Can I stick with my non-awakening weapons until I get terminus'?

[Areiy]

I don't know how I feel about throwing away my personalized build for a pure atk one, firstly I don't even know if its optimal because as long as I'm playing accordingly with my build I'm hitting cap anyways. Secondly it just doesn't feel good throwing it away, I spent time building these builds and it's just getting flushed in favor of a more boring one.

[Kyutaru]

It's actually LESS of a pure attack one. Your CURRENT build should be a pure attack build. Once you get Terminus weapons, you can reach 25,000 attack easily and you don't NEED all your sigils geared towards damage anymore. You can afford to pick non-damage ones for utility or defense.

You can do whatever you want, but currently you need more sigils to reach damage cap than after getting a Terminus weapon.

[Shiki Yui]

Awakened weapons get the benefit of some damage cap and sigil booster which raises all your sigils level by 1

[This PC]

Originally posted by Kyutaru:

...

OP is about whether he should get awakening weapons to like.. awaken them before getting to the point where he would get terminus weapons, not whether he should get terminus weapons or not.

To OP:
Your weapon is like... The most irrelevant thing to your build ? Haha. It certainly doesn't define it. It's the equivalent of a collection of sigils if you look beyond the raw attack power it gives.

If you get awakening weapon, you can just swap some sigils around and get back to the same setup you had. Awakening weapons will eventually give you more of these sigil-like bonuses too.

If you're hitting cap without awakening weapons or terminus weapons, it's because you're poorly built and you need damage cap sigils, and it's not an indication that you don't need a better weapon. You will always need damage cap sigils past some point, and you will only see the effects of awakening your weapon if you use damage cap sigils.

You'd probably kill twice as fast if you weren't capping. Also, there's some fights in the game that you won't get through without proper weapons and damage cap sigils because of DPS check mechanics. I guess getting carried through these online is also an option ? I don't play online however and I'm glad I have awakened weapons with damage cap sigils on all my characters in proud difficulty.

The flipside to this is you haven't lost that weapon you used - You're still gonna want to upgrade every weapon for their mastery nodes.

[Zeo]

There is no reason for not pursue DMG, even if you're playing for example Rosetta, besides, late game bosses have a mechanic that instant party wipe if you don't follow those conditions so additional survivability is pointless, my Charlotta was taking one hits from the black dragon with 45k HP with her awakened weapon.

There's no character in this game that can say "leave to me, I watch your back", instead everybody is for themselves while bringing some utility for the party, my main is Charlotta and I have the skill that redistribute AC to the team.

Another point of why you want DMG is for break bosses faster, meaning that you will skip one cycle of useless animation and running around depending of the boss.

[Tiasmoon]

Originally posted by Areiy:

I don't know how I feel about throwing away my personalized build for a pure atk one, firstly I don't even know if its optimal because as long as I'm playing accordingly with my build I'm hitting cap anyways. Secondly it just doesn't feel good throwing it away, I spent time building these builds and it's just getting flushed in favor of a more boring one.

Terminus frees up sigils that you dont have to invest into damage, thereby (with the exception of HP) you have more building options with Terminus then without.

[Areiy]

Originally posted by Shiki Yui:

Awakened weapons get the benefit of some damage cap and sigil booster which raises all your sigils level by 1

I didn't know about sigil booster, sounds neat. How many damage cap levels do awakened weapons get though? I'm guessing 15? That's 1 slot freed for the cost of a LOT of silver centrums and other miscellaneous costs, not really the most appealing deal.

[Areiy]

Originally posted by This PC:

Originally posted by Kyutaru:

...

OP is about whether he should get awakening weapons to like.. awaken them before getting to the point where he would get terminus weapons, not whether he should get terminus weapons or not.

To OP:
Your weapon is like... The most irrelevant thing to your build ? Haha. It certainly doesn't define it. It's the equivalent of a collection of sigils if you look beyond the raw attack power it gives.

If you get awakening weapon, you can just swap some sigils around and get back to the same setup you had. Awakening weapons will eventually give you more of these sigil-like bonuses too.

If you're hitting cap without awakening weapons or terminus weapons, it's because you're poorly built and you need damage cap sigils, and it's not an indication that you don't need a better weapon. You will always need damage cap sigils past some point, and you will only see the effects of awakening your weapon if you use damage cap sigils.

You'd probably kill twice as fast if you weren't capping. Also, there's some fights in the game that you won't get through without proper weapons and damage cap sigils because of DPS check mechanics. I guess getting carried through these online is also an option ? I don't play online however and I'm glad I have awakened weapons with damage cap sigils on all my characters in proud difficulty.

The flipside to this is you haven't lost that weapon you used - You're still gonna want to upgrade every weapon for their mastery nodes.

So the main thing I should focus on are damage cap sigils and not the awakened weapon is what you're saying? Do you know if the other weapon classes will eventually not hit cap at a certain level?

[Persona Au Gratin]

Originally posted by Areiy:

So the main thing I should focus on are damage cap sigils and not the awakened weapon is what you're saying? Do you know if the other weapon classes will eventually not hit cap at a certain level?

You have to look at your character and find out where their damage actually is. For example, this is really stupid and unintuitive btw, something the damage cap is rightfully criticized about being, but something I saw about Ferry, someone determined there is a relatively low amount of damage that can be yielded from her normal attacks, so the way that they play her is use her air combo, specifically the ender portion of it, that isn't capped as severely or can yield more from increasing her damage cap.

Doing this would involve smacking a training dummy and moving sigils around until it produces the results you deem desirable. To answer your question, it really depends on the character you play and what you're trying to do when you play as them to output damage. Much of which has to involve a lot of math and numbers, which I think for most people the game doesn't really do a particularly great job about making explicitly, if at all.

Think about that outcome for a bit, because if it sounds like it flies in the face of the tutorial that is given about Ferry well lmfao, welcome to this game.

[(deleted)]

Originally posted by Areiy:

I don't know how I feel about throwing away my personalized build for a pure atk one, firstly I don't even know if its optimal because as long as I'm playing accordingly with my build I'm hitting cap anyways. Secondly it just doesn't feel good throwing it away, I spent time building these builds and it's just getting flushed in favor of a more boring one.

To ascend your Terminus weapon, you need to have all nodes from the other weapons unlocked which means all your other weapons need to be level 150.

[CHAO$$$]

Originally posted by (deleted):

Originally posted by Areiy:

I don't know how I feel about throwing away my personalized build for a pure atk one, firstly I don't even know if its optimal because as long as I'm playing accordingly with my build I'm hitting cap anyways. Secondly it just doesn't feel good throwing it away, I spent time building these builds and it's just getting flushed in favor of a more boring one.

To ascend your Terminus weapon, you need to have all nodes from the other weapons unlocked which means all your other weapons need to be level 150.

That is only partially correct, you only need it for the last rank which you can easily ignore.
The best point is around ascension 5 which adds damage cap 5 so you can have full damage cap with 4 sigils maxed + weapon.

@OP, just use stinger or whatever else as long as you optimized it to hit cap

[(deleted)]

Originally posted by CHAO$$$:

Originally posted by (deleted):

To ascend your Terminus weapon, you need to have all nodes from the other weapons unlocked which means all your other weapons need to be level 150.

That is only partially correct, you only need it for the last rank which you can easily ignore.
The best point is around ascension 5 which adds damage cap 5 so you can have full damage cap with 4 sigils maxed + weapon.

@OP, just use stinger or whatever else as long as you optimized it to hit cap

What is partially incorrect? You mean to say that you can fully ascend your Terminus without collecting and enhancing your other weapons to lv150? Or you ascend a Terminus but refuse to get over the final ascension?

[This PC]

Originally posted by Areiy:

So the main thing I should focus on are damage cap sigils and not the awakened weapon is what you're saying? Do you know if the other weapon classes will eventually not hit cap at a certain level?

No, I'm saying you should focus your awakening weapon because weapon don't matter for build, it's just the strongest weapon you have access to atm, no matter what build you run, because you can upgrade them farther than other weapons. You will hit cap with it harder than you do with your current weapon, so you need damage cap sigils. So yeah, focusing on damage cap sigils is partly right, but you should still have the right weapon to output damage. Upgrading your other weapons is still a necessity to unlock mastery nodes, so you haven't lost the mats you put into that.

Awakening levels are massive upgrades you don't want to sleep on, but yeah, you won't see the difference unless you use damage cap sigils.

Edit: You will hit cap with anything you use if you don't have damage cap sigils, you will only see a difference if you run damage cap sigils, but you have no choice to run these, because some encounters have DPS checks that will wipe you if you don't clear them. Also, even making abstraction of DPS caps, you have so many mats to farm especially when you get into maniac/proud, some with low drop rates even, you will want to kill stuff efficiently. If you kill twice as fast, that's twice less time put into farming mats. :P

Edit2: I also meant that besides their attack power/hp, these weapons give you traits that you can have with sigils instead. If you were using crit weapons, and now you switch to awakening, you will have hp/atk in excess compared to your old build, and you will have a deficiency in crit/crit damage compared to your old build, so you can ditch a few attack sigils, replace them with crit sigils (wouldn't recommend), and you can offset that HP bonus on the weapon with tyranny (would super highly recommend, would even recommend switching these crit sigils for more tyranny sigils, as you only get hit with the downside once for a fixed %'age of your hp).

IE: You can easily make a "build" with sigils, no matter your weapon. Whether or not it's worth it to guide a character towards a certain "build", I'm not too sure.

[ffrotty]

it depends on character. weapon itself is just the stats it allows, and stats matter more or less based on your role and the encounter.

sigil booster is also on ascension weapon, for example, so that might be the best.

terminus isn't even the best weapon for all characters.

but that said if your interest is minmaxing dps, you would in all likelihood gain the most damage by maxing ascension weapon, using that until terminus, then equipping that as soon as you get it for catastrophe.

But realistically, graphics aside, you won't notice a substantial difference unless you're trying for world record speed kills between any of this and a maxed stunner weapon