First of all you should buy a balsam staff, it's really not that expensive and even in the case nirvana 99 gets an upper hand on the next version updates I don't think many people have it to make balsam irrelevant. I know a group of friends is required to let you leech a few skirmish 2 runs to get some nice gear for both your mages and dds, requires to throw a bunch of Nq stones to get decent pet:mab augs, and +1s to get the body with -4 perp. in the end your Magical bps should outdamage your physical bps by a large margin even with just balsam except on those magic resistant mobs.