R15 Gandiva

additional thought about Decoy Shot:

As Capuchin said better than I could, its an incredible tool for your whole alliance, being able to constantly dump hate on the tank while removing it from your most dangerous hate-puller (danger meaning what happens when you do, maybe not your most likely puller).

My only reservation about using Decoy Shot these days are Conal moves from some NMs. Its about the only time when you'll get a legit argument from your Tank about essentially pointing that loaded gun at your RNG and likely support staff. Another option is to place RNG and its GEO at North and support at East or West so they can reach the tank, standard melees and rangers while the mob faces North- in position for Decoy to work but avoid conal attacks on your mages,etc.


EDIT: damn page claim, my other post was more valid to the discussion.

To OP: R15 here. Do it. It's a great tool for white damage fights such as dyna's w2 or on anything demanding physical damage granted you and your tank are competent. The whole hate magnet thing is blown out of proportion nowadays, probably because of too many asleep-at-the-wheel tanks coupled with derps who don't utilize decoy or line up.

Worst case, hate becomes loose and you switch to your Anni,

R15 Arma here and r4 gandiva. Is there any benefit to take it the rest of the way if I have Arma already maxed?

If you can use it without killing anyone, then yes. That's the summary of the first page.

Majority of people, majority of the time, it's unusable.

If you're pulling hate causing the whole of the group to be slowed due to death/debuff/repositioning then you are on the whole losing DPS to the lesser weapon.

/thread

Plus, lets be honest, Jishnu's is the coolest looking WS in the game.

TBH I wish SAM could do it just for that fact.

Thank you so much for this! I started playing around on apex bats with 0 buffs on me and noticed how much of a boost I get swapping in +3 feet. No Jokushu Haidate yet, but I did swapped out to Arcadian legs+2 and another huge boost. With no buffs, JR went from ~9k's to 11-14k's. Still got 1000JP to go for master, so I'll do more testing after that.

To everyone else, thank you for actually replying here I read all of your suggestions and discussions very helpful arguments. We all have favorite pew pew's and I made a goal to R15 the bow regardless of the outcome, because honestly it needs a solid guide with all the DPS output and and well tested gear set in both buffed and none buffed situation. I have gotten some ridiculous numbers on Ou like 45K 55K JR with not many buffs. There is really not much info in regards to R15 situation so I'm going to take this task on me and run tests take screen shots and numbers down and hopefully in few months I'll share the results with everyone else.

fomal is way better than anni. Had fomal up to r9 before I made an anni and can't speak out the disappointment enough. Made it mostly because why not, and what I read here, but the only time I'd ever use an annihilator is if I was looking to make a darkness skillchain with someone.

Hate control, I've only ever seen be an issue when I constantly 99999 trueflights... and physical WSs just don't pull those kind of numbers unless it's some omen fight where you give the boss alot of buffs and take screen shots so everyone can think that you're amazing when really, any half-dd job can 99999 it.

I have yet to see a Corsair do comparable numbers to my Last Stand. Not sure why/what that is, and I've played with some super beefy Corsairs.

But again can't express how disappointing Annihilator is. It's not nearly as good as a Fomal, don't let anyone tell you it is.

This has to be a troll.

Confirmed troll.
I mean the last time he gave out tips was on rune fencer saying resist all status element on run was garbage from Erilaz greaves lol.

agreed. Gandiva is a very niche weapon, but its potential is incredibly high for those moments. Just to recap for those seeing this on the main page:

Gandiva is an incredible white damage weapon with a "respectable" weaponskill attached. Many of you are certainly familiar with "crit attack" based weaponskills like Chant du Cygne or Evisceration- they can vary greatly in damage dealt, and its not nearly as predictable as the "damage based on TP" type weaponskills like Last Stand, Savage Blade, Rudra's Storm (we're comparing apples to apples here, not adding comparing JR to Trueflight or any magical weaponskill). To see consistent high numbers for Jishnu's Radiance, it requires-

1. extremely high DEX, through things like Boost-DEX from a WHM over the usual Boost-STR one sees in a standard DD party or Boost-AGI in a ranger burn setup, and/or DEX bubble entrusted on the Gandiva-using RNGs...again over the more traditional entrusted AGI bubble used on RNGs and CORs. Even throwing on a Dextrous Etude as your 4th song over Quick Etude is a huge help.

2. solid crit rate/crit damage balanced in your sets with high-DEX pieces. These will honestly help more with your spike damage, but the more +crit you can functionally get in your sets the more consistent the boost from it rather than random spikes.

3. a two-corsair setup. Man oh Man does a Gandiva shine in these situations. This allows the necessary Chaos+Samurai rolls (your traditional wants and needs while on RNG) in addition to adding Rogue's Roll and something else- in the times I use Gandiva I like a 4 roll setup of CC Chaos+Samurai along with CC Rogue's/Miser's. The Miser's is where you'll get different opinions- some like Tacticians, some even like Courser's Roll if no RDM in the setup. Try different options, but Chaos/Sam/Rogue's are musts. If only 1 COR+BRD, drop the chaos and go Rogue's/Sam.

Gandiva brings with it an incredible risk. Its pure physical damage with zero hate reduction. Even Armageddon, which possesses the same hate risk during white damage phase is paired with a weaponskill that actively reduces Enmity, which sorta balances things out- think of wave3 Dyna-D runs built around Wildfire Spam.

There's no "balancing out" for Gandiva. Its straight physical damage combined with huge hate spikes with AM procs, esp during Double Shot up time. Then you get hate spikes from big crit procs on Jishnu's. It almost demands using Decoy Shot or your tank is gonna need every tool in their box to hold hate, nothing is off limits.

Its PERFECT for when you run the risk of Amnesia. Get that AM3 up before you get Amnesia'ed, then shoot for great damage without weaponskills. And if Decoy is up, you can put so much hate on a Tank when they are lacking THEIR /ja's to hold on to things.


Once again, a novel from Cele, but hope that helps wipe out the troll posts above.

You’re joking yes? Please tell me you’re joking lol

R.I.P ARMA since no one ever talks about you :P

My absolute favorite weapon I'm starting to think. For me these days, with all of them at least R13 or higher:

Armageddon>Annihilator>Gastraphetes>Fomalhaut>Gandiva

If you have a Yoichi and use it on anything except SAM, you're in the wrong forum. ;)

Dat profile pic tho

This guy clearly doesnt know anything. Guy r9s his fomal. Then tries to compare something that isn't ranked to something that is. Never says if he even has the proper set for coronach. Sounds of it...he doesnt. Probably threw ambu+1 hear together and did coronach once and decided hes the expert lol.

R15 anni is far superior. Fomal literally just pulls hate. Then you die. It has better skillchain properties. And -25enmity. I never touch fomal ever anymore. The damage is almost identical. It is beyond worth it. Only downfall is there isn't enough ranged acc in the ws set.

Or did I just respond to a troll? Just saw the next posts lol

Dude doesn't know what he's talking about half the time, talking ***out the *** in most things he tries to comment on for job tips/guides. Although at this point, hard to tell if he's just trolling or actually serious lol

best case scenario he's someone that eyeballs WS numbers in the log and thinks he's "parsed" the difference.

worst case is he doesn't even have either actually and is complete troll.

My guess is somewhere in the middle, but he's definitely one of those "but I went out and shot apex mobs with trusts and Fomalhaut is better!" dudes who has no care for party/alliance dynamics and fitting into a strat, and thinks he'll get that spot in an EGLS with big number screenshots.

Might as well participate in the slight thread derail to say I finished my R15 Arma today! Was planning to farm all the swarts myself, but yesterday I remembered that I originally made my base Armageddon on New Year's Eve way back during Abyssea days. My first empy! So I couldn't just let that tradition end, right? Bought the last detritus to cap it from where it was at R13. Happy Pew Pew Year, everyone!!!

I wish I had more resources to throw at RNG and make a bunch more weapons, but I pretty much stick to Arma as my super-all-arounder for RNG/COR and it serves me really well. I have too much tied up in other insane projects (like 2020 goal of all NIN RMEA R15... even Nagi lol).

Anyway yeah to get slightly back on topic, Anni got a hell of a lot of a boost with augments. I was one of the semi-detractors for a while when I didn't see the enmity- as making up for the significant damage loss at R0 (harder to pull hate with mediocre damage, and there are tools aside from Anni to deal with hate... magical WS, Decoy, etc.). But that 20% Coronach boost was a big deal to let Anni compete a lot better, so that changed my tune. Maybe I'll make one, one of these days!

Other than to troll people. I havent found a reason to take gastra off.

R15'd all RNG remas except yoichi and fail-not, and on RNG I use Anni/Gastra/Fomal the most, in that order, and Gandiva sometimes if I wanna *** around. The only times I ended up using Arma is for wave3 trash mobs when I'm on COR, or miscellaneous stuff when I want to solo darkness w/ COR.

In non-zerg situation on stuff like Ou, I find Annihilator really useful. Also since my THF is not geared enough to solo Lilith on E, RNG + Anni does the trick nicely w/ bounty shot

I get this take from someone with lots of RNG REMAs. But the main reason I love my Arma is that it only required me to make a single REMA, and I have the weapon that's generally no worse than 2nd best option for everything, all in one gun.

TF? Gastra is better, but Arma is next.
Enmity control? Anni is better, but Arma is next.
Last Stand? Fomal is better, but Arma is next.
Same goes for COR, where Arma is the next best option to DP for Leaden (and one RMEA for two jobs is a nice selling point too)

Arma does win for best Racc, best WF option, and *by far* best white damage (underrated aspect for RNG, IMHO)... while those might not always be your primary considerations, they're definitely nice to have.

To tie this to the topic... this is also the massive difference between Arma and Gandiva (aside from Gandiva/JR's awful DEX stat mod). Gandiva is such a one-trick pony. Brutal physical damage, zero flexibility. Arma lets you do well - not necessarily the best, but well - at every aspect of RNG.

If I could just pump out all the R15s and switch to each one for its niche, cool. But I don't feel like I need to do that since I have the uber all-arounder gun, and that freed me up to do other things in FFXI (say, R15 Masamune for my SAM, toys for my NIN THF PUP or my alt's BRD GEO, etc...)

As always, Capuchin is the champion of the under loved Empyrean Weapons^^ (see his talk on the NIN empyrean hehe). But he's damn right.

Armageddon is so damn versatile, and with the RP system became a straight up monster in that regard. I do think you'd be much happier if you at least made a Fomalhaut for its bullets- but that's honestly gonna be a minor improvement just physical things.

I also am sick of people saying that Fomalhaut is your 2nd best Trueflight weapon. This is probably true up until around 2250TP. Cross that threshold, and the TP bonus on Fomalhaut, the ONLY relevant stat that Fomalhaut brings to the table for Trueflight, becomes more and more worthless. And dunno about y'all, but if "m using TF I wanna save up my TP for monster hits that close a SC if at all possible vs spamming it ~1k TP.

Armageddon is an extremely easy path in terms of various Empyrean weapons. The insane amounts of AGI on it is beautiful for EVERY Marksmanship Weapon Skill, and adds a healthy chunk of Ranged Accuracy. Between these things, the power of Wildfire with modern gear and RP'ing it, and Ambuscade just throwing empy upgrade materials in your face monthly, I'm always surprised I don't see more Rangers with that option.

I agree with everything. Also even with arma's white dmg; I tend to stick to anni on anything that isn't trueflight. This will show in fights like wave2/3 bosses (minus trueflight builds) and master trials. To be honest even on omen bosses. being able to close skillchains for enormous numbers and still not worry about hate, is a big deal.

Pulling hate even just once is one too many times.

I’m not entirely sure why I started Army, but glad I finished it yesterday, at least to pre-augment state. Have mythic mask but no progress, and about 10% on Aeonic mask but no Aeonics yet. We have been working on getting masks, so hope we can get empyrean soon for Army and Verethragna. It is kinda fun switching between DP and Army though I slept through tonight’s dyna run, though since last run was packed, at least the team had my spot for those who missed out last time.

Now I just need to see what weapon to aug first when I get them unlocked (Army, DP or Terpsichore).

Question for fellow Arma/Gandiva users, do you guys use normal barrage set for AM3 barrage? or mix&match w/ AM3 set? So far I've been sticking to the normal barrage set, cause I can't reliably land all the barrage shots when I use AM3 set or mix/match.

I have Gandiva/Foma/Anni/Gastra all to R15 and I say learn to swap weapons. With decoy shot, double shot up go ham with Gandiva. When decoy falls off I usually switch to Anni to shed some aggro then for second double shot I'll switch to Foma. Of course with cor's random deal you get another decoy shot with a bit of luck and go back to Gandiva.

If I had to go back though and only choose one to R15 first I would probably go with Foma, since cor can use as well. Then Gastra, Anni, Gandiva. No love for Arma.

Edit - also when using Gandiva you should be using Oshosi Feet which give -15 enmity, with that and Dirge you are at -47 enmity.

Afaik Skillchain damage is not treated as part of Coronach, so it adds normal amount of hate. That being said Anni also adds tons of enmity- and Coronach itself does very little hate, so it will st8ll let you close skillchains much longer before pulling hate.