Prime WS Information, Testing, Discussion

This is, admittedly, subjective but I hold Gae Buide as S tier for the simple fact that it made DRG fun again. I know I'm not the only one with Savage Blade fatigue, and Gae Buide provides a competitive, reliable alternative, on DRG's primary weapon type.

Compared to Gsword's being "one of" the top weapon options available to DRK and WAR, who have access to other top tier 2H options, I would argue Gae Buide is S-worthy for standing alone on top of the polearm pile, and being great in both SC and non-SC situations

Lol that's the problem with these tier lists. What's the context? In a vacuum? Against specific enemies? For hypothetical scenarios that sound great on paper but have no relevant practical use with the fights / content that is commonly done? Tier lists are fun, but at least give context.

I see dagger listed high now, when in the beginning it was considered disappointing since it wasn't as much of an improvement over Twashtar as one would hope considering the investment. But with DNC being so prevalent in Sortie, it's now considered high-tier.

Gun/Bow seem great on paper, but then there's talk about only using it for a portion of the most important fight for ranged attack strats. In general, ranged strats just aren't as commonly used, but it's being listed as a high-tier due to the pure power of the weapons, not necessarily the use-case for them.

Polearm is getting a lot of love from the DRG community, and while it's a great polearm, DRG just does way too much damage with Naegling & Savage Blade when comparing straight damage. So how does that affect the tier ranking?

Everyone has tier lists based on their personal view on how they rank a weapon, but as long as it's clarified, and consistent in the reasoning, I think it's a fun exercise.

My tier list wasn't intended as a sortie tier list at all.

My greatswords are still stage 4 but the numbers don't feel A tier to me and war / drk already have options that make it not very important.

Scythes tp speed makes it not as fun for me but the utility is nice.

Great axe is good for warcry duration fights outside that it feels bad.

Katana always feels good the tp speed is insane warcry means almost nothing for it when you have 1450 tp bonus.

Great katana hits like a truck its definitely far above masa.

Hand to hand you have to hold way too much tp to do any reasonable dmg. If I had this on monk I still think I'd be using godhands or vere more.

Polearm I thought was lower till I actually used it a bunch its just amazing.

You opinion is uneducated lol polearm caps damage easier then anyother prime. Weapon by itself may not be stronger then other two handed but drg wsd traits and it being a two hit ws do. Then again, I don't even know why I argue with a guy who lives in a simulator. Go back to trying to prove the scythe is the highest dos because of Scarlet deliriumm

I was tiering weapons, not jobs.

what I'm seeing here is an argument occurring between two sides of different arguments^^ Some of us view Primes as new toys to add to the armament, just another option in the mix for various situations. And others are trying to value Primes as one-off, best option for a job-end-of-story type weapons.

Those of us on the 1st half of that discussion just will never agree that is how to view Primes, or what to hope to find in Primes. And those on the 2nd half see no purpose in valuing a weapon enough for the time needed- and have it only be just a toy.

This is why I say just find something you still love in this game, and find a way one of the Primes helps you enjoy that longer, or more. That is reason enough to justify building one. <3

Once you add in Jobs the list changes quickly.

Sorry it was the impression I got when I saw both gun and bow that low. They are one of the best Primes in general. As the only one they have ODT on all hits. They are definitely not lower tier, but they have very little use case in Sortie, unless you will invent strategy around them.


TP speed or swing speed? TP speed is pretty much the same as Great Sword. It hits slower, but for more TP. 6%TA is also better, than 10sTP in high buff scenario on DRK.


Warcry is still quite a lot for Katana (but I know what you mean), but you should change Mpaca head to WSD helm during warcry to improve that effect even more. Problem of Katana is that Naegling is better, but again in Sortie, with WS wall, Katana is better when you have BRD and COR doing Savage.


Far is subjective, but it's definitely better. I just dont think, that it's enough to put it in S, maybe in A+


I understand this impression, but it's really true for almost any Prime WS to be quite medicore at low TP thresholds. Ofc dual wield jobs has TP bonus offhands, so its not that visible on them. SAM gain TP much faster, so it's also less of a problem for him to hold TP for higher WS damage. WAR has Warcry for short fights, so it's easier to reach high effective TP too. DRG has jumps for faster TP in short fights. If you mainly zerg sortie bosses, I can understand why you judge them this way.
H2H value is a little less visible. First of all, quite a lot of damage on MNK is on white damage portion. The thing is, Prime is competitive to Veret when both are using Victory Smite. If you don't have Warcry with Prime, you can simply spam Victory Smite with Impetus up. Now with Warcry or if you happen to have 2000+TP for some reason, you can fire away Maru Kala. So it's really one weapon amazing for every situation.

EDIT: Also looking from PUP perspective, Varga is really great too. Pretty much for the same reasons, but also afaik +3 Automaton levels adds:
STR/DEX/VIT/AGI/MND/INT/CHR+12, Accuracy+96, Ranged Accuracy+99, Attack+87, Ranged Attack+84, Evasion+69, Defense+129 on top of giving straight +35acc/racc/macc and then it also applies PDL aftermath to Automaton too. Pretty solid boost to stats imo.

Subjectively every Prime can be S :D Even for the same reason you provided. Bow and Katana has similar "back to the roots" value.

For me personally Scythe is SS, because for me personally and subjectively Origin/Cataclysm has the best animation and sound effect in the game :)

Has anyone messed around with the axe on bst ? Just curious with the ability to self buff attk and debuff def down with pets, I wonder how fun and practical it could be to bring to sortie to replace a debuffer.

There are no debuffers in sortie.

BRD: caps haste, gives mass PDL, atk, acc to the party
RDM: other half of haste cap, gives dia, distract, gravity II
GEO: Ridiculous attack and DEF down effects, gravity bubble
PLD: Tank, some DD, main healer
DNC: DD, DEF down, samba, jig, gets TP without auto-attacking.
COR: Bolter's roll, Sam roll, misers, tacticians, massive atk boost to the whole pt.

Who do you suppose is going to be replaced by a BST in this scenario?

edit to clarify: it's perfectly possible to do *some stuff* in Sortie using a BST. Just saying in *the meta* you won't be replacing any of the jobs in the primary setup people are doing with a BST. Each one brings something extremely specific and highly necessary to the table that a BST cannot replace.

If you're doing a melee 8/8 run without Aminon, I could see BST being in one of the DD slots, sure. Prime almost certainly not necessary for this, though I haven't looked at the WS properties of axe WS to know if you would need it to avoid SC. Probably depends on what your other DD is and which primes everybody has.

We've had a Stage 3 & 4 Axe BST on our runs occasionally, our BST parse about the same as the BRD, this is only for 8 Boss runs, not 9 Bosses.
The BST in this setup has replaced the 2nd Heavy DD, so a bit slower kills. Nothing huge but notable.

Ooo swing and a miss. Defense @ML49 goes from 1467 to 1624 when you go from +0 to +3 and it goes from 1567 to 1734 from +2 to +5. So between 157~167 depending on how much you stack. I'm not going to pretend to know how much m.eva they gain but the testing on the BST forums implies that pushing your pets past 119 drastically increases their resist rate.

If the defense to m.eva is 1:1, you're giving up more m.eva than the strongest piece of nyame by using any other weapon. We all know what happens to DRG dps if they wyvern dies.

Personally, so long as the wyverns got pro/shell applied and if really in danger you have a couple pieces swapped in to cover the remaining pet DT, which is typically just the JSE neck, then you're fine as far as keeping the thing alive, that things plenty sturdy as it is.

Wont say its 0 but not sure it'd change a whole lot either, as far as DEF goes the wyvern gets an innate +50% correction to any def increases, like a lot of bst pets get for their atk/def so its not going to be the same as its meva

There are those who view everything as "if your not the first then your the last". Those people can not be reasoned with and actively look down on everyone else.

Prime are recolorrd relics, not that good or bad, just time sink for no lifers to satisfy their mental state. enjoy the worest content ever created and don't forget afk in pink aura and say it is pirplle.

Brolly is recolored Songo, not that good or bad, just another vigilant for diehard fans to satisfy their mental state. Enjoy the spin off and don't forget to set his face as portrait on forum and make a post in green aura and say it is broccoli.

Ranged weapons have very little use case in general.

Fun to frak around with doing Escha NMs or w/e, but you're not going Rng over War or Sam or Drk or Drg for anything meaningful.

And remember, prime Gkt is the worst of all.

I love you Simon :D you are a treasure of this forum!
I never Heard of Songo, I will check it.

Lol I'm sorry it's a language barrier. In Poland we had a polish lector for Dragonball and on top of that dialogue audio was in French. Translation was all over the place and Goku was mainly called Songo. I know it's not his proper name, but hearing it for so many years as a child, just cut to deep into my brain XD

I see no reason why someone couldn't replace one of the DDs in 8 boss run to RNG. Especially if you pair it with WAR.

I see no reason why someone would take a Rng over any other heavy DD, other than just to shoehorn Rng in it.

If you're not doing 9 boss, what are you doing with your life? META COMP ONRY! - Maletaru

Love when people who have never played with me assume ***because they're always wrong and it's hilarious every time.

I've done 8 boss with 2 CORs, 2 WARs, DRK SAM, DRK WAR, DNC WAR, probably 50 different setups. I've done segs with WHM and SCH, multiple times. I've done segs with a RDM who didn't melee, with PUP DDs, with DNC DDs, with 2 CORs, and probably a dozen other random job comps. I bring random new players from my ls all the time. I shout for members to come to segs and they come on whatever job they happen to have. I've brought loads of people into Aminon for their first kills ever. I've gotten D basement access for dozens of people in Sortie. I spend tags in inefficient ways constantly.

Just because I recognize that certain battles can't be beaten with a BLM doesn't mean I refuse to play with those players. I can hold two different ideas in my head without it exploding, you should try it some time.

I have more segments and gil than I could reasonably ever use, I don't need to obsess over making every run perfect or stressing over every event, so I don't. Doesn't mean I have to lie to people and tell them that their SMN will fit perfectly into a 9 boss hard mode sortie setup and they should go for it.

We play with you every day on the forums. Just because you might be different to some people in game doesn't mean we haven't seen you dump on new people in the Sortie thread recently. Why would your in game persona be more important to us here?

I gave an honest answer to an ill-informed question; I'm sorry if it hurt your feelings.

Truth about that situation is: can you take a BST into Sortie? Sure. You can take a THF wearing nothing but field gear and fruit punches into Sortie. Can a THF wearing nothing but field gear and fruit punches replace the healer in a Sortie run? No.

Can a BST replace "one of the debuffers" in a Sortie run? No. There are no debuffers in a Sortie run. It's like asking "Can I bring a SMN to replace one of the nukers in the Arebati V20 fight?"

I told him this and explained why his question was misinformed. Then I went on to say that he could slap a BST into an 8 boss run just fine. Apparently it's "dumping on" people to explain how party compositions work.

By "there are no debuffers" you mean "there are no jobs whose sole responsibility is to debuff" right?

The more relevant question might be "Can a BST, between higher DT- than Dia3 (they can give -33% right?) and their DPS over a RDM (not even sure if it would be higher...) outweigh swapping a minuet for a march?"

Answer seems like a no at a guess.

We've used bst with prime axe (stage 4) in Sortie. The def down debuff lands, but can't use it on A/E since it is a water based move and will cause him to freak out.

The def down landing is highly subject to macc too, will need near BiS bst debuff set to land it in basement. Since it cannot be relied on to land, and won't work on E at all, you still need dia, box step and all the minuets you can get.

The buffs bst does is only for bst and pet unfortunately, and bst dmg is nothing to write home about even with prime axe. Be lucky to match Cor dps, probably around brd.

it's more like -8% as it takes the same slot as a regular def down, which you'll likely have at least 1 job capable of performing, so better comparison would be if the bst can take the slot of a standard DD, which if we're comparing top-end, not really, they can boast a good atk boost with a equally large def drop through rage(most of the bosses are magic aside from B/F iirc) or a more standard one annnd that's about it.

Said -33% def down also cant be used for A/E as its water dmg + debuff so you're back to the normal 25% via bird or beetle etc


If its ooze, it has no macc check on its atk/def down, like angon it just lands, rest of bsts debuff pool does follow macc checks afaik

You can only consider it a 33% DEF down if no other DEF down can possibly land. If you have a SAM doing Ageha, DRG doing Angon, WAR doing Armor Break, BRD doing Shell Crusher, then the BST is giving 8% DEF down. Similarly, if you have a WHM then the "gain" of having a RDM is ~5% def down from dia 3.

Their DPS would absolutely not be close to a RDM's DPS and swapping minuet for march would be highly impactful because base atk is then multiplied by your Chaos roll etc.

You can absolutely bring a BST if you don't mind gimping your run some, but it will not adequately replace anyone in any Sortie setup.


Well yeah, you wouldn't call BRD a debuffer because it casts elegy, or a WHM a debuffer because it casts dia (or silence or w/e). I take debuffer to mean "person whose responsibility is to debuff". DD = "....responsibility is to do damage" tank = "...to hold threat and not die" healer = "...to cure and remove debuffs" buffer = "...to enhance the party"

It kinda doesn't matter though, even if you want to call a RDM a debuffer in any of these runs, BST can't replace them because Dia 3 isn't the thing you bring a RDM for, it's their damage, gravity 2, haste 2, refresh 3, etc. It's like saying you can replace BRD with a SMN because they're "a sleeper"...