Animator's Workshop: A Puppetmaster's Guide 2.0

Automaton's have a native -6dt(-16/256) separate from Stout servant. I think that source might be multiplicative, but I dunno for sure.

For people that have PM'd me asking for advice/guides/gear suggestions for tanking on PUP, I'm working on it. I'll make a separate topic for it when I am ready. Hopefully I can get my stuff together and finished by this weekend some time.

I use PUP/RUN for soloing Puppet in Peril on Normal. Still trying to get the Divinator II to drop from it. The main boss takes very low physical damage but extra from magic, so runes actually do more damage per hit than my KKK does.

For Avatars, I still use /WHM to paralyna Apururu and not lose Curagas and keep up stoneskin as a buffer to survive back to back area damage (Judgment Bolt into Thunderspark is pretty horrible). I tried /RUN but it was much more dangerous.

Right now the Trust Campaign ended and the trusts HP/MP went down dramatically. It's making these fights a lot more dangerous than last week was.

Which Merits are Recomended for PUP Nowdays ?

I lvl'd back then and did :

Auto Melee 5/5
Auto Ranged 5/5

Optimization 5/5
Fine-Tuning 5/5

Anything I must change ?

or Recomended to change ?

I using Divinator / Divinator II

So, I did:

Melee 5/5
Ranged 5/5

Optimization 5/5
Fine-Tuning 3/5
Ventriloquy 1/5
Role Reversal 1/5

Another popular choice if you're riding your repairs is to put 5/5 in repair in group one and put the remaining 5 in melee/ranged.

I think the most important ones (imo) are Optimization 5/5, Ventriloquy 1/5, and Role Reversal 1/5

Why Ventriloquy 1/5, and Role Reversal 1/5 important nowdays ?

wouldnt Fine-Tuning be better since the pet would get all sorts of buffs ?

Just wondering

and also Repair is nice one, might do that Repair 5/5 and Melee 5/5

^^ ty

Ventriloquy is great for dumping hate whether it's to solidify hate on you or the puppet or to take heat off yourself because you're worried of taking hate from a proper tank. There's also the rare chance you've realized you've made a mistake and need a quick exit strategy.

Role Reversal is essentially free HP for whoever is lower. If your repair recast is down or you're in a bind waiting for a cure to pop up from your auto that hp could mean the difference between a successful solo and death.

While other jobs can often get away with missing out on merit job abilities, simply put PUP's are too valuable to how the job is played that not putting a point into each is rather silly.

ty ^^

That was an amazing Explanation ^^

I shall do that , I Just got back to PUP 3 days ago, so I am still making my Macros ^^

Ty /bow

Regarding merits:

For Tier 2, Role Reversal and Ventriloquy were explained well above and each have lots of uses, don't skip unlocking both and pair with 5/5 Optimization and 3/5 Fine Tuning.

For Tier 1: I'm a big fan of 5/5 Repair and 5/5 Melee now. Repair is a fantastic ability after recent buffs and timer reduction, and it helps PUP's biggest current strength (automaton tanking) so it's kind of an easy choice to lower that timer even more. It does help all other puppets too, but especially tanks.

I think Ranged and Magic are outdated, but each had their moment in the past. At 75cap, magic skill merits allowed your puppet to reach skill levels at which you actually got additional spells). After that was no longer true, ranged was pretty standard for a while since SS puppet was the most commonly used frame.

Note also that S-E also very recently said they're considering changing PUP merits instead of being ranged/magic/melee, to combine those all into one "automaton skill" category. So this might change soon and be a general buff to all puppet skills, making the category pretty strong all around. Remains to be seen whether they open up additional new merits, if not and they just consolidate skill into one category, Skill/Repair will be the painfully obvious best choice.

Does anyone have a pup .lua that actually switches gear when the pet WS's and give you the option to switch to a pet modes like PDT/Acc/Haste etc. Trying to boost pet only DD situations but my current lua does not support such functions. Only has a pet engaged set but does not swap for WS and will also change for casting pets. Any help is appreciated.

Kinematics has a spot for it in their GS, but someone well respected in the PUP community once told me that because PUP WS are instant, GS can't detect the packet in time to swap into WS gear. BST and SMN pets are different obviously because the player controls those, but Automaton's just do whatever the hell they want.

I manually do all my swaps as I enjoy the completely control, usually when doing pet focused damage I change into automaton WS gear when my auto's TP is above 1000 based on the situation. I'm not 100% about this, but I think that Automaton AI for casting is the same as WS, so it reads the situation every 3 seconds or so. This explains to me why sometimes the Automaton might WS exactly at 1k TP, while other times it doesn't. I don't know this ***for sure though.

Falkirk and I theorized you could automate this by putting a pet tp clause in your GS that had a rule where when your pet's TP went above 1k, it automatically changed into WS gear. Dunno though.

How's that pup guide/gear thread coming along, Tru?

This one's kinda outdated and could use your touch! :D

Slowly. Compiling information for PUP has opened my eyes to just how much information is missing from the job. I've had to test ALOT of things I thought for sure we already knew, and found that either the information is outright wrong, or slightly wrong.

A good example of this is Overdrive. It's not QUITE as insane as unleash(yet), but it is by far one of the best 2hrs in the entire game.

I'm more or less the only one in my LS who can test a lot of the information I don't already have, also. And since I want to make sure EVERYTHING I put in it is right, it's taking me a while.

Also, I have been having to budget my time between my family, my company and still running my linkshell.

I'll get there though, just bare with me.

Well that explains a lot then cause yes they are instant. Just trying to make PUP stand on its own in comparison to other pet jobs and dare I say DD out there. Like Trulucia said very little people play PUP and much less understand how technical and complex the job is. It can effectively fill with above average efficiency any position in a party from tank, to DD, healer, support it is just most don't give it the opportunity due to this ignorance.

How do I do the clause to change gear based on TP? That would work definitely for pet only fights and even may work for dual DD even if it gimp my DPS some because the corresponding WS and SC combo will surely make up the difference. My current pet WS averages about 7-10k in Escha and this is without any GEO debuffs and about 6-11k in Sinister Reign. Trying to push that even higher.

I have put a lot of time and gil into the job and love to showcase it every chance I get. Most would agree that it does well but with this 15 min timer kills SE has added to everything it is hard for it to measure up to others, particularly DD.

I would have liked if pet WS had a cast time of at least 1.25s in order for pet WS gear to take effect, I have 1000TP pet gear I can't use...

Maybe rise the issue in the official forum? the Devs must know about this issue before the final update, and before they introduce more pet WS gear we cant use.

as for GS I suggested before making it a timed clause after 1k TP for like 3-5 seconds, if the auto didn't WS during this window then switches back to normal so we don't lose too much DPS.

What frame, attachments and maneuvers are you using? 6-11k is nothing to scoff at for Automaton WS, unless you are sacrificing WS frequency to achieve these numbers. Also, what timer are you talking about? PUP doesn't have any 15 minute timers.


The increase in delay between Auto WS would only benefit GS players and SE probably knows this, as such I doubt they would feel the need to adjust the timer for Auto WS delay.

Changing into PET ws gear really only means swapping 2-4 pieces(Augmented H2H with pet tp bonus and Karagoz pants are pretty optional). The loss of damage from the delay in the automaton actually using it's WS isn't really a concern in a pet focused situation.

That being said, most Automaton WS don't even scale that well with TP. Chimera Ripper, Knockout, Arcuballista and Daze are the really good ones, and to a lesser extent Armor Piercer, String Shredder and Cannibal Blade(How did you even trigger this outside of Overdrive!?). The other WS gain very little from TP. You can pretty much predict what WS your pet is going to use, however. So depending on your maneuvers and situation you can gauge whether or not the swap is even worth doing. That's why I like manual control.

As for how to write the pet tp clause, I have no idea. I don't use GS really.

I see, yeah I was thinking for Daze(solo) and Cannibal Blade, the later with 1000TP it's damage increased by 500, but as you said it's ridiculously stupid to trigger specially with light/dark maneuvers canceling each other! (you need TWO dark maneuvers to trigger Cannibal Blade if you have 1 light maneuver up.....) that leaves Auto self-skillchaining while overdrive'd to trigger -.-


September update changes:
nothing about attachments yet.

Both of PUP's new merit categories are pretty good too. That's honestly kinda annoying. I wouldn't take Repair potency at my level because I don't ever need it, but maintenance recast is awesome. I personally like maintenance even more than Repair most of the time. I still need to test and see if it can remove doom or not. If it does, that makes the tank puppet all the better.

Could always rotate the light for an earth while at 1000tp for cannibal, assuming you're using fire as the 3rd.

It looks like the Ice Maker consumes the ice maneuvers when the puppet closes a skillchain, since it counts as magic damage.

I don't believe it increases the SC damage though, just wastes the ice maneuvers.

Annoying and makes it impossible to SC+MB properly.

You're going to WS so slowly that there is no way that is ever worthwhile. You're just losing hate with anything other than Fire x2 Light(Ideally Fire x3 if you can manage it) Even then it would take another 30 seconds to reset your maneuvers. I can't think of any reason to try and use it with a DD focused pet either, since the base damage is so ***. I can't think of a single instance outside of Overdrive where you would ever use Cannibal Blade.


That's stupid as hell. I can't imagine that is working as intended, it literally does nothing but consume maneuver(s). Thanks for the information, Badstreak.

I understand and agree with you there, but my point was that its a way of activating CB.

Oh, I gotcha. When I asked how you were activating Cannibal Blade, I meant it more rhetorically, because you shouldn't ever be using maneuvers that will result in that WS.

I rarely use VE full tank setup because Arcuballista is too good to pass up. Even in VE full I still don't find Cannibal Blade that great over Bonecrusher/Chimera Ripper. With +4 to maneuvers, Optic Fiber, Regen IV attachment HP is almost never an issue. When times gets rough a repair and x2 light or 3 if absolutely getting wrecks is just what the Puppetmaster ordered. This is especially less of a concern when there is a COR in party for Companion Roll. VE/SS setups I use a hybrid DD/Defense attachment setup which make it a stout DD/tank option. Typically do 7-9k Arcuballista.

Is there something I am missing about the use of Cannibal Blade?

No, not really.

good setup you have there, I will have to try it.

It's now much easier for puppetmaster to hit PDT cap. Using this set:

ItemSet 335325

And some permutation of:
https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/Genmei_Earring
https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/Loricate_Collar_%2B1 (or Twilight Torque)
https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/Ryuo_Domaru_%2B1

Do we still lack a PDT waist?

This update doesn't do very much for PUP :/ We got 8 items that aren't all jobs.

We're continuously screwed out of gear. We're on a lot of the mage gear, which is pretty worthless aside from the Cure potency pants(Comes from Promathia, I believe) There were actually some cool DD pants for mages, but we aren't on THOSE. Oh, that fast cast body is obviously BiS for fastcast.

https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/Lissome_Necklace Useful for the extra acc and stp over Azi, but only on super high stp builds.

https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/Relucent_Cape Best DD back piece now if you don't want/need the martial arts from Dispersal.

https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/Cessance_Earring And https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/Telos_Earring offer a really great mixture of acc, double attack and stp. Only worthwhile if you need it for the stp, and possibly acc sets.

https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/Dedition_Earring Believe it or not, this oddball piece enables a 4 hit build on PUP using a +96delay weapon at 1200JP. So situational I can't imagine any practical use other than Salvage for setting up your own magic bursts.

Annnnnd that's it. I mean, aside from...

https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/Denouements 25acc and 3% quad attack is just so sexy. The refresh is actually kinda nice since you would probably use these for master focus, and might want to use a mage automaton in that instance. If Colossal Blow functions the same way as when Omega uses it, it works like Throat Stab where it will do insanely high damage. Depending on the proc rate and SPECIFICALLY what they do, this could manage to dethrone KKKs WITH AM3 up(if not using melee puppet), but I very much doubt it.

Yeah, the gear options for pup out of this aren't that great sadly.

Trying my hand at some "take no prisoner" PUP master sets:

TP:
ItemSet 334380

High ACC:
ItemSet 334381

Stringing Pummel (needs work):
ItemSet 334382

That's just eyeing up today's items. I'll still need to spreadsheet these.

I think this is overreacting. Most jobs didn't get tons of gear this update, since it was just a couple high tier fights, 7 UNMs, and the new Escha-sky NMs (Jailers, and what looks like Shijin and AA reused armor/weapon models).

PUP has had MAJOR buffs in several recent updates, did get some significant non-gear improvements here (improved merits, adjusted attachments, changes to Corsair's rolls that are a huge boost to Sharpshot frame), and didn't get lumped in with the BST distance nerf.

Plus as you mentioned, we got a H2H that (from the master DD perspective) is probably second only to Kenkonken.

Another item of note: Bilious Torque (neo Faith Torque), and the combined torque from Escha jailers is a pretty great TP neck.

Made some adjustments to my sets. So between August and September updates, compared to my best possible sets from before, it's a massive 34% total dps increase (Tojil with heavy buffs/debuffs, not realistic) and probably a much larger increase in higher-tier situations where you need maximum accuracy. +1 abjuration gear is amazing for PUP if you can get your hands on it- tons of strength, and an insane amount of accuracy on Ryuo +1.

I need to check out monk. It should have gotten a very similar boost with new gear.