Farming Abyssea: Blue Mages

After the last entry about abyssea farming I was anxious to try it out. Last Saturday I got my chance and it turned into a very good farming run. Building lights on VNM didn't work out so well. We couldn't find enough of them up, so we just built them the old fashioned way. We had two BLU's and two BLM's to start with. I pulled on RDM then did Accession Phalanx when mobs were slept at camp. I had the BLU's both sub PLD for Sentinel. It did help but later on when Cyrille was the only BLU left, we managed to keep him alive with curespam in between sleepgas after Sentinel wore off. Even though it's not necessary, I'm not sure what other sub would have helped more.

BLM's occasionally threw in nukes, but since we were on frogs they did measly damage. Whirl of rage was the big winner doing some very impressive numbers when buffed with drinks and the like. Tail Slap, despite its description of "area attack", turned out to be a conal attack. So it should be ignored in my previous post on the subject. I wonder how Battle Dance would have done. Some magic AoE BLU spells could work in other situations when your target doesn't resist them as much.


Pulling on RDM I used a setup of 43% physical damage reduction (daytime) with Phalanx and Stoneskin. Had I subbed BLU and left the Accession Phalanx to someone else it would have been much more comfortable. Still, due to them not pathing efficiently around the lake or when the train is large, I didn't have to constantly take hits, which ranged roughly from 10-50 on non-critical hits during daytime (when Umbra Cape's hidden effect was not up). It could have been the frogs themselves being weak, but is seems like any number of jobs could manage pulling the train. Even if you're lacking some gear you could send a healer along for building the train. Since only the initial claimed mob has the puller on hate list, the puller can supertank the rest of the train while being curebombed.

I'm afraid I don't have the parse with me right now, but I'm convinced we were killing mobs faster than any other 'traditional' EXP alliance I've been part of so far. Now maybe that doesn't say much about our speed and more about the general gimpness of pick-up alliances, I still think this can be a much better way to EXP when you're providing it for a bunch of low level jobs that can't contribute beyond opening chests. Especially because we essentially never needed more than 4 people and could lower that number further with some optimizations.