Starting SCH with some nuke questionsFollow

Lots of questions, lots of answers!

First for your gear questions: It's situational. "What's better" always depends on "what's the target?" and "what's your other gear/merits?". A build with prudence torque instead of ele torque has to make up for the lost 7 ele skill somewhere. Both can work, just depends what the rest of your gear/merits look like.

In general I'd go for the 6int/2macc head for SCH. You should also consider the 4int/2mab combo, which is better max damage than either, at the cost of some accuracy.

Errant/mahatma will be your go-to legs. Druid's slops are technically better macc, but it's a trade of 8 int for 5 ele skill. You can make a better trade on the body by switching errant body to AF body (10 int for 15 ele skill), or the head if you have argute m.board by switching af head to af2 head (5 int for 7 ele skill).

INT only lowers your resists by a little. It's not as good as Elemental Skill and Magic Accuracy for lowering resists. INT's advantage is that it adds damage while also lowering your resists. If you only need a little more magic accuracy, INT is usually the way to go since it'll boost your damage too. INT also is very good for helix spells, so you'll want a lot of int gear for those.

Elemental Skill and Magic Accuracy are generally assumed to be just about equal. The difference is that magic accuracy improves all spells, while elemental skill only improves elemental magic. The trade-off is that elemental skill usually comes in larger quantities. The only large source of macc on a single item I can think of is the appropriate ele staff.

Elemental Skill does not increase damage at all, only accuracy. Over time elemental skill will increase your average damage because of less resists, but ele skill itself doesn't raise your base damage any. Remember that there is a magic accuracy cap though, so just stacking ele skill everywhere will often lower your damage overall, since you will be wasting a lot of it and could've been wearing INT and MAB gear instead.

The general rule for magic attack on high level mobs with endgame gear and nukes is 2 int = 1 mab. At lower levels using lower tier nukes, int is a little stronger, but mab is harder to come by too. Since helices are based on the damage formula of low tier nukes, this is why INT is generally better than MAB on helix spells. So, vicious mufflers will generally do better on tier3 and tier4 nukes, while Yigit Gages will be better for helix spells and lower tier nukes (if you're casting thunder 2 or something @level 75 for whatever reason). The difference vicious mufflers make is pretty small compared to yigit hands anyway, but max damage is max damage.

Hope that helps.

Thanks a lot for the replies guys I really appreciate it.




Why is that for Kirin people talk about aiming for 120skill/130int? Is that just an optimal amount or is there some other reason for it? Seems from what you've said that you should just focus entirely on INT since it's unlikely you can get 159 int.

320/120 is a generally accepted minimum for resist rates on HNMs. MINIMUM.

With the hyper INT build, the only problem is that there are certain things where you can get considerably more elemental skill than INT. It's best to go with the skill if there's a big difference between that and the available INT for that slot. If the INT offered is higher, go with that. Just an FYI, I'm sitting on 157 INT right now, and I have another 13 INT available. It's very possible to reach the 159 mark for Kirin with quite some ease.

Or just zerg it

That's cool. I think kited Kirin is one of the most boring fights in the game, and would rather move on to real gameplay as soon as possible when W. Legs Farming comes up. I don't wanna use a "gameshark" RNG/SMN squad to kill the mob in 30 minutes.

SCH's pretty nice in Kirin zerging btw, aoe cure4 from outside party is awesome for astral flow and if Stonega gets off.