Usukane upgradeFollow

Will be interesting to see what they'll do to it, but sine it's multi jobs, and not job specific, I'm not expecting anything fantastic.

I don't see anything they could add that would beat af3+2 body w/ impetus up (which is 60% of the time)

Perhaps they will allow you to choose a path like with Trial of the Magian weapons. Regardless, I'm happy about it since I'm still wearing full Usukane in abyssea. I've almost completely upgraded Tantra +1, but have no use for it other than the feet for my Victory Smite set and the +2s are very, very slow going for me atm.

However, now that I'm really thinking about it, I assume those upgrades will take just as long to attain for me as the AF3+2s are taking ><.

Lets not forget the trials:

Usu body +1: clear boss of X salvage 75 times
Usu body +2: clear boss of Y salvage 75 times, and hand in 10k alexandrite ><

Kine should really get his own class.

Guru is not deserving of Kine lol.

I can certainly see why one would question those numbers. I put them up with the basic belief that the calculations in the spreadsheet are correct (given the amount of time I've spent using and correcting them), but I still need to go through step by step to figure out *why* they come out that way.



I'm going to go through only a single comparison, the one with the most difference: outside Abyssea numbers using Bison Steak and Impetus. Also using Revenant +2s instead of Vere to avoid dealing with ODD stuff.

First, I'll strip off all comparison armor -- that is, no head/body/hands/legs/feet -- for the baseline, and look at that compared to the full sets. Note that I'm leaving weaponskill damage alone; all comparisons are changes in TP sets only.

Baseline 60.899
Usukane 112.535
Tantra 145.044


The Usukane provides a reasonable increase in damage for a full armor set, but the Tantra set does seem massive. Is it really valid? Going to work step by step with the stat increases to see why.


First, accuracy.

Note: I made a mistake in the initial comparison notes in that I forgot about the H2H skill on the Tantra hands; I was only adding up acc + dex, so Tantra should get an extra 6 acc from that.

Base acc: 412
Base hit rate: 69.5%

Usu acc: 36 acc + 13 dex
Usu hit rate: 90.5%
Usu DPS: 85.717

Tantra acc: 43 acc + 7 skill (6 acc)
Tantra hit rate: 94.0%
Tantra DPS: 94.850

That's a rather remarkable difference in DPS for the slight increase in accuracy. What's going on? Well, there's two things.

1) The dex from the Usu set also bumps up crit rate, to 6% base instead of 5%. This is a minor effect.

2) The average bonuses gained from Impetus are hugely affected by the hit rate as soon as you drop below cap accuracy.

The average crit bonus from Impetus with Usu is 8%. The average attack bonus is +19. With the Tantra set, the crit bonus is 14% and the attack bonus is +30. The Tantra set thus has a net gain (after dex is accounted for) of 5% crit rate and 11 attack on top of the higher hit rate.

I'll drop the evasion of the target mob so that both sets are capped to see how that impacts the difference in DPS.

Usu: 100.850
Tan: 100.446

Usu wins by virtue of the +1% base crit rate due to the dex. This could easily be considered having Focus up, as well, and one should certainly expect to use Focus in conjunction with Impetus, but even then there's at least 1 minute of time where you won't have them both up together.

We're currently quite spoiled by Abyssea buffs in being pretty much perma-capped on accuracy, but before Abyssea when we were meriting on pink birds, getting up to even 90% hit rate was an impressive achivement, with most people in the 80% range without sushi (Focus down). It then becomes a question of which is the more valid assumption for going forward? Because there's no way for me to tell, I'll continue using the same evasion target as I always use (395), but I'll allow for a Focus up/down comparison.


The next major stat is haste. Usu gets 130/1024 haste with the full set; Tantra gets 162/1024. I will assume Black Belt, though Brown Belt obviously heavily favors Tantra due to Tantra making up for the missing 4% relative to Black Belt.

Usu (+F): 123.050
Usu (-F): 102.581
Tan (+F): 123.311
Tan (-F): 114.162

With Focus up the two sets are still nearly identical, though swapping to be slightly in favor of Tantra due to the tiny edge it has in haste. With Focus down, Tantra increases its lead just a smidge. In all cases the haste is about a 20% increase in damage, as might be expected (only haste buff in this comparison is the Haste spell).


Next, Str. Usukane gives 16 str, Tantra gives 27. Since we no longer have Abyssea buffs, there's now the possibility of uncapped fStr. Does it matter?

Base fStr: 5
Usu fStr: 9
Tan fStr: 11


Usu (+F): 127.909
Usu (-F): 106.913
Tan (+F): 130.785
Tan (-F): 121.406

We see that the gain in damage from fStr is relatively minor, but it does further widen the gap relative to Usukane even with Focus up.


Next, attack. Including H2H skill but excluding Str, Tantra gives +32 total attack, while Usukane gives 17. Obviously this explicitly favors Tantra, but again the relative gain shouldn't be that large.

Usu (+F): 130.192
Usu (-F): 109.094
Tan (+F): 135.212
Tan (-F): 125.791


At this point I'll go ahead and convert the acc/att from H2H skill on the Tantra set directly to skill so as to gain the +1 base damage. This gives a very small gain.

Usu (+F): 130.192
Usu (-F): 109.094
Tan (+F): 136.231
Tan (-F): 126.774


Next, Store TP: 13 for Usukane, 6 for Tantra. This will favor the Usukane set somewhat.

Usu (+F): 134.684
Usu (-F): 112.535
Tan (+F): 138.359
Tan (-F): 128.594


At that point we've reached the extent of the offensive offerings that the Usukane set provides, but we still have several more things to add to the Tantra set: Kick Attacks, kick damage, MA delay, augmented Impetus and set bonus.

+7 KA rate:
Tan (+F): 141.192
Tan (-F): 131.214

+45 kick damage:
Tan (+F): 145.982
Tan (-F): 135.834

-5 MA delay:
Tan (+F): 148.045
Tan (-F): 137.756

And the big debated one:

Augmented Impetus:
Tan (+F): 154.110
Tan (-F): 142.108


In this case we see a 3.2%~4.1% increase in DPS from the +crit damage. How do we get that? Augmented Impetus gives us an average 14%-17% increase to crit rate and damage; with base crit rate of 9%, that means a total crit rate of 23%-26%. So roughly (to make it simple) +15% damage on 25% of all hits, which are themselves boosted due to crit pDifs. With 1.4 cRatio you have:

75 * 1.4 + 25 * 2.4 * 1.15 = 174
instead of
75 * 1.4 + 25 * 2.4 = 165

For a 174/165 = 5.5% increase in melee damage. Scale that back for melee/ws split and getting a 3%-4% increase in total DPS is quite understandable.


And then putting the full set together and getting the (estimated) +5% kick rate from the set bonus:

Tan (+F): 157.273
Tan (-F): 145.044


Compared to where we left Usukane:

Usu (+F): 134.684
Usu (-F): 112.535


A 17% to 29% lead by the Tantra set. Each individual element -- extra kick attacks, higher attack, higher str, etc -- made only a slight (and easily believable) difference in the relative DPS, but there's enough slight differences to add up to a pretty substantial difference.

The gain Usukane made under Focus was for the same reason that the gap was much smaller while eating Pizza, and a similar narrowing of the gap occurs in Abyssea due to perma-capped accuracy. In addition, the relative gains from attack are reduced due to higher base attack, and the gains from the extra kicks are reduced due to the triple attack of the Apocaplyse atma. And of course the gains in crit damage are reduced due to both sets getting the massive crit rate boosts.

So yes, lots of things in Abyssea reduce the relative gap of the two gear sets in comparison to each other, though you'll note that the difference in absolute terms (A-B instead of A/B) is larger in Abyssea.




Notes about the final values for the Tantra set, to show they're similar to what you used:

653 attack
135 str
9% base crit rate

target mob with 420 def and Dia II, for 378 effective def, 7 levels above player

The Impetus augment on the body gives +1% crit damage per successive connected hit in addition to the normal +1% crit rate per hit and +2 attack per hit. So the 11th hit in a row would have the bonus of 10 hits behind it, for +10% crit rate, +20 attack, and, with the augment, +10% damage if the hit crits. It caps out at +50% crit damage (reduced, of course, if you have gear or atma that also gives +crit damage, due to the global 50% crit damage cap), similar to the +50% crit rate cap and +100 attack cap the baseline has.

I prefer Kine's way

Naw the Upgrade will be turn in 25 - level 15 pieces, 50 - level 25 peices and 100 x level 35 pieces and 100,000 alex

Simple boss wins would be too easy

I can see ZNM's being a part of upgrading armor, and/or new NM's. I think the focus would still be on 6man being the norm now.

It could be a great chance to bring parts of vanadiel up-to-date taking ppl away from abyssea (not that thats really needed right now imo). Could even add more NM's to existing zones, or up the levels of ones that get killed the least adding drops to them, or add some decent/required drops to synergy nm's.

I doubt ppl really want to go back to taking photo's of mobs for ZNM's, but the new dev team have been excellant at adding/tweaking things that mean you don't have to run through stuff that will take multiple ppl many many hours just to get you a piece of gear. They more than realise its an aging game with a small population compared to years of old, and with many seasoned players they want us to have the max fun / in-game rewards as possible.

Gonna need to expand on that, the link was dead.

I meant the potential augments as shown thus far, as far as TPing goes, isn't impressive. Not the fact that they're Byakko's Haidate.

The other pieces really arent that strong for tantra anyhow, head,hands,feet and legs can be replaced easily. Im still dubious about the body being rep'd while impetus is up. If they havent adjusted it, it seems that dex now gives more % to crits than before. Someone was reporting having 95% crit rate, with just GH/RR as crit rate atmas(they had SS but thats dmg not rate) So assuming cap'd dex and merits thats 24% crit + 30 from RR and 20 from GH, thats 74% crit they should be getting but said it was at 95% which would mean an extra 20% crit(probably 15% at best) from the new crit adjustments they made.

If this is true, wouldnt that make byakko our new pants? I guess more testing has to be made with crits/dex now.

Edited, May 11th 2011 12:23pm by hitoseijuro