Barsleepra: Resists only for spell or ability?

[lionx]

So...according to this Party Chat what is your consensus? OUTSIDE of the fact that they sound like pompous douches.

My opinion is Barsleep reduces the duration of Sleep of any form as long as it has a ZZZ in it(excluding special things like nightmare or songs). It might have a SLIGHT increase in resisting the actual effect. This is regardless if Sleep is from a spell or not as long as it has the bubble with Z's in em.

Any and all info on Barsleepra or other Bar spells are welcomed. If you guys have what they said in clear cut manner i would be willing to see it too. But until then i really dont see where they got that information.

[Armando]

Re: Barsleepra: Resists only for spell or ability?

My theory is that Barailment spells give you a % chance to completely resist the status ailment. Where the status ailment comes from is totally irrelevant, as long as the game considers the debuff to be "Sleep" (aka the ZZZ symbol) and not something else like Lullaby.

[TheGrandMom]

Re: Barsleepra: Resists only for spell or ability?

The thing is people can say what they want, all they want, but in the end the only people that know for sure is SE. As far as I know, there hasn't been anything said from them to help. We randomly resist spells without barspells anyways so saying because you saw it happen once really doesn't mean anything. I'd love some official info on how in the hell these spells are supposed to work so that this stuff could be put to rest. But coming from SE, I'm not gonna hold my breath waiting for it. lol

[Kitalrez]

Re: Barsleepra: Resists only for spell or ability?

Barelement were always pretty easy to see in effect. Your resistances went way up and you noticed immediately that you were resisting spells. Avatar 2hrs were good examples of this. Some of us also noticed that a barelement spell seemed to make the corresponding status effect easier to resist. (Like baraera and silence). We assumed this was happening because the spells causing these effects had the same elemental colored spot at the side that the BLM nuke did. It seemed to hold up in practice, so we started saying that barelement made a status resistable, which created confusion when it came to why we got the barstatus spells. We decided that since it didn't hold up that they made the spells noticably easier to resist, they must reduce durations of the spell somehow.

That was your logic argument leading to the current "common knowledge" on the subject. It makes some sense, I mean, if you look at Silence in your WHM spell menu, it has a nice green air spell dot next to it. What's Aero got next to it? Green spell dot. I don't know if anyone ever actually tested this, though. At least not in a rigorous way. I can say from my own experience that Barsilence doesn't seem to do anything for resists unless Mob lvl v. Your level has way more modifiers than your current resist rate for the spell. I mean, I've been silenced by virtually everything with this spell up. I've been slept by tons of things with Barsleep up. The only real anecdotal evidence I have that they reduce durations is that I seemed to wake up slightly earlier than the puller did when I had Barsleep on my WHM. Might be just a factor of high MND stat. WHMs already tend to resist status effects better.

You'd really have to test things in some kind of rigorous and exclusive way to tell for sure. (Or somehow get SE to spill the beans on just how the game actually works, which they've been very reluctant to ever do). Until that time, it's all just educated guesses. Don't let anyone try to tell you otherwise. "I know it works this way..." Nah, you think it works that way. You've observed it sort of working that way enough that you've decided it does. Until someone runs several hundred experimental tests for that in a row and posts results, we're all just guessing.

[Feba]

Re: Barsleepra: Resists only for spell or ability?

Why not just have someone (read: Armando, you little bitch) go and test it?

[Sabaron]

Re: Barsleepra: Resists only for spell or ability?

Barstatus spells are, in my opinion, the most useless and broken spells in the entire game.

I wish that instead of whining about people logging out for hate reset, that people would bitch about Barstatus spells and status protection songs. They are both almost completely useless.

Status protection songs need to have their own slot (that doesn't consume a regular buff slot) or they need to be the bomb. Say base 50% with +skill to boost resistance to 90% for "the bomb" version or reasonably efficacy of 15%-33% if they had their own slot.

Barstatus spells simply don't proc often enough for them to be useful. The protection they provide is barely distinguishable from no protection at all. I would say that a 20%-30% proc rate would be all you would need to make them appetizing. To seal the deal, though, stacking +MND could push them to say 50% on an even match mob or higher on weak mobs.

[TheGrandMom]

Re: Barsleepra: Resists only for spell or ability?

I'm occasionally still asked to perform the bar element type and I do. I have all the appropriate equips and stuff for them but /shrug......it just varies so much. I'll be in Dynamis and do a barfira and the gob will do bomb toss and people take a 200ish hp hit. Then I'm busy and run up a few seconds after it wears to cast, gob does bomb drop with no barspell and a single Curaga is enough for everyone. Go figure. If I'm asked to cast them I will, if I'm asked not to I don't argue.

But the bar status ones (mainly the ones I meant in my post but should have specified), I do not bother with hardly ever. Things must be hard and might not be looking too good in order for me to bother casting one of them. I'll try anything to help the fight be won. If I'm weak, have virtually no mp, and a mob does status stuff, I'll try anything once!

[Kitalrez]

Re: Barsleepra: Resists only for spell or ability?

I'll attest to the Barelement spells having useful effects. I've seen these in action enough times to test. By this I mean I've melee'd Ifrit, on Firesday, during a full moon, with my Taru SMN. Using Barfira on myself, His 2hr didn't break Stoneskin. I pissed him off bad enough to take a Meteor, which again didn't break Stoneskin. Conversely, my Taru SMN buddy who is meleeing right next to me has often failed to Barfira on this. He dies, I barely take damage. Same basic SMN gear. I have to be taking less than 100 damage for it not to break Stoneskin, conversely, for him to die with Stoneskin, he's looking at 900+ damage. If the only difference between us is 70~ fire resistance, I've gotta assume it works. While I suspect it doesn't work for a hard damage resist like Phalanx does, (where it gives you a set number of damage that doesn't effect you), I think it probably impacts the range of potential damage somehow. You go from 100-2k dmg without to 20-100 dmg with or something.

Look at the usual suspects when you see ranges of damages. Does the guy taking less damage have more MND? Does he have gear that augments the resistances? Does the guy taking more damage have crappy MND, and what's his gear got? I think you'll find a correlation to what kind of damage is taken. There is still that random range element, but I've seen the barelement work often enough that I'm a believer. It's clearly doing something.

[Armando]

Re: Barsleepra: Resists only for spell or ability?

Why not just have someone (read: Armando, you little bitch) go and test it?

Find me a mob that'll use the same debuff more often than once every 30 seconds.

I've thought about testing it, of course, but collecting an appropriately big data set would take eons.

[Lmnop]

Re: Barsleepra: Resists only for spell or ability?

Yeah it's not so much that barsleepra only affects the spell sleep... it's that they seem to be worthless for all types of sleep...

Though I believe it makes a difference, it's like my warrior wearing his defense set. I know that if I parse long enough, I can see a clear difference in damage taken... but with me only getting hit once/2 fights, the numbers look so close to the same that people would say it's not helping.

I guess S-E Expected us to all stack on as much +elemental resist for a particular element as possible, get bar-spell, get bar-status, and get a bard song or 2 to resist. And our accuracy and attack be damned.

I suppose their fear in buffing their effects is directly tied to the belief that the above stacking method would make everyone immune to everything if the bars did their jobs.

[Balfree]

Re: Barsleepra: Resists only for spell or ability?

Do Bar-element protect against TP moves of that element?

Then Bar-status should too... in theory and wishful thinking.

[Skoal]

Re: Barsleepra: Resists only for spell or ability?

Bar spells (the cheap ones) were great for Healing Breaths before blu came out. They are great for skilling up since they are fast, cheap and have low recast.

[Nuriko]

Re: Barsleepra: Resists only for spell or ability?

Would the Paralyze effect of Ice Spikes qualify for this? That's a pretty common thing for undead to have up, and it procs as often as you hit (damage or not).

[Elwynn]

Re: Barsleepra: Resists only for spell or ability?

Bar spells (the cheap ones) were great for Healing Breaths before blu came out. They are great for skilling up since they are fast, cheap and have low recast.

...only until you can spam Protect I and Shell I on General Mihli at the start of a Besieged. Fast, cheap, low recast, AND you get much faster skill ups. Which makes the barspells useless again.

I try using barsleepra every now and then, and I haven't yet seen much of a difference. But then I'm not normally around sleep casting mobs these days unless someone's ice elemental summon is throwing sleepga around besieged or campaign.

[Sabaron]

Re: Barsleepra: Resists only for spell or ability?

Would the Paralyze effect of Ice Spikes qualify for this? That's a pretty common thing for undead to have up, and it procs as often as you hit (damage or not).

Yes, Barparalyzra and Ice Spikes would seem like a good test bed for effectiveness of Barstatus spells. Besides that, you could always test naked in Brenner as well that way you have more "known values".

Oh, and as far as Barelement spells and Carols are concerned, I find them highly effective at preventing death from explosions, Astral Flows and frequent AoE moves. Limbus comes to mind. Frequently they'll mean the difference between a party wipe and just a bunch of red & orange HP bars.