[X] My Assistant

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Second, I'd like to see skyward sword damage increased since it seems too low compared to other skills. I mean, even the staff skill (concussive strike I believe) does more damage... wtf lol.

Do you have any suggestions or comments for better optimization? This is my gear for now:

The plan is to get a full Peerless set of:
Ethereal Katana of Slaughter
Ethereal Wakizashi Of the Nimble - slaughter seems a waste on offhand, balance is crap because half of the bonus is negated since it's easy to attain 200% accuracy from other sources. It seems to me that the choice is always between swiftness and nimble and I'm guessing extra parry helps a lot more than a bit more attack speed.
Savage Shade Armor Set of the Shadowdancer

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I'm not going to discuss every single point of your textwall (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/heh.gif) I'll just give you some personal generic opinion here.

First, you can play very well without Peerlesses; quite good legendaries are not difficult to find and not even much expensive, in your soulfusable range. In fact, a good Legendary of the right type is better then a Peerless with useless suffix; finding a Peerless of exactly the right type is a stroke of luck, not something you should count on. A full Peerless set of "best" items is a masochistic goal that will just make you hate the game. Not even very rich players have "best possible" full set of Peerlesses (with possibly very few exceptions).

Second, you should approach the equipment choice with an incremental strategy rather then an "end-game" startegy, especially when your resources/income are limited; for example, the first thing you should do is change that Mag plain Boot.
Savage Shadowdancer are usually more sought for, therefore more costly then other Shade armor; until you are above L.400 (and even after), a mix of simple Shadowdancer and Savage Fleet is more then adequate.
The off-hand for Niten shouldn't be Slaughter, as you guessed. Waki of Nimble is a very good choice, but it doesn't need to be Ethereal; if you find a very good one get it even if it's not Ethereal, then just IW10 to get the Void attack. The little Interference and Burden it has can be completely wiped out with a Featherweight, less then 100C, to make it completely the same as an Ethereal one (but easier to find a probably cheaper too).

Third, the real cost of a set is in the IW and forging. While there's no point in highly forge anything that youll replace soon, a little bit of forging of important stats is a must. The cost of IW is in the Amnesia Shards you have to use when you are trying to get the right potencies; but for items that youll replace you should just IW them accepting whatever you get.

Last but not least, "passive" income will always be low; a Goldstar surely helps, but not as much as one could think (though it has other benefits not directly related to income).
The main income for a starless low level will come from :
1) lucky drops (and here RE is your friend; try to do as much of them as you can always on PFUDOR, they are fast and quite easy)
2) artifacts and trophies selling (you can do the last 3 arenas on low diff if you cant on PFUDOR or is too slow, it doesnt matter for trophies)

Once also the monster lab could give some good income, but with the drop in prices for almost all the bindings it's not giving much nowadays, unless you have unlocked a lot of monsters. Still, if you have Tokens laying around, use them to open monster slots and start your monster army; just dont sink money in crystals to increase their PL because it's mostly useless.

Last but not least, seeing as you started a long time ago, you should have participated in the Easter and Xmas events; by now you would have got millions in gifted trophies, and cookies that would have given you a bit of that "passive income" you were wishing (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

First of all thanks for taking the time, if not even a single person would address my points I think I would just give up on coming to the forum (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif)

I'll begin at the end since it's relevant

Last but not least, seeing as you started a long time ago, you should have participated in the Easter and Xmas events; by now you would have got millions in gifted trophies, and cookies that would have given you a bit of that "passive income" you were wishing (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Believe me, I know I missed out on a lot. I did "start" long ago, but that's misleading. Even though my account was registered in 2010, I only started this game in around 2013 or sometime near that, and ended up quitting after a few months. I was effectively away from it for 6 or 7 years, and that was after I never even got really into it. Don't ask me why I remembered to come back last month because not even I know that. Long story short, Let's assume I started playing this only 2 months or so ago. I read most of the wiki by now so I'm not exactly a beginner either.
BTW my biggest mistake was probably at the early stages of the game. I actually sank around 11 million credits on training, which is a lot for a low level I guess. Got jebaited by the big percentages. It was only after I actually "studied" the loot roll flowchart that I understood how big a mistake that was (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/dry.gif)

All your points make sense, and to avoid another endless wall of text ill summarize things:

I do admit I have some trouble applying incremental strategies, I always aim for the end game. However, I am doing that up to a point. Every single piece of gear I have so far is either from drops or "lucky" finds on the bazaar. And yes replacing the boots is my priority but no drops/sales so far. At the end of the day I still need to aim for that Peerless set because that's what motivates me.

About IW, i always level to 10 on weapons to get the elemental strike but have been completely skipping over armor since it feels like a waste for now (maybe except for juggernaut). I'm not even gonna consider amnesia shards at least until I have Dark Descent (which is not a priority). Forging is completely out of the question for now since mats are too expensive and yes I do know how important it is since i "coded" the formulas on excel to test how much it would increase the stats.

I do have a small monster farm - 13 (1 of each type) all around level 210 and one level 450. I only use crystals to keep morale up mostly. But this is actually one of the things I dislike the most about this game. The rate at which you increase the PL of monsters is abysmally higher than the rate at which you get chaos tokens. The results is that monsters increase on level but not on stats. This is bad for both the monster owner and the players since the battles become unbalanced by super weak monsters. Sometimes I find 20k HP monsters in the middle of 100 HP ones. This system is one of the main things I would like to see revamped.

I got crystarium 3 so far and I was thinking about going for 4 and 5 next. The alternative is tokenizer but still haven't decided which one provides the most income on the long run.
I do 24 REs everyday on PFUDOR (lucky I got the time for now) and on good days do all 3 last arenas (all it takes is patience really, which I don't always have).
About selling trophies.. Again, thinking about end-game. I got more than 1300 trophies (mostry from SGs) which I was saving for that day when I'll get FoS (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif). However, I'm planning to sell my 55 Energy Drinks (doubt I'll ever use them), Noodle trophies and HGC. That should already get me 1 or 2 more hath perks at least. Just need to get into the whole HVMarket thing which I didn't explore yet.

Guess that's it for now. Cheers

This post has been edited by Snickers1: Feb 1 2021, 11:44

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I don't have experience playing Niten so I'll refrain to comment anything on how to play it, but as a fellow light armor player I suggest you change your gear in the following order of priority: Leather, Magnificent Negation, Magnificent of Fleet. Since it seems you might be struggling on survival leather gets in the way of your evade with its burden and the puny mitigations it has aren't worth it, also the extra damage of shade does come handy. Also the Mag of Fleet is lower leveled for sure, but it's a Savage and Fleet so it most likely is helping you way more than the Negation one even with the level difference.

I agree with mundomuñeca about equipment. You can always start with moving to legendary ranges before moving to shade (debatable), then move to fleet/shadowdancer and after that comes the savage prefix. And I don't know if you meant about there not being savage shadowdancers in your soulfuse range but just in case a reminder that SmartSearch is really finicky about how you search for stuff, for example if you type "leggings shadowdancer" you'll end up with zero results, however if you type "leggings of the shadowdancer" you end up with several results (by the way "of the shadowdancer leggings" also gives me zero results). Ah yeah and don't forget to save threads before you search for something in order to update the database.

And the pony cannon might end up being a good investment because if you're on the weak side, finishing off schoolgirls will take long enough that the cooldown is over by the time you end the round so you can just shoot again as soon as the next round starts, then again if you're thinking about maging it will end up being useless so give it some consideration before you decide anything.

I agree with mundomuñeca about equipment. You can always start with moving to legendary ranges before moving to shade (debatable), then move to fleet/shadowdancer and after that comes the savage prefix. And I don't know if you meant about there not being savage shadowdancers in your soulfuse range but just in case a reminder that SmartSearch is really finicky about how you search for stuff, for example if you type "leggings shadowdancer" you'll end up with zero results, however if you type "leggings of the shadowdancer" you end up with several results (by the way "of the shadowdancer leggings" also gives me zero results). Ah yeah and don't forget to save threads before you search for something in order to update the database.

Not sure If you saw the image of the gear page i put on the original post, but I'm already on a mix of legendary/Shade/savage thingies (the weakest link being the boots for now, still leather). But like I said I can do the last 3 arenas on PFDUDOR just fine, it's actually the middle ones that are more difficult (but who cares about those anyway).

About the SmartSearch thing: What i meant was PEERLESS shadowdancer gear. Not a single one for sale. I did the exact same searches just changing the Peerless to Legendary, and I got hits, so it was properly done, I assume. However, pretty much all Legendaries were out of my range for now, anyway.

About the SmartSearch thing: What i meant was PEERLESS shadowdancer gear. Not a single one for sale. I did the exact same searches just changing the Peerless to Legendary, and I got hits, so it was properly done, I assume. However, pretty much all Legendaries were out of my range for now, anyway.

Just for clarity: peerlesses in HV are a rarity unseen in the vast majority of modern games. An extremely active player might get 1 a month if they grind really hard (spending many energy drinks a day). Even with FoS, the chances of getting the 'right' pieces is still insanely low; for the record, I don't think anyone currently has a full peerless set of optimal prefix/suffixes, although I do know at least one player is only one piece away - after many years, and a ridiculous amount of money.

Settle for good legendaries. A full peerless set is not a realistic goal; it's a pipe dream for people who have little else to do in HV and still want to keep working on their account. But if you are just a daily arena player, forget it - you're gonna need thousands of dollars, multiple years of patience, and a lot of luck to get a peerless set of mage equipment.

And mage equipment is significantly easier to get than savage shadowdancers, or savage slaughters - look at the prefix/suffix rates on the wiki for an idea of why. Even blackjac00 - a bitcoin jillionaire who was likely the richest player the game has ever seen, maybe even including StonyCat - gave up trying to get full savage slaughters, and settled for plain-prefixed slaughters, without even a single piece from FoS after many, many, many attempts. And he quit with 1.5b worth of noodles in his inventory, after monopolizing the trophy economy for over a year. Modern FoSers have to compete with each other.

Not sure If you saw the image of the gear page i put on the original post, but I'm already on a mix of legendary/Shade/savage thingies (the weakest link being the boots for now, still leather). But like I said I can do the last 3 arenas on PFDUDOR just fine, it's actually the middle ones that are more difficult (but who cares about those anyway).

About the SmartSearch thing: What i meant was PEERLESS shadowdancer gear. Not a single one for sale. I did the exact same searches just changing the Peerless to Legendary, and I got hits, so it was properly done, I assume. However, pretty much all Legendaries were out of my range for now, anyway.

Yeah I saw the gear, in any case as soon as your evade goes up you probably will be able to have a better time in the other arenas, I suppose it will come naturally as you level up and replace the stuff just like it did with me...hopefully. I had a pair of boots that would've fit you perfectly but sold them already, if only you had posted a few days earlier (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/anime_cry.gif)

And like Nezu said the Peerless Shadowdancers are very rare, even random peerless stuff seems very rare but who knows, there's one in the lottery right now and there's still time so if you haven't you can still buy the winning ticket (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/tongue.gif) (no really, it could happen)

Ahaha Nezu finally brutal honesty, that's what I was looking for. You call it a pipe dream EVEN if spending thousands of dollars which makes it hillarious to think about it considering I don't intend to spend any money on it lol. Anyway I didn't intend to skip legendary, I just thought MAYBE i could do the sacrifice and keep playing with unforged legendaries until finally getting to peerless since mats are so expensive. Even the 10% you don't get back from salvaging hurts. However, apparently, HV is the place where dreams go to die (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif).

Yeah I saw the gear, in any case as soon as your evade goes up you probably will be able to have a better time in the other arenas, I suppose it will come naturally as you level up and replace the stuff just like it did with me...hopefully. I had a pair of boots that would've fit you perfectly but sold them already, if only you had posted a few days earlier

too bad (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

And like Nezu said the Peerless Shadowdancers are very rare, even random peerless stuff seems very rare but who knows, there's one in the lottery right now and there's still time so if you haven't you can still buy the winning ticket (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/tongue.gif) (no really, it could happen)

Don't have nearly enough GP for any lottery, unfortunately. Only enough for roughly 300 tickets, nowhere near the 72k already there lol.

(IMG:[pic.skk.moe] https://pic.skk.moe/file/sukkaw/hv/dwd/20200203-drop.png) (IMG:[pic.skk.moe] https://pic.skk.moe/file/sukkaw/hv/dwd/20210203-table.png)

Got new boots, test them with PFUDOR DwD.

My Set:

Legendary Shocking Rapier of Slaughter
Peerless Jade Force Shield of Warding
Legendary Ruby Shade Helmet of the Arcanist
Legendary Cobalt Shade Breastplate of the Fleet
Legendary Ruby Shade Gauntlets of the Fleet
Legendary Savage Shade Leggings of the Arcanist
Peerless Zircon Shade Boots of the Fleet

Got new boots, test them with PFUDOR DwD.

Soulbound a shadowdancer breastplate, test again (no infusion used on weapon).

(IMG:[pic.skk.moe] https://pic.skk.moe/file/sukkaw/hv/dwd/20210206.png)

Current set:

Legendary Shocking Rapier of Slaughter
Peerless Jade Force Shield of Warding
Legendary Ruby Shade Helmet of the Arcanist
Legendary Jade Shade Breastplate of the Shadowdancer
Legendary Ruby Shade Gauntlets of the Fleet
Legendary Savage Shade Leggings of the Arcanist
Peerless Zircon Shade Boots of the Fleet

Soulbound a shadowdancer breastplate, test again (no infusion used on weapon).

(IMG:[pic.skk.moe] https://pic.skk.moe/file/sukkaw/hv/dwd/20210206.png)

Current set:

Legendary Shocking Rapier of Slaughter
Peerless Jade Force Shield of Warding
Legendary Ruby Shade Helmet of the Arcanist
Legendary Jade Shade Breastplate of the Shadowdancer
Legendary Ruby Shade Gauntlets of the Fleet
Legendary Savage Shade Leggings of the Arcanist
Peerless Zircon Shade Boots of the Fleet

I would think that the force shield is a bit too much burden to work with shades? Do you use feathers on it? It's an interesting style that you're trying, but it's hard to make this work I fear. To profit from the defense of your shield, it should be forged much more though. But your evade is high, which means less stunned monsters from your shield, and less damage from the parry of your rapier

This post has been edited by Noni: Feb 6 2021, 09:33

I would think that the force shield is a bit too much burden to work with shades? Do you use feathers on it? It's an interesting style that you're trying, but it's hard to make this work I fear. To profit from the defense of your shield, it should be forged much more though. But your evade is high, which means less stunned monsters from your shield, and less damage from the parry of your rapier

Yeah, I notice that. High evade, lower chance of the overcharge, hard to maintain spirit stance.

I should try 2H or DW in the future with my current shade set.

(IMG:[pic.skk.moe] https://pic.skk.moe/file/sukkaw/hv/dwd/20210207.png)

Still the same set, but use infusions on my rapier.

2,562 turns 34:47:47 (0.02 t/s) 2 horses kind of record. was a bit distracted.

(IMG:[pic.skk.moe] https://pic.skk.moe/file/sukkaw/hv/dwd/20210207.png)

Still the same set, but use infusions on my rapier.

(IMG:[pic.skk.moe] https://pic.skk.moe/file/sukkaw/hv/dwd/20210213.png)

Since today is Saturday and my Rapier is a Shocking one, I manage to keep turns under 8000 without using infusions on my weapon.

Otherwise, recently my network becomes a little unstable and it is now harder to maintain 2t/s speed for me.

(IMG:[pic.skk.moe] https://pic.skk.moe/file/sukkaw/hv/dwd/20210213.png)

Since today is Saturday and my Rapier is a Shocking one, I manage to keep turns under 8000 without using infusions on my weapon.

Otherwise, recently my network becomes a little unstable and it is now harder to maintain 2t/s speed for me.

(IMG:[pic.skk.moe] https://pic.skk.moe/file/sukkaw/hv/dwd/20210214.png)

Less trophies drops. QAQ.

My first run as Fire mage. No hover used btw, not until I understand how its working:

(IMG:[i.ibb.co] https://i.ibb.co/HGS5gH7/Lvl439-150-P.jpg)

I also did it once before as 2H / Heavy, which took me something like 3h 40m (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif), so I swore off this arena "forever". Maybe I can bring it back now (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) .

Granted I'm fire mage and its tuesday, so....

(IMG:[pic.skk.moe] https://pic.skk.moe/file/sukkaw/hv/dwd/20210218.png)

Reduce turns by 500 using 10 Binding of Slaughters.

Granted I'm fire mage and its tuesday, so....

Why you have so many overcharges as a mage? Maybe you could try to use OFC to speed up more?

This post has been edited by OnceForAll: Feb 18 2021, 13:30

Why you have so many overcharges as a mage? Maybe you could try to use OFC to speed up more?

I don't have OFC. I just use 'em as free heals or mana.

(IMG:[pic.skk.moe] https://pic.skk.moe/file/sukkaw/hv/dwd/20210225.png)

Take a try for DW style. Not bad actually.

Here is my set:

Legendary Shocking Rapier of Slaughter
Legendary Tempestuous Wakizashi of the Nimble
Legendary Ruby Shade Helmet of the Arcanist
Legendary Jade Shade Breastplate of the Shadowdancer
Legendary Agile Shade Gauntlets of the Shadowdancer
Legendary Savage Shade Leggings of Negation
Peerless Zircon Shade Boots of the Fleet

I had posted improvements a week or 2 earlier in another thread but will do it here too. This was at level 349 (probably) on Friday. It's been a few times now on Cold, Dark and All days so I can confidently say I broke both the 5500 and 35 mins (not for this run of course) barrier without a doubt, for now at least. I did end up replacing my last leather and had to forge defense to somewhat compensate for the loss while the attack improved naturally due to the gear. Also this is now at legendary level of gear thus the improvements should slow down a lot until I can complete my shade Exodia/get a better weapon worthy of more forge.

This result happened just after I hit level 350 and after that I seemed to dance around 5300-5700 rounds for a while until I changed weapon from an Estoc to a Longsword in January, then hit a low of 5100-5200 I think, average went down to 5400, modified keybinds and the way I play to a very sloppy but comfy style and my time decreased but turns went up sky high, now being between 5700-6350 turns (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif)



This one being from the 370s or so, haven't really paid much attention lately so there's a chance the 30 minute mark has already been beaten, who knows, but it seems the sloppier I play the faster I end up even if turns increase. Also my current boots are a good 40+ levels behind and I've really slacked on forging all of my current gear but since I have my remaining Exodia parts on the back waiting for IW and soulfuse as soon as I get to level 400 it seems it's better to put up with stuff as it is for a mere 19 levels more, then comes the forging to 7 or 10 and hopefully there's more improvement before the monster scaling catches up. Seems I'm already at the "melee barrier"'s entrance though so we'll see then (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/faint.gif)