What should I infuse my blm with?

[Mairissa]

....Says the person who was *shocked* people used Ruin 3 outsided of Trance in the first place...

.....who apparently didn't realize you actually CAN use it out of Trace and be doing constant 200 potency single target damage... instead of 80 potency single target damage. No wonder YOU don't think you need Piety gear.

News flash... people moved on from the original guides once they realized you can get enough MP to do constant Ruin 3 spam outside of DWT.


PS: I should probably let everyone know I have about +110 Piety from Anima Weapon and Melds, its how I actually got to 10K+ MP. Its how I maintain such high Crit using other melds....and still have decent DET and SS.

It is VERY easy to show just how much damage you actually loose.

Let's take this build, which is very close to BiS http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/10N4F
We have 1238 crit, 700 ss (enough for one more Ruin3 in Trance), 228 Piety

And let's meld 110 Piety into it. Since crit is better than ss, I will first replace ss. I got something like that: http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/10N4O
We got 1238 crit, 590 ss (we LOOSE one extra Ruin 3 in trance), 337 Piety.

1 Piety=8 mana. We got 109*11=1199 extra mana at strat. 1 extra Ruin3 out of trance.
Mana regenerates at the rate of 2% each server tick. It means 109 Piety lets us regenerate 1199*0.02*20=480 mana per minute. So we get 1 extra Ruin3 each 2 minutes. BUT we loose 1 Ruin3 every minute because we don't have enough ss to cast one more Ruin3 in trance.

So if we take a 10 minutes fight we loose 10-5+1=4 Ruins3 (we loose 10 Ruins out of trance and get 5 Ruins due to MP regen and 1 Ruin3 in the beginning).

And I didn't even count in loss of potency of our DoTs due to lower SS.

[Silverquick]

And let's meld 110 Piety into it. Since crit is better than ss, I will first replace ss. I got something like that: http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/10N4O
We got 1238 crit, 590 ss (we LOOSE one extra Ruin 3 in trance), 337 Piety.

OOoo Ahhh...

....you gained a whopping 300 damage... At max in any boss mob fight that is not a raid you can do about 3 Deathflares maybe 4 with good spell speed.... that's a whopping 900 damage... maybe 1200....

You just outdamaged the crap out of me didn't you? Lol

And I actually threw in an extra Ruin 3 (probably a lot more than 1)... for about 3000 damage.

Congratulations...

[Mairissa]

OOoo Ahhh...

....you gained a whopping 300 damage... At max in any boss mob fight that is not a raid you can do about 3 Deathflares maybe 4 with good spell speed.... that's a whopping 900 damage... maybe 1200....

You just outdamaged the crap out of me didn't you? Lol

And I actually threw in an extra Ruin 3 (probably a lot more than 1)... for about 3000 damage.

Congratulations...

Dethflare doesn't depend on SS, it depends on time and time only. 3-4 Deathflares is a 3 mins fight. In this fight, you will get 1 extra Ruin3 in the beginning and 1 more Ruin due to regen, maybe 1 more if the fight is on your side and it lasts 4 mins. So, 2-3 Ruins3.
I will get 3-4 Ruins3 and more potent DoTs. Sorry, I can't argue with math.

[Silverquick]

Deathflare doesn't depend on SS, it depends on time and time only. 3-4 Deathflares is a 3 mins fight. In this fight, you will get 1 extra Ruin3 in the beginning and 1 more Ruin due to regen, maybe 1 more if the fight is on your side and it lasts 4 mins. So, 2-3 Ruins3.
I will get 3-4 Ruins3 and more potent DoTs. Sorry, I can't argue with math.

No... SS counts recast timer, which is the basis for the Deathflare rotation and Aetherflow recast of 1 minute.

I can do about 3 Deathflares in any given normal boss battle... only 2 with a good sidecar DPS who puts out really good damage. And that is all dependent upon Aetherflow stacks and the recast on it.

Usually you save it when the boss mob is low because you have to have it ready for the next large trash pack or you have no AoEs.

You guys got caught up in the minutiae and didn't look at the overall picture. Its why you ended up losing and putting out less DPS in reality while other SMN were outdamaging you.

You somehow mysteriously thought this whopping 10% damage while in Dreadwrym was the be all end all... it wasn't.

You were only squeezing an extra 300 damage out of it max. So Wow... you mega outdamaged me didnt you... oh wait... no you really didn't.

[Mhaeric]

As for BLM and piety, there are certain piety tiers that you can meet to be able to, in order of cumulative ascending piety tiers:

1. squeeze out an extra Fire IV before needing to switch to umbral ice
2. make it so that you always have enough mp to be able to thunder after blizzard 3 without sometimes needing to wait for a tick
3. make it so that you always have enough mp to be able to blizzard 4 immediately after blizzard 3 without sometimes needing to wait for a tick

The first requires only a very tiny amount of piety unless you're a dunesfolk lalafell who don't need to have any extra at all. The others require a moderate piety investment (~40 or so) in order to achieve. The easiest way to achieve this is to put it on your Anima weapon, since then you can save all your melds for other stats. This also makes you less tied to having to have piety on your SMN if you play both and don't want it there.

Beyond that, sps is your best bet since it helps with mobility and being able to dodge quite a lot on top of increasing your rate of fire which is important as a slow casting turret. After that, technically I think det is better than crit by a slight margin, since it always applies it's effects whereas crit's benefits only apply occasionally due to the slow attack rate... but det is boring. Since the margin of difference is so small between the two, most blm I know just choose crit as the secondary stat for the fun factor.

As for melding now... I would wait the 3 weeks until 4.0 hits, since all your current gear will become obsolete almost instantly.

(As for the SMN feud, I don't know Neela but I would take anything Silverquick says about summoner with a grain of salt. I agree with Neela here that Piety is not a particularly useful summoner stat to have when weighted against what crit and sps bring to the table.)

I will get 3-4 Ruins3 and more potent DoTs.

Don't forget more pet damage, since their attacks are directly improved by sps.

[Powercow]

No... SS counts recast timer, which is the basis for the Deathflare rotation and Aetherflow recast of 1 minute.

This is entirely not true. Like, at all. This is also probably the easiest thing in the entire game to test.