BrewingFollow

I would use sanguine blade.

Quinildorff's right. You can do some insane damage with Sanguine Blade while brewing. I know I personally popped off ~20k damage with it as a BLU while brewing a Pantokrator with just my normal DDing atma set up.

Edited, Sep 3rd 2011 3:02am by itrebul

Mine will go for 30-60k usually (less on your hi resist Shin Rani maybe 15kish). For my own level 90 Almace trial I usually can get 3 Apa(khim) out of one brew, 2 for 1 in the worst situation.

As far as physical spells, Brew gives you 50/tic regain so usually i just spam all weaponskills, some creatures will be cured by physical damage or by magical damage dependong on what action they are taking so i just use Sblade or whatever my best physical skill(CDC or Vorpal) and swap between them as needed. Magical weaponskills will always do more damage under brew so stick to them unless it is healing your target.

Edited, Sep 3rd 2011 11:14am by Quinildorff

Okay sorry for the double post even though these are hours apart...

I went ahead and did some testing on the test server so this is level 95 Brew vs. Shinryu. I also didn't want to waste a brew on normal server and get crappy drops, which all I got was a cape at battles end. Atma used: Beyond, Merciless Matriarch, Sea Daughter (yes I kno not best choice but I really don't have that much).

First off I started off with UK: Thunderbolt; Shinryu takes 23k damage.
Second I decide to cast Water Bomb; Shinryu recovers 7k (he was casting).
Charged Whisker; Shinryu takes 25k damage.
Dark Orb; Shinryu recovers 25k.
Sanguine Blade; Shinryu takes 10k damage.
Charged Whisker; Shinryu recovers 25k. (Still ending a TP move)
And so on and so forth.

Basically from what I could tell was that depending if he was doing an action I was healing or dealing about the same equivalent in numbers. The biggest issue here is that these spells take a little time to cast, and its hard to predict if the NM is going to start casting a spell or do a TP move. The good news though is when I did do this test I only got interrupted once and that was at the beginning when first trying to cast Thunderbolt, but 2nd try went through. I wish I could of landed a Dark Orb to see how much I could have hit for. I also had Thermal Pulse, Blazing Bound, and Leafstorm equipped but I forgot to try those, lol.

Physical damage factors cap. At a certain point, you're only increasing your base damage via secondary mods. And the higher your base damage already is, the less of an impact that's having. It's always going to boil down to base damage (str/vit function and secondary modifiers) X attack/defense (this caps at ~3? I don't even know anymore), barring damage-type bonuses/penalties (blunt on skeletons, etc.).

Meanwhile, the magic damage formula is multiplicative. INT is only base damage at that point, but it's getting multiplied by all that lovely magic attack bonus and affinity bonus. Plus, you're still getting the secondary modifiers, str and mnd for sanguine blade, boosting your base damage further. Between that and the 50 TP/tic regain and the speed that the weapon skills can be executed and repeated, it's just generally better.




I'll probably end up editing this because I flubbed something, but that's the gist.

Bout 50 more than it does to too weaks.

So I'm confused. How does increasing the secondary buff by 800 points only add a few more dmg. 30 % str 30% vit would mean a huge increase in the formula, but is quickly dismissed due to caps? Then question? That blu atk mod on synergy items, would that in the formula prove more useful than stat boosts? Kind of discoraging findings. Meaning no matter how great we stack our stat buffs we will not reach certain numbers like a blm would...

Errr... you probably misinterpreted it (or someone did)

Secondary modifier has no cap. On top of it, Sanguine blade use a "buffed version" calculation of magical WS damage calculation. Every magical WS have dINT factor that has cap at certain value. Sanguine blade also have this factor, but the difference is the damage growth is 4x as fast when you stacking INT, and it has no cap.

As for "What if transcendency gives us 999 blue magic skill?". Well, it'll boost our spell damage by only a because: Right now we're sitting at 400 ish blue magic skill when casting. So, caping it to 999 means there would be 600 skills to add. and 600 skills translate to 66 base damage. While the secondary mod of our spell probably going up by 500~1000 base damage due to 999 stats. so, it's pretty small boost, relatively. Well... maybe not. I see reports QC only doing up to 4k ish... there might be cap somewhere.

Edited, Sep 14th 2011 4:58am by VZX