FFXI: Beastmaster Guide By Ruaumoko

At this point we need some solid killer instinct test, because what Rua said in video is completely different to what is written on bg wiki (Which afaik was recently updated based on Fox? testing)

Nice one Rua! Good to see more attention going to BST.
About the Darkness SC part; Guttler (Onslaught) is great for Dark SCing with your pet. Had some fun testing it with Bertha.

I listened to the entire hour long guide while I worked. Honestly while I expected to dislike it this is a solid primer for a modern beastmaster playstyle, informative for sure and well put-together. So kudos on that.

My issue with the guide is that it basically ignores pet mechanics and strategies. We can have a discussion about how viable those are in today's game (I would argue not all content needs to be done in a melee zerg!) but I don't think it's controversial to note that new or returning players can get quite a bit out of their pets beyond them being a buff/debuff stat stick. Pets do not scale well in today's endgame but at lower gear and content levels they are still useful.

At least KI/KE/Circles are fairly easy to test. I haven't checked the NM bit, but my circle stuff is documented here:

Circle Investigations

It is important to note that there are many distinct effects from killer effects (Separate from Killer Instinct and Circles).

• Intimidation (We know that their is an NM penalty)

• Dmg Bonus with Empy/Founders Body (I don't recall what the NM penalty here is)

• Dmg Reduction with Empy/Founders Body (I don't recall what the NM penalty here is)

I'll check these out tonight and see what I can find. Sorry I don't recall, I just came back to the game this week.

BST is pretty much a geo with better melee potential.

Yeah the problem is thefoxdanger made test too and he tells totally different thing.

So someone is wrong. Seeing your samples I would say he is wrong, because he was actually doing this by hitting rabbits outside of town and calculating based on range of damage he made, while your test is with much more controlled Spirit Within.

What he is saying is that KI provide 15% Killer Effect and 50% damage bonus of your total Killer effects % and that merits doesnt work for that bonus (basic whats written on bgwiki, because he updated it with that). So with just Killer Instinct you would have +12% damage bonus (With 10% base KE + 15% KE from KI, so 25%/2=12.5% rounded down). Your test clearly shows that with KI + Nukumi you get +32% damage, which would imply that KI gives 50% damage of your total KE, but merits are working for it (so 50% of 30% would be 15% that we can see in test), or it's actually 15% fixed damage bonus from KI.

What we need is test with just Killer Instinct with and without merits and with and without additional killer effect % from gear/food. That would solve it and show if KI just gives 50% KE as damage, or its flat 15%.

Easy enough to do, merits are cheap these days :)

I did actually do it before though, I'll make a video this time as well! From what we can see with the very last item, KI is gimp w/o KE merits.

Fun project for tonight unless I either fall asleep or find an odyssey party :O.

If you did it, you haven't posted it. Unless Im reading it wrong
The crab test has description of "KI (erased merits lol)", but it cant be right that you get 0% damage bonus from KI without merits and 15% bonus with merits right? I mean merits are only 5%. Maybe you just used wrong pet for that KI?

Lol, I'm not sure anymore. It's easy to check, so I'll do it in a few hours.

Did a quick test. KI (Circle) KE does add to the total KE count for Nuk/Founder's damage. KE Merits and gear merits also add to this.

w/ regard to the last item in the last grouping on my prior results, My guess is that it was a typo where it should of said Nuk instead of KI (this is also what the factors show).

Here are my quick results, everything was done multiple times to avoid extra damage from off-hand crits.

Nice, so:
- killer instinct adds flat 15% damage, not affected by KE
- it also adds 15% killer effect
- killer effect merits counts towards Nukumi
- Nukumi and KI are multiplicative with each other

What's left to check is how much that flat 15% from KI and 50% of KE from Nukumi are cut vs NMs.
It would be also worth to check if damage taken is same as damage bonus and if it's multiplicative with itself and DT (So for example if KI and Nukumi with merits would push 50%DT to 63.875% (0.5*0.85*0.85).
Lastly it would be nice to check the nature of that damage taken reduction. If it's the same as Rampart and blocks Tiiimmmber? Does it stack/multiply with Rampart or they overwrite each other?

Yep, it does. Killer Instinct works like a Circle ability in that it gives Special Damage Taken -%, it bypasses the Damage Taken -% cap on equipment and is applied at the very end of damage taken reduction calculations. This also means that it will reduce damage against attacks Damage Taken -% does nothing against. You see the same thing when using Arcane Circle on Kyou to reduce the damage Unfaltering Bravado does.
Just double checked, they stack.


The BG Wiki page on Rampart has it listed as -25% Special Damage Taken, the exact same effect as Killer Instinct. It therefore stands to reason that the damage reduction calculation would therefore have three steps added to it after initial calculation: Killer Instinct * Nukumi/Founders * Rampart.

If this is indeed the case then it's actually a bigger deal than I thought. Just to theorycraft for an Mboze setup...
I'll really have to chase this up ASAP and report back.

I know it gives damage taken reduction. What I meant is to check if it's the same flat 15% as damage bonus and also if it's multiplied with Nukumi, or stack with it. As far as "overwriting" with Rampart I haven't mean they share same icon or something, I meant the possibility that only highest SDT- works at the same time for example. I would like to also know how Barrier Tusk interact with KI, Nukumi and Rampart too.

I only have two characters!

Tiiimbeeer isn't 10000. It's based on max HP of person who is hit and on amount of targets being hit. It's 95% with 6 ppl if I remember correctly. 85% for 7 targets, etc. So base damage for PLD will be much higher than 1428 for example, while it might lower than that for WHM.

I have some weird results on + dmg from the Level 99 Unity sheep. This is again with Spirits at 3k tp. I seem to recall a SW nerf on NM's but can't seem to find anything in the wiki, so maybe that has been changed over the last 18 years since I tried such a thing :/. Either way, the damage seems lower than what I would expect, even with the food. I'll look it again later.


Food: +10 spicy cracker

I assume they might be multiplying it by 66% rounded down from 66.(6)% In that case 12*0.66 is 7.92, which would be rounded down to 7 and that's why its 1.07


I would assume KE that KI adds is nerfed for NM. So it actually adds 10%KE, not 15%, so you total KE would be 35%, not 40%.

35%/2 = 17.5% rounded down to 17%
17% * 0.66 = 11.22% rounded down to 11%

1 * 1.11 * 1.1 = 1.221, rounded down to 1.22

I don't think it would be 48%

Nukumi/Founder's wouldn't be 13%.
KE from KI and Food: 10% + 12% = 22%
For NM Nukumi effect will be nerfed to 66%.
22% / 2 * 0.66 = 7.26% rounded down to 7%

More then likely it would be
Damage * 0.75 * 0.9 * 0.93

So something between 36 and 39% damage reduction, depends how its rounded after each step.

EDIT: It would be 38-41% reduction for BST, depends if merited KE or not and how its rounded on each step.

So Tiiimbeeer with 7 targets would probably hit you for around half of your Max HP.

That makes pretty good sense. However, it doesn't quite match with what we are seeing with just KI Traits. It could be that the reduction is done by dividing by 3 for the KI traits and then by following your process for the other + KI. My other idea is that some or maybe all items are out of 256 like we see with -dmg taken, so what is on the tin might not match the results. I'll retest later tonight and play around with a few more items.

To add another mystery I added the relic +3 hat (+5 KE +10 WSD) and I got a ratio of 1.166 :O.
Lol, ate the wrong cracker, Relic +3 hat makes sense
KI + Hat + Nuk + food gives a ratio of 1.35 which checks out.

Damage Mitigation is pretty much identical as damage taken.

1k needles from 122 Unity NM:
28 Plantoid Killer (Merits+Traits+Equip+Food)
6 Players + pet.
-50 PDT (~54% Damage Reduction)
1000/7 * .50 * .91 = 65 (matches log)

Add KI (48 Plantoid Killer + Circle + cookie :) ) (~62% Damage Reduction)
1000/7 * .50 * .84 * .90 = 54 (matches log)

Add Rampart (~73% Damage Reduction)
1000/7 * .50 * .84 * .90 * .75 = 40 (39 in log, so seems to work).