Bar-Status Testing

Excellent testing and information here. This will be very useful to concretely determine reflectable spells macc bonuses

But I do wonder if this could be used to quantify how Odyllic Subterfuge works?

No. It won't. This testing determined that a spell's innate macc bonus did NOT impact elemental resistance tiers.So you can't use this method, as is, to test spell macc bonuses.

The basis of this testing was using the break point in elemental resist+/-, where the possible range of resist states changed, to accurately pinpoint the exact values of barstatus spells. Since, as demonstrated by this, and prior JP testing, barastatus spells function as elemental resist+ applied towards specific status effects.

As such, this test method can only be used to measure things that can move that break point. Nothing else will be detectable under these test conditions.

EDIT: Actually, you know what, you could technically test spell macc+ bonuses this way. Just not via the ele resist breakpoints. If the bonus were ridiculously huge, or you lowered player meva enough that the bonus would push the mob's magic hit rate off the floor then you could get a usable result with a sufficiently large sample.

But it'd be a terrible test method, and a huuuge waste of time vs just spamming the test spell on a mob normally. There's no benefit here to having a colibri reflect it.
Nothing about this testing is applicable to investigating Odyllic. The player's meva vs the mob was already capped in all tests, and Odyllic would show no change whatsoever.

I had some previous testing (granted, it's about 10 months ago) that seems to indicate that bonus macc is factored in for positive resistance at least

I can't fully resist a reflected flash without crazy levels of light resist or magic evasion in gear (or combined of the two). I never really nailed down exact numbers because getting single points of precision of meva/light resist at those high numbers is a bit annoying. Job gifts add in some meva (70?).

This is really the only pic I have that concretely shows the test, the rest are just of gearsets and me talking to another ffxi nerd with only pictures of sets I used to dial up light resist or light resist + meva


The best I can tell from my conversation where I took this pic is that it's somewhere above 475~ meva + light resist

I do have the log of all the flashes that were reflected (including the one in that pic)

I used sed to filter out only the relevant information
https://pastebin.com/xTebpaJz

It's not clear to me what your proposed hypothesis is here.

Are you suggesting that native spell macc+ bonuses are directly applied against player ele resist... but stops at a floor of 0? Or that the spell macc+ vs player ele resist comparison can't go negative?

I have various thoughts about it, but I think I'm just gonna try to get some clarity on what the claim is before I go down any rabbit holes.

I didn't come to any conclusions like that, other than "boy it sure takes a lot of meva and/or light resist to actually be able to get a state where you can fully resist flash".

My initial test was testing how flashes effect lessens over time, and I noticed I never fully resisted flash, then I checked my logs i've taken for years and the only time I ever saw flash fully resisted was when Gurfurlur was warping out of Besieged sometime in 2006~, so I started to stack light resist to see what would happen... and I eventually was able to fully resist

Certainly I didn't get enough data to really understand what was going on beyond that

I needed some place to document this and didn't think it warranted a new thread, so I'll put this here since it's tangentially related.

Each Bar-status and Bar-element spell page on BGwiki lists their durations as "Varies". Interestingly, the Barspell page states the duration of Bar-element spells is a static 8 minute duration, and lists a duration formula for Bar-status spells that allegedly caps at 8 minutes at 240 Enhancing Magic skill. Which page is right, the individual spell pages or the Barspell page?

Bar-element spell durations were changed 12 years ago. There was a dev post in response to a bug regarding Bar-element spells not taking Enhancing Magic skill into account to increase duration. The explanation given was that it was the result of some other bug fixes made and they would abolish the Enhancing Magic formula for Bar-element spells and set them to a static 8 minute duration to match Bar-status spells in the next update. April 30, 2013 (JST) Version Update notes here.

Just to verify some things, as a lvl 10 THF/WHM I cast Barstonra with 18 Enhancing magic skill and had a spell duration of 8 minutes. Next, I gained 2 more levels and as a lvl 12 THF/RUN cast Barsleep with 21 Enhancing Magic skill and had a spell duration of 8 minutes. Then, as a naked Mlvl 19 WHM/RDM I cast the same spells with 413 skill and had 8 minute durations for both spells. This verifies that neither Bar-element nor Bar-status spells rely on Enhancing Magic skill for spell duration.

This left me with some questions:
-Were Bar-status spells always a static duration as implied by the dev post?
-Where did the Bar-status duration formula come from?

I vaguely remembered Bar-status and Bar-element spells having different durations from my early days of playing but had no clue about the actual durations so I did some digging. The early versions of the Bar-status spell pages on BG from 2008-2011 list an 8 minute duration (Old Barsleep page for example). It's not until the template changes that occurred in 2012 that the duration is listed as "Varies". This old version of the Barspell page from 2012 is the first time the formula is listed for bar-status spell duration. JPwiki only lists an 8 minute duration on their negative status resistance magic page starting on April 12, 2013 when it was created. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the origins of the formula. I didn't find any mentions of Bar-status spell durations changing anywhere else either.

Unless someone else has an answer, I don't really know where that formula came from or if Bar-status spell durations have ever been changed. However, what is plain to see now is that Enhancing Magic skill doesn't have any effect on the duration of any type of Barspell and the durations listed on the individual spell pages is incorrect as well as the formula for Bar-status spells. Both Bar-element and Bar-status spells have a static base duration of 8 minutes.

Lastly, the enmity value listed for both self-target Bar-status and Bar-element spells is a value that predates enmity changes for those spells along with several others in the same version update here. This dev post a couple of weeks prior to said update explains that enmity for these spells was to be reduced by roughly half. The enmity values listed on these pages are likely out of date as well.

I'll make the necessary changes to the relevant pages regarding the information in this thread over the weekend when I have time. I doubt I will delve into enmity testing for these spells though.

https://www.bluegartr.com/threads/120310-Barspells-Enhancing-Magic-Skill?s=b5a50bb086b6fc049ea23477157cbc49&p=4994508&viewfull=1#post4994508

Byrth talking about testing duration equation on BG though not the source of it. I'd search BG for testing, that's usually where this stuff came from in the past

I did a little digging on the more arcane sources and only ended up more confused. Allakhazam lists all barspells as lasting a flat 2.5 minutes. I tend to assume Alla is the most out-of-date of all sources so this should be pretty old data.

Barstone
Barstonra
Barpetrify
Interestingly, the single target ones even allude to Rune Fencer which suggests it's been updated fairly recently (in Alla timescales).

It looks like FFXIclopedia first had the duration added for some of these spells in 2008, and it's listed as 3 minutes for barelement and 8 minutes for barailment.
https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Barstone?oldid=504156 - 3 minutes
https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Barpetrify?oldid=504190 - 8 minutes

For Barstonra, it looks like this is the earliest entry referring to duration (from 2008) which does list it as being based on enhancing skill with a base duration of only 40 seconds plus 1 for every 5 skill. This would have them lasting barely 2 minutes back then. Much worse than the formula shown on that BGWiki page you found.


Now for my 2 cents... As a WHM main since 2003, I have a vague recollection that they used to last 5 minutes (which does match the max duration on the 2012 BGwiki formula you found) and were changed to 8. Back in the day, a WHM having to run into AOE range every 2-3 minutes to reapply barspell would've been a considerable burden so I feel like I'd remember if it were that short, and I definitely did use barspells religiously. Going into AOE range as a WHM was generally a more risky affair back then. Mages didn't have DT or magic evasion, they were paper thin. So I have a hard time believing I've just totally forgotten how short it used to be.

I'm inclined to believe that the 2012 BGwiki formula you found was probably the original formula from release until the bug mentioned in the devpost you found. The 2.5 minute and 3 minute durations I found elsewhere were probably just people testing with low enhancing skill.

Taken from jp wiki

https://wiki.ffo.jp/html/9170.html
March 27, 2013 version up
Due to a glitch, the effect duration was uniformly 150 seconds regardless of the value of the enhanced magic skill, and on April 11 of the same year, it was announced on the forum that the effect duration would be extended uniformly to 480 seconds.
Prior to that, the effect duration varied depending on the enhanced magic skill of the chanter, with an effect duration of 150 seconds up to 180 enhanced magic skills, and a linear increase (rounded down to the nearest whole number) from 150 to 300 seconds between 180 and 360 skills, reaching the upper limit of 300 seconds at 360 skills.

I am aware of the old variable duration formula for Bar-element spells that was eliminated.

The claims regarding Bar-status spells at the bottom of the Barspell page are the ones which I have no idea from where they originated:


No other source I could find had any mention of variable duration Bar-status spells.

No one gave a ***about status barspells at the time because we couldn't prove they did anything.

My bet is that I tested it on the test server, which was released in the fall of the previous year. This edit where I added it was definitely in the heart of my test server era.

I used this method to give myself arbitrary skill levels so it probably only took a few minutes to figure out the formula.

It's crazy to think back on 75 and how underutilized the resistance system was in SE's design. They had this crazy complicated magic evasion system that only kinda mattered when fighting EP monsters because anything else was going to land paralyze on you anyway.

PS. It was nice of them to run a whole server basically only for me after the first month.

PPS. Have you guys sorted out what element the different bar status spells give yet? For instance, I rather doubt that barsleep boosts both light (lullaby) and dark (sleep) forms of sleep. It would be funny if barparalyze only give ice resistance or something, because like half of the monster paralysis methods are not obviously ice aligned.