For The Shinies! A Guide For Thief

Oh I'm not saying it isn't good. I use all my Malignance pieces (5/5 here) regularly on many jobs. That definitely includes THF, where I think my 4/5 Malignance + Relic hands set is my most used TP set over the past year+. Just wanted to call out that the grind is definitely real, so comments that it is "easy" (not terribly difficult to farm on VE-E, but can be VERY time consuming) or "free" (not if you value time) are somewhat misleading.

In the meantime, Gleti's certainly isn't a bad "hybrid" leaning armor set, and is absolutely a viable alternative for such a build. Depending on your use case, even those of us with 5/5 Malignance may want to mix in some Gleti's pieces. For example, suppose you're fighting mobs that do physical damage only and you want some strong defense - aside from lower evasion, Gleti's is straight up BETTER than Malignance from a defensive POV for that scenario (see #1 and 3 below).

Comparing Gleti's versus Malignance:

Defensively:
1) Gleti's has substantially more Def/MDB/VIT and a bit more HP
2) Malignance has substantially more Meva and AGI, and a bit more Eva
3) Malignance is DT- versus Gleti's PDT-, but that may be irrelevant anyway since MDT is a lot easier to cap due to Shell (Shell V = MDT-29%, needing only 21% MDT- in gear to cap). In fact, with Gleti's hands/legs/feet having more points of PDT- than Malignance's DT-, you could potentially end up with more PDT- in a set swapping some Gleti's pieces in for Malignance.

Offensively:
4) Malignance gets STP on every piece, and PDL+ (that you won't be able to benefit from as often with gear that has no Atk)
5) Gleti's gets way more attack, crit rate+, PDL+ (that you're more likely able to take advantage of when using high atk+ gear), and some good stats when augmented (more Atk+, up to STP+7 on hands, up to DA+9% on body)
6) Both are strong acc pieces. Malignance with Acc+50 per piece and higher DEX, Gleti's with Acc+40 base (and Acc+50 augmented).

Don't sleep on Gleti's for "hybrid" builds, basically. And it's for damn sure a reasonable alternative with strong defense while working on acquiring 5/5 Malignance.

Well I was following up on the hybrid/tp set discussions, wasn't referring to WS.

I'm curious to know the math behind this food. Given the amount of WSD we have in our current BiS Rudra's set how does it compare against alternatives if we are not at attack cap. Is it good enough to just eat regardless? And if not roughly how far away do we need to be before say, red curry buns overtakes it if we need more help hitting the cap.

ItemSet 348287

Nyame is assumed path B rank 25. Ammo would be either orb +1 or stone for non sneak or trick attack stacked variant.

How close are R25 Nyame Body and +2 Skulker's Body?

Since we've generally decided that our real damage is in WS is anyone seeing this as a new top tier dd food for thf?

I'd rather see 2~3% TA in the hq, but that +5%/+6% wsd looks pretty nice.

Any thoughts?

I finally got around to making the +2 empyrean Thief pieces and the first thing I did was some quick testing on the vest's interaction with Conspirator. I am not sure if this has been covered already, but SE did actually address the issue with the augment effectively overwriting Store TP after they acknowledged it as a known issue a while back. I went back to the old test mandragoras, called 3 trusts, and started swinging.

• Using a 200 delay weapon, an empty body slot, and 58 STP I would get 102 tp per hit.

• Using the same setup but adding Malignance Body for 69 STP total bumped this up to 109 tp per hit.

• Using Conspirator with the vest on gave 106 tp per hit, indicating an increase of 6 STP over the naked-body set. More importantly, this confirms that the augmented STP is no longer overwriting the rest of your gear's STP.

This told me I didn't have all 4 names on the hate list, so I ran an additional test with a full set of 6 trusts.

Once all 6 of us were on the hate list, I got 109 tp per hit. I removed the vest, and re-equipped it, since in the past this had the effect of "breaking" the augmented Conspirator effect, and I was still getting the same 109 per hit, so that was also addressed at some point as well!

There's still a chance that one of the trusts was not on the hate list because the expected STP given with a party of 6 should be +12, which would push TP gain to 110 per hit, but it may also have a hard cap that I'm not aware of and am unable to test for at the moment. A cap of 10 would fit the 109 tp/hit I was observing.

If the augment follows a linear growth, a full alliance would give +36 store tp on one slot which seems pretty strong until you realize it has a 20% uptime, is prone to dispel, and may also work on a "per mob" basis, resetting each time you engage a new monster until the hate list populates again.

I did a little messing around with a NIN spreadsheet, but I think the same logic will apply to THF (and any other DD). It's going to be a flowchart:

1) Are you uncapped acc? Use acc food (sushi, etc.)
2) Are you good on acc, but uncapped atk? Use atk food (RCB, Carbonara, etc.)
3) Are you capped on acc AND atk? Use Gyudon.

I'm not seeing Gyudon being very close to atk food if you're not capping atk (or super close to cap). So, like so much else in the game today (especially considering the plentiful PDL+ gear/traits), gear/food choices are often coming down to whether or not you can cap attack.

So Gyudon is great when you're buffed to the moon. Or maybe on low impact content, but man, I don't wanna waste my money on expensive food for that... I'll just use something cheap like a Carbonara from Curio Moogle and at least get some STR/Store TP (as well as a little insurance Atk). Or just don't eat food on truly trivial content lol.

Other foods just don't bring a whole lot to the table when you're already mega-buffed and hitting acc/atk cap though. Maybe you get some STR from an RCB or DEX from a sushi that helps as a WS mod, or the aforementioned Store TP from Carbonara or some other noodle dish - but they aren't helping you a ton. That's where Gyudon slides into this new niche.

I think it's just 2sTP per someone on hate list, but not counting you.

That's your initial testing


TP for 200 delay weapon is 65 per hit. You got 66TP return with Conspirator on and just you and August. Meaning you got +2 store tp, because if you would get +4, you would got 67TP return.

65 * 1.02 = 66.3 (floored to 66)


This suggest the same thing. 65 * 1.04 = 67.6 (floored to 67)


And this too 65 * 1.06 = 68.9 (floored to 68)

So 10 store TP is not a matter of cap, but simply 5 other entities on the hate list other than you. Now the question is, does it even work with alliance and/or pets of players/trusts inside the party.

I figured as much. I default to grape daifuqu +1 when I need accuracy and red curry buns the rest of the time. I'm pretty sure unless you have a geomancer giving you fury/frailty on top of bard and cor buffs you're not gonna get very good mileage out of gyudon. Thief is NOT a high attack job. We have very high native accuracy but we're usually 400-500 attack lower than the jobs with smite, and many of the buffs are multiplicative so hitting the cap isn't a given. Unless you're certain you're capped it's probably safer to stick with the foods we've been using already.

Once again, having 500 attack less than DRK doesn't mean THF is further from attack cap. THF pdif cap with dagger is 3.35, while DRK pdif cap with great sword is 4.25 and scythe 4.5. That's 26% or 34% higher. Then you have PDL gear which for THF is usually an option, but DRK has 10% PDL on neck and now 8-9% on +1 and +2 earring which are really strong options even without PDL so you use them anyway. This means on something with 1200 def, DRK might need like 2500 attack more to cap.

It doesn't mean THF will have easy time to cap attack, but I wouldn't call THF low attack job, because it's all relative. THF just got new dagger WS body too with 87 attack, which will be even more in a month.

Depends on how good is roll on Chaos and how many minuets you have and if at least dia II is involved, you might not need GEO at all. With something like def down WSs and/or spells/belts on top of dia II or III and light shot, you might now even need that many minuets and high rolls.

It's not really relative at all. The fact that a job (in this case, THF) needs less attack to reach their cap doesn't detract from the fact that the job is not a "high attack job". THF, and several others, has no native way of raising its own attack (no traits or abilities that can do so) nor does it have any native way of contributing to reducing the enemy's defense (besides sacrificing the range slot and sitting there praying to land the effect on some bolts). It's squarely at the rear of the pack when it comes to affecting its own ratio against the enemy which absolutely classifies it as a "low attack job". One could even argue that the very fact they can cap their attack so much sooner than other jobs simply because the cap is significantly lower, and not because they can boost themselves higher faster, automatically qualifies them as "low attack".

Those jobs with higher pdl like DRK and DRG also happen to have ways of raising their attack and/or reducing the enemy's defense considerably. Funny how that works.

So yes, while thf can theoretically benefit from something like Gyudon sooner than a DRK could (sometimes), that's largely irrelevant to the overall statement that THF is, in fact, not a high attack job.

The point is that "high attack job" is a meaningless label by itself when determining how often a job caps attack, and thus how useful the new food is.

Alright that's cool and I addressed that, was referring specifically to a statement like "I wouldn't call thf low attack job"

Cause I certainly would, it's a valid assessment and regardless of its bearing on gyudon remains true. Some jobs just naturally have less access to attack than others, thf is one of them. Obviously once you start piling 3-4 support roles in the team you can cap anyone's attack, but that's also irrelevant.

Semantics. If you want to be that literal, then
Semantics. If you want to be that literal, then BRD, GEO and COR are high attack jobs, because they can push their attack really high with only self buffs.

You can call what I described however you want if you wish, but the meaning will be the same and that is how much attack is relatively needed to cap attack which is the point in discussion when using this food or not. I would even go further and I would evaluate how much attack and outside buffs are needed to cap attack to the point where it's the most effective. By that I mean how much PDL gear is worth to push, before you get most of it's full potential and start getting just marginal gains with lots of it, but that very complicated discussion and I don't even want to start it before empty+3.

Yeah, brd geo and cor would be high attack jobs lmao, was that supposed to be a gotcha?

Best part of it is, those jobs have also been getting plenty of gear to actually leverage it too. Brd and geo aren't quite there yet but cor has been gross forever now.

Listen I know how all this ***works. The math in your modified sheets came from people like me. I'm gonna call out weird ***when I see it though.

When we are determining what food to use, sure. But when we are discussing FFXI math in general, such choice of words can be confusing because it's too different from how it's used in the past in discussions.

Say for example if job A has 4 pdif but it's pdif cap is 6. Job B has 3 pdif and it's pdif cap is 3.

By this logic job A is the low attack job due to being further away from cap, and job B is the high attack job due to attack being capped. When in fact, job A will do more dmg than job B if both jobs are using the same WS in the same gears.

So next are we going to say job A is good DD because it's a low attack job and job B is a bad DD because it has high attack? The way it's used is FAR too different from how we discuss DD math in the past.

Low attack/high attack is simply how it reads. If a job has low attack then it's low attack job and vice versa. Pdif cap shouldn't matter.



We generally don't describe these jobs as high attack jobs because their JA can boost everyone's attack. Unlike WAR berserk is self buff only.

War drk is high attack jobs but cor is not, simply because if you checkparam war drk has higher attack in the same gear and same party.

Yeah, but like you said, the discussion was about capping attack and in context of food. I have no idea why discussion was suddenly changed to further implication of what low or high attack job can mean in different context. It's not like I wrote just a slogan that can be taken as anything you like. I answered specific comment in specific discussion and explaining in details what I mean by that. Context matters. Again I don't have time for this. I said what I wanted to say and further discussion will be pointless like always.

Thanks for food feedback, folks. Seems pretty obvious (most useful in rare situations of attack cap or near).

The more interesting thought is the fact SE added this recipe at all.

WSD and DA on a brand new crafted food? Seems like a field test right now to test this out. I expect more foods of this type will follow. Cooking crafters have been left dried out for some time....stats you can't get from the Moogle, I expect, is to be continued in the near future.

"Treasure Hunter"+5 on The thf footies, that's nice, you theoretically cap your TH with 1 slot. Really not much room to debate full timing TH or not with that.

So 4 out of 5 of the thief pieces are pretty great. I'm satisfied with that.

Hat -- Best TP Piece we could ask for.

Body -- Ridiculous rudra's storm / savage blade piece. Simply Incredible.

Hands -- Worthless. Don't even bother.

Legs -- I would happily use these for Evisceration over the artifact for the extra sturdiness you get from all that -DT. Simon would tell you to use them in a white damage twashtar build too. I still recommend artifact for that build myself, but that's neither here nor there. We've had this discussion a few pages back so no point repeating it.

Feet -- The one and only treasure hunter piece you'll ever need on thief. And it's got some pretty beefy white damage stats and -DT to boot. Feels so good. We can swap out perfect lucky egg for the orb +1 now. Very Nice!

Also by far bis WS piece for attack cap too and since THF has not much PDL in Rudra or Savage and Mandalic has huge attack boost, that PDL is pretty easy to use effectively in many scenarios.

At a glance I thought that as well, glad you confirmed it!

Hi all - anyone willing to share their THF gearswap lua please? Looking for an up to date one with all the bells and whistles if possible!

The hands only decent use is with single Sneak Attacks, but that's quite an upgrade for something so small.

If you're using sneak attack without stacking a weaponskill (preferably rudra's storm) you're doing it wrong. Back in the 75 era you'd do that because tp gain was weak and the damage from a non-stacked critical could rival weaponskill damage output if you rode the timers. But today we gain tp in seconds and rudra's storm scales on that tp hard. There's never a reason to NOT combine sneak and trick attack with a weaponskill.

none of you guys do bully+SA+feint for TH?

Sure, but that's such a small part of your overall damage that I could never justify carrying the empyrean gloves just for that specific niche use.

Hello! Is there a guide up-to-date-or-so somwhere I could see? BGwiki guide is still under work it seems. Wondering about sets, and if I should R15 Aenas, or go with another weapon? I don't plan on making a Twash anytime soon! <3 Edit: also offhand? Gleti?