Ramuh's Chaotic Strike & Merits

Is this move effected by Magical accu/potency or Physical?

physical

The damage itself is physical. The stun effect, much like in the case of Blu's Head Butt and Sudden Lunge, is determined by magic accuracy, but given its high success rate on things that aren't immune/highly resistant to stun, I wouldn't recommend meriting avatar magic accuracy for Chaotic Strike.

Are you sure blu's headbutt's stun is based on m.acc? I thought this was a long standing debate.. /shrug

idk, Night says it's m.acc, so I'd believe him. It's still not a reliable stun for most stuff.

I don't know about Chaotic Strike, but physical accuracy merits have been useless since forever, soya.

w/e Sudden Lunge is 10000000x better now at 95 ^^ seems to always land even on NMs and the stun is long :) sorry for derail and i'd trust Night as well lol

It does last long but I have been seeing that it gets weaker. The duration time seems to shorten after repeated uses.

That never happen to me on Itzy...was always pretty good stuns...least i never noticed a shortened duration (even messed up our yellows on accident a few times cuz i was stunning -ga3 or 4 or w/e lol)

do you have a source for this?

I've been outputting more damage with Physical pacts than with BP Merit pacts. IE: Shiva's BP Merit does less damage than Garuda's Predator claws for me. However, the high damage of Shiva's Merit BP is more consistantly decent damage. Doing more than just experiencing though killing NM's and such I've also found that the Physical Pacts are more useful than the BP Merit abilities.

Just like every other stun out there, I've seen Sudden Lunge's duration decrease through repeated uses, going from several seconds with the mob stunned to seeing that it wore off almost instantly after the spell connected. There have also been times when I've seen Sudden Lunge connect but the stun not go off at all, which basically leads me to the conclusion that it works just the same way as Head Butt, with a small chance of the stun resisting completely and the duration varying depending on the mob's innate or built up resistance to thunder based spells or Stun specifically.

This still doesn't make physical accuracy merits useful lol relic hands/af3 hands+evoker's spats and the amount of skill over cap you can achieve these days already gives an insane amount of accuracy to physical pacts, you should be at or near hitrate cap for BPs on almost everything.

Avatar Accuracy merits are good for increasing accuracy on avatar's regular melee though. Skill only works on BPs. I realize it's not very popular, but I've always been 10/10 physical on my SMN group 1 merits.

Source? Enhancing your avatar's attack does absolutely nothing(literally, not in the sense that it has a minor impact) for standard hits, I don't see why accuracy would be any different.

Personal preference, I'd say magic attack and physical accuracy are the best choices for anyone who uses SMN in a lot of different situations. Merit BP have fairly limited application when properly equipped for Lv.70 BP, but there are still going to be times when something responds poorly to physical damage.

I seen Turul/Ironclad Executioner-Severer come out of their stuns really fast after repeated uses of Sudden Lunge.

Attack has been shown to make a difference even for regular melee swings, but there is a PDIF cap and thus if you're testing on Lv0 mobs you will not see a benefit to more attack.

Kegsay over on Alla has done a lot of testing. Here's his live journal, it's the source for pretty much everything in this post:
http://kegsay.livejournal.com/

One line from his journal says:
In other words, if your avatar's critical melee swings are doing more than its regular melee swings, your PDIF is not capped and adding attack would add damage to your regular melee swings.

Yes, his testing does show that the boost from attack is laughable due to avatars having apparently extremely high attack. 5/5 merits for +10 attack equals a roughly 2% increase in attack which is rather pitiful. However, it's still an increase.

As far as debating whether avatar:accuracy works on regular melee swings in addition to BPs... you're joking right? Why wouldn't it? There are plenty of things in the game that specify that they only work on Blood Pacts, if the accuracy only works on BPs then it would say so. This is the same reason my perp down set uses Caller's Bracers +2 instead of Nashira Gages: more accuracy.

Did you even read what you sourced me? It very explicitly says that attack does nothing for melee hits. Because of this, its not illogical to assume that accuracy doesn't follow the same trend. Could it be different? Sure. Excess summoning skill only affects accuracy, after all, so we know the rules aren't that prone to patterns.

Edit: Heh, go figure, we both can't read. Anything that "boosts avatar attack" does nothing for melee hits, while anything with a specific attack increase does(i.e. "pet: attack+x).

Most importantly,

10 merits for less than 2% attack increase? Sounds good.

A 2% increase to a factor that, as thoroughly tested, does next to nothing in practice. Its likely less than .5% increase to actual damage, BP or otherwise.

brb meriting step accuracy and avatar attack

Not a fan of your new avatar :s

Butterflies are less scary than Frank

But I'm playing Frank at this Saturday's show!
Except the theme is fetish night so I'll be furry dominatrix Frank.

NOT.HAPPY.JAN.

Fantastic commercial.

That's his opinion, not a fact. His very next line is the one I quoted: "With 5 merits you'd have Attack+10, equivalent to 2% increase in attack." So he's not saying avatar attack merits do nothing. He's saying he doesn't think they're worth it. They do have an effect, though.

I agree with his testing results, but disagree with his conclusion.

Also, I have not seen any testing to indicate that "Enhances Avatar Attack" gear doesn't work on regular melee hits. He says it several times in his journal, but never refers to his source.

Stating that its a "2% increase in attack" is borderline misnomer. The reader will almost certainly assume that attack is as beneficial to an avatar as it is to a player. We're truly talking about step accuracy merits right now.

And among other things, he concluded that Summoner's Pigaches either don't work on melee hits, or give less than 4 attack. Your skepticism is delving into illogicality.

Is it illogical to want a physical attack boost over a magical one, no matter how small, when I use physical pacts 10 times as much as I use magical ones?

The boost to magical pacts from full MAB merits is only about 6%. That's hardly a game-breaker, especially considering how rarely I actually use merit BPs.

I wouldn't necessarily assume Smn Pigaches add more than 4 attack, either, unfortunately. Remember that those boots come from an earlier age of FFXI where +4 attack was a relatively "good" boost. I'd be more convinced if he tested Sacrifice Torque as that's the only item I've ever actually noticed the damage difference from. In fact, I might even do a little parsing myself later as I'd never even heard the claim that "Enhances Avatar Attack" doesn't work on regular melee.

I'd say so, yes. We're talking about the difference between something that's rarely utilized, and something that's virtually never going to show up in practice.

And well, I'm going to trust his correlative assumptions before another's eyeballing. I'm sure that's understandable.

If anything, why don't you do some accuracy testing? That'd be infinitely more useful than testing whether or not something is giving you an additional 1 damage per landed hit or not.

"Virtually never" stretched over the amount of summoning that I do adds up to a lot in the long run. Certainly a lot more than a few percent increase to my merit pacts.

Accuracy testing is a lot harder to parse. I've been down that road, tried to test the accuracy boost from summoning skill once. Even wrote my own KParser plugin that would let me do /echo <pettp> before & after a BP and it would record the accuracy of the BP. It was just painful because I needed to get a tank to hold the mob so my avatar wouldn't be meleeing it and gaining TP. Nobody wanted to do it of course because it would be incredibly boring and take hours upon hours. Definitely understand why no one has done it before.

You don't even have to go that far, as I never claimed I'd eyeballed any difference. The 'Enhances Avatar Attack' argument is a complete tangent.

I think even melee accuracy would be a fantastic starting point, and shouldn't take very long at all to determine. There's an immense difference between the melee/BP accuracy of a SMN with capped skill, so we'd at least have a base number to determine whether or not any additional accuracy is necessary for BP.

I agree that would be pretty useful. I've seen a lot of small testing done on avatar accuracy, usually somewhere between 100-200 swings per test set which just isn't terribly thorough. I'll consider trying to find an unobtrusive parser to run when I do some events. You should do the same!

I do know that Evoker's Spats has been shown (again, with small test sets) to provide a roughly 5-7% accuracy bonus to regular melee swings.