Question about the Magian stavesFollow

Which one do I get to enhance drain and aspir? Has there been any information or testing on it? If I had to guess, I'd say magic accuracy, but I'm not certain.

Also known as Dark Damage Staff



Also Known as Dark Accuraccy Staff.

Much easier than to list the trials they need. Also, make people know exactly what you are talking about at a glance, instead of having to go off to research what trial does what.

Enhance Drain and Aspir = Yama's Staff. Also effects Sleep, Dispel, Blind, and other Dark-element spells.

Your options are Magic Damage +4 (25% dmg)/Magic Acc +1 (20 MAcc), or Magic Damage +1(10% dmg)/Magic Acc +4 (+50 MAcc). As these are Trial of the Magian weapons, those stats are open to future development.

Personally, the benefit of that last 15% damage boost from the 4 MDMG affinity Yama's wasn't worth the extra time. Maybe later it will be, and if they work in a way to specify between MDMG and MAcc staves in macros, it will appeal even more; for now the MAcc one makes more sense across the board for Dark-element.

MAcc Yama's still leaves quite a bit of wiggle room in my drains and aspirs. There must be a random number generated and multiplied by your return or something. That said, I notice fewer 'pitiful' drain/aspirs (which may be from resists or extremely low generated multipliers). I have not parsed, taken accurate information, or capped Dark Magic skill yet, those observations are purely my interpretation of things.

I have noticed that the MAcc Yama's is a rock star at sleeping things. Haven't gotten a resist since I picked it up, which is exactly what you want from your Dark staff.

necrobump lulz



It's worth pointing out that there's some other spells that behave this way as well (in other words, they get randomized returns that aren't a result of resists). Two of the primary examples I'm thinking of, strangely, are both enfeebles affiliated with the wind element.

Gravity has some randomness applied to it (discounting the increasing resistance that NMs will often build toward Gravity), and it seems to me like it might be very similar to what you described with Drain/Aspir, with a minimum value being half of the maximum duration.

Silence is even worse than that. Its "minimum value" seems to be around 1 second; there is significantly more variation. It is capable of wearing off even before the message shows up in the log saying that it landed. Rather frustrating.

Edited, Oct 6th 2010 8:46pm by Fynlar

Well yeah, usually that is the case, but the spell is still packing some massive innate randomness that's allowing that 1-second duration to happen in the first place. I mean, if you get a partial resist on Sleep, it's still going to last for 30 seconds consistently under normal circumstances; it won't be a randomized 1-30 second range. It takes other factors in order to get a Sleep that wears off almost immediately upon being casted, and assuming you didn't brainfart and put a DoT on the mob previously (lulz), it's probably caused by the target having increasing sleep resistance (usually on a NM or BCNM mob). These 1-second Silences can happen on totally ordinary NQ mobs (just recently, I have been experiencing this often with the new worms in Aydeewa Subterrane while skilling up various magic skills), and we know it's not a matter of the mob having increasing Silence resistance either because the next Silence you cast may land perfectly fine and for a "normal" duration.

I've only noticed this kind of extreme deviation with Silence. Gravity (and Paralyze, come to think of it) comes closer to how Drain/Aspir are being described; those spells seem to have a randomness from roughly "half-to-full", rather than Silence's "1-to-full". The *only* times I've ever noticed getting a 1-second Gravity was on targets with increasing Gravity resistance, after already having cast Gravity several times. Sleep has no deviation; if it lands on a target with no increasing resistance, it's going to last 60 seconds if it doesn't partial resist, or 30 if it does.

Edited, Oct 7th 2010 3:19am by Fynlar

Working on dark macc right now. Does anyone have a good spot in ifrit's cauldron to kill opo opos? 16 minute repop really, really sucks.