Random Question Thread (FFXI Related)

No
Tagging shitty relics as useful to inflate the amount of useful relics and then dismissing useful aeonics because "prime exists" is moving the goalposts. Using the "prime exists" excuse for one subset but not the other is textbook moving goalposts.

Ok. Let's try some experiments then, answer these questions for me:

Would you use an Annihilator, while also having a St5 Earp?

Would you use an Aegis, while also having a St5 Duban?

Would you use a Gjallarhorn, while also having a St5 Loughnashade? (This one is potentially controversial)

Would you use a Yoichi, while also having a St5 Pinaka?

I think the Caliburnus actually occupies most of the niche of Excalibur, tbh...but the result is still the same, IMO, and is consistent with both of the posts you think are moving the goalposts.

As many (or more) relics are relevant and useful as aeonics. Including the existence of primes when making both comparisons

Case closed: by the transitive property, 95% of aeonics aren't worth making because they're not useful.

Am I missing something here?

Aegis:
DEF:40 Augments "Shield Bash" VI Magic damage taken II -50%
Base block rate: 50%
Damage reduction: -75%


Duban (I'm gonna go with stage 2):
DEF:150 VIT+30 MND+30 Evasion+30 Magic Evasion+30 Shield skill +129 All status ailment resistance +15 Magic damage taken II -20%
Base block rate: 108%
Damage reduction: -60%



Unless that extra -5% MDT is absolutely crucial, and if it were you'd upgrade to stage 3, but why would you go with Aegis over Duban?

But you said


What if my goal is to do Umbra/Radiance, or highest Tachi:Shoha or Stardiver damage? That's a "use" by your definition. Can primes make a level 4 skillchain? Can prime axe deal the
most ruinator damage possible"? See, even by your definition the same weapons you label as "totally worthless" or "replaced by prime" still have some use, so your first quote is ***. If what you're saying is "the replacement weapon is stronger than relic/aeonic, ruinator/umbra/radiance is not a practical scenario comparably", then why isn't every single DD weapon worthless except for Primes?

With Aegis you take 12.5% of magic damage. With duban you take 25% of magic damage. For the math wizards out there, we call that: DOUBLE the magic damage. Aegis is twice as good as stage 5 duban at reducing magic damage. You use it for reducing the magic damage you take. By half.

you can certainly make valid 1v1 comparisons in any weapon type that include prime, but you cannot actually own more than 6? if you have been doing the content from day 1. correct that if wrong please, I was guessing.

so you are forced to choose in a way unlike the other ultimate weapons. that's all I meant.

Whats dealing so much magic damage in 2025 that you're getting your ***pushed in so badly that the Aegis is necessary when you have Duban? Whatever extra magic damage you're reducing using Aegis, you're probably getting back from physical damage.

But yes, I misremembered the -50 MDTII, I thought it was -25 for whatever reason, even after copy and pasting it. Woe is me. Point stands that whatever magic damage you're saving is being offset to physical damage.

Where did i define it this way? Able to be used for a practical purpose.

What is the situation in FFXI where your goal is explicitly to do tachi shoha damage, or exactly an Umbra skillchain? I'm not aware of any such situation, but even still...I'm not even 100% confident that Doji does more Shoha damage than Kusanagi. It probably depends on which buffs we have in this imaginary scenario. I know of no practical situation in which an Umbra SC or Stardiver damage, specifically, is the goal.

Aminon does no physical damage, for an example. Things like Kalunga deal very little threatening physical damage, but their magical damage is much more threatening. Lots of ambus with casters. There are loads of content where the damage is primarily magical, or exclusively magical.

It doesn't matter, because this is circular reasoning/double standard, Maletaru.

For example, you started out saying "Kikoku is not useless because its "competitive depending on the scenario", despite being weaker than so many other options, including Aeonic Katana. In fact, you said Aeonic Katana is "very good" often eclipsed". So you're outlining a very specific scenario where Kikoku "might" be competitive (im super skeptical on this, but I'll play along), even though its clearly weaker the weakest Katana. Then I introduced a similar situation where I am being specific in where it "might" be better dps with a unique goal in mind, and your response is "why are you only focusing on that very specific situation, where is that practical"?

So either Kikoku is useless because the damage is eclipsed by many other options, regardless of your "competitive" scenario (and thus, irrelevant in your list), or my completely fabricated scenario focusing on a very specific thing deserves to be considered as well. Don't start the discussion being extremely niche and situational, and then when I do it it's no longer practical. That's in bad faith.

I mean, most of them are, ironically, but I just gave a few examples above that you might want to look at. Annihilator and Yoichi occupy a unique niche.

How about Tizona? Creating MP is useful. Nirvana remains relevant depending on BP and AM status. Liberator has stat stealing properties, conqueror gives attack bonus. Twashtar and Caladbolg might be close because Empy AM3 is better than prime proc and their WS is pretty competitive, depending on the SC situation.

Lots of weapons held on to a niche, but not many aeonics...

I'm not confident it's totally optimal but FWIW i use Kikoku in segs because
It's rare than naegling can 1shot
The hybrids aren't good on everything
Hybrids (and other weapon options) favor TP bonus offhand, but the accuracy can be an issue, especially on later packs
I use Yagyu as well, to help the group.

Considering all this, I think metsu to metsu is the most consistent 2 WS combo to kill most packs, while maintaining high accuracy and yagyu availability. There may be a way to do this or some other similar SC with heishi, but I hadn't thought of one. Kikoku is also one of the *maybe* weapons i included in my "5-7" so...depending what you consider a niche, it could occupy it. In my opinion, when 2 WS are required to kill a mob, hybrids aren't viable, and accuracy/offhand is a concern, i go for Kikoku. The prime might also occupy this niche with its WS, but without TP bonus of any sort I'm not sure how it would perform. I also don't have one or know anyone with one, so I can't really say for sure...

Aeonics can create some of the longest and most powerful skillchains. That is their niche. My overall point is, if the bucket you are putting that niche into is simply "damage" and all you care about is the highest possible damage at all, then something like Kikoku doesn't belong anywhere on your list of Relics worth making* either, since it has no niche outside of the damage.

Sure is, but if doing the same SC (but with light in place of radiance) with another weapon, or a different SC with another weapon, does more damage...the niche disappears, unless you're gonna argue about some fight where you need to do explicitly SCD only, or long SC only.

Again, from a practical standpoint, I don't see much use for (most) aeonics. My post from earlier contains my genuine opinions on each weapon.

if aeonic mb bonus applied to everyone they'd be permanently useful. missed opportunity there.

also aeonic suffer like relic in that many of ws just aren't very good.

But you just created a very specific scenario where

-savage blade won't 1-shot (just use 2?)
-hybrids wont work
-accuracy is a concern (where, eat sushi)
-you want to offhand Yagyu to help the party
-2 WS+SCD kills the mob (hopefully)

and then justified Kikoku because it fits that very unique scenario. Still weaker than prime/yagyu (im sure you don't have one, but that's besides the point). But when I create a scenario that makes no sense to you, it's suddenly not practical because it's beaten by a prime.

You be good bruh

The difference is mine is a scenario, clearly defined and explained with my logic, and yours is a random hypothetical with no actual scenario in it.

Also, even if prime could 2shot (you can't 2shot better than another, if the mob is dead), I'd still take Kikoku because en-paralyze and utsusemi cast times are better than nothing.

That's interesting, because when I did present an actual scenario that was clearly defined and explained with logic, your argument was that it didn't matter in the grand scheme and the benefit was extremely negligible. Which was your opinion. So it seems like when your opinion is different, a situation is not "practical". Unless you make the scenario. Then its "practical". Got it.

So my opinion is that En-Paralyze and 20% cast time (super fluff and negligible, to use your word, with gifts and even a halfway decent FC set) also doesn't matter because San is basically instant. And the mob dies in 2 WS anyways, approx 8-10 seconds? Shout outs to the 10% para procs.

Trolling Grade: E-

Finally got my solo sortie runs to the point I have enough spare time to attempt bosses as well, got absolutely rekt by ghatjot.

With max DT and high meva set, this happened:



Is this normal, or is this kind of damage indicative one of my trusts was juicing up his damage with water dmg somehow?

I was just spamming savage blade.

Trusts were Arciela, Sylvie, Joachim, Selh'teus, Ygnas.

There was one log I saw in that chat, earlier on, of arciela healing ghatjot for ~500, so that seems pretty sus, but it only happened once.

The Sortie bosses have gimmicks related to magical damage and status ailments. A/E are the learner bosses, in that their gimmick is Poison and Water.

If you do Water damage to A or E boss, they will retaliate by their next TP move dealing 99999 damage.

Every TP move they do poisons you, and if you don't remove the poison it puts an invisible stacking debuff that increases the amount of damage you take from its next TP moves. Most all of its TP moves are very low in damage, so it's easy to ignore, but once the stacks are too high, you will die.

One move in particular though is Clobbering Wave, even with just one or two poison stacks, it can hit as high a 3000 through DT set.

Solution: Farm the A Metal by magical nuke killing 6 A enemies, and bring Antidotes. OR Kite Ghatjot at a greater distance than it can use TP moves, and gun it down from afar with magic... or guns.

I had metal yes.

I had poisons getting removed, Sylvie is pretty on the ball with it.

Thus my question about if one of my trusts might be dealing water dmg to juice it.

check your logs for distortion skillchain, pretty sure selh'teus move revelation + savage = distortion

was definitely enraged based on that dmg in your log.

Literally impossible for her to be on the ball with it 100% of the time, since she'll be trying to remove it from multiple party members, and will also be silenced often because of Noyade.

Poison stacks are what killed you. Water damage only results in 99999. It's super duper obvious when water damage happens to Ghatjot or Dhartok.

The wiki does say something about, "it only triples the water damage received and adds it to the damage of its next attack" but in my experience, that's not true. It's far more than a tripling, as I've seen 8k Reverb yield the 99999, and have really only ever seen 99999 in relation to water damage.

This kind of question gets asked a lot, because people don't want to believe they weren't on the ball about poison, but it was the poison. Look at the damage disparity between Sehlteus and the rest of your Trusts. He has no reason to take more damage than they do, other than having more poison stacks. Noyade is AOE silence, so you have to keep your Trusts out of range if you don't have paid Monberaux.

This is patently false. I've seen 6k, 10k, 4k, 3k, 25k, all kinds of random numbers, while having an active, extremely skilled, human WHM removing poison.

Doing distortion, darkness, etc. is not a guaranteed 99k and can, in fact, give all kinds of random damage amounts. Most are deadly but plenty are also survivable.

You need to remove poison stacks (from all 6 members) occasionally and also avoid water damage. I'm not sure which you did in this case because it's just a screenshot, but it was probably some combination of both.

yeah definitely not true. made the same mistake myself a few times, that pesky scission on savage blade causes problems often.

btw selh'teus is also an offender in lilith htmb because he'll make gravitation with evisceration if you're on thf and heal her for obscene amounts.

If you're doing Lilith with trusts you disengage and tp on adds and ws on her, no skillchain issues.

I've seen the lower spikes a few times before, too.
I remember a particular run that resulted in a similar low spike when trusts didn't manage or bother to remove poison stacks at all for 1-3 minutes, I suspect something went wrong with the KI and it were taint stacks. Probably forgot to open chest after botulus kill since his model is so large that it covers the chest and there is a bit of a delay after chest pops before you can open it.

Every time I screwed up and did water aligned damage with a SC or due to wrong trust selection both dhartok and garjot retaliated with spike damage way beyond 10k, usually 60k+. Although you're sample size is most likely a lot larger than mine so take it with a grain of salt.

Iirc I use star sibyl, brygid, ygnas, selh'teus and monberaux on magic solo setup so ygnas, selh'teus and monberaux should be safe. If water damage was the issue I'd suspect arciela from that line up, if you manually summon maybe you summoned arciela II by mistake?

If you had the KIs and water damage was the cause then it most likely must have been trusts cause one of the KI's protects you from 1 or 2 water damage screw ups, no?