Stardiver Or Drakesbane?

In campaign, on the normal monsters no bosses wsing as close to 100 tp as possible. No food or other buffs.

It seems to go back and forth for me.

ws gear now
drackenhorn
light gorget
kemas + brutal
lancer body +2
lancer hands +2
spiral + raja
atheling
light belt
lancer legs +2
perle boots (maybe lancer boots +2 with 12 att/acc will beat these)


d1230
s1219
d1137
s1996
d1876
s2005
d1711
s1880
d1628
s1414
d1509
s1993
d1950
s1872
d2004
s1943
d1798
s1645
d1828
s2428
d2033
s2641
d1950
s2595
d1418
s1676
d2129
s901
d1445
s1227
d1055
s2278
d1607
s1112
d1580
s1325
d1388
s1819
d1848
s1741
d2142
s1406
d2144
s1679
d2931
s2596
d3605
s1791
d1999
s2393
d2810
s2570

With stardiver you would want to use light belt/gorget since the +fTP affects all hits (effectively adding +.8fTP to the WS before multihits). However, drakes only benefits by +.2fTP since they only affect the first hit's fTP value. Other options are better for those slots. I currently use rancor collar and wanion belt.

So if you want to test which WS is better against a certain mob, you need to optimize for each WS, not keep the gear consistent between them.

The higher end Drakesbanes seem to be with Angon or on a completely unbuffed mob, possible a mage or something, with lucky crits and the luckiest of pDIF rolls. Same sort of numbers could be hit by Stardiver.

On the flipside, the lows on Stardiver appear to be the result of highly buffed monsters, possibly heavy armor orcs or quadavs, with a few whiffs, unfavorable pDIF, etc.

Mostly not a very good place to be comparing damage with such a small sample size due to the disparity in monster types and whatnot.

Monsters so low on the spectrum would likely favor Drakesbane in any case as your ratio will be pretty high on them, doing a bit to aid Drakesbane's significant ratio penalty. Their base stats are likely low enough to where you'd be capping both fSTR and dDEX with minimal effort, indeed in that gearset you should be over cap on both. Not surprising that Drakesbane would be better in this scenario, but on higher content where the factors aren't so heavily in Drakesbane's favor, you'll see the difference very quickly close and Stardiver take the lead.

@ dragonlord I did not know that thank you. I am trying to crank a WS as high as it can go. I do not have the room or gil to make 5 diff macro sets for 5 diff ws. I do not know which I will go with at this point. :(

Which 5 different WS are you gearing for? The only useful ones for drg are stardiver and drakesbane. With camlann's being used when you have 300tp (but it pretty much a mix of drakes and stardiver gear) Rancor collar is pretty much a staple on many jobs. It's a sound investment if you don't have one yet.

Those are the only two ws I use really. I will screw with sonic in campaign while making notes but that's about it. I just do not have a lot of space or gil for making multi gear sets anymore. I kinda messed up and always 0'd out my tonberry hate :(

Ok I went to Boulder Eater's they are T low eva high def to my drg.
On these it appears to go with what others are saying that Star pulls ahead.

d2395
s2479
d1196
s1651
d487 (??? I suck)
s1177
d1629
s1996
d1987
s928 (kill shot)
d1565
s1647
d1767
s2238
d779 (kill shot)
s1568
d2083
s1975
d1998
s960 (kill shot)
d953
s2291
d702 (kill shot)
s2561
d1258
s1781
d2448
s1722
d2105
s1651
d2195
s1130
d1595
s2415
d1744
(I died here)

As expected really. The -20% attack on drakesbane really hinders it as mob's defense increases. This is where you really need as many criticals as possible because it modifies the cratio which makes up for the lost attack (by adding 1 to cratio, basically giving you the equivalent attack boost as the mob's defense for that hit). I believe this post-critical added ratio is called "wratio" now. Been a while since i dealt with these formulas.

Someone correct me if i'm wrong with that analysis though.

I assume you play with vanilla FFXI then and no windower? It's harder but you can swap all your gear and still have macro space if you know how to utilize the /macro command.

Perhaps you can give us some details on how your system works and we might be able to help with some suggestions? I had some seriously complicated macros before moving over to script macros and then finally using SC. I think the thing I had most fun with in this game was optimizing macros and making everything work the best I could.

I started on PS2, moved to xbox3shitty, and this year got a nice gaming laptop at a very good price so I am playing 11 on that. Lenovo 2.2 GHz quad core 8 gig of RAM a nvida Gforce 555 it has some cool processor and 1 gig RAM on it. I never really got into windower I tried to check out that status timer and nothing ever lines up and it looks like you have to manually enter every spell or buff in that info file and I did not want to do all that and I could not find one already filled out anywhere. I am still happy on HDMIing out to my LCD tv. I am running out of space to hold too much gear for a lot of macros. And as I just a couple weeks ago actually finally MADE Gungnir, I am now so broke I can't pay attention... I am trying to get the shadow belt/gorget it seems to me that having the 2 light and 2 dark ones I can toss them into about every ws macro. I have not really read up on spell cast it seemed overly complicated.

Spellcast is complicated and does have a learning curve. But a starting point would be script macros if you haven't used them but that requires windower. They are much like normal macros but are not limited on lines thus you don't have to use several macro spaces to do the same thing and does it faster than having to spam buttons.

As far as your space issues... That's just FFXI and honestly windower and spellcast make space even worse since you can optimize every action. You basically just have to go through your gear and ensure that every piece is being used, put situational gear away and try to find gear that is multipurpose as much as possible. You often have to ask just how much certain things are really helping and if they aren't then store them or sell em. But this is a great place to post to ask for advice on such things.

I don't use status timer for anything but aftermath on my almace and for physical shield in voidwatch. I don't like the numbers overlaid over the buffs, even though mine are lined up appropriately.

This?

Spellcast is about as complicated as you want it to be. If you just want to consolidate your sets into one file and have them swap in when you use the appropriate ability or hit a certain macro, it can do that. If you want to micromanage sets based on buffs, day, whatever, it can do that too. There's always basic windower text scripts as an alternative if you don't want to try it, and I'd really recommend at least giving those a look.

100% behind at least learning the extended macros. They work almost exactly like the in-game macros, if you had infinite lines. No more 6line BS holding you back. You just open up wordpad, and write in the gear you want swapped, and any JAs you want just like a normal macro. You just have to do a tiny tweak on the text. You can put in /waits and anything else you do in a macro. But you can change every piece of gear at once. Its a game changer.

I played on PS2 for some 4+ years before i moved to PC and know all about the limitations of the in-game system, and the improvement you gain by just having ONE macro for a WS to change all your gear at once.

I remember the day I finally decided to install windower. It was when I, as a thf, had so many gear swapping macros I had keep removing WS from my macro pallet. 1st Mandalic stab left. Then evisceration. Then sharkbite and the only WS i had space for was DE. That was when I said enough is enough! I had 4 functional WS, but due to having 2 macros for SA to change 11 pieces of gear, 2 for TA, 2 for TP gear. 1 more for acc adendum to TP, feint, AC, /RA, 2x for Eva gear, 2x for ONE WS, Speed boots/TH macro, Aura steal, flee, Utsu ichi, utsu Ni, etc etc etc it was HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE.

I just got so bogged down hitting so many buttons and finally ran out of space to have all the important stuff easily accessable. So I installed windower the day i had to remove shark bite.

Best. Decision. Ever. In the last 8 years ive played this game.

I went a long time without diving into spellcast. Only started that about 6 mo ago, but endless lines of macro are absolutely, astonishingly awesome, and have a very, very low learning curve. It is just normal macros with a minor change in wording in a wordpad file. Then in your in-game macro, you put the name of that file. The end.

Example:

File:
Name-Drakesbane.txt
*gear change stuffz(head/leg/neck/blah blah blah)
*WS drakes commandz!

In game macro:
Drakesbane.txt

Hit macro:
All gear changes to WS gear and Drakes triggers.

You:
:D

Figure I may as well post this since if you would like to learn how to do script macros, it helps.

This one is the way I use to do for my spells. To reduce the number of txt files I had and so changes could be limited to just a few txt files rather than a ton, I took the spell names, staves and the wait out of the scripts.



This is a ws example. It breaks it down in to two parts.



And yeah, these are super old ^^;

Ok thanks to all that got me the info to start using the windower macros.