Thankfully we are seeing some changes to endgame content to make meleeing a bit less stressful. However, I still see many complaints about the debuffs that enemies use so I thought I would provide a little advice.

The example I'm mostly going to reference is one that actually happened just this evening. Me and a few LSmates have been throwing our faces @ Golden Kist the past few days, as it's the last T1 kill we needed. He's universally accepted as the hardest (read: most annoying) Reisenjima T1 NM. If you've never fought him, you'll quickly understand this global opinion once you do. Keep in mind here, my LS is extremely anti-bring-only-the-most-useful-jobs, and playing the job you want to play, no matter what job that is, is praised. We got our Golden Kist kill tonight, and it was probably the most epic thing I've done in the game in a long long time. Wish I had recorded it. Anyway, we went tonight and trioed him. Myself as RDM/NIN, and my friends a SMN and COR. The Trusts almost always die very early in the fight. Even if they don't die at the start, they absolutely will not live through Manafont which happens many times throughout the fight. So we trioed this without trusts. It was a super fun experience.

Okay okay anyway enough bragging, that's not why I'm here. My point is, I use my Barelement and Barstatus spells religiously. They are very important to me. I'm not sure how widely known this fact is, but Barelement spells actually also help protect you from status ailments. In regards to Golden Kist, I was using Barpoison and Barwater since poison is of the water element. Barthunder would probably help against his AOE Stun as well. However, ever since the Staunch Tathlum came out, I've been testing wearing it full time.

And I love it. All of my other ammo/ranged items are now in storage. I mean, how much does 1% triple attack or 10 accuracy or whatever matter, when you're slowed, paralyzed, amnesiaed, or whatever? There's no way the other melee is going to out damage me using his regular ammo while he's debuffed. Ammo stats aren't that spectacular to begin with. So I've noticed when I do content and see a Paralyga or Silencega come out, I watch as everyone else gets debuffs and I resist them quite frequently.

Back on the subject of Golden Kist, his Death Trap move is an AOE Stun+Poison. The poison ticks for 200 so it needs be dealt with promptly. A Remedy works of course, but you're stunned (the internets say the stun lasts for up to 20 seconds but mine never seemed to last more than like 10 I think?) so it's going to hurt some either way. After the kill tonight, I asked my friends how often Death Trap gave them poison, and they said 100%.

Well, I'm here to announce that tonight, during our win, Death Trap poisoned me a total of zero times. ZERO! He was usually poisoning me once per attempt, but it never landed once on our final attempt. Not once.

So here's my thoughts on this whole enemy debuff thing. Don't be afraid to sacrifice a little DPS for utility. It can be a game changer, and it's beyond worth it. There are tons of items in the game that provide resistances to various status effects and the results I've had from using the new tathlum make me want to experiment with them.

That said, I do believe that the degree of enemy debuffs could be made a little bit easier on the community. For example, Traits could possibly become a little better. I've also thought it would be neat if those Traits were improved via our job specific equipment like Artifact or Empyrean. You never really see any Resists on any of our normal equipment, it's always a separate piece with probably no other stats so it never gets used. To be fair though, most of the Resist gear goes in accessory type slots so they make less of an impact on your overall performance. I've seen others suggest SE give RDM group Barspells, but I feel that could be a little overpowered. I suppose I could see since RDM is supposed to be the king of debuffs them giving us group Barstatus spells, but not Barelement.

If you have any other ideas or suggestions, and especially advice, feel free to post it here. However, please refrain from imposing the argument about this problem being solved by not bringing melees to content and only using mages - it's been discussed in many threads on many different forums already. Thanks.