Why Arent Melee Used Anymore

Incorrect. People slam him for his one line Threads and or ***like this: http://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/42462/crobaci-2-vs-ragnarok-119#2576210

Also, Play with scythe if you want to play with scythe.

man, I remember how accomplished I felt soloing out my Gaudy Harness back then.

Yorcia was absolutely anti-melee when it came out but Sword runs are actually terrible for mages and heavily favor melee now. I don't think Rala is a very commonly done skirmish, although we always used melee for it. Cirdas is great with melee. Bst is great for killing trash in Cirdas, but Geo/Sch/Blm are better, and melee are better for killing bosses.

Hah i know that feeling! I still have mine!!
I miss those days of CHR sets cause to be honest, they where fun than just using 1 pet to win, I remember kiting most of the La Value ORC nms as well as that Gnole NM for hours. Was fun, and enjoyable.

Well to be fair there is a way SE could balance it so that Scyth and GS were about even yet situation ally different. First they need to up the total fTP on the WS's, namely Resolution / Torcleaver for GS and Quietus / Spiral Hell for Scyth. Make Quietus something like 6 or 7 fTP and change it's TP scaling to ~30/50/75 for defense ignored. That would make GS Reso spam the best in high attack / accuracy scenarios but Scyth Quietus use when the target is actually worth a damn stat wise. Situations where your using sushi and getting accuracy buffs over attack buffs vs times when your eating meat and rocking capped Ratio.

:Break:

I've tried using SCH's for SC's and while it works and requires zero coordination for making the SC, it takes longer then having a THF + COR blow nearly half the T3's HP away in the first volley. Our setups usually were

<Tank> PLD or RUN
<Healer> WHM, RDM SCH or even BLU can do it
THF
GEO
COR
<Nuker> BLM, RDM, SCH or BLU

SE making it so we didn't get wiped upon pop was a game changer. Now both THF and COR have 3000TP at the start, all buffs are up and the only thing we're waiting on is the GEO dropping their bubbles and the tank taking 30s to build some enmity. Then 6~10K SA Rudra -> 40~60K Leaden (yes I've seen it off a Mythic COR) -> 70K skillchain then a MB off the BLM and GEO. Once saw a BLU do a 99K Tenebral crush MB, but they have a timer on BA which limits their MB potential, though they are really good free nukers cause few things nowadays have resistance to Dark / Light nukes. The final LS + Darkness is the largest source of damage by a large margin, only takes a few volleys to kill a T3. Lights a little harder cause you need a RNG instead which screws with your buffs a bit.

I didn't mention Cirdas for a reason, as melees are legitimately good there.

However, they hardly "reign supreme" overall though. They're usable in sword and shield Yorcia runs but really BSTs and particularly BLUs (acting as casters, rather than as melees) are the best.

Blus acting as casters were a huge deal when Yorcia first came out, but now you can just run around Sinker Drilling butterflies for much higher efficiency. Honestly I havent used my Blu nuking set in ages and feel pretty useless when I go to that on Scholar or Geo. It annoys me to death when I see 90% of the Blus I invited to Cirdas/Rala/Yorcia using Clubs and contributing nothing.

You can still sinker drill with clubs and two of the new spells will wipe out all the butterflies nearby instead of going up to each one and doing sinker drill/w/e to finish them off. So it's still worth it if there's a bunch gathered or if elements are nearby.

I'm lumping Sinker Drill into the caster category, since in this case you're not even engaging.

That said, while that is how I usually deal with butterflies, you can also use Tenebral Crush if you happen to find a good grouping. Even though magic damage isn't great against them, the spell is strong enough for that to not even matter.

You can, I'm just saying it's not really mandatory or maybe even worth nuking at this point if you can just Sinker butterflys over and over.

It's a shame we're not on the same server any more, because I've been using my clubs a lot more than my tizona on a lot of things. I can tenebral crush then subduction (or visa versa) the butterflies in yorcia and destroy all of them in two spells (as opposed to having to sinker drill them one by one). Blinding Fulgor works well too. I rarely need to pull out anything other than magic hammer, subduction, sinker drill, occultation, battery charge, blinding fulgor, and tenebral crush.

Tenebral crush is also good in farming silt in escha, and for a lot of the NMs, the new nukes do well, if you find the right ones. Sometimes though, I have to come on COR, to buff BSTs, which sucks, but everything is so BST and mage oriented now. All the T1 mobs can be trioed, or maybe duoed, with two BSTs and maybe a COR. Even some of the new unities favor that (the antica one for the melee belt, for example).

SE might have to nerf Beastmaster (though that'd be the 'easy solution,' the harder solution would be to tone down certain enemies' evasion and AoE effects so melee has an easier time, like in escha with NMs, particularly the harder tier NMs).

They kind of already did nerf Beastmaster really hard last patch. Personally I know people that use Melee, Mage, and Bst strats in Escha and never have any problem with the chosen strat. I also know people that have tried Bst strats and just went back to Melee as they found it to be better. Pretty sure all the T1s can also be trioed with Melee or Mages also, although I haven't done all of them because I have very little interest in Escha.

I don't really think Bst needs nerfing just because it's become a viable strat finally, seems cool to have Melee, Pets, and Mages as good end game strats.

You /really/ need to come to Bahamut, sir.:D

Quoting this because I don't think I can +1 it hard enough. It's so entirely true.

Was much more fun doing that gnole blu/bst for trying to learn Asuran claws. Had to really be aware of using leave so you didn't run out of pugils in the middle of the fight.

This is the reason I had lvld at least one of each of melee/mage/support jobs so I wouldn't be left out of events...

At 1st thought I considered SE might have made magic dmg too potent and needed a nerf along the lines of Rudra's. Now tho I think it's just that the highest level content is just too evasive. GEO, along w/ other buffs, fixes BLM, SMN, BST, RNG dmg just fine but 40% acc for melee jobs that stand within AoE range has made such tactics rather pointless.

I expect changes soon enough. (or not? heh) Highest level content is just not melee friendly at all w/ such low acc.
Scrolled up and stand corrected. COR needs a nerf instead! :x joking

I dunno I spent last night doing T1s in Escha and when I offered my GEO I was asked to come on my mythic Puppetmaster instead LOL.

Is Tenebral Crush the go-to nuke because it's dark based and can be boosted by Pixie Hairpin +1?

With full melee buffs and debuffed mob you can get a decent accuracy rate. The problem is that groups are getting a lot more bang for their buck with mage-centric buffs and debuffs. It's safer for sure. Same with BST setups. They are safer. And these setups require a lot less from support.

The current state of endgame kind of sucks. My "main" is samurai, and while our sustained melee damage is still top-tier along with dancer and blue mage, we've been relegated to more of a utility role than a DD role. It's pretty boring. I guess I need to bring back BST, just feels nasty joining all these awful bandwagon BSTs.

That and very few things resist dark / light damage now. All eight of the new BLU nukes have the same damage values, they each have different mods though. Ice, Dark and Light are the strongest right now because of how you can enhance them with the Water one being right after. Fire one does kinda low damage but the heavy -INT effect will make whatever you cast next hit that much harder.

Doesn't hurt getting 10 or 22 macc when setting it too.

While I do agree accuracy can require more buffs than you would need with a Bst or Nuke setup, it's worth noting that Samurai has a lot less accuracy than jobs like Blu currently. Taeon really boosted the accuracy of every light armor job and Acro didn't accomplish nearly the same thing. Not to mention dual wielding accuracy weapons, accuracy traits, 99% accuracy, DEX modded WSes, etc. I'm honestly not a fan of Sam compared to Blu now, but that's me.

I don't feel bad for sam's taking a backseat to pet burns. Sam is the only 2h job that is really in demand! Be happy you serve utility purposes and not fully benched like all other 2h'd jobs.

There is no such thing as bandwagon imo. There has been 22 jobs available for years. SE makes improvements to jobs that were irrelevent in the past, people jump on it. Preferred strategies come out, people copy. I dislike the word bandwagon. Why would anybody play a job that wasn't useful and or powerful? The "main" job era is over.

I agree that SAMs shouldn't be too upset, as they are literally the only 2h jobs even remotely viable today.

However, there are 100% bandwagons. There is NOTHING wrong with playing the currently top-tier jobs. There is everything wrong with having zero idea how to play it and going to no effort whatsoever in order to rectify that. BSTs using Candi against Tojil, Bertha for single-target damage, anything slashing against tulfaires, not knowing what snarl does or that spur actually exists. The same was true for SAM, with players who literally did not know what any of their JAs aside from Hasso or meditate did. Hell, BLU has been a craze for years ever since cleaving became popular, and yet you still see some running around with the JSE sword or TPing in MAB gear. That's what's wrong about playing the best jobs. Playing the best jobs like ***won't really help anybody's cause.

And, I believe it was Jeanpaul who mentioned it earlier, simply because one group is able to complete content using a particular setup does not mean it is the only one available. I watched a group of BSTs spend 10 minutes fighting Pazuzu and whiffing 9/10 Razor Fangs. But, they thought it was the best setup for them because people with far better gear made it work. People just need to think for themselves sometimes and not cling mindlessly to the established meta. I don't mean this paragraph towards you specifically at all, so apologies if that's how it comes across. I'm just ranting because it irritates me.

I think you people spent 6 pages arguing something that was well explained by the 3rd comment. It's a scaling issue. pre-abyssea, melee was king. There were far more options to unbalance the physical damage calculations in the players favor, and not so much for the mage. Outside of the MBursted AM, which took a hefty coordination, that no one wanted to deal with even before the introduction of colibri merit camp zerging.

Then along came abyssea and magic went ape ***. Why? because it's calculated differently than physical damage. Unlike physical defense that scales with level, mobs either have a metric *** ton of magic defense, or they have "1" magic defense. This meant alot of content in abyssea was either functionally or expressly immune to magic, or unrepentantly susceptible to it. With the only caveat being easily side-stepped elemental resistances, or the seldom used -MDT (not to be confused with MDB) that, i think, were only ever used by fodder mobs of the 'evil weapon' familiy..

So unlike a melee that has to keep STR/VIT, ATK/DEF, ACC/EVA, DEX(crit rate)/AGI in parity with mobs, ontop of capping haste. All the mage REALLY had to do, on the vast amount of content, was get their INT equal to, or above, mob INT, fill the rest of their slots with MAB, and nuke like no tomorrow.

With the advent of more dINT2 spells, no MAB cap, and additional sources of magic potency (and the kicker: legitimate. latent. refresh. sources.), as the game progressed into higher base INT characters, this began to tip the unbalanced damage types, especially regarding older/low content, heavily in favor of magic.

Yet there have always been the odd fight or content that required unorthodox party setups. The boss that could only be bloodtanked, another that could only be blinked. One where magic prevailed, the other where physical was key.

That's kind of a dull way to play, though. Jumping from bandwagon to bandwagon. A lot of players do this. When Adoulin launched they were MNK. Then they were RNG for HTB. Then SAM for Delve2. Now BST or GEO. I just don't see the point in chasing after the latest bandwagon job. You don't need to do that to clear content, if you have any sort of skill.

I guess it won't matter after November, anyway, lol.


Taeon and Acro have similar accuracy (for full sets), though Taeon I think has more DEX so it pulls ahead slightly? However, most SAMs don't swap into full ACC Acro/DEX gear nearly as quickly because we try to maintain our X-hit targets and JA/Hasso boost as far out as possible, or at least, I do. Dual-wielding jobs give up less in high-acc sets compared to SAM, I think? We are still very, very strong in situations with Koga where we can maintain a 4-hit- WSDmg Acro was a big boost to us as well, since Fudo is single-hit.

Doesn't matter anyway, seeing as the current band-wagon jobs are ridiculously easy to gear, its just the expenses of food and jugs.... but on our server (slyph) everyone under the sun is a cooker anyways.

Regardless, there will always be a band wagon job, and those who refuse to move to it are either die hards for other jobs. OR, understand and are smart enough to know that will probably change.
Stratagies change, it's just that doing the relevant content is just easier with these jobs rather than others.
I mean heck, most people don't even do delve anymore, therefore, good bullets and arrows for most are unaccesable after a certain point.

Not seeing that is silly.

Look at the pixies in escha atm, most do them with RNGs, but ive never had an issue with doing that fight with BSTs.

Constants, and variables.

What's happening in bahamut?

It's more about what gear you use. Due to constraints like Empyrean pants and the STP requirements of Koga, Sam TPs in 2/3 pieces of Acro, no accuracy on weapon, no accuracy on earrings, no accuracy in ranged. Blu TPs in 4 or even 5 pieces of Taeon if they don't have escha gear, double accuracy weapons, bladeborn/steelflash, ginsen, at least Accuracy Bonus II, it's really a large difference I find. So basically your optimal DD gear (multi attack mainly) gives much higher accuracy, the difference is probably not as high but still there when using high acc sets.

Job swapping to optimal jobs has always been a thing in MMOs, I remember the last boss of the last raid in WoW was optimal for Moonkin Druids so the world first guild has some kind of sketchy account sharing going on because they needed more players to play that specific spec/class. Obviously FFXI doesn't actually require you to play any job to do any encounter really, but some of us still like to play optimally. It actually hurts me to switch to a job like Warrior because I see myself doing literally half the DPS I could be doing on another job, swinging slowly, WSing for absolute garbage, and even though I like the job I just won't play it because of that.