The Dos and Donts of DancerFollow

I'm compiling this for all those AF body wearing, Joytoy weidling, offhand Heart Snatchering, psilos mantle spike necklace Alkyoneus's bracelets behemoth mantle dex ringers I see wandering around and repping me in parties.

Stop, please. Where should I start? Ok lets do the topic I posted here a few months ago, body piece.

I know the casque is pretty, but a SH costs only a little over 100K. Hell, jaridah peti is gimp but millions better than af body, get that at least if you are low on funds!

Or hell, no one can give you crap for wearing rap harness, and guess what? Its free!

Moving on.

Joy toy sucks. I don't give a crap that it has a 50% DA, guess what? It DOESNT stack with saber dance. NO it doesn't compound it either, stop thinking you can hit 3 or 4 or 18 times a round with the two together.

So lets do a lil math, ok? Lets first assume that because your using joy toy, your being silly and subbing nin for duel wield. Ok?

At double delay, your actually only getting the joytoy's effect every second swing, thus its DA is getting cut in half down to 25%, now if you pop saber dance, that cuts it in half yet again to 12.5% DA.

Not really worth its loss in 50% acc for your gimp as heel sword skill, and thats assuming you meritted it 8/8

Ok now speaking of dual wield, up until 60 your doing it right, after that, no your are not. Dnc/sam tps far faster than dnc/ninja, lets do some mat hshall we?

AT 60 dnc/sam you obtain Store tp 2 and meditate. Ok, so lets assume your being smart and using the best dagger for tping (NOTE not DDing, this is assuming your healing the pt) cobra knife.

3600/171 = 21.05 hits per minute. x 4.93 tp/swing = roughly 104 tpm. Thats a lot base.

Lets try ninjas TPM now, dual wielding these knives ( even though you cant as per the rare symbol, but whatever)

First we combine the delays of the two daggers and remove 20%, like so: 171x2 = 342 x0.8 = 273.6 delay, 3600/273.6 = 13.2 swings per minute, x (4.93x2, two swings at double tp) = 130.1 TPM, nice, you got +30 tpm for dual wield.

But check this out, lets see how sam fairs now. You get 1.15x the tp per hit from store tp 2, so your new tp/swing is 4.93x1.15, or 5.67 tp/swing

We found a single dagger wielded's swings per minute to be 21.05 earlier, so x 5.67 = 119.34 TPM.

Wait I thought its supposed to be better than ninja? Oh yeah, I forget meditate! you can use it once every 3 mins for +60 tp, so thats +20 tpm, for a total of 139.34 TPM.

So lets recap,

Base: Dnc/war? Dnc/pld? whatever your choice
= 104 tpm

Dnc/nin:
=130.1 tpm

dnc/sam:
=139.3 tpm

Oh yeah, and dont forget zanshin, which lowers your misses by 10%! hosnap it gets better huh?

Anywho, moving on:

Get yoself some acc rings fools. Dex is good for macros only. No seriously, woodsmans rings or ecphoria ring at least please.

Psilos mantle's 1 acc is not worth how gimp its att/str is. Forager's is excellent, chuchulains amazing if you can afford it, but I'd suggest amamet+1 at least.

Next!

STEPS! Dammit dancers, I don't care what your tp is at, use quickstep every chance you can get unless everyone is in crit and your at full finishes and waiting on reverse flourish.

DESPERATE FLOURISH! Gravity lowers evasion more than 5/5 quickstep, use this instead of wasting that 6th finish on your third step to reverse flourish, do step->step->DF->step->RF


Try and idle in fan dance in case something turns its attention on you!

I'll be back with more later, but for now, get a jaridah peti, level sam up like i am doing now, get some acc rings, put that heart snatcher in storage and save up for an azoth, etc etc.

Or, if you want to be more efficient, use reverse flourish after only 2 steps.

Step -> Step -> Some sort of flourish (Desperate, Violent, etc) -> Step -> Reverse Flourish
This gives you 5 finishing moves which will be converted to 60 tp every 45 seconds (with no RF merits), or 1.33 tp per second. If you happen to choose violent flourish to use in the middle (and maybe desperate flourish, but I've never really paid attention), you'll get another ~5 tp, bringing it up to 1.44 tp per second. If you have RF fully merited, you get 1.67 tp/sec or 1.78 tp/sec respectively.

Step -> Step -> Reverse Flourish
This gives you 4 finishing moves which will be converted to 46 tp every 30 seconds (again with no RF merits), or 1.53 tp/second. With full RF merits, it becomes 2.03 tp/sec. In either case, it's more efficient than using 5 finishing moves.

This puts the second method at 6-22% more tp/second than the first method.

I'll leave it to you to decide whether the extra tp you get is worth losing the benefit of using some other flourish and going for 5 finishing moves.

Edit: It becomes even more apparent when you account for the tp it costs to use the steps to accumulate the finishing moves.

Step -> Step -> Some flourish -> Step -> Reverse Flourish (45 seconds)
Total TP cost: 30
Total TP from RF: 60, 65, 75, or 80
Excess TP: 30, 35, 45, or 50
Excess TP/second: 0.67, 0.78, 1, or 1.11

Step -> Step -> Reverse Flourish (30 seconds)
Total TP Cost: 20
Total TP from RF: 46 or 61
Excess TP: 26 or 41
Excess TP/second: 0.87 or 1.37

This puts the second method at 12-37% more tp/second than the first method.


Edited, Sep 7th 2009 11:58pm by KaishenRamuh

c:/
...
...
...
c:/ %DNC%
...
...
c:/ %DNC% / run



I know my / is backwards, but for some reason my backslash only gives me a yen \ >_>

Is your DNC 75 yet?

1. http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Desperate_Flourish

2. Notes/Description

* Desperate Flourish causes an evasion down effect like that of the spell Gravity.
* Does not stack with Gravity.
* Does stack with Sneak Attack
* Accuracy seems to be increased with every daze caused by a step currently on the enemy. Therefore moves such as Quickstep affect its success rate.
* If landed, kills off Chigoes, awarding no EXP.

3. # The effect of Weight not only reduces movement speed, but lowers Evasion as well.
# The amount of Evasion lowered is 10. See the Talk page for more details.

4. http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gravity

5. On a whim, I decided to verify the evasion reduction. It appears to be a fixed 10-point reduction in enemy evasion as stated, rather than a percentage decrease, and it is certainly not a 5% reduction, although it is possibly a reduction of some other amount, which I'll address below. Test subject was Goblin Bandit in Cape Teriggan.

Using /check to ascertain the target's evasion, without gravity:
60 DEX, 240 skill, Accuracy+5 (271 accuracy): Normal Evasion
58 DEX, 240 skill, Accuracy+5 (270 accuracy): High Evasion
Target Evasion: 301

With gravity:
66 DEX, 240 skill, Accuracy+32 (301 accuracy): Low Evasion
64 DEX, 240 skill, Accuracy+32 (300 accuracy): Normal Evasion
Target Evasion: 291

So the result from gravity was a 10 point evasion reduction on the target. The only possible challenge to the validity of this method was that the subject was a Thief beastman, and as such presumably has an Evasion Bonus job trait, which could skew the values if the reduction from gravity is a percentage calculated prior to the application of the job trait's bonus. However, in order for this to cause the 10 point reduction to correspond to a 5% reduction, the bonus from job trait would have to be at least Evasion +82, which I doubt anyone would care to affirm. So, while I will be removing the line regarding the possible 5% reduction, I'll leave the verification tag on the -10 line, until it can be further verified that it is not instead a 3% reduction or something of the sort. -Suiram 15:14, 8 August 2007 (CDT)


Hope this helps.

Even those that sub /DNC seem to be clueless of this as well.

Quick step->quick step->desperate flourish = nice evasion down on mobs.

I use it all the time in Dynamis and works wonders.

About the /NIN vs /SAM argument.....

Not everything about DNC is to get faster TP.....

Sam fails in the following:
Damage mitigation, unless in end game situation you'll get hate (you'll also have hate in limbus/nyzul) 30 sec third eye every 1 min doesn'T compare to 3 shadows every 30 sec (asuming pre ni and no haste here). And don't tell me you'll never grab hate, if you over hunt (which seems to be quite the trend) you'll grab hate curing and if you don't you'll grab hate through damage.

DoT, Nin will have you do more swing and therefore more damage, (WAR will have more atk therefore you will deal more damage, but this is about SAM vs NIN)

WS, Nin WS will be stronger, you get a offhand swing and another possible extra swing from DA, meaning 6 to 8 attacks on DE (compared to 5 to 6) and this does count for something.

Sub slot, with SAM you can have the following: Throwing +5 or MP +20, Enmity -2, MP Recovered While Healing +5...... not very interesting.... It's true that Airy buckler is interesting, but that item is inexistant on many servers. Subbing nin, you can get all kind of off hand bonus, my favorite being atk +10 for BK+1.

TP generation excess, Unless you're a dedicated healer, a good part of the extra tp you make as /SAM will be wasted. Right now as /NIN in a merit I WS every 30 sec (step step RF WS), having more tp would mean I'd do WS at 130% instead of 115%, and personally I don't need that small acc boost on DE/PK.

Logically, it doesn't matter which thing caused two attacks to occur. A Joyeuse will DA at a high rate, roughly 50/50 or so (we'll say 50% for sake of easy example math). It won't stack with other DA effects.

So, for a basic example say you do 100 attack rounds. A Joyeuse all by itself, in this example, will DA on 50 of them. Now add 10% DA from a trait.

If you assume DA procs first, then you get 10 DA procs, and a 50% DA rate on the other 90 attack rounds, for 55 total DA'ed attack rounds.

If the Joyeuse procs first, you get 50 DA rounds, and then a 10% DA rate on the other 50, so 5 extra, for again 55 total DA'ed attack rounds.

In both cases, the 10% DA rate, only nets you a 5% improvement. However many trait-based DAs you get, the Joyeuse would have proc'ed on approximately half of them anyway.

Generally I've seen it stated that the Joyeuse procs first. The topic was a lot more prevalent back in the day when WAR dual wielding was more popular >_>

I suppose you could consider it a matter of perspective - if you have DA + Joy rate or Joy rate + DA...but as it relates to DNC, I would say that it's better considered as the latter. Saber Dance effectiveness fades. It prevents use of Waltzes. In turn, it's not always going to be active, or as effective. A Joy's proc rate will be.

All true but I was referring to what he said about joyeuse cutting down on the effectiveness of saber dance because saber would only kick in when the joyeuse doesn't. Which yes, it is true that saber and joyeuse wont stack, but if you swing and the next hit will be DA you can't say "that was joyeuse" or "that was saber dance" Even over 10 hits or 100 hits you can calculate which ones were "more likely" saber or joyeuse but can't say which individual procs were one or the other. Not that I discredit your math (or any math for that matter) but I kinda tend to not pay attention to calculations such as DA% because there has to be a certain range that those calculations have to apply to and unfortunately FFXI doesn't give us perfect ranges like that. For example, I've had my joyeuse proc 9 straight times in a row out of 10 and I've had absolutely no DA procs from my dagger or joyeuse over the life of an entire EP mob with both saber dance (was near the end of its timer though) and brutal earring equipped. (Disclaimer: this was back when i was naive and thought joyeuse was actually worth using lol)

Yaay!!!



>.>



...yeah not the best explanation I used there was it...

Like I said though, it doesn't matter. It's semantics at that point, since the end result is the same. Combining the two still provides a benefit, but it's less than the sum of its parts.

Saber Dance isn't a given though. You're in effect adding it to whatever your existing setup is. If that setup includes a Joyeuse, then you get less out of it on that weapon's swing than you would on a weapon that doesn't already have a 50/50 shot at double attacking.
The only time it provides a benefit above and beyond what you already had is when the combination produces a double attack on a round that the Joyeuse's native proc rate would not have.



Still can be. If you're, say, mowing down EP mobs in FoV, then why not? It's simply situational, like so many other things in this game.

you count it in the TP per second, but, it's an "extra" attack, ontop of regular melee since
it is instant.
To me, it's as if I was taking ~5tp off from
the previous or future step,

I'm not sure if it would change your equation or not.
Since the Violent flourish is being used to reduce your finishing moves by 1, I look at the ~5tp gained for it as a "~50% refund" on the previous step or reducing the cost by ~50% of the next step.

The ~5tp from violent flourish can make all the difference of how soon you can get Reverse off, since you can do it "NOW" to get the 5tp you may need for the next step, instead of waiting for your next attack round. Regular attacks can miss (and VF too) so VF can supplement very easily.

I look at it this way also because I usually initiate steps/flourishes ontop of eachother (waltzs and sambas as well where applicable) so that their animations overlap whenever I can to save time and take advantage of the slight delay in attack animation that happens anyway during the long animations.

(edit: silly iPhone auto corrected some things weird. )

Edited, Sep 9th 2009 11:51am by DreamerGuy

Hehe alright thanks for clearing that up :).

Another tactic I liked using:

Step > violent flourish > step > step > reverse

Seemed to work well starting from 0 tp.

Probably technically the exact same tpgain by your equation tho.

*huggles his joytoy*

I offhand my joyeuse (already had it from PLD, no way would I have camped it for DNC only) on anything and everything that is EM-T and lower (campaign, Nyzul climbs, etc). It has been said, but should always be reinforced that there comes a point where you should stop offhanding that joytoy and pick up a second dagger, and sadly most dancers just can't seem to understand that. As for subjobs, I have any and all of them at the ready, but 99.9% of the time I'm /NIN. Do I like dual wielding? Of course, but I'm a dancer! I weaponskill, I cure, and most of the time, I also pull hate. Why would I waste my own TP curing myself when it could be better used saving others? Not to mention /SAM vs /NIN is far too close in TP/min for me to get emo over XD


Warning: The above statement should not be taken as a guide. Things that work for me may not work for you. Results may vary. Offer not valid in Alaska. Void where prohibited.