Luck Of The Draw: A Corsair's Guide *NEW*

Finishing up my Path C Rostam; is it pretty much consensus that you make your Path A Rostam before your Path B one, because STP is useful for both Ranged and Melee situations?

And then as a follow-up (keke pun), is Path B definitively better than Path A whenever you're meleeing?

they're close enough i wouldn't bother with a path b myself unless you really want the SB2

Skrymir Cord +1

Magic Accuracy+7
"Magic Atk. Bonus"+7
Magic Damage+35


I guess at very least it's new BiS for Quickshot damage/Wildfire, would it also overtake Svelt for Leaden?

Maths are giving me 42 WSDPS increase over Svelt+1 for WF, with the new sash, against a lvl 150 target with 400 int and 10 MDB. This is with no buffs on the player or target, using arma r15.

It'll be best for Leaden outside of orpheus range and weather scenarios as well, yes.

Pretty much yeah. A is more universal and marginally weaker for melee, so you get the best of both. B is basically useless when you go ranged. If you’re loaded do both, if not stick with A.

If you ever have to snap into hybrid (which should be quite often), Path B plays a lot better with Malignance -- the severe drop in multi attack makes FUA pretty valuable.

As for ranged... there's barely any difference between a Lanun A and a Rostam A. Malignance has such high STP that most everybody should be comfortably able to achieve a 3-hit with DP, TS-down. TS-Up can still be a bit iffy, but quad shot procs.

So IMO, Path B should take priority for most CORs, with Lanun A being a perfectly good substitute for ranged if gil is limited. If your playstyle is somehow skewed toward ranged, then Path A Rostam all the way.

Yea ive seen so many people pass up rostam path b saying A is better... don't believe the hype...

I personally love path b and use lanun for path a

So who is ready to shoot their QD bullet accidentally again and then have to farm for literally 2 weeks to get another one?

I see the value in FUA when malignance is needed... but i cant think any situation when i want to melee in daggers when i can do savage. Wave 3 with my ls is always ranged leaden spam.

If for some reason I'm meleeing in malignance with a dagger main hand (not often), I'm usually using Blurred +1 in the offhand. How big of a difference in DPS is it going from path B/whatever to path A/blurred +1?

Trying to decide if the improvement is worth spending another month on COR in dynamis instead of upgrading one of my other weapons/necks.

If you got gil for another rostam, you should have enough gil to upgrade necks from buying heroism from ah, no?

Wave 3 leaden spam "should" lose to wildfire spam with proper gearsets/weaponry/buffs. Those volte mobs are more resistant to darkness than fire/light (the most successful ranged burns are often based on Wildfire/Trueflight in wave3 due to this).

In addition, if your shooters have solid melee sets with enough of your base things (capped haste, good acc for meleeing, etc) along with a bard song setup to assist in successfully meleeing and rolls/bubbles to assist in boosting your WS damage, meleeing for TP and then using ranged WSs "should" win against shooting for TP unless you can ride Triple Shot 100% of the time (ie a 3 COR in one party setup, rotating Random Deals). I believe earlier in this thread is some testing done on comparing TP gain with meleeing vs shooting, and I'm pretty sure the only way shooting for TP wins for a COR is when Triple Shot is active.

Even shooting for TP on RNG can be a huge pain in Dyna-D with the lag, and they have a lot more tools to successfully do that than a COR does (relic head, more acc/racc traits/gifts, Velocity Shot). I'd really suggest trying to see if your shooters can instead melee for TP and keep everything the same as you currently do(outside of probably need for change in your buffing), or even mess around with a Wildfire based strat with melee for TP on wave3. Don't forget that a 1k TP Wildfire is just as potent as a 3k one, meaning spamming is a lot more potent at times.

Now, wave3 boss- that's definitely a great Leaden moment, no questions or debate there.

So, if path A Lanun is good enough is Path B Lanun good enough? If so, you would be using this for what, dynamis TP gain on magic adds for quick Leaden spam and for Aeolian edge spam?

if you think about it, Lanun is pretty darn good, especially for the price difference.

I really appreciate the time you took to explain things throughly. I dont have Arma atm, i use my R15 DP for dyna d and the drop in dps on volte is very noticeable. At wave 1 and 2 i'm the top parser most of the time but as soon as we hit wave 3 rangers destroy me (even if i switch leaden to wildfire), so i think i'll appreciate the melee cor when i get arma.

What are the rangers using that are destroying you? If you have mythic rangers go with malaise setup and trueflight/leaden

Everything is so niche now. Kinda crazy.

Yeah RNGs Gastra/Trueflight with MAB support I'd wager. We have that setup for our wave 3 farming.

Our wave 3 setup is 1 tank party, 1 melee party and 1 ranged party.
Ranged party consists of COR COR RNG RNG iGEO BRD
Buffs are SAM/TACT, MAB/MACC, Preludex2 Etude x2, Acumen/Malaise.

I have all damage filtered except mine so i don't know RNG damage, but leandes get a significant reduction on volte, and wilfire is so so with DP. If i get a real brd instead of a ez one, dark threnody helps a lot on wave 3. In the end i catch up on the parse at the disjointed due to consisten 99k leadens, ending in like 24%ish dps from top RNG and 20-21% from me.

1. Aeolian Edge cleaving.

2. Multistep with leaden or fomal radiance.

3. Melee for magical ws in general.

From my experience leaden doesn't beat wildfire unless your brd and
Run do their things to lower dark resistance.

Leaden works if you are 100% certain that brd will pay attention I guess. Otherwise wildfire is really the way to go.


If you find wf dmg suck, your best bet is yell at brd so they dark threnody harder, lol. If you choose the leaden route then threnody absolutely has to land on every volte.

Since you also have a melee party in your alliance, applying Dark Trenody on every Volte might not be feasible. It's like light shotting all volte. You lose DPs with the light shot. By the time you actually get to hit the volte after light shot, the volte is dead. Mages don't bother with dia because volte don't last long if you have top notch melee.

Thus, if you truly want to boost dps on wave3 you can:

1) Move to the melee party and roll for them so you have DD buffs to boost a Savage Blade set so your Savage Blade damage is hitting 20k-35k

2) Make an Arma to stay on par with your Gastra RNGs.

3) Have melee focus on volte with pets (BST, PUP, SMN). Once those are down, CORs can do Aeolian Edge cleave safely.

The Volte NMs still have over a million HP; they don't take a large amount of time, but they don't die instantly either.

Mages should definitely be enfeebling the NM Volte.

As someone who is thinking about Arma as the next feat, is this due to Wildfire damage +10% with R15?

I doubt a ranged COR can beat a r15 gastra rng on wave 3 just because triple shot has lower duration than double shot, and it's not quite possible to full time TS in entire Volte phase even with Random deal rotation.

But arma is indeed the best gun for WF. Not just from WF+ but also AGI boost.

@Afania
The thing is, the situations you listed are never present for me to justify the Rostam FUA path, except maybe the Aeolian Edge cleaving inside Omen, but in that case mobs are so weak that it's not even worth throwing 150m for it.

When i want to melee, 99% of the time it's for Savage blade.

In the end, the obvious choice for me to really improve my DPS on wave 3 dyna is make an Arma and take it to R15... but i'm just too lazy (for some reason i find making an empy waay more boring than a mythic). I'll do it someday i hope.

@ Xurion

This is mostly due to volte mobs resisting dark damage, so for cor wildfire is the best option for those. It should be the 10% Wildfire damage from R15 plus whatever native boost it gives to it, which i don't see listed on bg wiki.

Cant think of any situation when you want to melee in daggers..? Do you even cor lol

Empyrean weapons don't have any native bonus to empyrean weapon skill damage, just 10% from augment (same for Aeonic and merit WSs). They have big amount of +Stat matching WSC of those WSs tho (like Arma has +70 AGI total at R15 and Wildfire has AGI mod).

For me, it's not worth the 150m price tag for a FUA Rostam that i'll use maybe 1-2 times a month, considering i have 5 other jobs to dump money/attend events.

Thanks Simon for the heads up, i didn't know that.

It's your personal choice. None say you need to have certain gears to play the job.

I'm just saying melee in dagger has its use. Can you complete content without it? Sure. Doesn't mean it's useless.