Bard in Song: Melding Piety?

[Ooshima]

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.

[Lyrinn]

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%.

[Judge_Xero]

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.

[Raminax]

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.

[Ooshima]

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.

[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?

[Raminax]

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).

[Thorauku]

That seems to be a logical explanation.

[Judge_Xero]

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.

[Ooshima]

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.