Tatang's Journal

Hello all,

My main goal in creating this new topic is to provide a discussion platform for a new page I created on my BG wiki user page. I’ve been compiling my findings as a career DRG over the years, and finally put them together in “Tatang’s Journal”. There’s a lot of unique facts, sets, and tips. The information may not be for everyone. But if you’re interested please head on over there to take a look: Tatang's Journal. Post any comments, or questions, etc. here, and enjoy.

Some interesting findings that I didn't know about. Thanks for testing and collecting a bunch of stuff in one place.

good list of lesser known drg and wyvern info.

I have that same wyvern elemental breath set but usually use an alternate one where I replace the acro pieces with nyame which at least still has pet mag acc but also helps keep me alive as right after I ws is when I'm most likely to pull hate and I find acro far too squishy for a lot of content.

I can second the empathy buff transfer info. Random ***is random. Did some testing awhile back, but never got around to organizing and publishing.

Interesting bit on the empathy relic augment potency. I didn't actually check the durations when I was testing other aspect.. I wonder if I have the raw data still..

Not sure why this needs to be on a user page, you could just add the information to the individual ability pages. You have an account on the wiki, you bothered to make a page on the wiki, but instead of editing it in where it belongs you turned it into your own blog? Your 'unique facts' aren't on the actual pages for the related abilities, is it about sharing information or building your own brand recognition?

If you care so much to post, maybe read it first?

Thanks for letting me know you saw similar results with the buff transfers. I've updated the Empathy page. I also added the changes from 5 to 10%.

I know you like testing things.. Id like to hammer down a better Spirit Link formula as the old one is not even close. I've found a formula that's pretty accurate, but something's slightly off so I'm not sure if I should update this yet. What are your thoughts on this?

I've known Darcain a long time, played together many years. He has poured a lot of time and dedication into his DRG, more than any others I've met. He's hands down the best DPS DRG I've ever seen, he's a top notch player on all jobs he has, and a very humble and helpful player too.

Great work, Darcain. Thank you for sharing this.

Also... Bump...

Cool page, has a couple tidbits I wouldn't have known. Thanks for that!

It got me thinking if there's anything obscure I might know, two things come to mind:

(old (pre-abyssea), glitch, impractical): you can (used to be able to?) get your wyvern to use healing breath on itself if they ready healing breath on a party member and then you kick them from the party, which causes your wyvern to target itself for some reason instead of just canceling. I seem to remember discovering this in Sea by accident.

and..

There was some eyeballing I did on Sonic Thrust seemingly dealing higher than expected damage to mobs you haven't accumulated much/any hate on compared to ones you've been wailing on for a while. I've noticed it off and on since abyssea era but never had the tools to verify it; certainly it never made any sense to begin with.

I think I noticed it only because i'd intentionally use sonic thrust to pull and kill at the same time and the numbers never quite made sense to me, where the mob I just pulled took unexpectedly higher amounts of damage that couldn't be explained from it being lower level.

Those are some obscure results. There was another obscure tidbit I wanted to include, but when I went to retest before posting, it seemed it was changed. Previously, the additional effect jump damage from relic body seemed to be actually coming from the wyvern. This was seen while testing on dragon mobs using Ancient Circle. The additional damage was not boosted unles Spirit Link / Empath was used to transfer Ancient Circle to wyvern. I could even cancel it on myself and wyvern would continue to do boosted damage until Ancient Circle wore off. I was looking forward to confirming this by testing with pet + damage augment on Nyame, but seems unlikely to matter now. I still kind of want to test it though, but I'd have to change augment path.

That aspect of spirit link is not something I've specifically tested. The random factor was pretty offputting. And the JA recast and having enough wyvern HP missing to actually see the full recovery amount are also problems. I'm not sure I'm curious enough about this one to pursue it.

I remember that one. It was neat, but impractical to actually take advantage of. With Spirit bond being a thing now, there's not even niche uses left for it. It probably does still happen though. I don't think they changed anything that would prevent it.

I have no idea what the Sonic Thrust thing is all about, though.

I think the next thing to look into will be Master level related Wyvern changes. I've seen data on other pets, but not wyverns yet. And thanks to check param, and Relic body, acc/atk/hp should be easy to test.

That's understandable about the Spirit Link testing. It was rather tedious. I'll update with what I have as it's only off by +/- 3HP, rather than over 1k HP. It will give those who need it a better idea of equipment selection. But I'll leave some disclaimer about it's accuracy.

As for the master level wyvern changes. I'm itching to get out of work so I can begin testing.

Note to self... If you're going to test wyvern stats between bouts of EP farm.. don't use a freaking Grape Daifuku. I was sooo god damned confused... Nothing made any sense, and then when I hit ML2(and my food wore) stats went Down... lol.

Also I forgot to effing Checkparam/Relic body jump before I started, so I don't have a baseline... Need to reverse engineer that before I can find the gains for ML0 to ML1.

Anyway, working on data.

EDIT: This is all *** up. Still getting weird numbers even after the Grape Daifuku epiphany, and stopping every ML level to try to record data is.. honestly pissing me off. I don't seem to have the patience for this right now.

Pretty tired but here's some quick numbers I got. acc att and eva all went up 10.5 per level. def went up 2.29 per level (not taking into account wyvern innate +50% def boost) so that's strange. HP went up 7 per level (I did account for wyvern boosting from Spirit Link here). I'm mastery 17 and I had a data point in the middle of there as well. I'll try to clean it all up and put somewhere once mastery 20 unless someone else beats me to it first.

Edit: Patch changed values see below.

Huh, well, maybe there was a reason I was getting jacked up numbers.

Well that's too bad. Seems they lowered it significantly. So I don't have a middle data point anymore to confirm. But I'll be dividing parameter boosts by my current mastery level (17).

Wyvern gets +1.529 on average to Acc, Att, Eva, and Def per mastery level. The HP did not change and is still a base increase of +7HP / mastery level.

The Def was unchanged from my previous post from the update. The only difference is this time I accounted for the wyvern's + 50% increase.

Wonder if wyvern is receiving a Macc increase as well.

Updated Tatang's Journal to reflect changes from Master Levels. Includes note that job traits beyond original sub level of 49 are not transferred to wyvern with Relic body. Tested sub Samurai STP, still receiving 15 not 20. Also seems you can not transfer sub JA above 49 with Empathy. Not sure if either of these are a bug or intentional. Updated bgwiki "Master Levels" page with wyvern increases.

I'd definitely say a bug report is in order for that. they probably had some aspect of the relic body effect hard coded...

Hi Darcain,

This is very helpful information and I realize there's a lot of aspects of the job I'm not taking advantage of to maximize its usefulness. You put in a couple of wyvern tank sets and say: "Super Jump to put hate on wyvern. Use in “wipe” situations. Wyvern can live through just about anything in this set while you stay as far away as possible. This will give the party a chance to raise and recover without the fight resetting."

Is it right to assume that I need to stay engaged with the enemy for the wyvern to stay engaged with the enemy? If a wipe is coming, I just super jump, run away, and stay engaged and at like 29' to not disengage?

How well does the set work without Aram? I know there are some huge defensive attributes on Path C, so is it worth building that set if you don't invest in Aram?

You need to remain engaged with an enemy. Wyvern only attacks what you attack, and stops attacking when you disengage.

Unrelated opinion: I personally like the format of these notes on a page all in one place, instead of only on every individual ability page (it can be there as well). So many times there's little nuances of certain jobs and abilities that are buried in threads or comments, and nobody knows where to find the information. It's usually not enough of a tidbit to include on the ability page, as most people wouldn't care, but a nice "here's what else it can do" kind of deal. This page was a very good read and I learned a few things I didn't know. I actually wish there were other similar job "cheat sheet" pages instead of buried in a "random FFXI question" threads (which is useful for a separate purpose)

Yeah, I finally got around to doing it here: Offical Forums. I haven't done one for Empathy yet because I wanted to test it more, but it does seem like nothing else will transfer.


Hello, Yes, you need to stay engaged under 30 yalms to keep wyvern attacking the target. However, you could disengage after Super Jump and the mobs would remain on your wyvern but it would be right next to you which usually isn't good. Pulling this off requires some foresight that the fight is going south, and it's going to wipe the entire alliance and you have nothing to lose but to try and hold it. But when you can pull it off it's amazing. I only recently got Aram and ran this augment path. You can still cap DT and have a nearly unkillable wyvern with out it. But since it's technically best, given the extra HP and giving you the ability to add more regen by swapping out some other DT pieces I have it featured. Maybe I could include an intermediate set, but that kind of goes against the theme of the page.


Thank you for your kind words. Honestly, when I started making the page I knew very little about editing the wiki. I didn't even know how to make it its own page or if it even merited one, so that's why it's on my user page. I have been going through and editing some more of the DRG wiki pages and correcting some of the info that may be missing or out of date or just wrong. I still need to update the Spirit Link formula but I've made other corrections on that page.

Minor updates to Tatang's Journal, including changes to reflect Master Level 30.