The Last Dance: Gearing Paradigms For A New Age

Got Felistris Mask finally and was playing with DPS spreadsheets today to figure out where I should/shouldn't be using it. What I found was a new (to me at least?) optimal set for Evisceration, that differs from what I've been using for quite some time, and haven't seen any updated sets since Reforged AF was introduced.

ItemSet 319678

Previously I had been using the Rancor Neck, with Atheling Mantle and Soil Belt. The set above is 24 more Dmg than that. Hume/War No food, no buffs, Chapuli (102) target.

Of course, Reforged AF2, and Skirmish 3 will be here soon to shake things up again.

DNC AF2+3/4 looks alright, but I really look forward to body/legs +4.

Legs +4 should become our best TP pants with Saber Dance up (hoping for 7% Haste).

Body +4 will be an excellent hybrid TP piece and will likely be our best WS body.

AF2+4 in general seems to be better for evasion and accuracy than AF+3. Hands will not likely see a real use. Feet may be our best TP feet at the moment, which could grant some legitimacy to Closed Position merits again. The Head is probably our best PK head, but it loses to Eje. Mask for lowman TP. Could be nice in a delay cap build.

Healing Waltz is on an 8 second recast now (from 15)
Curing Waltz IV is on a 12 second recast (from 17?)
Curing Waltz V is on a 16 second recast (from 23)

Potency of the Waltzes is unchanged for all the ones that I tested.

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet is all I can say..... Best update ever lol..... Paralyze no longer will be the bane of existence lol....

I'm planning to get the 119 af2+4 hands to replace my iutil pdt hands.
Horos+1 Bangles have highest Def+CHR+VIT+Eva out of my entire hand armor collection, they get -pdt from the aug if you are merited into fandance, and i'll be waltzing with them on too.

They look pretty nice for those of us that dnc in aa/dm/delve and pull hate regularly in fandance mode, i also bring dnc to vw to hold morta adds/bismarck pugils solo without fanatics/extra healer.
I feel there's a fair amount of situational use for the hands if people want to take a break from 5/5 saberdance and try the healing/tanking side more.

Unless I'm missing something, Horos Bangles +1 don't get any PDT unless you actually have Fan Dance up. So they don't replace Iuitl in PDT-TP hybrid builds (aka what we use to fight AAs with). As an added bonus SE released Iuitl +1 (with unknown augments) last night. Toss an Acc/PDT augment on those and you have a much more useful set of PDT-TP hands. You sacrifice a little defense/evasion in exchange for the only stat that actually prevents you from getting one-shotted, -DT.

So far it seems to be the standard fair of augments but with 3 slots instead of two. PDT and MDT taking up two and the third one being DA/Critical/Attack/Accuracy etc.

Man having the ability to use both a curing waltz and immediately follow with a divine waltz II is pure <3 not to mention healing waltz makes me a very happy camper today.... 4 mules on 99 dnc hard to kill to say the least lol...

You are correct, they don't add pdt unless you are riding fandance w/merits just like the older bangles. I think the core point we are arguing here is how much/should you be fandance'd for these gloves to be worth it?

If you are in fandance and you have it merited, they are our best in slot tp/hydrid hands bar none. Fully merited you get an augment luck-free 5% pdt, high acc, highest hp+stat+def handpiece.
Waltz recast -% from fandance merits on top of the new lower delay is pretty amazing now with the split timers.

A fandance'd dancer is a near unkillable fountain of waltz spam now for aa/dm/delve/skc.
With full buffs, haste samba does nothing to increase dps, and being in fandance versus sabredance is only 30-40dps difference at best on hard targets.

Clearly Horos Casaque makes a nice hybrid TP set. But for a pure TP set would AF3+2 body still be recommended?

af3+2 body still wins out solo/low buffed for dyna/salvage and normal mode bc's and stuff where you evade a ton and can saberdance your heart out.

For anything serious like AA/DM where you get more buffs I just fall back on maxixi+1/Iuitl body.
Horos body really needs to get a 119 version for it to be an ideal alternative to maxixi+1/Aug'd iuitl.

Thanks SE for the split timers, great for soloing random NMs that were a bit trickier before.

Dnc/Run baraero+icerunes+self buff.
-ga IV/V is 1200+ damage if you miss violent flourish (-_-;)

Having divine waltz II as a 2nd backup curing waltz on a separate timer is pretty awesome if you get nailed with something after using your curing waltz and its timer isn't up.

I was playing around with the dnc dps spreadsheet and added some missing gear into it, this is an alternate Solo/lowbuff Tp gearset that can perform better with the new Horos +1 shoes depending on the number of closed position merits.

ItemSet 319937
Horos +1 feet with at least 2/5 Closed position merits appear to be the minimum amount for it edge past Manibozho r15 from a Tp phase DPS standpoint, with haste samba fulltime, and sabredance either up or down.

Horos+1 shoes are -7/-2/+2/+5/+10/+15 dps versus Mani r15, depending on the number of Closed position merits (0-5).
Given the amount of +acc/stat/hp/eva/def goodies these shoes have on them, I retired my Manibozho feet for Horos+1 with 1/5 closed position (-2dps in tp phase).
So depending on how much you value all the other stats and what your merit setup is, this is a classic situational sidegrade/upgrade.

For the ring slot here, spreadsheet show Rajas losing versus Oneiros by a small bit, for whatever reason if you don't have a rajas ring and have the mp to trigger the latent, its another option.

With the latest reforge relic, we got more acc pieces which is really nice for Rudra's Storm on hard stuff where acc was lacking.
I'm using this for Rudras vs. AA MR/DM/Delve/Skc.
ItemSet 319908

The only defensively weak point remaining in this set now is the headpiece really, until we get a reforged Charis Tiara.
The Athos pieces for the Crit damage% are still good and fun, but missing your ws or getting hit while wearing them by something very hard is pretty dangerous from first hand experience.

Letalis Mantle?

Toe Tapper
Buremte Gloves
Honed Tathlum
as well. Not positive how much Acc is worth sacrificing Dex, but...

whats a good avg currency pull when dnc with no sub and minimal competition? and for the sake of my horible luck say a run with no white !!~

The ws is fairly reliant on dex stacking (60% dex mod) so I stuck with Kayapa cape.

In general I carry all these with me in my bag:

they are all good ws capes depending on how badly you want extra acc for ws's.

The lightning absorb ability on the Kayapa is pretty nice as far as 'getting caught in your ws gear' goes if you play with alot with AA MR/Hurkan/Khimairas in Arrapago II.

.

There are two ways you can go with Rudra's. You can either abandon the extra hits and rely on the first-hit WS Accuracy bonus and crit damage, or you can attempt to make all the hits land even though the main hit is the major source of damage. The problem is that we almost can't choose the second option because we lack sources of Critical Hit Damage / Attack that compete with just stacking Acc. The only potential change I'd make to tilt towards the second option would be Cavaros Mantle.

Brutal and TP Bonus Moonshade are likely an improvement over Steelflash/Bladeborn regardless which option you're going with.

What dyna zones do you have access to? I havent tried no subjob dreamland dyna in ages because its never been worth it.

A reliable currency pull for subjob unlocked on DC monsters is at least 350 singles and 20+ forgottens if you get a DC Nightmare camp.
You can do higher than that but it depends on zone/rotation/luck/competition and the new gear makes DC targets pretty squishy, so you have to be more careful you don't kill them off before they get proc'd.

access to all of them, favor qufim mostly, seems like the less traffic, but im only pulling 150-170 and i know thats low as hell. time wise is it better to hold/proc mobs, or just mow through them proccing what you can? if theres more then 4 people in the zone i just hold off till later so competition is rarely an issue and i always do DC camps

I mainly looked at trying to shore up the accuracy on the ws because I didn't like seeing random 500-600 damage rudras instead of of 4k on AA/DM. Looking at the tp return when you get a bad one I can only guess its the main hit missing and and an additional hit saving me from completely whiffing.

Athos body does lose to Maxixi+1 in the spreadsheet, so it just seems like the new default piece to use. It also shows bladeborn/steelflash being a tiny bit better than brutal/moonshade.

Is wild flourish part of your JA proc rotation? Its an extra proc that I sometimes see dancer not using in dynamis, it does increase your rate.

Generally you want to try to 'juggle' more than one target by having them all in their forward arc so you always have a target to continuously tp on and wear down while your JAs are refreshing instead of turning away or focusing on just 1.
I usually only turn and hold one and wait on JAs to proc it if there is nothing else close to aggro and hit/switch off to (usually due to competition).

Usually improving on one of those two helps a good deal.

Also on proc'd stuff I always spin around behind it and SA+WS it to nudge up the damage and finish them off.
Theres alot of little things you can do, they dont seem like much but they do add up over the span of 2hrs.

Edit: If there is no shortage of monsters even if you are solo, make sure you are using sabredance as much as possible. Also what kind of food do you use? A 3hr food like hedgehog pie/bison steak is cheap and does help your kill rate.

been using hydra koftes for the extra def too. I try to pop saber dance as often as I can and remember. Just recently got back into dnc so working out the rustyness. I try to pull 2-3 mobs and I did forget about that flourish I'll have to macro it in for proccing. Might o a run tonight see if I can't get better yields now.

A 119 DNC is a great addition to pretty much every AA fight except EV where you need to limit the number of melee in range of Arrogance. Box Step and Quickstep are great for speeding up fights. Good luck convincing a group to let you come though, people are way to caught up the RNG craze try new things. Also a good choice for Celestial Nexus fight to take care of orbs since DNC is not helpless without shadows.

We also tried bringing a DNC on a 9 man Tojil. It went okay, but violent flourish only lands like twice before it stops stunning. But throwing around divine waltz was helpful, and fan dance makes DNC pretty survivable.

Tonight I tried some SKC20s main healing dnc with no white mage, totally doable on normal difficulty on top of tanking the stuff, Just bring a blu(diffused magic barrier+sleeps) and a mnk(mantra) and you can power thru anything that tries to mijin/astral flow.
Did x4 Jungle Boogeymen runs, split waltz timers are so nice.

For delve, 6 man morimar in this update was probably one of SE's worse ideas, dnc does work good there but its only narrowed the jobs people ideally want to squeeze into a 6person run. It was much easier to go dnc to delve back when everyone was doing 18 person runs.


I find dancer rather useful for EV, with newer gear its much easier to get 1800+ hp before mantra, dnc can help split the aoe damage, heals everyone up a decent amount instantly with divine II, and despite what many people think, dnc is not easily oneshotable.

Thankfully I have an open minded shell that always brings 1-2dancers to AA/DM, for most people yeah its a battle to open their minds.
You do have to gear it all out and try much harder than other jobs to get those invites.

I played around with the DPS Spreadsheets as well tonight and for people on the fence in regards to Horos+1 vs Manibozho feet, it might help to know that Horos+1 also out DPS Manibozho R15 on Evisceration as well.

For those curious the Check Param differences of R15 feet vs Horos+1
Horos +1:
865acc
916att
756eva

Manibozho R15:
850acc
942att
697eva

Which is a loss of 26 attack, for the gain of 15acc and 59eva.

That's a huge Eva boost, +20 defense, accuracy bump for when you need it, DPS's more DOT than the 26att anyways all on top of +1 inventory, not to mention, the best feet step acc macro piece. One step further, for GearSwap users, these feet also wind up in your .acc sets anyways, so they cover TP, WS, TP.acc, Step, Eva, and the evasion should eclipse -4PDT on NQ Iuitl Feet for super tanking as well. I haven't gotten very lucky with Skirmish KI's to upgrade yet, but it appears the Iuitl Feet +1 are a better tanking piece, with the multi -DT on top of MDB and only 2 less Def and 13 less Eva.

Something else of interesting note... Qirmiz Tathlum has surpassed Charis Feather, but only for the TP phase, Charis still wins for Evis.

TP
ItemSet 320206
Evis
ItemSet 320208
*Yes, Caudata comes out on top of Wanion finally, and also doubles for PK.
*Also Moonshade/Brutal is back on top of Steelflash/Bladeborn again.
*I haven't looked too deeply into the new Skirmish Dagger once Augmented, I'll dig through BG right now.

Edit: This is assuming 4 Closed Position Merits
I swapped mine this week to
5 Fan
1 Saber
4 Closed Position

Ran some numbers on Leisilonu +2
For offhand (to Izhiikoh Mainhand), all you need is +5 Dmg augment to match Vanir Knife.
Anything more than that, and you're already ahead of Vanir. This isn't even accounting for alternate augments like DA/Crit etc. It's also ignoring the +10% WS Damage, simply because I believe I read it does NOT work in your offhand.

Main hand, with +10% WS Damage, you need +9Dmg to match Vanir.
Main hand, with +5% WS Damage, you need +10Dmg to match Vanir.

Keep in mind any DA or Crit Aug would lower the required Dmg to out DPS Vanir.

Another note, for some who may have been oblivious like I have been. We should be using /Sam nor /War anymore. I don't know when this happened, but I missed the memo. :(