Skillchain Bonus

As the title emplies, i'm curious to this. I've tried searching through the forum's but maybe i'm terrible at it or its just not found.

Is skillchain bonus a viable thing? I'm working on my dnc gear and i'm looking at possible toggle sets for self chains. The af pants give up to +16% and then there is the empy hands with +11% and a ring with i think +5%, can this out weight other items for the ws?

Has anyone tested this by chance? or do i get to be the lucky/unlucky culprit?

Keep in mind it's only going to be useful when closing/prolonging skillchains, so you'd want varying weaponskill sets, focusing on wsdmg for openers and skillchain damage for closers. I've seen some DRG with skillchain bonus gear that serves them well for multi-stepping Umbra. I've considered it for SAM but most of the time it seems higher ws dmg boosts skillchain damage so if you're making major sacrifices in wsdmg to get skillchain bonus instead it's probably not going to be worth the extra SC damage to have a weaker WS.

I don't know about specific testing but there has been general comparisons for certain pieces. The general consensus was that to add any specific sc damage you would sacrifice a whole lot of damage on the ws, which in turn weakens the sc damage by default.

BG has a whole formula for sc damage which to me implies closing damage is significantly more important.

Like i said i was considering using it as a toggle, because I self chain quite often when i'm Solo, obviously I can't rely on this when in a party unless i'm the closer. But I was curious if it was worth considering the option

Maybe some other jobs could justify it, but not DNC. Hands and Legs slots are the home of some of our best WS pieces, so swapping in Empy/AF would entail a significant sacrifice, especially if you're solo w/ trusts and under-buffed to begin with.

Not to mention the job already gets 29% from traits/gifts, so your SCD is already gonna be extremely powerful -- you should be close to hitting 99k Darkness/Umbras on longer chains already.

I'd say it could be close therefore not worth it. With some generous assumptions/rounding using legs and hands to cap SC bonus, you'd sacrifice 20%WSD or so; so if you did 1000 WS + 1230 SC before, you'd drop to 800 + 1200 with the swaps, assuming your SC did the same damage as your WS before bonuses. It may work out if your hands and leg slots didn't have 10% WSD each or if you don't have access to them, but I think in the best case scenario it would probably tie. I'd probably stick to trying to cap via COR with the buff being your 4th or 5th roll.

Being as most of my gear set Ideas came from Arislan with a few modifications of my own (poor pocket book) nature, I do see both of your points. The sacrifice from hands and legs is hefty, but i can't quite afford leg upgrades sadly lol, hands i'm working out though.