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I can imagine how a new Blue Mage would see the appeal of full-timing magic accuracy but it really should only be macro'd in, unless you're casting mostly magical spells and don't have the appropriate elemental staves.

Disseverment poison has always been extremely accurate on even the most magic resistant mobs. I remember sticking Poison on Proto-Ultima reliably at lv. 72. The game has gotten much easier since then, with regards to powerful m.acc. gear, atmas, cruor buffs, and merits. I see similar results with Disseverment as with Seedspray and the magical spells like Regurgitation when trying to proc yellow, almost always getting a wear off message; or just never seeing anything even with magical atmas.

Delta Thrust plague usually will proc entirely depending on the enemy's inherent resistance too. Most pick up group fodder will never resist it, and most of the "difficult" Abyssea NMs are totally immune to it. You can pop an Ascetic's Tonic and use full M.Acc atmas and see for yourself. It's too bad too, because the TP-eating plague effect would really help our MNK WHM BLU BLM lowman against annoying NMs. I guess SE thought it would be too powerful.

Finally, you also mentioned max MP. If a Blue Mage full-timing max MP gear wasn't a laughing stock before Abyssea, I can only imagine what one would be considered now... There is no reason for max MP gear except buffing before/between fights and feasibly a Convert setup.


Choosing to gimp your damage intentionally in favor of additional effects that will land independent of your magic accuracy doesn't make sense. It's fine to pick up magic accuracy swords to use in the proper occasions, but BLUs really need proper DD swords in the proper occasions too. Far too many BLUs go double M.acc. swords on things that even 1000 Needles would land on, naked. And then of course they proceed to cast nothing but the big 3 the whole time.

All skills recieved a boost.

Parry/Guard were slow before hand, I get maybe 20 guard activations an hour, so theres not a lot of chance to skill it up unless your pulling 7+ mandrigora

Thanks. Is this from testing or an assumption from the notes? The pre-update notes made it seem that Defensive Combat Skills might not be included.



My question comes from the fact that the above phrase seems to imply skills in which a player targets himself or the party.

And, I know the poor proc rates. I don't know how many hours I've spent working Guard and am still only at 198. Guess I'll pick a new target mob since Korrigans are having a hard time hitting me and try further.

Edited, Feb 15th 2011 7:33am by UCLARugby

With band and COR roll, I was getting 700+ in Qufim on Crabs at 22. Even the weak DC ones were giving really good XP, this new XP is reallly awesome.

You're right, that was idiotic of me for not fully reading your whole post.. I understand

Thanks for this, I was really confused :)

Edited, Feb 15th 2011 10:40am by eldelphia

If you're levelling staff or club on MNK then always finish with Hundred Fists to get a load of skill-ups.

If I'm only there to nuke, I agree with this. However, if I'm trying to proc red and/or blue on my BLU (and I end up being that person a lot for Sword/Club since I lowman with 2-3 other people), the +MAB allow me to nuke reasonably well (although definitely sub par to elemental staves) while still building up TP to proc Blue or Red. Maybe most people don't have that issue, but when we low man stuff, it works out really well to split the procs decently enough. Now I only lose tp when I'm manually switching to cover a different proc, instead, and can contribute to nuking the mob down.

It's also really hard to Sanguine Blade with a staff - gearing for Sanguine Blade can be very beneficial for any of the jobs that can use the MAB sword, especially if you don't have CDC yet.

Edit: Another thought. Although the stave bonus is definitely better than the MAB bonus (since it's applied separately) now, there may come a time where the MAB bonus on the swords exceeds the bonus that the staves could give. Since BLU can't use the Magian staves, these would make a good alternative and allow a little flexibility in Physical vs. Magical sides.

Edited, Feb 15th 2011 12:43pm by Dracoth

I'm actually fairly certain that INT+18 Magic Attack Bonus +20 beats out Magic Damage +15% Magic Accuracy+30 in any current nuking situation. If you're focusing on nukes you've most likely got Atma to back it up, or at least gear with Blue Magic Skill and Magic Accuracy.

Moreover, not having to sacrifice your ability to melee and having to only carry 2 swords instead of 8 staves are both nice perks.

Perhaps I should have put more emphasis on the MP... I did say MP. 75 or 150 MP is a huge boost especially outside abyssea. It gives you more endurance. I'm Galka. I need the MP.
Edit: also on the MAB swords, it requires you to set spells for dual wield. I might do that after getting rdm leveled, but atm I"m on /sch. I'll save set points for MAB and refresh after that, which I can use to add dual wield to my nuking build.

Edited, Feb 15th 2011 4:24pm by Xilk

It doesn't. I'll provide numbers in a little while. The biggest factor is that the staff bonus adds a whole different multiplication step than the 30 MAB does. Also, the truncation that happens affects it, as well.

Generally: (D+2dINT)*MAB*Staff (there's a lot more here)

Increasing MAB by .3 doesn't do as much as the 1.15 bonus from the staves Edit: depending on what you're adding the .3 to. I've got a spreadsheet set up specifically to calculate this, and it's always come out that way.

Edited, Feb 15th 2011 4:14pm by Dracoth

Looked at my spreadsheet, and nothing I said about the pieces is incorrect. It all depends on how much you've already got, etc, as RCD pointed out. Speaking inside Abyssea, though, and going /rdm, you can start with a base of 24% (/RDM above 40), 50% (Atma of the Ultimate), 30% (Atma of the Beyond), and assorted gear (17% for what I had when I started using the spreadsheet - need to update with new pieces), you're looking at 121% MAB already. The extra 20 from the two swords that we've got now won't trump the additional 15% that the staves will generate. Outside Abyssea, without all the atma boosts, though, the swords become much more relevant (in this case, I'd only have 41% MAB).

Also, to Vlor, my seal/+2 item/atma farming group consists of THF, BLU, WHM, RDM, BLM run between my brother and me. Occasionally, we might have either a WAR, NIN, or BRD (depending on who we invite to join us), but that's fairly rare. Thus, my ability to handle Sword helps my particular situation. And keeping TP becomes more relevant. If you're able to handle WAR, NIN, WHM + grellow procs, then the whole situation would change.