Samurai Merits

While many guides talk about gear choices, subjobs, and ways to play the job, very few has given much thought into this particular subject. The job of Samurai (SAM) has some very good Merit options to choose from, and this guide will seek to give a comprehensive explanation of the Pros and Cons of each merit category available to SAM, in the hopes that the reader can make an informed decision when selecting his or her own merits.

I will assume that you have a basic understanding of what Merits already are. If you do not, please, visit this page: Merit Points

These are the non-job specific merits. They will boost the general effectiveness of your SAM, along with all other jobs you have. While many people will have other jobs that will affect how they choose to distribute these merits, this section will assume that you are distributing these merits for SAM EXCLUSIVELY. They will take effect according to the table below:

HP/MP: Obviously, HP is the way to go if SAM is the only job you care about. But 80 HP isn't going to make a world of difference unless you are Tarutaru, and usually people have other jobs that will determine the HP/MP merit ratio that they want. Not too much to talk about here.

Attributes: For SAM, no other stat will matter here as much as Strength (STR). Some people may be tempted to go Dexterity (DEX) for additional accuracy and Critical Hit Rate, but 5 STR will help your Weaponskill damage much more than 5 DEX will help out your accuracy and critical hit rate. This is because the "big three" weaponskills for SAM in the endgame phase: Tachi: Yukikaze, Tachi: Gekko, and Tachi: Kasha (YGK) all have 75% STR modifiers to damage. In the long run, STR is the way to go here. However, save this category for later in your meriting career. It is not exactly a breeze to merit the 36 merits needed to cap it, there are other merits that you can obtain faster that will increase your performance by much much more.

Combat Skills: A total of 20 here can be applied to both the weapon skills section and defensive skills section.

• Weapon Skills (+2 skill per upgrade):

Great Katana (GK) is a no-brainer here. As your main weapon of choice, the GK is a high delay weapon that you do not want to miss with. In addition, each additional skill in GK = 0.9 acc and 1 att, making full merits +14.4 acc and +16 att (assuming you have over 200 skill with the GK), highly valuable. Get 8/8 GK merits. This category should be one of the first ones that you tackle. As for the remaining merits, you may have to put them toward other jobs. However, if you want to put them toward Samurai, the choices are:

• Polearm:

The secondary weapon of choice for Samurais. While a Samurai with a good polearm build can put out very high damage, and sometimes better damage than Gk depending on mob weaknesses, the relatively low skill at which it is capped forces you to put some merits into the weapon in order for it to reach maximum effectiveness. Your polearm will never be as effective as your GK on T mobs and above without adding to it's skill through either merits or equipment. On a personal note, I find that meriting polearm has somewhat limited applications for SAM. The times that you use your polearm will be when you want to adapt for very specialized situations. Unless you are specifically concerned about those times (meriting on bird camps, tanking on damage reduction gear with an Iron Ram Lance, or avoiding great katana for mob resistances eg. Limbus), you'll find that you wont opt for your polearm over GK all that often.

• Archery:

For those who enjoy SAM/RNG or simply being able to use demon arrows to pull mobs, Archery merits are a wise choice. Basically, the same idea from the polearm section applies here. However, due to the even lower cap for archery on SAM, you will need to compensate with merits AND gear. For more information on Samurai Archery or using SAM/RNG, go here: [[1]]. I prefer these merits over polearm because I personally carry a bow on me for versatility at all times. Though, if you are planning on using a Tiphia Sting or Black Tathlum in your ammo slot, these merits may be pretty unappealing to you.

While GK is recommended to have all 8 merits, many SAMs will choose to divide the remaining merits between polearm and archery. Depending on what weapons you use on a regular basis, splitting or prioritizing one weapon skill over the other is not a bad idea. Just be careful of how much you use, the 20 max merits cap applies to the defensive skills below as well, which you may also want to invest some merits into.

• Defensive skills:

The two choices here that you may want to consider are evasion and parry.

• Evasion:

Useful across the board. Evasion will apply to every job. If you want versatility in the defensive category this is the way to go. The problem here is that Samurai evasion is not the best. Though a B+ is hardly terrible, even with full evasion merits you will never evade as much as other jobs such as THF or NIN. In addition, since the most popular body piece for SAM is a Haubergeon, you are going to have a hard time making up the -20 evasion on that body piece, even if you have merits. Evasion also has the problem of being compared to your opponent's dexterity and accuracy stats. Extremely high level mobs will cause your evasion rate to drop significantly by comparison.

• Parry:

Much more exclusive to SAM, this defensive skill will negate an enemy single target physical attack. The two biggest advantages to meriting this skill is that for one, SAM is one of the several jobs that has the HIGHEST parry skill in the game. The second advantage is that parry activates independently of any stats on the mob you are facing, meaning you will parry at a consistent rate no matter how high the level of the mob you are fighting is. The major disadvantage here is that parry skillup are incredibly difficult to obtain, so getting it to where you want will be an ordeal.

While you can choose to put some merits into each of the two categories listed here, it is usually recommended that you focus on one of the two to "stack" effectiveness. 4 merits into a single category will be much more noticeable than 2 or 1 merit into each. Although, in the end, the choice is yours.

Magic Skills: Not much to talk about here. I suppose you can put some into ninjustu (for lower interruption rates)? It all really depends on what you sub on SAM here, even then, it hardly matters. You will most likely have other jobs that will dictate your merits here, much like the HP/MP section mentioned above.

Others: Max combo of 8 total, 4 max into each catagory.

• Enmity (+1 or -1 per upgrade):

I would refrain from touching your enmity. While lowering enmity may seem tempting when you are /war or /rng, it will make your life much harder when you go /thf to manage hate or /nin for tanking. One of the fantastic things about SAM is it's effectiveness as a Trick Attack hate manager due to Overwhelm merits that you can (and should) get later on, therefore messing with enmity is not preferred.

• Critical Hit Rate (+1% per upgrade):

A very good category to max out. 4% more critical hits will benifit any job, and SAM is no exception. Easy to cap, get this done close to or after meriting Overwhelm.

• Enemy Critical Hit Rate (-1% per upgrade):

-4% critical hits from mobs. Not as useful as upping your own critical hit rate, but it is nothing terrible to have either. Unless you have some significant reason (such as frequent SAM tanking?) to merit this, save this category for much later in your meriting career.

• Spell Interruption Rate (-2% per upgrade):

An alternative to meriting down enemy critical hit rate, less interruptions on spells really only applies to casting ninjutsu as /NIN. 8% at most is not going to make a world of difference, again, save this for something extra near the end, there are far better and more important things to merit.

These are the merits that really separate SAMs from all of the other jobs are there. In addition to boosting the general effectiveness of your Samurai, these abilities and traits will significantly change the way you play the job. Job specific merits are divided into two types, Group 1 and 2.

Group 1

[1→2→3→4→5]

Max combo: 10 (for each job)

Max per item: 5

• Warding Circle Recast (-20 seconds per upgrade)

A waste of perfectly good merit points. Due to the fact that at most, warding circle only lasts 1 minute and 30 seconds, with the recast starting at a ridiculous 10 minutes, warding circle is an extremely unreliable ability to use against the prospect of fighting against demons. At max merit, this recast is reduced to 8 minutes and 20 seconds, hardly anything earth shattering. The only real application for this ability is the +15% damage boost to Demons, for yourself and party members. But since that aspect is in no way enhanced by the amount of merits put into this ability, there's basically no reason at all to merit it whatsoever. The intimidation effect is only marginally boosted when stacked with your native demon killer trait, and for party members that most likely lack said trait, the effect is practically nonexistent. In summary, merit something else.

• Store TP Effect (+2 per upgrade)

A must max merit to have for all Samurais. The reason for this merit is basically to place as much of the Store TP needed to achieve a "6-hit" build (reaching 100 TP in 6 melee hits) into your job traits, leaving as few of it as possible to gear pieces, which gives you the ability to wear more pieces that enhance attack, accuracy, and or haste. The full explanation on how Store TP affects Samurais can be found here: [[2]] Basically, with full Store TP merits and a Rajas Ring, only one gear slot would need to be taken up by a Store TP piece at lvl 75. Without the Rajas Ring, you will need 2 pieces. Without full Store TP merits, you will be stuck at a 7 hit build unless you sacrifice SIGNIFICANT acc, att, and haste in gear to reach the needed Store TP to reach a 6-hit build. People may argue for food or additional gear selection, but so far there has been absolutely no gear/food combination that involves meriting less than 5/5 STP that is gonna beat the tried and true 5/5 STP. Don't forget, food and gear you use for STP is food and gear you are not using for attack, accuracy, haste, etc.

• Third Eye Recast (-2 seconds per upgrade)

This is a category that many SAMs choose to ignore. Due to the fact that Store TP merits take up 5 out the 10 merits available in this category, most SAMs will opt for the Meditate merits instead. However, in no way should Third Eye merits be dismissed. A lot of people think that Third Eye merits are something that only SAM tanks would care to go for, but it is actually something extremely useful for players who duo often or enjoy the soloing options on Samurai subbing Dancer (DNC). While each merit will only shorten recast time by 1 second while Seigan active, a 5 second reduction at 5/5 merits is absolutely nothing to scoff at (just ask any NIN if they think a 5 second reduction to Utsusemi recasts would make a significant difference to their performance). While wearing the Saotome Haidate or Saotome Haidate +1, your counter rate with Third Eye is increased to 25%, which allows Third Eye to last that much longer. For the truly ambitious out there, the Mythic weapon: Kogarasumaru has an "Enhances Third Eye" trait. Though the effects of it are currently unknown, it is something to consider when looking at the option of meriting this job ability.

• Meditate Recast (-6 seconds per upgrade)

The trademark ability for SAMs. This is the ability that other jobs sub SAM for. With both the Myochin Kabuto and Saotome Kote macro-ed into your meditate macro, you can get up to 180 TP per each usage of this ability. A reduction of 30 seconds from this category will be felt significantly when in any party or event situation. In addition to simply being able to weaponskill more often, a decreased meditate timer will also allow for more opportunities to use Sekkanoki and or Shikikoyo. When using SAM/DNC, a decreased meditate timer will allow you to weaponskill more often and rapidly gain back lost TP for curing.

• Zanshin Attack Rate (+1% per upgrade)

These merits may seem like a good thing to have, but the truth is that they are just a waste of space. It may sound cool that Zanshin is the only way that any job can break the 95% accuracy cap. However, you need to ask yourself if making up the 5% accuracy difference is worth losing your Third Eye or Meditate merits. Some people may present the prospect of meriting this ability to create a Zanshin/Ikishoten build. By using enhance Zanshin gear pieces, and fully meriting Ikishoten, you can gain TP at a rapid pace by intentionally sacrificing some accuracy. However, this build is totally unreliable due to the fact that the accuracy must be adjusted to match each new mob you face, to make sure the zanshin swing lands while the initial hit does not. The stock proc rate on main SAM for zanshin is 45%. Fully merited, the ability is increased to 50%. Looking over current gear selection that is worthwhile to TP in, the Katana Strap is the only worth getting (anther 5%). Making the effective cap for zanshin procs at 55%. This is not a good enough rate to depend on it as a source of TP gain or accuracy boost. The only time when zanshin actually becomes worthwhile is when you have a Nanatsusaya, which boosts zanshin rates to 100%, at which point, these merits and the rose strap become redundant and pointless. Therefore, don't merit these.

Group 2

[3→4→5→5→5]

Max combo: 10 (for each job)

Max per item: 5

• Overwhelm (+5% damage bonus per upgrade for the first 3 upgrades. 2% increase each for the last 2 upgrades)

Another Must have for Samurais. Nothing will beat having 19% more damage added to your weaponskills. A % damage increase means that as your SAM gets better and does more damage, the amount increased will also increase. At a base of around 800 damage per weaponskill from a decently geared SAM, the additional damage would come to almost 160, making it a total of 960. Of course, the damage bonus only activates on weaponskills used while FACING the monster, which means that you will have to do some shifting when fighting to pull it off. But the results are worth the trouble to running around the mob to have this trait activate (just make sure you don't stay up front all the time from laziness in case the mob has a frontal area of effect attack or if you are blocking the vision of the tank). A major advantage of this job trait is it's effectiveness when combined with Trick Attack while subbing THF. Since you can Trick Attack from the front, Overwhelm basically allows a SAM/THF to split up his Sneak Attack and Trick Attacks while doing fantastic damage in both instances.

• Shikikoyo (-2 minutes 30 seconds recast per upgrade)

A very useful ability once you choose to merit it's recast down. When you first get the ability it is a 15 minute ability, and you can choose to take it down all the way to 5 minutes. A good reason to do this is so that you have two 5-minute abilities (Shikikoyo and Sekkanoki) that compliment Meditate. This way, you will always have something to do with the excess TP you gain from meditating. This ability is also fantastic for people who duo with others, as a way of easily setting up skillchains. One of the major problems for Samurai duoing with others is that it will always feel like the other player has an extremely slow TP gain rate (unless they are also a SAM, DNC, and or have some good TP build gear that involve multi-hit weapons). With this ability at 5 minutes, you will be able to skillchain with every meditate, whether it is with yourself using Sekkanoki or with your partner by setting him/her up with TP. An additional advantage of this ability is that it can also give TP to your NPC fellow, allowing you to skillchain with them more effectively.

• Blade Bash (-2 minutes 30 seconds recast per upgrade)

The stun is certainly useful, but due to the fact that it is a 15 minute ability it is not very reliable unless you choose to merit it down. The fact that Samurais already have a stun weaponskill (Tachi: Hobaku) and access to a stun grip (Platinum Grip) makes the stun really only an addition to an existing arsenal as opposed to something entirely new. Another aspect of this ability is the Plague effect that activates around 60-70% of the time. While causing the mob to lose MP over time is most likely not very useful due to the large mp pools of most monsters, the TP loss over time will be very useful against certain enemies that use devastating TP moves, especially since SAMs lack any sort of innate Subtle Blow.

• Ikishoten (+3 TP gained per upgrade)

I kind of already covered earlier why zanshin is a pointless merit. By close association, these are also pretty much pointless. There is almost no application for this trait unless you fully merit it. Due the fact that you can gain up to 3 TP more on the resulting hit from Zanshin activating, you can reach a maximum of 15 more TP added to the TP you gain regularly. Now, here is where things get a bit mathy. In order to reach 100 TP in six hits, you have to get at least 16.7 TP per hit (most SAMs will actually get 17 TP back per hit on melee attacks to compensate for the loss of STP in their weaponskilling gearset). Due to the fact that Ikishoten will only give you back 15 TP on a Zanshin activation, unless you are expecting it to happen again within 5 hits it will not help you reach 100 TP any faster than you would without it. Since you should be sitting at 95% accuracy cap, you can basically expect that second miss to almost never happen (not like the first miss should even happen often, since you are at 95% accuracy). Plus, since zanshin only occurs on around 50% of your missed swings (without Nanatsusaya), that second miss will most likely not even cause zanshin to happen. So you weaponskill once for 16.1 TP, swung 3 times for 17 TP each, missed your next swing, activated zanshin (17 TP + 15 TP), and now you have 99.1% TP. Fantastic, you still need that 6th hit to reach 100%. Hooray for wasted merit points.

Now, it is just as important to know the order in which to get your merits as it is to know which ones to choose. Unless you plan on merit partying exclusively for a very long time, meriting will be a long process that will happen over the course of time. Knowing which merits to prioritize will allow you to become more effective faster, and facilitate the rest of the meriting experience. By no means is this order set in stone. But it does offer a general guideline by order of merit importance.

1. Great Katana merits

These are the most important merits to a serious Samurai. It goes without saying that accuracy and attack are important to a Damage Dealing class, but they are so much more crucial for Samurais. Our entire job revolves around our ability to connect our hits, either by quickly reaching a desired hit build or landing one of our numerous one-hit weaponskills. Though you do receive a bonus to your acc on YGK, you still need to land your other melee attacks to weaponskill in the first place. A 6 hit build is just that: 6 hits. Make sure your swings connect.

2. Store TP merits

Get these second. at 5/5 Store TP merits, it allows you to wear the Hachiman hands and feet to reach the much desired 6-hit build, or just wear one of the two if you have a Rajas Ring. (Please, do not wear the Hachiman Domaru. The loss of 13 acc (10 acc +3 from 5 DEX) and 13 att (10 att + 3 from 5 STR) from the Haubergeon will pretty much negate all the great katana merits that you worked so hard getting.) However, once you start meriting Store TP you need to make sure you finish it all in one go, as fast as you can. Store TP work sort of on a pass/fail basis. You either have enough to push yourself over the edge to a 6-hit build or you don't. There is a clear cut off point (5/5 merits) and anything less is useless and anything more is also useless. A lot of SAMs get 2 or 3 Store TP merits and then stop, and merit something else. DO NOT DO THAT. Having 3 merits in it when you need 5 is as good as having none.

3. Overwhelm merits

Once you have ensured you can land hits and reach 100 TP as fast as possible, it is time to work on increasing weaponskill damage. The easiest way to do that is to merit 5/5 on Overwhelm. 19% increase in damage will make a big difference, and you will feel it.

4. Third Eye or Meditate merits.

Now you can take some time to do some customization according to your playing style. If you are going for DD then meriting Meditate now would help you pull out more weaponskills more often. If you have chosen to do Third Eye you obviously solo or duo enough to make it a priority, which means that now would be a good time for you to get them since you have gotten the raw essentials out of the way.

5. Critical Hit Rate merits

Though you can choose when you do these, they are a very easy set of merits to get and can boost your performance noticeably. Why not get them out of the way before you move onto the really time consuming Strength merits? Just make sure you get these AFTER Great Katana merits. You cant crit if you miss.

6. Strength merits

Okay, there is no more putting these off. These are the last of the merits that will significantly affect your performance damage wise. By now you should have gotten into the mindset of meriting, just keep at it and get through it. 36 merits is a lot to get, but in time it will be done and behind you. Some people may wonder why I chose to list these so far down the list, since STR is such an important stat to SAM weaponskill damage. The reason why you want to do STR after all the other merits is that though they are the stat that will modify your weaponskill damage the most, they are the merits that will give you the least amount of improvement per each merit point spent. For 36 merits, you can get full 5/5 Overwhelm, and still have enough left over for 5 GK merits. However much 5/5 STR may give you damage wise, the improvement per each merit point will never measure up to merits elsewhere.

7. Everything else

Now you have gotten all the essentials out of the way, the rest is purely dependent on your own priorities. Customize your SAM the way that you see fit.

I hope that this guide has been helpful in giving you an idea of what you want to merit. If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to message me or post it on the discussions page, and I'll be sure to get back to you.

Thank you for reading this guide, good luck and have fun!

--Polive 09:16, 25 November 2008 (UTC)