Bard 2.5 Alternate BiS

With the addition of 2.5 gear and bards everywhere coveting the Demon Tabard of Aiming, I felt it time to revisit our true BiS for an alternative to pentamelded Kirimu. First our true BiS has not changed, although the new gear puts us very close. Adding the Demon chest into the mix and swapping gloves in favor of Dreadwyrm, we lose 12 Crit (3.78 weighted), 11 Det (3.5 weighted), 12 Acc, and gain 6 Dex (6 weighted) plus 7 Vit for those megaflares.

As you can see, we lose about 1.28 in stat weights (assuming DEX: 1 CRT: 0.315 DET: 0.318) but gain some effective health for surviving T13 and removing the need for expensive overmelds. This is all of course dependent on access to coil drops and RNG (still waiting for bard pants to drop : \) so YMMV. Just wanted to shine some light on this seeing as I know many bards are now considering alternative gearing options.

The "true" BiS has changed, Penta-melded Platinum ring of ranging is an upgrade.

http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/P9KM

That ring gives us +5 crit, +13 Det, and +18 Skill Speed with a loss of 3 DEX and accuracy that we didn't need.

I personally don't believe stat weights for Crit and Det are an accurate representation of the damage increase for fights but the new ring is absurdly good and shouldn't be overlooked.

Stat weights are just an estimated calculation on how much stat A would worth stat B, if they are interchangeable.

The fact is, they are not. You can't just say you can drop 100 Dexterity in favor of 315 points in Crit and you can pull the same DPS. However, it serves as a guideline if you have to exchange a little bit of stats here and there for min-maxing purposes.

The current BiS requires at least (I prefer to ignore the need to meld Skill Speed) 7x Savage Aim IV, 4x Heavens Eye IV and 1x Savage Might III materia to be melded in on a total of three 4* crafted gear. These are extremely expensive stuff that not even your average raider could afford.

On the other hand, with the Demon Chest you could finally have a set that is comparable with the BiS. At IL129 using only "Blue Icon" gears, you can achieve a set that still gives you above 600 Crit for an averaged 40+% critical hit rate, and the loss is only between 3 to 5 points of Dexterity (depending you want to run 532 accuracy or 538 accuracy) in terms of stat weights (you gain 16 DEX but loses about 60+ points in secondary stats).

The key in min-maxing here is to figure out what level of Crit you can maintain. Crit itself, based on my own experience and parsing tests does not indicate that it is not linear, point for point as in its Determination counterpart. Personally I believe it is tier-ed, a rough estimate of per 50 Crit, as my parsing runs with above 600 Crit gives a typical 40-45% critical rate while some 550-580 Crit runs about 32-37% critical rate.

My personal philosophy in min-maxing is to figure out what reasonable Crit I can maintain while seeking out a balance of things if I can. Whilst I have the luxury of the melded items, many do not - and the appeal of having a blue-icon-only set that performs at the same level as the BiS set (3-5 points of Dex difference is hardly anything for a BRD, it is like racial difference only) is very appealing.

True BIS should be optimized for savage coil.