- Blood tanking is horribly inefficient
- I might not be cut out for soloing
After spending some time lollygagging about on Warrior, Samurai and hunting the odd Notorious Monster, I decided it might be time to make another go at it.
The basic strategy was to bank on Cocoon, Phalanx and Stoneskin providing enough damage mitigation for me to simply outlast Dark Spark. Sadly this was not to be.
Dark Spark delighted in tearing through my Stoneskin with remarkable speed and once that was down, even my formidable defenses weren't enough to keep him from devouring my face. I held out longer than I expected though. I think I managed to knock off a good 20-25% of his health before I died.
As I said before, blood tanking just wasn't efficient. I burned through my MP way too fast. Even if I had been a bit more calm during the whole thing I would have simply run out of MP at some point and that would be the end of it. I can certainly see how using Utsusemi shadows would be a lot more efficient, but I just don't have the gil for it and there's a few other things that bug me about it, like the prospect of having to manually turn off shadows when recasting Utsusemi:Ichi. I'm fairly certain that alone would be enough to get me panicking and screwing up everything else. While I'm used to killing things really slowly on Red Mage, NMs seem to be on a different scale altogether. Usually I'm fine with killing things so slowly because they hardly ever manage to land a hit. Dark Spark was pretty much the other end of the spectrum, and that adds a lot of stress to the ordeal.
So my Linkshell found out what I was doing and decided to come out and help me kick Dark Spark's ass properly. Afterwards we had some fun just goofing off and beating up demons. All too soon it was time to return to Jeuno.
How long has it been? A few months now I've been trying to get these gloves? While many would say I wasted my time fooling around leveling Blue Mage and even attempting this solo, I think I'm better off for it. I've learned a bit about gearing for melee combat, I've learned the fear and stress associated with trying to solo a monster that you have no chance against, and I've also found what could very well be my favorite subjob for Red Mage. For me this entire ordeal has been an absolute success.
Dark Spark:1
DrJones: 0
The cavalry arrives.
Stlyish gloves!
Posts
One thing, :Ichi -> :Ichi overwrites itself just fine. It's when you're casting :Ichi -> :Ni that you have to manually cancel shadows.
ReplyDeleteEven us lazy DDs know that utsusemi:ichi overwrites itself. ;)
ReplyDelete@Tyler: Good to know. I figured Ichi -> Ichi worked the same way Stoneskin did: if it's already up when you cast it then it doesn't take effect. Casting Ichi and manually canceling Ni is still a little daunting on paper however.
ReplyDeleteOh well, it's all theory craft anyway since I don't have the gil to fund /NIN properly at the moment.