For The Shinies! A Guide For Thief

By that logic BLU has might guard so it's now a support job. Thf has hate control...in a game without hate issues. It has TH, but some content ignores it. That is not an issue to balance around.

It doesn't help that a lot of the player base agrees with them. Personally I never understood it. Why would you want someone on your team to do less damage because they increase the drops. Then again they might be the sort of player that will only self skillchain because they want to win the parse.

From SE's perspective, the key to balancing THF is centered around SA and TA, which is still in a great place (go try 3 man Delve as THF and watch bitchy NMs like Podarge die in a single SC). There is strategic value here, if you can dish out enough damage to push enemies through HP-based behavior, or kill them outright before they do anything.

Hate those NMs that trigger twice if you push them through two hp thresholds with 1 WS+SC.

Yeah, depends on the NM, but things like "only uses this WS during this HP range" or whatever can be nice to bypass.

Arciela was like that in SR, but she is actually pretty tame since you can run out of range of the Naakuals.

But a good example of just skipping the annoying parts is ADL, *** him and his clones, kill him before they spawn.

Mandalic -> Evisceration -> Savage Blade -> Stacked Mandalic -> Dead NM, if not Dead then another CDC for double light

Mandalic -> Requiescat -> Savage Blade -> Stacked super Mandalic for Light

Mandalic -> Requiescat -> CDC (BLU doing x2 WS) -> Stacked super RS for Darkness

Those last two are very powerful because it gives the THF plenty of time to build up TP for the closing WS. When your closing WS is doing 20~30K and the SC is then doing 200~300% the closing damage, things tend to die extremely fast.


Lady is extremely salty, it's the running joke in the LS. He is angry that he doesn't win parses by spamming RS.

THF is in a great position game wise. It's not going to win a parse contest by spamming RS. THF has always required group coordination to do well. On it's own it's a fairly weak DD, but with coordination it's ridiculously powerful, and it's been that way since level 30.

Who remembers

Tachi: Enpi (any transfixion WS) -> SATA Viper Bite

From back in the day. Yeah those giant distortions that practically one shoted XP mobs.

Shows how much Saevel pays attention. I do not spam RS. Generally only used when stacked as my evisceration outperforms it.

But enough talk about personal issues like that. You claim I am salty, except here I am on my own jobs forums in a discussion about the state of the game and thf's role and you swoop in with attempts to defend BLU. You aren't a thf, why exactly are you here?

I agree, though when you start having to use less favorable WSs like Requiescat, you're ultimately no better off using BLU over any other DD who can SC. In doing this, using other jobs can deal more overall damage than BLU (varying by enemy, since stuff like weaknesses play into that) simply because they may have better SC options. In this light, I would pick BLU more for their utility purposes or damage properties.

Though it's less often blu can use sinker drill instead of Requiescat. Used to do that all the time cdc > sinker drill > rudra. If you need it to be a 4 step either job has a fragment ws to put before it.

The point is that BLU's parse pride comes from spamming CDC; doing anything else puts it closer to other melees.

5-steps on BLU are also pretty effective, albeit impossible if you have someone else around to interrupt you (or anything that would otherwise cause you to stall, such as needing to put up shadows later in the chain).

I'm trying to max my spark farm on VW mob for 500+ damage. I got BRD trust, RDM trust and the dbl atk dagger from reives. Only thing i can think to push me faster is the blurred knife +1 which im aiming for... any other attacks twice dagger im overlooking that will hit x10 damage mob for 500 damage?

Both blu and thf shouldn't parse top if you ask me. WAR DRK SAM DRG should. Tanaka barance > Matsui barance.

BLU should only parse close to SAM if SAM's tanking had actual application, but it doesn't. SAM/DRG/WAR/DRK are "pure DD's" and should be the top DD's in the game if you're going with that theory of MMO balance.

Of course through most of WoW's history Rogue has been the top DD on any sort of melee fight, so there's that...

Who the hell had mandau pre-COP

seankp did on carbuncle

Leaders of big shells and the girls they cyber with

The reason why blu shouldnt parse top simple because it has more defensive power, and def- debuff that gives more dmg to everyone. Sam doesn't offer much useful abilities, thus it should parse top.

I guess in that case drg shouldn't parse top due to angon as well. But atm angon doesn't make up for it's lack of offensive power, so it still deserves a buff.

No one, I don't know why someone would claim that. CoP came out with the *** PS2 release of the game, like 4 months after PC release. There's maybe one crazy *** out there who pulled that off, but considering the team effort required to obtain a relic in those days there's not a chance more than one pulled it off.

That said, Mandau was far and away the most popular relic that wasn't horn or shield, which was weird since THF still wasn't considered a heavy DD by a lot of people and I sure as hell didn't know any THF's that even tried to be DD's outside of the forums.

The problem is that THF was never designed as a top tier DD, it was designed as a farming job and as a moderate DD capable of spike damage but above all capable of controlling a group's enmity levels. It's lost all of those claims to fame with today's game.

Treasure Hunter seems to have a minimal effect (if not entirely pointless) on Escha drops. Enmity control is no longer a problem with the adjustments to CE and VE and spike damage is now done with magic attacks.

Thief still has some powerful single hit weapon skills that stack very well with its abilities, all of which are placed very nicely on the skillchain chart as Saevel has said. It's functional for Apex parties and 125-132 content but every single skillchain in 140-145 content is done by a Scholar so... yeah... it's not just Thief that's suffering in high end content.

I've said this over and over in the Linkshell but I will say it again here. Blue Mage only gains it's perceived extreme power through a massive amount of player input in to power out. It's not like Beastmaster where one could throw some basic equipment together and get some absurd numbers with a Corsair and a Geomancer support. You need at least 1200 job points, all your spells learned, all your skills capped, great augments on tp/ws/mab/macc/dt equipment, a very strong understanding of monster correlation, knowledge of what job traits to use and pair in different situations, and above all you need have the patience to do all of the aforementioned. Don't think that Blue Mage is a case of get-a-set-of-herculean-gear-and-two-swords-and-own-the-parse but it sure as shoot is not. It's an extremely difficult job to truly master but if you do and if you have good support it's extremely powerful.

10 years later and we're still having the same discussion.

Agreed. THF not being "allowed" to be top parse because of hate control and TH is BS when BLU the top DD in the game has +75% defense, can AOE erase if needed, can heal itself if needed, can get ELEVEN shadows at once, etc. The amount of utility a BLU brings completely outclasses THF because of those things, so if anything BLU should be below THF in damage if that's what we're going to use to provide balance in the game. Though I think the haste and CDC power are my biggest issue. The self-haste cap just means bring a 2nd BLU instead of try to balance a party with another DD, it's inefficient to do anything but 2 BLU's in that setup.

Back in early SoA SAM or MNK were the top jobs in the game, and I had no issue out DDing all but the mythical best ones I never got to see in action but read about on forums. That's acceptable balance to me. I was doing VD avatar fights and best I could manage was 60-65% the BLU's damage. Granted, I was dualboxing, so that kept me slow, and he had finished 269 weapon(s?) so I was outgeared as well, but I doubt I could get above 80% of his damage, all while making the group entrust indi-haste, which would be better suited to almost anything else to entrust with dual BLU's. And all this BLU has to do is CDC CDC CDC CDC CDC CDCCDCCDCCDCCDCCDCCDCCDCCDCCDC.

And I don't think Angon counts as a true support ability, doesn't it only have like 30s uptime on a 3min cooldown?

CDC IS HARD!

CDC abbreviation is 3 letters. RS is 2. Therefore CDC should be strongest WS.

Oh and btw, 2 blu CDC spam setup is also prevents others bring their DD job to pt since blu start drama when other DD jobs:

1. Ask for entrust haste instead of another DD bubble.

2. Complaints about other WS breaking their awesome light SC if other DD uses certain strong WS that's not CDC
compatible.

So basically no one is allowed to DD as long as pt has blu.