(Don't) Fear The Reaper: A Dark Knight Guide

DRK has limited options outside of Volte set and the Alexander body. It's a set purely meant to resist status effects.

Do you have uploaded your LUAs for DRK somewhere? I came back since I left in 2013 due to college break. It would be really helpful to have a better idea for which gear I should aim for. I feel proud being from spain seeing someone from my country is able to deal such an incredible feat, lol.

I have these two and wondering if someone would know which would beat which.

Dagons Breastplate vs Valorous mail (augs Str 10, acc 36, att 36, DA 4%)

I'm having a hard time deciding

But for what. I dont recall any of that being in any sets outside of Dagon in subtle blow set.

Ah, I use val for when am3 is down on liberator. I've never checked sets on drk here.
For the meot part, it's always people talking about torecleaver.

DA val is pretty bad for liberator

Not sure Bad is the right word. But STP Val with AM3 up would be better.

Would odyssean body not be the ideal in that case?

Yeah. I made this val mail when I was playing Drg. It was for one of their weapon skills, Idr now which. Besides the point. The augment was just too good to pass up. So I transferred it over to my drk play. 6 DA, 56 acc, 36 att, 3stp, 3% haste seemed to me to be better than what dagon offered.

Edit: I use odin body for am3 up.

I haven't mathed it, but my gut says Dagon is better if the haste isn't making a difference, especially for mythic AM3.

Have any R15 Liberator owners played around with /DRG yet? Wondering how the 7% WSD stacks up against a DRK/SAM with Caladbolg.

I do, but no, I haven't played with that. But sounds like it wouldn't be bad to shed some hate

Bigger loss is hasso, regardless of what 2 hander you're using, dont think 7 extra wsd will outpace that, nice to shed hate but drks not too adverse to taking some hits

The weaponskill damage bonus from /Drg applies to all hits of your WS, so /Drg affects Liberator and Caladbolg equally in that regard.

As for Liberator vs Caladbolg, they very roughly compare like this:
Liberator will WS 50% more often
Caladbolg will WS 50% harder
With a lot of room for error. In practice for me for instance, Lib actually WS's about 65% more often than Calad given the same buffs, your mileage will vary.

As for /Drg, its niche is in long fights where your enmity builds up to cap over time, which you shed periodically with high jump. The only fight where this makes a difference in my experience are the wave3 dynamis mega bosses, and even there I prefer /Sam.

This is either inaccurate or misleading. If you are weapon skilling 50-65% more with liberator you are not properly buffed.
Max haste with sam roll you are coming out of any weapon skill regardless of GS, Gaxe, scythe, sword, dagger, doesn't matter. You are coming out of animation with enough tp to ws again.
Now you will generally have more TP overflow, but to claim 50%-65% more ws is not true at all.

That is blatantly untrue, especially given how using a WS delays your next round by 2 seconds.

It has already been parsed on a wave 3 boss dyna run, R15 lib and R11 calad. Where the r11 calad won by over 500k dmg and only had like 15 ws less than the r15 lib over the course of roughly 13 minutes.


edit: it was lib only had 12 ws more than the calad.
That was the case for a 13 minute fight were both drk had the same buffs as they were in the same party.
Lib drk lost overall parse by 500k in dmg, and ONLY had 12 ws more than the Calad.
Both were in near BiS gear, the calad drk had NQ neck, the lib drk had +1 neck at the time.

Torcleaver op!

Parsing between two different players is not a good test for WS frequency, especially when the details are so scarce as in your anecdote.

Regardless, my point was about the TP you have when you finish WSing, not the exact WS frequency difference between them.

To a point, Calad won mostly due to AM3 white dmg, the ws dmg was fairly consistent between both weapons with Torc only being slightly higher in overall ws dmg.
The benefit was Torc is still strong at 1k, where as Lib was pulling more tp overflow and hitting just shy of the Torc numbers.

Overall, I have seen 80k reso using Calad, I have seen 70k+ torcs, I have seen 65k+ Insurgency.
They all take an insane amount of buffs to hit those numbers and often are multihit procs. With the exception of Liberator with insurgency. Where as that specific ws doesn't generally have much, if an, multi attack in the build. So in order to hit those numbers with scythe, you need to absorb-str and just be superbuffed in general.

For calad to only win by 500k ish dmg in a 13 minute fight goes to show how close the weapons really are. In shorter duration fights I would put Liberator ahead in dmg as it doesn't need to rely so much on AM3 triple dmg and instead just uses AM3 for ws frequency and tp overflow.
In fights without cor giving sam roll, I would 100% put liberator as the better weapon as it can reach weaponskill much faster. But if you are Super buffed and the fight is going to be fairly long, then calad will begin creeping on the parse.

No but the fact that I have both weapons and have used both weapons on the same fights allows me to attest to the fact that the weapon skill frequency is roughly the same when full buffed.

https://youtu.be/9Xw7aGPKqcM

And this video shows you are clearly wrong about coming out of ws with enough tp for another ws.

Samurai is not Dark Knight, and that video shows 2+ rounds of TP attacks between each WS; the animation for a WS means nothing since they vary so much (you can be swinging for more than half an animation or not have swung once by the time it ends depending on the WS).

"Coming out" of a WS means 2 seconds after you start the WS, as that's when you can act again.

As someone who also has both R15 Caladbolg and Liberator, there IS a significant difference in WS rates when both are properly geared. Liberator both has more average hits per round (with AM3) AND substantially more STP in proper sets.

You are still wrong

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akei-9-tjXg

Still shows gain of tp during the 2 seconds you are talking about.

Give a timestamp; I looked at several WSs in that video and none of them got any TP in the 2 seconds after a WS.

Sounds like you are being lazy and refusing to do the work yourself. I can jump on youtube all day long and find people gaining tp during ws animation.

Gaining TP during WS animation is incredibly common; gaining TP (from meleeing) during the 2 seconds after you WS is a completely different thing, and is something that neither of your videos show.

https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/Forced_Delay

Feel free to edit the wiki with your new findings. Don't forget your source!

Ok, fine, at 4:44 he uses insurgency and you can clearly see he gains TP from a normal hit during the weapon skill animation.

Which is, exactly what I was talking about all along.


Here you see it again with great sword

He WSs at 4:43 and doesn't get TP again until 4:46. That's more than 2 seconds.

The actual animation of a WS itself is completely irrelevant, because it can be less than a second or more than 4 seconds. When someone speaks of coming out of a WS, it refers to the very first round after the 2 second delay ends. Caladbolg is only very rarely going to get enough TP for another WS in the first round after the delay, while Liberator usually does.

If you're properly WSing as soon as the game allows you to and not waiting for the previous animation to end or something, Liberator WSs significantly more often than Caladbolg.

you can use , and . to move one frame at a time and see that he does not gain tp from an auto attack for > 2 seconds, animation has nothing to do with the forced delay