Military Parade - A DD Bard Guide

if you swap instrument to instrument, you don't lose TP

Correct. You also don't lose TP if you equip ammo over instrument or instrument over ammo. This is literally explained in the OP, just search for "Common Bard Myth".

If you're losing TP when you swap ammo/instrument, it's likely due to a "range=empty" clause in your gearswap. That causes an unequip command which DOES kill TP.

Because your TP set says it has 50% PDT with songs up, which is only possible with Barfawc, otherwise you don't have 50% DT. In the same post you also talk about using TP bonus dagger, so...I guess you just wear 39% DT while doing Rudras? The post is not very organized so I guess I misunderstood what you're trying to imply here.


5% DW will reduce your TP/hit by like...1? Meanwhile /DNC requires you to spend 350 TP and add 1s delay to your routine every 90 seconds. There's a reason people cap delay reduction at 80% instead of stopping at 75%, DW is a net positive.


I didn't realize this, was it changed?

QA has 0 "diminishing returns" with AM3 up. You'd rather have 5 STP than 4 STP, 3 QA, and 15 acc/atk? Why? You think 1 STP is better than 3 QA? If there were a ring with 18% QA on it, would you turn it down in favor of Chirich ring because it has 6 STP on? I'm obviously joking but like...this is the comparison you're making with Aurgelmir.


Capping atk in the TP set is laughable, because increasing your white damage from 350 to 370 makes next-to-0 difference in your DPS, while increasing your WS frequency (by wearing gear with STP or MA) will increase your DPS much more. When using Rudras, this will be even more apparent because more TP when you WS = more WSD, and the difference between wearing 10 STP on your body or wearing 25 more attack will be astronomical.

Highly recommend you look at a DPS calculator if you want to see the differences between your set and other real TP/WS sets. It is astronomical.

Edit: using the Kastra FFXI simulator
Your sets:
26,676 WSavg, Total damage 578.4m, 6694 DPS

My sets (same ML, with NIN sub instead of DNC sub:
35,106 WSavg, Total damage 821.2m, 9504 DPS

Everything you said is mostly agree with, beside some of this. It is generally more beneficial to use /DNC and haste samba with 9DW cape in MLing scenario imo. The difference in tp per hit against 35dw for carn/cento is 54 vs 50. You can also Haste Samba between colibris, so you don't lose time for ja delay in fight.

That being said in this particular example, the best would be to sub DNC on GEO and provide haste samba for BRD/NIN. That way you don't need to wear any DW gear.

Hadn't considered the extra TP/hit from getting your delay reduced by haste samba instead of DW. If you completely eliminate the 1s delay from using Haste Samba (not to mention standing still...) then you only need to hit ~90 times every 90 seconds to make up for the 350 TP you waste on haste samba. I guess in the end it would probably work out better...but that assumes no mob ever dies while your haste samba is going down, and full uptime. You might be disengaged for 10+ seconds of that 90 seconds, moving/pulling the next mob, casting songs, etc.

Gear differences for Cessance/Sailfi/DW cape vs Reiki/Eabani/STP cape (in relevant part):
5 DA, 5 TA, 3 STP vs 14 STP

Interesting thought experiment. I personally prefer /NIN because it's a lot simpler and can go wrong in fewer ways (don't have TP between mobs to re-apply samba, because you just SC'd a mob to death, for example) but I can kinda see the merit of it. Either way the build above is still jank AF (and uses a DA cape so has uncapped delay) and I'm not a fan of /DNC unless I need to help the party/alliance with steps/samba for others.

Outside of EP scenarios, you also have to consider how much time you'll spend walking around between packs/mobs (Seg farms, dynamis mobs, etc) wasting the timer on your haste samba, making the 350 TP cost even worse.

This really changes with store TP, because that 4tp difference will most likely change to around 8-9 with samurai roll and stp in gear. Meaning it will require much less hits. WS will also generate slightly more tp with 15%DW instead of 25%.

Ehr... no?
Granted Nyame is better but Bihu+3, when introduced, used to be the BiS option for Mordant Rime.
Now it clearly isn't the best anymore given the additional options we received since then, but it certainly isn't "extremely awful" as you defined it, for Mordant Rime specifically.
He claims he's att capped, I'm a bit unsure about that but maybe he's right after all.
At capped att some Brioso+3 pieces become better than Bihu+3, I forgot which.
Small difference either way and no acc on Brioso aside from the set bonus.


I'm more perplexed by the lack of DualWield in his TP set... but I can see how the strange set he assembled can be effective.
Not the best of course but effective to a certain degree.
It takes care of att, some acc, some PDT (the rest of which comes from Barfawc) etc

He is fighting colibris though, they are harmless. What's the point of PDT. He is BRD, what's the point of attack in tp set?

I don't know. Att in TP set with AM3 up sounds irrelevant, considering like, what, over 90% of your overall damage comes from WS and WS-related things.
I'm confused myself, but if he claims he's seeing nice results then I'm happy for him lol.

I just wanted to emphasize that Bihu+3, while not the best anymore, is nice for Mordant Rime and definitely not "extremely awful".

I would guess he has nothing better to compare with XD

First of all, I'm returning from 2+ years of not playing, so I'm literally just getting started on Odyssey and Sortie, so yes there are gear options I don't have available to me.

Secondly, I didn't present it as a better option, I literally just joined the thread and said "hey here's my gear and here's what I'm doing with it". Not really understanding why the response to that requires a flamethrower, but internet's gonna internet I guess.

At the end of the day, "jank, terrible" set and all, I'm still managing to pull ML gains for myself and my alt without outside help, I'm still managing to contribute meaningfully to my party's damage while increasing the abilities of the other party members when I do runs, and I'm having decent fun with it, so if it offends people greatly that I'm doing that in Bihu? Not really my problem.

To anyone else out there looking for alternatives, just play around with what you have and find the right situation where that would make sense and work because hitting 88% of the damage output of a theoretical best in slot set still works.

I found your set questionable but not entirely stupid, I apologize if I offended you.
WS set for Mordant Rime looks pretty nice to me. Clearly not BiS but definitely good.

TP set is a bit... I dunno, the fact you're going /DNC and aren't capping Dualwield is admittingly very strange. I'm confident you could pull out better combinations for TP gear with options already available to you like, who knows, Ayanmo +2 probably?
Since you claim you have Ashera Harness I'd go with Ayanmo+2 head, legs (maybe hands and feet too?) and Ashera Harness.
You should consider getting ~11 DW if you're going /NIN, or more if you're going /DNC.
Some options you might already have are Eabani Earring and Suppanomimi, Reiki Yotai, Shetal Waist, or you could simply put 10% DW in your TP cape and be done with it.
In your position I would test this setup for a few hours and see if your DPS goes up, it totally should imho.

You weren't the one I was referring to, but thanks for that anyway.

Eh, honestly, yes I could probably optimize differently, but... why? DPS isn't the end all, it's just how fast you can accomplish kills. If you're limited in accomplishing kills by just raw respawn rates anyway, what's the point in squeezing out that extra damage?

White damage is an interesting thing most people don't consider, and it certainly isn't worth not considering. Attack capped I hit about 650 on these, with an STP focused set I lose a lot of atk and have to either switch bubbles to hit it again or I have to just take the loss of about 400 damage per hit. My build is 14 hit which triggers on average in the 4th round. In a TP focused build it would triger in the 3rd, so adjusting for WS rate (because the WS itself does not scale with TP) I'd get about 11k more weaponskill damage per 4 rounds but capped white damage mitigates about 6k of that loss. Point being attack in a tp set can be useful. It's not a full weaponskill, sure, but it's also not meaningless.

Only thing id add or echo really is that aiming for high atk in tp is generally a net loss vs just gearing towards MA/STP to get to ws faster, but if youre hitting in time to sc then at least for this scenerio its not a big deal.

As to ws was already stated but lacking nyame the relic sets fine, could maybe throw in ole lustratio but thats a hefty DT dip. On the plus side lacking all that ody/sortie gear your dmg can only go up from what you currently use

Admittedly I underestimated both the lack of WS gear BRD gets (pre-nyame) and also how little gear you have access to. The WS set probably isn't the worst considering what else you have to equip, but I still maintain that the TP set is very, very bad.

In the simulations I ran to compare our DPS, the damage coming from melee was between 13-16% of overall DPS. Increasing the "white damage" of your auto attacks by getting extra ATK on your gear is going to increase your damage by 1% at most. Increasing the rate at which you get TP by using STP, DA, TA, QA, and DW gear, will increase the other ~85%, thereby increasing your damage much more.

I would also suggest a different offhand dagger because apex/locus mobs are not at all dangerous, so Barfawc offers very little, if anything, in terms of DPS potential. Crep knife is one of the best IMO, but in the mean time, Ternion Dagger and Gleti's Knife (once you get access) are excellent options as well.

Finally, I made some suggestions above about changing your bubbles/trusts to increase your DPS, I think those will probably help. I think the GEO/DNC idea was a really good one, and that will save you having to change capes or acquire other DW gear, should be an easy upgrade.

Didn't mean to "flamethrower" your idea, but most of the decisions made (other than WS set, granted) were very questionable so...I had a lot of opinions. I have a lot of opinions about BRD in general, it's my favorite and most played job.

There is absolutely no chance that dropping 200 ATK in your TP set will drop your white damage by 60%. As stated above, white damage on BRD is less than 20% of your overall damage, even in the best of conditions. You cannot possibly hope to increase your DPS in any meaningful way by increasing your white damage.

Maybe next time include something like that in the first post to avoid being misunderstood.


Same deal. It's generally very bad habit to start blaming everyone instead of trying to understand what you could do better. You provided no context, so blaming people for not knowing it has no sense.


Like Sechs mentioned there is nothing wrong in using Bihu for some things if you don't have better things. It's not the gear that is problem for me, but reasons you provided to wear it, instead of something else.
BRD, especially with Carn main is not a job doing significant damage with "white damage" and should focus on WS frequency instead, so trying to prioritize attack in TP set over things like store TP is simply wrong.

So idk about anyone else, but I have nothing against finding alternatives and using what you have, but I'm against of doing that for wrong reasons.


No, definitely you shouldn't use more as /DNC. If you go /DNC you aim to use 9DW in gear and Hasta Samba (or you ignore both DW and Samba if you are DRG main ;P)

*Takes the time to post on a forum his gearsets and how he's TPing etc.*

Community>> Ehh heres A B and C that could improve that, we'll share our collective knowledge free of charge

*I WASNT ASKING FOR HELP, WHY AM I GETTING ALL THIS HATE*

Community>> No hate, just trying to improve your damage and direct you to a good line of progression

* Who said I wanted to do more damage anyway?*


This thread is just popcorn I swear

And you ended up learning something about your favorite job that you didn't know but authoritatively asserted was correct, so maybe we all just need to be more flexible with things?

The TP set *isn't* terrible. Terrible would be an onion knife and a bronze subligar. It's not perfect, but it's workable and gives the same end result in the content I'm aiming for. I'm also not rigidly sticking by it, I'm adjusting around to see what can improve but the measurable result with what I posted in terms of exp/hr is identical so far.

Ultimately, this is probably the most situational game out there, in terms of how and why you gear the way you do. "Best in slot" or best approach for one situation may or may not be the right path for a different situation, or may just be overkill.

These are not the same thing. Making assumptions instead of asking for clarification will absolutely invite pushback from any person, and part of the response was demonstrably wrong, so yeah that's going to cause a back and forth on clarification and mechanics discussion instead of a blind "okay let me take the misunderstandings and wrong advice and run with it"

The way your arrogantly responding and focusing solely on stuff like "Gotcha! TP doesnt get dropped if I switch to an objectively worse ammo, you clearly don't know your favorite job as well as you thought" just makes it seem like your got your feelings hurt when people said your set was sub par.

Edit:

I'll add, posting to a forum your set, regardless of whether its outdated or not, is invitation to questions and criticism. Period.

I had a whole response written but it's extremely clear that this person got his feelings hurt and won't take any advice from anyone because he's upset and thinks he's right.

Do whatever you want man, you're right and everyone else in this thread is wrong, because you got a random fact right. Stack ATK in your TP set and watch those fat crits.

This is a valid point.
The ultimate goal in this scenario is to get the best EP/hr rate possible.
For that you need to kill fast enough to keep the EP chain up, but not too fast that the slow respawns kill your chain.
Absolutely right on that.
But are you reaching the point where you're having respawn issues though? Colibri camp to benefit from the piercing bonus, right?


It's not meaningless but did you ever run scoreboard or another parser to check how your overall DPS is split between Melee and WS? (well there's SC dmg too but it's a consequence of WSdmg so let's leave it outside).
I don't have recent parses but if I recall the split is something like 15% melee and 85% for the rest.

With a split like this even a huge boost to that 15% part will end up being meaningful for sure but... not so much in the end?
Whereas even a small boost to WS dmg or WS frequency will end up being very noticeable.

Best combo of Brd weapons for Aeolian Edge spam? Assume all options are available (Twashtar R15, Carn R15 Crepuscular Knife, Tauret, etc).

Currently doing Aeneas (not R15) and off-hand Malevolence with max augments (10 MAB, 10 M.Acc, 10 INT).

Looking at DPS calculator, seems like Aeneas/Cento is the best combination, by a pretty decent margin. Malevolence is a decent MH but doesn't compare to Cento for OH.

Well ***, guess I'm doing another magian weapon. Okay thanks.

If it makes you feel any better, BRD uses Cento for like...95% of situations where they're doing damage so you'll get plenty of use out of it.

For the record I did incorporate a number of the suggestions in the last page or two, and continue to experiment around with things to try to tweak it with what I have and can/have gotten ahold of since.

Does anyone have an updated LUA for DDing / Singing? Along the lines of being able to lock weapons so it doesn't change when I disengage, or only changes main when I'm singing. The current one I have sucks to seg farm with.