The Beast Within -- A Guide To Blue Mage

Colada can get 4% with Fern stones. So +58% total

to be fair slots that cause TP loss on swap aren't very interesting to BLU anyway so ammurapi or coladas don't really count. 50% increase of 90 seconds; 135 seconds or 2 minutes 15 seconds. don't see us getting acceptable numbers without a base duration increase, even if they add blue magic to enhancing magic duration.

Maybe a job ability similar to composure but for Blue Magic. Or change Convergence into that lol. Who uses that anyways

I mainly want SE to make our physical spells matter again. Give them a significant boost so that they are worth casting, they feed a lot of tp, they could at least deal good damage. Not modern weaponskill levels, but come on they should at least be more damage than one or two attack rounds.

With Chain Affinity/Efflux then maybe they should be raised up to the level weaponskills deal now, their times are so long relative to the speed of battle in modern XI that there is no reason they shouldn't either get a significant damage boost or a significant recast time reduction.


On the same token, Unbridled Learning and Diffusion should really have lower cooldowns as well. Think maybe 2 minutes for Learning and 5 for Diffusion.

It would be nice if they replaced Assimilation and gave us those five points natively, there really isn't any other choice but to select that category which seems like a really dumb move on their part.

Lastly, I don't get why BLU buffs have such short duration when they're supposed to be expected to DPS. Give us a way to increase spell duration outside of using Diffusion.




Anyway, if any of those were implemented, I would be shocked. I think BLU, GEO, and RUN are the only jobs that haven't received any kind of buff at all, no matter how insignificant, since they started doing rounds for all the jobs. I don't think BLU is bad at all and I can still come out near or at the top of parse on top of being able to solo a bunch of stuff, but I do feel like it warrants at least some attention. It's clearly not on the same level of dominance and GEO or RUN and it wouldn't hurt to give it some love.

I'd almost settle for changing Chain/Burst affinity into stances that allow spells to natively skillchain or magic burst, but that's probably not going to happen given the augment on Zomorro

Well, they could always change the augment (which has already happened before on a Su5, granted it was aborted).

i'd argue even if you could R15 2 SU5s for 50% BA/CA recast reduction, that would still be what? 45 seconds recast? so you could MB maybe every 3rd or 4th skillchain? doesn't sound too hot, especially if you consider how fast you'd run out of MP without tizona.
even with tizona MP could become a issue as it relies on auto attacks for MP generation and autoattacks take a hit each time you start casting.

40 seconds minimum if you could dw su5c and merit burst to rank5.
assuming you set magic hammer for its magic att bonus trait. and retinal glare for 30% conserve mp. with idle refresh gear and any form of refresh, it will take a long time to run out of mp.

Along with this point, I fully expect them to change the merits for assimilation out to something else; it's basically BLU's version of merit spells and you really shouldn't have to choose to merit give extra slot choices. At the bare minimum, this needs to be given the same exact treatment all other merit magic spells have gotten.

Thats been a constant, even at 75 vorpal spam with proper buffs outpaced anything spells could do, and that carried to soa where sinker and CA heavy strike were finally pretty decent for their cost, then ws update happened and its back to normal.

SE just has trouble balancing, you see it with pets, basic nukes. Best thing they could probably do is laet them give tp, and lower ca/ba to atleast 1m. As for buffs just let enhancing duration work on them, wont hurt anything

Uh definitely not. At 75, our physical spells actually mattered quite a bit. In merit parties, the big three were a huge part of our damage and the only way we could self skillchain (well, if no one else interrupted which was fairly likely in a merit PT). In endgame, even though BLU was pretty bad in most of it, Vertical Cleave and Cannonball were pretty decent spells for damage with Cannonball being practically our only way to contribute in some cases.

Then before the the weaponskill adjustments and the significant increase to tp gain rates with all the multi-attack, we got pretty strong mileage out of CA for skillchaining.

Im going off memory mainly so this could be wrong but as blus got more gear together, primarily for tp since haste was a really rare commodity in 75, hell til asa i think your only haste legs were homam, spells fell off in dmg vs raw sword dps, so take bird merits ca diss is all you ever really needed, sc was a wash because it required using sb which was mediocre back then and sc dmg wasnt near as high as it is today, t2 i think was 1/4 the closing dmg?

Same deal for events, but blu couldnt zerg dos like ither jobs, so you seldom got those level of buffs, so cb/vc did admittedly fill a niche if you could slide in as blu/thf, in the same way eyes on me, regurg, and i think mind blast? (And beeaths, though those were a pain iirc)Filled in the "nuke" role if you could slide in as a pseudo-nuker.

Trying to remember if blu spells even worked off atk at 75, feel like it was solely blu skill/raw stats under CA, with the exception of cb which is in part what made it so uniquely good and that was another reason spells fell off in buffed scenerios

Yeah it wasnt til 2014 atk helped phys at all:
The attack power of physical blue magic spells has been increased.
Job abilities, magic, food, and equipment that affect physical attack are now reflected in the attack power of physical blue magic spells.

As for MA that actively hurt spell casting even more as that was wasted atk rounds+tp to ws, in a way 75 was its best since you had maybe 20 DA before any buffs

Wasn't a factor until the August 2014 update.

I remember BLU using Cannonball from far away on Khimaira! XD

SA cannonball(and sata on an unlucky person from miles away) was great fun, though it was hell once spinning top hate was acheived

Fights were so long back then you could afford to die (to reset hate) and raise I guess lol

In all honesty BLU just wasn't worth taking back then lol, I just ended up on another mage job. Cleave, Cannonball, and Breaths were the only thing that did actual damage to endgame bosses with how badly our spells (and weaponskills if we're being real) scaled back then. I basically only took it out for Nyzul, Limbus, or merits.

It wasnt the worst, sword dps was pretty decent honestly, job just lacked so many dd traits it couldnt really keep up. Looking back, properly supported cb+sa ch spam was pretty respectable, but the mp cost on it was pretty awful, 66mp of a 500~ pool dries up quick if you only have a eefresh 1

Seemed pretty lackluster to me. Since spells didn't scale with buffs and spells were actually a considerable portion of our damage back then, endgame stuff like Dynamis and what not had BLU lagging behind. Now sword DPS is great and not being able to use spells doesn't matter, but in the 75 days, Frenetic Rip, Hysteric Barrage, and Disseverment were are real damage dealers. Vorpal and Savage Blade, not so much.

Hello! I recently returned after stopping 3 years ago, and am curious what would be recommended to pursue for an Almace offhand aside from Colada. I know before I stopped, I sank hundreds of fern stones to try and get a good Colada but never got anything worthwhile. Tried again a few days ago and I just seem to have terrible luck on Colada augments.

That ambuscade sword looks appealing, but I was also considering making the club first for nuking purposes. Would that be worthwhile to prioritize? Or should I just continue throwing fernstone darts at the augment board?

Yea, I remember using Disseverment on Imps to great effect back then.

Naegling will make a better mainhand sword for Savage Blade than Almace with CDC will. Whether to get the club first or the sword, it's going to depend on what you mainly use your BLU for, but you'll want to get both (unless you have Tizona, then you can skip Naegling if you want, but there are a LOT of jobs on it).

Naegling is also a fantastic offhand, and there's also Zantetsuken, but that's rarer/harder to get.

Colads still probably the best offhand but cdc and by extension almace has taken a bit of a dip compared to neagling sb ot tiz expi if you run a tp bonus off-hand.


Gotta remember the time man, 1 hander dds that werent thf or /thf struggled to break 2k hell i think most dds that didnt tank their white dmg could only go above 2k/hit 3k with SA, large chunk of your dmg was from autos and swirds were just a bit under axes in that respect, again when properly buffed.

Also sb was almost always bad unless you just lacked acc to land vorpal hits, ws variance was so bad back then

At 75 cap, the only physical DDs commonly going above 2k damage without something like Mighty Strikes or SA on WSs like 2000+ TP Spiral Hell were Rangers using Slug Shot/Sidewinder.

Sounds about right, avg ws were in the 1200~1500 for 2 handers i want to say, maybe lower, outside of fun stuff like overwhelm penta on birds before nerf

Hello blues, looking to learn cruel joke, so do i try vagary or rala for success?

Do the single battle in Inner Ra'kaznar!

Depend how strong you/your party are.

Alluvion yorcia seemed pretty random. I dont remember if it was any less random on rala. But surely garanteed with vagary. Plus, probably vagary is more rewarding than skirmish.

Those also teach BLU moves?

You sure you can learn it there?

You don't actually Fight him there your valiants do