SAM parry build

One of the things that had bugged me is the way samurai was designed to tank, at least implied by design of the game. They could wear heavy armor, has Third Eye, and access to a decent amount of enmity (I am talking about earlier days before ToAU so I didn't include Seigan). They're also very proficient at parrying (A- skill) and somewhat proficient on evasion (B+ skill). I think they were initially intended for samurai to be parry tanks, despite their claims of never intending for them to tank. Heres a list of the maximum parry a samurai has access to:

MAIN: Schiltron Spear (+6)
NECK: Parrying Torque (+7)
EAR: Parrying Earring (+3)
EAR: Bushinomimi (+5)
HANDS: Praefectus Gloves (+5) or Amir Kolluks (+5)
BACK: Boxer's Mantle (+10)
LEGS: Myochin Haidate +1 (+10)

So far, that is +46 parry skill, which is significant. Add full merits and you have +54 parry skill. A samurai has A- parry skill, so the base at 75 would be 269. With the boosts, that becomes 323 parry skill!!! As a comparison, my ninja only has +20 evasion skill (289 total skill) and is capable of soloing monsters that check tough without debuff ninjitsus. I can also solo very tough monsters with ninjitsu assistance. 323 would be almost comparable to the base skill of a level 86 player! (Assuming the formula does not change past 75, a level 86 with A- skill would cap out at 324.)

Some of you may have noticed I put in Schiltron Spear rather than Parrying Knives. While it would be nice to have +20 skill (leading to a total of 337 parrying skill) rather than +6 skill, I suspect they will be of no use. First, having to use ninja as a subjob is limiting. Second, even if you sub warrior, then you lose out on one knife and only have a 4 skill advantage over the spear. Third, with the very low damage, there will be problems with hate in party settings and with killing things in a timely manner in solo settings (samurai has no access to Dancing Edge, Shark Bite, or Evisceration weapon skills, not to mention the 11 DMG on the knives). Fourth, and most important of all, parry skill seems more effective with 2 handed weapons over 1 handed ones. I will do more testing on this later on but on the similar skill and monsters, I have noticed my samurai will tend to parry more than ninja. Now moving on......

People may wonder if this sounds so godly, why haven't there been more people attempting setups like this. And to that I blame SquareEnix's design of defensive combat skills. If you didn't realize, this is the order in which the game processes a hit (for both monsters and players):
Evasion → Parry* → Utsusemi/Blink/Third Eye → Shield* → other factors such as Stoneskin/Phalanx.
*note that this is for weapons that can parry. With guard and counter, I believe they come after Utsusemi and before the other factors.
The fact that parry occurs after evasion checks causes problems for people who want to skill up parry. Evasion will occur more often and then the higher skill will prevent parry from skilling up. By the time you hit 75, if you had leveled normally, your evasion skill would be anywhere between 80 to 150 over parry skill. Anything weak would be always evaded and rarely parried while everything strong would be not evaded, but also way too high for you to parry more often. Overall, what this means is there are relatively few players with capped parry skill and most of those that do are ninjas (not all of which would have samurai leveled to 75 as well).

Progress










As you can see, my parry skill is currently at 192. Which means theres another painful 77 skill ups to go. Initially I had planned to alleviate the problems I listed above by leveling paladin and ninja concurrently and level up after capping parrying each time. However, I had lost sight of that at some point and had leveled ninja to 75, leaving paladin at 57. I think I will finish leveling paladin in hopes of getting more parry skill along the way, and then finish it off on ninja, soloing tough and very tough monsters.
As far as equipment goes, most of them are easily accessible except Bushinomimi (which I expect to get next week) and Myochin Haidate+1 (which I am currently working on). I already have the Schiltron Spear and Boxer's Mantle, currently have the points to obtain Amir Kolluks, and the torque/earring are buyable. I haven't started to merit yet either, but it only cost 90k of merit points so it should not be a problem.

Predictions
I think once I push my parry skill up to 300 and beyond, I might be able to do interesting things with my samurai as far as soloing goes. However, what I am really after is attempting to tank some lower or mid level HNMs with some assistance without sponging up MP. It might be possible to tank fine as long as I can keep the hate, but I will not know for sure till I get to that point.


I didn't quite expect to write up this much when I first started the blog, but I guess the next few posts will be similar in length as well. Till my next post, this is Chewbar signing off~