Leveling: Blue Mage Duo (8-15)

Our previous "leveling" bouts for BLU were more about learning abilities rather than just fighting things for experience points. Since we had nearly all of our spells through level 16 (were just missing Healing Breeze, a level 16 spell), we were able to just kill monsters for experience points for several levels.

We started off in Windurst, and went running through East Sarutabaruta to head to the Outer Hurototo Ruins. We fought mostly DCs, and headed deeper into the tunnels, and found some Tough bombs, bats and beetles. We successfully took on several of these, but one of the beetles killed us, sending us back to Whitegate, just in time for a bout of Besieged.

After Besieged, Grym gave us a Teleport-Vahzl, and we used the outpost teleport to get back to Windurst. This time we made our way up to Tahrongi Canyon, and fought DC-T mandies, sprouts, and bunnies. Corbun, who hadn't played for months, showed up to power level us a bit. I think he was curious to see what Blue Mage was like. When we hit 11, we headed back to Windurst to empty our pockets, upgrade our gear, and eat some supper.

We then decided to head out to Giddeus, and found a perfect spot in the "basement". For some reason, there was a lack of necklace farmers (perhaps because the necklace price dropped to under 1K over the weekend), and we had 6 mostly Tough Yagudos and 2 Even Match-Tough worms to rotate through. They respawned as fast as we needed them, and we had a great time getting to 13 there. We routinely had chain #3s, which is just not something we've ever seen with any of our other duo combinations at that level. In fact, besides BST, I don't believe we often fought Toughs as a duo and lived to tell the tale. Blue Mage does seem to be a bit over-powered, at least at these baby levels.

We headed back to Windurst after we hit 13 with a buffer, and again emptied our pockets and upgraded some gear again. I wanted to go beat up some Cardians to see if we could learn Bludgeon (a level 18 spell), so we headed to the Ruins in West Sarutabaruta and fought mostly the Threes. We had a power failure in the midst of this, and then kept getting disconnected for another hour afterwards, but we finally managed to both learn Bludgeon. Then it was off to Tahrongi Canyon to see about Healing Breeze. Elboron's BLU was 14, and he also needed Healing Breeze, so he said he'd meet us there.

We fought our way up to the dhalmels, using our empress bands, and quickly got close to 14 ourselves. Before Elboron arrived, we had a dhalmel link and kill Grymalkyn. She had to homepoint to Whitegate, Tele-Vahzl, OP to Windurst, and run back out to the Canyon, killing things along the way to try to make up for the death. Meanwhile Elboron showed up, and he and I kept working on the dhalmels. Grym got back rather quickly, and the three of us didn't have any trouble with the dhalmels, but they just didn't want to use Healing Breeze, and instead would use Stomping, Cold Stare, Sonic Wave, Whistle, and whatever the Berserk one is. Eventually we all learned it (Kiki first, then Grym and Elbo on the same one). Both Kiki and Grym got to level 14 in the process.

The next morning, Grym and I headed back to the Canyon, and Grym soloed until she caught back up to me. Then we teamed up and got to 15, mostly so we could sell all of the gear we'd bought, and can buy new stuff the next time we take out our BLUs. Another benefit of 15 is that we can rent chocobos in the starter cities, making it easier to get out to exp.

I'm having trouble deciding how to dress as a BLU. MP is critical, so even as a Taru, I think I'll be wearing MP boosting gear. I noticed that if I wear +MND gear, my cures do a bit more healing, so I'll probably end up doing gear swaps for every macro like for RDM. If we're going to keep duoing or trioing rather than joining normal parties, we need to be geared a bit like BST - good attack and decent defense. And if we decide to use our NPCs, do we set them to be Stalwart Shields?

Food is another question. I think we might try Menemen, a new food made from puk eggs that gives +30HP/+30MP and +1HP/+1MP recovered while healing.