Red Mage meriting

[Swords]

All more HP will do is make the fight take longer, look at the infamous PW fight.

PW took so long for different reasons (stuns, multiple morphings, etc), and that was when it first came out before anyone really tried to devise a applicable way to beat him outside of the normal grindstone. SE only reduced the difficulty so quickly because they wanted to avoid any more bad publicity over those players stupid stunt, to not know when to call it quits.

Most of even the toughest mobs in the game go down in 3 minutes or less which is well within most peoples buff timers. When player's zerg buffs wear most are in a very vulnerable position, hate is flying around, mages may or may not have mp to cure the aftermath or die from cure bombing, and tank's virtually have little to no hate to take the bunt of the damage, overall the group goes from superhuman to that wimp that gets a daily swirle every day after school. The situation usually only gets worse from there because most players cannot think on their feet, and some mobs get stronger as their hp diminishes and will likely have a ton of TP to lay waste to anyone left standing.

In which case on extremely high hp/def mobs zerg tactics would be far less effective on something that could literally outlast the players going all out. Those that can control their hate and contribute steady constant damage would likely have little to no trouble killing a high def/hp mob within a reasonable time frame.

[Neisan_Quetz]

Perfect defense. Most zerg'd NMs right now is old content anyway.

[Swords]

Most new content is too, they may not zerg it right away because of something like triggers, but after those are found most players usually go all out and kill a mob within minutes.

[Neisan_Quetz]

And all more HP will do is make those fights take longer.

[Terrigenesis]

Back to the original question, I personally like to be well rounded.

Ice Affinity: 4
Wind Affinity: 3
Earth Affinity: 3

Slow 2: 3
Paralyze 2: 3
Blind 2: 3
Phalanx 2: 1

I see consistent procs on all three of the teir 2 Enfeebles and having Phalanx 2 helps out other characters in my LS. Definitely makes helping with Fell Cleaving for time while the rest of the LS gets pop items.

[Neisan_Quetz]

Why Wind affinity? It affects Silence and Gravity, neither of which land on most NMs (Gravity is actually fairly accurate if it isn't being resisted by a NM last I checked). I rarely experience heavy resists on Slow II and Break also doesn't work on most (if any) NM.

[Greatguardian]

Blind II kinda confuses me. At absolute cap, it's only -10 acc better than Blind 1 (-20 cap vs -30 cap). It's a fairly worthless spell, if I ever saw one. To each his own, though.

[Neisan_Quetz]

Blind was one of my most self rage inducing spells at 75 cap, landed on a fairly odd amount of monsters but all our tanks had floored evasion.

[saevel]

PW took so long for different reasons (stuns, multiple morphings, etc), and that was when it first came out before anyone really tried to devise a applicable way to beat him outside of the normal grindstone. SE only reduced the difficulty so quickly because they wanted to avoid any more bad publicity over those players stupid stunt, to not know when to call it quits.

Most of even the toughest mobs in the game go down in 3 minutes or less which is well within most peoples buff timers. When player's zerg buffs wear most are in a very vulnerable position, hate is flying around, mages may or may not have mp to cure the aftermath or die from cure bombing, and tank's virtually have little to no hate to take the bunt of the damage, overall the group goes from superhuman to that wimp that gets a daily swirle every day after school. The situation usually only gets worse from there because most players cannot think on their feet, and some mobs get stronger as their hp diminishes and will likely have a ton of TP to lay waste to anyone left standing.

In which case on extremely high hp/def mobs zerg tactics would be far less effective on something that could literally outlast the players going all out. Those that can control their hate and contribute steady constant damage would likely have little to no trouble killing a high def/hp mob within a reasonable time frame.

Not exactly, PW originally couldn't be killed, literally. The first groups who fought him for hours commented on how he just kept changing forms, after you killed the 9th form he would just go back to the 1st one and get a HP new bar. That 18 hour fight had him cycle through his entire form set several times. Same with AV, AV's original design had him so overpowered that no LS could legitimately kill him. The first ones did so using a zero space collision trick (move him into a spot the server can't let me him from). Once they killed him, he dropped ... nothing. SE had created AV without a drop pool because they were confident that he could never be defeated. Eventually SE made AV killable, but made the conditions for the fight so outlandish that it had a similar situation to the original. Now AV's still ridiculously hard, but killable by skilled groups of people. They did the same thing to PW after they got the bad press. They made him stop cycling after 9 forms but put a 2hr limit on the fight and made his 10th form ridiculously difficult with a cheesy special move that's guaranteed to wipe you, and if it doesn't then he'll just keep using it until it does. LS's had to resort to BLU zombie tactics and everyone /logging prior to the special move. Now it's killable by a group of skilled players, but he'll still rape your face with that special 2hr he's got.

[Hyrist]

Blind II kinda confuses me. At absolute cap, it's only -10 acc better than Blind 1 (-20 cap vs -30 cap). It's a fairly worthless spell, if I ever saw one. To each his own, though.

On my end? It's a matter of defense totals.

It's a flat 10 Accuracy reduction above Blind 1 floored or capped, but speaking plainly, that's an additional 5% evasion rate, for 1 merit.

Slow II, an additional 4% Slow to your cap requires an additional 4 merits, and even then, you might not see the benefit of that in shorter fights. You ESPECIALLY won't see the benefit of an additional 1% Slow with just one merit for quite a while.

But the additional 5% evasion rate can proc on any attack round or even some TP moves. So long as you're not hard floored or capped on evasion, the extra accuracy loss is more beneficial for the merit, if not for the MP. Think of it as a defensive Brutal Earring in that sense.

And if you DO manage to cap the potency on the spell itself, it's as effective as the Ninja Ni Blind without having the ninja or crapshooting tools trying to land it /ninja.

For a merit I really didn't feel a strong purpose for, I found it a worthwhile purchase to add that additional defensive measure to my spell library. Though, again, I wish these were scrolls.