Fun with Merits!

[Solymir]

Re: Fun with Merits!

Solymir - Fenrir - FFXIAH.com

I'm too lazy to list mine out and a little embarassed that I haven't done more so I am going to make y'all "work" for it. Truece I am curious why you decided not to do any bar spell merits? I still haven't decided if I will do any regens, but I know I want at least 3 bar spell effect merits.

[Pavlyn]

Re: Fun with Merits!

What I have:

General
MP: 4/8
Crit Hit: 4/4

Combat Skill
Sword: 8/8

Magic SKill
Blue Magic: 8/8

Blue Mage Group 1
Physical Spell Potency: 5/5

Blue Mage Group 2
Assimilation: 5/5
Diffusion 1/5

What i will probably get in the future:

General
Spell Interruption: 4/4

Stats
STR: 5/5

Blue Mage Group 1
Chain Affinity Recast: 5/5

Blue Mage Group 2
Enchainment: 4/5

Bard Group 1
Lullaby Recast: 5/5
Minuet Effect: 5/5

Bard Group 2
Nightingale: 1/5
Troubadour: 1/5

I'm not completely sold on getting CA recast or enchainment yet for BLU and i'm also not 100% sure i want any merits on my BRD.

[Ziero]

Re: Fun with Merits!

Best advice I can give is just to knock one thing out at a time. It drives me nuts trying to split points among jobs and have things half meritted on all of them, as opposed to just plowing through a full category. I did RDM > COR > Magic Skills > Combat Skills, at which point they added the expanded group 2s so I had to go back and revisit the jobs, but it's nice knowing that I don't ever have to touch Magic/Combat again if they don't up the cap further.

I kinda figured it would be the best way to do it. It's why I pumped the 6 Merits I had stored up all into Thf, and will probably be focusing on that until it's all maxed out. I find myself using Thf more often in endgame things for my LS because, well, I'm the only thf. And as a Thf, my dmg can use all the help it can get.

I put the merits into SA because overall I'd get more use out of that and TA can be lame due to parties not working with you well; but now i'm going to redo them into 5/5 TA just to be some sort of full out hate control thing since I have enmity+ anyway
would have gotten rid of AC for 5/5 AS too until I saw the thread about it still failing with 5/5 on KI
then I guess lolhp merits are a go?

I actually find myself being able to us TA more often. Due to enclosed space or too many people, it can be rough getting behind some mobs. But TA allows me to get behind the tank...where most people avoid, and even gives me a nice little bonus of planting hateless(for myself) Dmg on the mob. But even then, I'm a bit anal with recasts and I need them to both be on the same timer or it'll drive me crazy.

[Truece]

Re: Fun with Merits!

Truece I am curious why you decided not to do any bar spell merits? I still haven't decided if I will do any regens, but I know I want at least 3 bar spell effect merits.

I probably should do that and fully merit Shellra V. But at the moment, the most end-game-ish activity that I do is Nyzul Isle, so I feel that I'll get more mileage out of the regen merits. With /SCH, I'm not sure how important it will be to even have Cure Speed fully merited. Maybe I'll decide to do Cure Speed 3, Barspell 2 (or vice versa). Fully merited regen plus cleric's briault is just too MP efficient to pass up, though, so I'll definitely max Regen.

[Aksannyi]

Re: Fun with Merits!

With maxed Cure cast and Cure Clogs my Cure 3's are almost instant. Want as much mind as I can get, but really those fast cures save a lot of asses.

[Callisto]

Re: Fun with Merits!

I know I posted it somewhere in here before, but there was the one BG thread showing that if you have 2 Cure Cast merits, Loq Earring, Cure Clogs, and /SCH your Cure casting time is essentially capped and adding more merits won't do anything.

If you still occassionally use /BLM it may still be worth it, but even then I'm not sure if you would hit the cap since you're only getting 6% more from the last 3 merits, while you'd be missing 10% from not being /SCH.

[Aksannyi]

Re: Fun with Merits!

Need to be /BLM on a lot of shit, like HNM fights where we're low manning and I might need to use ES for Slow (or in bad cases, Sleep), though I don't know exactly where Cure Cast time caps, just that I noticed a huge difference when I got clogs, when I didn't notice it before with the merits.

As for /SCH, afaik don't really get cast time benefits unless you use your JA (name escapes me, just finished SCH yesterday five minutes before Einherjar), and only get to do that every 2 minutes. Though I might be wrong, like I said, just finished it and haven't gotten to play with it a lot yet, did notice that the cure clogs made my casting a lot faster.

[TheGrandMom]

Re: Fun with Merits!

I have cure cast time capped and it has been for a very long time......well before /sch. I don't sub sch but I do use Cure Clogs (except I recently borrowed them out to a sac leveling whm until she can buy a pair). All I know is that I royally piss off other whms with how fast I can rip cures off. I even outcast rdms which REALLY ticks them off. LOL To me cure cast time is an absolute must but with the addition of /sch, maybe not to cap.

[Truece]

Re: Fun with Merits!

I know I posted it somewhere in here before, but there was the one BG thread showing that if you have 2 Cure Cast merits, Loq Earring, Cure Clogs, and /SCH your Cure casting time is essentially capped and adding more merits won't do anything.

This is kind of what I figured.

If you still occassionally use /BLM it may still be worth it, but even then I'm not sure if you would hit the cap since you're only getting 6% more from the last 3 merits, while you'd be missing 10% from not being /SCH.

The only time I use /BLM is when I need to do a lot of traveling... /SCH is just too damn good to pass up.

So it looks like I could change my WHM merit plans to go Cure Speed 3 Barspell 2.

[Callisto]

Re: Fun with Merits!

Light/Dark Arts always give 10% casting time reduction for the appropriate spells.

I found the thread, Saren had a nice summation here. I had remembered kinda fuzzy, the actual cap was at 48-50% where you needed max merits, Cure Clogs, Markduk's Body, Loq Earring, and /SCH.

The second tier was at 35%, which was LA/Clogs/Loq/2 merits, or Clogs/5 Merits as /BLM. So yeah unless you have Marduk's body it's pretty much either 2 or max.

Add: I know my g/f almost never uses /BLM anymore, so she was going for 2 Cure Cast/3 Regen/5 Barspell.

[Aksannyi]

Re: Fun with Merits!

Working on it lol. Though I don't know why in the hell I'd wear Marduk over Aristocrat's anyway. Fast cures are great but that Cure Potency +12% is much more useful to me.

I'll take a look at the thread, I never really bothered with exact numbers before to be honest, but might shed some extra light on using the subjob, which I do kind of need, lol.

(I admit to some laziness, though I will maintain that it was two months that my second account - with my SCH gear on it - was inactive, and I'm far too cheap to buy the same gear I already have. /cheer for doing Campaign Ops for two months, got me about 4 levels that way lol.!)

[Callisto]

Re: Fun with Merits!

Well you can always use both if you want to set up annoying macros, lol. Fast Cast is determined at the start of the cast, Potency when it fires, can set it so you idle in Marduks, then have it swap to your Noble's/Aristo's after 1-2 seconds from hitting enter(if you use st macros). That's about what my g/f's Cure Clog swap is like, except she idles in blessed, swaps to Clogs at the start, then back to Blessed before cast finishes.
______________________________
ugggh with all this WHM talk I just realized g/f got a bunch of new gear recently and I have to redo her macros on my laptop

[Aksannyi]

Re: Fun with Merits!

Spellcast is for the win, seriously. I started using it on BLM and I'm about to start using it on WHM. It's so good.

[Cotners]

Re: Fun with Merits!

General:

MP: 3/8
INT: 5/5
-EMN: 4/4
Elemental: 8/8
Enfeebling: 8/8

BLM:

Thun. Pot: 5/5
Ice Pot: 5/5
Burst 2: 3/5
Freeze 2: 3/5

RDM:

Earth Acc: 2/5
Ice Acc: 2/5
Wind Acc: 1/5
Dia III: 2/5
Slow II: 2/5
Paralyze II: 2/5

Rdm is still in need of several merits ; ;

[Callisto]

Re: Fun with Merits!

Spellcast is for the win, seriously. I started using it on BLM and I'm about to start using it on WHM. It's so good.

I tried to start using it on PLD, but my brain kinda melted while trying to set it up. My main issue aside from that is that there's a certain level of control I like having, especially on RDM where I swap staves using individual macros instead of having them added into my spell macros, plus I tend to mix and match certain sets, like Haste + Physical Reduction for Campaign, etc.

That and my PC macros are for the most part the same as my console macros, just at times I have to press an extra button to swap in the full set I need, but everything is in the same place and whatnot. I'd hate to come back to console when I do now and again and be like FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF I DON'T REMEMBER WHERE MY SHIT IS