Sneak Attack Precast?

I have been using Selindrile's lua for a while now, but I just noticed there is no gear being swapped in for Sneak Attack/Trick Attack.



Should I be swapping something in w/ SA+ on? Sorry if stupid question.

You would only use sneak attack or trick attack as a standalone ability if you wanted to try and proc a treasure hunter increase on a mob, so the only relevant swaps would be your treasure hunter equipment. You want to stay in your regular TP gear when you use SA or TA for that purpose since you're still in your TP phase and a standalone SA or TA crit by itself isn't a significant thing. If you wanted to maximize the damage of the critical you could swap to a full agi/dex attack set, but there's no need and you would probably end up losing on damage by swapping out of triple attack and store TP gear, which will have a bigger impact then the extra dex/agi you added for the critical hit.

Sneak attack and trick attack (the abilities themselves) do not get specific gear considerations when combined with a weaponskill, because it's the weaponskill you're going to be swapping for. SA or TA + rudra's storm versus rudra's storm by itself for example.

If youre worried with TH, could as well just go full TH/defensive for melee. If youre aiming something like deal 2000 dmg on a normal hit, can add crit hit dmg+ gear.

The main point is that even if you do gear for maximum critical hit damage the effects are still going to be minimal and could negatively affect your overall damage output. You're looking at a difference of 2000 versus 2300 damage or something very similar on the critical hit itself. Meanwhile your normal white damage swings are dealing 200-300 + damage and a triple attack round can deal a combined 1000+ damage between the three swings in the round (accounting for TA damage bonus gear as well, such as hetaroi ring, toutatis's cape, assassin's neck, and our relic feet). Our normal TP gear already has reasonable amounts of dex/agi so there is no need to go out of your way to try to maximize a standalone SA or TA hit.

The more important thing is to understand that the only time you want to use SA or TA as a standalone ability is when you want to try and procc a treasure hunter increase. Otherwise you should always combine it with a weaponskill for maximum damage, preferably rudra's storm or possibly mandalic stab depending on what you're doing.

Well... there is ONE other purpose but it’s very small... Omen “Melee Hit 2000+” lol. It may very well only require that the sum damage of one attack round exceeds 2000? Dunno, never checked? But for that particular challenge I pop TA and Insta-fix it.

BUT like I said, that’s tiny. Everything you said is absolutely correct, don’t burn your SATAs; they’re precious.

Even multihits proc works for that objectie iirc

Nah, Omen's 2k single hit is a valid use for SA and TA. But you're not going to build an entire macro just for that one specific scenario. It's far too niche to go out of your way to build around. I had already thought of that before I wrote my earlier posts, but it was such a specific scenario I didn't even mention it. The OP asked about fixing up macro sets, and if all you want to do is get that 2k crit off then my advice still holds. You would just pop SA or TA for the 2K crit and keep your regular TP gear on. Omen objective farming is also a special case since you want to phsyically restrict your damage output until all objectives are met. I'm sure we've all been in at least a few runs where people went DPS crazy and killed everything with their strongest weaponskills and then lo and behold there werent enough mobs left to finish all the objectives.

It's not single hit for 2k. you can just use assassins charge and sneak attack if you don't have a set for it. which you should have any way. for SA ws you register buff ID so the buffactive has time to see it because takes a second or 2, but if just engaging the mob can just use regular buff active check.

Its not 2k to 2300 increase, its more like 15k to 25k with twashtar am 3

Don't merit assassin's charge.... seriously. It's bad.



You're taking things out of context, and you're also blowing things way out of proportion. Sneak attack has a base 100% dex mod, and if you have 20 job points in the sneak attack category it becomes 120%. That means at most for every 1 point of dexierity you add 1.2 base damage to your weapon. My normal tp set rides with something along the lines of 350 dexterity, and my rudra's storm has around 480. I'm not home right now so I can't give you the exact numbers, but that's close to the mark.

So now, even if you added 100 dex to sneak attack, that would translate to 120 base weapon damage. With capped attack thief's critical hits have a maximum pDIF of 4.35, so the most damage 100 dex can ever increase a standalone sneak attack by is 522, and that's only with capped attack

120 (modified base damage) x 4.35 (Maximum possible critical hit pDIF) = 522.

Twashter's aftermath wasn't part of this discussion, but if you do want to play that game and account for it you're just going to triple that number, so 522 becomes 1566. And sure, 1566 damage is more than 300. But it's also a scenario where you have twashters aftermath up, in which case those 1000 damage triple attack melee rounds I mentioned earlier could be 3000+ melee rounds instead, so it all scales relatively. Under no circumstances is a standalone sneak attack ever going to do 15-25K. That's weaponskill territory. Standalone criticals will NEVER reach that mark. Sure you can do a standalone sneak attack with twashters aftermath up and get lucky and triple the damage. Then your 3-4k crit might become 9-12k (still way short of 15-25k btw). But then you've wasted your sneak attack timer. Do you know what else you can do with sneak attack and twashter? You can combine it with rudra's storm, and instead of doing 12k you could do 40-65k damage. Which do you think is the more effective way to use your sneak attack timer?

Good old sandung

TH can proc on WS so not using WS with sa and ta still has no sense. Just do it with th gear if you want TH proc.

It makes sense if youre trying to get TH as high as possible before killing. I generally just sata+feint+bully and smack away at a mob until TH hits 14 or it dies if im actively farming something.

Wait, I thought TH did nothing in Omen except for Ou? O_o;

Why u building TH on Kin? Lol

Same reason why people do TH on King Behemoth, i guess.

Oh...duh. Not sure why I completely overlooked that part. Maybe I was thinking you could pre-cast a Sneak Attack set and then quickly swap out to your precast WS set just in time? So...in theory, applying both bonus to SA and WS. Maybe?

I'm fairly certain I've seen THF TH very rarely unlock an extra drop slot on Caturae bosses, but I might just be misremembering.

Idk I don’t remember ever seeing any extra on Omen bosses. Scale, Item/Scale, Craft Material. Very many disappointments when frantically trying to get Utu grip when it was new. BUT I admittedly never intentionally built TH and was never asked to.

You could probably do three runs of Kin in the time it took you to build 14 stacks of TH.

Also re: stack va separate, if you're geared enough, isn't it worthless to do sata when saws and taws individually exceed 50k?

First, they do stack as long as the mob's back is turned to you and someone is standing between you and the mob. If you've played as long as me you probably still remember how powerful SATA Viper Bite was in Garlaige Citadel when you were leveling off of wingrats and seige bats and used it to close distortion. Your tank could never lose hate after that, provided the bats were even still alive.

Second.... no. You should never use SATA after level 60. The only thing stacking SA and TA together does is it combines both your dex and your agility score as added base damage in the weaponskill. That's only relevant at lower levels, and only because trick attack does NOT critical like sneak attack does before we get assassin at level 60. After 60 you should never stack your crits again. You always want to do a TA weaponskill and SA weaponskill independantly at level 99. Fuidama is a relic of the level 75 era experience grind parties and has no place in today's game.

To clarify how SA and TA add their mods to weaponskill base damage. If you use Sneak attack + weaponskill the formula looks like this

(((Weapon base damage +fSTR + WSC) x fTP) + DEX ) x pDIF

The point where sneak attack's dexterity mod gets added in the calculation is bolded. Trick attack uses agility in place of dex at the same location. And stacking both together would look like this

(((Weapon base damage +fSTR + WSC) x fTP) + DEX + AGI) x pDIF

The base damage sneak and trick attack add does NOT get multiplied by the fTP bonus, and is a flat addition at the end of the calculation. So if you have 400 dex you get 400 more base damage in your weaponskill when you stack it with sneak attack, and likewise with agility to trick attack. The abilities themselves add very little base damage to the rudra's storm calculation. It's the fact that they force it to critical that causes all the damage. Rudra's storm's TP mod is what causess the massive base damage, and forcing a critical hit off that is primarily where the huge numbers come from. That's why it's way better to separate your timers and force two weaponskills to critical than it is to only critical one of them with a meager improvement on its base damage as compensation.

I'm offended you grouped my message with theirs tho

I get most things to 12-13 TH within 5 or 6 minutes. Would be hard to do 3 in that time.

Your missing the point where TH does nothing for drops on Kin

And no one is saying anything about drops on kin? Honestly have no idea where that bit started.