Phalanx II Merits

My rdm doesnt even really get much play in the advent of abyssea and death of kings/hnm and what can be solo'ed in abys you can pin most of the time lol XD
Im stuborn my merits i worked for oh so many pink lil fukkers slain lol if we get new content and something to make me see a change is more worthwhile no doubt i will change my merits.

I really dont solo with it anymore thats just back at 75, but i hate abyssea ptys so im not changing them anytime soon.

If you levelled for solo, you'd have Convert.

Very true the usual fausts suzy seiryu skystrider nm (name escapes me atm)
Any thing that made me money lol
As for gear i like to think at 75 cap there wasnt much i lacked rly excpet morri robe but i had dalm so :S

This ^

Being a galka RDM solo was hard due to low mp, i treid to copy ppl but realized fast my gear wasnt as good as needed. Bio 3 was the most mp efficient for me.

Well being "Galka" and not having mp why in gods name wouldnt you merit vert lol

This was a couple yrs ago, not saying i made the best choices.

Key word there is was.

LOL fair enough being taru with 5/5 vert meant that i could just nuke more when the situation allowed nothing more fun than cs nuking a mobs last few % down :D

I took down merits i had on BIO3 cuz it seems useless in abyssea the slow steady fights are over so moved to 5/5 para/slow2 putting up as much MND as i currently can for potency but its me or SE made an *** move a lot of the NMs where it matters are inmune to paralyze?

Yea slow and para immune in abyssea is pretty common.

I haven't run into it that much. Though I haven't rdmd much in heros. Very resistant sure. Immune to one or the other ok. But not usually both

Some of the worse mobs i come across in the heroes zones are the remakes of the toau kings cerb hydra and khim they suck just as bad as there toau versions when it comes to landing ***to the point of where i tried a ***ton of different potency/skill sets and mag acc atma and said on vent this is resistant im gooing to ele seal and do it watch it not stick .... and it did >.>

Thats what i meant, i didnt mean both, but being immune and /or highly resistant to slow, para or both semms alot more common in abyssea.

Each to their own,

I have; 5/5 SlowII
5/5 ParaII
5/5 Convert
5/5 Ice Acc.

It's so easy to level jobs now, who wants to soro on RDM? I wouldn't exactly say it shows skill now, may aswell merit your jobs for the situation that your left in more often.

Abyssea would be trying to stick a potent Slow and Para on the mobs, if that means to lower Convert and put it on another element acc then go for it.

That's why I get lots of macc :) And full furtherance and MM/allure and still use skill/macc sets and HQ staffs. And blind II as well :). That thing lands on the weirdest ***too. Sometimes missing mobs that doesn't make sense then landing on idk say lord barney lol

Assuming your gearing / meriting rdm for events 5/5 Slow II Para II is what you should be meriting. (ice acc + earth acc 5/5)

For solo outside of abyssea BioIII is still nice. (wind acc + ice acc 5/5)

For low man AoE abyssea pts phalanx is nice or for spikes NMs.

DiaIII .... kinda useless compared to other merit options even more so now nothing in the game needs to be zerged and conventional 75+ pts are dead.

Only thing about paralyze is ..if it procs while you are trying to get yellow,blue,red !!s you wont hit it :X

Sorry in advance for the wall-o-text but I don't think it's simple to just say one way would be the best to merit RDM. :3

For me, it always depends on what you actually want to use RDM for and how you like/enjoy/are to to play the job, to begin with. It's never like "spell x or y is always the best in every situation", so you need to have to have a certain idea about what you want for/from RDM.
I "grew up" with RDM being my first 75 and most endgame stuff for me was sky and dynamis back then. Therefore, my duties were mainly to take care of the the PLD tank(s) and/or crowd-control. Now, in those situations, things like Bio III (which has always been a waste of merits unless you solo most of the time and merit it fully, since bio II always provided the same DoT as bio III until 4/5 merits, iirc) and Dia III has been of little use because things needed blink tanking or died too fast, compared to HNMs fights anyway.

The most important thing for me was to give my tank(s) the proper buffs and to match the duration of Phalanx II with Haste and Refresh duration, so I did 3/5 in that. On a side-note, since I've seen so many RDMs cast Phalanx II on themselves.., Phalanx I will always be better than Phalanx II on yourselves (if nothing has changed, that is. didn't check that lately tbh <_<;).

Furthermore, Slow II and Paralyze II simply help the Tank(s) to take way less DoT in longer fights and to get shadows up more easily. Where Slow II is certainly the best enfeebling spell RDM has to offer, IMO.

From my POV, Dia III was always desired for RDM in HNM shells, to speed up kills where mobs had very high def and huge amounts of HP, along with rather low dmg-output of the tanks and DDs. Which is a little bit different nowadays, obviously.
And Bio III was used for soloing mainly, like I said. Even though, I still don't understand why so many ppl needed Bio III for that anyway, when Bio II was almost just as good. xD

The problem with bio III now is with new gear and spells nukes just slightly less efficient than a fully meritted Bio III outside of abyssea. Inside of course nukes beat it on efficiency hands down

you mean this?

No I meant what I said. Hence you know the merit talk... context clues do you need them?

Bio II is actually about the same efficiency possibly less than nuke snow

And Bio III was used for soloing mainly, like I said. Even though, I still don't understand why so many ppl needed Bio III for that anyway, when Bio II was almost just as good. xD[/quote]

Sadly the age of Avesta is over ....

Ah, got it now. xD
And yea, nukes might be a little bit more efficient now either way, since they just help to speed up killing more. But then again, you can't merit nukes, so I don't really understand the comparison.
Would make more sense if you could chose between meriting nukes or DoT.

On a different note, just re-checked Bio II and Bio III with new gear and skill tiers etc. and you still need at least 4/5 merits into Bio III to make it better than Bio II, in terms of DoT. Or every gear with dark magic on it in HQ version and a merit into dark magic (not counting augmented items that might give dark magic skill) and even then you still need at least 3/5 merits into Bio III to make it better than Bio II. Unless you go for the att-down effect purely anyway.
That's why Bio II > Bio III, IMO.

Just if anyone wanted to know. xD

The point in the comparison is DOTs are slow... they were only used because of there better efficiency. Now that they aren't all that more efficient there is no point in using them. It's not a matter of chosing one merit over another it's a matter of it being useless. Especially when you need to throw full merits into it just to get it to be even that good and there are plenty of good things to put it into.

It'd be like a whm fully meritting protectra V ;)

If this convo turned into DoT debate then you have to talk about SCH ..the king of DoT ..yet is never used.. my SCH is 90 even but my main aka BLM is too godly 4/5 +2 only missing 5 coins for hat wich i was gonna get SUN but game got shutdown +Novio and all kinda goodies and yes i AM a sorc ring BLM (F-U happy trigger WHMs!!)

I do agree with the fact that the need for meriting DoTs has decreased due to the new nukes available. But then again, there has never been a real need anyway, like I pointed out in the comparison between Bio II and Bio III.

To me, it sounds like you mean that DoTs are almost completely obsolete now though, which is what I wouldn't agree with. It's not like you either used DoTs OR nukes on mobs in the past, only because you could deal the same dmg with both.
You still used both to speed up killing because, even when your nukes sucked, they still speeded up the process of killing. Each nuke did roughly 1-2x the dmg that a DoT like Bio II/III would have done over a period of 2mins. Now the new tiers certainly do more dmg, yes. But if you can apply poison II on the mob as well, DoTs are still way more efficient than nukes.
However, this should maybe be subject of a different thread and the situations where RDM really soloes like they did before abyssea are like not present anymore.

DoTs are still very useful, just the need to merit them has decreased drastically.

You mean like Avesta? and if you wanna get the best outta DoTs do the math of burn,choke,shok+bio2+poison2+helix VS. a nuke

Not like Avesta, he has just been badass and played at the ultimate limits with the best gear for like every spell, as well as close to perfection for melee style, iirc.
Even an idiot-RDM could cast a DoT and run away, that's why so many picked it up for soloing mainly. The only difference between good and bad ones was only, good ones didn't do Bio III 1-3/5 and had a good feeling about their mp-pool and threw in nukes and rode the convert timers.

And yea, SCH is probably the best DoT job in the game. But I sadly don't have own experiences with SCH, except for watching others (and I've only seen one really good SCH so far). That being said, there are also a lot of idiot-SCHs out there that think they are BLMs and suck hard.