You Spoony Guide! - A Troubadour's Libretto

1) You can overwrite ANY song by another one at ANY moment. As long as it's a different song. It will overwrite the one with the less remaining duration on it. So let's see an example :
- You sing paeon 1 with daur : Time remaining 2.30 minutes.
- You sing paeon 2 with daur : Time remaining 2.30 (paeon1 2.20)
- You sing paeon 3 with daur : Time remaining 2.30 (paeon2 2.20, paeon1 2.10)
- Now you sing Valor minuet V with anything, Paeon1 will be overwritten by Minuet (even if its time duration is above 2 minutes.) because it's the song with the less time remaining.
This mecanic will not be fixed in any way, and don't need to be.

It can be a problem if you use your duration set with daur with no presongs.
- Sing Victory march with Ghorn : Time remaining 3.60
- Sing Advcancing march with Ghorn : Time remaining 3.60 (Vmarch 3.50
- Sing Paeon 1 with daur + duration set : time remaining 3.60 (Amarch 3.50, Vmarch 3.40)
- Now sing Valor minuet 5, Vmarch will be overwritten at this point. (So you get Advancing march, minuet 5 and paeon1 on you)
Again, this won't be fixed.

2) You can't overwrite a song already on you if its remaining duration is above 2 minutes.
Exemple :
Tojil is about to be pulled, your leader says : "go songs !" You sing Valor minuet 5 with your song duration set but oh crap ! you forgot to hit your Night/troub macro, : Time remaining 3.50
So now you put your JAs on and re-sing Valor minuet 5 : You'll get a "No effect". Because the same song is already on you and above 2 minutes remaining.
To correct it, you have to sing 3 different songs to get rid of the first Minuet and be able to re-sing minuet 5.
This one will be fixed. And thanks SE for this.

The only downside to this fix is this :

Your 3 rangers just got Preludex2 minuet with N/T.
if one of the rangers dies, you can re-sing Preludex2 into the rangers group, and not overwrite the N/T ones.

Maybe this will be included in the fix, I don't know.

I'd like to get a "No effect" if I try to sing a song already applied with more time remaining.

Terpander ingredients:

Cehuetzi pelt, an ebony harp, and a shofar, as well as 150 of either Plutons, Beitetsus, or Riftborn boulders.

While I think you need either some sort of delve or AA win to make these, all the ingredients are ah-able and bazaarable.

This is stupidly easy to make, even at 15-20mil for the pelt I paid more buying souls when I got too lazy to farm them.

While not as good as daur because it has no song duration, it's really easy to overwrite one dummy song.. brds/potential brds everywhere rejoice, this is going to change how easy it is to either make yourself or find a 3 song brd for events.

I've always considered Daurdabla's duration increase to be completely irrelevant/useless 90% of the time and a downright hindrance the other 10%. This new harp is therefore equal to 3-song Daurdabla 90% of the time and actually better the rest of the time.

The only exception is if you're not bothering to overwrite your 3rd song with the proper instrument, but really now who does that? :P

Assuming player skill hasn't changed radically in recent history... about half the 90+ Daurdabla owners in the game?

I almost never overwrite my 2 daur songs, though it depends where I am and what we're doing.

In delve, I don't bother. Usually/sometimes for SV/bosses I will try to get all 4 songs G-horned.

In bcnms, I just cast paeons or w/e outside the battle before warping in.

In all my years of having brd and playing with harp, I find people get more antsy/bored waiting on you to deal with dummy songs than they care about having 3/4 G-horn songs. I've been told/asked very specifically many, many times to just get songs up quickly. Keep in mind I'm not the type of person that thinks they need to cast 4 dummy songs then recast them all either, I do 2 normal songs - 2 dummy - last 2 songs. It does start to get very tedious when you're doing 20+ hours of events a week, and there's very few places where the extra bonus from horn is going to make or break a win. (And considering how long I've seen it take most other brds to get up 3-4 G-horn songs, an argument could even be made that you're wasting more time on downtime than the extra bonus is making up for, whether you're either just standing around or fighting something without marches while brd *** with 3-4 dummy songs).

The time difference between horn and daur really isn't all that different either.

I do agree with this new harp having no duration you are pretty much required to use a dummy song.

Also, was the song overwriting being fixed in the update today? That could potentially make it a lot easier to deal w/dummy songs.. MarchX2, Minuet daur, re-minuet with horn

anyone get a chance to check and see if the new harp + daura = 4/5 songs?

I've never played around on the test server, but would it be easy to get both weapons and check them there?

I'm gonna assume they don't, but would be nice to know for sure.

Songs can overwrite themselves immediately now.

Am I the only one that's stupidly excited at how easy this harp is to make? At the high end of prices, it's gonna be 10-12mil max, and probably plateau at 3-5mil after a few weeks.

I always thought colorless souls were one of the silliest/dumbest/time wasting things se had came up with over the years.

99 harp is still a solid option for hardcore brds, but this thing is a really nice/new/easy alternative for the majority of the more casual population.

It's very nice. Beitetsu and boulders will reach some new equilibrium that's still affordable and everything else can be bought on AH. And the prerequisites are so easy. Anybody can do this; there's no excuse not to have it.

You can do SV N/T scherzo and click off JA then immediately overwrite it now. The song that was cast later will keep that duration (ie, the shorter one in this case, not the 15m+ one....)

But good news, you lose less DPS because you can do GHorn MARCH MARCH harp MINUET5 MINUET4 GHorn MINUET5 MINUET4 immediately during fights.

I'm kind of pissed about the greater duration not lasting... Gotta be careful not to overwrite SV N/T songs now :/

Is this the intended effect? Or were we only supposed to be able to overwrite songs with shorter remaining duration, but at anytime (over the 2minute base?)

Songs will overwrite, and their duration will start over the second you cast them. Yes, that means you'll have to be careful to not overwrite N/T songs if you don't want to ruin their longer duration. Unless you're party hopping a lot, it's very easy to get in all the songs/dummy songs while n/t is up.

It's still really super useful. I'm more excited to play brd than I have been in awhile. The duration on carn is nice, but it's always been slightly annoying in the past without being able to overwrite songs.

Not on songs like Marchs/Mardrigals/Prelude, from what I can recall atm or songs that are normally used these days...

Daurdabla(90) is +30 seconds. Daurdabla (99) is +36 seconds

99 horn is +48 seconds.

If you don't have a 99 horn the duration between +2-3 instruments and daurdabla is near neglible. (Duration on daur is actually longer than what a +2 instrument would give!)

that's 18 seconds(90) or 12 seconds (99) difference, or 36/24 with troub.

If songs are under 40~60 seconds remaining and stuff isn't near dead, you should be looking at how you're gonna be re-singing anyways.

(And yes, obviously I'm aware that +2-4 of a song gives more than just duration, but we're talking strictly duration for this instance).

Kinda random. While everyone's talking about songs, I thought I'd like to add another fun, not serious aspect to playing battle brd. I don't know what other people do and I haven't seen any other sets out there so I though I'd post mine. With haste or haste samba (/dnc) and >100mp, stuff can get really fun. If dual wield, I'd throw in Izhiikoh.

TP set
ItemSet 317364

Anyone have some windower macros they care to share when dealing with 3 songs?

This is my battlebrd setup. A lot less focus on pdt than the above set but more emphasis on DD stats like DA/TA because let's face it I'm not using this on anything that puts out any real damage.

ItemSet 318582

Most optimal sets as of now:

/NIN /DNC
ItemSet 289363
Kirin's Osode: Dual Wield+3% Crit. rate+2%

non-DW Subs
ItemSet 289847

K'ayres Ring is next best to Oneiros if you can't activate the latent via gear or MP Merits.

Exenterator
ItemSet 267136
Earrings for this can vary on target.

I see you're both Carn-owners, unfortunately I haven't made Mordant Rime or AM3-up TP sets yet, but I hope these help ^^

Are you using SC or GS or anything or just using straight windower scripts?

I use GS, and I used to use SC. The GS I have/use has daur rules written in, but I've edited them out.

All my gear/sets just include my buff gear minus range, which I put in the actual ffxi macro line. IE; my macro is /equip Range "Gjallarhorn" or /equip Range "Daurdabla" then /ma "Song Whatever V".

Also, 5/5 espial isn't that far behind the high tier sets posted, if you're lacking some pieces or don't want to spend a lot of gil. From what I saw they also beat old non-ilvl stuff like nabus and calmecac.

Motenten's spreadsheets

DD brd is fun as heck, especially when you get 4/5 songs on yourself :p

Or when you're bored enough to summon Ulmia and Joachim. then it goes haywire

Been looking all over but can't seem a more up to date brd layout. I've been gone 8 months and just recently got brd to 99 but idk what armor I should go for(af,relic,or empy). Any help would be grateful. Thanks.

Go to page 1 of this thread for current sets.

Ok thanks. I didn't know how up to date those were.

Does Soul Voice increase the duration of Hymnus and the barstatus songs?

Edit: to clarify, I'm asking for the purpose of a dummy song. I started using Hymnus as a dummy buff and it works as expected until I SV. :<

There are songs that instead of getting a potency, get a duration enhancement. Hymnus is one of them. It is very nice as a PH song until then because it's faster than other songs but... it does lead you to screw up fairly often ^^; so it's probably best just to use paeon's.

Scherzo is another song that does this.

Just a note that there isn't really much merit to using dummy songs after the last update anymore. Since you can now overwrite songs over 2mins, it is probably better and easier to just sing the songs you want to sing with dharp, then overwrite them with ghorn, no screw up :)