Astral fire and umbral ice

Hi all,

After more that 100 hours of play time, i have realised that tank is not for me. I have not much experience in mmo and find this aspect of the game to be stressful while in dungeons. I know that i a, a bad tank and feal bad about it...

So, i,switch to blackmage. However, i dont understand how this two buff work. Can someone give me some detailled noob tips to understand it better?

Why does my fire spell cost more when i cast it multiple time?


Thanks

Sure. Astral Fire boosts the damage of your fire spells, but at the cost of making them cost more MP. Umbral ice makes your MP regenerate at a faster rate while casting Blizzard.

Ideally what you want to do at lower levels is cast Fire until you are very low on MP, use Transpose, then cast Blizzard until you are full of MP, then start casting Fire spells again.
When you get to higher levels, Fire III and Blizzard III will automatically swap your AF and UI stacks, so when you become low on MP, casting Blizzard III will automatically put you into Umbral Ice, and your MP starts regenerating earlier, faster. Then when you're full, cast Fire III and suddenly you have a full Astral Fire stack, and your Fire spells are now at full power quicker.

There is also a BLM thread in the DPS forums that have more complete rotations you can practice when you get to level fifty, but those are the basics up there.

Astral Fire gives your fire attacks more damage and makes them cost more.
Umbral Ice give you massive amount of MP.
Tranpose switches you from Astra Fire to Umbral Ice and vice versa.

The main thing to understand with THM/BLM is that you do most of your DPS while under astral fire then recover your MP while under umbral ice. The class is built around this concept. In effect, you have infinite MP as a THM/BLM, but need to manage its use and recovery.

Until level 40, you'll be using Fire attacks till you're out of MP, then transpose into ice and use ice and thunder until your MP is full, then transpose back into fire

Once you're level 40, you'll have access to Fire3 and Blizzard3 and the level 3 astra/umbral buff, which will let you drop tranpose out of your rotation, since both attacks will give you it's respective buff at 3 stacks.

Now this is a lot more clear. Thank you so much.

If i understand it well, if my last spell was fire, doing a ice spell will not automaticly change my astral fire to umbral ice. It will only stop it. after i cast my second ice spell in a row, then i will get umbral ice ( first time - stop. Second time give in too you.)

Tranpose swap it right now...

Dont know if it make sense...

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Originally Posted by Zilon

Now this is a lot more clear. Thank you so much.

If i understand it well, if my last spell was fire, doing a ice spell will not automaticly change my astral fire to umbral ice. It will only stop it. after i cast my second ice spell in a row, then i will get umbral ice ( first time - stop. Second time give in too you.)

Tranpose swap it right now...

Dont know if it make sense...

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You're right about after you cast a Blizzard after Fire, it'll remove Astral FIre, but it WON'T give you Umbral Ice. Another cast of Blizzard will give you Umbral Ice.

That's why you want to use Transpose, it immediately switches your Astral Fire stack to an Umbral Ice stack (and the other way around, but honestly you won't want to use it that way). So if you're low on Fire, BEFORE casting Blizzard, use Transpose.

EDIT
Sorry, re read your post and you have it correct.........but yes that's the gist of it

Thank you again.

Another one : i guess you use sleep where there is more that one mob. You use sleep on them so they dont bother you and your team for a little while. This way, you can concentrate on one mob

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Zilon

Thank you again.

Another one : i guess you use sleep where there is more that one mob. You use sleep on them so they dont bother you and your team for a little while. This way, you can concentrate on one mob

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Yeah, you can, but it has limited uses. Best to ask the tank and healer if you should use Sleep to help them out. Instead, you could use Fire II and hit all the mobs at the same time.
Also, Sleep doesn't even work on level fifty dungeons and higher, so no point there. I used it mostly when solo, leveling up, Would sleep one mob and focus the other so I wasn't overrun, because I was a very squishy BLM.

That make a lot of sense. Do you use surecast?

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Originally Posted by Zilon

That make a lot of sense. Do you use surecast?

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No, but I'm not a BLM main. (also I'm /lazy)
But it's good for when you think you're going to get hit and it might interrupt your cast. You can pop Surecast and the spell won't be interrupted by the attack.

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Originally Posted by Zilon

Do you use surecast?

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There are a lot of limitations to surecast's usefulness.

At level 26, you'll get swiftcast, which is definitely better. And at lower levels the majority of attacks don't cause an interrupt anyway.

Surecast only prevents interrupts that would result from being attacked. If you're interrupting yourself by moving (because you need to dodge out of the way of an AoE or position yourself for a dungeon mechanic or whatever) surecast doesn't help you there.

In group play, you normally shouldn't even be getting attacked in the first place, not if your tank is able to keep aggro.


That said, there are still some places where it's useful. If you don't have swiftcast yet (or it's locked by cooldown or level sync) and you're getting hit by mobs that keep causing your spells to fail by getting interrupted half-way through the cast, swiftcast can allow you to get one off that they can't interrupt. Just be sure that spell's a good one, because you're likely to already be in bad shape when that situation comes up.

I myself am still a beginner at this class. (I have it to level 30 on one character and 26 on another, but haven't even played as black mage yet.) I'm not experienced enough to be any good at recognizing which mobs are likely to interrupt my casts until I'm surrounded by several of them and having trouble getting any spells out. I'd assume that familiarity would make a more experienced THM/BLM better at recognizing that in advance and therefore able to use surecast more effectively than I do.

As you get higher in levels and get Fire III and Blizzard III, you'll notice that the wording is a bit different compared to the lower Fire and Ice spells.

"Grants a full stack" - while the wording is a bit strange, I'll tell you exactly what it does.

Fire 3 - Will always give you max stacks of Astral Fire (even if you use it during Umbral Ice it will give you Max Astral Fire without using Transpose first)
Blizzard 3 - Will always give you max stacks of Umbral Ice (even if you use it during Astral Fire it will give you Max Umbral Ice without using Transpose first)

I wont give away too much, but basically that information will be key to becoming a successful Black Mage.