Can BLM have better Scythe Skill?

[Chilzen]

I know this will likely be scoffed by some people, but given the dev teams have always been Hell bent on showcasing BLMs with Scythe for some reason or another, is there the possibility of making BLM at least competent with the weapon?

As far back as Zilart, we've seen the BLM Taru Crystal Warrior wielding Scythe, gotten MANY R/E Scythes with suprisingly nice boosts to stats, as well as alot of promotional images even back in the Vana'idel Tribune showcasing BLMs using them. The kicker, though, is that BLM has horrible HORRIBLE skill rating with that weapon type. As it stands, BLM has a very unimpressive E Rating with them, and doesn't even have access to most of the weapon skills on the weapon. The most notable one that we can get for use requires us to change to /WAR to proc Red !! in Abyssea, and that's just silly.

WHM has club as their goto melee choice of weapons, as well as B+ skill rating in it that causes them to rival regular DD jobs pending on playerskill / mob type, so why can't BLM have a bit of love with the melee weapon SE loves to constantly hand us from high end NMs?

One last thing, just in case one of the community staff actually read this and don't mind clarifying it, but I've always been curious as to why BLM really have been shown extensively with scythes in XI. I see little nods here and there to Black Mage related things in other games in the series, like the black waltz wings from the /jobemote, but I don't truly recall any scythe wielding ones anywhere in the FF series.

[Bubeeky]

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that that's probably because a scythe is decidedly more ominious looking and contributes to the whole dark/badass/black mage motif moreso than just a simple staff or wand. With all the nifty spells and stuff that we have tho, lol why would u want a scythe on top of that?

[Monkeynutz]

Well BLM mobs certainly had scythes, most notably the crystal warrior taru and skeleton type mobs, but players didn't have the ability to wield a scythe on BLM until the release of Chain of Promathia and that was basically the dev team responding to hordes of BLMs saying, 'how come the mobs can use scythes and not us!? It's not fair!' So they decided to toss in a pathetically low scythe skill so BLM could technically use a scythe and I believe at the time added 2 scythes for BLM (3 if you count NQ/HQ as 2).

Players were never really meant to use scythes, but they really wanted to so SE figured why not? At this point I'm not sure what you'd want to do with higher skill level in scythe. BLM does have access to some very respectable staves and a much better skill level for staff. There aren't very many good options for a BLM scythe, and of course no worthwhile weapon skills to use, so unless SE just decided to open the flood gates and allow BLM to be mini DRKs I don't see why it would even be an attractive option to wield a scythe.

[Chilzen]

Interesting. Joined the game just a bit after CoP was released, so never knew that backstory to the situation.

As far as wanting better skill in it, I've seen how SE has gave BLM several nice JSE Scythes over the years, or added them to some pretty good casting types as well that share DRK and other jobs. Now that they did that deal with Occult trait, where you get back TP based on the tier of your spell, and with the very balanced stats of Maleficus, it opens up the playstyle of using a single weapon to build TP off spells, then run in for a single WS, then back out to the sidelines. Sure, there's plenty of high damage poles in the game that BLM can use, but most of the high damage Scythes they can use have nice WS modifiers / spellcasting benefits as well.

[Monkeynutz]

This might be worthwhile (if worthwhile is the word) if BLM's Occult Acumen trait weren't so pathetically low. Currently a BLM receive 2.5% TP for every 100MP spent, so you simply have to spend 4,000MP (on elemental and dark spells only) without switching weapons to collect enough TP to use a weapon skill. It's significantly faster to just melee things to collect TP, even with an E scythe rank.

I actually have seen a couple of BLMs full-timing a Maleficus and I can't help but wonder why they prefer to nuke with a weapon that's significantly weaker than a NQ level 51 elemental staff. I've never actaully seen them melee with it, they just nuke with it as though that's somehow a good idea. Also, of the 5 scythe WSs that BLM has access to (without subbing WAR, DRK, or BST) only one of them (dark harvest) uses an INT modifier and it's only 20%. Everything else is STR modified so it's not like you could do anything particularly impressive with a WS in any case.

Also, I forgot the mention the practical reason people wanted scythes for BLM. It mostly has to do with the ridiculous way magic damage is caluclated VS melee damage. Basically magic damage caps, or at least has a soft cap such that if you do 1000 damage to a mob that's IT++ the same spell will not likely do even 1100 damage to a level 1 mob. Because of this and the fact that BLM had virtually no access to any respectable melee weapons farming was a huge pain, so the inclusion of seriously more damaging scythes actually did allow BLMs to deal much better melee damage to TW mobs that they were farming items from. This was preferable to killing them with nukes and resting after every 2 or so mobs. Like I said though, BLM has good staves now, a decent enough staff skill, and there are at least 1 or 2 ok staff WSs that a BLM can use (mostly just spirit taker and retribution) so using a staff just makes much more sense. It's not as cool looking, unfortunately, but there it is.

[Fredjan]

I too have had BLMs ask me if Maleficus is any good, and I knew the answer before I even got one and tested it just to re-assure myself although unnecessary: No. Staves (and even moreso Magian) are so much better its pathetically amusing.

SE has never made a weapon that's better than elemental staves excluding Magian magic damage+ staves, Dorje looked impressive at first, but it even fell behind HQ staves, and that's MAB+25. The level 90 BLM mythic has some impressive MAB but it still falls behind magian staves. Thinking about that, there is absolutely no way a Maleficus could EVER be decent, and I wish BLMs that nuke with it got the hint, but alas.

Anyway, nuking discussion over, Scythes are just something I'd wear just for the look and so on (meh, they look cooler than rune staff [obviously referring to magian staves]) and messing around meleeing/un-practical use. In the case of BLM, that's all they're good for. BLM doesn't even get most WS in general without using certain support jobs and that's including all weapons they can use.

In the long run, if a BLM is messing around meleeing they are better off using a staff since they get Spirit Taker and Retribution (especially if they are crazy enough to have relic or empyrean or even god forbid, mythic), as Monkeynutz pointed out. The way I look at it, if someone wants to dish out strong damage with a Scythe, Dark Knight's that way (---->).

[katz]

Yes Lets give the squishee blms the slowest weapon so they can die even quicker.....

[Bubeeky]

I want a big bad dark-lookin scythe just to wear around town to look like the big bad blm I am!