Furthering the grind - Dark Knight

My DRK is sitting at 69 at the time of this post. The last two parties I was part of netted me close to 60k EXP. Needless to say, I'm making progress. I've watched my Scythe skill go up and my Guillotine damage approaching 1k without Souleater. The following is my highest so far.


I made the last two parties myself. This is the best way to avoid the frustration of mistakes and problems that aren't caused by yourself. Notice how I didn't say I don't make mistakes. It's just easier to deal with when it's yourself and it does seem to produce better parties from my own experience. In those parties I teamed up with Enigmas, who is also leveling DRK. The first 30 minutes she made me deeply regret gimping myself. I didn't have capped skills, ate the lowest form of accuracy food (crab sushi) since I was expecting to do Colibri when I passed by AH. Add to that her 5/5 DEX merits and my accuracy was lagging significantly behind hers. I bummed a Marinara Pizza off her for the rest of the exp and I did my best to catch up in the parse.

What that taught me was that if I opened the fight with Absorb-ACC and I timed Absorb-TP to the limits and doing my utmost to get two WS in one SE I could close the gap and even overtake her. However, this was only possible when we had a RDM. Also, sometimes I saw the healer running low on MP and I would cancel SE after the first WS. Even without riding SE, I could get off a lot more WS if I got high TP absorbs. I started using stun before Absorb-TP to lengthen the time the mob would build up TP and also to prevent it using Cocoon right when it was too late to cancel my casting (Cocoon has the shortest charge time of all Crawler abilities). Here is one of the highest ones, though I believe I got 100+ at some point.

Before ~25% HP mobs don't use TP as frequently and you can wait a bit longer to Absorb-TP. I would usually try to finish my TP from the previous fight, WS and then Stun > Absorb-TP. This was very effective until I told Engimas what I was doing and we started competing for the big Absorbs.

Both PT's consisted of 3 DD's. Two DRK's at all times and a third DD which always, except in one case, fell a pretty far third in the parse (one WAR and one DRG). The one exception was a Galka SAM that showed us why SAM is still top DD. I'm glad both Enigmas and I have that leveled too or we might have felt inadequate!

Now that I've brushed the topic of party setup I'd like to touch a bit more on what I think makes a good party excluding things like gear and food.

Killing power:

• Accuracy (Madrigal, Hunter's Roll, Quick step, Gravity, Ecliptic Howl)
• Damage dealt (Minuet, Chaos Roll, Dia, Drain samba, AoE Enspells)
• Speed, a.k.a. Haste (March, Haste spell, Hastega bloodpact, Haste samba)

Survival:

• HP recovery (Cures, Waltzes)
• Damage reduction (Ninja subjob, Haste spell and March for recast reduction)

Longevity:

• MP recovery (Refresh, Convert, Ballad, Sublimation, Elemental Siphon)

I believe strongly in setting up your party with 3 DD's, 2 Support jobs and 1 Healer. I'm afraid it's purely a question of feeling right. With 3 DD's you have enough Utsusemi shadows to go around and truly minimize the amount of damage taken. So why not 4 DD? Well, as I mentioned in another post, Bards and other support jobs add a lot to party's killing power (moreso than an additional DD would) while at the same time adding to the party's Survival and/or Longevity. Especially since the effects are multiplicative. At some point you could drop the dedicated healer for a hybrid role or in case of a powerleveler, but that's a less common/realistic scenario for most parties. Some jobs can fulfil multiple roles so you have quite some freedom to mix and match jobs.

If you take a look at the buffs and debuffs I list I also consider Dancer, Summoner and Scholar to be support jobs in addition to the obvious Bard and Corsair. I especially fancy Dancer for its ability to back up the healer and allow the DD's to be a tad bit more reckless. I suppose a DD oriented Corsair would be great addition to any party, but I haven't had the pleasure to party with any of those yet. Dancers, Bards and Corsairs used to being asked to pull. Pulling is still mostly a thankless job (as I remember from my days leveling THF), but very important nontheless. Speaking of which, the fourth and final factor in making a good party is...

Kill speed and EXP chains:

• a good puller

Dynamis - Qufim: Loss

I almost called this post "Dunamis - Qufim: Fail" but it wasn't much of a failure considering drops we got. If only drop rates could be more consistent. This is what the treasure pool looked like after only 1 set of mobs.

After this we took what I'm pretty sure is the standard route past Scolopendra manta NM, 1 set of Rocs and Suttung golem NM. Got a really stupid link from goblin stats which killed our main sleeper. I tried to play the healer in the mage party but it didn't work out well enough. Some deaths cost us time and when it was time for the boss we had only 10 minutes left.

The bard rotation had just started when I reached the last corner to get to Delkfutt entrance. I got aggro from the Boss before I even saw it. Looking back I should have probably wiped right there though I don't know if we had anyone else capable of pulling it to camp. We had two strong DD parties who would have taken it out just fine if the pull was done correctly. So for that I take full responsibility (easily said since there aren't any repercussions!). I had enough gear and defense to take 4 Trebuchets which would have lasted to get to camp. However, I had a a WAR voke it to camp thinking he'd survive. He got killed in one shot and so I tried to pull rest of the way. On top of that it linked a goblin statue. Pull sequence looked like this:


First Trebuchet that hit alliance did a lot of damage (obviously) but I'm not sure if that's what wiped them as my log doesn't show all the deaths. It must have been, I don't see anything else that could have other than Grand Slam which happened towards the end.


That picture also shows we did have a RDM/DRK to Chainspell Stun. He was outside of the main alliance so some people missed it who then later proposed we bring one next time. As I said then and I hope to explain here, CS Stun wasn't our undoing. Also, Trebuchet is supposed to be an AoE attack that ignores shadows so I'm not sure what I'm seeing here.

I believe aside from the terrible pull and the links something else that could be improved upon is waiting to engage until it's exactly at camp and not cast anything on it that might gain someone hate from a distance. Getting hate from a distance would cause it to use Trebuchet again which is something you want to avoid at all costs.

A clean pull is probably possible if you're extremely careful about pathing. However, that might take too long even if there's a PLD to make it walk where you want it to. I think an alternative is to pull through and past the main group into the cave towards Suttung. Make sure nobody is resting and drop party/alliance before pulling. This way I don't get hit by any songs while running past and BRD doesn't get NM's attention. I pull all the adds into the cave as far as I can without getting into repop territory. Without the alliance wiping it should go down way before adds return. That's just an idea though. The simplest way is to just sac pull it, but properly next time.

RDM/BLU in Dynamis

Last Dynamis we did Jeuno. I decided to try to do some crowd tanking myself this time. I geared up my PDT set on RDM, ate a Taco and subbed BLU. For the very first pull I asked everyone to not sleep the train right away. I wanted to see how much damage I took so that I could decide whether or not to switch jobs right then and there. I thought it looked promising and continued on.

The most obvious thing while taking hits waiting for the mobs to be gathered up is that Simulacra (the statues) have a super huge base damage. I'd still get hit for up to 200 with all my defensive measures. Most of the time it was in the low hundreds, so I could take it a while. Other Dyna mobs hit for (depending on their job) 10 to 30 damage. Sheep Song got me on multiple targets' hate list, then some barspells and buffs and I was set for when they woke up. I also pulled using aggro instead of ranged or magic. It was a bit more effective to get small pulls since it's so much faster than and precise. All in all it was very simple and effective and I'm going to keep doing it for City Dynamis.

For Northlands and probably Dreamlands Dynamis I'm going to try and get WHM to level 70 with a buffer so I can sac pull without great cost. Sac'ing on WHM is relatively common from what I've read, but since we don't have a WHM to spare most of the time, I might as well do it myself. My WHM was at level 66 before I decided bring it to 70. I made a MMM party on Wednesday and although the first run was kinda slow and really close (had to unsync near the end), Allied Ring + Anniversary Ring + Emperor's Band make for a nice chunk of exp.

Damage mitigation overview, part 1

There are a lot of different things you can do to reduce the damage you take from melee attacks. For example: Defense, Physical Damage Reduction, Evasion, Parrying, Shield Blocks etc. Of this list Physical Damage Reduction and Defense are the "reliable" ones in the sense that they will affect every single hit that actuall lands. The others are based on chance. I believe this is the reason why tanks prefer to max out these stats before the rest. Even if the law of averages implies (assuming a normal distribution) that the "less reliable" forms of damage mitigation will just as often reduce more damage as they will reduce less damage compared to their average amount.

Evasion
I believe evasion is severely undervalued as a ways of damage mitigation. However, if you look at the math people use for accuracy calculations (which a lot of melee class players use to great effect) it says that adding Evasion increases your evasion rate by a static amount, namely +0.5% per point of evasion. This is similar to PDT in the way that each point of evasion added has more value than the previous. For example:

Original evasion rate: 50%
+ Optical hat (=+5% evasion rate)
= 55% New evasion rate
55%/50% = 110%
= a 10% increase from original evasion rate

Take this even further and you actually reach the point where a Wind Staff (+10 evasion) gives the same damage reduction factor as an Earth Staff (20% PDT) if you start from 0% PDT and 75% evasion rate. It's a very extreme situation, but it's still pretty crazy, eh? Well it was a surprise to myself when I ran the numbers.

Not only does evasion give increasing returns, the cap is much higher than most other forms of damage mitigation. Namely 80%. That's right, capped evasion reduces your damage over time from melee attacks by 80%. You might ask: "What does this matter? Most jobs can't even get close to capping evasion on anything that matters." This is true. However, most tanking jobs are not at evasion floor when tanking such mobs, meaning that adding Evasion has a small but non-trivial effect. [I have to retract the preceding sentence, this is probably only true for Ninja] Also, what about tanking on things that "don't matter"?

You can get up to -20 accuracy from blind spells. From my experience people don't care to cast blind on mobs since they're perceived to have such high accuracy in the first place. As long as you're not at floored evasion that's still -10% damage taken over time. It doesn't change a lot of play elements for most tanking jobs, but I certainly will consider casting Blind the next time I go RDM to something. It's also made me reconsider gear pieces like Koenig legs and Genbu's Shield (both have +10 evasion).

Defense
Calculating how much damage your defense mitigates seems pretty hard at first. Not everyone (including me) is fully versed in the ways of cRatio, p-dif and fSTR. If these terms are unfamiliar to you, it's worth your time to take a look at this page. From what I've seen these functions aren't fool proof or complete and the game will, on occasion, show different values from what you'd expect. Take a look at this graph:
What does p-dif mean? It's what you multiply base damage by to get the actual damage. P-dif has a range and is not an exact value. The value is dependant on the ratio between target defense and attackers attack stat as well as the level difference between attacker and defender.

That's pretty much all you need to know. Looking at the graph with that in mind you will see that the lower left portion is what we are interested when tanking. I find it a bit hard to figure out what the average p-dif would be at atk/def=0 because of how p-dif can never be negative. I want to avoid getting too much into details, because I'm bound to say something wrong. I think it IS safe to say that in between atk/def=1 and atk/def=0, most of the time you can use
1 - 1/(1 + defense_increase/original_defense)
as a decent approximation of how much damage a single piece of gear or defense buff will reduce at the most.

To make a long story short: something like Cocoon, which raises defense by 50% will reduce damage a bit less than 33%. The higher your defense is compared to the attacker the lower the actual reduction is compared to this approximation.

The truth of the matter is that the exact function doesn't actually matter as long as you understand its shape. As long as you know that defense will help an amount relative to your current defense and that its effectiveness decreases as you reach low atk/def ratio's, then you can make better decisions for gear.

Complicating the matter
So, now that I have given myself a way to compare defense, evasion and PDT, I can make gear and buff choices based on some type of data and less on gut feelings and general consensus. However, some types of damage mitigation can't be boiled down to a percentage so easily as others. Take Phalanx. Its damage mitigation factor depends on how much average damage you take from melee hits, something you won't know until you've take many hits to the face. What about Utsusemi? The damage reduction factor can only be calculated for melee hits once you know how many shadow absorbs you get relative to the number of hits you take. This depends on things like spell recast and mob attack rate. I didn't touch on fSTR because of this as well. The more VIT you have the more the attacker's base damage decreases, but the actual percentage depends on the mob's base damage before the reduction.

Remember that this is all for melee hits only. There's a big difference in priority when you bring monsters' TP abilities into the mix. Some of them are magic damage. Some of them are more susceptible to evasion and others to defense.

All reduction factors can be applied in sequence (order doesn't matter except for rounding) to produce the total reduction. Another complication is that there are cases where multiple forms of defense can proc on the same hit. Think of Shadow Mantle, shield blocks and Phalanx. Here the overlap reduces the actual damage reduction factor.

Conclusions
There aren't any. This is not that kind of post. If anything we can summarize this post as:

• Evasion has increasing returns like PDT.
• The damage reducing factor of Defense can be approximated.
• Things aren't as simple as the numbers, but numbers help.
  

Weekend update 2

Did some Dynamis Buburimu on sunday and got the win for some people. Two WAR belts dropped, one SCH -1 piece and a BLU cape. Grats to people on drops. Again, this was a bit of a data gathering run for me personally. Had two bards in DD party which worked out pretty well. Next time we can start pulling Dragons a bit sooner. I think the mobs in dreamlands Dynamis are higher level than those in cities and perhaps even northlands. Their evasion was pretty high and they hit much harder than I ever remember being hit for while pulling other areas.

Friday wasn't as successful since we... *cough* lost an Omega. After the failed run I wondered why we ever won the other times. Tanking the first phase isn't really an issue at all. It was only the second time going PLD to Omega, but it's really not that hard to tank. Normally we had more damage output during the final 20% which took it down really quickly and Colossal Blow didn't bother us. This time we were low on damage and nobody seemed to really pick up on the fact that I got hit with Colossal Blow early on. I actually popped Sentinel right before getting hit, which surprisingly (to me anway) reduced the damage of CB. Stellina tanked for about 1-2 min afterwards before getting hit by CB too. I was spamming as much hate as I could during that time, but when I saw CB I pretty much instantly used Invincible. I asked if I should start kiting now. Kiting is something we actually never did with this group, so I didn't really expect anyone to say "go ahead". Third CB hits me and people start dying. Stel was actually down too. I proceed to kite, but you can't solo kite Omega without stuns. A better way is bouncing hate between PLD's and using stuns. Without hate from the previous 80% as a basis even when Stellina was back up we couldn't keep it up. Any cure would pull it right off one and onto the other who was unbuffed and low on MP. I have no clue why we had no RDM in the tank pt. If we had prepped for the 20% and actually conciously tried to gank/zerg the last part, we could have won. However, as a group we seemed oblivious to the change in modes and didn't show any increase in damage. We actually held back more since it seemed people were scared of pulling hate after hate was unstable. Aaaanywho...

Saturday I used the second charge of my Allied Ring on DRK. It turned a very mediocre party into a decent party which then later turned into a decent party by itself when the SCH switched to BRD and the full Artifact DRK started eating Sushi upon my suggesting it. I'm glad I was parsing or I may not have noticed how low his accuracy was. My skill was gimped and only learned Guillotine an hour into the party. We had a PUP but I think it had crap for attachments and/or underskilled ranged skill cus it was missing something awful. Souleater Guillotine on the last %'ages of a mob is quite amusing. I hit 66 in that party. Gotta take another break on DRK though since my RDM and THF buffers are suffering their lowest level in ages. My THF was capped no more than 3 months ago. Now it's at 6K from eating all the R1's in Salvage and Dynamis and the occasional HP.

I'm working on a tanking article to post on this blog soon. Ever since I started thinking of different ways to do crowd control in Dynamis the contributions of all the factors that mitigate melee damage started swirling in my head. I got some pretty neat ideas from it even if I say so myself.

Another Dynamis recap

I'll keep this short because I don't actually have much to say about it. Check the WoA Blog for pictures of drops.

Notable things that happened?

• East Gate "inner" statues (inside the gate area on the grass) can't be done like the video in the next point. The first one seemed to pop mobs right near the NM statue. Will probably clear one extra statue (15 according to this map) next time to give me somewhere to run to when sac'ing.
  
• This didn't work for me. Nearest "inner" statue has a weird pathing issue where it walks towards and links the two center moving statues and the whole gate area eventually. This probably happened because I started running too soon after pull making it redo its pathing. Kited and sac'd first pull towards the weapons' shop and Suri grabbed NM.
• The rest of the West Gate was a series of 2 or 3 sac pulls with 3 ppl grabbing mobs off the train.
• AF actually dropped.

I think I might start pulling on RDM/BLM soon so I can assist sleepers. However, I want a 102% Spell Interruption setup first so I can sleep trains even when taking hits. I need some merits for that first though, since I don't feel like waiting on a Solitaire Cape. Besides, If I don't rely on Muse Tariqah or Solitaire Cape, I can keep wearing Cheviot Cape and Genbu's Shield while being uninterruptable!

Tinnin downed DD tank style

...and an Enkidu Harness dropped for me! We did three pops total. I think the LS has at least one other pop waiting, but they weren't on at the time. The thing I enjoyed the most about this was the fact that we used a SAM and a MNK to tank it. We had a full alliance which means we could have easily afforded a pair of Paladins. So why try DD tanks anyway?

Tinnin is immune to non-elemental magic damage like Spirits Within and Atonement. That takes away a reasonable amount of their hate gaining ability. Not to mention Atonement adds up to a nice chunk of damage. DD's gain hate perfectly well when they're able to hit something consistently. They add more damage than PLD's would, especially in this situation. Survivability could be an issue for Trembling, which is a physical high damage TP ability that will hurt badly if you don't have any shadows on. Proof of this is that Skinwalker on SAM/THF (there to help hate management) died to it each fight.

In my opinion the keys to making this work were:

• Immidiate Cursna and Poisona after Nerve Gas and Paralyna after Polar Blast.
• Constant debuffed Tinnin.
• DD tanks buffed with Haste, March, Madrigal and Minuet.
  

For the first part Rcake (WHM) and I (RDM) took care of one tank each. When Tinnin had 3 heads up and it used a Bulwark we could start casting before Nerve Gas actually went off. The amount of time that tanks were cursed and poisoned was very short which greatly reduces the chance of either going down. I wasn't always on the ball with Viruna though. Especially the first fight I wasn't multitasking very well. Rcake is a very active WHM. I know from past experiences he's really fast with status cures and knows what ability inflicts what status in the first place. It really helps if we can trust on healers and support to know the fight's details without having to explain it to them before we start. Rcake is a good example of a proactive WHM.

I dropped the ball on keeping Slow2 on Tinnin. Several times I missed the "wears off" message due to doing something else. I don't use any tools to assist and so even though the duration of Slow is predictable, I have to keep track of it while doing something else and it turns out that isn't my forte. We had two Bards in the main party. One subbed BLM because I wasn't sure how hard it would be to land Elegy. Slow2 landed no problems, even in a full MND set. I asked two BLM's to use ES Paralyze to help smooth things out. It wasn't necessary, but it certainly had an impact for the time it was on. I couldn't land it in my standard Para build. I didn't take time to change my macros and instead just asked the BLM's when I thought Para would be the most useful.

As I mentioned before, we had two Bards in the main party. Double March, Minuet and Madrigal on DD tanks. I asked Helly for Minuet/Madrigal purely on a guess. I don't know what the tanks' accuracy was actually like. It could well have been more efficient to do double Minuet. I took care of Hasting tanks and refreshing Rcake. Along with keeping Slow2 on and looking for Tinnin's abilities that gave me 3 (types of) things to do (not counting buffing myself). As the fights went along I got better at juggling these things, but I'm no Avesta.

We had a full alliance with a great deal of additional fire power. I told the 6 BLM's to hold back until all 3 heads were back. By the time this happened we had taken about 20% of its HP using the DD tanks, some dots and a single SMN doing BP's. After that the 6 BLM's took the Tinnins down in a very short time with hardly any Draw-ins. Only the last fight had some Draw-ins, but nothing serious.

All in all it was a successful raid (2 harnesses and 1 cap) with only a few deaths. Mostly Skinwalker biting the dust, but Kittan, one of the DD tanks, actually went down on the second pop. I told everyone to focus and assist Kingcem (MNK/NIN and second DD tank) and other than the TP spam from a head regenning he didn't take any serious damage. I think a single tank could work though it may be an unnecessary risk depending on circumstances. The damage from the BLM's helped keep the fights short and reduced the chances of something going wrong. The longer the fight, the more random unlucky things can happen after all. Still, I can totally see this same strategy working without as many or any BLM at all. As long as the core party has their game faces on. An additional healer in the ally doesn't hurt either.

I'm glad I it worked out so well and have potentially won some people over to the idea of DD tanks.