Help, I can't play my job!

[Lokithor]

There are foods that increase the skill up rate for combat skills. There is also a family of foods that does the same for magic skills. For combat skills (including evasion and parry), the progression is Saltena, Elshena, Montagna, Meringa. Saltena is used at the lowest skill levels and meringa at the highest. They are, though, very expensive.

[Mirage]

Yeah mine is really crappy at the moment. Dunno what skill up food is. Tried getting skillups in merit parties and the problem is some mage or warrior rushes in on my target and completely steals hate. Getting those skills are not easy and then I get yelled at for expecting to get skillups in an xp party where they want to kill fast, but if I get lucky in fighting my own target then those points are already flowing in at 0.4 and 0.5 every few seconds. Currently eva is 299, dagger 257, parry 232.

Just focus on the dagger skill for now. When your dagger skill gets high enough, you'll gain TP fast enough to keep healing yourself while you get evasion/parry skillups outside of an exp alliance. While you are in the alliance, it doesn't matter too much that you're not able to evade anyway, because mobs will either be attacking other people, or you'll be healed anyway.

Until recently (a few months ago), parry was also incredibly slow to level and many players who have had max level jobs for years would still not have anywhere near capped parrying. So yeah, don't worry too much about that.

To give you a feeling of exactly how much that low dagger skill of yours affected your damage and accuracy though:

If you just got to the level where you could use evisceration, that means your dagger skill was over 150 points below cap. This means you were having something like 70%+ less accuracy than other dancers at your level. Even if you put on the same gear as them, where they would hit the enemy 90% of the time, you would be hitting 20% of the time. And that's not even touching the attack you're missing out on from the skill level.

[geekgirl101]

Yup. I've done a lot of work today in getting skills boosted. Now up to 379 dagger and 339 evasion tanking my own flea to gain tp for healing a thf cleave. Worked quite well actually. ^^ Tried the food too, couldn't tell if it was improving my chances of gaining skills or not but they were definitely flying in almost every hit.

Still only capable of tanking only 1 decent challenge mob in aby though as long as nobody else hits it. If I try more than that I get hurt real bad and hate is lost off the bat when another dps starts attacking. My thf is still more capable of handling 5-6 mobs at a time in comparison to the 1 my dnc can handle. Maybe more evasion is needed, maybe more better gear...

At the moment this is what I got:

Main: Peeler
Sub: Kartika
Ranged: War Hoop
Head: Empress Hairpin
Body: Alcide's Harness
Hands: Slither Gloves
Legs: Aurore Brais
Feet: Aurore Gaiters
Neck: Arctier's Torque
Waist: Scouter's Rope
Back: Blur Mantle
LEar: Suppanomimi
REar: Dodge Earring
LRing: Heed Ring
RRing: Demonry Ring

[Dohati]

Oh cheers, I'll start investing in those. I'll go pick up a new peeler and start making another dagger. The level 99 one though is a bit out of my budget at the moment though, I'll have to make do with 2x evasion kilkas.

Working on capping evasion if I can, I've a long way to go. It's only 265.

when you're 99 and your skills are around that of a lvl 75 char, of course you're going to suck <_< once you cap your evasion though, between that and the heavy PDT gained from fan dance, you're pretty much invincible.

[Mayoyama]

Put a merit into fan dance and full time it (until you gear better). wont help with magic but will def help with melee hits. Consider also 3 levels in Closed Position, 5 no foot rise (will help you get tp faster with reverse flourish).

Buy some squid sushi (+1), will help you out if accuracy still an issue The +1 lasts an hour.

Try get some Ballerines from Durinn (common drop... 100%?) in abyssea vunkerl. Relic feet for step accuracy, and relic body for violent flourish accuracy/duration

Make sure to keep collecting abyssites as some of them will give you things like extra boost to your cruor buffs, which will also help

[geekgirl101]

Ballerines better than aurore gaiters? I thought they were the same or at least the gaiters better because of extra stats, or am I wrong?

[Mirage]

They have more haste, the same evasion, but a penalty to attack power. Use them in your haste and evasion set until you get something better. If you cap haste with aurore gaiters, however, you might as well use Aurore gaiters because they don't have an attack penalty.

You might also want to get a pair of Tandava Crackows, they give you +12% movement speed and are a 100% drop off of Ironclad Cleaver. They are nice when you want to run away from/kite a mob, and when you're out of combat combined with Chocobo jig, you can get around really fast.

Also, your skills are starting to get to an all right level. I mean, it's not something to be ashamed of anymore, even if they're still not quite there. The difference between now and cap for evasion is however going to let you evade something like 40 percentage points more.

[Byrth]

Yeah, Ballerines are better than Aurore Gaiters.

[geekgirl101]

Oh right... I'll switch to using those instead then.

Thanks for the advice everyone. Hope I'll soon be less of the dancing queen of lame.

[Behemothx]

Dunno if you got your atmas yet but you'll have a much better tanking experience with Razed Ruins and Gnarled Horn.

* Razed Ruins comes from Ironclad Pulverizer in Aby-Misar. (F-8) Some dumbasses are selling this atma for some reason ><

* Gnarled Horn comes from Sobek, you can go in Aby-Misar. (J-11) and just ask the people doing it if you can join for atma, I don't see why they wouldn't.