Magic Burst respect // Leveling trouble

[navpops]

Recently (2 days ago) I started a Black Mage. I've been in the "newbie" upsurge. Leveling with then newbies is tough, and frustrating at times. I know it was MODERATLY difficult to do a skillchain, and I didn't even have help understanding it. I've had a Ninja/War basically all my time on FFXI, so magic burst is fairly new to me. Now, it's been tough to teach an entire group of 4 melees how to skillchain, and even when taught, there's a struggle to keep them using the Skillchain consistently. I see "TP 300%!" for 10+ minutes and I can't get through their thick skull that they need to keep the other members updated on their TP. How can these people not catch on? Even when they pull of a skillchain it bug's me, because they won't look at my mana. A skillchian ends up happening when I'm at 26 MP resting becuase they just pulled an IT and their all 1 level below me! Can anyone that's past Quifim tell me if the newbies get better? Any suggestions? I put "Magic BurstOK!" in my EXP party search and generally as a rule, i ask the leader "Skillchain, Do you have it?" before I join. Magic Burst is easy, but the newbies don't respect it enough, I think. Better damage for less MP cost is something they should not dismiss. Does anyone have any idea how I should explain to the new players that Magic Burst is a valuable skill? Should I stay seeking a group untill I find a group of "not-new players"? Has anyone leveling a sub experianced this recently and found a way to cope?

[Netrus]

im on bismarck it all depends on how long the person has been playin i wasnt doing MBs on a regular until 30s but thats when i started understanding it more. Partly because i wasnt told much about it before hand. Uhm.. im about to catch up with you cause i had to start all over myself. On account of me and my brother have 2 different games now and can play at the same time. Sooo im at lvl 17 nearly 18. So hopefully Ill pt with ppl that lknow thats they are doing. Cause it sure is a hassle to keep telling the new war. to voke or to try and get them to learn a WS, but you got to learn sometime i just dont see how they dont get it as soon as they should, but thats just me. As for the MB I just do it when its suppose to be done. Hoping that the skill chain is executed right tho ........

[navpops]

Magic Burst was easy for me, but just getting the people to listen was the difficult part... Luckily, I basically skipped the entire area of Valkurm (Got a PT at 15 with someone who had a 70/35 BLM/WHM powereleveler and got 18 in the PT) *phew*

[AtraposBLM]

it's entirely random, to be honest.

Usually though, if you show a party that you're a competant burster, and how fast you kill mobs with a skillchain+mb, they'll start to listen. Just be patient until they *do* pull it off though

You'll have a little difficulty again in some of the upper levels, mainly because melee's will get spiffy new weapon skills (*cough* pentathrust *cough*) that do good damge, but don't skillchain worth a shit. To me, that was the hardest time for me to mb, because melee's were too intent on spamming their sexy new weaponskills ; ;

[Taga]

Yeah that's why I didn't PT with DRG from ~50-60... they think penta makes them gods...

[Macht]

I've raised every job and every adv. job you can currently get in the game. Not one of them is under 10 now and two are in the 30's and 45's, I've had to play with a lot of new players when doing this. The big thing is you just have to see how they respond when you start mentioning a skillchain and mentioning the potential it has. The ones that remained silent or had a sort of resisting want to do it are the ones you'll tend have a harder time to convince and get to do them.

Many times though I had met players that were 100% gun-ho to do them, they just couldn't get enough of it. So much to the point that one group actually went and bought me MP regen foods for my mage because they really wanted the skillchain and MB to fire without waiting. When I played the melee classes it tend to be a lot easier to condition them to report TP often and to get it going, the harder part I tended to have was training the mages on how to MB.

The mages tended to get discouraged at doing the MB because they never get the timing right on it. With the melee's when I played a melee job was easy I made sure that the ones I picked would have them go first and I'd finish it up to get the skillchain. Still working on getting a method setup to help train the mages to get their MB's right.

[evilution]

Still working on getting a method setup to help train the mages to get their MB's right.

At low levels?

Tell em to cast when they see the effect start. It will burst every time unless your going for a mid-chain MB.. but you really wont have to worry about those till later in the game when your group expects you to be able to help them take a IT from 100%-> dead in one 3 man chain.

[Scatman]

Yeah I don't bother teaching people how to skillchain anymore at the low levels. It looks really bad when you spend half an hour trying to drill the order and timing into their heads, then when they FINALLY get it to work, it's a 1 damage chain.

[Macht]

Originally posted by Scatman
Yeah I don't bother teaching people how to skillchain anymore at the low levels. It looks really bad when you spend half an hour trying to drill the order and timing into their heads, then when they FINALLY get it to work, it's a 1 damage chain.

Not entire low levels, it's around lv. 15. At that time skillchains if you do ones that the monster has a weakness too the damage isn't going to be 1. Especially if you're smart about it and have heavier damage dealing weapons in the chain, otherwise if it's only 1h swords, 1h axe, h2h, dagger, staff, club, katana, etc... then the only big purpose of teaching the skillchain is so the mages get down how to MB.

Unfortunatly everyone has their own views on what to do in that manner. I honestly enjoy teaching people. What I meant by finding an easier way to teach them, because no matter how I've said it to the mages of casting their spell, is telling them and creating something to give them a better idea of the time they have to do it and so they get more of an idea when they should start (My intention isn't to just teach them that one situtation but to teach them how to judge when they need to start the spell so that'll it'll finish in the right time) . Actually a macro came to mind to try to help them out.

I never really try to bother teaching them if they are resistant about it, but I will still chain the best skillchain I can find to theirs when doing melee. Sometimes just doing that alone gets them intrested enough that they start to participate in getting the chains down. You can really get them into doing skillchains like crazy if you get a BLM good enough that they can hit a 3 or 4 chain skillchain, then even with small returns from the skillchain seeing a nice boost to the mages damage just makes it worth it.

EDIT:

Besides that it shouldn't matter much, if a player has TP and a weapon skill the weaponskill alone is going to give more damage then they usually do. All you are doing is instead of them mindlessly hack away at something, you're getting them to play a more active role in the party which won't only help them in the future but is helping yourself aswell.

[Scatman]

Well yeah, I usually will try to set up a chain if no one else knows how, and will try to teach them if they don't already know. But if they're not getting it after awhile or simply don't want to, then I just stop for the aforementioned reason.

[navpops]

I havn't missed a single MB yet, but my problem is I end up too focused on the MB and forget to nuke with the MB nuke, afriad that the party will start before it refreshes.

[Ragnarok54321]

I'm a fairly new BLM. I was wondering if anyone could explain how a MB works?

[Quezi]

Its posted elsewhere, but basicly.

Lets take a nice and simple low level 2 man renkei.

Burning blade(sword30) -> Combo(handtohand10)

What happens is, Sword guy uses burning blade, and then three seconds later, hand to hand buy uses combo. This will create a Fusion effect. This is where the mage comes in. For fusion you want to use Fire. So the idea is to make it so the fire spell lands on the mob during the fusion effect. This will make you do more damage.

You have a several second window of oppertunity to land the MB. With low level spells *such as fire* you can just start casting when you see "hand to hand guy prepairs combo" in the text box. It will finish before the fusion effect goes away and you will get a MB. At higher levels, spells take longer to cast and you have to start casting beforehand. But adapting is easy once you get the basics down. You have a good bit of time, so the best advice i can give is dont start casting to early. Iv missed several mb becaus i started casting to soon. But iv yet to miss a MB after the first PT i ever got to MB in was over (i even practice mbing with my /blm subbed while i leveling my whm.. it does 3 damage but.. its somuch fun ^^)

Use chat filters and turn off all the damage number spam. This makes it alot easyer to keep track of whats going on.

I am a newbie, but i knew how to skillchain and mb before i even started =x I have taught other newbies how to do it, aswell as how to make macros and the like. I have yet to get a PT that knew to just go when everyone was reporting 100%tp.. but sofar iv turned 2 melees and another blm into renkei/MB machines who never seem to miss=P They are probibly better at it than i am now :sweat:

[tracert]

i was in a jp party the other morning in qufim and they couldn't hit a skillchain... thank god i was leveling my whm...

[tekrebel]

I'm finally getting good with my MBs to the point that I can do 2 per SC (cast midway between 1st and 2nd SC with a II spell, the cast the I spell and if you time it correctly, one can do a second burst in the 3 sec timeframe). At lvl 38 I was bursting an extra 100-150 in addition to my firaga damage 200-300 on an IT gob in the Sanctuary of ZiTah.