Mercurial Kris or Hagun?

[Icemage]

Re: Mercurial Kris or Hagun?

Now, I don't want to accuse you of being a bad player but this is the line of thought that makes bad THFs (bad DDs in general, but THF is particularly prone to making this mistake.) If you forget about your DoT, you'll always put up poor damage.

What Icemage said is true - in the context of TP gain, Merc Kris is unbeatable except possibly by Kraken Club. However, its DoT sucks. Pretty hard. Especially more so when you consider the better Daggers not only have more than twice the DoT, but also additional bonuses (like Sirocco Kukri's constant wind damage and Blau Dolch's +Acc and Attack.)

Gimping your DoT so drastically just to gain slightly less than 50% more WS (and they'll be slightly weaker, too) while feeding the mob more TP to boot is a bad thing to pay lots of gil for.

That's not entirely fair, though, Armando.

While it's true that the damage per hit on the Mercurial Kris is just this side of pathetic, you have to figure in the damage boost from Sneak Attack and Trick Attack. Put plainly, that extra increase in WS speed, when stacked with SA and/or TA, represents more than just more WS... it's also a lot more DoT since THF WS (when backed by either/both abilities) are a much larger proportion of a Thief's damage over time than any other melee job, particularly once you get to Shark Bite and later WS.

As I mentioned above, the ability to separate TA and SA represents more than just an extra unsupported WS of damage, particularly after you get access to the Assassin trait.


Icemage

[rshermaniv]

Re: Mercurial Kris or Hagun?

That's what i was getting at ice, thanks. So its looking like its best to hold off on MK until 60, where Assassin kicks in and i can look at splitting SA and TA while using MK in my offhand.

[Armando]

Re: Mercurial Kris or Hagun?

Good observation, Icemage. That would be the case if you were spamming Shark Bite, but for Dancing Edge, which will put up better damage unless you're fighting IT mobs, the difference is minimal - you can achieve practically the same total damage using SA/TA during WS than without.

The formulas work out in such a way that the difference in damage between doing, for example, SAWS + normal hit and doing WS + SA normal hit, will be exactly (D+fSTR)*(fTP-1) + (WSC)*(fTP). Dancing Edge's fTP is 1.1875, and its WSC is 30% DEX, 40% CHR. For a THF with 100 DEX and 80 CHR, that works out to about 60 damage. That'd be the difference if everything stayed the same; however, you're doing a WS with an 8 DMG weapon in the offhand as opposed to, say, 32 (Magnet Knife), so you lost about 30-40 damage depending on Attack because of that. Now we're looking at a 20-30 damage difference.

It's not much, and much less when you consider that this difference in damage is only going to pop up whenever the Merc Kris user's WS and SA or TA timers line up - the Kris user can't afford to accumulate more than 100 TP any more than the normal dagger user can. The differences in DoT will be far more significant to his/her total damage than that.

[Malacite]

Re: Mercurial Kris or Hagun?

Suppose you merit Sneak Attack and Trick Attack fully (50s recast each) and offhand it; wouldn't it just be sick then if you mainhand say a Blau Doch or something similar?

Yeah the DoT of it will blow but with all that TP gain and the lowered timers you could be firing of SA+WS and TA+WS quite often. I agree that it should not be used on the main hand ever and certainly not before level 60 (when you have Assassin) since you'll still be doing SA+TA together thus wasting the extra TP.

[Icemage]

Re: Mercurial Kris or Hagun?

Good observation, Icemage. That would be the case if you were spamming Shark Bite, but for Dancing Edge, which will put up better damage unless you're fighting IT mobs, the difference is minimal - you can achieve practically the same total damage using SA/TA during WS than without.

The formulas work out in such a way that the difference in damage between doing, for example, SAWS + normal hit and doing WS + SA normal hit, will be exactly (D+fSTR)*(fTP-1) + (WSC)*(fTP). Dancing Edge's fTP is 1.1875, and its WSC is 30% DEX, 40% CHR. For a THF with 100 DEX and 80 CHR, that works out to about 60 damage. That'd be the difference if everything stayed the same; however, you're doing a WS with an 8 DMG weapon in the offhand as opposed to, say, 32 (Magnet Knife), so you lost about 30-40 damage depending on Attack because of that. Now we're looking at a 20-30 damage difference.

It's not much, and much less when you consider that this difference in damage is only going to pop up whenever the Merc Kris user's WS and SA or TA timers line up - the Kris user can't afford to accumulate more than 100 TP any more than the normal dagger user can. The differences in DoT will be far more significant to his/her total damage than that.

I don't think we're on the same wavelength here.

I'm not talking about SAWS + normal hit versus WS + SA normal hit.

At level 60, a Thief has access to Assassin, which makes his weapon D rating increase by +1 for every point of AGI when Trick Attack is used. This in turn means that if the Thief has enough TP to separate SA from TA, he now gets two critical attack WS, one with +DEX as a bonus to his weapon damage (SA) and one with +AGI as a bonus to his weapon damage (TA).

Under normal circumstances, it will take a Thief close to 60 seconds to pick up 100TP.

But look at a Thief using, say, Blau Dolch + Mercurial (dual wielded) with Suppanomimi.

Blau Dolch delay 178
M. Kris delay 192
Combined delay 370
Dual wield reduction 20% = 296
Delay per hand = 148
TP gained per hit: 5.0 + [(148 - 180) * 1.5] / 180 = 4.7 TP per hit

If he has a Haste spell active, we're looking at an attack cycle of 4.28 seconds (delay / 58.85), during which an average of 3 hits will occur.

60 seconds / 4.28 seconds = ~14 attack rounds x 90% accuracy x 4.7TP per hit = ~177 TP gained every 60 seconds.

A small amount of additional Haste from gear and/or a March song will push this close enough to perform two WS every 60 seconds (basically need around 190TP gain per 60 seconds to pull this off). Even so, you're not going to get to that necessary 100TP just in time every time, but chances are, as soon as you get to 100%, you're going to have either SA or TA ready.


Icemage

[Armando]

Re: Mercurial Kris or Hagun?

At level 60, a Thief has access to Assassin, which makes his weapon D rating increase by +1 for every point of AGI when Trick Attack is used. This in turn means that if the Thief has enough TP to separate SA from TA, he now gets two critical attack WS, one with +DEX as a bonus to his weapon damage (SA) and one with +AGI as a bonus to his weapon damage (TA).

I understand that. I was pointing out that for Dancing Edge, the WS of choice, the advantage of doing SAWS or TAWS compared to doing the WS and SA or TA on its own is very small. Being able to stack TA or SA onto every WS as opposed to just every other WS isn't going to make a big difference compared to the difference in DoT and WS rates.

TP and the timers also won't synch up every time and you'd lose more damage trying to synch them up than using them ASAP unless whichever one's not ready will be before the next attack round (so you can wait a max of about 3 secs.) In the end the deciding factors will still end up being DoT lost vs WS rate gained.

[Icemage]

Re: Mercurial Kris or Hagun?

I understand that. I was pointing out that for Dancing Edge, the WS of choice, the advantage of doing SAWS or TAWS compared to doing the WS and SA or TA on its own is very small. Being able to stack TA or SA onto every WS as opposed to just every other WS isn't going to make a big difference compared to the difference in DoT and WS rates.

TP and the timers also won't synch up every time and you'd lose more damage trying to synch them up than using them ASAP unless whichever one's not ready will be before the next attack round (so you can wait a max of about 3 secs.) In the end the deciding factors will still end up being DoT lost vs WS rate gained.

Using SA or TA on a regular attack is somewhat wasteful, especially once you get access to Shark Bite (which does quite large amounts of damage with either JA, since it has a base damage multiplier of 2.0 at 100% TP). Dancing Edge, while it does score extra hits, has a much more modest 1.18 multiplier, and only the first hit gets the primary benefits from the JAs.

The point I was making, though, is that it's possible to sync up your TP gain with the JAs fairly closely. Waiting one attack round for the necessary TP isn't a gamebreaking change in DoT, particularly when you have ulterior motives (planting extra hate on a tank via Trick Attack).

Playing Thief isn't just about the damage you do - it's just as much about enmity manipulation, and in this context, you may very well want to wait before using Trick Attack so you can plant some extra hate onto someone.


Icemage

[Armando]

Re: Mercurial Kris or Hagun?

Well, I was going with the damage angle because that's what people were trying to push (i.e. maybe the increase in number of WS is enough to offset the drop in DPS.) However, if you want to forgo optimal damage, Mercurial Kris STILL won't help the THF plant hate on anyone. You can still only TA once per minute, and nothing stops the average THF from using his WS's with TA rather than SA. The only advantage the Merc Kris THF would have is that he could feasably tack on either TA or SA to every WS instead of every other WS - again, it just boils down to damage.

Also, depending on the conditions (fighting VT mobs with good gear and a BRD or COR) the difference in damage between DE and SB may be big enough that stacking SB with TA or SA would only break it even with tossing DE's and TA's and SA's separately whenever they're up. But that's another topic entirely.

My issue with this is mainly the cost of the weapon. If this was just some toy I wouldn't care, but in my opinion if you're going to shell out millions of gil for an item it better be really freaking great, or you have nothing else left to buy.

[rshermaniv]

Re: Mercurial Kris or Hagun?

Agreed Armando, 3 million is a butt load, and a Hagun is really freaking awesome, hence my dilema and this posting. I'm going to hold off on the MK until I have 3 million in disposable monies that i could use to test it out, as opposed to getting rid of quallity equipment to try it out.

[Icemage]

Re: Mercurial Kris or Hagun?

My issue with this is mainly the cost of the weapon. If this was just some toy I wouldn't care, but in my opinion if you're going to shell out millions of gil for an item it better be really freaking great, or you have nothing else left to buy.

Fair enough.

Were it me that was wanting one, I'd just spend some time fishing - but I've long since paid my dues to get the requisite fishing skill and rods, and that's not a viable option for a large proportion of players.


Icemage