bar spells?

[myndreach]

are these worth buying and using? how long do they last? someone told me they are uselss as your magic defense is usually good enough...

[Issaac]

They are very worthfull. Where i have to admit that i also thought they are useless when i fought sheeps and used barsleepra i find them more and more usefull every day and ill hold my party protect if possible.

Barfirara extremely usefull against gobi bombs
Barpoisonra very usefull against crawlers
etc....

Buy them, they are cheep and not very mana intensive.


We went up qufim Delkfut tower (or what was the name spelled?) with 2 groups. We stumbled over some gobs and one of them throwed a bomb into both groups. While we where all same lvl i had barfira up on my group while the other white mage in the other group didnt. My group took less then the half dmg then the other group.

[Dux]

I agree with Issaac they r very useful.

The thing with the Bar spells which alot of new players don't appreciate is that they are NOT supposed to stop you getting poisoned / sleeped / paralysed etc. All they do is decrease the TIME you are in these negative states.

The Bar Fire / Stone / Water / Other Elements spells are very very good at reducing the damage of the enemys magical attacks. If your enhancing magic level is high enough you can even reduce the damage to 0.

The only one I am not sure of so far is BarSleepRa. I can normally cast cure on all the party members before the sleep wears off so I am not sure if it is worth casting it if you know you/your WHM won't be sent to sleep. For the small amount of TP it costs its probably worth casting it anyway.

[Kopitiam]

If you're short of cash, i'll suggest the few to get bar spell from my experience.

BarFira
Barwatera
Barsleep

The rest i hardly use...

[myndreach]

Hey thanks for all the info!

[Wolfoot]

One thing to know about Bar-ra spells
there are two types of Bar.
The elementals one's and the status one's

Barfira, barstonera, barwatera ... can not be stack, only one of them apply at a time
Barsilencera, Barsleepra... the same
but you can cast Barsleepra and Barfira for exemple, The two buffs apply at same time.

Elementals protections give a damage reduction, like barfira reduce damages from goblins bombs.
Status protection give a chance to resist effects spells, but as I can saw, they are quite never resisted :/ maybe because the level of the monster and the enhancing skill.
I didn't notice yet, but maybe the duration of the effect is reduce with protection, but as I can see I always have time to wake up my pt with Cure before the effect wears off from them.

[Calianeri]

Get all the bar-element-ra spells. Eventually you will find a need for all of them. But Barfira, Barstonra, and Barwatera are absolutely great and are used in many common situations. All of these spells will usually reduce damage noticeably, like the other posters have said.

For me the bar-status-ra spells are usually in the "they don't help much but I'll cast them anyway" category. Because they very rarely prevent the status effect, you will still have to use your -na spells if the status is really hurting the party. So the bar-status-ra spells don't save MP. But since they can lower the duration of the status, they help if you can't remove the status from everyone with a -na spell. Barparalyzra, Barblindra, Barsleepra, and Barsilencera are decent in that sense. (Barpetra may be too, but I haven't fought many petrifying enemies in leveling parties.) It's the really dangerous area status-inducing attacks where the bar-status-ra spells are potentially most helpful, like tigers' area-paralyze. Just never rely on them, and always have your -na spells fully up-to-date.

I use Barpoisonra too, but I think it's not very useful. Most special attacks that cause poison are either single-target or cone, meaning that only a couple party members will likely be poisoned. You'll want to Poisona them anyway, and you'll almost always have the time and MP to do that.

The bar-status-ra spells are sometimes embarassing. I mean, my party sees me cast this great-sounding spell and is then promptly hit by that status... it makes us WHMs look bad.

[Feenicks]

Don't bother with bar-status-ra spells. Yes, they reduce the status duration somewhat but there's no point because you should be healing status effects as soon as they're applied, not waiting for them to time out.