The Beast Within -- A Guide To Blue Mage

Depends on what you are fighting really. Expiacion with Tizona and Savage with Sequence are technically higher damage output, but in a zerg situation you are better off just using CDC(minus WoC).

I find myself using Expiacion more and more lately, just since some things are bad to skillchain on.

Savage trash cdc on Kin for me. 1k tp is close to 30k.

I don't have a tizona (no plans to get one honestly) so Almace will have to do I suppose.

CDC normally does low 20ks on anything of value with few spikes. Sounds like Savage may be something I should look into using (after aftermath is up obviously).

Reading the last handful of posts just got me thinking how I never use anything but CDC spam, but when I've tried Savage it seemed to put up respectable numbers with a half baked set for it.

Watching my buddy's decked out Sams (full HQ abj gear and whatnot) and a War geared as well as my blu is do work got me thinking I need to reevaluate my blu's DD capacity. Or gear another job for strict DD purposes, for fear of having to play geo more. I'm not getting trashed or anything, but not seeing myself at the top of a parse makes me reevaluate life. Although, I shouldn't be surprised that a pure DD with the best equipment out DDs a blu I suppose.

Tbh tizona is good on paper but doesnt seem to stack up to almace even on longer fights. If i were u, id focus on properly using cdc. From what it sounds like you might be wasting tp by not anticipating your own tp gain and using more weaponskills. Blus tp gain is gnarly so use it and get out more weaponskills. The white dmg from AM should be enough to keep u on top of parse if u dont have a rag war in party but lets be real, wars are cheaters and you know who you are haha. Savage is good but i recommend using sequence as a main, but you lose out on AM from almace so its kinda give and take.

Savage is definitely a very strong weaponskill to gear for. I don't advocate using it in every situation, but there are times where it shines.

While Savage can outperform CDC as a WS alone, I have never been able to find a general setting where your overall DPS does not suffer. Sequence mainhand offers the ability to shoot off 1.75k Savages at 1k, allowing for some very strong WSs, but your white damage suffers significantly.

Tizona/Almace with Expiacion at ~1.5k TP comes close, but still falls behind solely focusing on CDC.

I still heavily suggest building proper Savage/Expiacion sets, as there are situations in which using those over CDC will be overall beneficial. Some examples would be situations in which you don't want to SC (Maju, Onychopora, Gin, Kin) or the mob has a (presumed) Crit defense bonus trait, such as WoC.

As far as Tizona's place, it's a utility and solo weapon. I use it on every mini-boss and boss fight in Omen, as having the ability to constantly maintain defensive buffs and party heals with absolutely zero MP concern is unbelievably helpful. Tizona/Almace also offers lower attack rounds until WS and overall stronger CDCs in comparison to Almace/Sequence. So, if you're the sole DD focusing on damage, or need the utility with MP management, Tizona/Almace will win out. In super-buff situations with multiple DDs, Almace/Sequence, with that ridiculous white damage, is your absolute best bet.

Edit: Nevermindz. Super mega late post and wans't paying attention.

Generally I like Tizona/Almace over Almace/Sequence. Unless the fight is really short. A little less damage, but having pretty much unlimited MP where mages may be 2box'd or just to alleviate some burden from the WHM is the reason I prefer it.

Good thoughts.

Where I feel I start to lose some usefulness is when we have multiple geos and tons of buffs where it's all out dmg that is necessary. Empy wielding sam and rag war competition is stiff. i need to parse to get a feeling of how far we are off as I haven't on anything that matters but I've always topped the parse on stuff before I played with them but doubt I would against them in a Zerg situation.

Just eyeballing numbers they were putting out on ws in a delve run on the bosses were north of 30k left and right without even trying. Then 4K crits on regular hits ... I've got my work cut out for me.

I was botted for one of the new omen nms with the sam going pld and he said my Blu just couldn't do enough damage in time so he rather go on his sam and swap me to geo. Not sure how his sets for me are but his perspective was his sam did substantially more dps.

As much as the uninformed will cry and complain and whine otherwise, BLU is not the best DD right now. AG Masamune SAM is the current strongest theoretical physical DPS, given optimal gear and buffs.

From what you said, your SAM friend likely has the best gear available to him right now, and I would assume that you are not in the same boat. Look to your own gear improvement and see how you compare after some significant upgrades.

As I said, BLU is not the best DD, but it is the best utility DD. No other job can provide the benefits a BLU does while still dealing very respectable DPS. You should still strive to perfect your DD sets as best you can, but understand that it is not always solely damage that you can contribute to a group.

Yeah, that is why I like Tizona mostly over Almace main. Provides you with the best utility.

Wonder how AG Rag War stacks up now with Utu grip with Argosy proving so much dex

Anyone got an updated Mote spreadsheet they can link me?

Where's the validation for this?


The same statement on all accounts. I find SB vs CDC to depend heavily on what buffs you have. I've also never found Savage Blade to outperform CDC in either a spreadsheet or an actual parse or any verification that WoC has critical defense bonus.

In the SS using Sequence with SB has one of the highest DPS outputs. With my set on something like Serac Rabbits had it doing almost 27,000 dmg at 1000 tp.

That seems very anecdotal. I have literally out parsed other BLU by 3x in Ambuscade. The difference in gear and playstyle is a huge factor. Even on characters with nearly identical gear using an addon to spam weaponskills, I find variations of +/- a marginal 10% in our own DPS rates on the same mob with the same buffs.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to be a cynical, although I am bothered by how quickly and unquestionably something becomes cannon on these forums (WoC critical defense bonus, SAM best DD, SB > CDC, etc.) merely because someone stated that it was so.

Still mostly use CDC, it just depends on the mob all together and who I am in the party with

Is pure nonesense, just because you can toss 2bil worth of gear into in one job, surround it with stupid buffs on situational nm's doesnt make it best dps.

Here you go if you don't trust others:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B38hAR5yeCu2dWFnemNSTl85NGM/view

You should be able to get somewhere around 6500-6800 DPS by just capping attack/accuracy and using 0 QA Valorous, 7800~ with COR rolls and 11000~ with all of the above with WAR's Warcry and SAM's SP2/SP1 combo(60% WSDMG when charged and a currently unaccounted(assumed favorable) amount of extra TP). There's also SAM's unparalleled ability to multi-step skillchain and even the fact that spamming Fudo will also produce decent skillchain damage, which isn't accounted for in those numbers.

It isn't until you start taking things like the ability to overwhelm, accuracy and attack away from SAM(and to the same degree WAR) that BLU starts to shine, which is a legitimate thing that happens on some content, especially with lowman setups or when /nin is required.



This applies to you:

Chapuli huh? i'm getting 1k dps more using same settings without relying on am3 and hq gear.

Meanwhile real samurai's Cry over those 3k missed fudo's.

I'm not sure you realize I have a better geared BLU than you do, Jaja. I'm fully aware of BLU's capabilities.

And yet sam>blu on trash? i dont get what you trying to say.

That DPS sheet is from the SAM forum provided by Llewelyn and Nightfyre. Its gear is not updated with previous update's new gear nor are the base sets or buff/mob selection optimal... DIY

Wanted to send pm since I'd like to avoid AH drama, but decided to post here for the sake of finding an answer anyways. I used exactly the same set that you sent a while ago and here is the result.



4/5 QA+3 valorous, DA+10 ambuscade back.



4/5 10 STR 5% WSD valorous.



Masa AM3 up.

Unless I'm doing something really wrong I'm just not getting 6500 dps without COR roll. Target was set to trivial so attack is capped.

I can only get that low when turning overwhelm and meditate off, but can't really speak much to your SS without looking at the actual file. Mine with exactly the same gear as your SS is 6631.

I turned on everything that I can think of, unless meditate over time value is wrong.



I can send you the file a bit later, but I need some sleep first :S This is BLU forum anyways, would rather see the discussion back on BLU.

I rather like the sam talk. :)

My hunch has always been that sam is one of the best DDs with Empy weapon vs equally geared blu (which we know is quite good too). Obviously, stuff is situational, but if I could use my OTD almace on both hands, that would significantly increase my damage output (what 2 handers get the benefit of) or offhand REM effects work in offhand...

ANyway, Sam has little utility to the party and is there for pure DD so it would make sense that it would out dps a job like blu that can do so many things well. I haven't done any hard experiments, but plan to. What I've heard from speaking to my friend with empy Sam and uses a Rag War, echos what Elgin is saying. Sam is just ridiculous when geared/used properly. Blu wrecks the house against lesser geared folks and in situations where you need a ton of acc/cant cap it on Sam, but generally speaking Sam and to an extent War with the right gear/weapon seems to be on another pure DD class.

The parsing I did do was on a trash (ish) mob right when I got Almace AG on MOrta during VW campaign. Well geared Sam without HQ Abj gear or Empy weapon wasnt all that far behind me (maybe 10%) on the average kill but we weren't both at full buffs either. Granted my gear was better at the time and has gotten slightly better since but with adding the Empy weapon and now has better gear, I suspect I'm a solid 10% behind now, but have no evidence to back that yet other than others claims and the dps spreadsheet. My biggest surprise was not how often they can ws (it's a sam, that's what they do), but how hard their ws hits too.

I saw the new SAM spreadsheet on SAM forum, Ill check later.

There is very, very little reason to care about the dps job type in 2016 anyways. With all that OP REMA, random aug gear, DM aug, HQs, majority of your dps will come from the quality of your gear and your ability to manage those gears.(bolded for the importance since people often miss this part) The gap between gear quality > gap between dps jobs for most situations, unless you are comparing SAM WAR DRK BLU with something like melee whm.

People with REMA and HQ will do more dmg obviously, but a lot of times DM augment is really what makes the difference since the aug variety is so wide and you can get nearly unlimited combination for various situations to push dps higher by creating different situational sets. This is unlike a few years ago that everyone all run around with a few BiS sets and DPS hierarchy is very easy to tell.

I mean, back in the past I've seen REMA HQ DD deal 2x more dmg than equally geared and dedicated REMA HQ DD with better gear managing ability and stronger set variety. The gap is so huge that it's almost unreal, this is unlike a few years ago that people copy and paste sets on forums and swap them fast enough can at least get somewhat close. In real FFXI you will notice greater gap between player and much smaller gap between jobs.

From my observation with spreadsheet, fudo just scales extremely well with wsd dm aug. Many other ws, such as CdC, doesn't get that much increase with equal amount of crit hit dmg augment. You'll probably never see 99% of REMA SAM reach that kind of DPS.

Anyways, my point is, stop be jobbists and shout or ask for X, Y, Z jobs only. But hey, we are lazy, pt organizors are lazy, so 90% of time pt organizors just want a quick and fast way to get quality DD, therefore asking for X job, Y REMA, Z HQ became the fastest way to filter out bad DDs.

So yeah, I acknowledge that SAM has the potential to pull off good dps, but Im still going to argue it's because of gears, not because of the job being the best dps.

Can't say I completely disagree with you as you make valid points. My thought is Sam (the job itself) has many buffs that increase its DD potential. Blu has some traits that are quite good, but I think Sam wins when you look at all the traits and JAs they have, even when comparing to what Blu gets via spell traits. Let's be honest, we don't really get much in the way of traits/JAs that boost our melee DPS. We have to sub war if we want some DD boosting love. Most of our cool spells can be given by outside buffers so unless we're limited on what our GEO can give us, no one has haste 2, etc., we're not coming out ahead.

Another place where it gets interesting is in gear choices. Have you looked at all the ridiculous stuff war/drk/sam can wear? I mean all that QA gear that is out now? They flat out have better options for straight DD gear.

Always player skill and ability to manage gear swaps will be a HUGE factor, but with ashita/windower gear swaps doing the work for you, that's really not a huge factor anymore unless you're just slow on hitting your ws macro (or just not using them - you'll get smoked no matter what gear you have on hand if you're not). Come to think of it, you can set up conditions to where your xml in ashita will ws/buff/whatever for you to further optimize your damage and turn your char into a zombie while you watch it work.

Reminds me of an argument I had recently with an online acquaintance, I mentioned I have been playing XI again and they brought up how they enjoyed XI too but probably will never play again because "BLU exists so there's no point in playing any other job". I laughed because I thought they were joking but they got real upset about it so I just let them be with it, didn't seem like anything I could say would change their mind on the matter.

On slightly different note, finally recently cleared all of Zitah T1's with my friend and we managed to killed Nosoi! Got my Niburu Blade offhand so finally starting to make some progress on catchup.

It is more about the variety of gear choices in various conditions, less about hitting ws macros fast enough. BUT script does make set management a LOT easier than handling everything manually.

Dpsing in FFXI all about paying attention to small details and it takes a lot more than just swap a few sets from forum or well known players. You can get crit/crit dmg/multi hit/stp from aug and all those gear combination only produces optimal dps under certain buffs, condition. The amount of dps a dd player can do completely depends on amount of situational sets that they have.

For example, assuming there are 2 HQ REMA players parsing against each other:

1) player A has a perfect lua copied from a well known player, and perfect ws/tp set from the forum or spreadsheets.

2) player B has ability to write custom lua for different content, has perfect ws/tp sets, has blind up(more acc)/down(less acc) sets, amnesia up(no stp more da and crit)/amnesia down(more stp) sets, haste/flurry/slow up/down sets(dw/no dw), ws at mob 5% hp sets(100 acc lower due to only 1st hit landing), bolster frailty up set(no attack more crit, stat mod, stp) bolster frailty down set(more attack), crooked sam up/down sets, various tier of stp depending on sam number, ws at 3000 tp set etc etc.

I can promise you, player B will do way, way, way more dps than player A due to better set managements, probably more than 40%, I wouldn't surprise if it's 100%.

Now if you combine all those niche situations that can utilize one million different sets, and the fact that augment system can generate unlimited combination of offensive stats, it's near impossible to hit the so called "theoretical max dps".

All the best, of the best, of the best dps players has 200+ pieces of gears, and write their own scripts to utilize all those conditional swaps. Since your conditional swaps will vary depending on content as mobs all has very different mechanics, someone with the ability to write code will still outperform people that can't code and ask for GS help every single time, then just settle with cookie cutter lua scripts that just get the job done.

This is very different from a couple of years ago, when most of the BiS gear were reallly BiS in most of situations, and mob mechanics/buffs weren't nearly as complicated as today.

Anyways, sorry for the wall of text. tl;dr, Snaps sums up everything in 1 sentence:



I totally agree with him and I think it's incredibly unrealistic to talk about "theoretical max dps" these days anymore. Saying X DD is the best DD under X, Y, Z condition is just unrealistic because in game it's a lot more complex.

I haven't get time to check new sam sheet yet, but I'll just assume I did something wrong with spreadsheet and 6500 dps is correct number, and we could all agree that top tier SAM is still top DD.

But best DD that > everything else? Still a big question mark, really. I'm not 100% convinced just like Snaps. I know Ejiin can do great dmg......with great gears that is.