Basics

Preparation is key!

Start the fight fully ready. Watch this video that explains how to get and maintain full Ragnarok before each fight.

https://youtu.be/IqgI6g8wk0M

Skating

Q: What is Skating?

A: Skating is a term used mainly by Lancers. In short, Lancers will use their basic attack + block repeatedly to move in combat faster than their walking speed.

While Valkyries do not have a block to abuse this mechanic as hard as Lancers can, a lot of skills in the Valkyrie's arsenal have decent mobility. On top of their mobility, a lot of those same skills have a pretty decent range to both the front, side and back. This means if a boss is about to do a mechanic to hit the rear, you could use an attack to the side of the boss, still doing damage while putting you in a better situation to continue dealing damage. Due to this, Valkyries are a very efficient melee damage dealer.

High mobility skills include: Shining Crescent, Evasion, Charge, Windslash, Spinning Death, Backstab, Godsfall final hit

Medium mobility skills include: Leaping Slash, Ground Bash, Maelstrom, Twilight Waltz final hit

Small repositioning skills include: Slash, Glaive Strike, Twilight Waltz, Dark Herald (you can walk during Dark Herald animation)

Enraged Timers

Q: How does "Enrage" work?

A: In PvE, monsters can "enrage". This means that monsters will do more damage and attack faster; however, they will also take more damage from you. This includes minions, normal monsters and boss monsters. Boss monsters enrage for 36 seconds at a time. Both minion and normal monsters have a different mechanic and are irrelevant.

Boss monsters can become enraged both naturally and manually:

Naturally: by damaging 10% of their health while they are not enraged

Manually: by a tank using an "infuriate" skill.

Enrage uptime depends the group's composition and damage output. Theoretically, you could have higher enrage uptime with multiple tanks but it is not advised. Moongourd will also not track your score if you bring multiple tanks. The only way an enrage can last longer is if you infuriate a boss monster that is already enraged. If you infuriate right before or at the start of a natural enrage, you have basically wasted the Infuriate. Most tanks will infuriate at the start of a fight or before a major mechanic. The reason for this is that it not only merits a larger enrage uptime, but also snynergizes well with damage dealer rotations.

TL;DR: If you want to do top dps, you want to use your big skills in enrage if at all possible.

Tip: Personally, I am a strong advocate of the Shinra DPS meter. The Shinra add-on not only tracks your dps in detail, but also shows the boss's HP bar, the percentage it will enrage and how long enrage has left. It also has notification on certain class skills that alert you when activated or need activated.

Note: Some bosses have unique enrage phases where this principle does not apply but those bosses are very few and far between.

Noctenium

Q: What is Noctenium?

A: Noctenium is a consumable that increases damage of skills with noctenium effects in its description by 5-9%. Noctenium's boosted damage effect is randomly generated, so you may get +5% one time +9% the next. There is also a blue, superior version that has even more increased damage and supersedes the noctenium effect and forces itself on all skills - even those that don't use it like Apex skills.

2.0 and 1.5 Mounts

Q: What are the Dragon buffs?

A: In short, they are special mounts that grant bonus critical power for 6 seconds. The superior version grants 2.0 critical power and the lesser variant grants 1.5 critical power both of which lasting 6 seconds. The lesser variant's buff generally procs first and the buff can be overridden by the superior variant.

The crit power buff is on a 2 minute cooldown so you can actually proc this a few times during a fight. If you just fought mobs or the previous boss, you might want to wait to engage so that the effect is ready and in sync with the first enrage. If you see that this buff has proc'd you will want to use your harder hitting skills so that they hit even harder - this could be worth breaking your rotation.

It's also worth noting that the first crit that procs this buff is not affected by it.

Scything Crescent

Valkyrie's Shining Crescent behaves similarly to Warrior's Scythe. As a warrior, the higher you stack edge, the harder Scythe hits. This is the same for Valkyrie's runemark system. The more runemarks you have on a target, the more damage you will deal to them.

There are a few catches however:

• you have to have the runes on the target and not on yourself.
• runemarks add up to Shining Crescent's full skill damage at max runes (whereas edge modifies Scythes skill damage beyond its set skill damage)

The formula for Shining Crescent is:

SC_damage= 9,118 * ( 0.65 + ( runemarks * 0.05 ) )

TL;DR:

7 runemarks = 9,118 * 1

Twilight Waltz

Twilight Waltz performs similarly to the first hit of Shining Crescent. The more runemarks you have on a target, the more damage you will deal to them. In fact, the damage formula on the last hit of Twilight Waltz is the exact same for the first hit of Shining Crescent.

There are a few caveats however:

you have to have the runes on the target and not on yourself.

the first 2 hits of damage on the last cast of Twilight Waltz are unaffected by runemarks. they will always hit for the same amount of damage at 0-7 runemarks.

TW_Damage = 15,975 * ( 0.65 + ( runemarks * 0.05 ) ) + 2 precursor accessory hits of fixed damage that seem to do their own thing

The following numbers are numbers pulled from my test:

• A 7 stack runeburst does 2,630,376 damage
• A 7 stacked TW does 4,611,873 on final hit + two fixed accessory hits of 691,781
• A 0 stacked TW does 2,997,717 on final hit + two fixed accessory hits of 691,781

Assuming the crit rate of TW isn't based on runemarks, if you were to runeburst before the final hit of TW, you would see a total damage of 5,628,093 + the two fixed accessory hits. This is a 1,016,220 damage gain.

Unlike Runeburst before Shining Crescent, all the damage of the last Twilight Waltz is in that singular last hit. The accessory damage is fixed so that is even more of a reason to runeburst before. The only drawback as to why you wouldn't Runeburst before last hit of Twilight Waltz is if the crit rate seems to be based off of it - but that doesn't seem to be the case.

This is a much safer rotation due to Runeburst always critting. So while you won't see that big TW crit, you'll have overall more damage from pretty much the same rotation because Runeburst will crit 100% of the time unlike TW critting anywhere from 70-90% below the crit cap.