Ghostly Strike with MutilateFollow

Then maybe you should get Improved Poisons? Lends itself better to the build than Serrated Blades does. I simply don't understand how you can be thinking about taking Serrated Blades over Improved Poisons in a build that centers around getting poisons on the mob quickly. It seems like you want to play this like Combat Daggers.


I know very well how hard the ticks hit for. And saying you lose the full damage of a tick because you Envenomed would require that you got a grand total of 0 procs. With Improved Poisons you have a 40% chance to proc a poison again. It should take about 12 hits on average to get a full stack. Mutilate takes care of two of those, so you only need 10 white hits. With two 1.8 speed daggers (you can actually take a faster offhand with only a minimal damage cut to Mutilate), this will take about 9 seconds. Factor in extra instant attacks and a shiv or two (very efficient for getting the last CP you need or the last charge for a stack), and you only lose damage on two ticks on the top end.



Never called you a liar, or insinuated it. I was suggesting that your gear was crappy, and entirely different insult. At least take offense at what I did to give offense, instead of trying to bring something else into the issue.



How hard the weapons hit is completely irrelevant, it has to do with nothing but raw DPS. Envenom is typically a better use of your CPs than Slice and Dice due to the lack of Improved Slice and Dice.




Thought you'd have a problem figuring this one out. If you intentionally lower your damage in any way (outside of using something to reduce your current threat), you are losing damage. We'll say you are always at the maximum possible amount of threat, playing at 100% efficiency. Now, let's say somebody else is doing the same thing, but when they reach the cap, they feint. You keep right on going right under your cap, and they build back up by doing higher burst damage. In the extremely short term, your damage was higher, but in the long term, theirs will be higher because a reduced threat allows them to do more damage overall. Try to see more than 5 seconds ahead.


If you're intentionally doing less damage to not pull threat, you are gimping your damage. That is very much the definition of the word "gimping". Using inferior finishers so you do lower damage and don't pull hate is indeed gimping your damage.


In boss fights, it's quite the opposite. The energy management only matters in short fights when you end up blowing all your energy and are left with nothing to do on the next mob. These are also the situations where Rupture and Slice and Dice are absolutely terrible, since you'll never see the full effect. In a long, drawn out fight, you could say that the energy management of Mutilate is the best, because you spend the least energy generating CPs and get finishers off faster.


Never said he was a crappy tank. Calm down. I said that if you had to intentionally gimp your damage to not pull threat, your tank sucks. This is 100% true. If you are feinting as necessary and still pull hate, your tank sucks. By the way, good job assuming I was insulting a person I didn't even know existed. I'll take this as a compliment to my psychic powers.


Hah, so Provoking every 30 seconds requires some great deal of skill? Maybe the skill lies in waiting unti you get hit, then casting Utsusemi and hoping (yes, hoping, there is absolutely no control here) that you don't get interrupted. Any LS that even lets a WAR/NIN tank is either stupid or godly and bored, and my money is on the former.

Now, a few points I'd like to make about this, aside from the above.

1. I hate to break it to you, but your clever strategy of referencing an unrelated game in the hopes that I was not experienced in it has failed. I had a level 75 Ranger (NIN, SAM and WAR all leveled), and was in a very active endgame LS. We did the gods very regularly, including Kirin (which we got bored and PUGed once, that was fun), and ran Dynamis twice a week (only piece of Scout's that I was missing was the chest). FF XI is the single slowest game I've ever played. For the most part, you could play any class in your sleep.

2. Not possible for any tank to go "untouched" on any of the god fights. This has absolutely nothing to do with skill, or your friend apparently being the best player alive at every game he touches. You just get hit, hard and often. No amount of skill is going to lower his recast timers of Utsusemi to a level where he can remain blinked 100% of the time. If he's such a god, I'm sure he could solo them too, since they can't touch him, liar (feel free to be offended at that).


Sure, that's why you have to use SnD and Rupture so he can do his job, and the prospect of critting an Envenom makes you fear for getting one-shotted by the mob.


If he's the master, shouldn't you never have aggro problems?

[quote]Still, there IS times when I can pull hate with some serious crit spike damage.[/quote]

Since your friend are a master of this game, I'm sure he am, or should be, capable of keeping hate when you is getting some lucky crits. That are what masters do, after all.

[quote]Mutilate alone is quite a spike...tack on a crit evis or evenom after that, and you just might nab that sucker for half a second...and that's all you need to have your face hit the floor.[/quote]

So....L2Feint?

[quote] Your DPS tends to suck when you're on a first name basis with dirt.[/quote]

So....L2Feint? Maybe L2Threat Meter? Also, I'm not sure what's one-shotting you outside the raids, which you obviously aren't part of considering you admitted to be wearing mostly blues (which implies the rest are green, and every item that drops in Kara and beyond is purple). Even stuff in heroic Tempest Keep has to crit me to one-shot me (highest non-crit I've seen in an instance was just under 7k).

[quote][quote]Imp. KS and Quick Recovery are both great talents to have. Master Poisoner would be amazing if I had the points to spare. The Assassination tree offers a great deal of very useful talents. These talents, in my opinion, provide a great deal more utility than a 2% increase in physical damage.[/quote]

Yeah, I have Imp KS, I have Quick Recovery (why do you think I don't have these?). Master Poisoner is amazing how? I'll say it again, Remorseless is the ONLY thing that interests me in the Assassination tree that I do not currently have.[/quote]

You got me here, I did make an assumption there. I assumed that since you were speccing Mutilate you'd get one of the best talents to have with Mutilate, as would be logical. Alas, Improved Poisons is not in your build, yet you managed to find a place for Fleet Footed, and are considering Serrated Blades.

Oh, and the reason I said Master Poisoner would be good is because high level mobs resist poisons a LOT. Since you're so concerned with not losing a few hundred damage to Envenom I figured you'd make the connection. I guess not.

Now, the reason Envenom blows Rupture out of the water. Two words, Find Weakness. Get 5 CPs, wait for full energy, and go to town spamming 5 point Envenoms (4 point if you're unlucky) as fast as you can. You can get two off in a row under Find Weakness easily. This also keeps Find Weakness up for Mutilate at all times. Can't do that with Rupture or Slice and Dice, as they're long term finishers, and blowing your CPs early to get Find Weakness up again is a waste.

Honestly, you're trying to play Combat Daggers with Mutilate. If you want Combat Daggers, play Combat Daggers. Mutilate is a different build and is played a different way. You are so worried about burst damage in a build that is centered around big hits.

Edit: Bah, quotes stopped showing up properly about halfway through. Oh well.

Edited, Apr 2nd 2007 4:40pm by Nooblestick

Your comparison assumes you're only doing an Envenom every 16 seconds, when you'll generally do them every 6-8 seconds. It also assumes you get 100% of the rupture damage, which doesn't always happen, even on bosses. It also assumes 0 damage from the deadly poison on Envenom.

Edited, Apr 2nd 2007 4:56pm by Nooblestick

Not really, even a non improved 5 point slice and dice will produce more damage than any other fully tallented finisher during a sustained fight with a raid buffed rogue. SnD scales with everything directly (hit, crit, attack power, poisons, weapon enchants, and the weapons themselves... pretty much everything you got). All other finishers scale rather poorly in comparison. You'd have to be rather poorly geared for SnD not to do more damage than envenom or any other tallented finisher.

You can't throw out 5 point envenoms every 6-8 seconds. Unless you have a magical attack that we're not aware of that can generate 5 CP with 60-80 energy. Furthermore, even with 2x deadly poison, you don't have a very good statistical chance of refreshing 5 charges of deadly every 6-8 seconds... especially if you're silly enough not to be using SnD as your primary finisher. With 2 1.8 speed daggers and no haste buff... you can hit on average of what 7-9 times including a mutilate and assuming none of your auto attacks miss in that time frame? DP only has a 30% proc rate. If you miss out on 1 tick of 5/5 DP right after envenom that's already what... almost 300 damage with 5/5 vile?

While envenom is situationally useful... especially for farming/trash where the mobs likely wont be fully sundered/debuffed... and they'll die before DP and rupture run their full durations anyway... envenom is great. For raid bosses, you miss out on DPS by using it instead of SnD. Strive for 100% SnD up time first... then work in rupture...


As for the OP... I had GS in my origional mute build when I hit 70 but removed it when I respeced because I wasn't really using it. If it was spamable I probably would have kept it for the damage when needed - but I honestly wasn't getting hit frequently enough to warrent it's use in most situations.

Edited, Apr 2nd 2007 6:49pm by LordMeridus

I never said from 0 energy. Get 5 CPs, wait for full, and go crazy, you'll be tossing them out rapidfire for a fair bit of time, followed by another break for a few seconds.


Envenom -> Mutilate -> Shiv -> Envenom. 5 CPs (with a bit of luck, usually 4, very, very rarely 3) and one guaranteed poison proc. This means you need only 4 normal procs (which are 40% chance, not 30%), so an average of 8 swings outside Mutilate, which will take about 7 seconds. With a 10-15% miss rate, that means you'll need about one more swing on average, so around 8 seconds. This also assumes you Envenomed exactly as your daggers last hit, which is unlikely, so you can cut a second or so off on average. Can go much, much faster, or much slower. Requires a tad bit of luck, but it is very possible to Envenom every 6-8 seconds.


It's not hard to time your Envenoms so you won't miss that tick, though if your poison procs were being stubborn before you might have to rush it to keep FW up. Also, if you crit Envenom, that's going to be a LOT more damage, far more than a lost tick or two (my crits are approaching 4k when I'm buffed and amped). Pretty rare to see crits lower than 3k, actually.


Easy calculation. Just combine your DPSes, multiply by 1.3, then multiply by the duration (in seconds), then multiply by your chance to hit. Finally, increase by a percentage equal to your chance to crit. This isn't 100% right, but it's close enough. You could add in poisons, but it would complicate things, and you can do this calculation with calc.exe in about 20 seconds.

This number, however, is very misleading. To really compare it to other finishers, you'd need to calculate the average damage of your finisher of choice, then find out how many times you normally do it over the duration of Slice and Dice and multiply (damage per CP is nice and all, but actual damage is a more relevant number).

Edited, Apr 2nd 2007 6:35pm by Nooblestick

Christ...I'll read all that "arguement" tomorrow if I feel like it...I'm sure I'll enjoy a good laugh.