The Beast Within -- A Guide To Blue Mage

strong aoe buffs, high attack speed, a strong ws that ignores resistances, decent survivability, flexibility, virtually free potent stuns. there are a lot of advantages.

Thanks, anything else?

Harden shell is a 48~51% physical damage reduction and can be kept up for basically the entire fight.

Requiescat bypass -DT on mastop and wamoura (so you can do full damage on WS without exuviations). It also bypasses -DT on the bee. It's basically gonna speed up kills on 3/6 NMs so it's worth using if you can.

Really enjoying Blu in delve now. The update allowed deviation from accepted set up without too much performance drop. Blu all the things!

How is everyone getting these great numbers on the physical blu spells!? Highest I can hit is 2.3k CA Quad

Requiescat doesn't seem to bypass Wamoura DT.

Yes that's pretty much what i'm getting. What did you expect on the nms?

I got really bizarre numbers on Chapuli but I didn't experiment much elsewhere.

Physical spell damage is wildly varied by target level. The occasional 4K quad cont. VS fodder isn't a realistic number for NM's. Even if they boosted physical spells the way people are reporting, you're still going to be far more effective using them only to skillchain and focusing on melee damage. It's a good way to make quick work of adds if you aren't automatically sitting on 100+TP.

Oh. It also does not bypass uragnite -DT... not that it matters.


Adoulin mobs have no level correction. Target level shouldn't matter, but correct me if I'm wrong. The problem is usually the high defense of the NMs vs. low BLU attack.

I don't know enough about the math for blu attack, someone like Proth will have to break it down further. IDK if relative stats are the reason or if its just a matter of def.

I was just speaking as a rule that level difference drastically changes your damage.

I haven't observed level difference to be an actual thing in Adoulin aside from how the game rewards you with XP. The only thing that's holding blue magic back is its incredibly poor attack score; you are at floored ratio on nearly any type of Adoulin monster regardless of what spell you're using (besides maybe Goblin Rush and Vanity Dive).

We'd need +skill to add to attack as well as additional methods of raising blue magic attack to overcome this issue; for example, making Triumphant Roar (or a new spell) affect blue magic attack in addition to how it already affects normal attack. As it stands, we've only had a boost of, at best, 30~40 blue magic attack since Adoulin came out, and that's all from STR. Not nearly sufficient.

I'm hoping that one of our Adoulin spells will do what I said above, and in addition the physical ones should have very high attack bonuses similar to Vanity Dive.

So I haven't touched BLU since pre-delve and I just decked out my BLU with Manibhozo and Tharuandant Hat and tojil sword/halc sword rank 15 etc. I'm really disappointed in the damage BLU magic gets from main hand skill. I was fighting Colonization Reive enemies and my Heavy Strikes with +130 STR were doing 1.4k, Quadratics with CA were doing 2kish, Delta Thrusts were 750-800. I was really disappointed as these numbers are what I expected pre main-hand skill buff. I guess I was expecting like 1.8-2k heavy strikes 3k Amorphics/Quadratics. My DRG rocks Reives for 5-7k WS, hits mobs for 700 non crit meanwhile the sum total of 2 swings in an attack round were 250-350 with 1.2k attack(RCB+Triumphant Roar). Maybe I'm just eyeballing too much but Blue Magic doesn't seem much stronger. Also Requiescat with more or less the gear posted for max damage was doing 2000-2.5k with 1.2kish attack again compared to 5-7k on DRG.

While the base dmg from BLU spells might be higher than before, we need vastly more Blue Attack because these level 110-115 mobs probably have 700-800 defense and our Blue Attack is probably still 550ish from skill, skill+ gear and STR/2. Dunno if Main skill boosts Blue Attack and not just Blue Physical DMG or vice versa but I was underwhelmed at Blue spell damage post SoA.

So it's just a function of your actual blu attack? It's not affected by enemy stats at all or the ratio is floored BECAUSE of enemy stats?

Ratio is always your attack against the enemy's defense, the problem is that enemy defense is too high and blue magic attack is (and always has been) too low.

edit: well I lied, almost always. cannonball uses your DEF in place of blue magic attack!

Thanks again for the info. And yea, if it wasn't clear, I don't need to be sold on BLU being strong in general, BLU ftw. I just wanted to know what unique strengths BLU brings to the table for that specific zone.

So when'll we start seeing gear that beats AF+1 body for spells?

Does Requiescat count as magic damage for the likes of matamata/perdurable raptor/kurma?

I don't know how it affects the raptor, but I can say that MDT+ does not affect requiescat (nor does MDT- affect it). Thus, kurma will not take additional damage from requiescat after harden shell. Versus matama, it would depend on whether the matama's MDT and SDT (I'll just call it "special damage taken" for now) are both increased/decreased by physical/magical. My guess is that matama will take normal requiescat damage no matter what phase he's at, but I have absolutely no experience to back it up. I'm just assuming that his PDT and MDT are affected, and nothing else.

Regardless, it's best not to think of requiescat as magic damage at all. It is unaffected by MDB and MDT. So it probably would not affect the raptor at all. Depends whether raptor freaks out because of both magic damage and special damage.

Edit: actually I do have some experience to back up the matama claim, but it's on the craklaw in foret. If you attack only with formless strikes, magic damage goes way down, but requiescat will remain unaffected.

I've just noticed that some magic immune mobs take 0 from Requiescat, so I'd like to make sure I don't screw up a run if I actually get to come as BLU at some point.

Do you happen to remember what said magic immune monsters are?

Certain mobs in Limbus that are magic immune take 0 damage from requiescat as well as physical blu magic.

I was thinking of the mobs in Limbus, but I've seen other examples of Requiescat behaving as if it is magic damage.

For example, the puddings in a certain salvage area that must be killed while their head is spiky but lose the spikes when taking magic damage. They are extremely weak to magic damage, and Req does absurd amounts of damage to them AND counts as magic damage that resets their spiky head mode.

^ this.


I think it's also possible that formless= magic dmg too? I remember lonnnng time ago a random morimar fail PUG has someone formlessed on raptor and it raged.

It's the weapons on the top floor of limbus that don't take requiescat dmg.

Oh yeah the puddings are interesting. That reminds of neo-nyzul on BLU. I guess they gain MDT+ and SDT+. There's really no way to answer the raptor question without trying it. It's more of a question of, will the raptor rage due to special damage taken, not necessarily is requiescat magic damage.

Formless is definitely (some sort of) magic damage. It is affected by MDB or MDT or whatever the giant krab in foret gains after bubble curtain. The log says MDB, and quick draw is affected by it, so I assume it's that. I thought someone on BG showed that MDB didn't affect formless though, so I don't know. All I do know is that formless and requiescat are not the same damage type.

Some tests have shown Formless to be very close to being breath damage, although not 100% accurate in every breath confirmation test.

Formless does not damage enemies that are immune to breaths, so...

Most things line up, but stuff like those flans in salvage who change spike phases are anomalies; actual breaths from wyverns and BLUs don't cause them to change their state, however formless does.