Returning BST: questions and general confusion.Follow

1. You can go for damage axes like any other job, dual wield, high damage + Oa2/3/4 axe... however You'll get much more mileage out of the elemental axes. The most usefuly being, earth, wind, and water for pet -pdt, pet eva, and pet -mdt.

atma: You have ALOT of options.
Regen: Vicissitude, Mounted Champion, Stronghold, Sea Daughter - These are Fantastic for pet eating damage and keep going.
EVA: Cloak and Dagger, Siren's Shadow, (Gnarled Horn has nice agi bonus also)
RR is great for everything that melees
Damage reduction: Ducal guard, Winged Gloom, Heavens, Tremors
You can actually accomplish 100% damage reduction for your pet for either or both physical AND magical damage. You will have a hard time doing damage to kill many HeroesNM's but you can hold one forever.

3> GEAR: At this point you have no need for a charm set. Your atma will matter more than your gear. What you have is fine until you get perle. After perle you mainly want you AF3+ set. It is the foundation of a great TP set and the hands/feet are good WS pieces. Otherwise refer to bst haste options thread for tp. and you can gear for WS much like other jobs.

4: nazuna is the standard replacement for cc... mainly because its cheap and always available. Nazuna is a solid standard, and perhaps the best vit/hp for tanking. However, we have alot more options now than before. Yuly IS THE BOMB. Yuly is our own person thf in all the best ways. Treasure hunter, and EVA tanking. You can take ALOT of NM"s w/ Yuly that you can't do any other way. Lynx, Eft, and Raptor are our best dd. They move fast (lynx and raptor) and they hit hard. Lulush is good reliable dd w/ a AoE healing support, almost like having a dnc w/ you. Otherwise for tanking, often the elemental resistance of the pet makes a great difference: for fire use Lizard, for Water: Leech, DArk: funguar. There is a very noticeable difference.

5: Call Beat recast 5/5. Next is a toss up between reward recast and Sic/ready recast. The group 2merits are not very clear cut and just choose what you prefer. Beast Affinity might be very needed at level 99, but so far we don't see any caps on the 76+ jugs (might be close on the 76's but can't tell yet)

Not if it has regen.

I held Amarok and Orthrus the other day like this. (Ducal Guard, Winged Gloom, Mounted Champion)
was trying to trio (friend dual boxing) Amorok this way.
Its great fun watchine pet take 0 damage all the time, but the slip damage from Winged Gloom really is not very fun. 30/tick, reduced to 10/tick using Mounted Champion (which made it MUCH more manageable). It was easy to pop a zeta biscuit at 22% health to jump pet back up to about 50%.
The challenges w/ the fight were this: RDM and war could proc red and yellow (great!!) and rdm especially good to keep damage going, but I used sheep first(oops) then switch to lizard. Sheep died. then war and rdm died too, until Anna could get keep hate.During that time Amarok regened from ~40% to ~65% while rdm unweak. We got ls to come help finish kill even though they didn't arrive till we were back at ~25%. So a good dot might work, but it really takes a LONG time. (pet actually died when I was standing too close got paralyzed, and lost reward to paralysis)

With that much defensive atma, I couldn't add RR for some better damage output. I held Orthrus in the same way, just so we could WS for red and blu before moving in for the kill. Hp stayed around 94% w/ just anna holding it.
Magic damage reduction was actually only lik 98% because I dont' have -mdt axe, or shepherds chain. Having 2x pet atck+ axes would probably help alot.

I'd also like to try 1x -pdt axe and 1x-mdt axe for this (and get shepherds chain). then if using perhaps atma of tremors and atma of earthwyrm you can getto 100% w/out the slip damage from winged gloom.

I need to actually test this though. A friend tried tremors when fighting emperador de altepa and it seemed to be less effective than atma of the heavens (10% physical)

Even so,90% mitigation to both physical and magical while keeping RR on is pretty sweet.

Also, this won't stop slip damage from bio or poison... so no Chillwing Hwitti using this method. (really just stun the tantra on that guy and (yuly tank) have something to get rid of amnesia quickly!! (/dnc + ecphoria)

I was actually planning on trying to solo the airship battle since no one seems to do CoP anymore after the cap was removed. I think there was an initial flurry of people getting it finished and I missed it XD. Thanks for the advice, I'll give it a try.

You really should be working on a variety of axes rather than just pet axes if you want to be a respectable DD. Rampage will totally outperform Primal Rend in Abyss for the most part so you want an Axe from the STR (fire) path or Empy/Empy -1 Axes. The elemental axes are very easy to finish too so at the moment for example, I'm using a STR/Pet attack for main hand when DD'ing, but i'm going to start working on the Farsha in the meantime as the Empy weapons are becoming less of a strain to get.

Really depends what your playstyle is though, if you ONLY plan to solo then by all means you can just go for the pet axes. To be honest when you're using Atma it's really only the tougher mobs at the moment where you're going to really need those pet stat axes anyway. If you're just starting again, a lot of the content in the first 3 Abyss zones is going to be quite easy for you and extreme pet -pdt (and etc.) builds one way or the other aren't going to be of that much value to you.

Edited, Jan 24th 2011 7:40pm by blowfin

Yeah, Cloudsplitter was always going to suck in Abyss for damage like the rest of the elemental WS in the game. The only time when it's going to shine is going to be with a brew. I guess the main question is if it's better than Primal Rend, surely it has to be? Hate to think that they've given us another elemental WS without it even trumping Primal Rend.

Regardless, it's not going to stop me working towards that shiny, shiny Axe. =)