Thinking of giving Blm a go. Question.Follow

How much gear do you have to carry? I am talking the stuff that is required to be a good blm, not the stuff that is only needed if all the planets align and cause the moon to turn purple but only if its 3:00 on watersday.

You could contribute adequately with maybe 30 key pieces of gear, and the only hard bits to get would be your Ice and Lightning MDMG staves. Port all the MAcc gear from your nuke set and maybe make a few additions you've got a half decent enfeeble/dark magic set with how high skills cap. Most of BLM's intricacy is in play style, anyways.

Edited, Apr 16th 2012 4:43am by tertoonetwothreefour

Fumikuu's list is a start (he means Cognition belt, not Cognizant belt), but falls short. You need to add, at a minimum:
INT rings (or Strendu)
Nuking back (Goetia and/or Searing)
HQ staves for all elements you don't have a ToM staff to nuke with, except Apollo's (light staff is OK for cures if no cure pot ToM staff).
Some dark skill gear for drain/aspir, such as: AF pants, dark torque, relic hands, etc.
Enough MND gear to cap stoneskin (if that's even required beyond native skill/mnd anymore).
Any additional INT gear needed to break 150 for elemental debuffs, perhaps only necessary if you're an elvaan or something.

In addition (stuff that isn't quite as essential), you should carry gear to enhance stoneskin (Stone gorget, siegel sash, etc.). Enfeebling potency can be significantly improved with a few select pieces as well. Someday a pure nuking accuracy build will be required again. As Espetta mentioned, -PDT is something most good BLMs will carry. Resting for MP, and the gear that goes with it, is mostly outdated (but good to have available).

There are a lot of other things that a career BLM will carry, but that wasn't really the question so I'll leave it at this.

Edited, Apr 16th 2012 2:12pm by VxSote

Don't forget the Sorcerer's Ring / Latent Set. They're cheap as dirt these days and you can build the set required to force your latent with extreme ease. There is a -lot- of 'converts 70 hp to mp' gear available for dirt cheap these days. I built a set last night without any ra/ex gear for approximately 200k gil, including the price of the Sorcerer's Ring itself. Also, I have HP merits from my melee jobs, so for a dedicated mage it'd be even easier.

I can't think of any situation in which I'd choose 7 INT over 10 MAB.

Other handy but niche stuff (YMMV):

Fast Cast gear. Swap it in at the start of a spell, swap it out before it casts, your spell will cast faster and you won't lose potency since your damage is calculated upon completion. You don't get recast reduction this way.

Haste/Fast Cast gear: For drain/aspir/stun. Put this in any slot which isn't full of 'dark magic' gear to get your spells ready faster.

Idle Set: Refresh, PDT, stuff you wouldn't cast in but which is handy to wear. You might wanna have a "PDT Mode" macro if you're worried about getting your swaps all tangled trying to fulltime it.



I used this for Stun too. It really does seem to help with the duration. Back at 75, it was the difference between those '...is no longer stunned is stunned' results and a solid 5-8 seconds of stun. Can't say for 99, I have not built all my sets back up on this new character.

If there was a 10% double attack ring for warrior that cost <200,000 gil, would you say it was something only the best-of-the-best should buy?

The only case in which I can justify not caring about your MAB is if you're just a proc-BLM, at which point you may as well just show up naked for all anyone cares.

Sorc ring is both good and bad for BLM, largely depending on how serious you chose to be. For those who just want to have BLM as a VW tool, the inventory commitment and effort required is rather high for a moderate gain in damage that the rest of the alli will readily compensate. For mid range BLMs, it's a great way to step up your game, and all it takes is the decision to care enough to hold some extra gear and press some extra buttons. For high end BLMs, you may want those 300 max HP to avoid getting one- or two-shotted if the situation should arise that you'll be tanking (Rex, Bismarck come to mind). Still great to use if you have a situation where it is acceptable to absolutely let loose.

Edited, Apr 19th 2012 1:04am by tertoonetwothreefour

As Dantedmc mentioned, Sorc Ring's latent works differently from some of the other lvl 50 JSE rings. A WHM with medicine ring can just click off the HP cruor buff to trigger latent. BLM can't.

As a BLM, you would have to swap in your -minus HP gear, and then click off the HP buff icon while still wearing the -minus HP gear. You can still use the exact same -minus HP gear set that you do outside of abyssea.