(Don't) Fear The Reaper: A Dark Knight Guide

This program has a very easy to use skillchain calculator, which I suggest using for basic skillchain planning needs:

http://www.ffxicalculator.com/

It's missing Summoner blood pacts and Aeonic AM giving merit WSs Light/Darkness property, but other than that, it's great.

So finally got around to finishing up my AG Caladbolg. Initial thoughts are, Wow. It's so powerful it actually skews scoreboard which is unable to recognise some of the damage or process it.

Here are some screenies.





As you can see scoreboard doesn't show the true values of the melee hits highlighted and has done the same for crits on earlier parses. Having said that I'm unsure at the moment how much HP Tenzen actually has on VD so I couldn't do the maths to find out if any damage is missing. For now I think I'll assume the overall parse is accurate but it's interesting and I'll definitely do more research. Very pleased with Calad so far but definitely more whiffs on Torc than with Ragnarok.

Edit: My bad I should have taken the time to learn about battlemod before I posted this. I'll try to show a bit more caution in future. Thanks to Geriond for showing me the error of my ways.

Those are the damage of entire multi-attack rounds, which Battlemod condenses into a single message each. Scoreboard is accurate; you're not actually hitting for >10k on Tenzen in a single hit.

Cheers for clearing that up! Makes sense now. Hearts broken though lol. *drops Caladbolg*

bro you just say that because you don't have the weapon yourself. if you don't have one you don't know how much damage it can do go make one yourself and you can see, he probably has like 9999 attack too. /s

Maybe you both should stop shitting up the thread.

I have actually got some 9k crits with calad, and I once had a quad round top 30k lmao, was on teles too. This is not normal though, but hits of 4k~5k are and are very fun to see.

Together....an Apoc drk helps me duo some things...ambuscade, hm battles, low level unity, etc. Just trying to figure the best SC out for us. I believe we use Ground Strike > Cata now?

cata>Torc for darkness
insurgency>reso for light

You want the GS to end as its ws's should normally be top dmg, so you get bigger SC dmg too. However the sc's happened both ways if you need.

Have the Apoc sets on the OP been updated since ambu +2 gear/af+3 gear has been introduced? I am surprised to not see any of those included in the sets.

It's definitely possible. Even Tenzen has innate DT- so a 14k quad attack isn't exactly terrible. Calad is a lot of fun and so far isn't massively behind Ragnarok for me on higher end content (119-130 content it eclipses Ragna) but there is going to come a point where the acc from Ragna will be more important than the AM of Calad. Having to sacrifice a DS/NV drain 3 for an absorb-acc for example isn't something I really want to do if I can avoid it. Luckily I haven't experienced that yet but in time I'm sure I will.

There is still tons of tweaking with my gear to do in stp/ws sets and getting specific pieces to make the most of Calad's AM but that's half of the fun. I'll keep you guys posted and hopefully some of you more experienced Calad wielders can help me with the fine tuning.

Entropy/Cata > Torc is probably the way to go unless you're up against something that has heavy dark resistance. You'll be able to MB your drain 2/3's which will let the Apoc DRK souleater catastrophe spam for maximum dps.

There is very little, if anything in this game I cant cap acc on with calad now. I havent seen my rag numbers even come close to calad for awhile now. I only use rag when I dont have adequate buffs anymore which is rare. my calad low acc base set I think hovers at 1180 right now. Add in endark+hasso your right at 1210, food brings you to 1320. Thats a pretty good 'low acc' start, and if you can get vorseals thats like +200 acc right there, add in any form of buffs and its not hard to break 1700 which caps on almost anything at this point. Then we get cool 5 mins (or longer) abs-acc if you really need for another +60. Drks in a very good place atm.

You're 59 acc higher than I am with Calad on a "low" acc set so the only way I could match that right now, with what I have is by swapping in Rag or by sacrificing gear that would probably push Rag ahead if I was using that instead. I'm still lacking some high acc pieces such as utu grip, and my argosy +1 is all auged for my reso set. Like I said I would prefer not to sacrifice DS drain 3 for absorb-acc if I can help it and I doubt I'm going 1/1 unresisted
on abs-acc without DS on the level of content I would need that acc for. As I progress and attain some better acc pieces I'm sure I'll feel more comfortable using Calad on the highest tier but until then Rag is a safer bet.

Also I have to ask but maybe your Rag numbers haven't come close because you only use it when you don't have adequate buffs? They seem a lot more even than I would have thought before I made Calad which could partially be down to my gear not quite getting the most out of it. Not trying to start an argument on which is better, both are amazing but they are a lot more even in my (limited) experience of using both than people on either side of the fence will have you believe. I will take your word for it though as you've been using the weapon a lot longer than I have and obviously have the gear to push Calad ahead. Also I agree DRK is in a great place right now.