Jack Of All Trades: A Guide To Red Mage

Tried my first time on D and managed to win, uuuuh.
15 mins so pretty slow I guess.
Wasn't hard, but it's annoying to check when debuffs wear, wish there was a specific packet for that :-P

Monberaux died pretty fast though so I guess I'm gonna go with just geo trusts next time.
Guess Cornelia makes a real difference for this!


I didn't bother to remedy the -10% all stats stuff, should I? Used Remedy only once for Para, haven't been afflicted with any other debuff.
Well Doom a few times but Holy Water with Nycander, Blenmot+1 and Purity is extremely accurate.

Yeah and on VD, he shreds your trusts very fast.

Pancea is what works on the stat downs. If you're not noticing a large difference in your damage output, I wouldn't worry too much. I usually ignored them unless time was getting tight and I needed to finish.

Duuuh right, it's panacea for those. Brainfart!

Stage 3, not so much. Most groups running daily are probably getting close to, if not already upgraded to, a stage 3.

I wouldn't consider myself or the group I run with, top tier but I am 1 or 2 more runs from a stage 3 horn and someone else already has their horn. Recently our average run has been 2+2 (2 top floor, 2 basement), good runs are 3+2 and our best is 4+2. A few weeks ago our average run was 2~3+1. We do have bad nights (our Dhartok is remarkably inconsistent). The group size is not consistent but we do run daily. We avg 4~5 players, rarely 6 and sometimes just 2. There are 3 of us that can 2box when required but we all prefer to play a single char in Sortie.

All of that is just to say that: If you have been running sortie since the beginning, without missing to many days and you started saving for a prime when stage 3 was unlocked, you will likely be able to upgrade to a stage 3 prime soon.

Being able to play RDM or having a RDM in our group is a significant boost to our groups performance. We run as a melee setup. Our "best" setup so far has been WAR, DRG, COR, RDM, BRD and WHM.

This is the least invested in an end game grind I've ever been in this game and I'm at 800k after upgrading a couple pieces and taking more days off than on.

Excluding DM augs, Waist and Back slots, which are the Dual Wield options RDM has access to?
I can think of these ones, but I wonder if I forgot something due to augments:

Deacon Saber
Taeon armor set (5% aug)
Chironic armor set (5% aug)
Suppanomimi
Eabani
Carmine Cuisses +1 (6% aug)

Anything else? Well there's the Adoulin Ring lol
I seemed to recall a DW neck but I can't find any so I guess I was wrong.

Haverton Ring/+1 from SoA.

Yeah I mentioned that, doubt many people chose Haverton though.

I'm evaluating options to optimize damage in fights where you want to make use of Crocea enspells as one (but not the only) source of damage. Shinryu D and VD come to mind but there might be other fights like that.
In such scenarios you are unable to cap magic haste, so with just 30% you need a surplus of DW to get close to the attack delay cap.
With /NIN in theory you would need ~31% DW instead of the ~11% you need at capped magic haste.

So I was pondering on some options for some slots.
Regular Chironic and Taeon with 5% DW are imho not worth it in general, but please allow me to expand further on the options I mentioned:

So I dunno, the slot I have more doubts about is the Waist one.
Opinions? What would you do? What do you think would produce more efficient Shinryu kills?
Because honestly I'd rather take kills that are 1 or 2 minutes slower but are more reliable and require less attention/reflexes, over slightly faster kills but with more risk of failure.



Edit:
Emphasis on the fact that I'm talking about scenarios where enspell is an important source of damage but not the only one. Like think about Odin VD. For that I would say very different things of course.

My bad, it wasn't listed so I missed it skimming. I'm pretty much at your last point; I probably would take the slower kills to not have to deal with it.

Honestly Enspells are never going to be worth optimizing for outside cere strats. I do Shinryu with Excalibur and kor > savage > kor > burst is still unbeatable for dps when soloing - and now with Lehko's Ring I am able to 3step even with just haste2+11DW from my regular TP set (reiki + eabani), no need to cap haste (previously I was using reiki+eabani+dw cape and calling it "good enough").

Any other setup requires buffs, and at that point your buffing friend can just cap your haste and that's it imo.

Yeah! And that's the reason why I ruled out options like Chironic, Taeon and even Ayanmo+2.

But Reiki vs Orpheus is different because in theory it doesn't generate a loss in defense, so it doesn't increase the risk.
Both increment damage but in different ways.
One gives a pretty large boost to the enspell damage, the other slightly raises the WS frequency.

Despite me slightly leaning for Orpheus, I really can't say which of these two would provide the higher DPS boost in a fight like Shinryu.


@Lili
Yeah I read the strat you provided (thanks btw!) but I haven't tested it out because I do not own an Excalibur (yet!).
Granted I could probably do a very similar strat with Naegling, honestly.
On paper the Crocea Mors approach sounded "safer" to me mostly because of Bio3 instead of Dia3.

I think I must be misunderstanding what you said about Lehko's Ring though.
I mean I get how Lehko can manage to cap your gear haste more easily, allowing you to reach 26% even using stuff that would not let you normally (like Carmine+1 with their 6% haste rather than the tipical 9% in the same slot)

I don't get the part about needing "only 11% DW with Lehko". I mean you need only 11% if you are at capped MAGIC haste, but Lehko is gear haste and you're not capping magic haste with just Haste2... Unless you mean keeping Joachim/Ulmia alive throughout the fight to benefit from at least a March, but either way that has nothing to do with Lehko's ring?
I dunno, I feel like I'm having a brain fart here and missing something xD

That's probably the only change I'd make from my normal tp set. Reiki => Orpheus and tp back => Dual Wield. Whether or not it's better I don't know.

Edit: Excalibur~! Excalibur~! I'm from the United K, I'm looking for him, I'm going to California. (I won't link the song, promise.)

I had same thought once, I assumed Shetal Stone was a neck piece somehow. This damn icon look more like a necklace… You forged about delve earring set, Dudgeon and Heartseeker.

Thinking back on the Reiki vs Orpheus question, it's a hard one to tackle.
I wonder if Izanami's DPS calculation tool could be used to gather some unbiased data? But we lack Shinryu's stats, so...
To try a more mathematical approach, which clearly is not a field I'm comfortable with, I think we can examine the issue at hand somehow this way:

Total DPS = WD + WSD

WD is White Damage, WSD is WeaponSkill Damage.
I don't really know how my overall DPS is split in these two fields on Shinryu, but I get the feeling WD is quite large (>35%?). WSD average was probably around 14k, highly variating between 9k and 20k according to Shinryu's Wing Mode. I normally WS at >1700 TP so the frequency is not extremely large.

Orpheus gives an X% boost to WD.
Reiki gives a Y% boost to WSD. It doesn't boost the WSDA but it's a slight boost to the frequency.
So, over the same amount of time let's say 15 mins, there's gonna be a higher number of overall WS.

Now if I can get some rough estimate of how TDPS is split between WD and WSD and then I can get rough values of X and Y, I should be able to calculate which option will theoretically produce a higher DPS increase?
I... guess?

It has nothing to do with the haste, indeed.
Basically, ML50 Temper II + that tiny extra bit of Store TP that I get from my new tp set with Lehko's in it, enables me to 3 step reliably even without capped haste, with the same 11DW set that I use for capped haste. This was not the case previously.

(It was not a matter of "needing 11dw", it's just a matter of "hey I'm using the same 11dw and now I can 3 step while before I couldn't")

This is the set (Gleti is r30):


I don't think Bio 3 makes that big of a difference in safety really. The main danger of Shinryu is not its melee swings but his really hard hitting tp moves (and the doom), all of which are magical in nature I think. Cataclysmic Vortex is the main wrecker of fights, and that's magical at least.

Gotcha! Makes sense put this way ;-)

So I've tested 2 different setups on Shinryu D with 2 runs each (not a big sample, I know...)

Setup1:
Dia3 instead of Bio3
Naegling/Thibron
Red Curry Bun
Gain-STR
Savage Blade Spam
Reiki Yotai

Setup2:
Bio3 instead of Dia3
Crocea/Daybreak
No food
Gain-MND
Seraph Blade spam
Orpheus' Sash


Both setups seem to produce incredibly similar results.
~11 mins kill, ~1200DPS.

Now I guess I could try a setup3 that's identical to 2 but uses Reiki Yotai instead of Orpheus, and see if it's any different, hmmm...

Red Lotus blade is your hardest hitting move in there iirc.



Solo and obviously at max tp on spread wings stance.

Most common causes of death is getting greedy and sending a weaponskill while eating a vortex without mdt in return.
Or forgetting to stock holy water.

I saw an improvement to kill times by healing myself at 1k~ tp with sanguine over cure.

There was someone who mentioned Cataclysmic Vortex on D never doing above ~850 damage, and that's mostly true, but yet I've seen several breaking that "rule" and hitting me as hard as ~1450.
I'm of course talking about Vortex hitting me in my TP set, which has capped DT of course.

Also I doubt RLB can trump Seraph, considering I have Daybreak and Weatherspoon+1

Shinryu gets a general damage boost when wings are up, which applies to vortex. I believe that on VD, Vortex goes from doing 100% of your current HP to 150% of your current HP (reduced by MDT) when he puts wings up.

RLB does trump Seraph, as Shinryu halves light and dark damage.

When you were farming this hardcore, Geriond, which setups did you find produced fastest kills? Magic based ones (Crocea) or Physical damage ones?

Magic, using Crocea + Thibron. Spam Red Lotus Blade until you need to heal, then do Sanguine to heal up and repeat. I eventually managed to get it down to ~11 minute kills on average on VD, with my record being a little under 9 minutes.

I used Ulmia and Joachim, then the rest all passive bubbles; they died very fast, but they got 2 marches off on me before that; after engaging, stay turned away so they can get marches up before a Vortex oneshots them.

If you were using Joachim and Ulmia then I guess you were using Orpheus in place of Reiki Yotai, right?

The part I find the most annoying about Orpheus on Shinryu is that he's so big it becomes a problem to stay under 1,93 yalms

Yes, DW cape + Orpheus.

You don't have to worry about this, the game includes model size in distance calculations, while addons do not do that because it's impossible to know exactly what the math is most of the time. Proof is that your addon is telling you "hey you're 6' away" but the game considers you at 3', and you can melee - you can hit Mireu/Sajjaka/Bumba from up to 8 away, for example.

TL;DR just stay a bit under melee range and orpheus will be correctly at max potency, or very close to it.

I've managed to bring D kills to ~7 mins or a bit under that. Bit above 1300 DPS, WSAVG was >17k.
Which differences should I expect on VD? Other than the obvious much higher HP of Shinryu.

Like for instance on D I barely ever get Paralyze from Gyre Charge or Stun from Dark Matter.
Should I expect the frequency from these to increase on VD?

Any new TP move on VD? Resists on spellcasting? Accuracy issues? (I was capped at 95% with Thibron on D...) Debuffs wearing off sooner?


The annoying part of Debuffs wearing on D is that they don't share timers. So Silence, Bio3 and Poison2 will wear off before Paralyze II, which will wear off before Frazzle3, Slow2, Addle2, Blind2 wearing off at roughly the same time. Distract 3 wearing off even later.

Some of these make sense given the different base duration/enfduration midcast gear, some others I'm a bit puzzled about, eh

Just tried my first ever VD run and honestly other than the higher HP and slightly higher damage received on my side, I didn't really notice anything different.
Went down in a bit more than 14 mins (of course no drop xD)

Oh yeah I got resisted once on Frazzle 3. The third time I tried to reapply it, with Shinyu at 4% health, it resisted my frazzle3 once.


Well I dunno what to do now. Given how I don't really spam this but do it every now and then, I should probably do VD for the slightly higher (?) chance of drop, uuuuh



Edit:
Oh yeah I found a somewhat noticeable difference.
On D even without food I was at perma 95% acc rate.
On VD with Grape Daifuku +1 I was at 93.5% acc rate.
Not sure if Distract fell off, not that I noticed?
I mentioned earlier I have this issue where Frazzle, Addle, Blind, Slow wear off roughly at the same time, but Distract seems to last forever for whatever reason.
My hypothesys is that Frazzle gets slightly resisted (so it ends up lasting almost as much as the other mentioned debuffs, 3mins base) whereas Distract does not, so it lasts the full duration (base of 5 mins).

New record, 9 mins! Don't you love it when he spams Cosmic Breath over and over and over and over and over? <3

Speaking of duration, if we consider Distract's 5 mins base duration (300s) + 20sec from Job Points * 1,25 Saboteur bonus = 400 seconds.
This value is then multiplied for the Enf duration bonus on gear (I have 50% in gear + 20% from Composure, assuming they work on same turn but they're probably not) = 680s i.e. 11,3 minutes.

Wheeee that's a long duration. Sorta explains why I never have to reapply Distract3 lol.
And Frazzle 3 wears off way sooner than that, I assume that being dark based duration gets halved because of half resist or something? I've never seen this happen to Blind II though, and that's dark based too, hmmm...

SlowII/AddleII/BlindII should last at least 7 minutes, and I feel they more or less last that much.
ParalyzeII and Silence supposed to last around 5 mins and I feel this is correct.
Actually a bit less that that but it makes sense because for those enfeebles I use Chironic Legs instead of Empy+3, which means 10% less duration from Composure.

Bio3 should last longer than Poison2 instead, whereas I see Bio3 wearing off before Poison pretty much always. I guess same deal as Frazzle 3? Dark based etc.
Never saw this happen to Dia III but, to be fair, I've only did one run using Dia in place of Bio so it could've been a lucky coincidence.

Bio is not an enfeebling spell, it falls under Dark Magic skill. So you should always see it fall off at 3 mins.

Side note Dia does not benefit from 'Augment Composure', so your duration will be shorter than expected from the above formula.

I thought Bio was an enfeeble magic based on Dark Magic Skill instead of enfeebling?
Kinda like the 6 elementals Enfeebles from BLM which use elemental magic if I recall.

I assume this is enough not to consider them "enfeebles" instead?