~First And Final Line Of Defense V2.0~

would be nice to include directions on how to shield block and how to use a shield i.e mob positioning. how hold large amount of mobs,


i think the war guide had some of it down in the fell cleaving section.

Wow some good info. Aegis block rate with Reprisal up is only in the 17%? I must be getting really lucky on my AAs then because it seems to be a lot higher or are AAs on D not at least ilvl 126? Need to finish that ochain I guess ><. Thanks for the updates! Much appreciated!

You might not notice the damage as much as PLDs tend to take more precautions going into AA fights than they would going after gates mobs.

I do notice an overall difference between Ochain and Aegis when lowman tanking against AAs though because I switch between them maybe once a fight and taking care of my own cures.

Thank you for finally updating the guide.

I wish I could have done it myself, but I'm just too busy these days and I've retired from the game, so my knowledge would be second-hand only.

As for the sets:

Only real comment is on the magic damage sets. As said already, you don't need much MDT/DT to cap out.

Also, Magic Defense Bonus has very little returns once you're already capped with Aegis MDT. It's a waste of gear spot if you're already hurting on space. iLvL pieces with high magic evasion is probably better use of the spots, or leaving your other DD/normal gear there (which most likely already has decent magic evasion since they'll be iLvL pieces).

Thanx again for updating the guide.

Thing is, the only level we know for AAs is the content level. Which may or may not reflect the actual monster level. And heck, we don't even know if VD actually has higher level mobs than D or if they just have higher stats and PDT. So Aegis block rate Could be higher than on my lvl 126 tests. But trying to get a controlled test sample in an actual AA fight would be quite a pain in the ***. And take quite a few fights to get a good sample size.

If D AAs were only say, lvl 119 then you'd get about a 33.6% block rate with Aegis, Reprisal up.

I just wish we had some way to get accurate mob levels. :/

Would it be possible to make an add-on that estimates attack, defense and other stats based on chat log and currently equipped gear sets? Maybe something like that can be used if samples were high enough? I was thinking if such a thing existed, we might get more sample numbers off more players to make better estimates.

Or are the formulas we currently have not sufficient to make such an add-on?

That sounds... insanely complicated. For one thing, I don't think gear stats(aside from augment tables) are exposed in lua atm. So while you can tell what gear your wearing... windower itself can't for example, tell how much PDT you're wearing. Or how much dmg your weapon has for that matter.

So you'd have to make a gear resources that contains actual stats, at least for dmg PDT/DT, weps. Huge pain in the *** that.

And while HP/MP/TP are in the player table... I don't think we can pull current def/atk(or str, etc?) values atm.

Well, someone with a more in depth knowledge can feel free to correct me. But I think that currently this would require some rather extensive changes to luacore.

But even if we could do all that, it still wouldn't tell us what lvl the mobs are. Would be really cool for gathering mob stats though

Now, it'd be far more reasonable in PLD's case to just make a blockrate parser addon.

Battlemod can display shield blocks in the chat log, via parsing the shield block animation flag in the incoming packet(only works for normal melee hits. Not ws or Aoe melee. No block animation on those.) Which is still pretty freaking cool.

Now if anyone here has ever used scoreboard, you know we can parse a lot more than just hits taken+hits blocked.

Now to make it usable in normal fights, we'd need it to check shield skill, for pretty much every atk round taken. So it can sort all hits into sets for a given skill. But we Can currently check against player skills, so np.

Then we'd need reprisal and palisade up/down parsing. Which should also be possible.

And it will need to note the shield being worn at the time of hits taken, and sort hits by that as well. Which isn't too terribly different than scoreboard filtering by mobs, I think.

I think maybe the hardest thing, would be checking to see if the PLD was facing the mob(s) properly when hit, so that blocking is even a possibility...

I kinda worry about the lag potential, when holding 20 mobs, etc. That's a loooot of checks and calcs

Then finally, it'd need a export feature, so that results and data can be store permanently to a file. This is the biggest shortcoming of scoreboard compared to kparser, imo. Being able to save data to look at later is great. "Ummm, what was my acc on that NM the other day?", "Errr, sorry, I relogged so the parse is gone." -_-

Mmmm. I need to make this. Lol. Unfortunately, I doubt my lua coding skills are up to the task.... But I might try for a really simple version anyway. It'd just be so damn nice.

I'd definitely love to see a shield blockrate parser so we can all get larger sample sizes as well as making as it easier to gather the data from all PLDs.

That way, people will stop asking me to stay in Aegis thinking Ochain is useless...

You... play with some strange ppl. <,<

It's usually pickup parties in off-peak hours asking me to do that and I still don't know why. My regular group isn't that boneheaded most of the time.

Didnt they also say ochain has secrect 300 skill? I might be wrong. Also would the mobs in new zones like cirdias be good for testing. Something liek the headless guys or event respite cloak nm?

If there was ever a dev post like that, I've never seen it and I can't find it after searching the OF now.

I have a lot of good test data on Aegis/Ochain/size 3 shields. At this point we can even calculate block rate based on skill/shield/mob level. It's just that we never know that last one on NMs.

But if you're just wanting to test something... You generally want mobs with non threatening TP moves. And multiples of them up to the limit you can reliably survive. Speeds things up. But it's important to make sure that all mobs are the same level, or you get skewed results.

Sample size for a given test should be 3k+ hits. And even then it's possible for the results to vary +/- 1.8%. For very precise tests measuring minute differences(like when i was doing skill tests in 1 skill increments) Sample sizes should increase or multiple tests be performed.

There are two basic ways of recording test data atm. Kparser, and Battlemod+Logs.

The Kparser method determines block/non block via dmg taken. With high dmg reduction shields there's a gap between the dmg ranges on block and non-blocks. this difference is used to divide the sample. Not that this isn't a built in function of Kparser. I take the defense details and paste them into a spreadsheet that totals the numbers of hits.

Due the the method of differentiating block/non-blocks, this method doesn't work on shields that are size 2 and lower. Their block dmg- is too small, and no gap exists between block/non-block. The ranges overlap significantly.

The main issue with this method is that Anything that affects your dmg taken can screw with it. Changes in PDT, cureskin, sentinel, phalanx up/down. Basically, it requires controlled non-combat conditions to be reasonable.

The Battlemod+logger method uses battlemod's chatlog change on blocks to determine blocks, and then records it all with logger. It is absolute in determining block/non-block. And nothing related to dmg taken can affect this.

The issue with it being that manually compiling block rate and block dmg- data from the log files is a pain in the ***.

I've actually made an add-on that estimates approx values of Targets VIT STR DEF and ATT, I use it for calulctaing Attack Ratios and pDIF calculations to alter WS sets accordingly based on buffs vs Target, and account for a 5% Variance~

That said, this still wouldn't work on calculating a targets level, because a Level 10 NM vs a level 10 mob, the NM could have an Arbitary STR Attribute of +900, it doesn't work on this game unfortunately.

As I said in that very same post.

So did you set the player stats manually for that, or are they exposed to luacore somewhere? I couldn't find them anywhere I looked. Not that I looked that long or hard. Don't really have a need atm. But I'm curious. And it's always good to be aware of what's possible.

They said at one point ochain ilvl would be like 150, and that was part of the reason they wouldn't ilvl ochain and aegis, but its seriously hurting aegis. They could at least give ilvl amounts of shield skill on a sword or something, even if its a hard to obtain one.

http://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/46016/first-and-final-line-of-defense-v20#2844542

Not sure how i missed that post actually, i read the rest of the first page...

I'm curious what block rates are like in the highest content we can enter, 143 incursion, and what level the actually non NM mobs are there. This would also be an awful test though, because of the super fun hate mechanics i guess.

Well Anahera Sword has shield skill +15. Meh, in older FF games, Aegis always was an extemely poor physical defense shield but granted very high magic defense or magic evasion. In FFT I think it had like a 5% block rate but a 50% magic dodge rate or something. I guess maybe SE was going for that.

I can't justify using a sword for just 15 skill when its so inferior to so many other options for so many other reasons.

It was 10%/50%.

But this game broke that tradition from the start. Aegis was originally the strongest shield physically as well as magically. Til Ochain.

But anyway. This isn't FFT. And Aegis needs a boost. A PLD with a shield that doesn't block is just a crappy DD. May as well bring a RUN.I think if you used Aegis in 143 incursion we'd find out what the block rate floor is. <,<;;

And yes, testing would be a fair bit more difficult. The PLD would have to actually maintain hate on all the mobs, over the mage supporting them. And you'd want to kill all the casters and only keep pure melee.

Oh... but getting weapon stripped would screw the test... velk.. not good test mobs.

Do the normal mobs in Incursion /check as impossible to gauge? I don't even recall if I ever checked them.

So let's get this stickied.

Can un-sticky my old guide (or just add in "old" to title, idc).

Just want to make sure we keep links to the old guide since we had a lot of good discussion in there when figuring out mechanics.

The official post is here, from Aug 2013 around the time they were adding the + skill to weapons:
OF Dev Post

Forgive what may appear as laziness - I just have a terrible time with tables... What stones would be used to make the posted alluvion armors sets for Atonement and CDC? Acc/Att, Enmity and WSD% in particular. Please and thank you! Oh, and Phalanx please!

ACC/ATK = Snowslit
Enmity = Leafslit
WSDMG = duskslit
DEX = Dusktip
Phalanx = Duskdim(this has to be on yorium. Have yet to see a report of phalanx+ on acro)

Luacore can pull some of your stats from the game and it is entirely possible.

At the minute I'm primarily using for pDIF Calculations and measuring your targets accuracy/evasion (Although I'm facing some issue with Accuracy Calculations due there being no meta table with all stats / gear / base acc / Merits etc which is just a painstaking event).

With that said I make it take your ST, calculate your approixmated fSTR based on your attack, dmg per hit and other stuff and it averages over 50 attacks ~

The one I put up on Github as an "include" was a first take at how it works but used Arbitary Values based on my SAM (which obviously may not be 100% accurate but where based on tojil-esq target stats).

I was going to approach Bryth on here later once I have a more robust method for pulling Client Stat Data but I really can't find away from needing Tables with all your stats written into them.

Now if you could make /checkparam packet work and be recorded and this data be checked every time a buff dropped that would be useful, but I think the sudden spam of CHECKPARAM to servers may cause raise a red flag so I've not tried this.

I feel like I must be missing something...

Anyway, when I asked if stats were exposed to luacore, I meant is there currently a function to pull them from the game and make a table of them.

For example, for current/max HP/MP/TP, you'd use windower.ffxi.get_player() then they'd be under the vitals table. But str/dex/atk, etc aren't in there.

If there's something that does this for base stats, I can't find it. I have no doubt that it's possible for luacore to do this. But I don't believe it has a built-in way of handling str/dex,etc atm. That or windower documentation is failing me.

Knight's Earring Rare Ex
[Ear] All Races
VIT+2 Shield skill +5 Divine magic skill +5
LV 72 WAR MNK WHM BLM RDM THF PLD DRK BST BRD RNG SAM NIN DRG SMN BLU COR PUP DNC SCH GEO RUN

Why would this not be best for divine set?

Why would this not be used in -PDT set?

Because very nearly no one picks knight's over suppa. If you actually did, go ahead and use it.

But it doesn't let you attain any higher Enlight/2 tiers, and it's all of 2 shield skill better than the next best skill+ earring. Not really overwhelmingly superior. Also, depending on your shield, mob, and reprisal, you may be capping blockrate anyway, in which case the skill+ does nothing.

+1 XD

actually we need some acc/enmity on Empy armor, and shield ilevel boost with skill.

Can someone can share an complete PLD.lua file on the guide too ?

Zigbar thank's a lot for this new topic, maybe we can improve it by submit exemple set for each macro ?