Thf DD?Follow

Hey all so I recently just keep back and so right now just deciding what job to go either warrior or thief atm.. so my question is, is thief DD? I know they do TH but I hear they tank now and I'm not really a tanking sorta person.. I would rather do DD on thief dont really care if damage isnt great sorry for asking a dumb question just cant seem to figure out thank you very much in advance appreciate your answer!!!

If you are not a moron, THF dd is amazing.

Nope, THF is obviously healer.

Also, DD and tank are synonymous.

Thanks for your input and thanks others too... I kinda worded it all wrong sorry I know thief isnt the go to DD cause WAR probably out damage easy but I mean in abyssea or new dynamis what do thiefs mainly do other then pull?

BTW, it is not like damage really matters. It is all about kill speed. The difference in time it takes to take down a NM with war, mnk, nin ect is hardly less than with a THF (esp if we can use SA).

I could care less about what the numbers I do actually are. Just how much I accomplish per run. As I accomplish most everything about as fast as can be done using my thief I use the word amazing to describe it. It is not like I called it unparallelled or unbeatable, but the average player most certainly would find the rate I kill things to be amazing compared to how they do it regardless of the jobs they use.

Play smart and THF is amazing aka dont be a moron.

Hey ban, I wonder about your statement whether you would beat your DD oriented brd on thf. You lose 20% haste by switching out from brd to thf, which is negated somewhat by casting time, but 20% is still a significant bit. I wonder if it really would have been that different switching out to thf, now if another brd was present or something, yeah sure hands down your thf would have won.

I honestly havent given it TOO much thought as i just kinda assume thf would win. It gets shakey comparing support jobs with strong buffs vs normal melee because you have to ultimately make a decision on how you include buffs or lack of. I get free double march on brd, but far inferior gear (especially TP gear), lower skill, no offensive JAs/Traits of any kind.

Just compared TP sets (as that is the starkest contrast. WS is mostly heca)
Thf has (over bard):
3% DW
19 atk
58 acc
4% crit rate (and 8% crit damage)
16% TA
5% DA (epona+twilight)

All basically in exchange for double march. Of note is the rather rediclous cast time to keep up 2 marches. Its a lot in a constant melee scenario. With haste spell, my thf has 40% haste, my brd with haste+2xmarch has 61%. Brd gets 47.3% more atk speed than thf if both get haste.....eesh i didnt realize it was that much. Just never sat down and really looked at it.

Thfs big advantages are 16% TA, 5% DA, 58 acc and the cherry 3% DW. The TA alone adds nearly 30% more attacks over time. The acc accounts for 29% higher hit rate.

With teh DA/TA hierarchy, my thf with 16%da, 13%TA gets a net of 42.9% more attacks. Brd gets 8%. That leaves my thf with 132.3% more attacks than brd and a 29% hit rate boost in acc and a measly 19 atk (~4%ish more damage) and a series of smaller boosts (4% crit rate, 8% crit damage) and any solo SA/TAs competing 47% more atk speed from marches.

The 32% more attacks from DA/TA counters the 42% more hits from bard haste at a net 8% more dagger swings in any given timeframe in favor of bard. The 29% hitrate curbstomps that hard and the WS edge goes to thf easily. Even in a capped acc scenario the little things should still give the edge to thf. ~4% damage from atk, 4% crit rate on pants. 8% crit damage, Sneak/Trick attacks etc should all counter that 8% more atks and put thf over the top. The casting time to maintain 2x march is painful on brd as well and likely undoes that 8% all by itself. Seriously, 2min duration, 2x8sec casting duration. It sucks. I do have 43% cast cast so thats still ~5sec casts and roughly 2:30 duration, so still 10sec/150sec casting. Theres 7% of your melee time dead and gone even with decent FC gear and medium duration gear (need a few more big pieces).
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Anyway, i hadnt really given it much thought until now, but, ball-parked, it looks like (my) thf probably has an little edge in the TP phase on (my) brd. A HUGE one on non-acc capped mobs with a monstrous acc bonus. Thf always has the WS edge and that ignores SA/TA.

The exact parse i reference above was actually an einherjar one, so acc was not an issue. I have messed with brd in abyssea and it is far less impressive. Outside I can spam rudras like no tomorrow and get aftermath up constantly. Inside, rudras blows without SATA for crit and brd starts deflating fast just using Evis and acc becomes an issue believe it or not. Brd is forced into spamming evis onry and looses all aftermath. It also has less flexibility on atmas than Thf because I can force crit rudras (can get away without GH), have native triple so not as bent on Apoc. My twash thf can get superb results from virtually any combo of RR(Locked) and either 2 of GH/SanScy/Apoc/Omni and enjoy depending on what im doing specifically aftermath. Brd gets no aftermath and is pigeonholed into RR/GH/Apoc and never using rudras, in addition to its severe acc deficiency.

Thanks for that interlude to my slow work day XD I needed some food for thought :P

Edited, Aug 24th 2011 5:15pm by Banalaty

Yeah, sorry, I wasn't really going into the math too much, just pointing out that Haste is an extremely potent buff at this point, and brd definitely has that buff in favor of its DD potential. Glad I could cheer up your day.

Not using steroids that actually make it possible for athletes to push their bodies to the fullest extent results in poorer performance.

Pick holes in the analogy all you want, but the point is that it becomes a dangerous, slippery slope when we start regarding people utilizing unofficial "performance enhancers" and whatnot as if they were the norm rather than the exception. This is the same kind of reasoning that backed the whole "yeah, I use a bot to camp kings / duped in Salvage+Nyzul runs / [insert other unscrupulous activity here]; it's OK because everyone else does it too!" argument back in 2004-2006 or so.




Actually, it isn't.

I use windower and windower macros too, but I'm not about to go and say that anyone who is using ingame macros, whether because they are forced to or because they do not wish to change for any reason, is a gimp or a moron or whatever.

lol, for me it is actually less about it being 'too' easy or anything like that and more that i prefer the manual control for a functional reason, not a play experience reason. Its the little things.

Sometimes, someone pulls a group of gears in salvage and is sonic thrusting them to death. I put on my TH gear (macro) then select aeolian edge from my menu so i stick TH on all of them before he roflstomps them. If i want to do damage with it, i hit my AE macro with MAB gear and stuff. If i did spellcast for AE, i couldnt do that. Sometimes i wanna open with SA but have TH gear on. Sometimes i WS and dont change back to TP gear instantly so I can get the SC animation and see how much the SC does instead of blinking and loosing that info. Just little things like that would bother the hell out of me.

The other reason is preference. THere are 3 ways to do stuff. Typing commands. Macros. Menu.

I started on PS2+controller so i cant fathom swapping to keyboard onry. And its stupid to try to put down the controller every second and type commands. I choose controller.

Menus. I hate menus. I macro virtually everything. Hate menus.

Which leaves me using macros. I am ALWAYS going to hit a macro for SA. So i put my extended macro lines with it. Same with TA, WS, flee, PD, /ra, Shadows, everything. So what exactly would spellcast add when i would still hit my AE macro and spellcast puts on dex/MAB gear? Nothing hitting the macro wouldnt do in the 1st place, except annoy me by doing the SAME thing when i hit the menu to do it with TH gear on to AOE TH a group of mobs.

Edited, Aug 25th 2011 12:08am by Banalaty

Yes you can banalaty. It just takes a little work. The AE thing is actually pretty easy to do with just a variable flag.

And silly wanting to see SC animation, just shout to your whm and make sure he throws you a cure right as you WS so you won't blink.... lol. Just kidding, I usually keep blinkmenot off, seeing SC is the only reason why I even turn it on anymore. Or if I want to see myself meleeing in my WS gear, cause I think it looks awesome!

I realize there are work arounds to most things if you put more effort into it, but I just dont see the great gains as someone who uses macros to fire spells/abilities as it is. Could i find some way to right in "dont change gear when i do an action when HP is under 25% so i dont blink and whm cant cure me"? sure. Could i write in the aeolian edge thing? Sure. Can i also find some way to say "YES change gear udner 25% because im dual boxing and my rdm cure macros have <Aanalaty> so they dont misfire if i blink"? Probably. Could i do this for every condition that i seem to run across? yeah.

Would it be more efficient? Sure. Every time i see me do a 2nd atk round in SA gear that i didnt change out of wouldnt happen.

Do i really care to create an entire code that imitates what my brain would tell me to do in any and all circumstances so that the avatar does what i want it to? Not really. Its far more effort than i want to put into it just so that I never do a melee round in WS gear that i didnt change out of.

Im a min-max efficiency whore. But even that is to far for me. I would have to create such an elaborate spellcast that it isnt feasible. Everytime my char didnt do something that I wanted to in the exact way i want it to, i would get pissed off and add more code. It would never end and even I, as a min-max obsessed person, am willing to give up that little edge in gear swap accuracy to human error for my peace of mind.

Besides, I want there to still be somewhere i can work on to improve my game. I dont want my elaborate scripts to be my attempt to perfect my gameplay. I still want my brain to perfect the gameplay WHEN im playing, not set it up beforehand.

Blinkmenot is god. Well. It is and it isn't. If you have another way of removing the ja stun it's God. If you don't it was a mild annoyance for me unless I toggled combatself to OFF.

Spellcast I have a light version of, but utilize for my more situational macros as Bana said. I'm not coding in an essay for everything. Certain things sure, and as Trey mentioned the ease of syntax compared to SE's version makes the Lite version useful. As for putting in all of my variables for my 14 gearsets, no way.

You do know Thieves can use Ninja as a support job, right?

There's also this dagger which has a +10 Subtle Blow stat named Auric Dagger.

Thieves play more for speed than raw power. With Triple Attack merits/gear and Double Attack gear/Atma, Thieves can certainly do well as a fighter. Remember, those Heavy melee jobs have high delay weapons for all that power, so things are balanced out in that regard.

As a tank, Thieves can certainly hold up well against anything that doesn't have an absurd amount of accuracy or Piercing weapon resistance (see: any skeleton or slime).

I can take or leave Spellcast on melee jobs, but I wouldn't dream of it on my mages. Hitting precast>spell>midcast>idle 15 times a minute? Hell no.

Kurayami and Yonin (with acc so high, the -acc isn't really a sacrifice), plus 1-2 extra shadows (depending on AF3+2 feet) I think make up that difference. Subbing /DNC also gives I think 1 tier of eva trait. I have two accounts, one NIN/DNC with mediocre gear and one THF/NIN|DNC with mediocre gear. The NIN/DNC really, really outshines the THF for solo survivability.

To be fair, at this point there's very little content that challenges either job's evasion tanking that much.

I use spellcast for 2 reasons...
1- I'm not doing anything with it that I wasn't already doing through multiple macro presses
2- It slows down the progression of my wrist problems (damn computer games...)