RDM/PLD in EXP

[WishMaster3K]

Yes, I did it last night.

Of course it was uber, why else would I post it.

No, you can't be like me. There can only be one Renarudo >.>. Stop asking.

(Long Post on my observations of last night)

Ok, seriously, haha, RDM/PLD is fsking fanTASTIC in exp. Well, I guess, honestly, it's situational, but the situation was perfect:

I get invited to a PT, the setup at the moment was PLD/WAR THF/NIN RNG/NIN BLM/RDM. So I add myself as RDM and depending on setup, if we got WHM main, I was gonna sub BLM. Or if no WHM was available, I was gonna sub WHM and have another RDM handle enfeebs. It was JP Prime, so invites were real hard to come by, and I even said have a NIN enfeeble if need be. . . But regardless, I'd need someone to cover slack I couldn't cover by me main healing a PLD.

I say this because we planned on going to Lufaise, and those mobs hit hard and hit often. Anyway, we were trying to find members for an hour (I was fishing by Airships, so I was keeping track of time, lol) and I decided to get a little bold.

I told the PLD to sub NIN, and I asked Grendal if he could come as BRD. So then once that was settled, I subbed PLD.

I'm stating this to point out that I feel RDM/PLD works where:
-You can safely sacrifice Curaga, status heals and DS in exchange for Flash and Auto Refresh.

In a pt where all the DDs have shadows, Curaga isn't a big issue, especially on Decos. I'd usually Curaga twice after Whirl of Rage, meaning 120 MP, so with Auto Refresh, Refresh and Ballads going off, 3 Cure IIIs are about the same cost. So for all intents and purposes, I lost nothing by subbing PLD (except 60 MP, but that's the cost of Curaga, which I wasn't missing anyway. . .)

So the PLD basically couldn't rely on voke, but it was ok, because he had like 4 JAs and Flash spam (I was hasting him), in addition to Shadows, so it worked well. He also did 600 (avg) Vorpal blades using Company Sword + Joyeuse -.-;;

Despite the 3 Refreshes, the fact that I was enfeebling because lack of NIN, me main healing and Hasting the tank, I only needed to Convert every 25 or so mins. We got about 7k/hr exp in Sky.

With a PLD tank and a BLM.

So what happened? Well, Kills were faster, because Whirl of Rage not only does damage, it stuns DDs, making them miss hits or critical WSs for chains. Often when I flashed before WoR, Only one shadow would be hit, or they'd evade completely. This in itself GREATLY justified the 25MP Cost.

The only "tough" part of the pt was holding my finger on my Flash macro, waiting for the TP move to activate and Refresh was coming up. But regardless, Grendal did a great job Ballading, and the PT was actually much more fun than a lot of Deco pts i'd have been in.

I think this shows that if the mages and the melee actually work together the way my pt demonstrated, even BLMs and PLDs can still have jobs. In any case, Deco weapons are never camped, and there are a ton of PLDs that don't have parties cause Melee is all the rage.

Time for Renarudo to show some Love.

So YEAH! All RDMs, raise PLD as a sub, it's awsome. 5/5

(I'm sure I have grammar/spelling errors and I'll come back to edit this later >.<

Oh well, time to exp. I'm 1.7k away from cap :) )

[Fayttt]

Sounds nice. I really hope its not going to be another required RDM sub for HNMLS's though..I mean for the love of god most HNMLS already require DRK, NIN, wHM, BLM, SMN (Did I miss any?) I hope they dont start requiring PLD ._.

[WishMaster3K]

Firstly, you missed BRD, lol.

You can scratch NIN, that's a soro onry sub ;)

WHM and BLM should be standard! You should have those capped before you hit 65.

SMN is HNM (mostly) to Blink the gimp PLD tanks.

DRK is generic sub for Gods like Suzaku (that's the only one really. . .) and I suppose that's the only sky god where it's required.

BRD is optional, but subbing BRD is like yelling "I want to be in the BLM Pt! I want to be so busy buffing that I never get time to breathe!"

[Esoa]

I don't understand why you wouldn't just sub summoner and let the paladin flash. What am I missing?

[Kolid]

Seems pretty cool, I gotta get one of my friends to try it :wasted:

[WishMaster3K]

Because I gain nothing from SMN that I don't get from PLD (to a degree).

Sure I get a MUCH bigger MP pool than PLD sub, and Auto-Refresh as well, however, I do not suffer from MP problems (Convert merited 2 times so far :) ) nor do I desire a bigger pool.

And Flash, with just haste, is 45 seconds -12%, so about 5.4 seconds off. With Fast Cast and Haste, my flash timer is down to 30, but PLDs only get 40. In any case, he had no Voke, so he was pulling hate with Flash and Flashing often. In addition, the setup included RNG, THF and BLM. So although the RNG and the THF (who were SCing pretty flawlessly) were plapcing hate, 1500+ MB that didn't kill the mob was more or less ensuring that the PLD was spamming Flash whenever he could.

So essentially, he couldn't wait to Flash before WoR.

[Icemage]

It's funny that you mention this, Wishmaster. People didn't believe me when I said /PLD would be a viable sub in sky for BLMs a while back, but I really think that's one of the cases where a mage with /PLD sub is ideal, and is superior to /WHM and /SMN for specifically the reasons mentioned.


Icemage

[Taskmage]

omgz stfu n00b /pld laff wat a n00b gtfo :rolleyes:

[Fayttt]

That made me lmao irl Taskmage. XD

[Apple Pie]

I admit RDM/PLD fit well it that situation but I might prefer RDM/DRK because

1) Stun is better than Flash because it ensures no shadow is taken off.
2) Aspir can make up for auto-refresh

However, if we don't have DRK sub but PLD sub, it's worth subbing PLD there, better than subbing BLM or WHM.

To be honest, I am a bit frustrated by the fact that no one can provoke. I do not mean to blame you for the PT setup because it was JP prime as you stated and only a few people were available. However, we need to know the average battle time was 131.9 secs and the interval was 11.9 seconds. This is much worse than regular merit PTs.

What is worse, BLM asked (/tell) me for Lightning Threnody although deco weapons were only VT and it was not necessary at all unless his elemental magic skill was far from capped. In most merit PTs, BRDs are insanely busy in buffing, pulling and lullaby. Wasting a few seconds for threnody made me a little upset because bringing next decos to the camp before the last one died was most important in order to keep chains.

Anyway, the concept of RDM/PLD is nice. Flash help melees concentrate on attacking and thus shortning the battle time because of less utusemi recasting. I don't think it's a "must-have" sub but I am sure it's a "nice-to-have" sub.

[WishMaster3K]

Haha, oh THATS why you were casting Threnodies. Well, something was off with that BLM, his damage was horribly bad. Thundaga 3 did 700 on a MB, and I just rolled my eyes. I wasn't paying attention, I thought you were casting Light Threnody to help with the duration of flash or something.

PT was pretty average, but yeah, suffered from job choice. I personally wouldn't have had a THF there (but THF was PT leader >.>) and instead of a BLM, I'd have gotten another Melee, but then again, they intended to go to Lufaise Meadows.

I'm very glad we didn't, because exp would have been abysmal there. . . Birds hit friggin hard.

But about Stun and Flash, I'm not sure, but doesn't stun just stop them from using the move? Meaning that they still retain TP? If that's the case, then Flash might take the cake on mobs like Decos, but Stun works better on magic using mobs.

At 1MP/3 seconds, I think someone figured out that in-between Converts, we get 200 Net MP, and even if I average 40MP a Minute (Recast on Aspir) thats 300 MP (Because Aspir is 10MP. But still, that's assuming my stupid Dark Skill doesn't gimp me out and give me the OH SO OFTEN NINE MP /fume)

(And I was going to ask you if you were parsing, but yeah, that would have been an obvious question.


I bet you even parsed Plauge Chigoe, lol)

[Jei]

\'A'/ apple pie~~ You got a really solid point about stun compare to flash. Do you think having refresh is a little over kill? I only have 1 points into convert merit and I rarely run out of MP without my convert being ready to use. Especially in the new area, we can macro refresh gear plus refresh sanction which help conserving MP even more easier.

Granted, I enjoy soloing DC-EM in ToA with /PLD a lot. With a Taco I can straight up tank these guys with my sword and kill them at fairly decent speed.
Never thought about using it for merit tho

[WishMaster3K]

I honestly wanted an excuse to cap Divine, because I never use any Divine Spell. (It was at 114 before I got PLD to 37. It's now 122 and climbing :) )

[Balfree]

I want to move to your server and party with you.

x.x

That sort of understanding between players is unheard of, atleast by me.

[Raydeus]

RDM/PLD and a Rune blade is (fun) +1, I use that combo when I'm leveling NPC (or just slaughtering stuff for fun) on non-magic mobs, magic mobs get treated with RDM/DRK pwnage. :thumbsup:

Flash is nice if you are tanking, and in some cases it could be more useful than Stun like when the mob has a high resistence against Dark magic, in which case Stun will wear off almost instantly. But then again Flash doesn't stop ws and other abilities so I dunno. :worry:

[Icemage]

I don't know that Stun is necessarily better than Flash. While it's not a guaranteed stop on damage, Flash does have the nice effect of bleeding the enemy down to 0 TP. With Stun, if you don't kill it right away, it will just use another WS immediately.


Icemage

[WishMaster3K]

Ah, that's what I figured. But for MP moves, I know Stun is obviously superior. Just like how BLMs, DRKs and RDM/DRKs are pretty much necessary on mobs like the OHat mob.

[Bishop]

To be honest, I am a bit frustrated by the fact that no one can provoke. I do not mean to blame you for the PT setup because it was JP prime as you stated and only a few people were available. However, we need to know the average battle time was 131.9 secs and the interval was 11.9 seconds. This is much worse than regular merit PTs.

What is worse, BLM asked (/tell) me for Lightning Threnody although deco weapons were only VT and it was not necessary at all unless his elemental magic skill was far from capped. In most merit PTs, BRDs are insanely busy in buffing, pulling and lullaby. Wasting a few seconds for threnody made me a little upset because bringing next decos to the camp before the last one died was most important in order to keep chains.


I don't mean to question your skills because I do agree with you, the blm shouldn't need threnody at that lvl unless his magic wasn't capped. But how is it so much harder to cast threnody when even you said yourself that each fight was an average of 131.9 seconds?

[Aeni]

I don't know that Stun is necessarily better than Flash. While it's not a guaranteed stop on damage, Flash does have the nice effect of bleeding the enemy down to 0 TP. With Stun, if you don't kill it right away, it will just use another WS immediately.


Icemage

It does? I've been flashed many times before and retain my TP. Is there some other mechanics at work here?

[Bishop]

I think what he meant was flash will make the enemy miss his ws, therefore eliminate it's tp.

[Aeni]

I think what he meant was flash will make the enemy miss his ws, therefore eliminate it's tp.

Thanks for making that clear for me. I was taking Icemage to literally for his words.

[Apple Pie]

But how is it so much harder to cast threnody when even you said yourself that each fight was an average of 131.9 seconds?
This is because the rest of them did not try to move from the entrance of each Deco room first of all. They just camped there and waited for next weapon coming. As a result, I always had to run for long distances to pull those that spawned far away. Well, I didn't intend to blame them for that because we had BLM who needed to rest.

As you know, the whole PT has to move in search of mobs to shorten the intervals at most places like KRT, Uleguerand, Caedarva and so forth. The Shrine of Ru'Avitau is not an exception.

Second, I believe each BRD player has its own rhythm and routine. I usually go for merit points only with my friends and don't go to old areas anymore. At places like Bhaflau Thickets and Caedarva mire where the battle time is less than 45 seconds and the interval is less than 5 seconds, I don't even have time to sing 4 buff songs and I usually skip Ballad I. I get used to this too much and I wasn't able to adjust myself at that time. Honestly, I didn't think of singing Threnody in merit PTs and I was a little confused.

Anyway, as for the comparison between Flash and Stun, I have to agree with Icemage and Renarudo. I didn't consider TP issue.

BTW Jei, I haven't been in trouble with MP management without auto-refresh in merit PTs, too.