Delay

New to Drg lvl 24 now. Is it better to focus on low or high delay polearms?

thanks for any help, and any other friendly advice on the job.

So... I dont know to to much about polearms however I do know bout 2hand weapons....at lvl 24 you mainly want to focus on weapons with stats on them... delay isnt going to play as much of a factor at lower lvl as it will when you get higher into the job... and start gaining more acc/haste/atk/etc.... any weapon with decent upgrade to stats ie more acc or atk/str/dex then what you previously had, and that doesnt bog down your base dmg to much is worth getting.... I hope that helps

Focus on High Delay lances. The high delay helps in your TP per hit and with free extra hits (jump and high jump) you get more free TP per extra hit.

Edit: lances typically have a MUCH higher base DMG rating as well, so win-win.

thanks for the info, makes sense. ^^

I personally go for the high deamage / high delay weapons, mainly because they ive more DMG on WS, moe TP on jumps and very similar DPS.

If there is only a small difference in DMG/other stats, go for the Delay. If the difference is huge, go for the high DMG typically. This will make your choices very easy for the majority of your DRG life - only a few polearms are an exception to this.

I always go high delay because the lower delay can screw with your xhit build. My friend got a couse+1 for her sam and it required a lot more stp than the NQ yet it was only a 19 delay difference. Higher damage with lower delay isn't always the best.

As ppl have said high delay got higher base damage and the xhit favor. To explain it better, the tp/hit formula varies with the weapon delay and weapons with lower than 180 and between 480-530 delay have the best tp/sec in the game. Lances usually have 492 delay which is right at that magic spot, and even though you loose a bit of dps (thalassocrat, a very standard career weapon, has one of the highest dps among poles) you gain more with ws frequency.

Thalassocrat is also good if others in your pt lack some acc since it procs quite often.

>deep breath<
Platoon Lance
Military Spear
Royal Squire's Halberd
Lance
Peregrine
Mythril Lance
Holy Lance (ymmv, may be unavailable)
Dark Mezrak / Grand Knight's Lance / Schwarz Lance (Mez if acc isn't a problem, GKL if it is, Schwarz if you want to try something really different and get huge spike damage)
Narval (if you feel like camping it, made the difference for my Maat)
Gae Bolg (can be interesting if you have it, but avoidable and annoying to get, will be replaced)
Skystrider (if you want to spend the gil this early)
Thalassocrat / Mezraq / nicely augmented Fay Lance
DONE. Did I miss anything from memory? Obviously endgame opens more options, and I haven't played with Magians much.

60: DM / GKL is an ageless debate. GKL will have Acc on constantly, while DM will have -10 evasion... when it procs. When it doesn't, you get nothing. For an Elvaan, GKL might be the better choice because your natural Acc is hurting to begin with. For a Mithra like me... there are options. Schwarz Lance is a completely different beast, and will give you positively HUGE Penta Thrust damage, but the delay is almost a full second longer, so you'll be swinging slower. Inversely, the TP gain on Jumps will be higher with Schwarz, but it's usually not available. By 60 you should be able to get a feel for where you're at, and playing around a little can be fun. Around 58-60, you should be able to solo colibri outside Whitegate for fun if you feel inclined. Go for a Chain 5 and put the polearm WAR/NINs to shame 8D

"Final" lance: Skystrider competes quite well if you want to take it all the way, and the Jump bonus is nice, but I don't get to sub /SAM much and the extra 5 went to waste, hence why I sold it. You build may make it work beautifully though. Mezraq will give you the biggest returns on Wheeling Thrust and Drakesbane, but is admittedly 1 DMG less than Thalassocrat, so it loses on Penta Thrust. Thalassocrat will give you bigger Pentas, but doesn't have that extra STR for Wheeling and Drakesbane. Fay Lance can also offer some great augments, if you can find a group for Sidhe that can win.

Obviously there's room for experimenting and choices to make due to gil, but that's the road map I'd suggest.

Edit: Corrected RKL to GKL (Grand)

Thalassocrat is better than Mezraq for Drakesbane if the DEX matters but as a general rule I'd use Thal over Mezraq because of the higher base damage, DEX, and it not being a huge waste of Imperial Wootz Ingots.

Also, *** don't know 'bout my Love Halberd. Nice choice pre-Magian.

Thalassocrat is also an assload cheaper than Mezraq which can help new players.

GKL is better than Dark Mezraq but Dark Mezraq looks so much cooler :(

When I was a whee tyke, I made an entire spreadsheet devoted to checking the damage outputs between Mezraq and Thalassocrat, with all things equal. I also did GKL/DM/Schwarz for fun.

With Mezraq, that STR gives it an edge in Wheeling Thrust and presumably Drakesbane as well. However, Thalassocrat's DEX equals out the STR in Penta and that +1 DMG wins. DEX improves the chance of critical, which Drakesbane CAN do (and Penta can't,) and I never took that into account, so that would be an interesting string of numbers to play with.

With the level 60 lances, that's a different game altogether. In a one-attack battle, Schwarz wins hands down, but that doesn't take into account the longer delay. Between DM and GKL, it actually gets interesting. It turns out that DM's extra DMG moves it to the next "tier" of weapons, which is calculated slightly differently.

That difference in calculation gives GKL an edge, and I believe it winds up that your minimum per-hit damage on Penta is 1-3 damage higher with GKL while maximums are the same, which of course narrows the average nicely. However, Mezraq is -10 evasion (+10 accuracy) when it procs, and that's for the entire party, not just the DRG. But "when it procs" is an important term that some people tend to ignore.

For both debates, I'd say go with what you like. On Fairy, the price of Mezraq vs Thalassocrat was competitive, and I haven't looked very closely at Sylph. And of course, I'm leaving Skystrider completely out of that debate. The extra TP was pointless to my build, but most people don't wear a Barone Corazza, and may switch to Askar legs instead of Barone in that slot as well, in which case Skystrider is a different beast (equaling out the lost +4.)

In b4 AJ is better than Barone. lolPBnJ DRG (AF+AJ.)

Edit: Recalled that I had moved my polearm spreadsheet to Google Docs and checked it over. The difference between GKL and DM is actually that the "minimum" damage you'll get per hit is almost always identical, while the absolute max is slightly higher, due to the different DMG ratings. The numbers I was using at the time would mean (vs level 65 Colibri) a minimum of 115 per hit, and a maximum of 233 on GKL and 237 on DM. Schwarz is 116/238. Wheeling was 222/449 DM, 222/442 GKL and 224/452 Schwarz.

Fun to play with, I suppose

You'll get more consistent numbers with GKL and honestly, who uses Wheeling Thrust in a PT <_<

Crabs in Boyahdra Tree! \o/ Or Cape Terrigan! \o/ Or Erucas! Closing Light before you get Drakesbane! And stuff... There's more than Colibri in this world, you know :p

tbh, I put together the spreadsheet for DM vs GKL, and then added on to it so I could do Thalassocrat vs Mezraq. I don't believe I'll ever be top tier, but I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing.

I didn't find Dark Mezzy's procrate to be stellar unfortunately ;x which is to say it was pretty bad. Thal's etc is quite good though!

Also I used a Holy Lance +1 for about 10 levels and never saw a single proc.

I saw one!

...no really, one. >_>

My Penta always did more with some type of attack food.

I really don't think mezraq is better than thala on wheeling like you say (or any ws i will add). Mezraq 2 str would need to increase base damage on ws by 2 to be able to do that. And simply put, that is really hard to happen because the str bonus would need to increase fstr and wsc tiers at the same time. So you would need to create a really specific ws set for it to happen.

Here is what i think: 2str can at most increase fstr by 1 ,and due the @ modifier, it will increase wsc damage by 0.83. So unless 0.83 wsc increases your damage to a new integer value, you wont get any increase in wsc. And the same applies to fstr (if you don't get a new interger fstr value you wont get anything at all). In the end mezraq has 41.5% chance of being better than thala on a 50% str ws. So like i said before, you would need a very specific set to make it be better everytime.