PLD and the Staff...

[Gozer]

Why on Earth is the Paladin the only class with an A in staff (according to the charts on Shadow-Dragons.com)? Is there any reason to train it up if my character will never be a casting class? Bah.. it just seems odd to me..

[Exsol]

Galka mode:
PLD..*grunt* rahh...staf are weak *snort-grunt* PLD are 1h sword having....*snarl* *grunt* ...sharp...
you.. ..sword....

[Gozer]

Bahaha... There's no arguing with that, I suppose.. But seriously.. any ideas?

[Calianeri]

I think the grades lists on that site are pretty ridiculous, don't put any faith in them. They are just one person's or one group's subjective opinions, and many of them very odd. The grades mean little or nothing.

[Mithrael]

the skill grades on shadow-dragons.com has been accurate on everything i've checked. you may or may not understand what it means though. it simply is an indication of that weapons skill cap for any given level.

here is a site to confirm, if you can understand it. It loads extremely slow, and babelfish has a very difficult time translating it due to the technical nature and the insane amount of jscripting on the page.
http://www.ausystem.org/~aushacho/gbox/ff/skill.html

Basically, just because you have an A in staff doesn't mean you'll do more damage with a staff. it simply means that your skill caps out at a higher level. there is little subjectivity to it. simply cap out all of your weapons and magic and you'll see how it breaks down. Since weapon profieciency directly contibutes to your attack rating, if you had two weapons with identical stats, in different categories, the A weapon should average more damage over hits.

Since staves are generally slower than 1-hd swords, the sword will almost certainly do more damage over time. You should however have greater accuracy with a weapon with a higher skill lvl, so if you were to fight with an a and b weapon, your a weapon would connect more often. However, that still doesn't mean you'll have better damage over time.

The shadow-dragons.com table doesn't take into account the a+ ratings that the site above does. It's a game of choices

[Calianeri]

Well, that does help understand it, yes. Thanks! I still think it's misleading, and the shadow-dragons site appears to have NO explanation like yours Mithrael. I wish it did... One sentence on that site would have cleared this all up!

What peeves me more is the "Status Rank" list -- giving "Unsatisfactory" ratings to particular races isn't fair. And while I assume their letter grades reflect the "ranking" of those stats for each race quantitatively, the words they put with the grades take that away.

In both cases, it seems to me that they're such small views of the overall character that it pains me to see people putting so much faith in them.

[Gozer]

I would imagine that a large part of the faith is due to the fact that there are so very few English language sites with detailed information on the game yet. Not to kiss their asses, but I appreciate it as a fine starting point.
Thanks for the great breakdown Mithrael, I am all for going the optimal route, but maybe, just maybe, I'll be whipping out the ol' staff after the 1h and 2h sword skills are capped just to see what I can do.. Like you said, choices :p

[Sagat]

Staves are cool weapons

[Calianeri]

Yeah, as a mage I love staves too. But it would seem really odd to me see a Paladin using one as a frontliner. Though some of them do have nice damage...

Gozer's right, I'm sure we'll see a lot more information about FFXI very soon, and it'll be in context. But for now we've got these great boards to sort out the info, and folks like Mithrael.