The Beast Within -- A Guide To Blue Mage

NINs are fodder and so are those orcs and stuff, mijin is probably a ability trigger by HP% rather than TP? Dyna D is group content and subtle blow is more something for solo situations, for example the odin HTBF. having multiple DD on the same target seems counter productive for s subtle blow build.

its nice if it lands on some Dyna D NMs but as i said, resistance builds quickly and i think debuffs like paralyze and slow help more with TP negation.


its to many spells to rotate, every time you cast you lose like 3-5 seconds where you don't deal damage and don't gain MP thru tizona. some of them have poor duration or don't stick and others need to be reapplied every 25-30 seconds. then you also have the standard rotation of spells like nature's meditation, erratic flutter and occultation.

even if you drop cocoon and barrier tusk you'll quickly find yourself just rotating spells and eventually time out or run out of MP. remember, koru for some reason doesn't seem to cast refresh on BLU and all the other RDM trusts who do also attack and feed TP. selh'theus also attacks and WSs the mob and feeds TP.


on a side note, it absolutly, totally and completely pisses me off that after so many years you still can't tell wethere a additional BLU spell effect did land or not. i'm not even sure if it tells you when it wears off and even if it does, there needs to be a better way to tell what debuffs did land, how long they last and when they wear off other than eagle eyeing the chat log.

I don't know about you, but I don't think most people would call NMs themselves "fodder".

Sure, if you are talking about the generic named mobs. If you are talking about the 1 NM per job you encounter once per wave, I don't think people consider that the same.

Also, Mijin can go off anywhere between 1% to 60% HP remaining. It's very rare, but I have personally seen it blow up at ~55% once.

When I'm doing dynamis D with my shell and I'm on BLU, I always stun lock all NMs, and generally stun lock the NIN mobs period. It helps with killing faster due to less TP moves going off and less SP abilities going off. It helps everyone out.

Unless you are soloing, the NM should be dead before it starts resisting.

I have yet to have a full resist when I'm on BLU doing Dynamis D with my shell.

Subtle Blow is only something that is going to benefit 2 DPS or less, or 1 tank + DPS, and everybody has to be using it to benefit from it's effects. I don't know about you, but Sudden Lunge does in fact work on a lot of things. NMs do gain resistance to it fairly quickly, which is frustrating, but a 10+ second stun is really potent at tempering a monster's offensive power.

I did say that really no job can make a Subtle Blow build as effectively as MNK, so you can't put it in that lens directly. You may have to go out and test your sets to see which rotation might be effective for keeping low TP feed for BLU. The tools are there, go test and see which ones work in practice and which ones just waste time. It may or may not be worth it, but worth shot.

You can reliably stun Heavenly Gods which are level 140 mobs. I don't think your assessment on Sudden Lunge is accurate at all lol. Some mobs are much more resistant to BLU stun it seems, but a blanket statement about it only being useful on fodder is just misinformation.

I do sometimes have the problem where the same mob one pop will resist all my lunges or have really short duration stuns then another will stun easily for 10s+ each time without changing any buffs or gear. I don't really know what is up with that...

My guess is lag on gearswap.

Sudden Lunge is one of the most underrated spells in the community. It lands on many thing and stun duration is very often 10 sec+ on first cast. Duration is indeed way shorter on next casts on same target, but you can still stun lock something for like 20-30 sec total with few casts and you can choose to make it during 20-30 sec when target is biggest treat to you (during SP for example).

Sudden Lunge and White Wind I would say are the two most underrated spells for BLU.

When i first saw malignance armor my first thought was: lunge set upgrade yo!!!

don't think they are underrated at all, sudden lunge is a staple in any melee spell set for the store tp trait alone and white wind usually takes magic fruits slot if the points permit it.

however both are flawed if you few them like a equivalent to a tarditional party version of it.
sudden lunge != stun
mobs build resistance too fast and it doesn't land reliably due to acc + macc check. even when overcapping acc/macc you'll still run into the 95% melee acc cap, not sure if macc also has such a cap but magic can partially resist while physical simply whiffs
white wind != curega
it burns too much MP and generates too much hate to spam. BLU simply doesn't have the tools to use it like a WHM uses their cures. its a AoE backup cure for ohshi situations and to buy your mages a breather.

Yeah lol. Every time I say I need some piece for White Wind, most people in my LS are like "White Wind?"

Every time I see RDM or SCH discussions about giving them curaga, so WHM wont be only healer that can aoe cure Im like "Helllllloooooo blu can aoe cure for like 1400 in dps setup"

With Tizona and Malignance neither of those are issues at all in regards to MP/hate generation

I main healed a Teles fight once with White wind because the WHM died in the first 30s and still came 2nd on parse lol. ***was pretty cash lol

But, you're a Galka. No one believes you

You’re just jealous of my strong arms.

he didn't say they won tho.

Magic accuracy has 95% cap too afaik and melee doesnt always have 95% accuracy cap. I think all 1h weapons have 99% acc cap on main hand and h2h has 99% acc cap on both hands (h2h was actually changed to 99% like year+ ago which was imo as big of a deal as h2h WS update). Very possible that blu physical spells also have 99% acc cap.

Sudden Lunge is way better than stun in a lot of situations. Stun duration is very short and recast is 45. Sudden lunge stun duration on first few casts is very long, then even when its shorter after several casts, you still can spam it to chain stun target, because it only jas 12 sec recast, so in most setups you can start casting it again asap.

Stun is only better when mob has very high meva and you need to stun few specific moves or you wipe and you have someone on stun duty only.

Who cares if white wind gives blu hate. You have many tools to survive that. Also its a backup cure only because BLU is utilty dd. If you actually put blu into party with intension to make him main healer then you can easily do it for a lot of content. Also many content is based on fighting new waves of mobs, so BLU will never pull hate with white winds before mobs are dead. You would need some really long fight to even make a problem out of it.

Tizona provides tons of mp when you are engaged and for other specific scenarios magic hammer can usually easily put your mp back to 100%.

Sure we did, obviously because it didn’t spam any bad ***but it’s still one of my highlight as BLU lol

Share white wind set plz

galkan white wind dream tier set:
ItemSet 374870

Were you the only melee in that fight?

he said he parsed 2nd while main healing so there was 1 more melee participating.

ItemSet 374871

ItemSet 363403

Those sets are kinda specific to my taste tho. There is more way you can approach it.

there are quite a couple of usefull sidegrade or BiS pieces from the new unity augments and considering just the augment path is already 24mil i wonder which pieces to prioritize first.

cohort cloak maybe? i think its BiS for macc on BLU and replaces 2 slots, pretty strong if not BiS in matt too. especially if you have BLM, SCH, GEO or RDM too as i assume with the extra elemental and enfeebling skill it whipes everything else out of the water in regards to macc?

closest combo for macc seems to be artifact head + relic body combined with total of 96 macc, 66 INT and MND, 64 CHR and only 28 matt, but 12% haste and 9% FC

cohort comes with 110-120 macc, 55 INT and MND, 48 CHR and 100 matt but only 9% haste. 33 to elemental and enfeebling skill.


what pieces would you prioritize?

kentarch belt +1 is an excellent acc swap for both TP and Savage/Expiacion. You sacrifice extremely minimal damage from Sailfi +1, and gain ~20 accuracy.

blistering sallet +1 is the best acc option for CdC, without contest. You lose a tiny bit of damage compared to Adhemar HQ, and a little bit more if losing the set bonus, but you gain ~53 accuracy.

odnowa earring +1 is an amazing DT earring.

aurist's cape +1 is your best macc option for back, and can save a ton of space if you play other jobs on it.

fi follet cape +1 is another good space-saver if you play mage jobs in addition to BLU.

I haven't seen any information on the HTMB Zantetsuken sword. I was lead to believe this is the best off-hand now, (other than the 1000TP Sword) compared to Almace.

Anything I am missing?

Zantetsuken is a very solid offhand option indeed. The main reason to offhand almace is the 269skill and 50dex(lots of acc and Expi has a 20% dex mod). If you're not in need of acc I'd imagine they're fairly close with almace giving ever so slighlty more ws dmg and zantetsuken having faster tp gain. I'm sure someone has run the numbers on this stuff though, so feel free to correct me ^^

Random Question mid thread - But it's for my BLU, and the job I play most frequently...

Any tips on augmenting Herculean Gear (or any gear really) to get DA and TA stats? I've read the description of how Oseem works on FFXI wiki and BG Wiki and am having difficulty following the logic.

TLDR: Any particular stones I should be using, and is Dark Matter a one-shot deal, or is it augments above and beyond the regular stones?

Thanks in advance

fern stones, you will have higher TA cap on your augment due the nature of that stone prioritizing those sort of special stats. taupe stones are for base stat prioritization (str, dex, agi, etc), pellucid are... acc/atk? that could be wrong

and dont use dark matter that you can purchase it's a waste, especially since the free dark matter augment campaign is currently going on. with dark matter augments you could potentially get da, ta, and qa all one one piece (yeah, gl with that!)

Basically you can get any listed stat with any stone. The reason you may want to use specific ones is up for you to decide, but I'll try to explain how it works:

- When going for melee path augments, pellucid stones will force atk and/or acc augments each roll, how high is still random though.
- Taupe stones will force base stats (should be either str, dex or agi for melee path). Which one and how much is still random.
- And finally Fern stones will force one of the "special" stats, like TA, WSD or crit.

Each stone will usually have a higher cap for related stats too (usually noted with T, F or P for each stone in parenthesis on wiki), but it's stil all very random.

Cheapest way is usually to just spam pellucid until you get something decent since the other stones tend to be a lot more expensive


Dark matter is only available during campaigns or by spending an actual dark matter each try, which is not advised :P
Results from dark matter tend to have higher caps for stats and can roll stuff that's usually not even available on said item, but it's completely random and 95% of the time you'll get just crap.