The Beast Within -- A Guide To Blue Mage

Unless you're Spicey. Then you spam Kaggen ;p

There you go. If you're a blu and are considering paying for some Escha or Reisen gear because you don't have friends strong enough to win and your server's shout scene is dead, just migrate to Asura and hit up spicy.

IMO for BLU specifically, paying for 1 or 2 crucial gears is not such a big deal, if you really can't seem to get them or would rather spend your time on other content. The game has a lot of things to do in general, even beyond what we would consider "content," and BLU is quite exceptional for a lot of it because of how diverse the job can be due to its customization potential.

Easy as the fish is, just consider how many activities are opened up or improved greatly by upgrading from sparks/bayld clubs to Nibirus. Cleaving is the best way to get JP, and 1200 is a big deal for BLU. If you're doing it for all of your gear on all of your jobs, I don't understand why you play other than enjoying theorycraft and math-driven set-building (which you don't technically need to be playing the game for), but doing it for select pieces of gear can make sense in gaining access to actual desired content.

ItemSet 343269
Adhemar bonnet Path A
Herculean Vest: Dex5, Acc 18, attk 25, crit rate 5%
Samnhua Tights: Max
Rosmerta's cape: Dex 20, acc & attk 20, crit rate 10%
Herculean gloves: Dex 12, acc & attk 15, macc & mab 17, TA 3, QA 2
Moonshade earring: Acc 4, TP bonus 250

Zahak Reborn spellset
Checkparam says 1156 acc no buffs or vorseals

Spreadsheet ws dmg: 19048

Going to abnoba kaftan I see a 157 dmg increase in ws dmg.

Improvements?
Note: Its a little bit acc focused. 1200 acc was the target.

What content is this catered to?

If you're worried about accuracy, swap the tathlum for Falcon eye and the Dignitary's earring for Cessance.

Edit: didn't see the 1200 part, my mistake.

falcon eye is a nice boost. If you're really looking for accuracy, dual Ramuh +1 are the best you're going to get for the ring slot. You could also build some high DEX/acc/crit Herculean legs. Your biggest issue, if you're looking for accuracy, is that you're using Thereoid. They're an amazing piece, no doubt about that, but have absolutely zero accuracy outside of native DEX. I'd suggest building some DEX/acc/crit Herculean boots. They'd need crazy good augments to beat Thereoid when accuracy is not an issue, but barely anything to win when you do need the accuracy. For the head, building a Herc helm isn't a bad idea when you really need the accuracy, as the bonnet is quite lacking, even with path A. Telos earring or Cessance would also replace Dignitary, or even use Dominance +1 if you want additional damage for a slight loss in accuracy.

I'd really like to start burning some JP but what targets do you all go after? I'd also like silt but from my experiences silt farming isn't very good for for JP. Any tips/camps or ideas to make it a bit less of a drag?

Buying gear isnt a huge deal, but also you have to weigh it. I am new and now I have pretty above average gear I would say. I have time issues so, I am very keen on if I am wasting time or not. Lately I have been, haven't really logged in for VW event... need some gils! But dang finals are killing me this semester haha.

Anyhow New players like me I always tell them the same thing. Get 99, get full sparks gear, go kill escha-zitah crap for rawhide set (8hrs~ you will 100% get a full set, unless you fail at the game), augment it with all acc. You now have a blu with an easy to get 1200 acc. Get 2 nibiru blades and your set for most stuff. Not very complicated.

Now with herc gear, it can be a pain, but I started farming it in full rawhide and while I can't solo, I could kill them in a party and did so. Got myself herc gear, dropped around 10mil on fern stones immediately and bam, good herc set.

I havent done a ton of sky stuff yet, but I do have a few key pieces I needed. I did buy one piece, and it wasn't for laziness it was more convenience. 5mil on a j body to me seemed like a good deal actually. Not only did it save me time, but I assumed by its drop rate, I would have blown nearly that much trying to get it or more. A few friends went 1/15+.... and well, f that haha! I didn't shout for this though, I just logged in to spam some wkr and saw shout for it, 15 minutes later I had it and I farmed my wkr all that day (2 hrs) and recuperated my gil. This didnt change my job tons though, because by this point I had a very good setup, and j body was really that last noticeable upgrade.

I now need colada's but will not be buying those. Its crazy to pay 7mil each.... 1mil maybe because at that point I could farm gil quicker than the time to form a shout party. But, I also want to kill for those :D help me spicy (after finals)!

I really don't understand whats the big deal of buying gears, a lot of times it's just that much more efficient to get gears by paying gil. For example back then(pre SoA) I've paid for archons ring when ADL needed more than 6 to kill. I didn't have a job that's useful for ADL marrow farm static so I can't join them. I didn't want to make a pt of 10 people and farm ADL pop for hrs just for a ring, and I didn't want to lv THF, DD, SMN to join ADL static just for one ring either. Instead I just pay 500k to an ADL group and get it done in a day.

Also what's with all that "just theorycraft" comment. I'd like to play this game as well as theory craft. If theorycraft is what I want to do I may as well don't play at all.

Maybe some people like to farm every single piece of gears for your job. Just go ahead and do it. When I need hundreds of gears(not exaggerating) to "finish" a job, I'm not going to farm every single piece of gear when it can be done faster by paying gil.

I just not gonna agree that paying for gear is somehow more lazy than making a shout group for an NM and watch everyone outlot your stuff in a pt, and you ended up spending hours killing an NM and get nothing. That's like saying spending 2 months lving a job to 99 in 6 man exp pt is less lazy than pay for a leech spot in escha cleave pt and finish lv 99 in 2hr.

If anything I'd actually encourage people utilize different methods to improve gears faster, that way we have less undergeared people in shout groups and the community gets the benefit of improved PUG quality.


Anyways, back to blu :/

Thanks!

But dignitary's earring is 10 acc and Cessance is 6 acc. Are you talking about for dps?


Thanks! How much of a boost is Falcon Eye over Honed anyways? I just did a /check param was at 907 and put on my Petrov ring which only acc related stat is dex+3 and it went to 909 which is 2 acc so aren't they equal aside from dex being better for cdc? 13+2 and 15?

Yea I will try making some herc boots/legs. Legs would need like 10 dex and 5 crit% to come close or outdo max samnhua tights? I guess I could check it on spreadsheet as well. I have some herc legs 14 dex 15 acc and 2 crit hit but not satisfied with them. Yea I gotta work on getting another herc helm. That pony is just annoying. Thanks again for the input!

With a nice pdt set and mab set. You could farm in reisenjima with occulation, carcharian verve, entomb, spectral floe, and some other spells like cocoon,barrier tusk, erratic flutter, healing spell, ect. A strong cure set is also nice to have if it only takes you a few magic fruits to heal to full cause mobs hit hard. Really good CP cause mobs are high level. Its even better if you can aoe hordes solo and have friend with trusts out killing constantly to keep the cp chain going.

I did a lot of farming at ethereal ingress #2 across the bridge away from the accursed manti there are faaz, mosquitoes, and the frogs. Buff up and make sure carcharian verve is up along with occultation and entomb a horde then spectral floe or entomb until they die. Mobs there are like VT++ or IT, I forget, but they hit really hard and its almost impossible to cast w/o that strong aquaveil. Faaz and mosquitoes aren't a problem and you can magic hammer for mp back on mosquitoes. Frogs are actually more dangerous cause they are so magic resistant and hit you constantly.

Its pretty easy if you have the gear, spells, and get the hang of it but can get unlucky and die at times. Many times this is when aquaveil wears off so I just try to recast it as soon as unbridled JA is ready again. Ascended frog is a pain cause he aoe charms so if you farm w/o Mollifier be careful.

Basically with this setup you could farm most mobs in escha/reisenjima. I used ^ method shortly after job master was released to obtain it.

Thanks Taki. How many casts did it normally take you to kill them? I had some serious resist issues. I know my set isn't very good but it seems to be especially bad macc wise. I hadn't really used it since yorcia alluvion skirmish and that didn't require much.

ItemSet 343317

Hagondes hat - 13mab aug
Hagondes Cuffs - 22mab aug
Cornflower - 8 blu skill aug
Hagondes pants - burst bonus on them so pointless for this...
Herc boots have 2macc 24mab

I'll likely have some people with me for this so I may have access to a geo and/or sch. At this point I probably just need to focus on some easier to get mab/macc gear so I can actually kill things.

Two spells is enough once you get into Escha gear (Amalric, Herc head, Nibiru Cudgels, etc), especially if you've already got some JPs to work with.

You could try Ru'aun (aern/phuabo near Naga Raja), but with that gear it'd still be slow going. I'd definitely prioritize upgrading your nuking sets.

How cool would it be to be a 99 BLU with 0 spells learned? I think I may do that on my alt and then gear up its BLU like that.

Yea along with macc and mab I did have a decent amount of job points (I was maxed at 1200 before job master came out) and vorseals (int,mnd, macc, mab) to help assist in doing this and below is the set I think I used.

ItemSet 343322
Helios band had like 5 int and 24 mab on it.
Cornflower cape has 9 blu skill.
Leyline gloves and samnuha coat were max augments.

Note that while herc boots do have native mab and can get nice mab/macc augments they are horrible for nuking on blu like Oraen said because they have absolutely no native INT. I did a test with some that had like 30mab/32macc and they were much worse than Hashin +1 boots.

Reisenjima mobs were dead in 2-3 nukes but you can still get away with entomb spam cause they are re-petrified each time you use it. Frogs would sometimes go to 4 nukes. Normally, I would BA spectral floe on them after entomb and that would kill all but a few stragglers.

You should be able to find a camp that you can work and use the same strategy on them as long as they don't resist petri or do annoying things like stop and cast magic.

Escha Zitah ingress 2 puk/dragon camp and ingress 6 with bugards and lizards are fairly popular as well.

My alt gets most of the mage gear I've managed to get so my blu's gotten the short stick on nuking. ^^;

Dragon/puk camp is a bit hard to do now with ambuscade taking over. Both dragons and lizards are decent silt but not very good for JP. I can do lizards but sight linking efts are a pain to pull quickly so it slows it down a lot. I can one shot those. JP on both of those camps is a bit terrible though. I'll see if I can get some better nuking gear and I'll probably need some better PDT as well. Those frogs hit hard...

You really want DEX+15/critdmg+4% if at all possible. DEX+10/critdmg+4% should be enough to beat Samnuha, less if you get a decent acc augment and need the boost. Any attack is obviously helpful.

Crit rate gear simply doesn't contribute as much when nearly 3/4 of your hits already crit.

ugh... so I should overwrite my crit rate+5 herc hands and work on herc legs over max samnuha? ; ;

It's going to depend on your overall gear. Going overboard with crit rate and not enough crit damage will hurt you, and the same is true for the reversed situation.

Nightfyre did an exceptional job on the new spreadsheet, and I highly suggest, for niche questions such as this, to check for your exact situation. A lot of the time we'll be able to suggest general, overall gearing advice, but a lot of smaller swaps are going to depend largely on your specific gear. Nothing is better for determining exact specifications for yourself than a sheet dedicated entirely to your own gear.

10 DEX and 4 crit damage is not nearly enough by itself to beat max Samnoha- for basically anyone, really.

Ideally yes, but Samnuha is by no means easy to beat. Kyte's right - turns out 10 DEX 4% critdmg on its own is close, but still insufficient to actually surpass Samnuha. You really want some acc/attack and as close to 15 DEX as you can get. Up to you whether or not the investment is a worthwhile use of your time.

To elaborate on baseline crit rate a bit:

-5% base
-You're probably capping dDEX on melee friendly content, especially the Almace crowd, so call that 15%.
-5% merits
-15% innate critrate bonus, plus another 1% for every 100 TP between 1k and 2k. 1.5%/100 after that. Even if you're spamming CDC that's easily another 2-6% critrate depending on weaponry and whether or not you're using Moonshade Earring. Sequence would add even more.

Even before gear or TP overflow that's 40% critrate. Rosmerta's and Begruding is another 15%, body and feet slots may add 3-5% each, maybe you're getting Adhemar +1 set bonus. It adds up fast, whereas we have less opportunity to significantly boost critdmg.

There is a notable unquantified variable here though, namely mob stats. We've seen examples of crit rate penalties and crit defense bonus traits on previous monsters (Morta and Aby-Uleguerand Bluffalo, respectively). At a guess I'd say any PLD monsters probably have crit defense bonus, but beyond that is a big question mark.

The game refuses to give me perfect Samnuha legs, so I've had to compensate with Herc augments.

After at least a thousand stones,
DEX+14 Acc+26 Atk+11 Crit rate +3% and
DEX+6 Acc+22 Atk+30 Crit dmg+3%

are the best I've done, and both are still behind Samnuha legs by a decent margin :(

I'd recommend against augmenting Herc legs if you happen to have perfect Samnuha, unless there's nothing else to upgrade and you have tons of stones sitting around.

You can learn a majority of the "needed" spells in about 3-5 hours or so, depending on luck (Barbed Crescent/Occultation/Magic Hammer have always been annoying for me to learn on all of my characters). If you have 0 skill, I'd use sparks books to get to around ~50s and learn sandspin. Then go spam sandspin on ~4 uragnites in Ceizak to skill up. Would take ~2 hours or so to skill.

Sorry but, xp farming blu to 99, skilling it to full using pages, and then spell farming, in my opinion, is about as enjoyable as taking all of the ingredients to a cake, eating them separately, and uncooked.

Blu has more of a learning curve than most and there is really no "correct" way to play it like there is no correct way to paint a picture.

We play games for fun experiences so I think that wastes more time than it saves but to each is own.

The game is a grind. We do this to accomplish that and accomplishing that is the fun part. Who wants to grind out all these spells? Who wants to do Voidwatch every night? It's when u accomplish something then that's the fun part. A formidable blue Mage dd that can dish out good damage.

Unfortunately the path you described is the only reasonable way to do it at this point. No one got time for taking it slow.