Bards And Macc?

like this?

For elemental magic, and BLM enfeebling spells (sleep, poison, etc) M1 is determined by checking the INT of the caster and the target. For whm nukes and enfeebling spells, MND is considered.


so chr for brd and not singing and wind or both?


Does anyone know for sure the effects of the two magic skills which are combined in BRD songs on magic acc? They can't simply be added together, as that would give us a ridiculous amount of magic accuracy (540+ combined skill for many career BRDs) and, barring resistance/immunity of mobs, BRDs do not a noticeably higher success rate of landing lullaby with 500+ skill vs a well-geared BLM's or RDM's Sleep with ~300 skill. Or are they averaged together? Or is only one taken into account?

both your singing and wind is counted

for debuffing they say you want 120 chr and 500 skill

and string is just aoe but it lands just fine for sleepga? so i still dont get it, how can something land 90% of the time when its 230 skill points lower?

It's just instrument skill + CHR. Why'd you make another thread with a copy/pasted question?

put it in the bard section, so y dont people use string then, string skill and merit string?

string isnt as accurate as wind

how and y do we think this, if its skill and chr... can a merited 80brd please explain what they think?

You need the job leveled to count? I'm pretty sure there's just more wind+ equipment available, hence higher accuracy and higher song tiers. That and most +2 instruments (Minuet etc) are Wind.

It's simple, really. Wind skill affects more of the songs that BRDs often use. Here's what 8/8 Singing and Wind merits will do for BRD:

- Increase the accuracy of Foe Lullaby (and Horde Lullaby when it's cast in a wind-skill set and a Mary's Horn akin to a backup Foe Lullaby)

- Increase the accuracy Carnage Elegy.

- 8/8 Wind and Singing merits will cap Minuet4 without additional +skill gear (prior to the level cap increase).

- 8/8 Wind and Singing merits made it easy to reach the Blade Madrigal cap at 508 skill (again, prior to the level cap increase).

- These merits also made it easy to not only reach the 11% Haste Victory March tier at 499 skill, but easy to reach the higher march tiers. I once could reach 11.52% Haste with 536 skill before I removed my Wind/Singing merits in favor of Elemental/Enfeebling.

Here's what String merits do for BRD:

- Presumably makes Finale more accurate when cast with its corresponding string instrument, but that's debatable since Finale lands on nearly everything anyway (it's even pretty accurate from /BRD).

- Increase the accuracy of Horde Lullaby when casting with a Nursemaid's Harp (I do actually have a +string build for this).

String merits are useful for Horde Lullaby, and that's really about it. Across the board, Singing and Wind merits benefit more songs (and more of the useful songs) than does String skill.

It pretty much is CHR+instrument skill. No, Singing skill determines potency, it might add to macc, but its so unnoticeable its actually irritating. Generally speaking, if you've ever tried to cast lullaby w/o an instrument you'll say hello to a 95% resist rate. That's because infact SINGING doesn't not add to macc, only POTENCY.

If you try it with a string instrument for example nursemaid's harp, you'll notice that while your horde lullaby spells range actually increases your macc does not as well as wind.

Singing = song potency strength of your elegy/capping your attack on minuet/duration of sleep.

String = gives macc to song, and increases potency of very specific songs, increases the range of said song if its AoE, though length is based on your bard's string skill Level over the level it caps @ at the level you gain the spell, does not increase over 20'.

Wind = gives macc and potency to a song. Wind restricts distance of AoE songs to 10', but maxes their potency based on your skill level Above the skill level at the level you get the song.


String in general only effects very specific songs, that are naturally string based, and can only be found to have string based instruments, that is to say they are best played on instruments to cap them out; However, that doesn't mean that a wind instrument with the correct skill build won't be able to match it.

Thereby, In my opinion if you are gearing yourself for debuffing the order should go Macc > Wind Skill > Chr, if you can combine any of the two together in one place for example, Omega's ring, Marduk's Shalwar, Bard's Roundel/Marduk's Tiara, the better as eitherway your chr will increase. Personally @ 80 your CHr is so high that you'll pretty much only need a couple pieces of CHR equip to max out the macc gain from Dchr that theres no point buying rings/earring.

For potency, Singing skill > Wind skill, and unless its one of those very few string based songs like etudes, minne, paeons, don't even bother getting +string equipment.

That being said there are clear indications when one will choose chr above skill, or macc above either for example: Shadow Coat is superior in every sinlge imagineable way to both Marduk's Jubbah and Minstrel's coat for debuffs period.
Jester's Cape is better than Astute for Debuffs(because astute is singing and thus gives no major benefit over the other option), and vise versa for buffing, sing CHR in no way helps buffs, whereas singing skill increases potency of songs.

There are times when one option might be just as good as the other for debuffing. For example Gleeman's belt v Marching belt. Either works, though I'd personally prefer marching belt.

Finally, This whole 120chr 500 combined skill, is complete horsecrap. There is no generality. If we are talking Merit camps you could have a combined 300 skill and 80 chr and still sleep birds and pull them, 500 skill is only to maximize the potency of songs. CHR is by far the lowest stat on any monster in the game, even really high level monster's like Tiamat/proto-Ultima have REALLY low chr, infact its super easy to land elegy/finale on them, hell even odin can be finale'd easily. The problem comes with their Resistances to those spells, and I can honestly tell you stacking chr in every friggin slot is not gonna maximize your chances of landing on them w/o Elemental Seal.

I can land elegy on resistant mobs like Khim/Cerb easy enough around 1/3 to 1/4 casts w/o eseal, doing that on odin becomes more difficult, since he's just obnoxiously resistant. Mobs that are Immune to it, are simply immune to it can't do anything about that. The way I do it is by stacking macc wherever I can, Shadow coat, shadow clogs, balrahn's ring/Omega ring, filling extra slots with Wind skill and chr, and combinging two of the three where I can. You see because their CHR is really low, I can sit @ 104 chr on my taru BRD, and land better than someone with 150 chr, by placing wind skill/Macc in slots where I can, simply because the amount of macc gained via chr is lowered after approx 20 chr over the monster's, thus making the +12 CHR from Marduk's Jubbah, lower than the +10macc I get from the shadow coat on monsters where I have the necessary chr anyways.


Its based on your gear, but in principle Macc > wind skill > Chr.

Do you need to bother with meriting skill for that? god no.

How do I know this? I've been playing endgame bard for a long time, made my own observations and tested my theories, and read a lot of peoples math on a lot of this game, and yes this game is based on math therefore math that explains the game actually SHOULD be read.

-Thanks

I should add, certain monsters suck at being slept by light based sleep, and you should simply accept that and move on with your life, Aerns for example.

for real? it's not proven whether brd songs macc work the same way as the other magic. We can only assume so cause it makes sense. One thing is for sure, both skills are summed to account a brd macc(*). After all who never noticed an increase on debuff rate when wearing wind torque? That would make a brd have over 500 macc, yes, but who is to say that magic evasion against songs doesn't work differently?

*That's basically for wind skill. Why wind has better macc anyway? Because it's skill value is added to the singing skill when you are equipped with wind instrument when you sing a debuff. If you don't have a wind instrument equipped your debuffs will have the macc provided by the singing skill alone. String skill controls the range of the aoe of a song, but it's not added to the singing skill to do so. So a debuff used with a string instrument will have a wider aoe (if possible), but with the raw macc provided by the singing skill.

Anyway, maybe the trick lies on how the wind skill is summed to the singing skill. If it's fully added then brd would have over 500 macc like you noticed. This would certainly need a different value of magic evasion to check against, specifically for brd songs. Maybe then, only a fraction of the total wind skill is added, as an extra macc bonus, which could provide a reasonable macc vallue. Still i never really seen any test on this subject.

edit: you made some interesting points there Lekotas. Some i agree, others i don't. I'll came back here later cause a two and a half man marathon just started~

If you use a wind instrument, you add your singing skill and your wind skill. If you don't have an instrument on, you only have one skill; hence the high resist rate. tl;dr the rest of it... more because this statement made me want to throw my monitor out the window.

Let me both correcnt myself and clarify. I was wrong and you do need to combine singing+wind skill to land lullaby on a mob, a level 40-50 mob should sleep w/o an instrument for full duration with JUST singing skill and no instrument/macc/chr. It generally doesn't.

Assuming then that is infact correct, that both singing and either instrument skill is needed to maximize your macc, then even with 500 skill, the evaluation of how skill effects the macc needs to be changed for bard. My example, does not discount the fact that singing skill impacts macc to an extent, however, It is not as great as wind/string. In that, singing skill to macc to debuffs probably occurs on a 2:1 basis, 2 skill to 1 macc gained, whereas with instrument macc of either string or wind is essentially 1:1. Thus giving generally speaking around 330-350 macc in total. By this, then it is STILL better to stack string/wind--and since most of the best debuffing instruments happen to be wind for say like Elegy/Lullaby-- stacking wind is by far superior.

Lekotas already receded one of his ideas, but allow me to reply anyway~

I've done some research and found some interesting things to add. Overall this is my current thought:

Brd debuffs have a fixed potency. The only thing you can do to change them is Soul Voicing. Still debuffs that are narutally on cap (carnage elegy), won't be affected.

A brd has a option to sing a debuff with either wind or string instrument. This choice will affect their macc. If sang with wind, 1/3 of wind skill will be added at the singing skill to define the brd macc (from skill - i believe the chr part works in the same way as int). Kanican seem to know of a test on this subject (here). I found the link to this comment here. There is another brd macc discussion righthere

For now i did not find anything saying that string skill affect a debuff macc. Maybe it does indeed. I can't even provide a personal experience because i hardly use string. I don't even have a string skill build for this reason. I do know however that string alone (not added to singing or anything) controls the aoe range of song. Here is a link showing exactly how it affects all brd songs. So it is my personal felling that string doesn't provide any macc at all to a brd debuff. Or if does, it will be in a even lower rate than wind. This would actually be the explanation as to why wind is more accurate.

Finally a test on singing skill macc is found here. It's a small sample, but he did notice a huge difference on resist rate by adding 23 singing skill.

With all this we can say that for debuffs: macc/singing skill > wind skill > charisma. Bah, actually charisma is better than wind if indeed only 1/3 is factored. Charisma will be at a worse case half effective to macc (taking an int analogy).

As for buffs the total of sing + either wind or string (depending on what instrument you have equiped) will affect their potency. This is can be tested easilly. Sing a minuet4 with a flute that's not cornette and check your attack value. Sing a minuet4 with a harp and check your attack value. It will be the same or very close (varying due the total skill - need 462 to cap it at 56 without merits).The only downside of using string on minuet is that you loose the +2 instrument bonus, but you do increase it's range. This is not a good trade on most scenarios anyway.

If you don't have any instrument equipped, only the singing skill will be factored, and your buffs will be completely gimped. Minuet4 gives only 27 skill without an instrument for instance. That's the reason why /brd sucks. You can't equip an instrument and you also have a gimped sub skill. If minuet4 could have been sung as /brd i doubt it would get past a +20 attack boost.

I've got a brd alt so any other info/testing on this would be greatly appreciated. I'm always grasping for what is really good and have a very hard time deciding what gear sets to use and why because I don't really have very much experience with brd yet. This discussion brings up some interesting thoughts and I'm curious what else I may need to change.

so where does macc fit in? I still want to try the teal set and I am using the ele staffs, is that necessary with merits?

and THANK YOU for all the great info!!!

you can follow this:
macc=singing skill > charisma > wind skill
1 charisma will be equal to 1 macc if your charisma minus the targets charisma is less or equal to 10. Otherwise 2 charisma equals to 1 macc. This is the int analogy.

For example: your target has 100 charisma. The macc provided by your charisma if you have 100 while debuffing is +100. If you have 110, it will be 110. If you have 120 charisma it will add 115 to your total macc.

3 wind skill = 1 macc taking these links i found.

and the stat magic accuracy + ?
http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Teal_Saio_Set

# CHR +20
# Magic Accuracy +12
# Magic Attack Bonus +7
I want to main in this if the fast cast is 10% and recast is 5%

For fast cast teal set could be useful. You equip the whole set before singing anything and swap to skill/macc, depending on song, before finishing the cast. As a macc set, for a brd i think almost every piece can be replaced by something better. But mostlikely this set is easier to get than any of this said pieces.

Does anyone know the range of Horde Lullaby with wind vs strings? I know strings gives it a variable aoe range but I couldn't find any information on just how much it is with high skill. I have noticed that with wind the aoe is is so small that it's very hard to get more than 2 mobs with it. But having accurate info on just how big each is would help a lot.

http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Endgame_Barding_Guide_by_Ghlin

I don't know if that's 100% accurate or not, but the guide has helped me understand things in the past, so I tend to believe it.

Hmm, wasn't as much as I was hoping for but the 3.9 sounds right, it is very small. Trying to decide if having nursemaids and cradle is worth it with another inv -1.

can you do me a great favor, show me what my build should be with buyable items.
i got af1 hands, the turban, and most +1,+2 wind instruments

It's absolutely worth the inventory space, and I say this as someone who usually uses Horde Lullaby as a second Foe Lullaby (Mary's Horn with Wind debuff set). I actually have 2 macros for Horde Lullaby for this reason. When I need to make use of the AoE range on Horde Lullaby, I don't hesitate to use my Nursemaid's Harp with a String debuff set (which isn't inventory intensive either). Also, if you're not carrying any other string instruments at the time, Nursemaid's Harp is also good for Ballading a mage party.

One of BRD's roles is crowd control, and that role can never be taken too lightly. People can die and events can fail for no good reason if crowd control isn't taken seriously. Putting together a halfway-decent String build for Nursemaid's Harp and Horde Lullaby isn't terribly expensive or inventory intensive. BRDs should be used to carrying a shitload of gear anyways.

I just want to thank all the people posting information. I've recently started Bard and most of my random thoughts have been answered throughout this thread.

So, thanks for saving me time from browsing through the Bard forum.

Can't disagree with that... I'm 78/80 with latent gear and other stuff.