You'll Shoot Your Eye Out! - New FFXI RNG Guide

So after some sleep on the subject, I think a lot of the points being made about how to get the most out of this mechanic are dead on right, but wanted to bring up (or agree) with a few things in particular:

1. Hover Shot is massive. We're not talking about some ability we just charge up for use on a WS. Every offensive action we take gets pumped up as long as we "do the dance". This will show its greatest benefit in longer fights, of which we don't have tons these days, but enough to where this greatly solidifies RNG as a great option for those moments...and RNGs getting to act like RNGs.

2. The RMEAs who have attached WSs that do NOT scale with TP just got the single largest boost I've ever seen given out in game. Gandiva, Armageddon, and Annihilator all have boosts to their white damage that we've been building around for years, but there is no direct benefit to saving TP as Jishnu's Radiance, Wildire, and Coronach all do not scale with TP. Recently some scenarios have arisen where WS'ing with those kind of options can be a DPS hindrance (like doubleshot and AM3 up with Arma against some mobs)....but this addition allows us to scale up damage on those 3 WSs unlike any other job in the game- we get to break the math of those WSs and how they were designed.

3. The inability for Hover Shot and Decoy Shot to interact will take some getting used to. As many pointed out, hate management these days is the biggest tool a RNG has for sustained damage in a long fight, and we have great tools to do so. But the draw of Hover Shot's DPS potential may cause some RNGs to ignore their other tools of hate management in lieu of big numbers.

4. All the +True Shot gear we have received in the past 3 years now has a lot more value. I'm interested in messing around with weirdo builds for long fights where these mechanics can be fully abused, and I think True Shot will be something to consider rather than "well, I guess that's nice the 1 time out of 1000 I shoot at that distance". We may need to sturdy up in order to stand/strafe/hover at that distance rather than always shooting from 20.4'.

All in all, its a LOT more than I expected. Major thanks to all who did the real work vs just getting to brainstorm on it^^

Do the hover shot stacks clear if you misstep?

What I think I'm reading is
1) do the dance, get a stack
2) if you do the dance again, you get the bonus for your stacks
3) if you miss the dance step no bonus, but no penalty
4) if you dance again you get the bonus again and resume building stacks

Is that right?

If missing a step in the dance doesn't reset the steps this is fantastic, but I'm a little worried I'm missing some catch that starts you back at 0 besides switching targets.

Only the bee and bird WKR was up on my server, probably gonna need to test on shark/lion/tojil to see more realistic number but it was nice to see barrage breaking the cap on non-omen boss. this was with arma

Try it on the VW Qutrub that takes 1000% damage and has like 2 million HP.

Decoy shot change isn't a nerf, definitely a buff as it allows you to fulltime it and they raised the ceiling of the enmity transfer at the start of the ability which decays to the level that it used to be by the end of the duration.

I'll have stronger opinions once I can take the Ranger out into a real full sized event with real targets, but I completely agree. I am starting to feel that Hover Shot/Decoy Shot will be our version of Hasso/Seigan. Except for us, one will be used when we need to help with hate transfer and we'll be stable, and the other when we can go full DD with reckless abandon, and dance around.

Mentally, I'm thinking of it as military Archer vs freelance Hunter or Assassin.

QoL question, is there a way to count your hover shot stacks other than manually counting your shots?

If you ever stop, it stops, does it not? you have to continue regardless of capping it.

See now THAT is an addon I could fully support lmao.

like a simple meter counter would be nice on a side

The UI icon could've had been set by SE to show the number, like Utsusemi, Steps, et cetera, although they would've needed to find a way to show more than the "5+" for it to be useful.

Here's hoping they adjust that at some point in the future.

Has testing (god I'm actually imagining how terrible this testing would be) or dev talk about it done yet? The wording of the update notes leaves room for interpretation.

Do the hands stop glowing when you've hit the cap? If so, that should be easy enough to identify.

I know an addon is planned by someone on the Windower discord. Just need to poke a little for the hand animation.

A lil quick test ^^
https://www.twitch.tv/kikoxiallday/clip/BeautifulTransparentScorpionWOOP-6G1obbDKHggqrIWX

This is my concern. I sort of just copied the patch note into the node but left it open lol.

I did not do that with Hover Shot.

Yeah, this would be reminiscent of the WAR burn strategy, and god the White damage strats look SOOO funny.

the dev digest said it raised the initial enmity reduction and floored at the same amount prior to the change because i guess they knew people would react to hearing that decoy shot was being changed, so take that with whatever amount of salt you find appropriate.

Testing things noone asked for:

Hover shot does not boost the bonus of Sharanga Path C

The bonus does carry over in the event you swap weapons (aka TP bonus gun > Gastra)

Its very easy to Kclub for TP, and just strafe during the WS animation (assuming your not animation locked /wink)

oh naughty

Okay, I pushed an update to the public node with a little clean up on the weaponskill section.

I added slight modifications to the formatting of the preface to hopefully grab people's eye before they just scroll to the item sets.

I also put in a breakout of the Wildfire sets so that in the future I can modify them easier if they get more of their own unique gear. For now it looks a little dumb that they have their own row of 95% the same stuff, but whatever.

How big of an impact is this update to hybrid WS like Hot Shot / Flaming Arrow?

The real question is.... Can we make split shot do more damage than a CORs leaden/last stand so we can meme on them for once...

Well my initial tests are suggesting a damage increase consistent with the damage bonus applying separate to the physical and magical portions of hybrid ws's I'm getting much more than a 2X damage of Hot Shot, more like 3.6X which is about what I would expect for it to count twice given my current gear, sample size is only 5 of each at the moment though so probably test more tomorrow.

You can also update recast on decoy shot to 3min

I had the same idea and...
it actually breaks the game lol
Chat cant handle the number XD

I was doing 40-99k per shot which was reducing its hp by max 2% damage. Then I did few barrages for ~8k, ~28k or ~60k, but all of them were dropping it's hp by 14-20% (so it was several hundreds thousands in reality) lol Tried with and without battlemod and same thing happened XD

just finished recording over an hour worth of RMEA hover shot material including the VW Qutrub and apex toads...
everything is hilarious on Qutrub so lol...
on apex toads we managed to hit 99k flaming arrow with Fail Not R15 and 99k Hot Shot with Gastra R15. Seems like those got the most boost since the boost is effecting both sides of the hybrid ws
I'll post all the videos tomorrow

Did you get broken barrages on qutrub too?

loll I don't see beyond 99k!!!!