Prime Resolution Set?

This has always been a silly argument, at least now it has some merit with the aftermath being JA haste. If the fight lasts longer than LR it at least gives some benefit as opposed to before. For DD jobs, the best relics are the ones that output the best damage. This has always been the case, you never said Bravura is better than Conq because it offers more "utility", this is true of plenty of weapons. Sure you can talk about Utility on jobs you can swap the weapon in like Whm or Brd. The heal just comes down to "do you have bad healers", as it always has.

Now if you simply stuck to the argument that making self Dark is good, you'd probably have something. Ragnarok shits on Apoc but Resolution can't SC and that is an absolutely massive problem.

Apoc does have +60 base accuracy and another +15 from AM over Liberator, which is the other Scythe option. 75 accuracy and another +32 base DMG isn't anything to sneeze at, especially with accuracy being so important on anything worth writing home about. Makes for some interesting gear decisions. Rag Reso spam does ***loads of damage but without a darkness SC you are kinda boned for hitting that high HP which mitigates the -35% defense penalty on LR.


Actually Ragnarok can SC, it's the only GS that can. It just can't SC darkness and some of it's WS's are single hit so Curse of Fudo.

Five step double light
Resolution -> Torcleaver -> Scourge -> Resolution -> Torcleaver

Two step easy light

Scourge -> Resolution

Scourge is the all important Fusion WS that's used as a linker. With the last round of updates it's actually good damage and the AM is worth keeping up. Just, no darkness, not even a gravitation to NV DS Drain III MB.

Amano sure has a lot of utility, eh?

Same for Mandau. In some fights it could even be detrimental (add effect poison).

Gungnir was also often used in spite of its "utility"; the def down overwrites (still? I could've sworn they fixed this at some point) Angon despite being weaker, and shock spikes were/are all but irrelevant barring /mage soloing.

Bravura's aftermath wasn't quantified until late 2009, and WAR wasn't doing much tanking at that time. If you wanted to DD tank at the time you usually went with SAM or DRK, or MNK for Salvage.

Yoichi/Anni's utility (reduced enmity) allowed them to do more damage in extended fights, so you could argue the focus was still on damage output.

Post-Reso Ragnarok is literally a "press this button to bash the mob's head in" weapon, and it's pretty good at it.

People stopped caring about Spharai as soon as Verethragna was a thing.

Kikoku's utility was never a huge deal. Weak para, often didn't care about the Subtle Blow. Nowadays it's pretty easy to cap if you care, but many NMs also have regain.

Even Apoc was a DD weapon first and foremost when it was the go-to shiny of choice for DRKs. The proliferation of haste gear and emergence of alternatives that weren't utter garbage relegated it to a predominantly utility role, at which point its value dropped immensely.

Balancing utility is something that XI has never done well. Either said utility was so obscenely strong as to warp the metagame (75 cap: Utsusemi, RDM; PD and Embrava in their respective times; recent examples: SCH SC/MB, prenerf BST, GEO) or had virtually no presence at all because you could just stack damage instead (BLU, PUP, BST, etc sat on the sidelines for 8+ years; even 75 cap support DNC was situational at best). Rarely has SE achieved the middle ground.

Gungnir's added effect overwriting Angon issue has been fixed for nearly two years now. (sometime in early-mid 2014)

Sure enough, February 2014. For some reason I thought they'd fixed that before I quit, but that works too!

took them entirely too long, regardless.

Significantly more apoc have been made than amano... And when you consider drk population vs sam population its evident that the weapon is vastly more popular. Why? Utility. FYI, Rng relics used to be near essential and back when I made mandau it was absolutely game changing as stacked mercy stroke was double any other ws dmg. The utility of Rag used to be that it was the best GS in the game war could equip, now its evolved into a powerhouse usable by multiple jobs. Mythics will always bring more damage, so make a relic which offers something unique and it will be timeless.

Apoc was a game breaking relic at 75 for its pure damage potential, more than Amano even. Remember, GS and Ragnarok specifically were considered laughable relics from 2003-2011. So really Apoc was the only way to go for Drks for double the time that Ragnarok has been. If you were a fan of Drk pre-2011 and you wanted a relic, you got apoc. Apoc took drk from "loldrk" to likely the best DD of 75, whereas Amano took Sam from good to really good, this is all in pure damage output and not "Utility". I'm not saying Apoc doesn't have a cult following for "utility", it's obvious from this and many other threads it does, but it was for a very long time the best weapon regardless of any utility it added.

If you really want to look at Amano, you'll see the weapon wasn't even really considered good until 2007 or so. It fell off in 2011 and never recovered to its Mythic or Empyreans until the last update at least. Amano has had a rocky past.

Rng relics are one of the few examples of utility that mattered, and even at some points pure damage trumped them like when Jishnus came out.

You literally just said Mandau was made for its damage potential, which is his argument.

Mythics will not always offer more damage. Mythics were for the most part a joke at 75, Empyreans competed until SoA, and mythics then had to compete with just base weapons like Oatixur or Tsurumaru once SoA came out. Now mythics have to compete with Relics, Empyreans, and Aeonics that got way more buffs in the last patch then they did.

If you are going to talk about amount of RMEs or back in the day, you should remember this game has existed for a very long time and in many states. Ragnarok may have felt like it's been a powerhouse forever, but it hasn't, and Apoc might feel like a "Utility" only relic, but was also the highest DPS output relic for a much longer time.

Well to be honest, Ragnarok was still very powerful at 75 for melee damage but Great Sword had really shitty WS's compared to Scythe. The "relic" WS which was supposed to be the "Ultimate WS" had a 40% MND 40% CHR mod, which is laughable even today with stat iLevel stat vommit.

I don't specifically have any numbers to back this up but I think it is nigh impossible for a weapon that gave essentially 5% crit to even compare to a weapon that gave 10% Gear Haste when Gear haste was not a thing that could be capped realistically. Heck if you really wanted to just ignore WSes completely and give Ragnarok its aftermath I don't think you could touch 10% gear haste.

Remove the weaponskills and Ragnarok still couldn't touch Apoc because of aftermath. The actual Damage/Delay split wasn't even very good and obviously you lost that not irrelevant Atk/Acc from using a Gsword. Apoc was just better in every way.

Because 10% gear haste in the weapon slot singlehandedly transformed DRK into a relevant job in top level play. Remember, most jobs couldn't cap gear haste at the time. Apoc DRK was part of a very exclusive club that could actually hit 256/1024 gear haste, and had the gear flexibility to do so in a wide variety of situations.

Meanwhile SAM could show up with a Hagun and a Tomoe and do just fine pretty much anywhere. Worst case, make some adjustments to food. Amano was nice, but not revolutionary.

Self-healing with Catastrophe was a nice perk, but it wasn't the primary selling point. Oftentimes the biggest benefit of said healing was the ability to more freely utilize Souleater without straining your healers, and maintaining a higher average HP while doing so. In other words... more damage.

Because staying alive meant you could do more damage.

More damage you say?

Ragnarok was a *** joke before Resolution entered the picture. Arguably the biggest joke of a legendary weapon available at 75. The immediate reaction to a completed Ragnarok was "That could've been an Apoc/Bravura." Even Claustrum didn't (quite) get that kind of reception; it was blatantly a town/lolmeleeSMN piece.

That's not true. Largely correct in recent years (mostly once OA2-3 AM3 became a thing at 95) and held true even at 75 for certain jobs that had lackluster relics/particularly awesome mythics (DRG), but certainly not true across the board now. That's without even comparing them to empyreans, many of which have also enjoyed renewed viability after the 119 III update.

Not to mention GS has no good crit WS, so the 5% critrate bonus (and another 5% if using Scourge) only went so far. It was (is? lazy) also the slowest 2h relic in terms of WS frequency. 431 delay forced a 7hit build at the time; even Apoc was slightly faster to 100.

However, it actually wasn't as awesome for melee damage as you might expect either. An oft-forgotten fact about level 75 Ragnarok is that its base damage was oddly low - it had the worst damage/delay ratio of any 2h relic sans Claustrum. This was remedied on the level 80 version, and it's consistently held one of the highest damage/delay ratios ever since.

Don't ask me how or why I remembered that, I don't know either.

No. Having the only weapon in the game which grants you a play changing ws is offering utility, like coronach or namas arrow (which you seem to agree on)... or mercy stroke for mandau, which is why as soon as you could unlock rudras, mandau was devalued a lot. Making a rag and spamming reso isnt utility as the weapon isnt offering anything unique; you can spam reso with any GS.

Re mythics; I was referring to current game obviously, where weps such as liberator will out parse apoc but doesnt offer the utility, which is why apoc (and weapons which offer similar utility) will always have a situation where it shines.

Depends on the DD, SAM could cap gear haste as could WAR and DRK, without a relic. SAM went /DRG and could 6-hit with a Hagun, WAR and DRK used Rune Chopper, provided someone could refresh them or they were inside ToAU and had refresh bonus. That Great Axe greatly devalued Apoc's Haste +10%.

The real crunch was when they put a cap of 20% delay floor (80% haste). DRK's were the only job capable of 25% JA haste, everyone else was stuck at 10% from Hasso. 79.3% vs 94.%.

Edge cases. Drk wouldn't ever choose to use a Rune Chopper except when it was broken for zerging, War had the option sure, and /drg was something that people still debated whether it was better than /war till the level cap broke. You might as well also mention Ninjas with JSE if you just want to mention all the situations it's possible. Apoc gave you capped gear haste with zero trade off, while the ones you mentioned had gigantic trade offs to the point where you wouldn't use them much of the time. Rune Chopper did not devalue Apoc except for the small period of time that people abused Rune Chopper for zerging, as an actual non zerging weapon the two had zero overlap.


How exactly is your play changing from having a Mandau versus not having a Mandau? All Mandau did was give you a stronger WS, aka more damage. Mandau is the worst possible relic you could talk about here, most relics at least have some "utility" but Mandau literally has nothing but pure damage.

You guys make it sound like Apoc is years behind liberator and rag in damage. Its not.
Back in the voidwatch era, when the difference between the 3 was greater than today, Taint, a few other good drks and myself would often ***on Rags, Masa's, Ukos, vere's, and gandivas.

Point: Apoc has less dmg output potential than lib/rag, but its not anything to fret about. So what if your fight takes 3-7 seconds longer?

Owning a rag/lib isn't going to make you a better DD than a good apoc wielding drk just because you are swinging them.

Both apoc and liberator modify drk in different ways. They both have utility based on your enjoyed playstyle. If you are an already aggressive player you will shine with Apoc and often ***on everyone else unless you find your equal using a rag/liberator.

get over it

I love that argument. I used a Hoarfrost Blade for a large portion of VW and never lost to any RME Drk I parsed against, so Hoarfrost Blade and Ragnarok are totally comparable right?

One time I used full level 60 gear in a level 80 raid on WoW just to see if I could out DPS the average pug, I topped the meter. I guess there was no difference in there either.

People are bad, other people are good, this has nothing to do with the strength or weakness of an item.

valuable contribution. Glad you understood my post and didn't choose to misunderstand it. that would be pretty HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE.

Why don't you tell me what you really think.

All I'm thinking is where are the set for resolution? You guys know that...a scythe can't do resolution right?

I loled. ty

I think Saev mentioned earlier Reso's best set is going to be full argosy +1 unless you get some really good augments on odsyssean/valorous (quad attack/triple atk with some str and accuracy) which is easier said than done to accomplish with dark matter augments.

Who gives a ***about that when we can argue about GA's used 7yrs ago?

Do you even meripo your mp, bro?

/DRG was infinitely better then /WAR for SAM back then. 5% additional gear haste was good for the exact same reason people use'd Apoc. Imagine having an Apoc in your ear slot, that's how good it was. For SAM the loss of 10% DA and Berserk wasn't much due to YGK being single hit, having a very high attack bonus and SAM deriving nearly 80~90% of it's damage from them. SAM was one of the few jobs that could take full advantage of that earring.

Zerging is exactly what Apoc was used for, which is why I brought up the Rune Chopper. It was good for the same reasons Apoc was, it let a DRK hit gear haste cap. Apoc didn't give you some magicaly "super haste" that transcended time and made your *** mandingo size. It was just +10% gear haste where you only needed ~3~5% to hit cap.


Before the forum barfed I had a post written up showing the relative DPS differences between the different relics. That was in response to the "Rag has abnormally low DMG / DPS" comment. Rag has the same DPS as the other 2h relics, around 12.0 and it's stayed that way ever since. What Rag had was abnormally low delay, 431, on a weapon class that usually has 450~480. There is a pro and con to that, the pro being favorable TP gain per second and better damage over time due to how fSTR works. The con being that the lower delay made your TP gain from WS lower then other weapons, and weapon skills are a static +2 second delay on your attack round regardless of the weapons own delay.

To illustrate,

Rag: 431 delay 7 hit = 3017 delay to 100 or 50.28 seconds.
Apoc: 513 delay 6 hit = 3078 delay to 100 or 51.3 seconds.

Now lets use the WS as the first hit and it's static +120 delay

Rag: 431 * 6 = 2586 / 60 = 43.1 +2 = 45.1 seconds.
Apoc: 513 * 5 = 2565 / 60 = 42.7 +2 = 44.7 seconds.

At 20% delay

Rag: 2586 * .2 = 517.2 / 60 = 8.62 +2 = 10.62 seconds
Apoc: 2565 * .2 = 513 / 60 = 5.55 +2 = 10.55 seconds

See the "ZOMG it's only a 7 hit!!!" didn't make it WS any slower.

Once you factor in fSTR and the passives, 75 Rag ends up being the best melee DPS weapon out of the bunch. With AM applied only Apoc beats it. Once the level cap was raised and gear haste was much easier to cap, Rag easily overtook Apoc for melee DPS.

But without a good weaponskill it didn't matter. Scourge was bad because stacking CHR and MND wasn't going to happen, even at today's iLevel stat vommit. Which left DRK's using Spinning Slash and WAR's using Ground Strike, neither a particularly attractive option. The other relics had solid WS's to fall back on. Apoc had guillotine, Bravura had Raging Rush, Gungir had Penta Thrust, Amano's Kaiten was already powerful as *** but SAM still had reliable YGK if it needed the attack.

This situation was why the moment SE released Resolution, Rag shot to the top. Rag was already an extremely powerful melee weapon, it's only weakness was the lack of a viable Great Sword weaponskill, Resolution fixed that. Resolution made Ragnarok.

Which is why the OP is asking for Resolution sets. Basically stack STR and multi-attack while making sure your WS accuracy is the same as your TP accuracy. DRK gets even more attack then WAR does so that shouldn't be an issue.

"Around" is laziness. Knock two base damage off 75 Bravura or Gungnir and they'd have ~equivalent (<0.5% variance, about as good a resolution as you'll get without fiddling with delays) DPS to 75 Ragnarok. That was kind of a big deal in the days of double-digit base damage and low WSC values. It also got the second largest raw base damage increase from 75 to 80, behind only Apoc. By percent it was easily the largest increase: 15.1% to Apoc's 13.6%. Amano/Bravura/Gungnir got less by either measure, and the ratios established at 80 have more or less held true ever since (again, within applicable limitations). That wasn't an accident, it was due compensation.

You've got that backwards. 430 delay was near a local minimum for TP generation over time using the old equations. The sweetspot was the 480-530 range - polearms, gaxes, scythes, and most greatswords. Of course, any weapon in that range inevitably used a 6-hit if /SAM (SAM mains went for the 5hit), so weapons on the high end of that range suffered a bit. When you account for WS delay and xhit, Rag had TP generation comparable to a ~517 delay weapon. Slightly slower than Apoc, certainly slower than Bravura or Gungnir.

The ideal at the time was basically however close you could get to 480 without breaking your 6hit. You might recall that the more popular greatswords of the day had delays in the 480-501 range.

More benefit from fSTR, sure - but you had very little STR on TP gear, so it was entirely possible that you'd reap little or no benefits during TP phase. Apoc for instance arguably got more out of fSTR simply because it could afford to TP in more STR (Ares legs, Ace's Helm, etc).

You literally just showed that it was slower to 100 than the highest delay relic, supporting my previous statement. Good job.

I never said otherwise. What I did say was that it didn't fully live up to its potential in that department due to relatively low base damage.

/drg was great, I think it was a heavily underappreciated sub. It was not infinitely better than War. The loss of Berserk was a big deal on HNMs, so you could find yourself wanting to sub War for them. For weaker things you may find yourself wanting to use Tomoe anyways, which absolutely was better with /war. Sam was the only job that could take advantage of /drg to be honest, not just one of the few that could take full advantage of it.


Zerging is not what Apoc was used for, wat. You do realize that the amount of time that using haste weapons for zerging was very small when compared to the amount of time Apoc existed right? Even compared to the amount of time that zerging was a popular tactic. Apoc/Rune Chopper were such a small thing compared to KC zerging for FFXIs history. Apoc was used as a purely good weapon for anything, it turned Drk from a job that was relatively weaker than jobs like Sam or War to one that was stronger than either except maybe Amano Sam. You gained significant slot improvement from that haste, sure if you had perfect haste gear and the highest possible in every slot you were technically gaining 3%. In reality you swapped slots, Blitz Ring specifically was horribly inefficient for the slot and was an amazing swap. Ares Cuisses, Onyx Cuisses, Aces Helm, Aurum Sabatons, just the simple fact that having less than perfect haste gear was pretty normal at 75, it made it so that you gained way more than 3-5%.

Let me break down the differences between using a max haste set + Perdu Scythe and using an Apoc set:

• 3% Pure Haste.

• 10 Base Damage

• STR+9 from Legs and Head swaps

• Attack+9 from Legs, Ring, and Feet Swap

• Accuracy+34 from Weapon, Ring, Head, and Hands swap

It may not look like that much at 119, but for 75 that is likely more of a stat gain than you would get from going from pure starting 75 gear to perfect Drk gear, just from changing your weapon.

Out of pure boredom I actually went to go look at what you gained going from baseline "I just hit 75" gear to "Absolutely Perfect, Like one person per server if anyone per server had this level of gear":

Starter: http://www.ffxiah.com/item-sets/342818
Perfect: http://www.ffxiah.com/item-sets/342816
Ignoring STP because I can't be assed to really remember STP numbers for 75.

Stat change between the two:

• 6% Haste

• Base Damage/weapon change is hard to quantify

• -1 STR

• -12 Attack

• 30 Accuracy

• +12 DEX

Other than the haste, which is honestly only a bigger gap because of how important Homam Legs were to playing Drk, you actually did gain more relevant stats from simply getting an Apoc and switching the relevant slots than upgrading literally every slot in the game from baseline to perfect.

And yes, a large majority of those stats did come simply from the fact that Apoc had a 10% haste Aftermath. If you want to nitpick just remove 20 Accuracy and the base damage completely from the numbers and it would still be pretty comparable.

Not true. Like I said I had a long post written up showing the DPS values, then the forum ate it. Here is the short version.

Rag: 11.97 (baseline)
Apoc: 12.05 (0.6% higher)
Bravura: 12.17 (1.6% higher)
Gungnir: 12.2 (1.9% higher)

For comparison the 1H relics

Excalibur: 12.62
Mandau: 13.3



WTF.... you had plenty of STR on TP gear...

For the jobs in question, WAR and DRK, you typically had +6~10 fSTR bonus which would coincide with 20~30 more STR then the target has VIT. The only mobs that you wouldn't be hitting positive fSTR would be adamnatoises / Genbu types who had super high VIT / defense.


Your bias is showing. Read it again, this time without blinders on and prejudice. I showed that Rag had ~2% faster time-to-100 from flat 0 and Apoc had ~1% faster after WS. Once haste is introduced the difference gets even smaller as the 2s delay doesn't scale with delay reduction. Those small differences become a wash with human error and game lag.


No, just no.

TP per second got better until you hit around 350, which is staff delay, then it got worse until you hit sub 220 where it spiked back up. 431 delay still had better TP per second generation then 513 delay, barely but it was better. The reason you wanted the higher delay was getting higher return on your WS. WS TP return is essentially "free" because it's a flat 2s regardless of weapon delay. A 150 dagger has the same WS delay as a 528 Scythe yet the Scythe will return a much larger amount of TP making the trip back to 1000 shorter. The original optimal delay was actually around 450 though it didn't hurt to go a little in either direction (430 ~ 480).


That is not what hurt Rag, it was a lack of a viable GS Weapon Skill. Rag still has a lowish base DMG compared to alternatives though it's DPS is high as hell due to it's low delay. Level 99 was

My Zulfiqar
DMG: 297 +25 (322)
Delay: 504
Accuracy: 15 +21 (36)
Attack: 15 +16 (31)
STR +11
DA: +2
WSD: 2+3%

That technically puts out bigger Resolutions then Rag, assuming the accuracy isn't a deal breaker (it can be). Rag does better overall due to it's massive melee DPS, especially on WAR. I was on the test server playing with Resolution and upon noticing how powerful it was I immediately started making a Ragnarok because I knew what would happen once that WS went live.

And you just failed horribly.

You couldn't switch out all that gear because you still needed Store TP, otherwise it was an overall DPS loss. Apoc never got it's full 10% haste effect, more like 5~6% depending on how much Store TP was present and what era it was in. Not a minor increase but not this dramatic one either. That is just your nostalgia speaking.



YGK all had a large attack bonus, Gekko's being the largest at +100%. The additional haste from that earing, +12 accuracy from acc bonus and TP bonus's from jumps were worth more then /WAR for SAM. I only mentioned that because someone made it out like Apoc DRK was super exclusive with capped gear haste, which it wasn't. The other two big DD's also got capped gear haste from options cheaper then a relic. And you are right SAM was the only job that could effectively use /DRG, I know I exploited the hell out of it back during HNM. Also exploited Run Chopper zergs on WAR and SEBW RC zergs on DRK.

Note, before the delay floor, SEBW with Rune chopper was better then SEBW kclub. The 25% from DB doesn't work on one handed weapons nor does Hasso Kclub couldn't cap gear haste. We are talking about 66.3% haste vs 94.3% or better written 33.7% delay vs 5.7%. That's somewhere around 500% faster attack rounds. Then SE created the 20% delay floor, which prevents any combination of weapons from going under 20% of it's base delay, aka the 80% haste cap. Nerfed the *** out of Apoc and RC, so everyone went back to kclub, mkris and ridill.

Are you just trolling me at this point?
ItemSet 342804 to ItemSet 342816
Literally not a single slot you switch has any change of STP values. You gain FULL effect of 10% haste, since you equal down to 15%.