Hello Falkirk,
There has been a rumor gong around that you've done some testing on the Aymur and found that it wasn't as good as originally thought.
Care to comment?
Sure. A friend of mine (who also has an Aymur) was doing an investigation into Sweeping Gouge and fTP stuff for Ready moves in general. He noticed something bizarre though - basically, wearing Aymur by itself (TP Bonus+1000) and spamming Ready moves was weaker than Anahera Tabar+Nukumi Manoplas+1 (TP Bonus+600).
You can easily test this yourself by using magical damage ready moves (for consistency) like Cursed Sphere against Wild Rabbits in West Ronfaure:
Aymur only - Cursed Sphere DMG =
4043
Nukumi Manoplas+1 (+Anahera Tabar) - Cursed Sphere DMG =
4094
The only difference in play is the amount of TP Bonus your pet has. So from this, and a variety of other tests, he surmised that
whenever you execute a Ready command with TP < 1000, your pet's TP in the precast phase is hardcoded to be 1000.
Think of it as a holdover from the days when our pets were more like actual "monsters" - when SE abolished the minimum TP requirements, they actually just gave a behind-the-scenes boost to 1000 so they didn't have to rework their fTP formulas. This finding not only explains the strange TP Bonus issue, but also coincides with Ready move damage and buffs not increasing in potency/duration until your pet has TP > 1000.
Rage/Scissor Guard/Zealous Snort all have fixed durations until TP is > 1000. You get the picture.
So with that in mind, what does the complete TP spectrum look like from 0-3000?
For WAR pets with Fencer V, the window from 1000-2500 is where we can influence the resulting damage by adding TP bonus. And for non-WARs like the boar pet it looks like this:
Because of the rate at which we spam Ready moves, our TP amount tends to be ~250 or less, so we're relying almost exclusively on TP Bonus to increase our damage in that regard (just set aside things like Attack etc for now).
Most BSTs can use
Alluvion Axe x 2 with TP Bonus+200 augment, plus Nukumi Manoplas+1 for a total of TP Bonus+1000. So with a
WAR pet they're already at
2500 effective TP when spamming Razor Fangs or whatever. And since TP potency starts to scale poorly beyond 2000 TP (less than 1/3rd as potent from that point onward), it isn't a huge deal that they can't get much further at this time.
Now, for you and I, when we use
Aymur in our precast we actually aren't benefiting at all from the initial 500 TP bonus because after the precast is over our pet's TP is hardcoded to be 1000 anyway. So what we really have is a 500 TP midcast from Aymur + a 200 TP Bonus Alluvion Axe offhand + 600 Nukumi+1 hands. We are at an advantage by 300 TP, and it certainly helps a bit, but it's unfortunately past the threshold where TP Bonus is most attractive. We're spamming
2800 effective TP Razor Fangs, and we get a large boost from Pet:Attack+80 simultaneously (Pet:Attack+128 for Randy), but it's
not quite as large of a difference as previously thought.
You would be able to take advantage of Aymur's precast TP Bonus if your pet could earn more than 500 TP in the melee phase before executing your next Ready move though (perhaps if you couldn't offhand Charmer's Merlin for some reason? Or using 3-charge Ready moves? I dunno).
Sorry for the lengthy explanation, I hope that was clear.
tl;dr: Aymur is still the best, but because of the way Ready moves are calculated, the gap between a Mythic BST and a regular BST isn't as wide as you might think.
