For The Shinies! A Guide For Thief

They're "supposed to" get one more buff. Not that I believe it but whatever.

Don't give them any ideas.

Maybe that final buff could be dropping Tauret from 180>176 so I can stop twitching when I see it.

Shadow Lord one is cake, so wouldn't be bad at all.

It's a 13 min fight that can be done with bot whm.....it's a much faster farm than pulse weapon lol.

going through the last pages of discussion but my mind is heavy.

Is Tarute now considere better than perfect Tamming sari for offhand With an R15 twatwasher?

Delay:180 DEX+15 Accuracy+40 Attack+30
Delay:211 STR+22 DEX+22 Accuracy+20 Attack+20 "Triple Attack"+3% "Subtle Blow"+8

It's slightly faster, but taming has TA+3 and more STR DEX. Moar betterer Rudra's

Taming 10 dps better

Honestly I can't tell the difference between the two so far. Granted my only event now is Dynamis.

Overall Tauret offhand will offer more white damage and slightly better TP/hit, Taming will offer slightly stronger WS. In the end it's your choice as the difference is likely under 1% for either option.

I've been trying to analyze Tauret versus perfect Taming offhand choices for Twashter and I've come to the same conclusion as LadyofHonor that they're very comparable. I'll summarize the two's strengths briefly

Tauret offhand -- The lower delay results in slightly better DPS and a slightly faster TP gain rate. The numbers come out to approximately 2.5% more TP than Taming Sari. The extra swings will increase the amount of Twashter aftermath procs you get per hour, and the extra tp will increase weaponskill numbers as well, however neither is a particularly large jump over taming sari so the gains aren't that significant.

Taming Sari offhand - The boon from taming offhand is the stat bonuses over Tauret. Taming has 7 dex, 22 str, and 12 attack more than Tauret (after factoring in the 22 attack gained from strength). This equates to either 6 or 7 base damage from fSTR calculation based on rounding (thief will never cap strength on anything relevant), which will increase white damage in a similar way as Tauret's faster attack speed does. The 7 dex will increase Taming's rudra's strength, so while a tauret build gets 2.5% more tp, Taming's 7 dex just makes every one of its weaponskills hit harder. The 12 attack further increases both white and weaponskill damage. But again, none of it is terribly significant.

I didn't factor the triple attack rate into taming because when I did my base attacks per hour calculation earlier I already accounted for it there. The two options are very close to a wash and I can't directly discern which is stronger. In the end however a perfect taming sari DOES has one clear advantage over tauret. The one thing perfect taming has that Tauret doesn't is treasure hunter +1, which is a convenient boon that not only allows us to cap TH with just the relic hands +3, but is a fulltime thing just from being there.

I'm hedging a guess that Taming sari may have a miniscule lead over Tauret, but only because Tauret's stat gains over kaja knife were so minimal. I expected the stage 5 increases to be a LOT more significant in stats than they were. Had Tauret gotten some form of strength and a bit more attack than it did it would have been a much stronger contender. I agree with Lady that the difference between the two is probably just a fraction of a percent though, so it's really not a big deal either way.

So here's a somewhat new-ish topic. I was browsing bgwiki today and eventually found myself on the dancing edge page. I noticed it was updated on 12/2014 to state that fTP transferred across all hit snow, so elemental gorgets work with it when they previously didn't. Additionally it apparently has a 40% dex and 40% charisma mod now instead of the previous 30% 40% ratio. I wasn't playing at the time the weaponskill update happened so I missed out on some of the changes.

The reason I mention it is because gear options have changed in the 4 years since the update and our relic +3 set has a very significant amount of dex and charisma, in addition to beefy levels of accuracy/attack. I'm wondering now how a dancing edge set would compare to a non-tauret evisceration set. Obviously tauret mainhand makes evisceration flat out stronger, but what about a Twashter/Taming build? Is it feasible to believe a dancing edge set chould outperform an evisceration set when not stacking SA or TA for rudra's if your attack is high enough?

I highly doubt it can compete with evisceration. Eviaceration has 5% higher fTP and DE would have at best 15% higher base damage. Ability to crit should easily push Evisceration ahead.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're right. I gave it some thought and ran a few actual numbers and it looks like you'd need close to capped attack for dancing edge to stand a chance of winning. The difference in base damage is only about 15-18%. I thought the gorgets would give dancing edge a bigger base damage lead than that because of the higher stat mods, but that doesn't look to be the case. Oh well, forget I mentioned it then.

The gorgets work for evis too, so why would you think that

Bigger stat mods on dancing edge was what made me wonder. 40% charisma and 40% dex versus just 50% dex. And at high attack values the effect of critical hits is diminished, so I thought maybe there would be a point where the combination of the two would pull dancing edge ahead. I thought all the stat vomit gear would have had more of an impact than it did though.

Snapshot is king, but should only be in your preshot set. (Think of Snapshot as FastCast for shooting.)
Rapid Shot is also preshot-only, and is a proc-based reduction that applies after Snapshot. (Think like Conserve MP for shooting. XD) Rapid Shot should only be a concern after maxing out your Snapshot or in slots that THF doesn't have any Snapshot (Snapshot caps @ 70% from all sources.)
Where ever you read that Rapid > Snap was wrong. <,<

You should avoid both Rapid and Snap in your midshot set and focus on racc to make sure your bolts land for that sweet, sweet def down instead. STP and ratk are also nice to have so your pulling is doing double duty.

In a pinch, THF can also use Last Stand if needed for SC purposes. Damage sucks, but works well for opening if you need Fusion from range. XD

Coulda' sworn I mentioned this somewhere here on ffxiah when the final form Ambuscade weapons went live, but the devs apparently decided to trade in their plans for augments for the ability to store the weapons on a slip due to JP player concerns about storage space.

If I only said that in my ls Discord and forgot to let y'all know (since so few of us here watch FP broadcasts).... sorry. ^^;;

SS set for THF would basically be the taeon head/hands, pursuer's body, adhemar legs, and meg+2 feet, dont think you can get much more. Racc you can just use the mummu+2 set, high racc/macc for bolt landing. Though in omen i just use darts as i like not losing my ammo swaps and mobs wont live long enough for the def down to matter if its just basic card farming.

Yemaya belt

taeon can get +5 snapshot on both the leaf and dusk slot, so 10% per piece, so take that back can put body in there

FYI, Taeon gear can get 5 Snapshot from both Dusktip and Leaftip stones for a max of 10. EDIT: beaten

My RA precast set:
My midcast RA set:
My midcast RA Acc set:

So either:

A. Plans for any additional buffs are shelved

Or:

B. There will be an additional upgrade stage in the form of a +1 version of the weapons.

You have to wait 6 months after the previous thing. Augments will happen (if they happen) in august(ish)

Which is when everyone (should) get a free pulse weapon to make one. Coincidence? lolprobably they aren't that smart.

From what I understood from what was said, it's "A". Weapons are done.

Also, you can buy https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/Gashing_Bolt from Curio Moogle. Basically, ilvl Acid Bolt w/ a bit more oomph and racc+10 behind it. ^^

Gashing bolts are still only 12.5% DEF down. Abrasion bolts are 20.5% (basically Angon on a crossbow bolt) but are RNG only. I know a lot of THFs are salty about that one but RNG doesn't bring much to the table these days and needs all the help they can get so I'm fine with it.

Most of the time we're going to be using ammo builds anyway so I don't see why people should get salty over something like that. Crossbow is a useful niche, but ginsen/yamarang and yetshila (+1) are just too good in group content. And with all the "good stuff" we've been given over the last few years we shouldn't complain about anything. Almost every piece in both our Artifact and Relic sets are usable to BiS somewhere, Rudra's Storm update was beyond ridiculous, Twashtar, Aeneas, and Tauret are all top tier weapons, and even the the dual wield overhaul that removed the old 1 hander versus 2 hander dex/str to accuracy/attack calculation discrepency was a huge boost. I haven't been this happy with thief's performance in the meta since, well... ever.

I hope so. someof them are already to powerful compared to how easy they are toget.