For The Shinies! A Guide For Thief

Thank you Melphina, I base many of my sets off ones you have posted. Appreciate the help. Also use the ones from Spicy's BG guide.

If you really wanna bump up your farming the fastest way to solo omen for gil if you can pull it off is aeolian edge cleaving. When I do it I summon a bunch of healers and a tank (to hold a transcendent mob in place so it doesn't ping pong between my trusts after I get hate on everything). On floors 1 and 2 I grab every mob, and on floor 3 I pull 2 camps at a time wearing this.

ItemSet 381499

Then engage a transcendent mob and cleave with this to apply TH 8 to everything

ItemSet 381500

and then this to finish everything off

ItemSet 368547

Everything dies in a couple weaponskills and the risk is very minimal. You don't need all the luxury equipment I have in my sets, but the basic survivability tools to handle evasion tanking one to two dozen mobs or so without dying are a must. Malignance is pretty core to the strategy. Herculean can work in place of nyame for aeolian edge, but nyame is so much safer.

Path C Gandring is the ideal mainhand dagger, but it's also a luxury since it costs 70 million gil. I just use a pair of perfect augmented malevolence's from sinister reign myself. You can't cleave the final camp on the third floor though, because pixies have astronomically high magic defense. Just swap to a melee setup to tackle the unseelie camp. Simon and I both posted videos of the process somewhere in the thread archives. If you really want I can look mine up, but simon's is more recent and shouldn't be more than 9 or 10 pages back if you want to see the process in action.

Thank you Melphina.

I tried a ~10 runs of AOE faming but netted on average 8 astral while killing them individually averaged 12 astral. Not sure why this is, maybe TH applies differently, just how it happened for me with each at ~10 runs. although AOE killing is ~10-15 mins faster.

Looking all over for i139 mob stats. This is what I found, which seems to align on a couple forums:

Mob
Level Def Eva Agi Vit
139 1525 1319 301 295

Me - No buffs/Only food - Spicyryan's Solo Rudra Set
Food Att Acc Dex Str
Rivfn 1540 1410 401 293

Should I make a sacrifice in Dex to get over Vit/Str difference, although small? Possibly use a Caro Necklace?

Treasure hunter works just as effectively AoE cleaving as it does focusing single targets. As long as you have hate on the mob your treasure hunter applies, and aeolian edge gets hate on everything while it kills. I average 12-14 swarts a run AoE farming. 10 runs is too small a sample size to write it off. My highest run was 19 swarts, lowest was 6. Variance happens. You just got unlucky.

Just for counter arguments sake

AoE cleaving most of mobs are only procced TH by WS hits and not TP hits.
Single mobs killing all mobs have both TP and WS hits

That nets more hits per kills aka more chance for TH upgrade.


not sure if that is what is showing the diffrent. but i agreed 10 runs is a veery low amount of samples

It's true that solo killing each mob provides more chance at proc and by extension a higher drop rate than TH8 AE

In an instance where there is no reason to rush (limited entraces via lockout) it's more optimal to go for high procs than speed kills (unless you plan on gil farming more/other stuff after)

But still chance is chance. Anywhere from 4-16 drops happens regardless of TH level (2+)

Double because why not, to expand on droprate, optimally you would melee every mob to death in TH without wsing, as killing faster yields no benefit. (the exact opposite of old dynamis for example)

If you only consider time spent in omen, and not playtime in general. Even if you consider all time available for play today, the benefit from killing every mob that way may increase your gain enough to outweigh the time wasted.

An extra 5 drops for 20 minutes more isn't a bad trade off. Depending.

I mainly kill single after single (or pull a bunch and kill one by one) for the chance to proc more TH. Been doing 2 runs/day for months now and never ever gotten lower than 8 astral and never ever over 24. Average yield is kinda like posted here 12-16. The cruel *** that is rng can make you paranoid about TH theories sometimes. Last week got 8 astrals 3 runs in a row, this week 24, 19, 21. Huzzah for rng.

so this is my current TP/hrybidt set

main={ name="Twashtar", augments={'Path: A',}},
sub={ name="Centovente", augments={'TP Bonus +1000',}},
ammo="Aurgelmir Orb",
head="Malignance Chapeau",
body="Malignance Tabard",
hands="Malignance Gloves",
legs="Malignance Tights",
feet="Malignance Boots",
neck={ name="Asn. Gorget +2", augments={'Path: A',}},
waist="Reiki Yotai",
left_ear="Telos Earring",
right_ear="Sherida Earring",
left_ring="Gere Ring",
right_ring="Hetairoi ring",
back={ name="Toutatis's Cape", augments={'DEX+20','Accuracy+20 Attack+20','DEX+10','"Store TP"+10','Phys. dmg. taken-10%',}},

Is there any of the newer gear from omen I should replace ?


Also what is the current Glascannon TP set ?

Was interested in seeing the averages people get on THF. I usually just go in on WAR and with just some TH gear swaps, my avg isn't very far off of what's being posted here - 10 or more.

I say *** it, kill em fast and get the chore done with for the day.

Ok for some actual numbers just reference the treasure hunter chart here

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

It's pretty apparent that swart crystals fall into the "Very Rare" category in the drop table, meaning treasure hunter 8 has a 4.75% drop rate and TH 9 has a 5.5% drop rate. Meaning on average it would take you 134 TH 9 procs before you got one extra swart crystal. Even when you melee burn the runs you usually want to go through it expediently, meaning you're still trying to kill quickly. Procs happen when they do but you won't ever get more than a few dozen procs a run this way.

Let's put it this way. I just ran a cleave run earlier today and netted 17 crystals. I got 12 yesterday and 14 the day before. I run fairly leisurely and still finish in around 20 minutes. You may be able to squeeze a few extra crystals out here and there melee burning, but from a standpoint of time and effort to reward ratio, the cleave method is vastly superior.



This this and more of this a thousand times over. If you can't pull off the cleave method safely and risk dying then by all means go the melee burn rout, but if you are capable of cleaving efficiently you'll appreciate the amount of time you can save.

Reasonably sure it would be Rare, 8% of the mobs drop with TH4 sounds about right.

It's like 120 mobs on a full card run and getting 10(+) is what you'd expect

Use trusts that stay close. It's the easy answer, but the other solution is do more damage with your edges.

My point would still be valid either way. The drop rate increase a TH 9 proc affords is a measly 0.25% difference between the two tiers; 0.75% for very rare and 1% for rare. You'd still need on average 100 procs before you saw an extra crystal. No matter how you slice it, aeolian edge cleaving with TH 8 on everything is still going to be far more time efficient.



You don't. It's normal for a couple to die here and there. That's the reason you summon a tank trust. If you don't then ALL the mobs will bounce around between the trusts and it'll be too hard to weaponskill without losing tp because "the mob is too far away". It should only take two aeolian edges with a strong set and three with a mediocre one to do the job, so you just clear and resummon them afterward. It's ok to lose one now and again.

With right items on thf, it takes 12 min or less to cleave whole Omen and no trusts die.

I don't try to push any speed records when I cleave. I just go in and farm at a leisurely pace, and I still clear in about 20 minutes. Path C gandring would shave a few minutes off my average run times, but it's a bit counterproductive investing 60 million gil just to farm swarts slightly faster. Maybe one day I'll buy one but right now I'm working on the last few stages of terpsichore so the resources are already allocated. I get by with dual malevolences just fine.

And I agree with Eiryl. Swart crystals are probably categorized as rare in the drop table. That still means you would need to proc 100 times on average to get an extra crystal. With approximately 120 mobs per run you'd only get an extra crystal once every 5 to 7 runs with the typical proc rates meleeing em down. It takes me about twice as long to clear a run meleeing the zone, so there's no way I'd consider that a worthwhile tradeoff.

Has anyone analyzed the effect of crit rate on TH proc rate?

No noticeable difference. And it's easy to test too. Just mainhand tauret with gleti's knife offhand, equip the full geti's attire set, and throw in yetshila +1 and crit rate cape. If crit rates affected TH proc we would be able to tell, but it doesn't look like it does.

First, thanks for this video. I just tried this method 3 times and it went very smooth and sped my run up quite a bit. I started farming astrals about a month ago went from 25-30 minute runs to:

1. 1st run 20 minutes
   

2. 2nd run 16:42
   

3. 3rd run 14:43
   

This was from enter to exit. I usually had to recall my WHM after every pull. First 2 runs I had to recall a trust 2-3 times the entire run. Last run I recalled 0 trusts.


Second, regarding your TH head...are you manually toggling this, using a different WS macro, or do you have a rule in your lua to handle this? If you have a rule, I would be interested in seeing the rule (and your entire THF lua, for that matter) if you are willing to share.

Again, thanks to you and Melphina for sharing your sets and strategy for this!


For anyone interested, my gear is almost identical to SimonSes and Melphina. I do not have a Gandring. I use the much cheaper (currently 14mil on Asura) HQ1 variant, plunderer's knife. It still provides 75 EVA and +35 TP per hit evaded. Obviously, not as good as Gandring but, like Melphina, I do not want to spend 60-70mil on a farming tool.

I use Selindrile lua. It has toggle for TH. If it set to "Tag" it will use TH pieces on top of your normal sets for first melee hit on new target and for AoE WSs. For first Aeolian I switch Toggle for "Tag", for next Aeolians on same group I switch toggle to "None".

That's what I am doing. I was hoping for something that may remove me having to toggle as occasionally I forget.

Thanks again!

if you want to use a less complex lua you could always just put TH on your cyclone set and leave aeolian edge as damage gear.

Has anyone got an up to date evasion set for thf pls? Also is it actually possible to get an reasonable evade rate or are mobs accuracy values just too high?

escha nm's
htbf
ambu

You don't even need to use cyclone for Omen cleaving, just do what I do and have two different aeolian edge sets; one with relic gloves and treasure egg, and the other with your normal damage pieces. And the up to date evasion set is what I posted at the top of this page. I haven't made any videos in a while but since we've been discussing it I figured I'd record my latest omen cleave to show off the process from my perspective. In the video I'm using two perfectly augmented malevolences, and my aeolian edges are hitting for about 16.5k each at full tp return. I can cleave a wave in 2 weaponskills.

This also shows off the evasion set which is what devasbismarck asked about just above. I have my chat log color coded so evasions show up light blue, and you can see just how often I evade mobs with the -dt hybrid evasion set I linked above.



It wasn't the most perfect run, but like I said earlier I don't go for any speed records. I just went in and casually cleaved the zone, and walked out with 14 swarts for the trouble 20 minutes later. I swapped to twashter a camp early after the porxie and ladybug camp, which can sometimes be annoying when amnesia hits like it did this run. Since my trusts were already down I just went with the melee setup last two camps, but it was pretty straightforward and shows the process much like simon's video. Gandling would have shaved a few extra minutes off my run time, but for the investment cost it's a luxury.

You can cap evasion on probably almost everything, but for some things you will need buffs (mambos and/or Voidance).

ItemSet 371968

This set is very high meva while also capping PDT. If you dont need/want to cap PDT there is more evasion to gain in rings/waist/cape slots. Ethereal Earring also isnt bis evasion (Infused followed by Balder +1 are bis afaik), but has good synergy with Raetic Bangles +1.

Here's what I run in my evasion set. I do have a Nibiru, but I like the extra kick from Tauret on AE. I also have +20 Eva and +30 M.Eva on my cape.

ItemSet 381650

Idk about those regal gloves silva lol.

Looks like one of those situations where someone try to fit rare item into some build, because he feels that he should use it if he was able to get the drop.

Idk was just thinking, evade get some tp, get hit get a lil tp. Just switched it in recently to test it out, haven't change it back yet. I mean I thought the number of times you can evade was capped, you’re going to get hit anyway. I was curious to try it, another little thing to min max. Instead of taking a weak stab at me how about some constructive criticism about why it’s not a good idea lol. Anyway, so far a can’t really notice a difference over Malig gloves that I was using before.

I got the hands for my dnc cure set, but always wanted to try them in this build. No flex just testing it out.