Military Parade - A DD Bard Guide

I was using my BRD recently on ambuscade and I rememer having similar DPS (without sc damage) and I didnt have GEO. I was using Carn R5/kaja spamming Mordant. This is my alt so im still missing some vital stuff like 10DW (i have stp on cape instead of temporary putting dw there, because im about to get suppa and farming eabani without success so far). So even that Mordant is doing less on avg (I think it was doing around 22-28k with AM3) the tp gain from AM3 is really noticable.

With R15 carn instead of R5 and 10DW and possibly 10DA cape for building tp for am3, it should easily be way higher than 4000 DPS.

The difference between RP5 and RP15 carn is going to be pretty big I think, no doubt about that. I just really am not a fan of using carn for dps. First you need to build AM3 which costs you 3 WS. Next, any TP overflow really hurts when using MR while it benefits you with rudras / savage. Any time you are not WSing due to applying debuffs or changing mobs is also a big loss. Finally you have to optimize fast TP gain of AM3 coinciding with AM3 wearing off, not hitting 3k tp and WSing right when AM3 falls off is also a dps loss. Either you sit on TP or AM3 falls off and you tp slower trying to get back to 3k.

Finally, and this part is purely personal, I am not compelled to drop 100+m to RP15 my carn when A: i play about 17 other jobs (none of which are RP15 due to not enough resources) that could benefit from it more such as my drk, dnc, or chango war, and B: when it seems like it is heavily dependent on the situation to be better than other options. Any short fight AM3 will not be useful and any fight where you constantly aren't engaged it won't be as useful either (like dyna). When I tried carn in ambu this month it was about 1k DPS less than other options but then again I'm not RP15. All my other MR gear is about on par with what folks have posted as BiS so all I'm missing is the RP.

Not saying carn isn't good just in my experience there are a lot of issues with using it based on common situations.

Edit: Actually one way I've used carn AM3 that I found to be great was using cento offhand and spamming rudras with the high tp gain of AM3. My rudras hit harder than my MR and have better SC properties.

New to gearing BRD for DD so be gentle but wouldn’t Tauret/Twashtar be our best option considering on the THf forumns it was shown by Simon that (besides cento which is too situation for me) that Tauret/Twash Evisceration beat pretty much everything else? So why wouldn’t this translate to BRD, as well?

lack of crit dmg/rate through traits/gear would be my guess

The further away you are from being att capped, the better Relic+3 likely gets.

I tested it some time ago on Rudra's Storm at very low buffs and, surprisingly enough, it was beating other options despite the lower DEX and lack of WSD.
I'm talking about Head/Hands/Legs/Feet slots of course.

I haven't tested it for Evisceration but I assume a similar behaviour to the one I noticed on Rudra.

Building am3 costs 2 ws not 3. Since you will ws once instead of 3. Its actually not even that because ws delay makes it even less than 2.

Carn has imo an amazing advantage that it uses 5/5 relic+3 for Mordant. Most people only see offensive aspect of relic+3 set, but i already mentioned it here few pages back, it has amazing defensive aspect during WS. -29% pdt, high meva, high mdb are great for not getting caught by physical/magical damage or debuffs during WS. -26 enmity helps to not reach hate cap on something like wave3 boss or some ambuscade. I also use BRD on NMs while trioboxing dynamis d and I open with Mordant>Mordant for Distortion for my COR doing Darkness with leaden, then I finish with 3000tp rudra for double darkness. I never pull hate from Trust tank and pulling hate in Sandoria is instant death from counters. I realy like that over Rudra and its asking to be killed or debuffed lustratio pieces :P

Last thing, when you happen to overtp with Carn because you couldnt WS, you still can make Rudra instead of Mordant. Also rebuilding 3000 tp with am3 active is like 50% faster than without am3.

I'm in semi better place with my Carn, because its on my alt that I
treat as separate char on its own rights and intead of balancing all jobs like on my main I just use all of her gils and drops to first pimp BRD, so I slowly but without any remors upgrade a Carn for her :)

I think carn can definitely be better but all things are situational. You outline a very specific circumstance where it works best (that's where I was getting at with my posts, when one choice is better over another). I think for typical dyna runs where you often have to herd your melee together for songs it will be more of a DPS loss since AM is constantly ticking.

The point you made about using different gear in WS sets for survivability is interesting and I have to admit I haven't thought about it much aside from using scythe WS on DRK. In my personal experience this has never been an issue on BRD, I'm constantly spamming WS pretty much whenever and I've yet to die mid WS, this includes omen bosses which fire off magical AoEs quite often and catch me in WS sets all the time. In fact I'm usually the last dps to die on most content barring drain 3 DRKs or some other special circumstances. Maybe the WS window is so short it doesn't matter, dunno, just never had issues going "dang I died cause I was caught in a WS set".

I might try carn out on wave three next time because I hadn't really considered the -enmity on MR WS set. Typically I pull hate around the 85% mark and am capped on hate along with the tank and other melee DPS. I suspect this will still happen with MR (will probably happen even just from auto attacks after a certain point) just take longer. In my experience unless you are a DRG, using magical WS, or have a SMN take hate off you with pacifying ruby you're going to cap hate at some point and probably die as a result of it anyhow but I'll give it a shot. If anything wave 3 MB is where the mechanics of carn will outshine other weapons.

Think I've mentioned it before but has anyone else tried carn/cento combo? I've found I could use cento in more content than I would have guessed and would like to hear other's opinions on this matter.

Thanks for the response simon, it's always nice to have a little theory-craft banter, you made some fair points.

That's pretty much the same for everything in FFXI so it goes without saying.

Regardless of that, if my calculations are right (but I'm not too sure of them myself given how old the spreadsheet is, I'm very skeptic) then R15 Carns is slightly (very very slightly) better than R15 Aeneas even if you ignore AM3 and just spam Mordant Rime.

One thing you forgot about is that you lose TP (and handling this while engaged can make things quite complex/annoying in Gearswap) if you want to re-cast songs for whatever reason while engaged.
With Carnwenhan you don't really have to worry about that.

Again, not saying Carn is >>> than everything else, but this clearly is a point in favor of mainhanding it over other options.

Personally I also think you're sorta underestimating how nice Mordant Rime is with a R15 Carns, compared to other WSs.



It will, but you will reach that point way after 85%. Eventually you will reach it no matter what. If you have a SCH in your alliance ask for Perpetuance Animus: Minuo before you engage the boss, helps so so so so so much, regardless of which weapon you'll decide to use.


WAAAAAT
Why would you even want to offhand Centovente with Carnwenhan? It's not a matter of accuracy, it's a matter of Carns getting absolutely nothing from TP over 1000. Why would you want to boost that?!

If anything we should be talking about Twashtar R15/Centovente or even Tauret/Centovente.
In case of the latter I doubt it would matter because Evisceration doesn't really scale that well with TP.
In case of the former then uhm... I'd be curious to try and to see detailed tests about it.
On a hunch I would say BRD lacks the necessary gear/traits/JAs to fully exploit the potential of Twashtar and its AM, but then again who knows. Would be really interested in seeing some tests about it.

I use carn/cento for the combined bonuses of TPing faster and WSing rudras at 2250 TP, I don't use MR with carn ( I don't even like MR at all tbh). I do this all the time on DNC with terp/cento since in case it lets me utilize three diff WS at a higher potential. Dunno why you assumed I would want the TP bonus for MR, I'm not an idiot lol.

I don't have a twash yet so can't say much about it. Carn/cento vs twash/cento would be a battle of higher WS frequency vs higher WS numbers. Once I get my twash I'll do some in game testing. I'm not a fan of spreadsheets and will dismiss them outright because of how uncharacteristic of actual fights they are.

In the meantime I'm gonna be dunking on fools with savage blade, can't wait til I upgrade it to pulse version.

Using Carns to activate AM3 and then spamming Rudra with Centovente offhand sounds like quite a crazy idea, but glad to be proven wrong if numbers are on your side hey!

Oh I'm just tossing ideas around and looking for feedback. As it seems there aren't exactly a ton of us melee BRD around. If the idea sucks it sucks and we still learn something. If someone who has RP15 twash/cento and carn/cento has any experience I'd like to hear their opinion as I'm still 10 glavoid shells short and probably still will be next month lol.

I happen to have Aenas, and Carn both, it is still better to go for Taming Sari for offhand for MR? I cant find info on dual wield that tells me that to look for

I have also been curious about R15 Twashtar Main with Centro offhand for Bard for DPS and how it compares.

I know it is a great combo for THF, but figured since it hasn't really been mentioned at all until now it wasn't for Bard.

Would appreciate if someone could test if they had time..

But I know this has been said, but to confirm:

If you want to just use Rudra's, is Rank 15 Aeonic Main, Twashtar off hand Bis?

Thanks again guys

It's a great combo for DNC too, but both jobs have stuff that is lacking for BRD so I dunno how things would work out here. Might be good hey! But I'm not so sure.

It's hard to give you a 100% safe answer because, just like you wrote above, we don't know the results of TwashR15/Centovente.
Would that be better than AeneasR15/Twash? Or not?
Pending on that, you can have your answer.
Supposing it's not then yes, BiS combination for people who intend to use Rudra's Storm would be AeneasR15/Twash.

I thought I would share my latest obsession on BRD, been trying to solo Ark Angel TT on Very Difficult for a while now, and finally conquered him :D



I know he's not really relevant these days, but he's super nervewracking to do solo. At least for me, someone with the means to get better gear than I might say otherwise lol. Took me more than a few tries before I figured out exactly what to do as far as a game plan

good times, so many wasted merits @_@

Nice Bruno! Always great to push the limits of any job, thanks for letting us know this is one more thing BRD is capable of. Next time I need some of those chapters I'll give it a try myself.

So the Dark Matter campaign is going on right now, are there any Chironic slots worth trying for DD-BRD pieces? Either for TP or WS? Kind of bummed by the lack of base accuracy on them, but eh... that's what Accuracy toggles are for, right?

I guess the Chironic gloves would be the first piece to tackle since Ayanmo gloves+2 are pretty lackluster? thoughts anyone?

Everthing can end up totally op, but gloves have probably easiest time to beat alternatives. Body is probably the last on the list.

Hands first, feet after. Kinda concur with Simon overall

I'm not really sure how I should feel about these gloves. How does this compare to Ayanmo +2 for TP?

Stp9 is very good

Hands are possibly the worst piece of the ayanmo set. If you can manage to keep 26% haste with just the 5 main slots, then I'm pretty confident those hands should beat ayanmo+2

I'd be at 25% haste with my 5 main slots. Would I be better off getting to 26% haste with other slots or just live with 25%?

The DM gloves should easily win.

Just got Acc/Atk20 QA+3 and STR14 on my Chironic Gloves from DM, pretty happy with that.

I was doing SR last night, with r15 Carn/Sari and a Mordant set that is almost identical to yours, and my Mordants were doing 20K-25K. I don't have a decent Rudras set to test it, but wouldn't Rudras be doing closer to 30K in something like SR?

To evaluate the average number of Rudra we would need to know the target and the buffs.
You defined one, granted there's a lot of difference between Wave1 and Wave3, but what was party setup? Were you att capped in all waves?

Also are we talking about Rudra with Aeneas MH/TamingSari OH?


When I wrote the post that you linked the spreadsheet (which is so outdated at this point it's hard to consider it reliable anymore) showed R15 Carns/TamingSari being slightly better than R15 Aeneas MH/Twash OH, even with AM3 down.
As I said before though this difference was really small.
In addition to that, spreadsheet tend to minimize a factor that is actually quite present in real-scenarios. That is TP overflow.
It's unavoidable, it's gonna happen.
TP Overflow does absolutely nothing for Carns, whereas it contributes to raise the average WS Damage of Rudra builds.

For all these reasons I said I was skeptic on those results and I suspected that Rudra builds with Aeneas should win over R15 Carn builds with AM3 down.
I also suspect this difference to be pretty small though, to the point that if someone for whatever reasons prefers to use Carn builds, then I wouldn't honestly worry too much about it. It seems pretty viable even with AM3 down, and for those situations where you can make use of AM3, of course it's gonna be way ahead of anything else.



With that said, there are multiple additional variables to put into the system.
What about Twashtar R15 MH/Centovente OH builds?
What about Tauret MH builds?
What about Tauret as an OH in place of Taming Sari?
I have no bloody clue for the first question.
I have a hunch the 2nd is gonna lose but be incredibly close to all other options.
I'm really uncertain on the 3rd question. At first glance I'd be leaning to say that Tauret as an OH would be slightly behind Perf TamingSari at capped acc, but be better if you need acc.
And this would be totally true if they had the same delay, but Tauret has a noticeably lower delay, so that makes things more complicated and it would need to be tested on a spreadsheet.

Also last but not least a dagger like Perf Taming Sari OH for Carns MH builds has varying levels of efficiency. That is: it gives a bigger contribute to DPS with AM3 down, compared to what it does with AM3 up (diminished return of the TA on it).
Tauret doesn't "suffer" from this and gives the same exact benefit wether AM3 is up or down.


Edit, Spreadsheet stuff:

It was with HM, two Minuets, Idris frailty/fury, and rostam chaos roll, so pdif was most certainly capped. I was using r15 Carn/Imperfect TamingSari OH (with augments approximately half of max augments).

The Tauret OH question is an interesting one, especially if you're hurting for acc. Though, perfect Taming has 12 more CHR, 7 more DEX, 22 more STR, and TA. The lower delay and additional acc on Tauret makes it an interesting question though.

One thing I've also wondered - MR properties seem similar to Coronach in that it has lower WSC mods and no damage benefit from TP overflow. With Coronach sets, the general feeling is that STR is preferable over the actual WSC mods (DEX and AGI) because of how low the mods are, and in general, the set is STR starved. BRD seems even more STR starved, so it makes me wonder if working in more STR would be worth. Though, I realize there's a sizeable gap between fSTR vs fSTR2 scaling.