The Beast Within -- A Guide To Blue Mage

This is great stuff! Thanks, guys.

I have a bad habit of trying to only fit in a defensive spell or two with the leftover points I have while maximizing my offense instead of sacrificing some damage and points a bit to give myself an easier time staying alive.

I've been happy with Sudden Lunges performance in the new Omega/Ultima fight. It really just depends on the event for when it is useful or not.

All this talk of defensive buffs is great, and you should definitely follow the advice if you're looking to tank or even just survive better. However, something that people haven't mentioned for magical defense is Saline Coat. I don't think I can stress enough how powerful it is. At the beginning of the buff, you're looking at 50 MDB. To put that in perspective, that's 6 more than double what a Rune Fencer gets through traits. It's an enormous boost to survivability.

And on the issue of Sudden Lunge, with a good enough set, you can land it on surprisingly high content. I'm able to regularly stick it on Vagary bosses, outside of Perfidien/Plouton. It won't work in Escha, but that's because literally every NM there is immune to it, even T1s.

It was one of the only buffs I specifically mentioned by name. lol.


On Quetzalcoatl I am. I might see more BLU action now that people are scared off of the bst bandwagon.

I am blind, apparently. Apologies.

Would you opt for Rawhide feet path A fot TP and WS uses or path B for amazing acc TP feet?

It depends on your current tp set and sword really, and what you schedule to do with your blu.

I personally opted for Path B. I used to have the hands on path B as well, but decided to switch them to path A after getting perfect Leyline's.

Has anyone attempted Dhokmak or Ashrakk (SoA 5-2) solo on BLU (with trusts)?

I haven't tried Ashrakk yet, but Dhokmak and his adds seem to wipe buffs so quickly they barely make a difference. It seems like a race to kill him before he kills you.

I've managed to get him down to ~40% a couple of times, but with the damage he and his adds put out, even two trust healers have trouble keeping up.

Haven't tried kiting with Subduction either, but I'm assuming that's not a viable strategy for this fight.

The frog/poison one with the Acuex is very doable. You need to kill them asap with Subduction, then it's mostly just kiting the boss around and spamming subduction. This is made easier with a real healer though; expect to die once trying.

It's very much a viable strategy, Subduction absolutely destroys this fight. I'm sure it's doable solo with trusts (go overboard on healer trusts), and it's not very difficult if you gather up a small number of actual players: a real healer, a tank to hold stuff while you subduction spam, additional BLUs, etc.

I think for solo with trusts, my ideal group may be something like:
August or Amchuchu
Apururu
Kupipi
Joachim (some buffs and he'll toss out -na/cures)
and, um... Star Sybil? Robel-Akbel? Koru-Moru? something like that.

Yeah, when helping people I'd usually run in, Subduction, crack open Unbridled Wisdom, spam Crashing Thunder to kill the adds and severely damage the boss, run off and vert, then Subduction spam the rest of him down.

The other fight's a good bit rougher in my opinion. If you have both the main boss and the Cerberus on you, it can be tough. That dog can do damage in the 400's if you're not careful, so if the main boss does a painful move while you're taking hits from that, you can easily take a dirt nap. Maybe best to have a trust tank one or the other while you kill the other.

What would the best TP set for DW4 with just Erratic Flutter look like?
I was thinking something like this
ItemSet 338146

I don't think you need THAT much DW to cap at dual wield 4. But I'm not the mathcrafter of this forum lol

It's coming, but midterms this week. I need my brain to focus on that crap for a little bit. Damn real life.

In a twist of irony, I minored in math back in college, but I've forgotten more in the 8 years since graduating than most people ever knew lol

Thanks for the feedback on Dhokmak, I was able to solo it easily*. I was just kind of assuming everything in there would resist Subduction's gravity for some reason.

*When I say easily, I should note I have no idea how close to dying the tiger came...


My biggest hurdle with BLU at the moment is, for all the buffs it has, it seems like it falls way short in serious endgame content. BLU excels in Skirmish, typical CP parties, and probably most of the Unity NMs. I did fine in the Rancibus Vagary, haven't been able to try the others yet.

But in Escha, it seems like mostly everything you want to stay far away from, and Saline Coat, Barrier Tusk and Diamondhide aren't really going to save you from being flattened by Meteors, -ga V spells, and whatever other AoE TP the NMs can spam. I assume these reasons are why people only ever want SCHs and GEOs for Sinister as well.

Glad all I have to work on is a massive grad project!

There are a lot of enemies that dispel now as well, so there are situations where your buffs can drop. Most GS have a toggle or auto swap when your buffs are dropped.

Sinister with Blu is my favorite way to do it, it's not that dangerous unless you make a mistake like standing in cleaves and such. You most certainly don't have to play defensively in that event. Escha just depends, T1s are easy enough that it doesn't matter, T2s there are some that Blu can do and some that would be harder with Blu, never even touched T3s.

I use magic haste un-capped sets a lot now, since most stuff now requires a tank and 90% of stuff requires a GEO and WHM and SAM roll is just too good to give up (and COR contributes to damage/skillchains) a lot of the time I find myself dropping BRD from 6-man partys to get a 2nd DD and getting a GEO to use its haste spell is not always viable + we can mighty guard the whole party now further lowering the need for BRD in a lot of situations but that can get dispelled. So I carry around 2 extra earrings and feet to cover the extra haste when im waiting on recast for mighty guard or buffs drop or I get slowed or my BRD is slow at re-applying marches, or my BRD or GEO die, the uses are much more than just salvage, dynamis and limbus.
imo carrying around 3 extra pieces of extra gear (some of which are already in my wardrobe all the time) is well worth it especially when GS will swap sets in an instant depending on what buffs I have. You say you don't care or need to know about a set like this, maybe you dont but personally I try to maximise my DPS in all situations.
I guess my question should have been...
ItemSet 338146
This set is around 2% short of capping delay reduction. Would I be better off using this set which is 2% short of the delay cap with windbuffet +1 or something like this...
ItemSet 338162
which will cap cap haste completely

So with mighty guard I take it I should be casting this in my blu skill set or is it a fixed amount?

My thought was that it's static like our Haste spells. If that's the case, you'd see the biggest benefit in stacking Conserve MP for it. And of course Diffusion feet when using that.

If there's a formula for it somewhere, it's be pretty trivial to write a JavaScript calculator for it. Do nodes allow js and jquery? Also, anyone know the Haste and DW formulas well?