Songweaver - returning player

[Casiopia-DN]

Hi all! I have decided to play Aion again after a year of hiatus. I need help with SW in pvp. What's the best weapon now for pvp and the best weapon to fuse it with? Also for gears and manastones, what manastones should i socket for pvp? What's a good stat for SW in pvp, like how much magic attack, magic accuracy and magic crit is need that can hit hard hehe. Any tips and suggestions are much appreciated. Thanks in advance xDD

[AriaTheMelodious-DN]

Hiya, welcome back @Casiopia-DN.

Best Weapon/Set: Ultimate Dark Talon. Takes a long while to get and is costly, I would recommend for a returning player that you get Ultimate Fierce Aureate Sky, or "Blood Mark" gear for short. The Blood Mark (BM) set has identical retune stats to dark talon and only 5% lower base stats, so it is a very good set to get you on your feet and is very capable of beating someone in full Dark Talon.

Armsfusion: You'll want an undercombine with the highest magic attack and crit possible. In the previous patch people would use the Divine Pandora as a cheap and easy undercombine. I am unsure if BM gear can be use as an undercombine but if it can it may be worth a look.
 

Manastones/Retune Stats: Your main blood-spiller is Magic Crit/Crit Spell (same stat, sometimes referred to by different names). You will want as much Magic Crit as you can get in both your retunes and your manastone socketing. If you can't get your hands on Crit Spell, you can socket some Magic Attack instead but I would not spend a lot of Kinah on that; going full-crit makes you much more likely to one-shot people in the long run. Your best source of Magic Attack is in re-tuning your gear's bonus stats; the manastones give too little to be worth it really.
How Much Do I Need? The rule of thumb is to aim for a 30% crit ratio (your % Ratio is shown when you hover your mouse over the stat in your profile). 30% is 5143 Crit or more, which can sound intimidating but as you get ultimate gear you will get a lot of crit from the retunes. My personal tip though would be to stack as much as possible up to 44%. At around the 44% crit marker, you start to get less crit for your money spent.
Why So Much Crit? The Crit modifier for all magic classes is 1.5x the damage your attack would have done without a crit. If your crit rate is higher than 30% you are likely to frequently dish out these devastating 1.5x attacks. My crit ratio is 36% and just today I crit'd 40,000 damage with a single attack on an enemy cleric who I know for a fact is max geared.
Is Magic Attack Important? Well yes, but you need hundreds to make a difference and the most expensive stones are only +23 each. You would need to socket many stones and this would take away from your precious crit slots. Like I said before, most of your magic attack will come from your ultimate gear and retunes, + your SW stigma "Impassion" which gives +800 when unenchanted. When you're in full ultimate gear with decent tunes expect to have around 19k magic attack.
What About Magic Accuracy? There are a handful of players who are starting to build Magic Resist sets. Generally speaking your Impassion buff + Thronesong buff will keep your accuracy high enough for the average joe, but in order to counter full-MR players you will need to eventually invest in a few extra PVP pieces to socket pure Magic Accuracy into.
Anything Else? Off the top of my head all I can think of is to not neglect HP stat on retunes. The few hundred you get seems like nothing individually but it adds up a lot to make you a tankier cloth, and similar to matk it is simply not worth socketing when the retunes give you so much more. PDEF is also a good stat to have tuned on all your gear pieces to deal with sins and glads.

Transformations for Songweaver: Speaking strictly from a PVP point of view, the SW is first and foremost an attack speed class. Most of your CC and debuffs require nimble fast movement to lockdown the opponent which enables you to nuke with your long casts. However, almost all of your damage skills, including atk speed chains, are hidden by some small to pretty large casts. It is for this reason I would say that Hybrid transforms of atk/cast are best for SW, but failing that a pure-atk speed transform can carry you far. With the current event guaranteeing you a choice of 3 types of transform contracts, you must choose the hybrid contract which gives either Frigida, Sheba, or Modor.

Frigida: Caps your attack speed and gives a bonus +23% Cast speed which you can DEFINITELY feel when casting big nukes like Blazing Requiem. Only downside is a slower movement speed. I consider this to be the best legendary transformation for Songweavers.
Sheba: Gives 25% attack speed and 18% cast speed; you wont be at attack speed cap without big additional buffs however Sheba's movement speed is faster and that can make catching prey easier.
Modor: Caps your attack speed but sadly no cast speed; meaning you will have to work extra hard on your timing for some of the bigger nuke casts. It does have maximum run speed like Sheba though.

Now you know which gear sets to get, which transform to select from the event, which manastones and stats to aim for and a rough ballpark of how much you should plan for. If you need anything else let me know, I'll try to help. I've probably missed some things as it's quite late where I live right now. Take care, see you in game o/

[GenericUser34531]

Magic atk gives you more dps than crit. You should focus on magic atk and the crit only in the available retuning should be 25% with food and transformation.

[GenericUser34531]

Phy and mag def are better than HP to don't be too squishy like wet toilet paper.

Don't forget healing boost, it is very important too.

[AriaTheMelodious-DN]

@Youmu-EK I'll reply to the other stuff later cos it's late, but I can say with complete confidence that if they are going to be a DPS SW then Heal Boost is not very important unless they specifically want to toggle Impassion on/off mid fight in which case I would just recommend ultimate BM HB set to swap into during that 10sec window of no Impassion.
Impassion is -800 HB, not really viable to try an heal if, as OP's desire to "hit hard" suggests, the SW intends to be a DPS stick. DPS Spec SW have no healing capabilities mid-fight beyond Snowbound Melody which is unaffected by Heal Boost.

Also, the nature of the SW buff Etude means that not having HP on your pieces is the difference between 55k HP full buffed ultimate gear, and 85k HP full buffed ultimate gear. I would, however, advise that you never neglect pdef and mdef either. Armor pieces can't get atk tuned, so HP/PDEF/MDEF/Crit is pretty standard stuff.

[GenericUser34531]

the 15% of etude applies only in your base hp, this means the hp that is written as a white number. the yellow bonus is added after the % buffs and not before. in other words, the hp retuning and manastones doesn't increase the buff etude.

[Casiopia-DN]

Thank you so much @AriaTheMelodious-DN and @Youmu-EK for your help, tips and recommendation. I'll take a note of all these. I really appreciate it <3

[Casiopia-DN]

On 3/22/2020 at 9:41 AM, AriaTheMelodious-DN said:

Hiya, welcome back @Casiopia-DN.

Best Weapon/Set: Ultimate Dark Talon. Takes a long while to get and is costly, I would recommend for a returning player that you get Ultimate Fierce Aureate Sky, or "Blood Mark" gear for short. The Blood Mark (BM) set has identical retune stats to dark talon and only 5% lower base stats, so it is a very good set to get you on your feet and is very capable of beating someone in full Dark Talon.

Armsfusion: You'll want an undercombine with the highest magic attack and crit possible. In the previous patch people would use the Divine Pandora as a cheap and easy undercombine. I am unsure if BM gear can be use as an undercombine but if it can it may be worth a look.
 

Manastones/Retune Stats: Your main blood-spiller is Magic Crit/Crit Spell (same stat, sometimes referred to by different names). You will want as much Magic Crit as you can get in both your retunes and your manastone socketing. If you can't get your hands on Crit Spell, you can socket some Magic Attack instead but I would not spend a lot of Kinah on that; going full-crit makes you much more likely to one-shot people in the long run. Your best source of Magic Attack is in re-tuning your gear's bonus stats; the manastones give too little to be worth it really.
How Much Do I Need? The rule of thumb is to aim for a 30% crit ratio (your % Ratio is shown when you hover your mouse over the stat in your profile). 30% is 5143 Crit or more, which can sound intimidating but as you get ultimate gear you will get a lot of crit from the retunes. My personal tip though would be to stack as much as possible up to 44%. At around the 44% crit marker, you start to get less crit for your money spent.
Why So Much Crit? The Crit modifier for all magic classes is 1.5x the damage your attack would have done without a crit. If your crit rate is higher than 30% you are likely to frequently dish out these devastating 1.5x attacks. My crit ratio is 36% and just today I crit'd 40,000 damage with a single attack on an enemy cleric who I know for a fact is max geared.
Is Magic Attack Important? Well yes, but you need hundreds to make a difference and the most expensive stones are only +23 each. You would need to socket many stones and this would take away from your precious crit slots. Like I said before, most of your magic attack will come from your ultimate gear and retunes, + your SW stigma "Impassion" which gives +800 when unenchanted. When you're in full ultimate gear with decent tunes expect to have around 19k magic attack.
What About Magic Accuracy? There are a handful of players who are starting to build Magic Resist sets. Generally speaking your Impassion buff + Thronesong buff will keep your accuracy high enough for the average joe, but in order to counter full-MR players you will need to eventually invest in a few extra PVP pieces to socket pure Magic Accuracy into.
Anything Else? Off the top of my head all I can think of is to not neglect HP stat on retunes. The few hundred you get seems like nothing individually but it adds up a lot to make you a tankier cloth, and similar to matk it is simply not worth socketing when the retunes give you so much more. PDEF is also a good stat to have tuned on all your gear pieces to deal with sins and glads.

Transformations for Songweaver: Speaking strictly from a PVP point of view, the SW is first and foremost an attack speed class. Most of your CC and debuffs require nimble fast movement to lockdown the opponent which enables you to nuke with your long casts. However, almost all of your damage skills, including atk speed chains, are hidden by some small to pretty large casts. It is for this reason I would say that Hybrid transforms of atk/cast are best for SW, but failing that a pure-atk speed transform can carry you far. With the current event guaranteeing you a choice of 3 types of transform contracts, you must choose the hybrid contract which gives either Frigida, Sheba, or Modor.

Frigida: Caps your attack speed and gives a bonus +23% Cast speed which you can DEFINITELY feel when casting big nukes like Blazing Requiem. Only downside is a slower movement speed. I consider this to be the best legendary transformation for Songweavers.
Sheba: Gives 25% attack speed and 18% cast speed; you wont be at attack speed cap without big additional buffs however Sheba's movement speed is faster and that can make catching prey easier.
Modor: Caps your attack speed but sadly no cast speed; meaning you will have to work extra hard on your timing for some of the bigger nuke casts. It does have maximum run speed like Sheba though.

Now you know which gear sets to get, which transform to select from the event, which manastones and stats to aim for and a rough ballpark of how much you should plan for. If you need anything else let me know, I'll try to help. I've probably missed some things as it's quite late where I live right now. Take care, see you in game o/

Btw, do you use any defensive gears? Like MR set or Evasion set against other classes? or just MA pieces? Thanks again.

[Ele-DN]

No need, but if you did, 7.5 will come quicker than you finishing those sets.

[Casiopia-DN]

9 minutes ago, Ele-DN said:

No need, but if you did, 7.5 will come quicker than you finishing those sets.

Hi Ele. Any tips for gearing up SW in pvp?

[The Secret Cow Level]

You can buy Ultimate Aureate Sky equipment using legendary Blood Marks. These are awarded from Red (Crimson) Katalam quests. The entrance is at Demeha Stellusia.

Ultimate Aureate Sky equipment boxes can give either Fierce or non-Fierce versions of equipment. My records so far

The base stats of Ultimate Aureate Sky (fierce or not) is 98% of that of Ultimate Dark Talon.

Ultimate  Fierce Aureate Sky has same tuning stats as Ultimate Dark Talon.

Ultimate Non-fierce Aureate Sky has only 85% of retuning stats of Ultimate  Fierce Aureate Sky or Ultimate Dark Talon.

Aureate Sky equipments are level 79 so they cannot have level 80 weapons fused underneath it

[Fuzzywuzzy-DN]

where i can buy the bloodmark eq?

 

[Arhangelos]

1 hour ago, Fuzzywuzzy-DN said:

where i can buy the bloodmark eq?

 

If you go to Lakrum city, there are new npcs in the main upper area where the Veilbreakers NPC is (the one that gives dailies for Mark of Wisdoms).

With legendary bloodmarks you can get the real equipment and with ultimate bloodmarks you get the skins that also have skills in appearance.