Blue mage made me pay attention to mobs' skills

While I was testing blue mage yesterday, I noticed a nice little bonus effect it had on me.

I was avoiding all places where I saw players gathering, in an attempt to not have the mobs with learnable spells spoiled. And I learned 4 new spells this way without ever following the crowds - that felt nice, and rather surprising, since it was the first day and the whole server was chasing the same mobs.

So I tried different mobs, waiting to see if they had any special attacks, especially ones with aoe markers, and for the first time I actually paid attention. The field mobs have never been very dangerous, so I've never bothered to see what they actually do while fighting them. Now I did, and for some reason that was fun! For the first time, I noticed that enemy x has a poison attack, enemy y has a stun attack, and the attack names are tailored to suit the enemy. Like the spell

acorn bomb from the treant sapling.

Not all of them were learnable, but some were, and I had a blast finding out which ones.

Not very special this, maybe, but I liked to be given a reason to pay attention to the details the devs have put into the world that would otherwise go unnoticed. :)

This is one thing I'm appreciating from BLU, as well as players re-learning (or some for the first time, I'm sure) the old ARR zones. As someone who didn't teleport very much in my early days, it kinda baffled me to see players shouting "Where are the caves?" or "Where are the wasps?"

yeah this bit of blue is done really well, theres been a couple times i wish theyd renamed some of the blue spells to their 14 counterparts (cermet drill as opposed to drill cannon) or injected that spell into the existing mobs instead of adding whole new mobs to the map that scream "heres your blue spell, come and hit me!" but yeah i found quite a few running off on my own attacking random mobs to see what i could learn from them based on what ive played of previous blues (PLEASE YOSHIP GIVE US GOBLIN PAAAAAUNCH!)

I love seeing so many people out in the wild. It was so easy to stay in one place and just teleport to every instance. Having something worthwhile to do out in the world is so refreshing to see. I've made a lot of BLU friends from random parties. I hope more abilities come from open world mobs in the future to keep the whole world feeling alive and active.

It's been refreshing to have to pay more mind to enemy skills. Especially when one of the first skills you need to learn, Blood Drain, is not one of those AoE skills that uses a big yellow telegraph.

Makes paying attention to other single target skills that enemies use more interesting. Get to know some interesting things, like Wolves and Gigantoads having extra burst damage through oGCD skills such as Foul Bite and Lap respectively. Coeurls have a single target paralyze skill called Microblaster (The name only pops up when you manage to dodge it though).

I can only imagine the insight to be gleaned from figuring out what each Diresaur ability is called (Those being the big dinosaurs that have hugely telegraphed attacks, but that never use the yellow markers to highlight them, such as the last boss(es) in Stone Vigil (Hard)) if it ever comes to trying to learn one (Or more) of their skills.

Like, some skills are easy to remember, since you spend so much time moving out of their AoE cones while the enemy channels the cast... While it's the more subtle ones that you often don't have a second thought about or maybe don't even notice at all that you can find when you start trying to pay attention to any skill usage in case it can be learned (If you don't look at a list of the names of all learnable skills, of which there are depressingly few...)

You can see the names of skills used by enemies in the combat log, even instant cast ones that don't deal any damage.

OMG, I can not agree with the sentiment more. Most of the time as a Healer I just wait for AoE or respond to the tank's health. I just never payed attention to ability names, didn't need to. Only a few times in my career did I focus target a boss to watch it.

Although on the downside, during a run of the Monastary, I did not know that Cid's attacks share the same name and got my self killed a couple times.

Clarification: I DONT need to because I don't do savage or extreme. I'm an above average healer and can handle healing and DPS just fine without pre-empting boss attacks. All I am saying is that MC is beating the habit into me.

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Originally Posted by Skeith9

OMG, I can not agree with the sentiment more. Most of the time as a Healer I just wait for AoE or respond to the tank's health. I just never payed attention to ability names, didn't need to. Only a few times in my career did I focus target a boss to watch it.

Although on the downside, during a run of the Monastary, I did not know that Cid's attacks share the same name and got my self killed a couple times.

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As a healer you should always be paying attention to boss casts so you can prepare for upcoming damage. Knowing what the tank buster or aoe is called will significantly reduce your healing load as you can shield/ pre cast accordingly.