RDM End Game Gear Guide

Yes you are missing something - the boss takes 10 mins of a 60 minute run... you should think a little before trying to correct people

I'm not correcting anyone. I was asking about scenario where you want to use it, because buffs/debuffs and target matters. You instead wrote a reason why you might happen to be in non DW scenario.
You are being defensive for no reason and it's especially funny that I was the only one trying to help you and answered your question.
If you are such a smartass though, I'm sure you can figure it out yourself :)

Yep and I understand his post after your post guessing his intentions and his post confirming it, but it definitely wasn't clear what he meant. He could simply explain it, instead of saying that I don't think if I can't guess it on my own. His reason for being without DW also still doesn't tell anything about in what scenario he wants to use physical WSs for damage, since I have no idea what he is doing in a run beside Aminon.

I really appreciate straight to the point gear guides like the original post. Just a shout out for the effort to those who make these. Much easier than trolling forums for hours searching for scattered information.

Your response above reaffirms your issue.. I didnt ask for any opinions on the intentions, nor any input on the reasoning and scenario behind 'the why' for not using thibron offhand (the best physical option when feasible, as my question acknowledges). This was your response to the question - jumping to asking why someone is doing something rather than answering the actual question (with the exception of half of your first post which did make valid points about tp overflow, KoR damage vs savage beyond 1200 tp and sc property considerations, which I did appreciate). I do not need you to validate the question, I am very able (quite likely more able) to analyze and determine a scenario in the game where options not currently in my arsenal may present an opportunity for improvement.



Yes I can calculate/research the answer for myself, but i'm asking the RDM community for their experiences, previous research/calulcations/parse results, even personal thoughts (e.g. KoR vs savage 1k tp spam is similar damage but more fun) so I don't have to do this solely myself and have an opportunity for peer review before pursuing a potential upgrade (a key point of having and using this forum).

My first post was ALL answer to your question. I haven't asked why you are not using Thibron or DW at all. I only wrote about accuracy, because it was hard for me to find specific scenario you are talking about, so I proceed to give you full general answer for buffed/unbuffed/wantingSC. It's all your imagination that I tried to validate the question or asked you why you are not using Thibron. That's why I was confused by your post explaining why you are /drk and couldn't understand your intention of doing that, because once again I wasn't trying to validate your question at all, I was only interested about where exactly you want to use physical damage, so I know buffs/debuffs/target, so I can give you a better answer.

Maybe you should take your own advice and start thinking, read my first post again and stop making assumption of stuff that are not there.

Hmm for savage blade / KoR / Black Halo ammo slot, Oshasha's treatise or Coiste Bodhar upgraded?

RDM forums haven't been this angry in years.

RDM/DRK is just the opposite direction of all good stuff we have gotten since they started doing job rebalances. We got Enspell buffs, Crocea Mors, Daybreak, Malignance, and Nyame. Lots of toughness, utility, and magic damage. We got left behind pretty handily in the era of PDL for physical because we can't really use it on anything serious because we have an inherent attack problem, but not an accuracy problem because of Composure.

You'd think Last Resort would be good enough to make our physical damage respectable, but Naegling, Dia, and Gain STR is basically all the support you get from the job and it's not enough when you're fighting much higher level mobs. We are extremely attack starved and we don't have ANY subjob options to rectify it.

On the other hand, if it takes any form of magical damage, we will enspell, sanguine/seraph/red lotus blade it dead pretty easily. Reasonable numbers with Aeolian Edge for AoE. This is pretty much the niche for RDM right now. You can still fight fodder type mobs until 130~135 with physical WSs and you'll do respectable numbers with good SCs. Once it's an NM with higher defense or even regular mobs in the 140+ range you really need external defense down and attack buffs. Without any outside support, your Magical Damage will start surpassing what you can do with physical very quickly, even faster with SCs involved with you getting extra boosts from wearing affinity and magic multiplier gear that is normal for magical WSs.

If you're running the RUN RDM COR BLM SCH SCH then you might get Armor Break or Shell Crusher against a boss. COR and GEO COULD give some attack and defense down support against fodder, but I assume you are dedicating those buffs to supporting MBs. Without a BRD to give you additive attack buffs to improve your base, you require very large amounts of attack multipliers from buffs and large amounts of defense down to get the same kinds of results you would normally see on a job that just used Last Resort.

If anyone can correct me, I'm happy to hear it. And I get that you specifically weren't asking about magical damage on RDM, but the reason why people are giving you weird answers about how to make RDM do respectable physical damage, 1handed no less, past a certain point is because it doesn't do that. You won't see PDL on its dyna neck, sortie earring, or it's empy +2/+3 armor. The only piece of gear that has both attack and PDL for RDM is the Bunzi body with augments (and Sroda Ring with Trusts) and that's because they had no intention of fixing RDMs inherent attack issues to be competitive with PDL. Instead they gave us exactly what we asked for, broken enspells and magical WSs that can hit real numbers.

Fingers crossed for prime weapons making a significant change to this dynamic but it seems unlikely unless the dagger or sword has an AM or mechanic that mimics the additional affect of Coruscanti on WSs.

He's rdm/drk for stun and abs-TP on the final boss

Yup and he wants to know what he can do for the rest of the time in Sortie after the boss as RDM/DRK to contribute damage. Completely reasonable and timely discussion.

He wanted to know what the good WSs/weapons were because presumably he was underwhelmed by RDMs physical damage. That checks out. Depending on what their runs look like, they can use magic WSs with Crocea Mors instead of Physical.

I assume that their focus is on clearing bosses so they can do the mega boss. For A boss you can Red Lotus Blade > Seraph Blade and make Scission, mages nuke earth. You can go back to Red Lotus Blade or Immanence fire spells to keep the MB window open indefinitely so long as you can make the window and you don't worry about nuke wall as much because you're changing elements. Same idea for E boss but with less WS and more Immanence. With magic focused buffs for bursting, you should be hitting for reasonable numbers.

For C and G you can open Red Lotus Blade > Immanence Higher tier Thunder spell for more SC damage > Luminohelix for 1 SCH and everyone else does fire > switch to making Fragmentation and bursting thunder. If RLB closes harder than high tier thunder then imma stone > RLB > imma thunder.

Both B and D are not good targets for magical WSs. I wouldn't even attempt them that way.

If they aren't always fighting bosses then Crocea Mors is generally effective against everything else in Sortie except Fairies and WKR mobs so it's good there too. If he has more than a passing interest in RDM it's an amazing weapon and worth the cost.

I believe oshasha's treatise is a little better for those WS with str mods being 30-50%. Crepuscular pebble for attack cap.

Anyone got a ws set for mercy stroke? I know its not one of the best ws for rdm, but im just toying with mandau/crep dagger. It looks like a nice and fast way to make darkness busrts while some mindless mxp.

This seems like a good opportunity to test (and advertise) my damage simulator a bit more for non-Ninja jobs. My code should already have most/all modern RDM equipment for testing. I've added Mandau R15 and Mercy Stroke to my code and obtain the following outputs (after checking over 45,000 valid sets).

RDM/NIN Low buff:
ItemSet 388682

RDM/NIN High Buff:
ItemSet 388683

• Both capes use STR+WSD.

• I've assumed that you have TA+20% from full-timing Temper II with Enhancing Skill = 500.

• I noticed that Malignance Gloves are essentially equivalent to Nyame Gauntlets R25B when attack capped (30354 vs 30331 damage). This loss is ~6% for the uncapped set due to not using the PDL. All other Malignance swaps result in much larger damage losses of around 1000~2000 damage.

• Nyame Sollerets R25B are almost identical to Empyrean +3 boots for both capped and uncapped sets.

• If you do not want to use Sroda Ring, Epaminondas's Ring, or Karieyh Ring, then use Shukuyu Ring and Rufescent Ring (with Shukuyu > Rufescent). This is only ~5% damage loss (30354 to 28726) when attack capped or ~2% (11064 to 10834) when uncapped, but saves a lot of gil.

Note that I'm currently using ML20 NIN/WAR base stats (STR, DEX, etc) until I can resub and confirm RDM stats. The gear sets should be correct, but the absolute damage should be off, probably by approximately 1~2%, but it may be larger.

tyvm :)

This is bad assumption. Temper II is up to 39% now I think with bis gear and MLs.


I think this requires more explanation. I have a gut feeling that for capped attack almost whole 5% lead is from Sroda ring and Epam and Karieyh barely adds anything, so whats really worth the gils here is Sroda Ring (This will be even more true, when you apply a correct TA rate for Temper II). That being said I doubt that any RDM trying to optimize Mercy Stroke, doesn't have bis Savage gear, which means all those rings.

Thanks for the note. I don't play RDM since NIN takes most of my inventory. I only use Wardrobes 1+2 and I'm confident NIN is taking 100~120 of those spaces alone.

Do you have a reasonable estimate for the TA% bonus from Temper II at ML20 RDM?


You are correct that swapping Epaminondas's Ring for Shukuyu Ring changes almost nothing; most of the bonus is coming from Sroda Ring. At attack cap, Epaminondas's Ring is showing ~300 (average) damage more than Shukuyu Ring and Rufescent Ring (~1% loss). When uncapped, Epaminondas's Ring is worth only +20 damage over Shukuyu Ring (~0.2%) and +112 damage (~1%) over Rufescent Ring.


Edit after learning that +35% TA from Temper II is reasonable:
Increasing TA from 20% to 35% allowed Malignance Gloves to beat Nyame R25B for the attack capped set. This is because the additional TA hits do not benefit from Nyame's WSD, but they do benefit from Malignance PDL. Both pieces are still essentially identical in terms of damage, though.

35~36

With bis enhancing skill gear you should hit 700 enhancing skill at ML48 and based on the formulas on BG that would be 40TA (and conveniently 90 enspell damage).

True I forgot about cape.
I would still put ML20 RDM around 35~36, but I guess highest possible at ML20 is 37% TA

This is really cool thanks ! Used your nin simulations as a reference not too long ago, but I had no idea it also had rdm (and just saw sch too) available. I've been playing with the GUI for the past hour now. :)

Do you plan on adding any other things in it on a short term ? (thinking about some other ws like Sanguine Blade, AE, Seraph Blade,...) or even other jobs ?

I haven't really looked at the code itself yet, but maybe it is easy to add some things manually ?

Awesome tool. I have also poked around that thread for NIN reference in the past, very happy to hear you are expanding on jobs. Thanks for this! Awaiting patiently to toy around with DNC things :D

I should mention that the SCH part of the code still needs SCH JSE gear and Helix spells.

Adding new jobs requires a few things:

• Copy/pasting an existing job python dictionary and modifying the stat values based on the new job's base values, traits, job gifts, job point categories, merits, skill levels, special bonuses (like the Wyvern bonuses for DRG), and assumptions based on things the job can technically full-time (Temper2, Composure, Hasso, Klimaform, storm spells, etc).

  BG Wiki provides everything except for Lv99 base stats (STR, DEX, etc) and bonuses to base stats from subjobs, which I can not determine myself until I resubscribe in January.
  

• Adding JSE and other missing gear to the code. I mostly just check existing gear guides for niche pieces that I wouldn't think to add otherwise, like the Zoar Subligar +1 R15 seen in the unbuffed RDM CDC set.
  
  Doing this manually is prone to errors/typos in gear stats which don't get caught until I see a piece in a set that it shouldn't win in.

• Adding missing weapon skills, including bonus damage to those weapon skills from the various REMA and ambuscade weapons.

• Finally, adding the WS names and job abbreviation to the GUI files to allow them to be selectable options.

The most annoying part is adding all of the gear in the proper format (see the gear.py file for examples). I think it'll be easiest to automate this process using the Windower/res/items.lua and Windower/res/item_descriptions.lua files, but these do not include augments.

The short-term plan is:

• Add WHM/NIN (since I occasionally WHM/NIN in OdyC.)

• Include magical WS. Hybrid WS and spell damage already work, so I feel like magical weapon skills should be ready to include now.

• Make the ranged slot available for modification and include ranged weapon skills.

• Add COR melee+ranged WS

• Add the TP set finder to the GUI.

I'd like to add a drop-down menu for the user to select the rank of Odyssey gear to be tested. Most users may not have access to R30 Nyame later, so they'll want to see how their R15~R25 Nyame compares to other gear.

I think (hope) I can add this feature easily. I recently wrote a simple for-loop to automatically create all possible (useful) ambuscade cape combinations for all jobs to avoid having to copy/paste the same ~15 capes for each job and modifying their item names and base stats. I think I can apply this to Odyssey gear to automatically create ~30 sets of gear each and have the code only consider the set with a specific augment rank that the user provided.

The long-term plan is to include most weapon skills for most jobs and post the full list in a separate ffxiah post. The node currently only includes DRK and empty DRG sets. I can't find a way to copy ffxiah itemsets, which makes manually creating each set a slow process. This post won't be completed for a long time.


I'm worried about the coding aspect of THF and especially DNC. They'll need additional logic to find sets with SA, TA, and flourishes.

Edit:
Since this is a RDM discussion thread and not my Python thread, my contribution for this post is to consider Agony Jerkin+1 R15 over Empyrean +3 for the "best in slot" uncapped CDC set and Malignance Body for attack capped CDC. Although, I do not think that Agony Jerkin +1 R15 is worth the gil or inventory loss for a small damage improvement over the free Empyrean+3 body that you'll already have. Empyrean +3 body is great if you need a lot of both attack and accuracy, though.

ItemSet 388714
ItemSet 388715

Accuracy swaps: Relic+3 legs, Empy+3 feet, Mache Earring

Hmmm this sounds easy tbh. Just create separate WS instance called Climactic Rudra and add 100% crit rate to first hit. You probably has first hit calculation separately anyway, because of fTP, so it shouldn't be hard to add crit hit there. Only item that directly support Climactic is Empy head and it's bis anyway.

Ok guys, another crazy question. RDM shooting sets, preshot / midshot and Empyreal Arrow sets. This is for Arribati since I'll have spare time on it and might as well contribute some damage.

Midshot is just 5/5 malignance with telos/crep earrings, marked gorget, yemaya belt and whatever rings you can get the most racc on probably. 2x Chirich+1 if acc allows, but kinda doubt it on that thing? :P

Taeon can get 10 snapshot on each piece (leaf + dusk augs 5 each) depending on how crazy you wanna go with it. Most people playing cor or rng would probably have the hat done already, and there's carmine gloves for +8 and crep ring for 3. That's about it for RDM I think, outside like bastok volte pieces. Getting the 40% you need should be doable at least though.

Empy arrow is probably just 5/5 Nyame. And depending on acc requirement probably a lot of the same accessories as midshot set tbh. (you drop like 50racc and something like 30-40agi in 5/5 nyameB vs 5/5 malignance and most of those pieces come with ratk too anyway)

edit: forgot about crep ring for midshot, that's a pretty safe bet for one of the rings

Did you read OP?

Fishing for more ideas from folks that might actually use this stuff.

First page is spot in for ranged sets. Raetic Arrows are great for WS. Flurry 2 makes snapshot easy unless you need Haste 2 for recasts. Gain AGI or STR. It's finally pretty simple and effective.

Honestly didn't even realise OP had sets for ranged, but for one thing they're missing crepuscular items, of which both the ring and earring should probably be in midshot set.

Another good option for neck if you don't want to carry Marked gorget just for RDM is combatant torque which should be at least a little bit less niche to be carrying around at this point I guess?