RDM Tanks?

[Syntex]

I have heard a little about RDM MT'ing HNM but whenever I try to look up anything about it all I get is some halfassed information and when I ask people about it they are like "wut?"


Now I know LS's use this for their jormy kills and have seen pictures here and there(there was even a blog about it which I lost track of) but no reliable set of information.

Does anyone either have firsthand experience or maybe know someone who does it or maybe a how-to guide?

This is something I am really interested in and would like more information but its like chasing a ghost even though its a lot more common then you would think.

[ubermonkey]

Here you go

[Drex]

Keep stoneskin and utsu up, spam blind and dispel, make sure you have good gear (duelist's body, duelist's hat, and an autorefresh body that doesn't take head slot help a ton)

[Tonyanjaii]

Yeah, read Belkin's live journal. It's a good write up if you are interested in red mage tanking. It will give you an idea about it in his journal but its up to you how you utilize and make it effective.

[Caerloc]

I've tanked pretty much anything imaginable on rdm, and a few pointers i can give you right away is

1. Dont worry to much about enmity gear. You need a reasonable amount, but not very much really. I pretty much always fulltimed terra's staff and Umbra cape. I would keep chainsaw's and cerb mantle on for the first few minutes but thats about it.

2. Dont think you are a PLD. You dont cure for hate. You can cure if your hurting for cures, or your healers are burning mp, but it isnt very efficient hatewise. Blind & Dispel is where it's at. I would use Sleep II and Dispel untill my CE was close to capped, then swap to my dmg down set and pretty much just spam blind untill i took dmg, then i would use a few dispels and Sleep II's again.

3. Fast cast > All. I have both Dalmatica and Duelist's chap, and i wouldnt trade either for my duelist's tabard or walocks chap+1. Duelist's tabard, war chap, traits, 1 march and haste puts you at 46%, so add a swift belt and you're done haste wise. Not to mention the -40% casting time is godly for all spells, especially utsusemi. Blind is a 5 mp spell. You dont really need any refresh outside of balladII and refresh, especially when you have sanction or sigill refresh.

4. Learn to convert at the opportune moment. Wait for ws, make sure you have shadows.

5. It's way easier to have someone else buff you, both with haste, refresh and phalanx, and its a good qway to easing into tanking as rdm, but you should still learn to be able to buff yourself. You should also try to keep stoneskin up, but dont focus so hard on it that you run out of shadows and get hit just by trying to get your stoneskin up.

I'd be happy to give gear suggestions, but they arent very hard to figure out really.

[rog]

Duelist's tabard, war chap, traits, 1 march and haste puts you at 46%, so add a swift belt and you're done haste wise.

tabard, hat, march, haste and swift belt gives you ~44% delay reduction. with 21% from FC, you need ~36.7% haste to cap recast timers. haste and fc are applies separately, they are not added together.

[GuntarHolyFlame]

tabard, hat, march, haste and swift belt gives you ~44% delay reduction.

Not quite:
Duelist's Tabard = 10% Fast Cast, 5% Recast Reduction
Warlock's Chapeau = 10% Fast Cast, 5% Recast Reduction
Victory March = ~11% Haste (Recast Reduction) with Faerie Piccolo
Haste Spell = 15% Haste (Recast Reduction)
Swift Belt = 4% Haste (Recast Reduction)

For a grand total of:
20% Fast Cast, 40% Recast Reduction

And you are still lacking 10%, so this

Duelist's tabard, war chap, traits, 1 march and haste puts you at 46%, so add a swift belt and you're done haste wise.

is actually correct.

with 21% from FC

You are referring to Chapeau, Tabard, Traits, and Loquacious Earring, I take it?

you need ~36.7% haste to cap recast timers. haste and fc are applies separately, they are not added together.

Using your numbers from above, I'm not sure how 50% (maximum recast reduction) - 21% (Fast Cast traits/gear) = 36.7%. Outside of Fast Cast traits/gear, you still need 29% haste. I'm fairly sure the recast reduction from Haste items/spells and Fast Cast stack linearly. Having nothing other than eyeballing my recast timers to go on, I'd welcome evidence to support or refute that statement.

[pchan]

Not quite:
Duelist's Tabard = 10% Fast Cast, 5% Recast Reduction
Warlock's Chapeau = 10% Fast Cast, 5% Recast Reduction
Victory March = ~11% Haste (Recast Reduction) with Faerie Piccolo
Haste Spell = 15% Haste (Recast Reduction)
Swift Belt = 4% Haste (Recast Reduction)

For a grand total of:
20% Fast Cast, 40% Recast Reduction

And you are still lacking 10%, so this

is actually correct.


You are referring to Chapeau, Tabard, Traits, and Loquacious Earring, I take it?



Using your numbers from above, I'm not sure how 50% (maximum recast reduction) - 21% (Fast Cast traits/gear) = 36.7%. Outside of Fast Cast traits/gear, you still need 29% haste. I'm fairly sure the recast reduction from Haste items/spells and Fast Cast stack linearly. Having nothing other than eyeballing my recast timers to go on, I'd welcome evidence to support or refute that statement.

(1-36.7/100)*(1-21/100)=0.50 so yeah he is correct, with AF1 hat AF2 body and loquacious earring you only need 36.7% haste (double march+haste would give 35 already).

[Callisto]

haste and fc are applies separately, they are not added together.

wat

Can you show me a source on this?

And most of what has been said I agree with, but I want to stress the importance of physical and magic damage reduction sets for when shadows go down or you're staring down an impending Citadel Buster/Astral Flow/etc. The whole to blink or not to blink issue is possibly even larger on RDM than on PLD since you'll want to be switching in W.Chap for practically every cast.

I personally prefer handle my own Refresh and Haste, it's not really any trouble keeping it up, and if you have decent support you're going to have surplus MP many times as is. I would rather not have it go down and have to go without it for a bit because the WHM is busy casting something else.

I've also pretty much stopped using Beaver Tails since I end up just switching out of them quickly, if it's something that doesn't have serious 1-shot potential I'll go ESword/Joyeuse and eat Sushi for TP with a few non-blink Acc pieces...Death Blossom is kind of a nice debuff for the mages, and DB -> Atonement Light with a PLD co-tank is nice on many mobs. Otherwise I just use Terra's, and am looking into getting a Shark Strap.

[pchan]

http://www.bluegartr.com/forum/ffxi-...ste-stuff.html

Oh and due to the fact that you do truncations when calcutalting the actual recast, 36.7 is only the theorical value, the exact haste value depends on the spell :

recast= floor( (1-fastcast/100) * ( (1-haste/100)*base_recast))

and you need to round the value to the first 10th before doing the *

For utsusemi : ichi you only need 33% haste.

[Callisto]

Thanks, semi-off topic but is anyone aware if /SCH Arts reductions factor in as Fast Cast?

[rog]

sch arts are separate from haste and fc.

[Caerloc]

wat

Can you show me a source on this?

And most of what has been said I agree with, but I want to stress the importance of physical and magic damage reduction sets for when shadows go down or you're staring down an impending Citadel Buster/Astral Flow/etc. The whole to blink or not to blink issue is possibly even larger on RDM than on PLD since you'll want to be switching in W.Chap for practically every cast.

I personally prefer handle my own Refresh and Haste, it's not really any trouble keeping it up, and if you have decent support you're going to have surplus MP many times as is. I would rather not have it go down and have to go without it for a bit because the WHM is busy casting something else.

I've also pretty much stopped using Beaver Tails since I end up just switching out of them quickly, if it's something that doesn't have serious 1-shot potential I'll go ESword/Joyeuse and eat Sushi for TP with a few non-blink Acc pieces...Death Blossom is kind of a nice debuff for the mages, and DB -> Atonement Light with a PLD co-tank is nice on many mobs. Otherwise I just use Terra's, and am looking into getting a Shark Strap.

Yeah, i also did my own haste, phalanx, refresh, i was just saying its easier not to. I used dalmatica when i didnt have duelist's tabard, but i always had so much mp that any refresh gear seemed unnecessary. Today i would simply stay in duelist tabard and w.chap full time. I dont think i would blink much at all today. NNo more then switching to magic reduction set or fire-set.

I also wouldnt use a second march on rdm either way. Unless i had 2 brds, but Im not a great fan of 2 brd tanking. But then again i rarely find myself in an ideal-i-have-more-then-18-pick-and-choose-situation. Typically we're about 12, and wasting 2 brds in a tank PT isnt really a good option. Unless your like dual-drk tanking Cerb or something.

I wasnt aware that haste and fast cast was counted seperately, and i dont know how much of a difference it is, but duelist body, w.chap, swift belt, loq ear haste and 1 march was always ample haste for me.


To sum up, RDM/NIN is a great tank, and even with shadows down you are able to take a decent beating due to stoneskin, phalanx, umbra cape (esp at night), terra's staff and sometimes jelly-ring.

[Tsuko_Asura]

'Pretty good damage' is a bit of an understatement. I've yet to take more damage than any Paladin on a hit-for-hit basis, obviously discounting shield blocks, which depend on a coin-flip.

As long as your server isn't at a shortage of Darksteel Ingots, any Red Mage should be able to easily hit -44% during the day, -50% at night.

[Byrthnoth]

'Pretty good damage' is a bit of an understatement. I've yet to take more damage than any Paladin on a hit-for-hit basis, obviously discounting shield blocks, which depend on a coin-flip.

As long as your server isn't at a shortage of Darksteel Ingots, any Red Mage should be able to easily hit -44% during the day, -50% at night.

About this, is Darksteel Harness tier 1 for a 100Smith/60Leather crafter?

[Caerloc]

'Pretty good damage' is a bit of an understatement. I've yet to take more damage than any Paladin on a hit-for-hit basis, obviously discounting shield blocks, which depend on a coin-flip.

As long as your server isn't at a shortage of Darksteel Ingots, any Red Mage should be able to easily hit -44% during the day, -50% at night.

i guess you could say 65% is a somewhat biased toincoss.

[Tsuko_Asura]

i guess you could say 65% is a somewhat biased toincoss.

You give the Paladins of FFXI far too much credit.

Even if you have the privilege of tanking alongside a Paladin who knows what the hell they're doing, expecting a capped block-rate on anything and everything is a bit farfetched. Those things aside, yes, its almost exactly a coin-toss. Don't get me wrong, I'd kill for some A+ shield skill wonderfulness ;p I'm just saying its no guarantee.

[Caerloc]

Hehe, of course its no guarentee, and you cant say, ok im gonna block this next hit. But even at 50% blockrate its still every other hit, and its ALOT of dmg mitigated.

[Tsuko_Asura]

About this, is Darksteel Harness tier 1 for a 100Smith/60Leather crafter?

Unfortunately, most of the Coral/Darksteel set is tier1, and tier1's that don't like to follow their 10% statistic at that. Full HQ Darksteel ran me ~2M, full HQ Coral at least 3M. Q_Q

[Syntex]

This is all very good information thankyou everyone who posted information, this is going to help out a ton.

As far as fights go, when would a RMD be the best tank to bring? When would a NIN or a PLD generally be better or is it personal preference(barring some really unique fight)?

From what I can tell they can tank just about anything given the proper gear/skill and sometimes can be better.

One other thing, other then sky gods is there anything thats good practice for HNM tanking so I can work on a rotation?

I was soloing the mobs that drop the pop for ulli in sky, kinda intense but at the same time you have to be fully self sufficient with haste and refresh+other buffs ect but was wondering if something like Roc or Sim might be a good start?

Anyways keep the posts coming!