Bard in Song: Melding Piety?

[elreed]

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

[Judge_Xero]

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.

[Ooshima]

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.

[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?

[lyndwyrm]

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.

[Ooshima]

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.

[Alcyon1]

Someone did the test with i90 accessories ?

[Ooshima]

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.