The Last Dance III: A Dancer's Guide *New*

For apex idlers specifically and cor/sam roll + bard buffs (no geo,) I have had the best experience five-stepping (evi, shark bite, rudra, evi, rudra) when climactic was down and 3-stepping (evi, clim rudra, rf, clim rudra) when it was up.

Weapon combo didn't seem very relevant, the same combos would kill with mythic, empy, or even tauret main.

Spamming mindless rudras or pk's was much slower.

Try Aeneas/Twashtar and 4step Umbra or Twashtar/cento with Honor and 2x madrigal and Evis > Rudra > Rudra (and 3rd Rudra without SC to finish if needed). It's hard to believe that you would need 5 step to kill them, but I haven't tried them on DNC with those buffs.

I have long suspected that WS gear affects the delay of the attack round following the WS. I also suspect that Haste Samba does not affect that round.

With Lustratio legs / feet +1, that's 22% slow and no Haste in those slots. So if you're in a capped haste situation and basically drop to 0% gear haste during WS, your next attack round delay basically doubles. There's an argument for ditching Lustratio anyway because of its lacking defensive stats (and I'm probably going to do it anyway), but it would be nice to have another reason.

Has anyone else noticed this? I have some thoughts on how I could test it, but it seems like a PITA.

I dont think so. Sounds more like a lag and hitting in WS gear. Its super easy to test tho. Wear all slow possible with 0 haste buffs and go WS.

I mean first attack round after WS being delayed is not a guess, but it's something believed for decade I thought? WS delay is ~2sec and you wont start attacking faster, even if you are single wielding 150delay dagger with 80% haste and your attack round delay is ~0.5sec

I ditched Lustratio a while ago. It always felt like it was slower to get the next WS, but could be cognitive bias(maybe) with the slow on the items. I did dig them back out of storage a month or so ago, but never put it back in to any WS sets. It is pain to see that DEX in the leg slot just sitting there sometimes haha.

Why would that be difficult to test at all, let alone a PITA? With a 999 delay weapon it'd be trivial to see any difference if there was one.

"Haste takes time to proc"

I don't want to go farm a 999 delay weapon and do a bunch of math. That's a PITA and I was hoping someone figured it out already. Regardless, I guess I will see if I can do it using Ukon.

WSs have a fixed 2s delay after them: https://www.bg-wiki.com/ffxi/Forced_Delay#Weapon_Skill_Delay

With a 482 delay weapon and capped magic haste / hasso (54% haste) as a base, I should be able to get up near 80% with capped gear haste (TP) or push myself down to 20% Haste with lustrario cap/legs/feet +1 and no haste gear. This would make my delay after WS either ~4 seconds or ~10 seconds, which should be easy enough to see. Just reading that, it seems pretty unlikely that slow+ in midcast will affect the delay of the subsequent attack round.

The thing of it isn't black and white like that, either 4 or 10 seconds

It may have an effect not equal to the full slowdown. it depends when/how the attack round begins processing. more complicated than is worth explaining. And never was worth bothering to look at.

You don't have to do any math at all. Just get a 999 delay weapon, WS in capped haste and in maximum slow right as you swing, and time them with a stopwatch to see if there was any visible difference.

Killed 8 Uragnites and it was always 3-4 seconds after WS that my next melee round landed whether I was swapping Lustratio in for WS precast/midcast or not, which is consistent with it not mattering.

If you're using a lua the game "never even sees" you equip the lustratio

The whole swap ws and swap back all go out at the same time. or so fast that they're indistinguishable etc, apparently

Should totally do a good ol ws > wait 1 > tp gear macroset attempt!

I wrote gearswap and did much of the original testing on forced delay. If this was open and shut before the test from a mechanistic perspective, I wouldn't have needed to do the test.

Gearswap injects an equipset chunk for your precast, then the action chunk, then the midcast equipset chunk. When the client receives the result packet (damage, miss, failure to use, etc.), it injects an aftercast equipset chunk. The server sees all chunks, but the question is what determines your attack round delay after a weapon skill.

If it is the gear you were wearing during your last attack round, then your WS wouldn't matter. If it was the gear you wear during WS, then it would matter. Looks like it doesn't matter, at least under my testing conditions. I am probably going to swap away from Lustratio anyway did to the lacking defensive stats. You wear it for about a minimum of a second, which can be a lot of enemy attack rounds if you have pulled a crowd.

Personally I only left Lustration in feet slot for PK. It's kinda hard to find alternative. Can use Gleti's for 1% loss at attack cap, but then whole set has +48%PDL and you need tons of attack to reach cap.

I cut a lot of the non-sturdy stuff from my sets already. I really hope the empyrean gear has some good defensive stats on it when it comes out. You do notice the difference between the hybrid builds and the squishy sets.

Pretty much 100% of my feelsbadman.jpg deaths on DNC in the 7 years I'd been wearing one or two pieces of Lustratio were directly attributable to those pieces, so I never looked back after getting Gleti even if the Lustratio were still narrowly better.

I'll trade like 2% damage on PK if it means I no longer have to worry about instantly dying if I pulled five mobs, any day of the week.

It would have to be at least in the neighborhood of how tanky recent sets are (Malignance, Kendatsuba, Odyssey sets) to even consider using it, or it would be difficult to use. I have replaced most if not all of my squishy armor (herc, valorous, JSE) in favor of the tankier pieces, simply because the damage gain is not worth the defensive loss, and it's so minimal that it doesn't matter anymore. It would be a real shame if empyrean gear was just better JA swapping items from their 119+! versions and had the same terrible defensive traits.

While I really hope there's gonna be P/DT... I doubt it. (See: RUN artifact for how much PDT the tanking job that needs PDT has...)
Though I would expect/really hope that their evasion/magic evasion is at least on the newer sets' levels.

Most likely though that outside of mages, it's mostly just gonna be a few WS or JA pieces... maybe something like DNC's head or SAM's body also could work with TPing in without feeling a loss of P/DT... But I don't think most things are going to wind up being useful outside of specific macros.
Unless you're a mage, then you'll have anywhere from 3/5~5/5 being useful. With few exception.

Also, to keep it more DNC focused: I swear to God... if they put WSdmg+10% on any piece that's not the head, I'm going to cut some ***. (Also: given R30 Nyame, it's possible the empy sets might have more than 10% WSdmg on their WSdmg pieces.)

I suspect the empy set will just be macro pieces with a few good for TP or WS.

I usually default to full malignance, nyame, gletis, and mpaca's for almost everything I do on my jobs that can wear it now. If I played sakpata's jobs I'd probably work around mostly the full set there too. I agree the damage difference is so small it's not worth the defensive loss to use the squishier pieces anymore, especially once your augs are rank 20 or higher. You can't even notice the damage difference between 5/5 gleti's and a set that throws lustratio into the mix when you're spamming pyrrics or eviscerations, especially once you get the augs to current cap. But you absolutely CAN see how much less incoming damage you take in the process.

Are you talking about Empy sets in general or DNC empy sets?

The head has... potential let's say. Hope they don't *** it.

Empy sets in general.

For DNC... Head will be good for CF still, and the only competition for CF will maybe be striking with body +3 if they bring it to ~100% crit. Hands for reverse. Feet for feather and maybe TP but probably not. Legs for nothing. So maybe two pieces used for WS when combined with a JA and likely no other TP or WS gear (at least for me and my GEO mule).

Maybe I will be wrong and they will throw WSD and DT- on every piece, but I doubt it.

I know cynicism's always the safe bet and all, but the other +3 sets really are pretty burly and had a lot of use before Odyssey came along and flipped the table over. It seems more likely to me that they'll never be released at all than released and immediately irrelevant, stat-wise.

Well Bhikku Cyclas+3 will be an exception I guess, it's already strong right now, can only get better.
The legs have potential to become good as well.

But well, off topic I know. Concerning DNC I have your same feelings, with the addition of Body being useful for low haste situations (but it already is after all)

I hope they remove the dual wield from the empyrean body. It was originally a BiS TP piece, but we've gotten so much extra dual wield since it came out that it would be more of a hindrance in its current state than a boon. I don't really anticipate them doing it, but it would be nice if they changed it to double attack or store tp instead.

I think more empy pieces will get similar powerful augments to JAs like bhikku body. I suspect DNC might get some augment to haste samba for example.

I wouldn't mind Haste Samba being bumped up to 25%. Tho I do wonder if the will bump Striking Flourish up to ternary flourish.

I was thinking the same thing. key word, augments, not just "enhances".


I feel like they can do more than simply "bump" up values on JAs we have. Make them different, or enhance them further than just more numbers. I like special effects, like what Simon mentioned with MNK body.

Throw an "Augments Saber Dance" on the feet and make it something like QA effect. "Augments Drain Samba III" occasionally turns melee attack AEs into a TP drain effect, similar to Twilight/Crepuscular knife. Can do something with Fan Dance with the Empyrean legs, since those appear to be tanking legs, but have nothing useful attached to it for tanking. Throw some high DT and Augment Fan Dance where it applies a RDM-level Phalanx effect to Fan Dance, further reducing damage. I feel like there's a lot of ways they can make empyrean gear REALLY good, and not just a simple activation JA enhancing swap. Whether or not they will actually do it properly remains to be seen.