Chango VS Ukonvasara !!!

Yes, it "seems" reasonable on surface, because he mixed some facts in his opinions and you weren't presented in the discussion an year ago when we had ukon debate.

At that time spreadsheet/theorycraft results and parse data were presented but it was completely written off by him with emotional arguments like "your war sucks then" "spreadsheet is incorrect" "but ukko sucks" "but 80:20 ws tp dmg split" "white dmg focused tp set is doing wrong" sort of thing...and more. So at that point his opinion about ukon loses credibility because I do think he is biased toward it.

Either way, at this point I will be convinced about weapon hierarchy if someone post a neak parse video with optimal playstyle for both weapons, with equipviewer on. Or else there very little reason for me to believe what he said was true just because of his (very very biased) post history regarding this matter.

Neak is a bad NM to check ukon DPS on. fight is too short to make up the difference on the first 3k ukko. Need a fight that takes longer than 30 seconds (preferably a lot longer). Same with yakshi. Ukon is solid, but it needs a specific type of fight to not be left completely in the dust. Random Ambu months have it doing pretty well.

We did the neak parses a while ago and had r15 chango > r15 conq > lycurgos > r15 ukon. none of us had a labrunda so idk where that fit in. It was a very big gap with ukon, we believed the reason to simply be how long the fight was. Opening with a 25kish ukko vs a 45k+ upheaval really forced it to climb out of a big hole. there just isnt many good fights to test it on. testing on wave three boss is just a giant load of crap.

Ideally you seem to want a 3+ minute fight that you can pre TP on. That really doesnt leave a lot of content. Onchyphora? (tested it on that fight, does pretty well, had reso beating it though). Honestly maybe half a dozen fights in the entire game where ukon is competitive.

Stuff like WOC or Kirin/Kouryu or reisenjima helms you are just going to MS zerg in about 1 minute. Ukon falls really far behind on a MS zerg. Unity mobs fall in 30 seconds. Basically all of escha besides onchyphora falls in about a minute or less (never been able to zerg zerde on war so idk about that one). The only content where you get a chance to make it shine is Master trials (not many people EVER do that) and wave 2 boss and wave three boss. What else?

If someone wants to send TP/Ukkos/Upheaval sets my way for Ukonvasara, I'll run those numbers after I get home from work tonight.

I have a question tho Spaitin. Did you hold TP for 2000+ Upheaval and used white damage focused TP set or just same sets like for Chango and WS asap?

Well, uses like sustained farming wave 3 Volte mobs is also very practical. Each individual mob goes fast, yeah, but going through all 8 in a group (where downtime between each one is trivial) takes long enough to be meaningful and give AM3 a chance to impact things.

A lot of D/VD Ambu fights are also potentially good tests of an adequate duration. But you do run into the major issue of having to start up AM3 on WAR and give other weapons a “head start”. Comparing to some other Empys, this is a non-issue for me on Masa SAM when I can Meditate and idle regain to 2900~3000tp by the time buffs are done. Not an issue for me on Arma RNG when I can Barrage and usually get 3000tp just after starting the fight. Significantly bigger issue for WAR having to build TP, use a less than ideal WS in Ukko, then finally get to the real DPS.


This really is a good question that I’d love to see data about. Seems pretty well established that Ukon falls behind if you use it like a typical “spam your good WS” weapon. But I think it’s right to try to tweak playstyle a bit to optimize Empys. Not sure if that makes enough difference to outweigh some of the hits to WS frequency/damage with other weapons (and it’s surely relevant that fewer WS = fewer SC opportunities), but it’s worth analyzing.

I used the same set you suggested in the war thread. Held to 2k we also tried holding to 3k and just spamming. Had fighters/rogues (that worked best) for awhile and sam/fighters and sam/rogues. we farmed 50k worth of beads with all the weapons, probably around 50 kills with ukon.I am not saying ukon CANT get good dmg. just Neak is a VERY bad NM to check ukon DPS with. Had lycurgos a big chunk ahead of ukon on neak. What I would like, is a better NM to test it on. Onchyphora is almost good, but his mechanic makes his parses pretty worthless. Same thing with Kin. Gin seems like a semi reasonable mob to test it on, but doing it essentially once a day and hoping to get all of my crew on at the same time is a bit of a struggle. Also it is a bad mob to use chango on.

One of the more interesting things was how good Lycurgos got when we did boost vit entrust vit and had a mnk using mantra. Was kinda fun. A solid option for a new war. I would still recommend motante over any other beginning weapon just because of how easy to build a solid reso set is.

So what is a good suggestion for an NM to test Ukon on, 3 min + fight that I can Pre TP on? A fight that I can do frequently. Honestly, all geas fete NM I would say Ukon is not a good choice of a weapon if your goal is to do DPS. The fights are just too short. I am also not counting SC damage with this.

Just curious. Have you maybe parsed DPS with some parser? It would be cool to know what was the DPS for all those builds.

did i use a parser? yes, we used three different parsers and set them to start calculations the moment the first hit landed and turn off the text had the mob dieing. Or do you mean do I have the Parses saved? Sadly i do not. Ill message one of them see if they do. But i doubt it. Ironically for ukon, we had spamming Upheaval on neak and forgetting AMIII entirely to be about the same DPS with warcry up and going sam/fighters. The fight is just too short for AMIII to make the impact we want out of it.

Yeah I was wondering about DPS check for all those builds. Mostly to compare it to sheet calculations and to compare DPS between jobs. IF you make any further tests, please save them XD

Next time i decide i want to make an aeonic ill probably keep it.

For all the concern about getting AMIII up, why not make getting AMIII part of the prefight? Obviously limited by battle fields where you can do this, but in Reijei, for example, Plenty of mobs around to gain TP on, build 3k TP, War gets AMIII and pop the fight. We already do prebattle uber buffs for zergs, why not treat AMIII the same? A semi competent group should be able to get a fight in with 80 seconds of AMIII active. That, or don't forget wings and such from various areas - those can be up prefight to open with AMIII WS on any job.

I think you are hitting the point on the head, takes a crap load of prefight work to get ukon working. We also did all of that. Then end result is a weapon that does competitive damage (still less) with WAY more effort being put into it. The other thing, if you want uber buffs for a zerg. Then you are using MS. under MS, EVERYTHING demolishes ukon. I wouild confidently put almost ANY 119 GS ahead of ukon during a MS zerg . i would bet zulf with 0 augments beats ukon during MS by a pretty big chunk.

If you're doing "uber buffs" for zergs or fighting something like a Reisenjima HELM, you're probably getting everyone pre-fight 3k TP via Tactician's Roll anyway. In which case, non-issue for those heavily buffed fights.

But this really isn't always practical. Look at a significant chunk of current high end content:
- You can't reliably get 3k TP to start an Ambuscade
- While it's viable if you're prepping for a HELM/WoC/Kirin, nobody wants to sit around every fight at #9 Reisenjima and wait for a WAR to run off somewhere to TP if you're doing something like spamming multiple consecutive Neaks.
- Divergence? You can maintain AM pretty well by building TP as AM is wearing to reapply it ASAP. But that does entail some DPS loss from having to "waste" a WS on Ukko's instead of using Upheaval (not an issue for, say, Empy DRK or SAM who can reapply AM with their best WS).
- I'm not giving too much weight to the "wasted" DPS from building to 3k TP instead of higher WS frequency from just spamming WS at 1000/1250/2000/whatever, and I think people overrate that loss (that aspect is more than made up for from the additional AM3 white damage), but that's also a minor consideration.

I also find it massively obnoxious to require non-standard COR buffs in order to make Ukon work. Most of the time, if you're only getting 2 rolls then Fighter's/Rogue's is going to be worse than the alternatives for most other jobs. Lots of people will clamor for Samurai Roll instead, and Chaos (particularly for Divergence with weaker GEO potency, where you may need the added Atk on non-WAR jobs).

So, you're likely gimping overall party DPS just to appease the WAR with an unusual weapon setup. Yuck.

Except it doesn't. Starting at 0 TP is the worse case scenario for Empy weapons and puts them in a situation they can never climb out from. By the time they would of gained 3K, the other guy would of WS'd 2.5 times. They would of then used that 3K TP on a weak WS to get AM3 up while the other guy continues to belt out stronger WS's. They would of continued to use a weaker WS due to their weapon choice for the duration of the fight. So not only does the extra melee damage need to overcome the difference in raw WS damage, it needs to overcome the hole they started out in. This won't happen.

The only situation were Empy's are "good" are where the mob is nerfing you via Amnesia / non-WSing allowed, or when you are nerfing yourself by denying the single strongest Corsair buff in the game (Samurai's Roll). The entire Fighters + Rogues roll line is more about removing Samurai's roll as that massively buffs the non-Ukon users. Using that logic I can reason that I can run faster then Usain Bolt, in the situation where I break his legs first.

i think ukon calculations should realistically start a 0-600 tp (meditate as /sam). doing too much prefight buffing makes the fight itself faster, but it extends prep time by a lot. and most content you really wont get the chance to pre tp. Reisenjima you basically go in 1 of two modes. Pop the mobs as fast as possible and destroy in thirty seconds, or uber buff and pop MS and kill. In both scenario Ukon gets left far behind.
Then you have other content like ambu. You dont get to pre TP and get AMIII up. so you have to build to 3k TP and start to catch up. As saevel said, that is 2.5ish WS. r15 chango upheaval this month is averaging 40k + (more like 42k). so by the time ukon STARTS to do good DPS, you are 100k damage behind. This isnt even considering SC or the fact that chango is better at TP building than ukon.

Dynamis? you dont get to pre TP and reapplying buffs and downtime between fights make basically all parses for it unusable. yeah you "can" get a decent parse. But i havnt seen one yet. Dynamis is just bad content for basically everything "testing" other than what the WS peak dmg could look like. The wave three boss tends to ruin parses because of the adds. I am thinking that chango AND ukon are not the ideal weapon for dynamis on war. It might be xoanon. (only used it in there twice, was awesome but havnt tried it on wave three yet.)Cataclysm is a pretty solid WS in there. Nothing solid at this time though.

Its probably best to just AM1 for most content.

Doesn't make Ukon better than Chango but 30% AM is still better than a full 50% AM prep.

Another scenario being one where WS damage is expected to be capped. Qutrub Ambuscade was a prime example

Fighters/Rogues were used specifically to show how potent AM3 has to potential to be when it's most viable, like during qutrub.

Samurai roll is irreplaceable, and contrary to how Saevel is presenting it, has the potential to devalue Changos advantage.

Chango is bad *** in dynamis because you need to farm lots and lots of mobs before those super boss's. Being able to self SC and do multi-step SC's is amazing.

I agree, but you should try xoanon with cataclysm. it is a bit interesting if you buff it up . Xoanon is specifically for those mobs BEFORE the bosses. It is meh on the bosses.

To be clear, I more or less agree with your overall take on Ukon.

And yes, you are correct that needing to start with 3000tp is a factor. But what I'm trying to say is that I think it's MUCH less of a factor than the weapon resulting in weaker per-WS numbers (either the Ukkos you are forced to use, or the Upheavals that are comparatively weaker to other weapon/WS). That's a consistent hit to damage which ends up being a much more significant overall factor than the having to build 3000tp what, once or maybe twice over an entire fight?

Yes, they're both something to consider, but I find people tend to overexaggerate the DPS loss from one or two AM-triggering 3k WS over the course of a fight. At the very least, that part is easier for the white damage from Empy AM3 to overcome.


While I suspect it was not your intent to imply otherwise, I would clarify that although your statement may be true for WAR Empy (I haven't seen data here refuting that assertion) it is not necessarily the case for ALL Empys.

Empys like Masamune, Caladbolg, Verethragna, and Twashtar don't have the issue of needing to use a "weaker" WS to trigger Empy AM, and their stats make the best WS even better. So it's definitely worth the tradeoff in taking a little longer to pop an occasional 3k WS (even less of an issue for SAM main with Meditate taking care of pre-fight 3k TP in almost all cases).

Or to take another approach, jobs that can do a ton of white damage (proportional to WS damage) like MNK NIN RNG can get more out of Empy AM3 to enhance that white damage.

Ukon WAR doesn't really have any of those advantages though:
1) It has to use a weaker WS (Ukko) to trigger aftermath
2) Even when AM is up and it can use a stronger WS (Upheaval), that's still not as strong as other weapons/WS (i.e., Chango/Upheaval, Shining One/ID, Doli/Decimation, etc.)
3) Even if you use a more white-damage focused build, WAR total damage is STILL heavily weighted toward WS, moreso than other jobs that can take more advantage of white damage (MNK RNG NIN etc.)


Yes. I agree that Fighter's/Rogues is crazy talk, because you're willingly gimping everyone by taking away their Samurai Roll, just to manipulate the white damage/WS damage split in favor of white damage, in order to inflate Ukon's numbers. It's totally impractical and a major nerf to overall party DPS.

Now, if you had 4 rolls though... at least you could fit all of Samurai, Chaos, Fighter's, Rogues. But I agree with you that when you add Samurai Roll to the equation, everyone's proportion of WS damage to white damage goes up. Which hurts Ukon.


I don't think this is really too relevant, since every other weapon can also start with /SAM meditate. They're all in the same place in that regard. Real difference is just the additional amount of TP the Ukon WAR wants to gain before first WS - i.e., comparing a 3000tp Ukko's to a 1250tp Upheaval, the real difference is going to be 1750 additional tp regardless of starting point (unless both are starting at 3k).


Eh, I'm not saying whole run Dyna parses are greatly useful. But surely you can compare stuff like several runs of wave 3 from wave start until final boss, as long as same buffs are used, and get some useful ballpark DPS comparisons from weapon to weapon (same player using different weapons). Or even parsing each individual group of 8 Voltes to get an idea across multiple samples of how a weapon performs DPS-wise in that kind of situation where there's little downtime and a significant enough total time to kill the entire cluster of mobs.

As for pre-TP in Dyna, this is pretty minor IMHO. Nobody is ever doing perfectly optimized WS in Dyna just due to changing mobs so often, overkilling mobs with WS regardless of weapon/TP, etc. So it's less impactful to not WS at absolutely perfect times (we're not talking about, like, parsing a lengthy wave 2/3 boss). You can surely sit there and get an extra 1750TP on a trash mob before firing off an occasional 3000tp WS to maintain AM consistently throughout a run with very minimal difficulty.


I seriously doubt this. 20% more ODT for 3min is likely going add enough in extra white damage to be well worth building 3000tp to maintain. I've not seen reliable data suggesting otherwise, but if someone can show otherwise...

Though, like you said, I'm certainly not implying that means Ukon is better than Chango. Just that when using Empys, I think it does make sense to shoot for AM3 as the standard approach.

I was only speaking in the context of WAR here since I know other jobs can use Empys for various reasons.


The weaker WS average is the primary reason, the damage hole is why it can never "catch up". That has more to do with those people who want to create a fight against a theoretical monster with infinite HP.

Player A starts at 0 internet cookies and gains 3 internet cookies every second.

Player B starts at -100 but gains 4 internet cookies every second.

In this situation Player B will eclipse Player A, given infinite time. This is unrealistic as there is no such thing as infinite time, and in the case of Emp's that time is 180 seconds minus twice the time it takes to build 3K TP. The -100 represents the hole they start in and that gets periodically reapplied. In the case of regular Empy uses that penalty isn't very bad and they accumulate those internet cookies much faster then the other guy.

None is really saying to not use Samurai roll. I always had Fighter's and Samurai in mind for Ukon. Outside of Dynamis where GEO is gimped, it should be generally possible to not use Chaos roll, when you have access to Armor Break/Dia2-3/Frailty and most jobs can use Berserk, Last Resort or Naegling.

Some really napkin math:
War white damage per round is at ~5000 (this is with floored dDEX and no blood rage or rogue roll). You need at least 2 rounds after WS to WS again.

Scenario 1:
Chango will do 10000 white damage and xxx damage with Upheaval
Ukon will do 20000 white damage and xxx damage with Upheaval (Tho at this point Ukko's Fury might be better when WSing asap)

Scenario 2:
Chango will do 10000 white damage and xxx damage with Upheaval in 5.41 sec
Ukon will do 40000 white damage and xxx damage with Upheaval (will TP for 2 more rounds and WS for more damage than Chango after 2 rounds) in 8.83 sec


Scenario 1: Would Upheaval with Chango do 10000 more damage? I kinda doubt it.
Scenario 2: Let's assume Uphaevel from Chango will do 35k damage (I exclude both warcry and blood rage from this). That gives 45000 damage total and 8317 DPS. Upheaval from Ukon after 2 more round would do more, but let's assume it will do the same 35k. That's 75k total and 8493 DPS.

Please explain the holes in that napkin math, because outside of obvious disadvantage of getting AM3 up, I see Ukon being at least on par or higher when you are already have AM3 up.

Now if the DPS advantage is only for example 100, then it would be 18000 more damage in 180 sec. Which means Ukon would probably lose, because the loss from initial disadvantage of building AM3 is probably higher, but if the DPS advantage is something around 300- or 400, then it might be worth it, but this would required detailed math or good practical tests with controlled environment.

Your napkin math... is all over the place tbh.

Assuming:
- both Chango and Ukon R15 (thus same base damage)
- ideal TP sets (100% DA build for Chango, your AM3 set for Ukon)
- capped attack (of course)
- capped Double Attack on both builds (this skews things slightly in favor of Ukon)
- capped dDex on both builds (this too)
- AM3 fulltime on Ukon (this too)

Then we're looking at

Chango:
DA damage +20 (cape)
Crit rate +35 (20 base + 15 dDex)
Crit damage +7 (gifts)

Ukon:
DA damage +31 (cape + empy legs)
Crit rate +52 (20 base + 15 dDex + 17 from gear)
Crit damage +24 (7 gifts + 17 in gear)
White damage x2 (empy AM3 is effectively this)

We're looking at white damage multiplier of 1.2 (up to 1.284 * 35% of the time) for Chango VS 2.61 (up to 3.249 * 52% of the time) for Ukon^{I'm shitty at mathing probabilities so I'm not going to do that}. This is 2.2-2.5 times the white damage of Chango. This is doubled 3% of the time (empy set proc), but that's not very relevant since it's only one round every 33, so a 3% increase per swing on average (makes for pretty screenshots tho, for sure).

Now let's take a look at WSs.

Assuming:
- no TP overflow for ease of calculations (this skews things heavily in favor of Ukon)
- always 2 DA proc on WS for both builds (not too unlikely) but no TA, making Upheaval 6 hits instead of 4
- performing Upheaval at the right TP values to get the exact same numbers on both weapons

Upheaval is a flat 10% stronger on R15 Chango due to augments, then there's TP bonus. To make it of comparable strength on both weapons:

6 hit Upheaval at 1750 TP is 2.875 + 5 = 7.875 ftp base, 8.66 on R15 Chango.

To get to the same ftp with Ukon, we need to push a little past 2k tp, around 2045 if I did the math right (I probably did not).
This means that to have the exact same Upheaval numbers, Chango can spam WS at 1000 TP, where Ukonvasara needs to wait for 1800 TP.

For reference, R0 6 hit Upheaval at 1250 effective TP has an ftp value of 6.625. 500 TP bonus and R15 augments are thus a flat 30% increase in WS damage (actually a bit more because we have 50% WSD in our best Upheaval set, which is multiplicative with this).
Hence, Scenario 1 answer: yes, if you spam Upheaval at 1k TP on both weapons, Chango it will do 10k more damage or more, 500 tp bonus and R15 augments are just *that* powerful.

Then there's TP gain. How did you conclude that waiting two more rounds with Ukon would land a stronger Upheaval? That can't be, Ukon needs at least 3 more rounds than Chango to gain enough TP for a comparable WS:

Your AM3 set for Ukon has 15+13 store TP VS the 15+30 of our 100% DA Chango set, plus higher TP return on Upheaval because permanent 10 stre tp on Chango. So the cycle time you calculated is wrong and the difference is quite bigger than that. Then keep in mind that we're assuming some really weird situation with all the possible buffs, in reality you're seldom going to have capped DA with the Ukon build - this lengthens cycle time even further, on average.
For reference, in Chango 100% DA set with Carbonara and no Samurai roll/no Retaliation proc, I generally end up at 1006 TP. That means at least one more round for Ukon to get to 1k, *then* two more rounds to get 1800.

(Things change a bit with Samurai roll but not *too* much, and we're leaving Napkinmathlandia really fast here.)

Assuming no misses, our Chango 5hit 100% DA build effectively has 2 melee rounds between WS *without Samurai roll*. Ukon needs FIVE melee rounds to perform a WS of the same strength. All things accounted for, this means that Ukon WS frequency is half that of Chango or worse if you want to output the same numbers, give or take a bit. Add in the need to use Ukko's fury every now and then to put AM3 back up, which no matter what will always be a good 30% weaker than Upheaval even with R15 bonus, and consider that most of the assumptions I made here skew things in favor of Ukon, especially the part were we ignored SC damage, which is going to be much higher with Chango by virtue of Aeonic AM...

...and there's no way that Ukonvasara under AM3 outputs nearly enough white damage to keep up with R15 Chango Upheaval spam, by the math of it, in an absolute sense. Situationally things might change just enough, but you kinda need to force things to make it happen.

One day we will get an ambuscade where the boss spams Yaegasumi or something and there Ukonvasara will be amazeballs, until then Ukon is just a fun toy and not much more. As it is now, it is at best on par, and you need to go quite a bit out of your way to make it so, by having specific buffs, getting 3k TP before the fight, etc.

(Corrections, or unaccounted for factors, are welcome)

Fighter/Samurai roll were assumed.

I didnt even assume my white damage build for Ukon, because then it wouldnt be 10k damage difference in white damage in 2 attack rounds but much more.

But let's use that build. It has +13 STP. +15 STP from /SAM. Then let's say +72 from CC Samurai, tho people usually assume +81 here (which is XI CC samurai roll with +7 phantom gear). That's +100 StoreTP. That gives ~269 TP per hit with Ukonvasara. 2hits per round, so 538TP per round. 2 rounds is 1076 TP. Now Chango has more store tp in set, so let's lower that 1076 to 800.

You want to tell me that 800 additional TP from those 2 rounds won't at least be even with 500TP bonus and +10% Upheaval damage? Please notice that +70STR is +18 damage, because fSTR wont be even close to cap with Chango on anything serious and +20dex is another +2 base damage with Utu grip. That 20 base damage is +3% increase in Upheaval damage, so we have +500TP +~6.5% Upheaval damage on Chango vs +800 TP on Ukon with 2 additional rounds.

Even assuming Upheaval with Chango would have avg 1750TP (1250+500) and Ukonvasara with 2 more rounds will have 2050, that's ~14% increase is WS damage from fTP gain and 3% from STR and DEX vs +10% increase in WS damage from R15 Chango.

I stay with what I said. With Fighter/Samurai rolls, Ukon will do same or more damage with Upheaval if you will add 2 more TP round on top of Chango rounds.

EDIT: Forgot to add Moonshade. So 2000TP with Chango and 2300TP with Ukon. Doesn't really change anything. That's still ~14% increase for Upheaval damage.

This is just the opening salvo for both. Chango continues to average 2 AA rounds/WS, Ukon does 4 AA rounds/WS. Feel free to extrapolate from there.

Keep in mind, WS lock is .4s longer than the auto attack rate.

This is basically the result i got. For a lot of extra work, it can be on par with chango. But you could kill 5 neaks on chango by the time you kill 1 on ukon because of the super annoying pre fight work you need to do. It can be as good, but in general it will be far behind. You are gimping your total event timeline by constantly pre fight AMIII buffing. Assuming that is even an option. without prefight AMIII, ukon is realllyyyyy far behind. Then you add SC damage which puts chango massively ahead of ukon. 2xDD set up has a good chunk of SC damage.

I have no idea what is so hard in prebuffing Ukon in Escha. You go and buy wing and use it 3 times and buy again. Takes like 20 sec with temps addon. You go pop Neak, you start with 3000TP. When AM is about to wear off, you pop wings and meditate between pops and you should be at almost 3000TP again. So all you nee din Escha for 6+ minutes of fight is buy wings and use it. After 6 min+ you are probably done with your sets if you spam Neaks and need to go to npc again to buy KI, so you can buy wings again. Not to mention if you boxing or play with friends, they can all have aoe wings too, so you can have even easier time with that.

Now in other events like Ambuscade, it's much worse, but on the other hand Ambu fights usually takes longer, so more power for Ukon to catch up.

At the end of a day, I don't have Ukon, so I can't really go prove my point and as much as I would like to get it and buff WAR to a point that I could go and test it, I would rather finish my other jobs that I like more. I wont discuss this topic again until I can do a practical test, so probably few months from now.

1) You don't even need 3 wings to get 3k. 1 wing in stp set can get you 2000+ and that's enough. I can usually get 2.7k on cor in stp set + roll. WAR shouldn't be any different.

2) schah(none zerg with a large pt) can take somewhat long if people wants to try that. Use wing in stp set in between.

3) Pre tp before escha fight is pretty common from my experience. Especially for serious ones like T4 melee, not T1 spam.

4) This entire discussion shouldn't involve AM3 preparation because the argument wasn't "will ukon win parse more easily" to begin with. If that was the argument then chango obviously wins. The argument was to compare dps generation on scoreboard when both are being used optimally.

I would suggest getting a group together and trying it. Practical tests would help you in this case. Kill 12 neaks with doing a 3k WS BEFORE the fight and then do 12 neaks and just ignore the pre TP. You will see, i have done the practical tests and i stand by the Chango > conq > Lycurgos > Ukon. Probably put labrunda in before ukon as well. none of us bought that weapon though. This stands true with doing AMIII before the fights. Granted this is ONLY for neak/yakshi. mostly neak.