Weapon Tierlists 2025

It wouldn't match the other weapons then, how they work

Yeah I really don't understand all the weird mental gymnastics people do to avoid the obvious truth.

Naegling(SB) is overpowered. It needs to be nerfed. The modifiers/ftp are insane for a WS of that class. It gets a 15% bonus on top of that, and the 1% atk boost / buff was an absolutely unhinged idea. It's clear that the developers intended to sunset the game after releasing this weapon.

One or all of those aspects needs to be nerfed. Frankly, 10 ftp on a quest ws is ridiculous.

If we go that rout are we still ok with the prime weaponskills having the same characteristics? Because every prime weaponskill is essentially a savage blade. What about the other non-sword weaponskills that line up with savage blade? I'm talking black halo, judgment, rudra's storm, calamity, mistral axe, etc..

I get that naegling's bonus damage and attack for each buff coupled with its job versatility is just a combination of effects that makes it what it is, but there are quite a lot of alternatives that do similar work. Where do we draw the line?

All ws are 50 str/mnd dmg vaties 5/10/15 and hit 8 times. All fixed

I'm not going to agree that prime is effectively the same. Noone is running around spamming Imperator with a tp bonus offhand. Maru Kala has maybe 5 mentions in all of ffxiah.

The 2h prime ws are fantastic and I'm fine with that. They actually scale all the way to 3000 tp (which is where you need to use them to be good). They actually need party buffs to be good. They also don't have the same job versatility and require actual top tier endgame grinding to accomplish.

Its in the same area as mistral axe, blade ten, rudras, and black halo. Its really just the weapon itself with its seperate wsd and bonus atk along with the wide job selection on it rather than the ws, though axe and katana could use a small nudge but 10 ftp 1 hitter isnt super uncommon

I am speaking as one of the people in a circle of friends who does 9 boss regularly and has 4 stage 5's personally. I know people with all the weapons I don't have. I've played with stage 5 Laphria. I have stage 5 Mpu gandring. I have seen stage 5 Foenaria, Gae Buide, and Kusanagi in action firsthand. They are every bit as strong as naegling. In all cases I rank them stronger than naegling. When I warrior I don't bother subbing dragoon and going sword and board anymore. Laphria just does more damage than naegling, and that's because it does the exact same thing naegling does, but upgraded. Ruthless stroke is dancer's bread and butter. Diarmund is ridiculous. Sarv can do this to V 25 Arebati



That was without my bayeaux arrow by the way. I didn't have one on me and I forgot to scavenge before firing off that shot. It would have probably broken 90k if I had the extra stats.

Point is that naegling is not the sole factor the meta is what it is. There are THREE factors that are making the tp bonus meta so prevalent

1: As you noted, there are a plethora of one hit weaponskills that have extremely high schaling fTP values and large secondary stat mods. Savage blade is only one of them. Black halo, judgment, rudra's storm, calamity, mistral axe, Blade: ten, and literally every single prime weaponskill do the same thing

2: We are carrying around approximately 80% WSD or more in our gear sets, so that one hit is amplified by extreme amounts. The base line is 5/5 R30 nyame along with JSE cape, cornelia's ring, and epamonindas's ring. Each job has a few JSE pieces that surpass 3 of the nyame slots, and further job specific accessories exist for certain jobs... knobkierre, ishvara earring, and thrud earring are the major ones.

3: We have gear that grants us an effective bonus of 1250 or more tp, so weaponskilling at 1000 tp counts as near 3000 tp in many cases. Moonshade earring was fine when it was the only option. But magian trial offhand weapons for 1 handers, guns and bow for cor and ranger (in ranger's case the bow allows them to equip hauksbok arrow, which is an additional 20 WSD for savage blade), ikenga's axe, mpaca's cap, fencer, and kraken club, all perform the same function

It is not just one thing making these big weaponskill numbers. It is all three in conjunction. Hitting naegling and ONLY naegling will not make the meta be something else. Because tp bonus will still exist, alternative weaponskills like savage blade exist, and we will never NOT have less than 80% or more WSD in our gear sets.

I agree that WSD spam is absolutely another big problem. It's pretty much why ftp replicating WS got left in the dust.

Sure other moves have kinda-similar qualities but I don't know what the point of bringing it up is.
Black halo - 7tp @2000. That's 30% less than SB on top of being blunt and had less favorable mnd/str.
mistralaxe, blade ten. I don't see these moves ever. Are they really as good as SB?
judgment - only relevant when mob is slashing resistant
rudras - Needs twashtar at least but sure.

I don't necessarily agree that TP bonus is as big of an issue. There's much more variety that is enabled by tp bonus vs wsd.

I'm not saying SB is the only move that will be used in all situations. It's limited by game mechanics like slashing resistance and WS wall. Like I said I'm ok with prime beating it (if only all primes actually did that).

Twashtar makes rudra's storm stronger because it has a cubic boat load of dexterity and adds a flat 10% to rudra's storm's damage, just like dragoon's WSD trait (which by the way, subbing dragoon for that 7% WSD that gets upgraded to 10% WSD with Mlvls is yet another source of WSD that people are stacking).

Rudra's storm itself is an empyrean weaponskill, which means its unlockable by building a daka and trading it to the magain moogle in walk of echoes. You can use rudra's storm with a pair of bronze daggers once you've unlocked it.

BH is 10.875 with maxentius along with a heavier mnd mod which is a net gain for most jobs using a club for example its better than naegling blade on rdm -if- you can cimpensate losing the +10~14% atk boost from it, which is something to consider since rdm aint made of atk.

Judgement is just savage blade for clubs. Mistral axe and ten i saud are in the area and still need a modest bump, MA is sb but lacks the 50 mnd so its slightly weaker. Ten is smidge higher ftp but lower wsc so again very similar buuut +15% seperate wsd and +10% or more atk when using savage

Nobody here is saying that Naegling isn't warping the meta. What we're saying is that Naegling is merely the most egregious outlier, because it is the most easily accessible option, with the widest variety of job spread to use, and comes with additional perks tied specifically to the weapon that are honestly unnecessary. But there are far too many alternatives that are on comparable levels available to us. If you hit naegling and only naegling, the meta will not suddenly shift to using pyrrhic kleos, dancing edge and evisceration. That's the point we're making.

Youd have to take off magian tp bonus or cap tp bonus to bring back tbe need to hold tp to use these heavy ftp ws' similar to what 2 handers have to do. Dont think itd shift the meta in a huge way but should close the gap between spamming a multi-hit at low tp vs holding to use a heavy scaling ws

If you hit naegling and only naegling, people would probably stop bringing 2 cors to ody c. A lot of ody NMs v25s might look different. Magic strat sortie would not change. Melee strat sortie would probably not change.

Thinking harder on it, I think WSD gear is the bigger issue. We need more multiattack to bridge the gap. Opening up builds for Reso/h2h/dagger would go a long way.

I think the problem is a lot more fundamental than you're giving credit for.

If MA options are improved to allow, say, resolution to be more competitive with torcleaver, then what? I see it one of two ways:

1.) Resolution beats torcleaver. Congratulations, now everyone is spamming resolution instead of torcleaver.
2.) Torcleaver still does more damage than resolution, but it's closer. Congratulations, everyone is still spamming torcleaver.

The fact is in an online video game, the meta exists and will always exist. People will calculate WS damage, figure out the strongest WS, and use that one.

You could argue that FFXI has different options because of SC (wanting to make them or wanting to avoid them), and damage type weakness/resistance and...yeah...that actually happens. Idk what world you guys are living in, but in my version of FFXI, Savage blade is not all that common.

Nobody's using savage blade on ongo, arebati, Xevioso, or ngai. 1 or 2 out of 5 are using it on Bumba V25. 2/5 are using it in Sortie. It's...fairly common in segments, but even then it's on BRD (whose only other melee weapon is daggers which are *** in segs), COR (it's a B- combat skill, only really competing with marksmanship and dagger, which are *** in segments), and other jobs with similar problems like DRG (primary weapon is piercing...) and RNG (primary weapon types are both piercing).

I think the "everyone in all content is using naegling SB" talking point is just ignorant nonsense from people who don't do anything but segments and ambu? Idk. This game is not particularly SB-centric, especially if you bother to invest in your character. WAR has like 15 weapons they can use to do incredible damage, Naegling is just a starter option. DRK is the exact same way. DRG, RNG, BRD, COR, NIN, it's situational, depends on the target.

TL;DR: If you think Naegling is the end-all-be-all weapon that's used by everyone all the time: you need to broaden your horizons a bit. It's not even used in all situations on ANY job, let alone many jobs.

I'm waiting for them to allow us to use prime weapon skills same as mythic empryeans weapon skills.

None is talking about Maru Kala because not many people use MNK or Prime for it. Doesn't change the fact that Maru Kala destroys Savage Blade. Also MNK simply have several options that are not copy of Savage, but are powerful enough to destroy it (and Maru Kala too) at 1000TP or compete with it at 2000tp+ even while being ftp replicating WSs.

Throughout the games life
Whatever the top jobs are

Like %75 of players or more
Become band wagon D riders

Say like PUP become broken
It wouldn't take to long
Before all you see are PUP every where

Amazing Damage, How do you manage hate with this damage, just wondering.

You don't. You die right afterwards or you use it as a last-ditch effort to try to kill something fast before it kills you*. Makes a cool screenshot though!

*

Since when was that commonplace?

You don't. Pinaka is too powerful for that fight. In an ideal run you would rely entirely on coronach. But that particular fight ran long and our rune fencer got paralyzed and amnesia's for an extended duration so hate found its way onto me anyway. The lion was down to 10%, and once the back lines start pulling hate you've kind of reached the point of no return.

It was a hail mary. The hope was that I would be able to finish him off before he killed us. Didn't happen. But that gambit did shave off 5% of his health in a matter of seconds. The point is that all of the primes are absurdly powerful. For what it's worth Pinaka is actually quite usable outside oddy where you get access to /drg and super jump too. I plan to take it to limbus sometime to play around with.

Unfortunately, they haven't even allowed us to unlock relic weaponskills.

Tbh Foenaria would drop from best scythe to probably 6th place lol

I don't know why they decided to allow other EMA Weapon skills to be used by other weapons and excluded relic Weapon skills.

How are you gunna have a weapon tierlist and then segregate them by aquisition method. I get wanting to compare apples to apples, but if I'm making a weapon tierlist it's going to just be all of them on one list against eachother. Like Daurdabla? S tier. Epeolatry? S-tier.

Give me a tier list, no holds bars, everyone in the ring together. Cage match style.

What's the difference, exactly? You'd put the weapons in the same tiers regardless. They're not fighting one another. Did you rank Daurdaubla higher in the Empyrean section than you would if Lougnashade were in the same section? Would you rank Ochain any differently if it were in the same section as Duban?

Yeah that would be amazing but will ruin some people business scheme in some servers lol.

You know what I'd actually like to see? An intentional return to that glorious glitch they allowed to remain for a while, where WSD was applying to every hit of every WS.

Maletaru is correct that the meta would just eventually settle on different WS, but I think it would be fun to shake things up. I guess I just root for a little chaos.

I kind of liked the era of coordinated SCs, especially when Aeonics were the hotness with Umbra/Radiance. Everything capping damage made that niche for Aeonics basically dead in the water. Even on something like Gartell or other Sortie bosses, I enjoy seeing double Darkness 99k and 2 99k Rudra's, or a 4-step Light on AECG that just obliterates the mob.