The Beast Within -- A Guide To Blue Mage

One of the things that initially drew me to BLU was the sense of adventure inherent to learning one's spells. It's a midgame experience unlike any other, one that encourages you to go places and fight monsters that most players happily avoid. I'm still proud to say that I solo'd most of my spells at or near their levels - not out of any sense of accomplishment, but simply for the experience and the opportunities I had to explore creative use of both my spells and monster behavior in the process.

I don't think farming all one's spells at 99 really captures that experience. If anything, what would interest me is leveling purely through farming spells. With all the exp bonuses these days I'd imagine one could get most, if not all of the exp needed to hit 99 via spell farming. Trusts probably trivialize the more difficult spells if so inclined.

Same, Im glad I was a BLU from the beginning when it was released. One of the first "full Homam" BLUs on Bismark (or was it Seraph at the time) right behind Glenn. I always enjoyed the excitement of learning a new spell, despite some of them being quite a chore.

c'mon, everyone knows full homam means everything but the head piece!

(insert proto-omega_want_sum_hats.jpg here pls)

When you level jobs they get stat boosts form level ups, new job traits/abilities, new gear, and skill ups. When you level blu you get all this plus every new mob is a opportunity to learn a spell and become more powerful. No job was as fun to me lvling as blu and I would do it again lvl 1 to 99 w/o "abysseaing" it.

You also learn more about the job going from mob to mob, place to place having to adapt to different enemies. I honestly feel bad that people don't take the time to enjoy how fast blu accelerates lvling the old way. I love the learning blu magic and seeing those words in golden letters "You learned xyz".

People take the shortcut and spoil the challenge for themselves and to me its no mystery why people would hate looking at that huge list of blu spells trying to swallow it all in one bite. When you level the old school way you take it piece by piece and you learn more about blu along the way.

You can eat a cake by taking the time to mix ingredients together and cook it or you can just eat the raw ingredients separately. It is up to you.

I have a question for the Master Magi out there! What is the viability for a support/debuff focused Blue Mage in lvl 130+ content?

I am trying to see how I can step into a support role if a more common support isn't available. So I was looking through the BLU spell list, and saw several things that might be useful as far as AoE buffs, and Debuffs.

Has anyone explored that lately? With proper gear, how end-game viable is a blue mage in a pure support build? And what would their biggest strength be as far as support?

Sadly I don't see a great case for it in the current meta.

-Searing Tempest is a wickedly potent burn, but in many such fights your primary source of damage is Death (no dINT term).
-Acrid Stream's MDB down is nice, but only if you're not already posting 99999s.
-Reaving Wind is a great spell, but Mewing Lullaby is unresistable. 3-4 people rotating it from sub gets the job done when needed, often without any meaningful tradeoffs in party composition.
-Most other debuffs we can offer are either available from other common jobs, are not mission critical for SC/MB setups (circumventing gimmicks is generally more of a concern than damage taken by a competent tank), or get resisted outright. BLU cannot utilize immunobreaks.
-Most of our spells require standing closer to the monster than is necessary for traditional mages, which potentially means putting ourselves in AoE and/or aura range.
-If the fight involves adds that are not immediately killed, utilizing AoEs is much more difficult.
-Our better buffs are generally single target, so Diffusion's cooldown limits our options.
-BLU is not an effective primary healer for high level content. MP constraints, limited cure options, potential range issues, etc.
-Your mere presence in the alliance instantly increases the monster's HP pool. Given BLU's cooldown-dependent MB abilities, it's also extremely difficult to keep up in damage output.

Current mechanics simply don't give us a lot of flexibility against high level content. The subset of tools that actually matter in such strategies is very tightly constrained. If you have no better option then obviously you should make the best of it, but generally you should find some other way to contribute.

I'll certainly grant that one of the most unique aspects and more memorable ventures through the game for me (the other being leveling BST back before all the changes) was taking a break from XP parties every day or two, because XP was THAT slow, to go out and learn your new spells. few things were ever as interesting as how far off the beaten path you would go as leveling these jobs and spell mastery were. the less fun part was how some of those spells were a nightmare (looking at you, Frenetic Rip) if you were going at level or could even kill you (pretty sure I got nixed when trying to learn Sickle Slash back in the day). I still shudder at how many treants I had to slaughter in Lufaise to learn Pinecone Bomb.

The spells that "required" a party to learn were pretty fun.

Dahak alliance GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Watching Llewelyn wipe on twitch, while we wipe on the same mob over here on Quetz X.x

Hey, we ended up beating it pretty easily once we replaced our scrub PLD! And when everyone stopped D/Cing. <_< If you're talking about Schah.

Thread related question. How are Adhemar Gamashes +1 compared to Thereoid Greaves for CDC at high ratios now? In my outdated sheet (2.25 ratio cap) I had them ahead of Thereoid before Rosmerta's Cape, but once I included the cape and Begrudging Ring into my set I had Adhemar +1 fall behind. Wondering if this still holds true at higher ratios.

Here's the rest of my set for reference:

ItemSet 343469

I have Thereoid winning for capped ratio and Adhemar +1 winning for uncapped.

Out of curiosity, how many other swaps, if any, are there that you can make depending on capped and uncapped ratio scenarios? Think I'd be too lazy to make a toggle if all it'd be changing is 1 slot.

I believe anything else would come down to specific Herc augments, and the margins would be very small.

With regards to the two items in question, I'd stick to Thereoid if you're only going to choose one. Obvious cost differences aside, the margin for Thereoid in capped ratio situations is almost double Adhemar +1's advantage when uncapped.

He doesn't wipe Occultation shadows off fast enough to run into recast issues either. We do him BLU BLU GEO GEO BRD WHM with an outside COR buffer.

The other BLU I run with is an Almace BLU and he hasn't had any trouble.

I don't actually use /checkparam very often so I can't give you a number. This is my max acc set though:

ItemSet 343483

We have Honor March, Madrigal x2, non-Idris Torpor and Precision, Hunter's roll, so we're pretty stacked on acc buffs.

What are some people's best Colada augments? I wanted a good offhand Colada for when I AG my Almace, and for now I have DMG+4 DEX+14 Acc+20 Atk+14 Dbl Atk+3%. I'm not sure if I should farm thousands of stones in an attempt to beat that one, since Colada augments seem especially random.

I would keep it like that.

Doesn't necessarily mean it's the best use of one's time/gil, particularly for an offhand weapon.

Perfect augment is D+20 acc/att+20 DEX+10/15 DA+3/4 yes? DEX/DA values varying based on stone choice?

is that for Almace offhand only? was figuring stp would be better for tizona so it doesn't mess with AM3