RDM/WHM and RDM/BLM and X as BLM. The numbers you suggested earlier in the post seemed pretty high. I didn't have a 150dmg Drain until Lv.49~50. And those were very few and far between.

As RDM I've managed 210HP Drains in EXP, and last week I had a 201HP Drain Vs a VT Puk as DRK62. I don't think I've broken 100MP with Aspir yet, with RDM or DRK.

But I still think Drain is so erratic that we may not be able to fully test it and find out if MAB does make a difference, or is it just INT and your current Luck level that decides if you get a good or a bad Drain.

[Taskmage]

Re: sword/spell dark knight?

...

I don't know where you're getting your numbers from, but ffxiclopedia, somepage and the skill cap chart I've been using for years all list drk's elemental skill rating as B+. tdh actually has dark knight and red mage leveled, so I'll trust his numbers. I think you may have gotten confused and read the enfeebling magic skill rating.

As I said before, drk's nuking problems aren't because of skill. A drk is actually more accurate than a rdm with elemental. The problem is they get higher tier spells, deal 20-24% more damage with the same nuke because of thier magic attack bonus trait, and can use elemental staves as you mentioned and as I mentioned in the post before yours.

If it wasn't made clear in my last two posts, I've already acknowledged blm is not a worthwhile sub and that war and thf will be better, so I'm not sure why we're even arguing about this.

I wish people would stop chanting "skill gap" and "refresh" seeing as I list weapon skill merits and juice in the first post as a given for this to work at all. RTFP

...

Drain testing is weird and time consuming, but I'm up for it. I'd still like to figure out exactly what role int and dark magic skill play in determining the damage. Even as erratic as the damage is spell for spell, if we take a large enough sample and compare the averages we should be able to see a trend.

I doubt we'll find out MAB does actually work though. On elemental magic, the difference is pretty apparent. If I were to take whm/blm and whm/drk out and cast Stone on a few mandies, I should see 42 damage every time with /drk and 50 every time with /blm. Since there wasn't a noticable increase with Drain I assume the effect isn't there.

About my 150 estimate ... that's probably best disregarded. At that point in the thread I was assuming dark magic behaved the same as elemental magic, with consistent output that fell into predictable tiers of resistance. I saw that one of my drains had done over 100 damage and another drain did only 15, so I assumed the 15 was a 90% resist and that the full damage would have been 150.

[Tisaragi]

Re: sword/spell dark knight?

To add some light to drain I have some numbers for you. A 42 point drain when your max is 77 isn't a full resist. At 75 my drains on exp mobs range from 16-250+ keep in mind this is without gear changes. As for dps nothing even comes close /war from what I can tell the lose of berserk and double attack is painful every time I have to sub nin. A decent drk/war can keep up with if not out dmg an average war/nin (avg. as in no multi hit weapons)

[Shinhiryu_Kage]

Re: sword/spell dark knight?

Thinking about it again, MAB shouldn't be a problem, comparing DRK to RDM, because there is MAB equipment out there that a DRK can equip and swap into a macro during spell casting. I would think that would help tremendously, not to mentioned swapping in INT gear too, no?