Pushing Monk's Limits: [HASTE]
Monk has a ton of haste gear. With the new haste headgear, my monk haste has finally passed the haste cap (yes there's a haste cap from gear) regardless of subjob, allowing me to test and play around more easily with haste and recast timers, especially on mnk/nin.
I was not in a hurry to get this, just using points from xp and besieged, but it went pretty fast anyways, mostly from all the soloing and duoing on VT imps, and from things like triple-besieged for 2100 easy IM points.
With this, my haste from gear reached 30% (35% if you count subbing dragoon, which at least now, given the cap, is even less useful and mostly just for fun).
With a little testing I verified that the cap for haste from gear alone is 25%, which now I get with just 4 pieces without sacrificing subjob or weapon:
12% Black Belt + 5% Byakko's Haidate + 5% Walahra Turban + 3% Fuma Kyan = 25%
For additional testing, I also used my 5% Capricorn Staff, with various combinations of all the items above.
I tested with both /nin sub and /whm sub, since reraise has a longer round recast of 60 which helps getting slightly more accurate numbers. Without any haste, reraise is 60 seconds and utsusemi ni is 45. With increasing haste from equip, those timers shorten up to 45 and 33 (it doesn't round up luckily) at 25%, and adding more haste after that will not change those timer by even 1 second.
Haste from spells and songs still work on top of that of course, reaching about 50% haste, for a 22s (!) utsusemi ni recast and a 15 seconds utsusemi ichi recast.
I have not tested if there's any cap in haste from magic or total haste (although I suspect there is, since 50% is too nice a number to be coincidence). I would have to check this by having a bard use soulvoice and double march and see if I still get just 50% total haste.
On a totally unrelated note, after doing lots of BCNM40 runs (20+ fights) to get rid of my seals, runs where drops averaged to 8-9k at best, I finally got a nice drop! (a thanks to Knight, Bri, and Clem who did this bc with me most of the times I did it)
after getting mine we kept going until we each had one, possibly with a few days break and more seal farming in between, when it dropped a second time in the same night(!) and surprisingly both times from my lucky orbs o.O!
This item used to have the stigma of gilselling to me in the past, but since they changed the NM drop to rare ex and added this to BC drops that changed.
On another totally unrelated sidenote, having perfected a few 3-man strategies involving monk in assaults I also spent some of my points on a few assault items like this:
Of course since neither are rare ex, I don't care as much for them, I just played around with this for a bit and then sold it for a decent amount. I know I can get both back with a bit of effort (and some luck in the case of BCNMs).