Is X better than Y for me?

• For weapons: item level (iLvl)/weapon damage (WD) wins, regardless of substats.
• For armor: iLvl usually wins, unless 5 materia slots.
• For same-iLvl pieces: substat itemization can be in your favor or not depending on the rest of your gear and stat tiering.

When in doubt, use the Gear Planner - only here can you get an accurate answer for your setup!

Samurai has positionals?!

Samurai has two positionals:

➜ Gekko from the rear/back.

➜ Kasha from the flank/side.

• Each one when successfully landed grants a 50 potency bonus to the base combo potency. Given the overall usage of ~7 positionals every 60s, this equates to a 350 potency gain every minute.

• Remember to use your True North buff when you encounter mechanics that make you unable to properly execute your positionals.

Executing positionals correctly is an essential part of any melee DPS job!

Is my ping too high to play Samurai?

High ping is bad, but not unplayable if you know how to work around it. Choose a slower GCD range and/or stick to single weaves if you notice consistent GCD clipping after double/iai-weaving.

When is Higanbana worth using?

It takes ~45s (depending on server ticks) for Higanbana to outdamage Midare which is the point for Higanbana to be 100% worth doing. Depending on your killtime or if it grants you an extra usage of Shoha it may be worthwhile to use Higanbana even if it would not tick for 45s or more.

Is Kaeshi: Higanbana Worth Using?

Short Answer: No. Never.

It is important to note that the DoT from Kaeshi: Higanbana does not stack with the DoT from regular Higanbana. This makes it obvious from even a cursory glance at the tooltip that it has no use case in single-target situations. What might not be obvious though is that, in fact, Kaeshi: Higanbana has no use case in any situation - ever.

The Sen efficiency of using our Tsubame cooldown on Midare is quite literally impossible to beat. In short, it is always better to use Tsubame on Kaeshi: Setsugekka and then apply a manual Higanbana to our second target than it is to ever use Kaeshi: Higanbana because it costs just three GCDs to do so compared to the nine to fire off another Midare. I have created a simple potency table to illustrate how this works.

Each line is a GCD. Yellow numbers indicate where total damage at that GCD is equal between rotations. Red numbers mean that rotation is underperforming compared to the other. And green numbers mean that rotation is outperforming the other.