The Last Dance III: A Dancer's Guide *New*

Hands are easily #1 priority. WSD+10% = best Rudra's hands, so they'll be a staple for a loooooong time. Much more minor perk, they can also can be used for steps accuracy.

The body is an excellent waltz piece, but Maxixi+3 is a very small improvement over the +2 version, which in turn is not a big improvement over the lv119 +1 piece. It's not hard to cap waltz potency (50%) without Maxixi+3, so basically you're just getting 1 second of waltz recast reduction for +2 and +3, slightly stronger potency received for self-waltzes (30% cap, which we can't currently reach), and some extra CHR/VIT for higher waltz amount.

After you're done with hands, pretty easy/cheap to upgrade Body then Feet to +2. Upgrade them to +3 eventually, but nothing to stress too much over. Head has some niche use if you often need a DW option (i.e., frequently not getting capped magical haste for some reason), but generally not terribly important.

Whats bis evis for atk cap some1 mentioned 4/5 gletis a page or 2 ago and im just curious which piece is better as not gleti?

Adhemar head HQ B

Anyone have an updated set for terp am3? Thanks :)

I've got an idea of what to use, just wanna see others thoughts!

Malignance 5/5 or 4/5 with relic feet (especially if facing the mob). Moon rings. Can use STP on cape and for belt probably kentarch although sailfi or windbuffet should still be pretty close. JSE neck, STP earrings (Telos / Cessance are prob good). Pretty basic, just stack STP and TA/QA where you can. Set should be super tanky as well. As long as your gear in each slot is good there shouldn't be huge differences between bis and second to bis. Malignance is the real big one since it has so much STP and is very defensive. You can also wear gleti in idle set to build TP outside of fights for AM3 (even though you can already do that with NFR+RF+Meditate). Offhand weapon can be gleti, twash, or even TP bonus dagger if you want much stronger rudra's for climactic / SC purposes. Shinryu dagger is likely really good, but that dagger is fake and does not exist.

Hey I asked about af +2/3 to do first and people replied "hands" i forgot to mention I have Nyame path B and the hands only give a bit more stat. Are they still priority to +3 first if you have Nyame? The body is looking really nice.

2nd stp ring only really marginally wins with Gere if you have Saber dance and DON'T have samurai roll. Otherwise it's pretty big loss both sailfi and windbuffet are slightly better than kentarch. Coiste for ammo. Sherida is the 2nd earring you want to pair with Telos.

Without Saber Dance Epona's ring and Adhemar hands marginally beats chirch/moon and malignance too, but not enough imo to sacrifice survivability for it.

RE: Belt, an option is to use Yotai and not worry about whether your bard trust is keeping March up, or just not run a bard at all.

The thing about dancer's artifact gear is that most of it is on the mediocre side. I upgraded the body and hands to +3 and I just carry the other 3 pieces because I like to lockstyle the full set. There are only 2 pieces worth taking to +3, and those are the hands and body. The body is strictly a waltz piece, and it's not that big of an upgrade over the +1 version, but if nothing else the extra self waltz potency is nice. This is my waltz set for reference. With gleti's knife, yamarang, JSE neck +2, sjofn earring, and artifact body +3 I have waltz potency +54, so I'm already overcapped. The rest of the set is just devoted to defensive stats.

ItemSet 382302

As for the hands, maxixi bangles +3 are better than nyame gauntlets for rudra's by a few percentage points, so it's worth your while to upgrade them first. I keep two different rudra's sets and swap between them depending on content difficulty. I rudra's storm in 5/5 path B nyame against harder content that could one shot me, and I use maxixi gloves +3 and Horos Tights +3 on weaker content.

Artifact head gets a nod for being a samba duration macro piece, but that's it's only use outside of lockstyle. There is no duration difference between the +1 version and the +3 version so there is no reason to take it to +3. Artifact legs are purely lockstyle and the feet are also (for me) lockstyle. The feet can be a useful waltz piece if you need them to hit 50% potency, and the 40 second jig duration is nice, but jig duration caps at 50 seconds and you get that just from relic legs +3. And you WANT relic legs +3 because like the artifact hands, Horos Tights +3 is the BiS rudra's leg slot for raw damage output.

Aren't the Maxixi Legings bis for skillchain damage? Like 18% right? And in reading these replies am I to assume as career Dancers you have tested the job out in all content and come to the conclusion the -2 waltz delay isn't that great? I ask because I have begun cping and I use a decent evasion set and so I thought I would try doing big pulls and using aeolian edge. This has gone better then expected and I am doing massive pulls and have been relying heavily on Fan dance which reduces the waltz delay and paired with the AF 2/3chest and divine waltz 1 with +50% heal potency I could see this being extremely strong because of the low tp consumption paired with the high heal output for party and still allowing for me to spam aeolian edges. Thoughts? I have built up 24 cards now. Seriously considering making a terp. I love that this job is used for veng 15 bosses and excels.

There is no use case for such skillchain damage tho. Master DNC has base 31% SC damage, Rudra is what's usually use to close SC and Nyame head, body and feet provides 17%, so you are almost at cap with just those.

I guess you could use Maxixi for some super niche situation to for example spam Exentrator with uncapped attack and AM up on Aeneas, but even then you can still also use Nyame. Also in general its much better to improve WS damage for higher SC damage instead of increasing SC damage directly, unless you have gear like Nyame that improves both.

Maxixi body +3 is very useful for that -2 delay, but there is not many scenario where you will need to spam Divine Waltzes that much. It might happen tho.

Things can go south in a hurry sometimes, and whenever they do it's almost always unexpected. Being able to provide auxillary healing alongside your parties primary healer is a significant contribution dancer brings to the table, and -2 second delay on waltz is actually noticeable, especially when combined with fan dance. I would recommend upgrading the body to +3 simply because of the extra waltz potency received bonus. Your cures cap at +50% potency on everyone else, but your self cures reach 58% potency with the +3 body. It's only 2% more than the +1 version, so once again it's not a huge difference, but there isn't a lot else to do with dancer cards and to me it was worth the cost. The extra charisma and vitality you get beyond the +1 version also factor into the waltz formula btw, and that's another reason I waltz in 4/5 nyame. In addition to the defensive stats nyame is pretty stacked in both chr and vit, so your base waltz potency gets a boost from them as well.


Practical applications limit their usefulness. Dancer has a high skillchain damage bonus already, and other than the skillchain damage + 18% the legs have no redeeming factors. Do you know what also increases skillchain damage besides wearing more skillchain damage + equipment? Hitting harder with your weaponskills! Horos Tights +3 adds 10WSD to rudra's damage, and that extra damage directly increases skillchain damage in addition to increasing damage whenever you don't make a skillchain. Nyame flanchard has 9 WSD and 5% skillchain damage on top of it. There is no reason to ever weaponskill in the artifact legs because it is always better to increase both your weaponskill AND skillchain damage rather than just skillchain damage alone.

Melphina said that better than I could.

Just chiming in to say I agree that body has enough value to be worth an upgrade. Recast and better self-waltzes are nice - it's just not as big of a priority as uber Rudra's hands. Once those are +3, work on body to +2/+3 as you can. Even then, I don't find that super urgent and if you need the gil for more impactful purchases I wouldn't prioritize buying the mats for AF+3 body.

After hands/body, there is a pretty steep dropoff and any upgrades from AF 119/+1 versions are for niche uses at best. You could make an argument for feet as a good waltz option to give some more flexibility in other slots (though can prob just use +1/+2 for essentially the same purpose), maybe a real completionist might look at head for emergency/low buff DW needs (should be very rare to need it though). For legs, IMO the existence of Horos +3 and Nyame makes AF+3 legs completely irrelevant (outside of a fancy gold border for completion's sake, for the really hardcore DNC enthusiast).

I know its not the most important set to max out but isnt af 5/5 best for steps?

Aside from the shoes, yes

The only thing the artifact gives you is step accuracy, and if you need that then I dunno what to tell ya. Steps are no less accurate than your melee hits, so if your accuracy is where it's supposed to be it's a moot point. If you got extra finishing moves from them then sure, I could see more of an argument to care. But as it stands that's the least important reason to upgrade the artifact equipment.

This was always the cruel joke of Terpsichore's Augments Steps II~V. I tested it for a long time trying to find out how it augmented steps and the answer was that it doesn't.

Add on to that that steps are 40 Acc more accurate than your normal swings with full JPs (90 with Presto) and that Acc is almost the only stat worth optimizing when using a Step (all slots except feet) and it becomes obvious that Terpsichore's upgrades were just the generic AM, base damage, and PK damage.

I had a lot of fun with the weapon and job, but it's really another situation where they could have spent ten more minutes thinking about the upgrades to it and ended up with a much better result.

I've come to the same conclusion. I've had a few months to play with terpsichore now and as far as the I119 upgrades go, it's extremely lackluster going from base I119 to Rank 15. Twashtar is definitely superior and pumping out raw damage, and it feels like a real shame. I was really hoping that terpsi would shine brighter than it does, but the augments steps V does literally nothing (and if the steps accuracy bonus matters you're already in a bad situation). The mythic aftermath is great if you need to play a more defensive role and spam a bunch of waltzes, but as far as performing dancer's core functions Twashtar is a step ahead (pun intended!) of Terpsi.

The truth of the matter is that rudra's storm is just stupidly good. It's the savage blade of dagger weaponskills, and it shows. Twashtar's 70 dex on top of everything else is really the deal breaker though IMO. Whereas Terpsi gets an accuracy bonus for steps and 1 extra finishing move Twashtar gets 70 dex and 20 agility which is just so much more valuable.

While the step bit is lackluster these days, to be fair I don't think any rema or specifically mythics in this case had any kind of alteration to their base JA/trait on the weapon, they just got increased, except for the FM thing, which I find odd now that you mention it.


That's simply the case with majority of TP scaling WS' when compared to non-scaling, though rudras/savage probably show it off the most. Mythic AMs are also somewhat devalued in todays power level of high natural MA, in WARs case its sometimes simply a detriment due to the high DA rate + high DA dmg if thats a factor, while empy AMs don't have this problem. The R15 helped push some back up respectable levels with the high DMG increase and another boost to their respective WS but they really missed a chance in not making that 3rd augment job related like they attempted with relic, which still seems backwards to me given that mythics are the JSE REMA. Wouldnt be surprised if some of those ideas were actually pulled over into the crafted dyna path C weapons instead

Yagrush would be the closest analogy. Originally it just made status removal spells AoE, but they couldn't upgrade that trait so they added Divine Benison I~III.

That actually reminded me of terpsichore's other achilles heel, which is the mechanics Pyrric Kleos operates on. PK is basically a souped up dancing edge, distributing its damage evenly across 4 (5 with offhand) swings. In contrast, rudra's focuses all its stat mods and TP scaling into creating one massive hit. Therein lies PK's downfall. Like any multi hit weaponskill, WSD is ineffective because it only applies to the first hit, so multi attack becomes the go to method of boosting damage. But even with sabre dance and the best triple attack gear available the numbers just don't add up favorably for PK. Our gear sets are massively stacked with WSD, typically in the 60-70% range, and that just screams "rudra's storm". This is more a problem (if you can even call it that) with the way our gear sets are statted than the weaponskills themselves, but it doesn't change the fact that rudra's has a lot more working for it with our current gear options than PK does.

PK also doesn't scale with TP, so whenever you're spamming it with terpsi's AM3 up you end up wasting a fair amount of the extra TP generated just because you do tp so fast. Sure you can take advantage of the over-tping by using rudra's storm with terpsi mainhand too, but in my experiences they're always slightly weaker than what I see if I just mainhand my twashtar instead. I touched upon this a few pages back in the thread, and I've had ample opportunity to try and optimize my weaponskill use with terpsi mainhand. The anti synergy between the various factors definitely does drag it down a bit. And before anyone takes this the wrong way, I'm not actually ragging on terpsi here. It's still a fantastic dagger and one of our top tier weapons. It just has some rough edges in its playstyle, whereas twashtar feels smooth and right all around.

I would say it WAS a downfall, but in a light of Odyssey gear, that's it's advantage now. For Rudra PDL is not much of an improvement, exactly because it fights against WSD and usually is very close. Now for multihit WSs with fTP replication, PDL is HUGE improvement. Of course we go into another problem of having enough attack or def down to cap with PDL, but that's still huge boost, even if only under right conditions. Before Odyssey, avg PK in bis gear was ~34041. With addition of Gleti's and Crepuscular Pebble this changed to ~39198, which is 15% boost. For comparison Rudra changed from ~36589 to ~38462, so only 6.5%.


This one is indeed a problem tho. Personally I would like PK to actually mimic Blade: Shun and have Attack bonus scaling with TP. It would fit perfectly with needing PDL gear to achieve full potency and would be much easier to balance.

The fact that PK's TP mod is useless is bigger than a Terpsichore problem, I think. I thought that the PK WS damage boost from Terpsichore applied to all hits of it, though normal WSD is obviously only first hit.

I would personally have just gone with an fTP boost for the TP scaling. WS Atk boosts are only inconsistently useful and WS Acc boosts should really never be useful. Evasion -10 debuff duration is obviously even worse than either of those.

All WS augments are to all hits. I dont think anyone was saying anything about that. We discussed regular WSD on gear.


The problem with this is balancing. Almost all fTP scaling WSs are poorly balanced, when they suck at 1000TP and are OP at 3000TP, to the point you use non ilvl TP bonus sub hand weapons instead of ilvl ones, because TP bonus is just too strong. The difference between 1000TP and 3000TP should be small, but then you risk another issue, where 3000TP fTP will be too weak, or 1000TP fTP will be too high.

Imo attack bonus scaling with TP is actually great. It let you use PDL more. PK set has up to +48% PDL now. It's really hard to achieve attack cap with this on anything serious, especially when you need to balance buffs for all DDs in party and someone else might be overcapping attack already and find additional minuet or indi fury useless. Attack bonus would also let DNC work much better in solo and lowman (Terpsi is best solo and lowman weapon anyway, unless you just zerg the fight with one 4 step, but thats not the solo Im talking about) and also with more diverse setups (BLU and/or RDM instead of usual GEO/COR/BRD).

Yeah, Terpsichore's 49.5% damage bonus applies to every hit of the weaponskill just as tauret's bonus does to evisceration. But WSD itself doesn't, so wearing our artifact gloves, relic legs, nyame path B etc is a bad way to gear for PK. Simon makes a good point that gleti's PDL is the best answer here, but dancer is a low attack job so actually making use of a significant amount of PDL is difficult. This goes back to when Simon pointed out that terpsi spamming PK is better against NMs like xevioso than trash pulls in dynamis because trash pulls don't get debuffed like a single target does so you rarely end up with enough attack to make use of PDL.



I like this solution a lot actually, because PK's current tp mod is just so awkward. Evasion -10 isn't very useful to begin with, but when you're spamming the weaponskill extending the duration is less than useless. PK would be so much better if it had a native attack mod.

Can someone tell me why dnc/war doesnt have access to savage blade when Bg wiki say you must be or sub war drk run pld rdm ?

Not seeing anything about subjob for Savage Blade on BGWiki. Not sure if Savage Blade would even be worth it on DNC if you can't use Naegling, though.

It doesnt say that? Its a quested WS, only jobs that have access to that quest can use the ws, or they get it from naegling

Savage Blade 240
Quest Delivers a twofold attack. Damage varies with TP.
Main or Sub must be WAR, RDM, PLD, DRK, BLU, COR, or RUN.

Its whats written on the wiki

Edit: oh ya itd quested lol, got confused

"Savage Blade is only unlockable to the jobs listed above, regardless of the sword skill level another job may attain; due to the necessity of equipping Sapara of Trials to complete the trial."

Idk what wiki you're looking at. Even the ad-ridden wiki doesnt say it


Skill Level: 240 (Paladins, Blue Mages, Warriors, Red Mages, Dark Knights, Corsairs, and Rune Fencers only)