Hally

You need to bank mana to always have enough sp. For example, keep your mana in the 200 - 400 zone mid raid; and only burn it up when you actually need to use reso/shift; to avoid wasting too much in ruin blade. If you are casting ruin blade with 3 - 4 bars of sp; you will actually run out.

If you still have SP difficulties (and/or plenty of stamina to spare at times), it means you are getting hit too much, or missing out on too many dps windows due to being overly cautious. At perfect gameplay, you should have stamina shortage even at 40 speed.

Take a hypothetical boss with 3,600,000 hp. You do 40% over 5 mins (300 seconds), rest of the party do 60%. In this case, you are doing 1,440,000 hp over 300 seconds, with a dps of 4,800 per second. Rest of the party would be doing 2,160,000 hp over 300 seconds, with a dps of 7,200 per second.

Boss kill time = boss hp/(your dps + party dps)

If your dps go up by 16%
new boss kill time = boss hp/(your old dps*1.16 + party dps)
= 3,600,000/(4,800*1.16 + 7,200)
= 3,600,000/(5,568 + 7,200)
= 3,600,000/(12,768)
=~282 seconds

Your +16% dps just reduced the raid time from 300s down to 282 seconds, an improvement of only 18s.
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EDIT: if mysterious shards are 100m each, a 120 shard weapon will not earn enough extra money to pay for the shard cost even if you farm 10 hours per day for 10 years straight with our current poop drop rates and drop sale values.

As for the nimhain raid.. it'll almost certainly be cheaper to just make a new defensive set of gear that gets you to 18k def; where your chance of dying is pretty much nil.

In the end, if you are not after boasting rights, its just not worth the cost. This is something purely there for the few that want prestige.

On a 5 minute S3 raid where you are amazing and do 40% damage, a 16% damage boost for just yourself would shave less than 20 seconds from the raid kill time if everyone else play the same as before. Grind 15 raids, and you saved 1 raid worth to time. It will be even less in practice due to time spent filling boat, server failing ect. But lets just assume, for simplicity's sake, that for every 15 raids you do, you get 1 "free".

Just how many extra raid's worth of time it would take to pay for those mysterious shards? Even if the shards are only 10m each, you'd need to raid thousands of times before the "bonus raids" actually pay for the shards. New gear that will obsolete your old ones will likely come around by that time.

Shaving 20 seconds per raid is not "immense". You will probably not even notice it if you don't look at dps numbers.

It gets even worse on grind maps. You are one shotting trash with or without the limit release. Most of your time will still be spent from running from point A to point B, and not actually fighting. shaving a few seconds off a <1min boss fight isn't going to pay for itself anytime soon.

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PS: unless the damage formula has been changed, your effective attack when capped is about 10k, with +900 from a fixed offset, +1875 from 300 additional damage stat, for a total of 12775. +2000 increase from limit release would end up being a 15.65% increase. The real attack cap is a little lower than +10k of monster def, so the increase from maxed attack limit release would probably end up at 16% ish.

There are 4 abyssal shards on market in east right now; so the drop rate probably is comparable to eochaid ess.

250 stones is nothing I fed videk over 2500 blue stones...

How could you get >5b just for feeding Videk?

By making one hell a lot of element stones over a very long time. Last year, I usually make about 400 stones a week; sell 200 to pay for material costs, feed other 200 to videk. Repeat for a couple months.. and you end up at my place.. of wanting to hang, draw, and quarter that scammer. This cannot be done nowdays anymore, as too many people have caught on to this, and mats now cost far more.

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Neamhain outfit looks like an outfit to me, it kinda cover way too much skin to be an inner.