Chango VS Ukonvasara !!!

Also...

For someone with no real intention of making a Chango any time soon (I don't have the chance to do a lot of Aeonics, and would have several others in line anyway before GA), does Ukon have any added appeal? I at least have most of the empy trophy items already (50 Glav, 50 Itz, a handful of Orthrus).

However, I also already have a Shining One, Montante +1, and Kaja Axe (to be upgraded to final stage once I grab another shiny weapon) for high end pole/GS/axe. My go-to GA is kinda lame, a decently augmented Aganoshe... but I don't necessarily care much about GA cuz I tend to pull out the WAR for stuff where my other weapon options are fine (Montante zergs, etc.).

I gave Ukon some brief thought, but it kinda bummed me out that Ukon doesn't have much in the way of Upheaval stats, and Ukko's seems like it isn't ideal (but IDK, perhaps it's worthwhile as a go-to WS if using Ukonvasara? Kinda like Blade: Hi becomes a top option for Kannagi but not for other katanas). All that thinking about making Ukon did was make me wish WAR Empy was a GS instead so I could Reso all day with an obscene amount of STR.

In contrast, some of the other Empys work well with all of their weapon type's best weaponskills. Masamune? Boatload of STR is great for all GK WS. Armageddon? AGI is fantastic for every single Marksmanship WS (plus Racc and R.crit rate). Yes, STR is still STR and retains some use regardless of WS... but it's still annoying.


Ah, I see. Figured I might have been missing something (DW on Emicho D hands). Thanks for educating me :)

It's a lot for white damage tho :P 70 STR is basically +17 more damage on your weapon in any serious end game content and 70str/20dex is 70att/15acc which is nice too. STR is also pretty much a 25% mod on any WS, until you cap fSTR, which again you probably don't, unless WS has STR mod and you actually stacking STR for it.

Yeah, I mean... STR definitely has its benefits, but it's hard not to wish your Empy weapon attributes aligned with the best WS for that weapon type.

A few questions for the WAR crew though:

1) Are people finding themselves with uncapped attack on WAR with buffs on current content, and where? Just Wave 3 Dyna? I've always hated the tendency of people on FFXIAH (not you, Simon, but a lot of people) to assume capped everything all the time. Even on jobs like NIN... But WAR with all of its tools and proper buffs should be a lot more capable than most of capping attack and rendering that aspect of extra STR on the weapon kinda irrelevant.

2) With Ukon, and not any other weapon, how do Upheaval and Ukko's compare damage-wise? Does King's Justice have a place? I am well aware that different weapons require different WS approaches, especially with our current RMEA augments... I'm just not familiar enough with Ukon to know how exactly things play out with it.

3) Can anyone actually show data to convince me white damage matters that much on WAR? I'm still a little lukewarm on the idea that WAR is best served giving such focus to white damage, and this is coming from someone who really likes Empys in general and feels that white damage is indeed underrated by a lot of people in many situations. Armageddon AM3 with a ranged crit set was a revelation to me, I love my Kannagi (and think a lot of the NIN community is really missing the boat on it), I totally respect Verethragna's more white damage-centric style...

But lately I've been playing a lot of Masa SAM, and hey, extra white damage is extra damage - not gonna complain. But I'm not really using Masa for white damage on a WS-heavy 2h job, I'm using it because it has a ridiculous amount of STR that allows me to FUDO FUDO FUDO spam (or occasional other WS) that still results in a very lopsided proportion of my overall damage coming from WS. Yeah, WAR prob gets a bit more from SAM in white damage thanks to all the DA, but it's still going to be a more WS damage heavy job... which makes that whole Upheaval/Ukko/STR/VIT annoyance rear its head again.


IDK, basically I'm just thinking:
- If no Chango, is Ukon the clear next best WAR RMEA alternative and how far back is it?
- Is that really necessary at all with great non-RMEA tools in the form of stuff like Ambuscade polearm/axe/sword, Montante+1, etc. Or would those end up beating out an Ukon in most realistic situations anyway?

None will provide you that info imo, because WAR playerbase is very strongly fed with WS frequency is the best thing ever (Saevel will feed you with that every time you ask about Ukon). I would compare that to me coming to BLU thread with revelation about TP bonus sword as offhand and getting a "bad" feedback there at start too. I cant compare it tho, because for Thibron I had it mathed out and I made a setup and tested it before throwing that idea at playerbase, so I was very confident about it and had all the evidence to prove it. For Ukon i had no time to do the proper math and I dont have weapon too, so I far from saying its 100% competitive with other optimal weapons for WAR, but Im still smiling when I see some stereotype responces and ppl being close minded to different playstyle ideas. I wonder if Ejin wouldnt make Shining One videos, would people even think to hold TP for optimal dps with it? I guess we will never know.

Ukon is a decent weapon, the problem is so many other weapons are better and WAY easier to get. Motante/+1 Raetic/+1 Chango Dolichenus, shining. basically all 119 GS will be at least as good as ukon. Unless things have changed, Chango>Motante/Raetic > Shining one > Dolichenus > the other stuff.

The fights where ukon seems to shine is high amnesia fights.... which isnt a super common fight. Ukon is a beast on oryx i guess. Unless you start the fight with 3k tp or the fight is really long, ukon is pretty meh. It is solid for wave three boss, but not ahead of chango (or the other options). The only situation where ukon should win consistently is when you get a 3k fury off at beginning of the fight AND then spend the majority of the fight under amnesia.


Then fencer build war fits in there somewhere.

If you have the ability to R15 Ukon, it will be BiS for fights where you're not pDif capped or will be engaged and attacking for longer periods of time. Perfect places for R15 Ukon include: Iroha Master Trial, Dynamis Wave 3. Terrible places for Ukon: Omen, Geas Fete Content.

You need to be able to make good use of the AM. If your WS is dealing 45~70k already, it usually means the fight will be over before you can make use of AM and are better off spamming Resolution or Upheaval with Chango.

With the current buff meta WAR will be capped attack unless something bad happens. GAXE has Armor Break which is the same potency as Ageha (-25%) just in case your not capping with the typical stuff. Dyna (D) is a bit of a outlier because of the -75% resistance to Geo Debuffs, just means you need to stack defense down and not rely on Idris Frailty.

Ukko's still sucks, even with Ukon Upheaval is much better, hell King's Justice is better. The problem with Ukko's is that it's only 2.0 fTP on the first hit and only two regular hits, meaning 3.0 fTP starting. Bonus TP just raises the crit rate, which is ok but not great. You end up gearing for WSD and hoping for bonus MA's to raise it's damage, or you just switch weapons.

Melee damage is nice but inconsequential to a job that does over 80% ~ 85% of it's damage with WS. The only reason it works on SAM and DRK is that their Empy WS ~is~ their strongest WS.

Strictly REMAs? Then it would be Conq due to KJ being a solid WS to spam. Conq basically lets you simulate the whole Monte+1 / Raetic Resolution spam but with a Great Axe.


Shining One and Dolc end up stronger then Ukon but weaker then R15 Chango.

No because your building TP and using a vastly stronger WS anyway. The increase in melee damage doesn't come close to beating the loss in WS average. Ukko's is bleh and Ukon does nothing for Upheaval while Chango turbo charges it.

pDiff is a percentage, meaning it effects ~everything~ equally. Being uncapped means your melee damage is going to be less by the exact same percentage as your WS damage, meaning the relative difference stays the same regardless of attack values.

Mostly, this. If you have Ukon from the days of yonder, keep it and make good use of it, otherwise make something else.


This is also true, tho there's a caveat to it: Resolution comes with an intrinsic attack penalty, which makes being uncapped that much more painful. For full Resolution power, you need to be 15% overcap.

Two more things to consider.

First: seems to me that most people who have Ukon, have built it during abyssea, and are stuck playing war the same way as they were back then. Things changed.

Second (and most important): guess what? It's situational.

Under perfect situation (capped attack/accuracy/haste, SAM roll, tank able to hold hate against you) R15 Chango spamming Upheaval is purely best DPS, and that's it. Outside of that, Chango still wins because it's the most versatile. In most situations, if you have a R15 Chango you will perform well. Every other weapon needs specific buffs and/or situations to outperform R15 Chango. In no specific order (and by no means an exhaustive list):
- Shining One: needs Rogue roll and/or somebody opening with Rudra/CDC to close a mean 2step darkness. Need to hold TP until 1800 (1500 with moonshade). Worth noting it's a rare situation where we can make good use of both Warcry and Blood Rage. Rapidly becomes underwhelming below attack cap.
- Montante/Raetic: short zerg fights with capped attack and sam roll where you don't want to SC (otherwise R15 Chango Upheaval spam still wins). Raetic also requires a little bit of Refresh to really shine, unless you're in Escha where you get all your MP back at the start of a fight. Requires having capped attack. Without capped attack Resolution starts sucking really fast.
- Ukon: needs a very specific TP set under AM3, and need to keep that AM3 up, and the fight to be long enough for it to matter. White damage can be absurd if you have somehow managed to convince your COR to give you Fighter's/Rogue, and are smart with Warcry/Blood Rage. Also starts sucking really badly if you're not attack capped. I'm not sure if it'd be better using Upheaval at 2k tp, or foregoing WS entirely outside of putting AM3 back up, somebody will need to math/parse it. Fun game: ask your COR to do Fighter's/Blitzer's, and ride Seigan/Third Eye fulltime for added survivability while keeping delay reduction at cap, since we don't really care that much about TP gain in this build anyway.
- Bravura: gives you a ton of DT while keeping 100% DA (or close to), Evasion Down debuff procs often, WS frequency stays high and Metatron is a solid WS with a nice def down effect that's stronger than Full Break (but less than Armor Break/Ageha). R15 bonus to Double Attack is really nice too, and gives you that tingly feeling when relic proc occurs. But ultimately DPS is a ton lower, so you're trading damage potential for sturdiness - tho probably less than using any other weapon in full DT set. Worth noting it's our best accuracy option by quite a bit (highest accuracy stat on weapon + highest skill in gaxe).
- Dolichenus DW: Solid all around option. Also lets you be nostalgic about war DW axes. Honestly if somebody can't make Chango, I'd suggest they go this direction, since it's our only other option that is still valid without perfect buffs. Big downside: locks you into /NIN, which will make every other weapon suck hairy butts, thus forget swapping on the flight (except maybe to sword+shield). Caveat: if for any reason you're forced to hold onto TP above 2000, use Mistral Axe instead of Decimation.
- Dolichenus + Shield: no. Mistral Axe does very well with Fencer, but Savage Blade wins if you have at least Reikiko.
- Savage Blade DW (Naegling): don't do it outside of MS zerg, and even then stick to Reso/Decimation. Somebody go make Fernagu and report, but I suspect it's not going to be worth the accuracy loss.
- Savage Blade Fencer (Naegling): Sword and Board war is *fantastically* sturdy (moreso with Defender up and Adapa shield), while being able to push out crazy spike damage. Requires a competent healer. If you don't have hate for Retaliation TP gain, your WS frequency will suck, so only do this if you're soloing/you're stuck in ambuscade with a sucky tank. It's also the best build against Kin (try it). Bonus: can switch into this on the fly since it does not require a specific subjob.
- Club: no idea, I heard it's good on blunt weak stuff but never tried it. Somebody pls report.

Then there's this:
- R15 Chango: whatever you're doing, whatever your buffs are, your damage will be solid and you're not going to get outparsed by the WHM^{[Citation needed.]}. TP gain and overflow is our best, Upheaval gets buffed to Super Sayan levels, SC damage is awesome, white damage is good.

WAR is tons of fun because it's versatile and can adapt easily to a ton of situations. We have B skill (or higher) in 9 weapon types. In the era of auto-buff and auto-ws scripts, there's very few people with the expertise to leverage that. And even then, by favoring any option that is not the most versatile one, you're locking your "being good" to those selected situation that fit your choice. Not that they're intrinsically bad choices, it's just that they fall short for one reason or another.

club is solid. kinda fun. Really good for killing stuff like belphegor. But not really something i recommend unless you are just bored.

for blunt i usually go with divinty/shield or xoanon/ultio grip. basically just fun to see a different animation.

This has no sense at all. Your melee to WS ratio is based on weapon and build and buffs, not job. If you equip h2h on WAR you will have the same split as MNK. If you equip club on MNK you will have same split as other jobs with club. If you equip Ukon on WAR and switch to White damage tp setup you are changing melee to WS ratio too.

Your opinion about Ukon is build strictly on your experience with other weapons and one playstyle and you keep talking about Ukko's fury, which is almost irrelevant because you will use this WS once per 3 min.

That's not strictly true. There are certainly job-based mechanics that can alter the split (Overwhelm, SA/TA, Flourishes, etc).

warcry, blood rage, boost. AMIII etc etc etc. tons of stuff actually changes the ratio. unless you are counting literally EVERYTHING under job weapon and buffs. then i guess everything is important? You could spam torcleaver with a cor doing rogues/fighters to increase your white damage ratio.

Yeah I agree, I went a little overboard with that statement, but it starting to triggers me. Still WAR has native Crit rate and damage that favors melee when you are using non crit WS. It has 31% double attack damage boost in equip, which with 100%DA is pretty much +31% white damage. Blood rage fevors white damage too imo. The only thing that favors WS is imo Warcry/Savagery. How Upheaval scales without Chango also probably favors holding TP and holding TP favors white damage.

the biggest problem imo on ukon build is what it does to party damage. Yeah sure you can buff it up to where the ukon war is doing pretty competitive dmg to chango war. But spreadsheet users tend to forget that SB cor and to DD bard is a thing.

To make ukon do solid dps you NEED fighters/rogues. Look what happens to your cor and bard (they like to dps now). Cor i usually party with is usually above the 5-6k dps range with sam/fighters (naegling really made cor shine in melee). usually floating around 3k with fighters/rogues. bard can hit around 2.5-4k (bard i usually party with is an animal). fighters/rogues neuters them down to sub 1.5k dps.

So yeah, you get the wars to about the same dmg, but you DESTROY the party dps. usually in the range of 20-30% drop in party DPS. If you count SC, since ukon up>up doesnt do light. Then it is an even bigger drop in DPS.

Jobs is part of the build, especially jobs that have high native values of the two most build-specific values, Multi-Attack and Store TP. There is a reason WAR and SAM are at the top of the DD hierarchy, and its not the weapons they wield.


This is why I love playing WAR the most. So many different ways to effectively murder pixels.


This is why I call COR 50~80% of a DD. They should be doing solid damage while providing those rolls. I especially love working with them for SC's.

Full Break -> Upheaval -> Savage Blade -> Upheaval

Then just Upheaval -> Savage -> Upheaval for the rest of the fight. Gives them time to charge their SB to max damage while also doing the same for our final closing Upheaval.

I wouldnt say Rogue roll is needed. It helps, but its not needed. Rogue is also recently used for Shining One builds and people seems to accept it. Fighter is needed tho, but it was used already anyway and it helps COR and BRD quite a lot too.

None is also saying to use Ukon against party composition. I said at very start that Chango is far better if you SC with other ppl like Saevel wrote in his post and the same goes for buffs. If buffs favors Chango then use Chango.

/jumps in.

Conqueror > all

/jumps out.

I totally get what you're saying about people being resistant to objectively consider anything that isn't the accepted forum meta. But IDK man, what Saevel is saying regarding Ukon seems pretty reasonable to me (nothing jumped out at me as highly questionable in his first response after my previous post), and until someone can provide compelling mathematical/evidence based data that contradicts that general approach...

I also get your point that white damage/WS split certainly isn't set in stone. You can give up some WS damage in favor of more white damage (especially via Empy AM3), and it's potentially true that could result in higher overall DPS. I think people will start to accept that approach more and more for several jobs in time (I'm first in line for the Kannagi revolution, and smart RNGs already have some respect for Armageddon these days), with whatever video or post catches fire like Eijin's Shining One stuff... Just like job communities came around to stuff like TP Bonus offhands. I just have a bit of a harder time seeing it for WAR empy in particular. But hey, I'm open to being convinced with evidence.

One thing Saevel said that makes perfect sense to me were his comments about SAM and DRK doing great with Empy because those weapons have perfect synergy with the jobs' best damage weaponskills. For Ukon, I'm not really surprised to see that Ukko's still isn't worth using over Upheaval/KJ for purposes other than maintaining aftermath. So you're looking at using a less idea Upheaval/KJ weapon, and making up for that deficiency in white damage - I'd love to see some results or testing, but until I see that it's not shocking to me to think that Empy doesn't manage to make for a worthwhile swap.

Now, again... I don't have Chango and I'm not planning to get it any time soon, so the whole "Chango is better" argument isn't what I care about. But I do have lots of other high end WAR weapons, and between Montante, Shining One, Dolichenus, Naegeling, Raetic... that still seems like I'd have something for most any situation that would be as good or better than an Ukon. And realistically, my personal use of WAR is more just for something to pull out for MS zergs, or just to mess around. If I wanted to be a super serious heavy DD outside of a MS situation, I'd probably change jobs to Masa SAM.

if your goal is a zerg. motante will crush ukon.

Yeah, I know. That's mainly what I currently use WAR for.

But in case I felt like branching out a bit more in when I use WAR, I was kinda saying IDK if Ukon matters for me even then, since I already have other weapons that might beat (or at least equal) Ukon in those situations too. Even if Chango is a non-starter for me personally.

This isn't anything new, every 12 ~ 18 months someone comes on here saying that Ukon is the best for <insert reasons here>. The exact same arguments get present, the exact same discussions are had, the exact same feelings are hurt and the exact same conclusions are reached. Ukon is bad, relative to other options, because SE hasn't done anything to make it not-bad and if anything has made it worse by introducing better other options. Until SE changes something fundamental, like say making Ukko's transfer fTP, then this conclusion will not change.

If you want to make it go for it, we shouldn't begrudge people for wanting to have fun and experiment in a video game. Other zerg options are Shining One and Dolc for two very different play styles.

At some point they'll make some arbitrary change - then you'll all be like omg ukonbae y dont u have it

Its more like, every some time pass, someone mentions Ukon as an alternative and gives logical arguments/questions/math and you jump in and trashes that with just your opinion acting like what you say is ultimate truth. Show math or practical evidence of Ukon played right being as bad as you keep saying it is and provide the same for Chango showing how good it is.

I'm extremely late here - Just started playing around with WAR Dolichenus + Decimation (>Smash Axe>Decimation>Decimation) with trust buffs on Apex Bats and its pretty absurd for an out-the-box weapon, as others have mentioned.. Haven't gotten the chance to mess around with Shining One on warrior, but I imagine it's equally as broken. I don't even have a Chango, but my WAR is pretty endgame ready with just these two...The rich just keep getting richer...

And in the case of war, the argument was that they do get job specific JA that enhances white dmg aka blood rage.


Either way, this argument is absolutely pointless until someone finally post a parse video with equipviewer on. Otherwise it's been 2 sides presenting the same argument over and over and over again like a broken clock every couple months.

Yeah I feel like I need to change my priorities and put Ukon on top lol