The Beast Within -- A Guide To Blue Mage

This set is 102% w/o merits. Talar has +3% augment

When I had set for it I had different equip because some of above werent exist.

I had

Mage's blade +10
Nashira head +10
Torque +5
magnetic earring +8
Body+3
Hands+3
rings +11
back +8
waist +12
Legs +12
Feet +15
merits 5

total: 102

Curious of the need of that much gear vs a super fast cast set? I am thinking about upgrading both but seems like over kill. The mobs that cause me trouble mostly are ones that do knockback or enstun the fing new turtles suck...

Well it depends.
if you are BLU main and you have space than you can have both and just put it in the inventory when needed.

Fast cast is obviously set that you should have anyway but it wont cover everything. I would like to know when spell interruption is calculated. Specifically is it counted when you start casting or in the moment you are hit? If the former then in some really really hardcore tanking it would be possible to actually start casting in fastcast and switch to SI tho not many spells and situations would allow/demand combo like that.

SI set was very useful at dynamis jeuno which I did a lot. I was only pulling NMs so sometimes I had massive links to deal with and skill alone wasnt sufficient to not being interrupted.

SI set is obviously very good for spells casted from sub. Utsusemi: ichi, stoneskin, aquaveil, phalanx comes to mind.

Blu can't cap FC, they can only get about 43% in gear. There may be some I missed but:

Fastcast:
Head 5%
Neck 5%
Earring 2%
Body 5%
Hands 4%
Ring 2%
Cape 4%
Belt 3% comes with instacast so if potency is the goal then this may not be an option.
Pants 8%
Boots 5%

Can get a bit more if you are willing to use a weapon, isador has 5%.
Blu trait is 5% for FC 0.5(FU SE...) and 10% for FC 1 or 15% for /rdm.

And even with all that, if you get hit you can still get interrupted. I think that all the FC you can get is essential but the capped interruption can help when you're tanking a huge number of mobs and absolutely have to get a spell off, IE sleep. Also you can use both, just complicates things a bit and yea the inventory - is huge. And even if I had that last piece right now, I might carry it in my satchel but wouldn't use it very often.

For the knockback, the set will still work provided you smash yourself in to a corner so you don't get moved, but there's not much you can do about stun other than hope you resist or it misses you.

You would use the general physical set with it. While Whirl of Rage's optimization may be slightly different, it isn't really important enough to carry extra gear for.

what pants give 8% FC? And what boots give 5?

Enif
Chelona +1

Ahh, that's pretty dope.

What about emp hands/body?
I precast all blue magic in the body and switch to gloves midcast.
Net gain of -7% cast time and -10% recast.

Anything non blue magic with a long cast time, I usually Actinic burst first.

That's why there's two sets in Proth's xml, one for Blue Magic and one for anything else

No, no You misunderstood me. I was talking about spell sets. I dont see WoR in any of them.

The list I made, if that's what you were referring to was just for fastcast so I didn't include recast reduction like the gloves or or the body because it's limited to just blue magic but I should have included it somewhere in my post I suppose because it is an important piece. ^^;

So... Max that I'm aware of is 48% including the sword 55 on blue magic including the body.

toss in /rdm and you have 63 fc and 70 for blue magic.

70% fc for blue magic isn't too bad but that's highly specialized. I don't see anyone who could get the rest of the gear wearing isador for anything serious and /rdm is a rarity for me at least. Fastcast in general isn't applicable for short cast spells as anything under 1 sec can't really get anything out of it without having to actually have the spell go off in FC gear. So just about all of our physical spells won't see any use from it, but the magical ones do.

I hope they add a few good pieces so we can cap with a practical, any sub set. 10% on the head is very common for mages and for a week I even had it but then they took us back off Nares ^^;

Cure Cast time -% affect Blu related cures?

Not that I'm aware of but I meant Nares head not pants but I forgot, Nares head wasn't changed to blue in the update mess up, I just derped that one.

My post wasn't in response to your fc I was just thinking of Medala cape

Yeh I find it really handy for stuff like magic barrier, but more for debuffs/sleeps (especially sleeps). I hoped we would get a decent fastcast body piece with the expansion for :Ichi that would replace the ugly *** talar :(.

I've wondered if it's better to go for max -recast or a little extra potency on barrier etc. via +skill gear. I like being able to recast occultation as soon as poss after a random AoE, or barrier/saline after/before a big spell, without waiting for recast.
Anyone with both willing to chime on?

Ah okay. I'm just being dumb, and significantly so cause I looked at Nares trews and it doesn't even have cure cast - on it, that's Praeco Slacks...

Blu doesn't get access to too much gear for cure cast time - so it'd be hard for me to test since I lack the few pieces they do get. Could try to test whm/blu but my alt doesn't have blu unlocked so I can't test it myself ^^;

It's going to depend a bit on your play style. For occultation, going for the full shadows at 500 skill tier isn't really worth it even if you can get all that random gear and have space to use it.

So I'd just hit 450 and fill in the rest with haste/fc.

Occ:
424 A+ cap
16 merits
15 pants
5 tathlum
450

So you can cap with just 2 slots and one of those has 4% haste anyway ^^ If you don't have merits you'll have to put the body and one other piece in there too, Zaffre would be best I think since you carry it anyway for spell damage.

For M. Barrier each point of skill gives you more potency so you can't just hit a tier and then say whatever but since most slots lack large bonuses to blu magic skill, it'd probably be best to go with recast if you're recasting often, if not, then max potency is likely to do better for you but I think the gains of max potency are somewhat lacking. Body, ammo, legs, gloves if you have fea's or Khepri are all decent slots for blu skill, the rest not so much probably best to use haste/fc on them.

Depends what you're fighting. If you need to recast barrier often, then use fast cast. Otherwise go with skill.

I use it extensively in SSR2 fighting the dvergrs. I need the recast to be as low as possible so I can recast it after every nuke. Occultation will depend on whether the mob has any AoE abilities that will wipe the shadows. If it does, you'll want recast to be as low as possible.

so my group is doing NNI, and we are 2 of 5 on floor 80, with four more floors tonight.

if we get lucky to go 3/4, i get my first piece of NNI gear, and I was wondering which i should pick.

jobs at 99:
"Main": BLU, BLM, WHM
"others": THF, NIN, RUN, SCH, DNC, RDM, BRD

Basically for me, it is thaumus body, legs or nares legs.

but I don't blm too much anymore, mostly a proc job now, whm when my friends need it, and I blu most of the time.

I still don't have a toci's, so I think the body is the best choice, then the legs, right?

Really can't beat that body in my book for tping...

Well i'm doing NNi too at the moment, and my main is BLU too.

What piece you'll choose will depend of what your needs are right now. the body is surely the best piece for a tp set. At the condition you can manage the loss of the refresh from the empyrean body. Personnaly, i took the hand first cause I was interested by the VIT on it for a few spells. and seems i was at 26% haste I keep it for my tp set too instead of my enif manopolas.

You actually need 26% in equip to cap at 25%.
Ofc the gain from last 1% is much smaller than 1% so if other stats are superior than go with 25% in equip.

well i plan on getting thur gloves very soon, but i think thaumas body will be a huge increase for me, and so many other jobs

Since you have most Light DD jobs, Thaumas body would be the best bet for you tbh :P

Yeah i heard it was 0.2% so I prefer pure stats lol

edit: yeah same person, wrong avatar xD

the idea to help yourself and the group with nni wins should be to enhance the jobs you do nni with.

Thamaus body first without a doubt, then either kecks or nails, then hands. You could change your armor selection after that since t.hat isn't as big of boost for blu as for other jobs.

for those vit spells instead of opting for t.hands you should be using athos or heafoc

I've only begun playing around with spellcast, and so far its sooooo amazing. I was looking at your xml, Proth, and it shows sets for evasion and hybrid evasion. However, I dont see any rules that would equip those. How can you set it up so that in need of evasion it would equip the appropriate set, is it a command or something? Thanks for all your hard work on this guide.

I just removed the space(so now it's Hybridevasion and Fullevasion) so I could /sc set Name to switch to them. Was never sure how they were meant to be activated otherwise as there are no triggers in the xml.

Seems like just typical macros to switch to them.

Friend of mine made triggers though. I'm too lazy to post them :P