Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better!: RDM Guide

This is why this game is great and bad at the same time. No details are presented for mechanics, which is frustrating, but then again you keep exploring and find new things after 20 years..

I sit in my midcast gear so again can't be the issue. I have checked the gear BEFORE casting to make sure it is on and I was testing in a town even to make sure combat wasn't possibly creating an issue. Still only getting 29 instead of 30. Don't use any of that "black magic" stuff either if it would helps I cast in this:


Ghostfyre Cape Augs: MACC +8
Enfeebing skill + 6
Enhancing skill +10
Enhancing Magic Effect duration +19%

Master level 9 right now and about to upgrade af3 feet.

I mean, it's literally the same for everyone there are no variables.

If you're over 500 skill you get 25 and you add the gloves you get 55, every one, every time, always. It's not even possible to do it wrong. Unless you're under 500 skill with a gear error.

(I suppose you could have a different idle set by mistake and be 1 stat off but yeah)

Just to confirm:
You wear full 600+ enhancing gear and Vitiation Gloves, cast Gain-STR, then get completely naked and it says STR+54?

Yes and it's super weird, and seems AH doesn't like that my image is on imgur too. pfft

You need the extra i.

https://i.imgur.com/fadgw0x.png

not https://imgur.com/a/0WojlYR

Though, that's not the kind of picture (we) want.

Show your INT, show casted gain-int, and show casted gain-int w/ gloves to compare
(+160 +185 +215)

As I said I sit in that for the entire spell cast so I will get that result regardless of the gain I am casting.

Can't see any stats in the screenshots. Maybe it got cut off?

Yeah that was my mistake. Tried with INT and that one actually did go to 55, I guess I did miscount sorry for the mess. I think I will find myself a spot in Crawlers to go die in now. xD

Math is always the final hidden Boss.

Hi everyone,

What do people use for tracking silence timers on Mboze? My group has been progressing on Mboze V25 and I'm joining the fight as RDM for KI#1 and WHM for KI#2 and tasked with silence duty. So far it's been working out well and I have managed to land silence on all attempts and re-silence him before he gets a cast off. However it's such a stressful fight for me and I worry about casting anything and being locked our for a few seconds and wiping due to Stonega going off before I can cast silence, I end up basically waiting for it to wear off and reapply it before I can do anything else. Is there an addon or a tool to accurately track debuff timers? I use debuffs with the standard windower kit and it will show silence as a debuff but the timer is inaccurate. I suspect it's because of enfeebling duration gear (I use Snorta Earring/Emp+3 hand/leg/feet and Obstin. Sash). I wonder if it would be easier to just remove the sash on WHM and rely on base timer.

My next question is about resistance, after reading BGwiki enfeebling magic page and magic evasion/resistance, my understanding is that for silence, the spell can either land fully, be partially resisted, or fully resisted. Would partial resist in this context be 1/2 of duration, 1/4, or 1/8? Meaning 60s/30/15 base duration instead of 120 seconds?

Thank you!

Regarding resist states, a partial resist for an enfeebling spell results in 1/2 duration.

Maybe somebody else can answer your timers question as I don't use windower.

So what are people's RDM free nuke and MB sets looking like these days?

For Burst, If you have a bunzi rod equipped then the neck switches to sibyl scarf and if you're > 12 yalms it changes to empy body and legs + orpheus sash. The back should be +10 INT instead of M.acc at this point.
I've noticed that Quick magic does a great job of messing this up if there is any lag. I made my FC set this instead of what I use for everything else.

I'm sure there is room for improvement somewhere, so please correct if I'm wrong. The FC set is only 79% FC so you need that +2 Earring after all if you're casting without a Crocea Mors.

This is a verification of the results from this blog where they found Threnody has no effect on Slow or Paralyze.

The test: As BRD/RDM, perform 50 casts of Silence on a lvl 125 Apex Matamata in Moh Gates, then another 50 casts with Wind Threnody II on. All casts during neutral day/weather, no Ionis. Enemy level verified by casting Aero and finding ones that took the most damage.

Silence Equipment:
Main: Crepuscular Knife
Sub: Ammurapi Shield
Head/Body/Hands/Legs/Feet: R20 Nyame
Rings: Stikini Ring +1 x2
All other slots empty

Relevant stats for Silence:
182 Enfeebling skill from /RDM (including merits and Stikini Rings)
248 Magic Accuracy Skill from dagger
300 Magic Accuracy from gear
13 Magic Accuracy from Job Points (362 total job points)
MND=101+190, 10-17 Magic Accuracy from dMND (This is assumed. I couldn't find MND stats for this enemy, but going off of the progression of stats for Apex Crabs which are also PLD/PLD, I would say this is a reasonable guess.)
753-760 total Magic Accuracy

Relevant stats for Threnody: 445 Singing/459 Wind Magic Skill, Gjallarhorn +4 Songs= -180 Wind Magic Evasion down.

The data:
Silence without Wind Threnody II
Full duration: 33 (66%)
Half duration: 11 (22%)
Full resist: 6 (12%)

Silence with Wind Threnody II: -180 Wind Magic Evasion
Full duration: 31 (62%)
Half duration: 16 (32%)
Full resist: 3 (6%)

This data confirms that Threnody has no effect on enemy negative status magic evasion when casting spells that can Immunobreak. If Threnody had any effect on Silence there is no way I would still have a 62% hit rate with -180 Wind Magic Evasion down.

I'm not going to bother verifying En-spell II or Elemental Ninjustu that was also checked in the linked testing. The main point here is that negative status effect resistance ranks are completely separate from elemental resistance ranks and lowering elemental magic evasion via Threnody/En-spell II/Elemental Ninjustsu will not help you land Immunobreak spells.

Edit: typo in data set

I feel so cheated. You mean Wind Threnody doesn't increase ability to land Gravity 2, Ice Bind, Dark Sleep?

Well low sample size of 50 without threnody and 49 with threnody should have been 50 and 50 for a fair test.

You also had an increase of silence landing with threnody on for 3 resists out of 49 casts vs 6 resists with 50 casts.

tell me you don't understand statistics without telling me you don't understand statistics

if you're assuming the well accepted formula of 1-2 m.acc = 1% hitrate(above/below 50% hr), then even half that sample size with the same result ratio is more than sufficient to say it doesn't effect it

if you were trying to suggest wind threnody II provides m.acc equivalent to less than ~10% hitrate, then this would be inadequate

So basically, it's useful for landing frazzle, distract, or dispel?

Don't Frazzle and Distract have resisted duration?

Per bg-wiki:

So, presumably anything without an enfeeble resistance rank is effected by elemental resistance-, and frazzle, distract, impact, threnody, stat down, etc.. will still utilize threnody and other elemental resistance debuffs. This fits well into the model we've seen from JP testing.

They do and I'm pretty sure they can also immunobreak. I think the main purpose for threnodies is for damage rather than enfeebles anyway but there was an increase in land rates on that test.

Oh nvm they can't immunobreak but they can have resisted duration

I apologize for the typo, there should be 16 partial resist casts with Wind Threnody. I will correct this.

Frazzle and Distract refer to an enemy's elemental resistance ranks for resist states. Anything that has a Resist! property associated with it works off of a separate negative status effect rank when cast on enemies. This is even stated by the devs in this post.

This is easy to see when casting Frazzle and Sleep on a bat. Frazzle will always land for half duration because it operates off of the bat's 30% elemental resistance rank. Sleep will land for full duration because negative status effect ranks operate separately and do not have a guaranteed 1/2 resist state at 50% rank and below like elemental resistance ranks.

Didn't the data suggest you went from 88% hit rate to 94%? Also I think 790~ macc is needed to cap on them you were basicly there.

Per BG:

Unresisted is the key word here.
Hit rate for casts without Threnody: 66%
Hit rate for casts with Threnody: 62%


If you go by the table on the Community BLM Guide, a lvl 125 Matamata which has a 100% wind elemental resistance rank requires about 779 magic accuracy to reach a 95% hit rate, but these values are estimated to be +/-10.

If -1 elemental magic evasion on the enemy = +1 magic accuracy for spells you cast with correlating element = +1 magic hit rate above 50% then:

753~760 player magic accuracy + 180 magic accuracy from Threnody = 933~940 total magic accuracy

Magic accuracy would be capped at 95% hit rate using the numbers in the chart in the BLM guide or your number of 790 if Threnody had any effect.

180 magic evasion is such a drastic change that if Threnody had any effect it would have been readily apparent in the data.

I'm just pointing out there was a large difference between the resisted vs non resisted casts cant say it doesn't matter. Going from 12% casts fully resisted to 6% seems to matter. Maybe more testing can prove that wrong?

I think the point you are missing here is that I am applying such a large amount of -wind elemental resistance to the enemy at a point where I should reach the 95% hit rate cap with just an extra 40ish magic accuracy that there would be a dramatic change in magic hit rate between the samples if Threnody had any effect.

The point of this test is not to look for an exact distribution of Full duration/partial resist/full resist between the samples (which is why the sample size is on the smaller side). It is to look for a dramatic change when applying an overwhelming amount of a supposed modifier to magic accuracy.

So, no, going from 12% to 6% full resists does not matter when it should be 5% partial/full resists combined if Threnody had any effect.

The fact that land rate went up still matters. Maybe threnody doesn't help partial resists but helps it land in general. The fact that immunobreaks debuffs are acting different in the first place means something more might be happening.

We already have a proposed model for this; monsters have seperate resist ranks for elements and statuses. Immunobreak debuffs are those that use status resistance, you can't immunobreak on the ones that use elemental resistance (presumably because lowering elemental resist would have other side effects).

Statistically, if you were looking at the data in a vacuum, you're right that it's inconclusive. But, when you look at it in the context of our current understanding of m.acc, the results indicate clearly that threnody is not granting anything even remotely approaching the amount of m.acc it would be expected to. Combined with the model fitting the results cleanly, and further testing from the linked JP blogpost indicating the same, it seems reasonable to me to accept it as factual.

An alternative model, such as wind threnody giving ~20 m.eva- for debuffs, could fit the data. But, there's no reason to invent models like that when the one we have fits everything logically. You're seeing hoofprints and assuming there are zebras.