Finally broke down and did it

[Cyric_SP]

How to imbue Virtuoso's Armor for max resists without wasting imbue slots

A while ago I gave up trying to imbue Virtuoso's Armor to get the max imbue slot out of it. However, since this topic keeps coming up time and time again, I broke down and spent about 6 hours working on a solution for this. I believe I came up with the best way to do this to not only get max resists out of the suit, but also the most slots for imbuing so they aren't tied up in imbuing resists on the suit. The following images show the excel spreadsheet I used. Let's get started:

I started by setting up the sheet with all the suit pieces and inputting the resists for the 4 pieces. Looking at the breakdown, the Fire Resist on the suit is 64 to begin with without adding in the legs and the arms. Since we don't need any Fire Resist at all, I start creating legs and arms that only had 4 Fire Resist, the lowest fire you can get on a piece. Both the legs and arms MUST have only 4 in fire resist for this to work. I created them out of plain leather for the idea of reforging them if needed, but that is not necessary if you don't want to. Under the Enhanced section I just added in a formula for the Legs and Arms that would take the base resists of the plain leather and add in the bonus when enhancing those pieces with barbed. After all 6 armor pieces are input, we get our total resists as 41/76/57/45/49 before we add in the imbued resists. The numbers in red are the resists on each piece that are going to be imbued to max resist for the specific one. To get the most out of our 5 imbue slots, we only want to imbue one resist on each piece, however since the 4 main pieces have such low resists, we actually have to imbue one of them with 2 resists. I choose the Gorget because of all the low end resists.

Next I created a formula that would take into account what the max imbuable resist is for each resist. Looking at the Imbue Resist Bonus row, that number is the max resist minus the resist on the piece which is input by hand. The row for Final After Imbue is a formula that adds the Total and the Imbue Bonuses together to get the final resist after the piece is imbued. Example to try to explain it:

Looking at the head slot, we see we have a Physical resist of 3. We know that the total max resist we can imbue for physical is 17. So we subtract 3 from the 17 and add that to the box in the Imbue Resist Bonuses row, which is 14. Since we are also imbuing the gloves with physical, we also do the same thing for that piece giving us 13 more physical resist on the piece. The formula then adds the physical resist for all 6 pieces as well as the 2 imbue bonuses giving us a total of 68 physical resist on the suit.

So, after our imbue our final resists on the suit come out to 68/76/68/66/69. While not maxed out, it is very close. To finish maxing out the suit we need to get ourselves a spell channeling shield. I have a few laying around that had Spell Channeling and decent DCI with no FC penalty on them. By enhancing the shield with Valorite it adds the resists you see in the chart in the Shield Bonus row. This gives us all our resists above 70 except for Poison, which can be easily obtained by wearing Snake Skin Boots adding in another 2 poison resist (boots obtained with 20,000 Clean Up Brit points)

All this was done with imbuing only 1 resist to each piece except for the gorget which needs 2. Next post explains our imbue slots and how they are used.

 

[Cyric_SP]

Imbue Slots Explained

We know we need to use some of our imbue slots for adding resists to our suit. However this is one other slot that has to be used to make the suit usable. We need to add Mage Armor to the chest piece since that piece is not medable. So now we know we are 1 slot less after the ones taken up by the resists.

The image below shows all 5 imbue slots for each of the 6 pieces. We have the slots that are taken up by our resists and the one slot on the chest for the mage armor. Since most bard use some form of magic, ie magery/myst/SW/chiv, we need to add 40 LMC to the suit. That takes up another slot on our suit, so we add that to our chart. We always need mana at some point so we add mana regen to the suit as well. All the slots that say FREE are slots that can be used to put in anything the template needs. For instance, a mage would benefit from LRC where as a SW doesn't need it. When filling in the FREE slots while imbuing, don't forget to take into account additional items you have for your suit, ie Totem of the Void. The totem gives you 10 LMC so you only need to add 5 LMC to each of the 6 pieces which keeps the overall property weight down on each piece so you can add another mod with higher property.

Of course this is just one way to imbue the suit, you don't have to add the LMC or the Mana Regen but you do need the slots for the resists and the mage armor. DO NOT imbue your resists first!!! Always start your imbuing with any mod that takes relic fragments so that you get 100%+ success rate and don't waste them.

 

[Aibal]

Cyric, nice work in doing this. I used it as a guide to imbue a set for a mystic/mage/bard I'm developing. Although the 450 point cap on the suit really inhibits what you can do, I still managed a solid suit with 100% lrc, 40 lmc, 2/6 fc/fcr, 15 mana regen (18 with boomstick), and 14 hpi, and a smidgeon of intel and strength increase with a straight 70's (75 energy) with a shield. Dropping the shield so I can chug still leaves me at worst 66 in physical. I will say the sleeves and leggings were an absolute bear to get the right resist spread, with high physical and only 4 fire. I burned through 4200+ leather before the damn rng even gave me a pair of 4 fire leggings, and then the physical was only 6 lol, so I kept at it. Finally got what I wanted and am quite happy with the results. I just wish the virtuoso suit pieces had at least 150 durability on them, but I can always get another set and reimbue them precisely the same, so it's not a huge deal. Thanks again for your efforts!