The Beast Within -- A Guide To Blue Mage

Yes I realized . My bad

Does the TA+3, Dex+6 and 20 attack on the NQ Adhemar Body trump Foppish Tunica's 3% crit rate for CDC? Seems like a decent alternative for those who can't get Pakicet, and maybe deserves a mention in OP? Seems better CDC piece than Rawhide.

Any tips on how best to take advantage of burst affinity?

Also, I have tested a couple of spells out but so far have not received great results with magic bursts on my self skillchains. Any particular spell that seems to be better than others for that?

The ones you learn from hybrid elementals are very strong. With enough casting time reduction at precast, you should be able to reliably MB your own SCs with one of those nukes, such as Tenebral Crush.

BA is also really good w/o magic bursting given you have 15/15 burst affinity bonus from JP categories. Mix that with empy feet and the damage boost is really significant.

You don't need the BA JPs to make BA worth using outside of magic bursts. Most of the damage increase comes from the doubled WSC.

Rawhide A is actually a bit stronger than Foppish, both NQ and HQ. However, they're both solid when it comes to accuracy needs.

Basically, you want to be using BA whenever it's up in a nuking situation. As Kite said, the main draw of the ability is the massively increased WSC. You don't even need to burst to see some pretty absurd numbers. If you can burst, though, you'll obviously want to save it for that.

Our new dual elemental spells are your best bet for BA and nuking in general (outside of subduction).

Enforcer's is a good bit stronger than Rawhide and slightly stronger than NQ Adhemar. I just didn't include it due to absurd rarity. You have a significantly higher chance of getting HQ Adhemar than you do of ever seeing Enforcer's.

To my knowledge, only one Enforcer's has ever been found, whereas there have been quite a few Jinxed Jackets being made.

And yes, Abnoba is superior. We use a double PLD and magic bursting setup for Vir'ava and he's not bad at all. If you really want to, you can focus on killing his add, but it takes a good bit of time and it's generally better to just have somebody tank him away from the group.

saying anything meaningful regarding rarity would depend on how many of those mobs have been killed opposed to how many jinxed jackets have been attempted, as well as whether each of those numbers is large enough for a statistical test to be run with enough confidence in the result.

I was just making a comment offhand. I'm not about to conduct a statistical analysis of the rarity of an item in FFXI. I'll include Enforcer's in the OP since it seems to be such a big deal for people.

Question - Best place to learn spectral floe?

the usual answer for this is alluvion skirmish in Yorcia, but I got mine in Hennetiel; there is a secret beach near one of the waypoints where they spawn.

Our group is PLD/WHM/SCH/GEO/GEO/RDM. If we have more than 6, we do PLD/PLD/WHM in one party and nukers in the other.

If your SCH doesn't have the 550 gift, might be a good idea to bring two.

If our PLD doesn't time Fealty properly and gets charmed, we just sleep him and break/bind/gravity Vir'ava and wait it out.

I wouldn't bother trying to melee it, its evasion is absurd. Had SV madrigal/DEX etude, Bolster non-idris precision/torpor and acc was still pathetic. We went with BLU BLM SCH WHM GEO and used August to tank it (was during campaign so might need a real PLD now, not sure.) BLU popped the NM and had the adds go after him, can sleep them with Dream Flower and kept defensive buffs up. SCH SC'd and GEO/BLM/SCH magic bursted it to death.

I was thinking of Vepar when discussing the single add, as that's the one that does a ridiculous amount of debuffs.

During the few times we went with one PLD, we never had him get charmed, so we didn't have a contingency for the adds, so I can't speak to that. I highly suggest the double PLD setup because of the adds. And I would not suggest melees. I had something around 1600 effective accuracy and still wasn't close to capping hit rate. Magic bursting is a safer and more efficient strategy.

Morimar Basalt Fields is also excellent, as snow weather is really common there. I found this one the easiest of all the elemental spells to farm due to the frequent pops. Don't remember exact positions, but surely you can track them down on widescan, I recall a couple pops near one of the lakes in the central to northern section of the zone.


If you know any PUPs with a good automaton tanking set, this is a pretty good spot for an automaton tank (immune to charm).

Quoting again this really excellent post-Escha to-do list from a few pages back.

But one question about the Zitah stuff... why get "all of the Psycloth/Rawhide gear"?

Rawhide I definitely understand. Body/feet absolutely, probably hands, and even head and path D legs have a justifiable use for refresh.

Psycloth I don't really get at all, unless you have other mage jobs that use the gear. What pieces are people actually using on BLU? Legs for M.Acc I guess (for non-damage spells, wouldn't want to give up the massive MAB of something like Hag+1 for nukes), and... what else? None of these besides the legs even show up in any sets on the OP. I don't use any other Psycloth jobs so I haven't gone for these and haven't really missed them. Am I overlooking something?


I've seen several people mentioning BA on *self* SCs. What kind of hybrid spell loadouts are you guys using where you do both self SCs and MBs? Completely understand one or the other, but not both at the same time (at least not expecting to do a particularly good job at either role if you're setting both at once).

I feel it's generally just gimping your melee damage if you're also setting nukes and the additional traits to make them really good. And vice versa, if you're doing a nuke loadout you're probably setting a lot fewer good melee spells and should just go all out on the magical stuff. I've always felt gearing exclusively for one or the other role is the best way to go - do people disagree?

I should have clarified when it comes to Psycloth. Legs and head are great (head for FC/MACC), and hands are decent if you don't have a better nuking option. I just said all because I do use each piece for different jobs.


And no, you really shouldn't be setting hybrid spellsets outside of niche situations. The only nukes I suggest being in a general DD set would be Tenebral Crush and Diffusion Ray for defense down and STP trait, respectively. Don't forget that in a typical DD setup, you don't have your MAB traits set. Any nuking you do is going to be much less effective than if you were set up properly for it.

You don't need a hybrid spell set to use nukes. Tenebral has a place in regular melee sets and can be used for a fairly strong MB even without MAB set or a hybrid main/offhand sword.



Although I had a couple more magic oriented buffs than usual in this particular instance (had malaise, possibly INT down from Conflag, the corsair was giving me Wizards for whatever reason. It was a strange pickup that wasn't used to having a melee). With just Malaise (not a bad idea even in a melee setup if you have multiple GEOs and/or have room for a superfluous Entrust) and our own -MDEF, the damage is more like 32k on the enemies without strong MDT/MDB. This is with Tizona/Nibiru, not a hybrid sword setup and no MAB set.

Sweeping Gouge.

I've tried out the whole self SC into MBing Crush or Anvil Lightning or whatever and just haven't been too impressed. It looks pretty but the numbers don't seem to be worth it to me to use any nuke spell without a nuke load out or nuke buffs.

It's still useful in few situations. Magic burst dmg+ cap in gear and BA with Diffusion ray or Anvil lightning off CDC/CDC is going to be over 10k typically.

Yeah, that's my experience too. If I'm meleeing, I'd rather just keep swinging to produce more self-SCs and let my party members MB off them. While self SC+MB looks flashy, it's just not as effective as all out melee and more CdC spam (and more SCs for my backline mages, if any, to do the nuking on).

Not to mention that for non-Tizona BLUs, you're probably more concerned these days about MP conservation thanks to often wanting to cast Mighty Guard whenever it's up. Tenebral is a pretty expensive MP spell to be casting when you're probably not getting heavy refresh support. You might get a couple nice looking MBs, but they come at a cost it's not even substantially better overall damage than just dishing out more CdCs.

Psycloth legs can also be augmented with FC+7%, which is second best in slot (there's an 8% piece from Neo-Limbus).

The problem is that 10k for casting a spell and using BA isn't exactly good. You'd do more just continuing to swing and CDC.

Which is why I said depends on the situation. That isn't always the case.


I just posted a strat w/BLU and I don't see why you would need two PLDs tbh.