Bard in Song: Melding Piety?

Hey. Was just wondering if it would be possible to raise Bards MP regen to equal it's song MP usage by melding enough Piety on the new I90 crafted gear.

I think you can but I'd rather meld something else honestly.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kaname1304

I think you can but I'd rather meld something else honestly.

---

Yeah it would definitely gimp the Bards damage a little, but a permanent Foes would be pretty cool.

Comparing melded HQ to BiS 110 you would lose 8% of your DPS but gain around 1700 MP and possibly a permanent boost to your mages damage.

Did some looking at it and you could boost your MP Regen to 74 per Tick, with the Bard song costing 80 MP per tick.

@ 3700 MP you should be good for a solid 10 minutes.

Unless you are running something like 1 bard 3 magical dps it wouldn't be worth it to lower your dps for increased song duration. For the Second Coil of Bahamut turns 6\7 have dps limitations between the phases and lots of movement and positioning you would not gain a large benefit from it outside of a few quick phases that your current mana pool could support. The only turn I would see it being useful would be turn 8 if you ONLY ran one bard you might have a solid reasoning, once again if you are caster heavy.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Soapbox

Unless you are running something like 1 bard 3 magical dps it wouldn't be worth it to lower your dps for increased song duration. For the Second Coil of Bahamut turns 6\7 have dps limitations between the phases and lots of movement and positioning you would not gain a large benefit from it outside of a few quick phases that your current mana pool could support. The only turn I would see it being useful would be turn 8 if you ONLY ran one bard you might have a solid reasoning, once again if you are caster heavy.

---

If what Judge_Xero said is correct, 8% loss vs a perma +15% for a single magical DPS is already way better. 2 mages = overkill.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Judge_Xero

Comparing melded HQ to BiS 110 you would lose 8% of your DPS but gain around 1700 MP and possibly a permanent boost to your mages damage.

Did some looking at it and you could boost your MP Regen to 74 per Tick, with the Bard song costing 80 MP per tick.

@ 3700 MP you should be good for a solid 10 minutes.

---

Info on 1,700MP gain?

I don't believe you can meld that much Piety into your gear. Stats not native to your job have a pretty low cap.

To gain 1,700 MP you will need to meld in approximately 120 Piety which means an average of 20 Piety per i90 crafted piece.

Due to it being a non native stat, I don't think you can meld 20 Piety per piece.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Ooshima

Info on 1,700MP gain?

I don't believe you can meld that much Piety into your gear. Stats not native to your job have a pretty low cap.

To gain 1,700 MP you will need to meld in approximately 120 Piety which means an average of 20 Piety per i90 crafted piece.

Due to it being a non native stat, I don't think you can meld 20 Piety per piece.

---

You can. Your job have nothing to do with how the gears are stat. capped.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Thorauku

You can. Your job have nothing to do with how the gears are stat. capped.

---

I'll try it tonight on my Saurian Tabard since it was replaced by Soldier gear.

I was doubtful because I was trying to be funny with my WAR while leveling it, I remember I tried to meld in Piety to the accessories but it was restricted to +1 or +2 despite STR/VIT on the accessories were 4 or 5 points each.

Similarly, for the sake of fun in 2.1 I tried to create a BLM that could "heal" for a fair amount with Physick (CT was terrible on my server, when I was playing BLM I had to compliment some healing with my BLM's Physick lol). I tried to meld in MND to my i70 crafted and I do recall I can't even meld in 10 points of MND into a piece. Can't recall the exact numbers, but 2 pieces of MND IV Materia would have exceeded the cap (according to memories).

Which i70 you're trying to meld Mind into? Astral ones? It's because the base stat. (INT / MND) of Astrals were already capped if it's the HQ version.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Thorauku

Which i70 you're trying to meld Mind into? Astral ones? It's because the base stat. (INT / MND) of Astrals were already capped if it's the HQ version.

---

Nope not the accessories (don't worry, full DoH crafter and been selling/making $/pentamelding, I have the Materia Hysteria achievement so I know the melding basics) but the left-hand-side. The Vanya gears. For the left side the only piece that gives decent MND was the Rose Gold Circlet but that's cause it is in-built.. I don't really recall any of the Vanya gears can meld anything close to the Rose Gold Circlet's inbuilt +12 MND.

This thread is interesting. o.o

So to achieve this, we need full i90 crafted with max PIE melds? Then we can have near permanent Foe Req? I might have to make a secondary set just for double mage compositions.

Edit: Also, what would accuracy look like with such a set? I'm trying to imagine how fast Twintania would melt with a permanent Foe Req and 5 BLM/SMN but if accuracy is below threshold, you'd lose a lot more than 8%.

With full HQ I90 you get +66 Accuracy. Hitting cap will not be an issue.

It might even be worth just using the melded body pieces. Less DPS loss for the Bard but would give you 6 minutes of Song because near infinite may not be needed.

Almost permanent Mage's Ballad sounds pretty nifty. Army's Paeon and Foe Requiem eat 133 mana per tick for me though, rather than 80 like Mage's Ballad. (Yes, this thread unleashed my inner experimenter)

There's also the slight problem with the apparent Piety benefits being through the roof. I only gain 279 Mana from equipping my healing accessories as a Bard, which gives me a boost of 53 Piety. That's only ~5.26 MP per Piety gained. Assuming that the Saurian/Cashmere stuff actually has identical Piety caps to ilvl90 healing gear, you would be able to get 26*2 (Body and Legs), 15*3 (Head, Hands, Feet) and 12 (Waist) Piety. That gives us a total of 109 Piety through the left side of equipment, or 573 extra MP. I'm curious of what calculations you used, because even with fully melded Gryphonskin/Rose Gold accessories you'd get nowhere near the proposed 1'700 MP boost. Must've either been overestimating the Piety gained or the amount of mana you gain per Piety. :p

Confirmed this is impossible, and the gain on Piety on BRD is less compared to healers which is their naive stat.

It is approximately 5.26/5.27MP per Piety as Raminax pointed out, and below are the caps:

Head, Hand and Feet: +11 PIE
Body and Legs: +18 PIE
Belt: +8 PIE

Total: +77 PIE => 405MP gained.

Hmm. Is it really only 18 for Body and Legs? Isn't it 26? 16 For Head, Gloves and Feet, and 12 for Belt?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Thorauku

Hmm. Is it really only 18 for Body and Legs? Isn't it 26? 16 For Head, Gloves and Feet, and 12 for Belt?

---

Physical DPS/Tank gear probably has lower caps on some stats, similar to how caster gear has lower Vitality caps (as an example).

That seems to be a logical explanation.

Thanks for the information and testing. I thought PIE was a static increase by level so I based it off a what my WHM got.
It's good to know it varies by class as well as melding caps being different by gear type.

Yeap, from my past experience of fooling around, I knew 1,700 was impossible.

Anyways the prospect was interesting enough for me to give it a go. I made a full i90 set with max PIE. I am currently i94, and I drop to i92 if I equip this PIE set (my chest was i100 and belt i110). My Crit dropped from 53X to 470 while DET suffered about 10 points lost. Did T8 tonight, should be a good 6-7 mins parse since we went to less than 50% HP, it was noted that my DPS dropped by 10 points, whereas my SMN increased DPS by 25 points.

We had 2 BRDs in the team for T8, the lesser geared BRD was assigned to TP/MP song roles while the main BRD (me) will do the Foe. Typically my play cycle will be 4mins and 30s with X-Ether HQ, just nice X-Ether HQ had a cool down of 4mins 30s too.

How it will look like

0min - 1min 45s => Foe Requiem + Battle Voice, full MP to 0, inclusive of X-Ether
1min 46s to 4min 30s => Full MP recharge (without Mage Ballad)
4min 31s to 6min 15s => Foe Requiem + Battle Voice (voice have a 5min CD), full MP to 0, inclusive of X-Ether
6min 16s to 9min => Full MP recharge (without Mage Ballad)
9min 01s to 10min 40s => Foe Requiem + Battle Voice (voice have a 5min CD), full MP to 0, inclusive of X-Ether

10min 41s to 11m => 20s to enrage.

As you can see, each cycle is 4min 30s where Foe lasted for 1min 45s each (rounded down, the actual time was 1min 47s). That amounts to 105s per cycle. Considering that Battle Voice doubles the effect for 30s, you can say that it is effectively 135s of +10% dmg for your casters. You have time to pull 3 such cycles, and thus a total of 405s of the battle you have Foe Requiem played. That amounts to 61.36% of the battle time you will boost your cast's dmg by 10%

What would this mean? Assuming that your caster can produce 330DPS throughout the whole 11mins, you should expect it to be boosted by 20DPS (DPS boost = current DPS x 0.1 x 0.6136)

The above theoretical example was assumed that MP regen is not boosted by Mage's Ballad. Since we had another BRD that is doing MP/TP songs, your MP regen would have sped up by and you could probably play more of Foe, pushing total up time to 65% or slightly beyond.

Whether one should do this depends on, does the gain in caster DPS outweigh the drop in DPS from the BRD? For my case, I dropped 10DPS while SMN gained 25DPS so it's a net gain of 15DPS. However, I would expect my DPS to improve after swapping out Artemis Animus for Weathered Rosenbogen. The Weathered Rosenbogen will push my crit back to above 500 - when my crit drops below 500, seems to see quite a drop in amount of critical dmg done.

But ultimately, I don't think a 10-15DPS increase would justify one to go for such a set. However, if you have 2 casters in your team, it may be a point for consideration if
1) your raid DPS really need the push (practically speaking, 5DPS dealing 300+DPS is enough)
2) your bard that is going to do this does not suffer significant DPS loss. the net gain must be well positive to justify going to such extremes.

I was a fun idea for me to try out, I enjoy fun things. Maybe one day I shall do 5-6 DPS twintania, with me as the sole BRD and the rest as casters, we'll see how Twintania melt lol.

buy X-ETHER, and use it when you see that you are at 400 mp, sometimes I do that when im the only brd in coil turn 2

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Ooshima

I was a fun idea for me to try out, I enjoy fun things. Maybe one day I shall do 5-6 DPS twintania, with me as the sole BRD and the rest as casters, we'll see how Twintania melt lol.

---

Thanks very much for your insight. I enjoyed reading your scenario too. PIE would have been a neat build for Bard but I guess it's best to carry HQ Mana POTs for now. I'm sure the Devs realized the potential of that kind of build pushing for mage heavy parties (BLM Burn). Which would have been annoying for any melee trying to fill a role.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Judge_Xero

Thanks very much for your insight. I enjoyed reading your scenario too. PIE would have been a neat build for Bard but I guess it's best to carry HQ Mana POTs for now. I'm sure the Devs realized the potential of that kind of build pushing for mage heavy parties (BLM Burn). Which would have been annoying for any melee trying to fill a role.

---

Probably the reason they are capping on the ilvl of crafted items. It seems to benefit for now since most people are not that geared yet - most people hover around i95 range and only a handful hit i100 and beyond. Thus falling back to a full i90 crafted on the left hand side doesn't see a sharp DPS drop for a BRD yet. However, as you progress to obtain more left-hand-side gear, using such PIE tactics will get less and less beneficial.

That's probably why we don't see i100 crafted. Some of the weathered 495/375 tome pieces can already be matched or surpassed by i90 crafted pentameld (at least the case for BRD's head, hands and feet). Having i100 crafted could potentially break a lot of things lol.

It may be impractical due to seals required or brd;s own damage lost. But how would going full piety in attribute points affect this?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Karaha_Baruha

It may be impractical due to seals required or brd;s own damage lost. But how would going full piety in attribute points affect this?

---

It would up the mp gain from 405 to 562/563, but of course your DEX would suffer. I'm not sure how much that 30 DEX lost would affect your dps, but iirc it would be in the realm of 5-10%.

That also brought to my attention that 77 PIE is just on body pieces. I know there aren't crafted i90 accessories right now, but they would probably add an additional 8 PIE per, so 40 more. But again, currently those don't exist, and there would then be even further dps penalties with crafted i70 melded up with PIE (which would also probably be less than 40). If they did, then, including another 30 from stat distribution, we could gain 773/4 mp.

Looking at Ooshima's numbers though, a more extreme build where you re-allocate your extra stat points to PIE (and in a universe with crafted i90 accessories) might necessitate that you bring multiple casters to make up for your dps, but it may still balance out to be a marginal gain with only one caster.

30 DEX loss from respec will be a terrible DPS loss. A drop in 2 item levels earlier, in the form of 8 DEX, 70 Crit and 12 DET resulted in an overall 10DPS loss. I can't imagine someone tries to respec 30DEX and furthermore, use i70 crafted.

Someone did the test with i90 accessories ?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Alcyon1

Someone did the test with i90 accessories ?

---

There isn't even a need to try. You can look at the accessory PIE caps for i90 from healer gears and calculate approximately how much PIE you can actually meld.

However given that BRDs only gain 5.26/5.27MP per PIE, unless you are allowed to meld in at least 320 and above PIE into your gears, you will never achieve enough PIE (and thus, MP) for the required amount of MP regen (2% battle regen) to feed the Foe drain to sustain a 10mins fight.