Tank/DD gear 50+

[Ayrlie]

Re: Tank/DD gear 50+

currently 48 pld but planning on taking it a little higher. PLD AF is a bit so-so until you hit 56, so this is what I'm using:

body: brigadrine
legs: lvl 29 hq leg gear (can't spell that name)
hands: engineer's gloves
head: IM head
feet: power sandals
rings: woodsman
waist: dash sash
weapon: af
shield: jennet
ears: drones
neck: holy phail (was going to be something else but can't find it on AH)
back: cavalier's

when pld hits 50 I'll probably replace the body and leg pieces, and use phanlax rings. I get to use earth/dark staff at 51. New shield at 52.

Once I hit 55, I could use Jadriah Peti but I will keep what I got so far. At 56 is your first decent piece of AF, the head. I get to use my SH at 57, which will likely be used against those pugils in terrigan. At 58 is the AF legs, and 59 is Hauby (likely used to macro in for Vorpal Blade). 60 is the body, which is a must for tanking.

For accessories, I would just use life belt for waist, phanlax rings or VIT+ rings, and drone earrings. VIT and AGI should be important as a PLD. VIT for obvious reasons, and AGI to imporve shield/parry chances.

I don't have much merited in for the PLD job (I only put in couple marksmanship merits for my thief), since I didn't put much time into gaining merit points once I hit 75 with a job.

[dirtyclown]

Re: Tank/DD gear 50+

Why Phalanx rings? Those things aren't much use at the level they become available, at least in my opinion they're not. I'd rather wear a pair of Chrysoberyl rings and just use Defender for my damage reduction needs. Speaking of which, I've run into some problems. Last night I was taking shots from Lesser Colibris for a significant amount higher than I was before. My experiment with new gear failed, I can tell you that much. D:

[Lmnop]

Re: Tank/DD gear 50+

The phalanx rings could serve the purpose of closing the defense gap and thus, allow her to fill other slots with more DD-oriented gear. Popping Defender would negate any sort of DD advantage.

Also, SH... you using it for acc or for the evasion? I seriously think +evasion is useless on IT mobs for any job of C rank or worse evasion. Hell, I think it barely has an effect on B rank evasion jobs (monks, for example). But if you can create a heavy evasion build that's effective, I'll retract my statement. :D

[Maju]

Re: Tank/DD gear 50+

60 is the body, which is a must for tanking.

It's not. In fact, it stinks. I have only used the AF body for exp tanking a couple times. Usually the marginal defense improvement over a haubergeon is completely unnecessary. Hell, I don't even use defense food unless the enemy is overwhelmingly strong because it makes such a tiny difference. Sushi on the other hand more than doubles your accuracy and WS damage.

[ValisOfValefor]

Re: Tank/DD gear 50+

Well me Im a pure defense Paladin, the job in my own mind is ment for pure defense.

I wont even experiment with the DD capabilities untill the 70s, but thats in my own opinion. The Tactical Magicians Espadon is about the best thing to happen in any terms of being a DD. Though I haven't been able to test it out in EXP yet.

(Im still farming for the rest of my equipment and for the coffers, and getting my AF, I already got the boots, and garliage coffer. Now i got the fun ones up next)

I mean im still gonna buy a Hauby when I hit 60, but it'll probably remain in the Mog house, unless im famring or something that actually requires more damage.

My damage itself has never been that bad, but that could probably be because im and Elvaan. And my accuracy has never been that bad either.

[Maju]

Re: Tank/DD gear 50+

Well me Im a pure defense Paladin, the job in my own mind is ment for pure defense.

I wont even experiment with the DD capabilities untill the 70s, but thats in my own opinion. The Tactical Magicians Espadon is about the best thing to happen in any terms of being a DD. Though I haven't been able to test it out in EXP yet.

(Im still farming for the rest of my equipment and for the coffers, and getting my AF, I already got the boots, and garliage coffer. Now i got the fun ones up next)

I mean im still gonna buy a Hauby when I hit 60, but it'll probably remain in the Mog house, unless im famring or something that actually requires more damage.

My damage itself has never been that bad, but that could probably be because im and Elvaan. And my accuracy has never been that bad either.

The problem with this mentality is that:

1. Additional defense is useless. If your party's MP regens fast enough to cure 500 damage/min, why reduce damage taken to 400/min if you can instead increase your damage output? The mages will only end up sitting with tons of extra MP that isn't needed for anything.

2. Defense suffers very heavily from diminishing returns. Already in your 60s the benefical effect from eating defense foods starts to diminish greatly. Attack stats, however, scale very well.

[DakAttack]

Re: Tank/DD gear 50+

Defender instantly kills any possibility of raising your damage output before level seventy-four. Until you can throw up some shadows and dodge damage completely, espesially without having to be the only tank, your damage possibilities are very low.

After a certain point +Def becomes useless, and after a certain point there's better ways to mitigate damage than +Vit. There's still Shield Skill, Parrying Skill, Evasion Skill, -% Damage taken, as well as +Enmity. You should concentrate on +Parry skill, then +Shield Skill, then +Enmity, then -% Damage taken, THEN +Evasion skill if you think you have enough Vit and Def.

Parry and Shield skill are important, but Shield is capped so much faster than Parry, but if you block an attack while casting you'll still be interuppted. I find it's much more imporant to parry well and continue casting your cures. Others might prefer shield though, it really is just personal preference, and we're all probably doing just as well as long as the mitigation is there.

[Armando]

Re: Tank/DD gear 50+

Also, SH... you using it for acc or for the evasion? I seriously think +evasion is useless on IT mobs for any job of C rank or worse evasion. Hell, I think it barely has an effect on B rank evasion jobs (monks, for example). But if you can create a heavy evasion build that's effective, I'll retract my statement. :D

I believe you're correct. I tested this recently because I wanted confirmation for when I can afford Woodsman Rings and Haubergeon. Obviously, Flash wasn't cast at all during my tests. Also note that I subtracted the number of misses from the total number of hits when calculating parrying rate; evasion checks come before parry, so it's only logical that a parry would've been impossible on the hits that evasion kicked in. Also, yes, I understand that right now, the sample size is technically small seeing as I didn't even do repetitions under the same conditions, but bear in mind that waiting for 100+ attack rounds to elapse can often take over 20 minutes, and, unfortunately, I can't do these tests alone.

Armando
PLD56/RDM27
Evasion Skill: 170 (capped)
Parrying Skill: 120
AGI: 33+5
Lesser Colibri (IT)
Test conditions: No Blind

Attacks evaded: 5/130 = 3.8462%
Attacks parried: 7/125 = 5.6%
Attacks avoided: 12/130 = 9.2308%

---

Armando
PLD58/WAR29
Evasion Skill: 178-180
Parrying Skill: 122-123
AGI: 34+4
Lesser Colibri (VT)
Test conditions: No Blind
EXP: 20 (73 WHM in party)

Attacks evaded: 9/175 = 5.1429
Attacks parried: 6/166 = 3.6145
Attacks avoided: 8.5714%

---

Armando
PLD58/WAR29
Evasion Skill: 180
Parrying Skill: 123
AGI: 34+4
Lesser Colibri (VT)
Test conditions: Blind
EXP: 20 (73 WHM in party)

Attacks evaded: 14/159 = 8.8050%
Attacks parried: 6/145 = 4.1379%
Attacks avoided: 20/159 = 12.5786%

From this, I reached a few conclusions. Blind does seem to have an effect, even if it's small, at least on VT mobs. Its effect is probably diminished against ITs, but I still consider it worth casting for two reasons: 1) its MP cost is negligible (5 MP) and 2) the gap between your evasion and the mob's accuracy WILL have an effect when the mob is Flashed, and to maximize MP-efficiency, it's best to reduce the chances of getting hit through Flash as much as possible. However, as you can see, our base evasion rate is pretty damned pitiful even with Blind up. While more repitions are necessary to get a better feel for it, since this kind of thing can vary from fight to fight, my evasion rate only jumped by about 3.7% with Blind up, and that was on a VT mob.

From what I can tell, Accuracy has diminishing returns. That is, +10 accuracy would increase your actual hitting rate more when it's at 50% than when it's at 85%, for example. Because Evasion has an inverse relationship to Accuracy, it SHOULD have increasing returns. However, given that the mob will have 93-95% Accuracy on us, it's already at a point that it'd take large ammounts of Evasion to get you out of the near-horizontal part of the acc/evasion relationship and put you at a point where you actually see good returns from adding +Evasion. Then there's the fact that you often have to sacrifice large chunks of Defense in order to get meaningful +Evasion. Not to mention carrying around so much equipment is a pain in the ass, so I'd prefer to get some use out of it. In short, I'd be willing to bet your evasion won't increase enough to overcome your lowered Defense, or justify having higher risk of being one-shotted (or those freak three-shottings, i.e. double attack w/ critical hits followed immediately by a damage TP move.)

When Flash is up, that's a different story, though. From what I've read, Flash, like Blind, is a static -Accuracy. Due to how skills increase throughout the levels, the higher you go up, the wider the gap between your Evasion and the mob's "weapon skill" will become. If you were to equip -40 Evasion (achievable through, say, Haubergeon, Woodsman Rings, and Spike Earrings) I'm pretty sure you'd be getting hit through Flash more often. While even with Flash up I wouldn't recommend a full-blown evasion set, if you're going to be switching out -Evasion pieces for something else, it wouldn't hurt to switch to something with moderate Defense and a bit of +Evasion (Spike Earrings for Drone, etc.) if you already happen to have some +Evasion gear.

Bottom line: +Evasion won't help much, and -Evasion shouldn't hurt much during normal melee, but -Evasion is bad with Flash up.

EDIT: Another reason not to worry too much about Evasion is that like Impaction said, there's still shielding and parrying to cushion the blow from non-evaded hits.

[Frazzle]

Re: Tank/DD gear 50+

i was just wondering what anyone thought about using a sword belt (def 4 attack 10) past 50? I've been using it since 45 (with some other offensive stuff) and found that it adds to hate nicely

[dirtyclown]

Re: Tank/DD gear 50+

Depends on what you're doing. I'd rather the Life Belt for moar accuracy, more hits connected does better for you over time than stronger hits in general. I might use the sword belt for farming though.

[csBahamut]

Re: Tank/DD gear 50+

Yeah, usually you are using defense food, so you need acc more than attack. If you can get away with sushi though (T-VT mobs), then swordbelt would work fine.

[Aeni]

Re: Tank/DD gear 50+

In the server, 60 Delay should be the same as 60 Frames and 1 second. Or am I wrong?

I don't know why it's so hard to convince people frame (draw/graphic) and delay (time duration) mean different things; I give up. I'll just PM if I want to continue this. -_-

Basically, it's 60 delay on the server is equivalent to (roughly) 60 frames on client (assuming normal conditions) which all are based on the 1 second clock that is running in the lower right hand corner of your desktop.

We're talking values and not semantics.

[csBahamut]

Re: Tank/DD gear 50+

If your graphics/draw rate is set to 60 fps, then yes, delay = frame rate. But loads change, and frame rate/draw rate is never constant. So even if your computer starts chugging, and your frame rate/draw rate drops, the sever delay does not change. How efficient your computer runs has no effect on actual delay. Otherwise people could run at a higher frame rate, having a lower delay (which would be stupid of the developers to do).

[Celeal]

Re: Tank/DD gear 50+

I just wondering what is your expectation for Tank/DD at lvl 50+? I mean at what Acc or DoT would you consider Tank + DD at the same time? Beside PLD, I also leveling couple DD job past lvl 50s. My expectation of melee DD is: If the weapon I am using has base damage 40 dmg, I expect it deal around 40 or more dmg each swing on IT mob during exp parties. For acc+ gear, 10 acc from life belt alone at level 50 to me is not enough. Maybe I am expecting to much?
I don't know. During my level 50 ~ 60, whenever I try to tank using some DD gear or sushi, I failed (too much downtime or eat dirt T_T).

[Gilge]

Re: Tank/DD gear 50+

i usually go full defense gear, never even seriously thought about attack gear.
usually my pties work fine (no one ever dies, if i lose hate i cover them). but recently, w/ warriors using rampage, and even monks using raging fists, im losing hate more often, so i think maybe ill look into dmg+ gear.