It's Tenzen o'clock (and blue mage gear 2.0)

Wow! What a wild past few days it has been.

I have been on quite a roll lately with things I am doing in game and acquisitions of gear. Sinister Reign has been really good to me the past few days, so i'll talk about that in this post. I will also talk about how Project Afterglow is going as well as show off the current TP and WS gear on Blue Mage.

I especially want to thank contributors on the blue mage board of FFXIAH for helping me determine what the issue was with Thereoid Greaves and why they were showing a lower DPS. The reasons were twofold - #1, my WS set did not have enough accuracy to compensate for the addition of the Thereoid Greaves and the spreadsheet was predicting a drop in my weapon skill accuracy on a 125 mob - enough that the herc feet's augments and accuracy would be a better option. Also #2, had I turned on Aggressor from /war. The answer was no, and once I did that it made the DPS change be positive just by itself.

Ok so, on to the post!

Most of the past few mornings have been Tenzen o'clock

Tenzen

I have been doing my best to get in 7 rounds of Tenzen every day since I finished bringing Almace to 119. I have been doing more runs with members of my linkshells and starting my own via shouts and yells. A few people have been added to my friends list as well and they are usually on in the morning when I am. We have a pretty solid strategy and setup that works 99 times out of 100.

My Tenzen spell set is a modification of my DD spell set with a few changes. First, I remove Subduction and a tier of Store TP and replace those three spells with Tenebral Crush, Silent Storm, and Dream Flower. I also remove magic barrier and another spell to free up the points for these three. After buffing (and calling trusts when we are going with 3-5), I hit the tarus with SS, TC, and DF. We melee and WS Tenzen until he uses his 1 hour WS immunity. We then melee him down throwing a CA+Efflux Sinker Drill at him as well. Whomever has hate then runs out of range when he invincible/meikyo shisui's and he stands in place. At that point, I have to resleep the tarus unless Cherukiki 1/2 resists DF, then I sleep her sooner. Cherukiki is also immune to SS, so it is important to keep her slept. The ranged attacks from one of the other tarus are not nearly as annoying as a shadow eating slowga.

We bring at least 3 melee to each, and if people are on with jobs like cor, geo, or whm we bring them as well. I try to bring RR when possible if we do not have someone who can raise. We fill out the party with trusts and can usually win in 3-4 minutes.

We have a High-tier mission battlefield campaign going on right now that started this morning so it was nice to get a third box/case/parcel each battle on top of the two we were already getting. This already had a significant impact on the amount of boulders I turned in just from the 7 runs this morning.

As of today, I have turned in 4288 boulders. Additionally, I have 69 Beitetsu Parcels and 16 Beitetsu Boxes in my mog house along with 121 loose Beitetsu.

Sinister Reign Acquisitions

When I wasn't doing Tenzen or capping merits (more on that later), I was participating in or starting runs in Sinister Reign.

I have been spoiled by going on runs of this event with Kaht, our resident AG-Tizona/AG-Almace blue mage. He's a bulldozer hands down. When we go with him, we're usually done with the run in around 4 minutes, give or take 30 seconds. The only tough fight we have at times is Arciela because her Naakuul's Vengeance move can be flat out unfair. When we do runs without Kaht, we average 5 or 6 minutes per run. I have gone on PLD and on BLU to this event and am pretty successful with either.

We also found out last night that August makes a pretty darn good trust tank in SR. It's also funny to watch him tank himself.

I'm the real August!

So what did I win?

I have two Vampirisms with nearly maxed augments. Useful for situations where piercing damage is useful on blue mage. They also are fairly good for nuking on blue mage. I do not know if they are better than 2x Nibiru Cudgels right now, but they do seem comparable.

Brilliance (max): Whoopee. Because this is so much better than Burtgang. Oh well I had nothing else worthwhile as an option at the time, so it sits in my mog house.

Medium's Sabots (max): An improvement over the addition I got last time to my cure set on blue mage. I can almost hit 900 on magic fruit now.

Lengo Pants (max): Idle legs for blue mage. I had just said the morning before I got these that I needed to get some Rawhide Trousers so I could get more auto refresh on my blue mage. However, they are no longer needed thanks to these.

Jumalik Mail (max): And I had also expressed the need for a refresh body on Paladin that same morning. This also works as a cure potency piece for Paladin and allows me to change the augment path on my Souveran Cuirass to path A. Because of the max Loyalist Sabatons I received last week, I can now keep capped haste wearing Souveran Body as well as the three Sulevia +1 pieces I have been using (head, hands, legs). Those three pieces are terrific in a Hybrid set, allowing me to easily go past 1200 accuracy with just sushi.

Funny story about this is when I had this as a choice, I also had near max Samnuha Tights as well I could have chosen. Kaht told me at the time that the bigger need was having refresh on my PLD and that I would see the tights again. If they were max, however, Kaht said picking the tights would have been better.

Words of wisdom for sure!

Leyline Gloves (almost max): This allows me to put the Thaumas Gloves away, as they have a total of 7% fast cast. I can also use them on Paladin, and this puts my Reprisal timer a little lower. It was 1:20, so I imagine I can get it closer to the 1:00 goal.

And my favorite...

Max Tights!

Samnuha Tights (max): I wish I could have shown you my celebration when I saw these. This was literally the 8th pair of tights I had seen in the past few days. I did one run two nights ago where we had Teodor 4 times in a row, and all 4 times I had the option for Tights, and the augments were bad. Since I saw the nearly max tights (when I picked the Jumalik Mail max), I had not seen anything close. Getting these tights makes all of SR worth it. They are amazing for TP, CDC, and for just in general awesomeness.

Samnuha Coat (max): In the very next run, we saw Teodor again and my choice was a Samnuha Coat with max augments. I have a lot of options for melee and magic on BLU so unfortunately this won't see action in all likelihood. Still it's a cool piece so I will keep it in my mog house.

So to say I had a good streak in Sinister Reign is an understatement. We had completed many battles for sure, but when each one takes 3-5 minutes it is easy to get 15 battles in an hour.

Other acquisitions

Cessance Earring: I finally got this to drop this morning in the One to be Feared High Tier Mission Battlefield. I needed to use TH4 (blu/thf) and the trusts August, Apururu, Arciela I, Selh'teus, and Joachim to get the win. I stun-locked Ultima and CDC'd it down and outlasted Proto-Omega and his pile pitch. It took me a total of 10 wins at this BC and I have now seen 2 Cessance Earrings (a friend had won the lot on the 1st one).

Early indicators on my BLU spreadsheet are that this earring will add a staggering amount of DPS to my current TP set. I switched this in for Suppanomimi and adjusted my spell set to include DW IV instead of III. The increase was a 55 point DPS increase. That's a lot for one single item being swapped in, but it makes sense. I'm trading 5 attack for 1 more accuracy, 3 more store TP, and 3% more double attack.

What's coming up

I am continuing to do Tenzen runs and getting more boulders for the Almace Afterglow and will follow that up with beitetsu for Burtgang Afterglow. To cap merits, I am fighting Mosquitos and Beetles in Reisenjima (melee or cleave - whichever I am in the mood for) and also farming stones from the ascended NMs that do pop when I am there. The ferns and taupes are going into trying to perfect my Valorous head, hands, and legs for my PLD CDC set. I am also throwing some at my Herculean Hands to try for superior WS hands, but right now my focus is the Valorous gear. I eventually am going to farm a Vatic Byrnie to play around with to see if I can get it to work with my CDC set on Paladin.

Thanks for reading. What a long post!

Current BLU TP gear

DPSssssss