Quote Originally Posted by ManaKing View Post
I agree with GG. No matter what kind of RDM you are, Enfeebles are what we need. Regardless of subjob, we need to be able to do our job (see what i did there, keeping it in line with what we are discussing).

RDMs can significantly reduce the amount of damage that people engaging a mob take by reducing that mobs total damage through debuffs and to a lesser extent buffs. It doesn't matter if you are engaging or sitting back, your job is to keep the people around the mob in good shape. Slow, Blind, Paralyze, Addle, Bio/Dia, Dispel and to a lesser extent silence, bind, gravity, and sleep/break are all good ways to buffer the tanks and DDs from quick or near instant KOs from more powerful mobs. Currently, these spells are completely at the mercy of how cheaply the mobs were constructed.

We are there to help WHMs keep people alive. The WHM can do nothing to keep people alive if the mob is going at full speed and can just run through people faster than they can cure them. A WHM is a poor solution to the instant KO from damage, because there isn't anything they can do when they can't slow down a mobs damage. RDM can't do anything either, but that is because RDM is broken right now. We are supposed to have tools to be able to slow mobs down and take the wind out of their sails, but currently our enfeebles might not work at all.

The point of RDMs is to make it so either themselves or others can outlast what they are engaged with. We are cripplers, we are protectors, and we are support in the broadest implication of the word. If you are willing to learn how to play all of RDM, there will never be a situation where you won't be useful. The problem with that last statement is that currently we are undervalued because we are underpowered. The situation where you won't be useful is the situation where a party fills up and every jobs does what you can do, but better. That is the current state of RDM. Not only was our main focus arbitrarily thrown out of existence by whatever amazing person came up with mobs being straight immune to our magic, but all of our other strengths aren't strong enough to make us desirable. You should not take a RDM to anything right if you can get anything else, unless you know that the RDM can land enfeebles on it.

We need enfeebles back and we need to be better at them than everyone else. Buffs, w/e they are cool, if you want to include them I will never say no. But this bullshit with our only A rank Skill being no better than anyone else's in any qualitative sense that matters to a party needs to go. People give us back our enfeebles. That is the first of many steps that RDM needs to get it back on track.
Unfortunately, sitting back and casting enfeebles just means you get to see them be resisted more. This is SE's fault in their attempt to crush soloist RDM's. People can sling all the mud they want, eventually it boils down to them wanting RDM to just be a WHM. And even if SE "fix's" enfeebles, it's not a full time job, wasn't in 04,05,06,07,08 nor anything after that. You slap them on and ... then sit around ... with your light staff shoved where the sun don't shine waiting for them to wear off to reapply.

Current enfeeble library is,
Useful ones
Dia III: Godly, can't be resisted and effect is direct and scales dramatically
Slow II: mediocre, can be resisted but few NM's have high resistance to it. Scaling is poor due to haste formula.
Para II: potent on anything not resistant, absolutely worthless on anything that is resistant which unfortunately includes most of the boss's you'd want enfeebles on.
Poison II: Damage isn't high enough to matter, can be useful in long solo's with Saboteur
Addle: Won't make any significant difference on NM's but seeing as few are resistant might as well toss in on the stack

Then the crap enfeebles
Blind II: Only useful in low-man situations with a evasion tank vs a weak NM. Vs anything bigger you won't lower it's accuracy to under the accuracy cap.
Silence: everything that you'd want to silence is immune, nothing more to say.
Bind: see Silence
Gravity: see Bind
Break: see Gravity
Sleep: see Break
Bio III: I hold my own special hatred for people who insist on using this. Other then some sort of /SCH long DoT solo it's completely useless. The -attack won't actually change the damage anyone takes due to enemy Ratio being floored at 1. And what's worse, it blocks / overwrites our best debuff Dia III, so not only does it do nothing, but its worse then nothing as it's blocking an extremely useful effect. The sole reason to have 1 merit in this is for the ridiculous VWNM procs, that's it. I'll say it one last time, using Bio III will NOT reduce the damage your tanks are taking. At most it could slightly reduce the CS MNK or zerked WAR due to their defense being so low to begin with.

So out of our "master of enfeebling" we have five useful enfeebles, out of those five three are consistent and out of those three only one is great. It doesn't take a large amount of effort to keep the applicable enfeebles in place. That's the whole reason I started building a melee set to begin with. If I'm going to be standing around with my light staff shoved up my --- I might as well contribute some form of damage. And from there it grew.

And before the annoying people try to say how *great* slow II is, let me demonstrate. Slow and Haste the same thing, one is merely the negative of the other. Thus while we state 30% haste as 100/(100-30), 30% slow then must be stated as 100/(100+30). Wanna see what happens as you scale slow up?

100/115 = 0.8695 (86.95% attack speed)
100/130 = 0.7692 (76.92% attack speed)
100/150 = 0.6666 (66.66% attack speed)

And finally the ZOMG awesomeness of 100% slow
100/200 = 0.5000 (50% attack speed).

Slow gets exponentially worse as you stack more of it, its the inverse of the exponential effect of haste and defense down. This is why I stopped using saboteur on Slow II, I realized that it was better used on other enfeebles if possible. Along with the fact that regular hits were not even scratching our tanks, it was the monsters TP moves that are the most damaging, and we can't do squat about that. Not even the age old "TP FEEd!!1010101011 oHH NOES010101" argument works as most NM's can now use TP moves without needing TP, thanks SE.

So let the bashing, hating and name calling continue.