DRG @ 99

It's not STUPID to be talking about it. Obviously it's situational, but aside from having to remove status effects, Blu subjob is sub looks superior to me.

I'm in a bit of a toss up for which mage sup i prefer.

at 75:
/Blu : Cocoon, Sprout Smack, Wild Oats
Really for anything i don't see myself needing bar spells or sneak the ability to land Slow even if it's only minor is very nice.

/Rdm : Bar-
I dunno why i started doing Campaign as /Rdm but I feel more comfortable on it

/Whm : Bar-, Erase & -na
If i need a tele... I'll get on whm

/Sch : Sublimation, Dark Arts/Aspir & Sleep, Light Arts/-na
Lacking fast trigger spells, but you can land sleep & aspir along with getting some -na's and can front load sublimation just in case your runnin low on MP

at 99:
/Blu : Refueling
/Rdm : Haste, Convert, Refresh
/Whm : Haste, more tele's
/Sch : lol.Accession

I imagine I'd play just about the same...
/Blu : do i need cocoon to live?
/Rdm : long endurance fight?
/Whm : do i need to tele- myself to get there
/Sch : am i just dicking around?

/sam /blu(awesome). Nice to meet you :) refueling and more blu stat spells:3 /rdm /whm i dont like it for solo.. /blu is the way.

Yeah sorry about putting Blu down but mostly It depends on how you play...some ppl are good with /rdm or /blu or /whm w/e it depends on how u play.....I'm too lazy to lvl some mages for my drg <.<

tbh, I haven't noticed that much damage control from Cocoon. I still eat damage like an alcoholic drinks. I started out with /RDM because I hate healing, but eventually added /WHM for Raise and Reraise. I really don't want to add more levels to /WHM, either >.>

Funny we've even mentioned the unusual /SCH, but nobody's brought up /BLM :p

As others have said, it's situational. For Campaign, you can pry /WHM from my cold, dead hands. But do it fast, 'cause I'll be reraising in a second. I also like /WHM for Sea soloing, but I tried /BLU the other night and found it was working fairly well, even without status cures. And of course, I was 75 with /RDM before I ever leveled /WHM.

ymmv, use whatever you like. I think my base Attack drops a whole 14 between WAR and SAM vs WHM.

Also glad not to see /DNC even remotely considered >.> It doesn't work XO

For the most part, if/when i'm soloing on drg, i bring /blu. For my personal playstyle, the cast/recast speed, mp cost, and cocoon is hard to beat.

/rdm is nice, but i haven't found anything that REQUIRES me to be /rdm rather than /blu. On some occasions i do go /whm where things like erase and reraise can make or break winning/beating your mob. (like soloing Sheep in Antlion's Clothing)

In regards to new spells and abilities with /rdm (as 99 drg). Again I don't think it will fit my playstyle nor is it really game changing--

With convert: If you run out of MP i would think you're either fighting something too difficult, or using trigger spells that cost too much. Also, I can't imagine someone Converting while fighting, limiting it to be used in between fights.

Refresh: Being a 5 second cast (it will admittedly be less with fast cast of course) it will very likely be interrupted. Therefore the only time you would use it is before a fight. For longer endurance fights if you NEEDED the refresh to keep afloat on MP, you'll quickly run out of MP once it wears. (see convert)

Haste: This is very nice for recasts, and DOT in general as we all know. But depending on what you're fighting you are likely never constantly meleeing to truly get the benefit of it. People soloing will be interrupting their attack rounds when casting their healing breath triggers.... unless you're fighting something easy like lesser colibris. With recasts, both /rdm and /blu have enough spells to alternate HB triggers without worrying so much about it. I would say the same thing about the BLU spell refueling

Again, i'm not saying /blu is the end all, be all, but for me personally, I cannot see the benefit of /rdm over it.

Just like others said -- all comes down to preference.

(i do solo with ethereal earring, ares body, and usually have sanction refresh or whatever)

I think you all should be worrying about GRINDING ALL THOSE SUBJOBS TO LV49 before complaining about the strength of the combinations itself.

WHM37 took all my patience away, I don't think I'm gonna level it back..
I quit and got really excited when I saw the new updates; was thinking of coming back, but after reading the level cap is gonna be raised, only the sentence "Crap, gotta level all those painfully boring subjobs to 49? Riiiiiiight SE, you are not gonna have my money." came to mind.
This is BS, it's just giving the extreme nerds something to care about, pointless to raise the cap.

I think some of you are forgetting this is best sub at 99 not 75. /Blu gains pretty much nothing but refueling and um def bonus and some stat spells in that range. /Rdm gains a hell of a lot. If nothing else 5% more haste will speed up your kills, Fast cast get your spells off faster, Dia/bio 2. Refresh, Barspells (not only for HB but to help status effects a little), MDB, shell II, Pro III, ice spikes, dispel!!!

As far as defense goes lets compare cocoon to say just Protect III and bio2 and phalanx.

Assuming no improvement on +enhancing gear and no merits in enhancing the best phalanx a drg/rdm can get is 13.

I figure drg at 99 probably tp in 450 w/o food or cocoon/pro whatever. Let's say the lvl 108 mobs you are fighting have 700 att.

Cocoon will raise that def to 675 making your ratio 1.03. Assuming mob dmg is calculated same as ours on a single hand weapon mob that would come out to a pdif of .424-1.28

Will pro III will raise your def to 490 and bio II lower the mobs att to 628. So that would put ratio at 1.28. That would make pdif .716-1.58.

So with prot/bio vs cocoon you will take by 23.4%-68.8% more dmg before phalanx.

I'll assume a mob fstr+base dmg of 117 which would put dmg with cocoon at 50-150.

And with pro/bio/phalanx it would be 70-171. For a dmg gain of all of 20-21 per hit.


Assuming capped gear haste that extra 5% haste 8.3% in attack speed. While true you aren't just attacking you are HBing too well you are saving time to melee with fast cast.

You will shave probably like .075 off your cast time for HB triggers. Since pretty sure it rounds to .1 that might be .1 or nothing.

And the fact that cocoon last only 1 min vs 2min bio and 3min phalanx...

That 20-21 damage adds up. I'd even argue it probably balances out the additional 5% Haste as it means more time spent casting, so kill time is unchanged but the danger factor increases.

DRG can't quite cap gear Haste, 24% is our limit. Most will only have maybe 19% (5% difference is Dusk +1, VBelt, Wyrm Mail +1).

If you're going to argue casting frequency, remember that Refueling lasts 5 minutes and most soloists cycle in Cocoon as a trigger spell when it's about to wear off (yes, /RDM can do the same - just making the point). Also, get your duration right you silly BLU o_O It's 90 seconds.

Actually if you count weapon drg can get to 29%. But staffs aside 24% for now lol. If you don't think drg can scrap together 1 more haste in 24 lvls... well just look how haste gear is tiered already and how it starts kinda high vastly scales up with lvl especially at the end. I mean sure SE is dumb and lame... but I don't really see people wearing the exact same tp gear now at 99.

As far as the 20-21 dmg adding up I wasn't really factoring anything else in. If para from ice spikes procs just 1/6 attacks you already got that dmg back. Also there is the lowering the effectiveness of debuffs with barspells or elemental dmg with them. Not to mention all magic dmg /rdm will be 23% less before resist or phalanx. Danger factor is negilible at that dmg and the hp you will be at.

As far as dmg dealt well I wasn't factoring in alot like the bio dmg. Or the 13-21 enspell dmg you could do. Or dispelling buffs most mobs will put up. Or Dia II if you are handling dmg fine.

Either way /rdm brings alot in those lvls should bring it up to /blu solo or surpass it

i still want see what happened when they raised the lvl cap..
/blu will have more blu points new magic for status bonus and cocoon def increasce for sure..

Joining in the trend and necrobumping silly threads for absolutely no reason.

Drg at 99

xD

I'm new to DRG, why would /dnc be a bad thing?

because /mage cures are exponentially stronger and you get a better variety of traits. I can cure for more than waltz'es (sometimes 2-3x as much situationally) for 5-8 mp as often as I can cast dia, stone, footkick etc.

Each job presents its own bonuses as well. whm gives me self haste and hp regen/mdb to wyvern. blu gives me another self haste, cocoon. Also mage buffs are usually able to be empathy buffed on wyvern while nothing /dnc can do does.

It's like refusing to use one of the better aspect of drg soloing.

edit: I should point out that the "granting regen/mdb" is assuming that you have relic body and macro it in when you call wyvern.

In a solo'ing situation only, why waste your TP healing yourself when you could sub RDM heal yourself for more with 5 or 6 mp. With dynamis every day now I'm sure any good main DRG can get themselves a Wyrm Armet fairly easily. With a good Wyvern HP set there's no reason why you can't heal yourself for 500-600hp every couple seconds (1k or more every 5 minutes with Deep Breathing). Plus the many other benefits of a mage sub: Cocoon, Haste, Refresh, Phalanx, Dispel, Reraise, etc. I just really see no reason to ever sub DNC on DRG.

Although now that there is Restoring Breath it's a little different. Whenever I solo something where Restoring Breath every minute is enough to keep me alive forever I just sub SAM. So basically, /SAM for pure DD, /SAM for Easy stuff where Restoring Breath is plenty, /(RDM,WHM, or BLU) for soloing where Restoring Breath isn't enough.

Edit: Also, what Ashman said.

You're a bad man >=o giving into peer pressure!

Good points all around. I've just become so accustomed to going /dnc a lot lately with war and drk mains. I haven't subbed a mage job on a DD in a very long time, so I'm really out of practice with it. Just got a Wyrm Armet last night, actually.

you too are soooo true. (o and every one left out SCH) lol

Get an Ethereal Earring, your MP problems will be gone for good. You wont even bother wasting your time on Refresh.

The only use I can think of for /SCH is using Empathy to transfer Sublimation when fighting a mob that uses Sleepga. Even then, you'll be ***out of luck once it finishes charging since there's no way to make the wyvern use the completed charge. You'd have to be able to resummon it immediately and transfer the buff again. Aside from that, it's vastly inferior to /RDM, /BLU, and /WHM.

/sch has no good trigger spells. I dismissed it as soon as I saw it's spell list when the job came out. Sure, you can get decent enhancing and other skill levels but they provide little use for a drg solo situation over the benefits of other subs particularly considering they lack the spells that having enhancing skill would help.

Shouldn't you be writing a paper or something slacker?

Actually, I'm at work, but yes, I have plenty of programming I could be doing for school also...