Inventory -8, sweet!

There comes a time in each Mage's life when they will need to acquire a few select pieces of gear that they will use for the remainder of their career. This gear happens to be available immediately after you break the first level cap. That's right kids, it's time for fun with elemental staves.

I've known these were coming for a long time. They're kind of hard to miss, since every mage in the game is lugging them around once they hit level 51. So for the past couple of months I've had an ongoing project of slowing picking them up when I see them at a good price in a bazaars or when someone decides to put a bunch on the auction house at dirt cheap prices. At 10k gil a piece, they're an absolute steal.

Think about that.

For the price of 24 pots of honey you can get a piece of equipment that you'll be using indefinitely. Ok, ok, there are high quality versions that go for absurd prices, but until you get mixed up in endgame you probably won't need those.

So yes, I've known these were coming and made sure to have them all waiting for me when I reached level 51. What I hadn't accounted for was how much I was going to stress over redoing my macros to incorporate them. It looks really straightforward at first. All you have to do is put the corresponding elemental staff into your spell macro so you'll cast fire spells with a fire staff, dark spells with a dark staff, etc. What they don't tell you is how much blinking for the equipment swap ruins your ability to target. Up to this point I had been using two basic INT and MND gearsets, switching prior to casting my spells. I didn't have any equipment that needed to be macroed in for a specific spell so I never realized until now how that blinking can throw off the target cursor. This wasn't a problem so much with my nukes, but with more critical things like Cures, it was pretty unsettling to have the cursor vanish right as you were trying to keep someone from dying. As a result I've shifted a lot of my macros' targeting types from < stpc > to < stal > . This means I have to get used to selecting people using the arrow keys, but at least I'll be able to target them as we all start blinking from frantic gear swapping.

The other macro issue that's been troubling me is the need to somehow maintain a macro set that will let me still swing my sword on my own time. Do I just use my new macro set with elemental staves and continually switch back to a sword and shield gearset after each spell? Do I add new lines to my current macro palette that are identical to what I have now except that they don't have the staves macroed in?

I'm not sure what the ideal solution is, but for now I've decided to just maintain two macro palettes that are more or less carbon copies of each other, except that one leaves out the staves. I also included a macro to toggle between the two.

As a Red Mage these are the things that plague me. It's not about having the right gear, it's about knowing how to make proper use of the gear you have.

From Mediocre Mage

I kill Manticores in my spare time.