What Are The Weirdest Pieces Of Gear?

Was exactly that, to push up some of the odd low delay weapons like emps/relics to more around their normal weapon-type delay. But as the grip has no other stats it was mediocre out of the gate iirc. Though comparing it now, the +5% delay basically equals to a +5~6 STP grip anyway and probably should have been +10% to have any real alternative value. Sidenote but i do wish they'd try to bring back negative stat gear with some good trade offs, if just to see what they could come up with. Think the last real attempt with that is ratri set

The modern version of "negative stat gear" is the omission of positive traits common on other pieces, which creates a decision for the player on potential trade-off. You saw this very early on with HTBF gear like Mes'Yohi Haubergeon, which didn't directly have -evasion like the previous versions, but didn't include base evasion on them either, effectively being the same thing.

Example:
-Arke set has no Magic Evasion (gives -DT); the tradeoff is you receive more TP per hit received at the expense of taking significantly higher magic damage.

-Adamantite Armor has no Haste, but has huge magical and overall defensive traits, allowing you to build around it.

-Any armor missing DT, Haste, Accuracy, Evasion, Attack, MDB, Magic Evasion etc in general can be considered a "negative trait", since most ilvl gear has these as base traits

There's still some pieces that have "negative" traits, mostly accessories:

Menelaus's Ring
Sroda line of accessories (all have a unique trade-off)
Epaminondas's Ring

It just happens that the benefits of the gear far outweigh the negative traits, and they can be applied on an adhoc basis. Generally speaking, I dislike straight negative stat gear, unless it is designed in a unique way to encourage some distinct purpose like the gear mentioned above. They've moved away from straight -negative effects on most gear, and I have never seen them on stuff like JSE.

I thought the tradeoff for arke was you get all the resist debuff stuff without the magic evasion

Maybe both too, you are correct and you can view that as a benefit in some way, but it also comes at the cost of hundreds of Magic Evasion, so how much of a "benefit" is that +Resist (is it a direct % increase to "Resist!" traits like Tenacity) after you sum up all parts?

Anyways, that's kind of a distinction without a difference; whatever the intended tradeoff is, the gear sacrifices your magical defense for some other defensive property, getting an offensive bonus as well, the point I was making. It's basically reverse STP, but I question Arke gear for straight enfeeble resistance anyways, because usually enfeebles are paired with large amounts of magic damage as part of the move. I find the situations where you would want to only resist debuffs and not care about your magic defense to be quite rare. I would see that set as more beneficial for something like Aminon and less for straight resist, but maybe I just dont have it and haven't found practical uses for it.

edit: you know, i forgot PLD was on there, thinking it was WAR/DRG only. Now that I see PLD, it actually has a very valid use in situations where you want to absolutely avoid an enfeeble (Fealty, like Charm, Doom, Stun etc), you can swap to this set and take a hit to magic evasion to basically be immune to status ailments. A Paladin would have an Aegis, so he can cover incoming Magical Damage to an extent and not get destroyed from whatever the incoming move is. I forgot about this, so I was mistaken. Point taken Shadowmeld

Oh sure I always wanted it, but it's all jobs and realistically just gives MP+15 for them. I don't really know why this ring was all jobs. MP+15 wasn't good and who is going to sub SMN and gain benefit from Avatar: Enmity+2

This is only true if the extra meva you have from other pieces of armor is making you to resist the magic damage though. And its only been rather recently that SE has been slathering meva on armor.

Just to use Pumm Mask (literally the top piece when going down the list, I'm not cherry picking anything)
NQ 36
+1 53 (+17)
+2 63 (+10)
+3 73 (+10)
+4 98 (+25)

The stat upgrades from +3 to +4 were pretty shitty overall, but they backed up the brinks truck to upgrade the acc/macc/eva/meva on those pieces.

You don't need to take my word for it. Go out and use a non ilvl set of gear and get cast on by a random Ghost in Feiyin. Throw on a Wayfarer's set and look at the difference in damage received. There's a reason why we used Vex/attunement for a lot of bosses early on before we had this massive magic evasion stat bloat, partly enfeeble resist, but it helped a lot for magic defense of front line jobs to help resist the damage. Not needed so much now with stuff like Nyame/Sakpata's/Malignance/Empyrean +3, but same concept.

Sir
You're confusing the MEVA+ stat with the MDB+ stat

MEVA increases your chances to turn the 1000 damage magic attack down to 500, 250 or 125.

MDB turns the 1000 damage magic attack down to a lower number, which can then be reduced further via MEVA.


Also a "random ghost" in Fei-Yin is level 95-99. Going from non-ilvl armor (lv99) to Wayfarer's set (ilvl 117, 380 MEVA) is a really horrible test for what you're trying to prove. I dont think you're gonna see anywhere near a similar impact if you do this same exercise vs a Spurned Elementalist (blm fomor lv120-123) in Inner Kaznar.

Hiding the commentary because it's really not directly related to the topic anymore and not interested in derailing.

That DT probably wont matter much though if you have ShellV, since you can get the remaining (M)DT-21 elsewhere with ease.

I didnt pick a BLM because "the monster has higher stats", I picked a BLM because its most likely to fling nukes at you. Feel free to do the same thing with Apex Draugar or Velkk Abyssal, both DRK's. But as DRKs, you're gonna have to also contend with them smacking you around between castings, and theres a much greater chance their spell of choice wont be of any use for your test data. You can probably also test it against an avatar HTMB, as they have native enspell damage. I cant think of any field target that would be applicable.

But since youre the one who thinks I picked a BLM, the powers that be that edit the Wiki also came to the conclusion that "the random Ghost in Fei'Yin" is also a BLM.

Damage Taken trait is separate and additive with Magic Defense Bonus trait. Simply having DT doesn't make up for not having additional MDB on a piece of gear (and by extension magic evasion). Not sure what point is being made by highlighting that.

Yes, we need to stick RUN on this thing. BLUs and PLDs? What are those?

Ah yes, the greatsword spread of jobs mace

I do feel pretty cool running around on DRK with Ratri+1 head in my typical idle set for the Regain+5. Yeah I'm tough, I idle in DT+8% gear!! I did build with that in mind though, filled up the rest of my set with DT-58% to counter the penalty and still cap DT-

Does that work? I think we established that other stuff doesn't work that way, like haste vs slow - tho now I'm unsure if that was only for magic haste or also gear haste, hmm.

It does work for DT, as far as I know, though wearing that stuff impacts meva, def, stats and everything else.

Not just about dt or we'd all still be wearing terra's staff.

Not entirely sure but afaik it works for both magical and gear haste.

Both have a cap which under normal circumstances you cannot get through (~43.75% and ~25% respectively).
If you have for whatever reason something that's lowering your magical or gear speed (like a slow effect giving you -10% magic haste, or an item like Bahram Cuisses giving you -10% gear haste) it means those caps mentioned above become "indirectly" higher, because you don't start from 0% but, in the 2 examples I gave, from -10%.
Which means that, overall, you can stack up to 53.75% magic haste and 35% gear haste, and both situations will perfectly work.

Along the same lines I have no reason to believe the same wouldn't work for DT.
I'm pretty confident it works exactly the same way.


What might work a bit differently is "Weakened" status. There are no thorough tests but I think Weakened is a % based (not fixed) "slow" that's applied as the very last step in the attack formula.
So you can somewhat reduce its effects with excess (magic?) haste, but you cannot completely remove it.
Now I don't know if weakened is magic haste or whateverelse haste, think it's magical.
You can notice the recast timers for spell are huge when weakened, if you get lotsa haste they get noticeably reduced, but never go back to how they would be without weakened status.

Yeah it's a hidden stat. I remember farming this pop was a pain in the *** @ 75 cap.

A couple of months ago someone went and tested on Kei's slow effect, and found out that triple marches did not counteract its effect. It's relatively recent, hence why I mentioned it.

Ohhh I have a good one:


Allows all races to eat raw fish and raw meat!

Similarly, the line of Sahagin NM drop weapons that allow all races to eat raw fish. Exocets (H2H), Pagures (H2H), Narval (Polearm), Calamar (Polearm).


For sure, and that's often the catch for some possible gearing options. Hjarrandi is a good example. Aside from the lack of haste being relevant for offensive builds, defensively these pieces look pretty appealing with a big chunk of DT- on the head and the body... but then you look closer and see their very poor Meva and mediocre DEF

Specific to Ratri Sallet +1, among DRK head options that piece (and the set, really) is at least decent with the other defensive stats, so it doesn't really worry me much when I'm wearing the thing to tick up my TP while I run around. I have a separate straight up DT/turtle style set if needed.

A small selection of DRK headwear comparing Meva and DEF:

Meva:
Sakpata/Nyame - Meva+123
Ratri+1 - Meva+101
Relic+4 - Meva+92
Empy+3 - Meva+87
AF+4 - Meva+77
Hjarrandi - Meva+53 (lol)

Defense:
Sakpata - 160
Nyame - 156
Empy+3 - 145
AF+4 - 141
Relic+4 - 139
Ratri+1 - 136 (not great, but not that far off)
Hjarrandi - 125


A sneaky bad stat on Ratri is the absence of ANY MDB, unusual for ilevel armor. Also has mediocre VIT.

But a sneaky good stat? (unless it causes HP yo-yo annoyance for you): HP+510 (!!!). Ratri's kinda nuts for HP, with the whole set being designed around the odd concept that It will have a lot of DT+, but does something to counter that by throwing in a boatload of HP (about HP+500 PER PIECE).

Interesting! IIRC, stacking 3x marches does work on some other similar aura style debuffs - like Bastok Dyna[D] wave 2 boss.

Sort of similar to movement speed+ buffs (Bolter's Roll) used to counteract the movement- Haunt effect from Sortie C/G bosses.

I always thought the idea was to make it synergize with Scarlet Delirium and Souleater and Dread Spikes... DRK has a bunch of tools that scale with high HP after all


I went and looked it up and it looks like the original testing (by Martel nonetheless!) had a flaw, so yeah it turns out slow and haste do apply in the same term after all. My bad.

My favorite weird items are these 2 shields. You can only get them from Rainbow mog pells.

https://www.bg-wiki.com/ffxi/Town_Mog._Shield


https://www.bg-wiki.com/ffxi/Nomad_Mog._Shield



Another honorable mention. Warps the whole party to a random mog house in their home nation.

https://www.bg-wiki.com/ffxi/Moogle_Cap


https://www.bg-wiki.com/ffxi/Nomad_Cap


TLDR: Food shield doubles food duration. Stacks with Sigil for x4 duration too. Cap takes you/your party home.

Yeah! Was about to quote Aita as an example. When he uses Eroding Flash he applies Slow to everybody, overwriting haste.
Under normal condition when you create Fragmentation ending with Hydrohelix, you won't be able to use them back to back because Hydrohelix will be on CD because of Slow.
But if you have Embrava and/or entrusted Indihaste, then magically Hydrohelix will work just fine, which implies the additional haste was able to compensate for the Slow.

Of course all of this works if we're using "same term" types of magic.
If you have magic slow you can "compensate" with Magic Haste beyond the cap. But if you try to use Gear haste beyond the cap, nothing will happens.
Vice-versa if you have an item that gives you Slow, you will be able to compensate with gear haste beyond the cap, but adding magic haste beyond the cap will do nothing.
And so on.

Don't think there's anything that gives JA slow or a form of slow that's not either magic or gear.
Uhm... Not sure about Weakened, if it's either of those or something else completely.

SAM AF Hands buffing Rice Balls,
which is also on some other pieces of gear.

Weakened is most probably, over 99%, a separate form of slow on top of everything else and cannot be compensated for by any form of haste.

Easy to see on jobs that have an abundance of both JA and magic haste, like Sam with stacking hasso+ gear, dnc main with haste samba or drg with wyvern out and hasso.

Sam especially has three pieces of JSE that gives hasso+, while you only need one of them to cap delay reduction with capped magic haste.

Overcap gear and magic haste on these jobs and also overcap JA haste and you're still slowed while weakened.

No it can!
It's just that it can't be COMPLETELY compensated.
You see recast of long spells going down, but they don't go back to normal even if you have 200000 magic haste.

Which implies Weakened likely is a % stat (not fixed) and applied at the end of everything else, on the very last term.

Try any spell with long recast when weakened. If you do it with lotsa haste the recast will be lower than if you do it without, but it won't be as low as it is when you're not weakened.

That's what I meant. As in, go back to normal attack speed/spell recast while weakened.

Also - back on topic - I am surprised, nay shocked to see absolutely no one mention the insane amount of metal crotch pants aka subligars available in the game.

In no particular order:

Morbol



Cait-sith



Pink



Triplus (Blue)



Luna

Bravo's - dropped by Odqan in Misareaux "Lottery from Atomic Cluster during foggy weather between 02:00 - 07:00." - like wtf.

Dashing - aka the infamous yellow piss pants aka "golden" subligar aka "I pissed my pants and I'm wearing metal" aka "worst lockstyle known to gaming".



Who the f**k wears a metal subligar IRL in any case. Outside some kinky fun times in the bedroom involving a lock and key, of course.

You can completely overcome weakness at least on spell recast.
I was able to get my Arise down to 24 second, but need a bard and the lots of equipment.

this is from a post I made several years ago:
Normal recast with above set
No buffs (30s)
Haste only (24s)
If you have access to /sch
Light arts only (27s)


When under weakness
No buffs (1:12)
Haste only (1:06)
Double march and haste (47s)

If you have access to /sch we can go faster
Light arts, double march and haste (42s)
Light arts, celerity and haste (32s)
Light arts, double march, celerity and haste (24s)

I thought it was interesting at the time... others did not.