By Leviathan.Duvessa 2010-05-17 09:00:27
Asuran fists, like all weaponskills with 5 or more hits benefit greatly from attack and accuracy. Once you have capped accuracy on your target, stick attack in every slot you have left assuming you're fighting something with relatively low VIT and you aren't attack capped. If there isn't any substantial accuracy or attack gear for that slot, then go for weapon skill mods. As said before, you really don't need brutal for Asuran fists. It wouldn't be that big of a spike in damage if you managed the double attack on an 8 hit ws anyways. In fact, the only way you could get a double attack is if you missed one of your normal attacks, because 8 hits is the max obtainable amount of attacks under any circumstance. You're better off with a consistent return from an attack earring that will influence every WS in this case.
One good way to determine what gear you should utilize to boost damage is using the damage calculator here:
http://ffxi.killvoid.com/page.php?al=dcalc
Level 82 Greater Colibri have Defense 327 and 67 VIT.
You'll have to input all your stats and such and the mobs level/defense/vit values for it to be accurate. At that point you can tell if an attack addition or STR addition would make a bigger difference by altering the values to match the new addition. Typically, I find that even 5-10 attack is USUALLY better than 5 dex for my dancer's DE's. (Dex is a ws mod of the WS) At times it will be necessary to add some str to your build if the mobs VIT is too high though. You especially don't want to stack attack to the point where you go over the cap on that particular mob, though.
What kind of mob are you planning this build for? It's hard to make recommendations without that bit of info, because optimal ws gear is always situational.