Smite

[Mrbiceps]

Why doesn't samurai have smite? isn't sam 2handed weapon user?

[Zeldar]

It does........if it subs war !

[Mithlas]

I'm curious as to this reasoning as well.

[Cblade]

I actually just made a post about this myself. It makes no sense.

[Raydeus]

Yeah, my favorite god is still Chronos. ( •̀ᄇ• ́)ﻭ✧

[Zeldar]

It makes all the sense in the world. SAM and RUN are still used,... still relevant. They don't get a boost. The other jobs are not used by the community mostly and need an upgrade to make them accepted again, so they get it. It's that simple really. If you say that SAM is not relevant, I am not sure which game you are playing. Can another job easily solo the 4 and 6 step skillchains necessary to pop vagary NMs?

[Selindrile]

Saying Sam is relevant because it's used in only one situation (popping Vagary NMs) which wasn't really much of a thing even until this last patch made Vagary drops more relevant again... not really fair, I think, that's like saying War didn't need a buff (at least this month) since it's good in this month's Ambuscade.

[Zeldar]

Well let me give more examples then. Sam can make skillchains so easily for black mages to burst off of, which is crucial in Geas Feat and capacity parties. For those farming meywa plasm and HPB, SAM wrecks wildskeeper reives and delve (annoying that this still needs 3 to enter, but thats for another post.) Sams damage output is still insane and they have more tools to survive at close range than DRK. And before you make the arguement , I know that fighting at close range these days is suicidal, but smite will not fix that. All I'm saying is this: I believe that the problem SE was trying to address with smite is the fact that MOST parties will only accept SAM out of the pool of close-range DDs. In situations where people are still accepting close range melee, SAM is the first non-tank job they will accept. I do admit that all close range melee need to be given a break somehow: its just brutal in there !

[Selindrile]

The only situations people do accept non-tank melee is the easy content, and even for that, people usually will take Blu or Dnc over Sam because there are less stringent buff requirements to optimize them.

The only content where Sam is really used is Vagary that I can think of, haven't seen anyone using a Sam on Fete, on the hard ones, no melee, and even the easy ones you generally lowman, and Sam is generally meh without appropriate buffs and nukers and not worth wasting the party slots even on trusts to buff the Sam, is why you'd usually see a Blu or Dnc there, at least on Fenrir.

I haven't played Sam in ages, doesn't help that it didn't get access to Sulevia gear, the "asian set" was pretty bad, and making Valorous, while good stuff, seems wasteful for a job you almost never play, for me at least...

[Zeldar]

The thing is, the fix for SAM, and every other close range melee, is to make it more durable. The other 2-handers suffered from less attack potential than SAM, so smite was an effort to fix that. What we should ALL be crying for is for SE to make melee'ing at close range in general a situation you can actually survive.

[Selindrile]

I -mostly- agree with you here, but as much as survivability, it's resistance to being completely disabled and useless.

There's no way to get rid of amnesia, and it just SHUTS everything down for a certain amount of time. Charm messes with hate and gets people killed and also turns off DPS, can't remove it either. Because of the way TP works, monster special move frequency, and the amount of monster special moves with nasty disables, yes, we can remove alot of them, but when it's spamming 2-3 moves with 2-3 disables each (The monster can just do one move, and dispel 8-10 buffs on everyone which is rough to put back up, or slowga and silence everyone requiring a lot of effort to remove slow/re-haste/remove silence etc), it's very hard to keep up with, and all this time spent disabled just makes the melee useless compared to mages which can just avoid it all.

It's not a matter of laziness or making things easier per-se I mean, we're completing the content now mostly... it's about it being far less efficient to do with melee, making melee never the right choice on the content, which is a balance problem.

I'm not sure the exact answer, but it's somewhere between monsters not having such ridiculous effects on melees and the melees resisting/surviving these moves better.

[Zeldar]

You can remove amnesia with ecphoria rings. You can sleep the charm. I'm not sure I would agree with adjusting charm, but I do agree that there should be other ways to remove amnesia. You can use medicines to remove most other status effects, which have ALWAYS been a big part of Final Fantasy games. The multi dispel sucks, I don't have a smart answer for that one.

[Selindrile]

Ecphoria ring have long cooldowns for mobs that spam, and you need to be fulltiming it otherwise you have to wait for the initial cooldown to wear, so, unless you want to carry around about 10 ecphoria rings and continaually swap them out.... hah, no.

I have no problem with mobs doing the occasional status effect or even mass dispel... it's simply that the insane amount, type and frequency of debuffs that mobs, make melees not playable right now.

Sleeping charm doesn't stop the fact that you just turned off that person's dps, but, admittedly, charm is more niche than the other issues... again, it's not an issue of difficulty, it's an issue of these things making melee inefficient and therefore not viable compared to mages now.

[Zeldar]

Well there are several, and I mean a HUGE number of mobs, that are magic resistant. In these situations, ranger spam is the solution since they don't get hit either. Just being able to take some hits would get melee back into the fight. The status ailments are a mechanic of the game that makes each mob unique.