how can we help with SC other than threnody?

[grunion]

just as the subject asks...

can we magic burst? this is only for damage spells i thought, and we don't have any (requiem is DoT).

threnody will lower resists i guess - does that increase damage? which threnody should i use if the SC is "ice/thunder" ?

obviously minuet/madrigal help as always but is there something specific we can do for a SC to help?

[Mylek]

You can tell what element the threnodies are by looking at the color of their icon.

If i remember correctly the opposition is like this:
fire<->ice
wind<->water
earth<->thunder
light<->dark

Meaining fire threnody is ice element spell, and ice threnody is fire etc. For example you could mb distortion(water/ice) with fire or wind threnody.

Now I'm not sure about this but I believe that a monster can only have one threnody in effect at a time. By magic bursing with a threnody you risk overwriting the proper one for the mages to magic burst unless your time it to land just after their mb spells.

[grunion]

that makes sense but what would be the effect of MB a threnody? a stronger reduction in the threnody element? that doesn't seem really helpful, especially when it's not the SC element

[Karinya]

It seems to me that the most useful way for a Bard to contribute to a skillchain is to sing Minuet(s) before the skillchain starts, and/or +INT etude(s) on mages who will be MBing.

A lot of bards focus on Madrigal to help the melees build up TP, but when you want to convert those TP into damage, it's important to have a high attack stat, i.e. Minuet.

In order to do this you have to anticipate the skillchain. If the melees are reporting their TP often, you can see when they are getting close and start minuet, but if they only report when they hit 100% you have to do it by intuition.

Also, if nobody has cast Dia, you can do that, if you have whm or rdm subbed. It's unresistable. Even if the monster is normally one that you want Bio on (pugil, tri-bats, scorpion), you still want Dia during the skillchain and go back to Bio afterwards. Of course threnody the SC element (if it's a lvl 2, threnody the element that the BLM will be bursting with) - but threnodies are so fast you can do this after the SC starts and probably still land it in time. (If the SC starter has a macro like "Starting Skillchain in 3 seconds", threnody then.)

Don't worry about magic bursting _after_ the skillchain - instead, enhance party members before the skillchain to increase its effectiveness.

[Lokan666]

Don't forget... you can also burst things like Paralyze/Silence/Slow etc... I do that often when im bored =p