Just Came Back And Lost @ 99

Hello everyone, I just came back to the game a few weeks ago. Blue is my second job of choice but I am crazy lost with all the new armor and spells and wiki still has guides only going up to 75. that being said.

TP build gear?

What self sc's ws's and gear to match are best DPS now?

I can figure out the rest but those are the two I am most concerned about. I have all weapon skills on sword but the empy and chances are I will not have one for awhile since my friend and I pretty much just duo everything.

Another thing I would like to ask since I have seen alot of people say 2 str swords are the way to go if you cant get empy. Where the hell is the best places to go on firesday? Being that it is winter I never ever see fire weather in any zones and that path is crazy slow =(.

Thank you very much ahead of time.

Oh and I do not have the merited WS either because alot of threads I was reading people were saying it was not worth it.

what do you need to kill?

Merit WS allows for self SC dark with the higher damage physical spells. It is well worth it for blue mage. Despite this, I am afraid to say SE has made bluemage annoying for most event play, as it is a proc job and requires the player to gimp their spell selection in order to increase drops.

Ya I have just begun to start joining some pick up party's and trying to ease myself back into the game and well pretty much re learn everything. I already got screamed at because I had no clue WTH proc was and went and learned all the new spells (aside from the ones you have to get like gates of hades etc.) still have to work on those.

I know blu is a seriously gear intensive job (to do it right anyway) as far as what am I fighting. I would really like to try and solo alot of aby things for +2 items on some of my other jobs. So realistically I am going for a good solo / proc setup. Or just solo setup in general.

Why wouldnt you just have a standard set spell list with one proc, your party finds the hint and you swap in the correct proc?

There isnt a big rush for blu to try first and by the time a blm/brd alone goes through the procs thats plenty of time for your spell to be up?

Because by time your spells are changed the mob should be dead. Also, waiting on spells to change holds up procing since you're waiting for the blu proc to change to another proc, which in turn slows down everything.

in VW if you want drops, which most people do, and played blu back at 75 end game, you know it is not much of a DD on higher tier mobs and your time will be more well spent trying to stagger the mob rather than feed it TP with spells (blu is AMAZING at this and can force a TP move and stun it if they know what they are doing, so it is not true in all cases but most blus do not utalize this aspect of the job). As Serj said it speeds things up. Blu is more for soloing, or raid type things such as nyzule and dynamis sadly.

Cannon ball builds however are worth looking into /thf expecially since crit dmg + items such as Loki's apply and requires a minimum of cocoon and cannonball to be set. I have done 10k /thf using RR VV MM /thf chain/eflux in abyssea to NMs, so when I do go for yellow I tend to use this build. 2-5k w/o chain/eflux

so in terms of gear what would be my optimal TP setup? I am familiar with the cannonball mods as that was still in play when I played years back so I can figure that one out on my own. That is still champ when your solo I take it? Or are any new spells better?

I know that usually any TP setup is going to be focus on haste acc attk. I do not have homam legs or feet and was wondering if there was alternative options out there on say feet that still give haste +3% and I swear last night I saw some green pants that were haste +4% but he changed gear before I could catch the name of them lol.

Gear is going to lean more towards play style for the most part. Many forums have been posted in the past year or so due to the new content, I would advise checking them out. TP is straight forward as all ways; haste. All jobs can cap haste easy.

The 1st thing to go for when starting again if Emperian armor +1, shouldnt take long, then after that +2. It will give you a good foundation if nothing else.

Blu has a few more outlest for soloing. The FFXI game style has changed, now AoE is a common form of farming exp(cruor and time which you will learn about in abyssea).

It does so by using a Charge Whisker build, which is heavy in dex and MATB (Yeah, blu isnt all physical any more. Kind of a nice change for once). You can find a lot of info on that on the forums posted.

Most abyssea content is soloable, and a skilled blu will struggle only on the higher tier mobs that cant be out run or stunned; however due to the proc system soloing is not rewarded and your time will be bettter spent in groups.

You dont have to solo stuff lol. shouts work great these days. I would suggest getting the proper atmas and atmacites first. Then you can achieve alot of stuff in abyssea. You can charged whisker aoe alot of monsters for chest and KI to pop notorious monster with the proper atma. Hopefully you have killed ultima lol, as an atmacite enricher will give you the atma. But try for atma of the razed ruins, atma of the apocalypse and atma of the ultimate mainly and atma of the minikin monstrocity. Those are the main and really good atmas for mages and DD. Otherwise dont try to get all the gear without the atma, because you will just be making it harder on yourself.

Just a warning: If you loved old school blue, know you will come to hate its position in the new world. was my main job along with rdm before the chaos of abyssea started. Fully merited, back when it meant something. Now rdm is in storage and 1/2 the time I question why I even bothered gearing blu for events.

Main jobs now are, well idk. Only use WHM THF and WAR.
if you like WHM THF WAR BLM NIN you are in good hands! because thats pretty much all you need for abyssea, and outside of procs the same for VW. DD, healer, procs.

Thank you very much for the advice. I have all those atmas I have been working on them. I have a huge problem with people.. well putting it nicely people annoy the ***out of me in XI. So I just stay quiet. But again I'm an old school HNM player and there doesn't seem to be near the drama like there was back when lol. I have most fun in the game solo'n or trying to solo stuff that is hard. The challenge is what draws me to the game over other mmorpgs. All though XI seems it was dumbed down ALOT. It still posses more of a challenge than say rift that I played for a whole month before I was capped pvp and just flat out bored.

can any of you tell me what the hell the green pants with +4% haste on them are called? lol

Athos's tights. Good luck lol.

haha take that as #pain in the *** crap drop rate piece. Sweet. I will say I got stupid lucky and went 2/3 on twilight helm and head when I first came back hope that carries over to the athos's lol. Anyway thanks again very much for takin the time to respond. Greatly appreciated.

As a returning player you'd need to get gears in Abyssea first, they're easiest to get and good drop rate with proc. Also BLU can duo majority, if not all the Abyssea NM with a WHM.

There are also a couple of new job trait that changes the job a lot compare with lv 75 era. TH is useful if you have no THF, and plenty of new melee job trait such as DW 3, store TP2, zanshin, counter, triple attack etc, makes this job a lot stronger compare with lv 75 era in terms of melee/WS dmg especially on NMs(since spells are weak on NMs) The best DD SJ is now /WAR. Old cannonball and /THF takes a back seat thanks to enmity mechanic issue in this game(and fanatic+over powered WHM too).

Firesday STR sword can be done by CW burn in abyssea, also if you like soloing, evasion sword is pretty useful too. Evasion set is also useful for lowman tanking, soloing and CW pulling.

On Abyssea NMs you would want to set all offensive melee job traits with a WHM curing you, if you're soloing you can set more defensive job traits and spells. The time you stop and casting spells on NM isn't worth the DPS lose IMO.

Besides SC with QC and use on Pil's shield, Req is weaker than CDC, and very weak on VW T6. But if you don't have CDC, it's still the best sword WS you can use outside of Abyssea on none T6 mobs. You may as well merit it until your CDC is done, 100 merit points are pretty fast. Stick with vorpal in Abyssea though, crit-hit WS is better inside.

The most optimal TP set came from Neo nyzul and VW, which can take a while to get(although some ppl still 1/1), and requires decent gear to do. Just stick with AF3+2 stuff first then work on Neo nyzul/VW stuff.

As for self SC,
Req--->QC
CDC--->A.spike

are 2 of the most common ones.

Haste +4 pants are everywhere. AF3+2 legs has haste +4, Ocelot has haste +4 if you need evasion or something. Athos's pants is the best haste pants though.

Feet just buy a dusk +1 feet and get the job done(they're pretty cheap). Or you can try your luck with athos feet.

My god that neo nyzul stuff is insane. I think I am going to try to have to start / join a static for that. WOWSERS I JUST MADE A MESS IN MY TROUSERS! lol.. seriously though that armor is insane. Thank you very much for the great info though. I learned a little while ago to just use bgwiki instead of wiki and that helped solve half my problems. Wiki just seems like it is on pause? lol... Sorry to bother you guys with the questions by the way. Normally I look for all the answers on my own but it is such a different game now compared to what it used to be. Thank you!

I'd expect Vorpal with a good build to pull ahead of Requiescat if you're meleeing T6 with Champion's Drink given the latter's attack penalty, but otherwise it's BLU's best non-CDC weaponskill given that ele gorget and belt's fTP bonus transfers to all hits. You should really get an Almace though.

And Almace is totally feasible to obtain even with low man numbers. You will decrease the time it takes to get one by shouting for help, but it can be done duo depending on you and your friends jobs.

I don't understand what's different about 75cap BLU and now that indicates a turn for the worse? You went from being a guy who can cast headbutt with no real WS options/gear, no place in merit parties or HNM to being a top tier DD if geared/buffed properly. Majority of the time a 75cap BLU played like a 75cap RDM.

Is this like a RDM can't melee and solo things for 3h anymore type of complaint or what am I missing?

Beats me, I enjoyed BLU at 75 and I'm loving it now. Proc spam is kind of shitty but that's really only relevant for a handful of NMs at most.

>mfw Night implies he proc spams

It's easy to say this to people who have already done abyssea for quite a while. Got to remember that he probably has no merit or furtherance abyssites which can drop survivability down a bit if he has none. Discernment definitely speed things up and having access to atmas. Not to mention the stones that he probably does not have.

Just don't want to give this guy false hope that it is within reach at the get go.

@OP One of your priorities should be getting clears/atmas/abyssites.
Oh yeah if you want to save some time and get a decent weapon off the bat, look into trying to get an Isador.

I have alot of atmas now, I got isador looking for a good OH at the moment. really I need armor and to work on my emp. blahhhh

I hear that, but better to encourage than dismay. Having CDC access for Voidwatch is make or break.

Can I suggest to you not to come back? Game sucks not the same no fun at all. Do the same crap over and over and over and over and over. About 90% of content can be done with low man shouts.

Minus the shout party it's always been this way for everything.

Man I left my account signed in and my jackass friend hijacked my keyboard and just necro bumped some old thread when I went to the store. awesome.

On another note honestly I wouldn't even come back if my buddy didn't just hand me the account. But yea I am really just killing time and preying for some great mmorpg release. Until then this is still the only mmorpg that I have ever been able to get into.

But it seems almost to easy now and that is what I really really liked about this game was the fact that it was hard to accomplish things. When you did it actually felt like a reward and kept you playing. Atleast thats how it was for me. Now its just wait times and a daily grind it seems. None the less I tried rift aion wow all that stuff in between and it was seriously like 30 days to max lvl and some of the best gear. There was no reason to keep playing. lol