Magical Music Testing

Recently, I reached rank 2 for Playing Instrument and I have been testing out the mechanics of magical music, specifically the duration of stat boost effects and the area of effect. I was curious how the mechanics worked as the wikis don’t give in-depth detail. If I can understand it better, I can use it to my advantage in dungeon party play. I did my tests over the course of 2 hours utilizing 3 magical music imbued scrolls, all of which were stat boosts. I’d like to thank Peach for helping out.

Duration

Three scrolls with different song lengths were compared. ‘Auras’ (rings of lights emitted from the instrument) were generated every 10 seconds, resulting in three data values of 3, 7 and 8 auras. Magical music effects begin 10 seconds into the song and will only persist after the song if the entire song is played (in other words, not cancelled). Success rates and quality of the boost are dependent on the playing rank, but this is not the scope of the testing.

• A rough estimate of the duration of the effect is [song length + 30 * (number of auras)] seconds. In other words, [song length + 30 * floor(song length/10)] seconds.
• The duration of the effect will remain constant for a scroll regardless of the playing rank of the player, provided the player can play magical music (rank 9+).
• It seems there is some variation around the expected value depending on the song, however song length is generally a good indicator of duration.
• To receive boost, a player must be within the area of effect for at least one aura.
• If a player leaves the area of effect before the song ends, the boost they received dissipates immediately.
• If a player leaves the area of effect after the song ends, the boost they received will continue for the full duration.

Area of Effect

A series of trials were conducted to see if party members will receive boost even if they were on different maps or areas.

Trial 1: Bard in house, party member outside house.
Result: Only bard receives boost.

Trial 2: Bard in Sen Mag housing area, party member in Dugald housing area (Same channel).
Result: Only bard receives boost.

Trial 3: Bard by Morva Aisle entrance, party member at stump square.
Result: Only bard receives boost.

Trial 4: Party member on same screen, at the maximum distance where they can see bard’s auras, hear music and read the bard’s public text bubble.
Result: Only bard receives boost.

Trial 5: Party member within ~2000 range of bard.
Result: Both bard and party member receive boost.

Conclusion: Party members receive boost only if they are within a room’s length of the source of magical music, provided they catch at least one aura.

Conclusions and Limitations

It is uncertain if these conclusions will be the same for special effects and recovery-type magical music, as they rely on auras. Recovery is only gained upon each generated aura. It took too long to make these type of scrolls.

So it doesn’t seem that reasonable to play magical music and then rush a dungeon afterwards while the stats linger, because you’ll have to finish a long song for the music to last long enough. I was especially hoping that it would be possible to play a short MP-boosting song and then have it last for a few minutes, as this would benefit mages in the party. However, this is but a dream.

What this means though is I can make a tempo 1, length 1 DEX scroll with only rests, which lasts 13 hours or so, and then play it while in a production party and all party members will benefit from it. Then when it finishes, anyone who caught the end of the song will have almost 40 hours of DEX boost until they change channels or relog. Of course this could carry over for any stat, such as STR or INT, provided you have the scroll in hand. That’s pretty neat.

Hope that was enlightening. I had some fun running these tests.