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Talk:Ice Staff

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Level Sync

How are this and other elemental staves affected by Level Sync? Pometeme 15:01, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

The +10/15% potency/accuracy is most likely completely negated, as they are the first instance of this sort of ability on a weapon, so far as I know. --Lecureuil 00:45, 8 December 2008

Wind Spells

I'm surprised I haven't seen this question asked yet. Ice Staff/Aquilo's Staff + Aero (I, II, III, or IV). Does it hurt it more than help? Also, if this is the case, is it better to equip the appropriate elemental staff to the corresponding elemental magic or just use the Ice Staff/Aquilo's staff for all of them?--Mikatukana 06:48, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

My findings:

Alright, so I did some research and found the following information. The monster I tested on was the Death Wasp in Rolanberry Fields. I performed this experiment as a Red Mage 69/Black Mage 34 wearing full AF, Electrum Rings, Moldavite Earring, Antivenom Earring, Beak Necklace, Red Cape, and a Morion Tathlum. I used the same equipment (except for the staff) for each trial.

With Wind Staff and casting Aero III: I hit 483 damage 6 times and 0 of the spells were resisted. With Ice Staff and casting Aero III: I hit 402 damage 4 times and 2 of the spells were half resisted. With no staff and Aero III: I hit 405 damage 3 times and 0 of the spells were resisted.

I then proceeded to test with the spell Stone III.

With Earth Staff and casting Stone III: I hit 405 damage 3 times and 0 of the spells were resisted. With Ice Staff and casting Stone III: I hit 376 damage 3 times and 0 of the spells were resisted. With no staff and Stone III: I hit 368 damage 3 times and 0 of the spells were resisted.

In conclusion, equipping the elemental staff associated with the element of the spell is the best option. I'm sure some (or many) of you already knew this; however, this experiment was done for those, like me, whom did not.--Mikatukana 00:12, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Your testing is in no way statistically significant, and your conclusion, while correct, is completely unfounded. --VxSote 20:16, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Your Ice Staff and you: Maximizing DMG/MP

Personally, the only real way to test this, in my opinion, would be on the Seed Mandragora. Since they have no resistance to magic (from what I understand). I'm getting ready to do the Amber Key quest again I will try a few things. (My real reason for this is not to see if Ice Staff will be a better choice for using with a different element spell, but to see if Blizzard will do more damage than Thunder when they are both cast with thier respective elemental staves.) So I will perform two tasks:
My main reason for this particular test is because in certain instances (for example: Up in Arms) monsters are weak to both of these elements (in this case Fe'e). So for the purpose of being conservative with your MP would Ice spells be worth casting over a secondary weakness, assuming Ice and another elemental weakness are both present on the same monster. This seems to me to be a more relevant test, since it is already understood that casting a particular elemental spell should be done with it's appropriate elemental staff.
I will post my findings below shortly.--Tristaenkun 11:44, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Statistics with Ice Staff

Character: Tristaenkun
Race: Tarutaru
Job: 61Red Mage/30Ninja
Intelligence: 67+16
Elemental Magic: 212(Capped)
Magic Attack Bonus: +5 (From Moldavite Earring)
Game Day: Iceday
Weather: (none)
Moon Phase: Waxing Gibbous 86%
Spell: Blizzard (Costs: 30mp.)


Here was the damage output from casting Blizzard on 15 of the Seed Mandragora:
Average Damage/MP: 13.6.


Statistics with Thunder Staff

Character: Tristaenkun
Race: Tarutaru
Job: 61Red Mage/30Ninja
Intelligence: 67+12
Elemental Magic: 202(Capped)
Magic Attack Bonus: +5 (From Moldavite Earring)
Game Day: Lightningday
Weather: (none)
Moon Phase: Waxing Gibbous 86%
Spell: Thunder (Costs: 37mp.)


Here was the damage output from casting Thunder on 15 of the Seed Mandragora:
Average Damage/MP: 12.1.

Conclusion

While there were only 30 spells casted in this test, based on the results my conclusion is that you will achieve a better MP efficiency by casting Ice based magic with an Ice Staff equipped assuming a secondary weakness is of equal strength. Obviously there are instances in which this may not hold true, such as the following:
  • The day of the week can influences your spell's damage by 10%.
  • Weather can influence your spell's damage by 10%.
  • Blue Magic is also influenced by additional factors including but not limited to: HP, Monster Correlation, and TP.
  • Weaknesses are influenced by third party factors (i.e. Bard Songs, Ninjutsu, etc...).
  • Other special factors: Weakness to elements are varied (i.e. Weakness to Ice is greater than weakness to Lightning).
While there are many factors that influence damage when casting spells, I hope that the information provided will in some way help you achieve a higher efficiency when casting spells. Thanks for reading!
--Tristaenkun 15:25, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

There are two factors here that I find off. While I don't dispute that at your current level it might have a higher efficiency, there are still two points to your math where you might want to adjust before you average. If you're comparing just staves, you'll want to even out your INT to compare the difference that the staff has, not the difference in INT (so either lose 4 INT in your Ice staff setup or find 4 more for your thunder). I'm aware that the Icestaff comes equipped with 4 INT. Also, you should eliminate day/weather bonuses from your calculations, as you only have a small sample size (30 mobs) and weather effects will be more rounded in the long run. You have 6 occurrences on Iceday, and only 4 on Lightningsday. You should assume an equal amount of these (assuming 0 is best) as they are a random boost in damage, not something you can count on all the time, and something that is unaffected by which staff you pick. In the end, your numbers might still come out on the Blizzard side of things, but it's important to make all factors equal.

To address your two main points:
  • Evening out your INT when changing just your weapon adds a variable. To keep the test clean you have to have all other modifiers equal. If I take off the [[Ice Staff} and change my other gear to give me 4 more INT when using the Thunder Staff, why would I not be using the extra INT with my Ice Staff as well? Any Black Mage would use the maximum amount of INT available to them regardless of which staff they were using.
  • There was no weather present for any of the spells cast. The reason behind the day of the week is explained in the paragraph below.
Fourtunately when experimenting on the Seed Mandragora, you will get the same damage consistently as long as the base conditions are the same. For example if you take the damage Blizzard did when the day of the week did not trigger the bonus 10% damage: It will do 393 everytime I cast it, as long as on Firesday, a 10% penalty is not incurred, and on Iceday, a 10% bonus is not incurred. I can go back and kill Seed Mandragora 100,000 times and get the same base damage output. The same goes for the correlating situation with Thunder/Thunder Staff. What was proven here is given stable conditions Blizzard spells are more MP efficient than thier respective Thunder counterparts when both are present as equal weaknesses on the sam monster. As such, when I solo Up in Arms next time, I will be Chainspelling Blizzard II instead of Thunder II as I did in the past. (In other words ignoring modifying factors a DMG/MP ratio of 13.1:1 is still preferable over a ratio of 11.8:1). I realize the way I set this up maybe a bit confusing at first but I felt it significant to still display the modified damage due to the day of the week. By using each spell on it's "strong" day, I erased any possible unknown resistance factors. The bonus damage can be ignored by using the base DMG/MP ratio of each spell in place of the Avg.DMG/MP obtained by adding in the modified damage instances.--Tristaenkun 09:26, 17 May 2009 (UTC) (Feel free to ask any other questions.)

As a side note, while I agree in special circumstances, as I stated above, it may still be more efficient to the situation to use a different spell than an Ice based spell, it will typically save you MP in the long run to stick to Ice when there is more than one weakness of equal value present.--Tristaenkun 09:26, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

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