Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better!: RDM Guide

I have been gearing my Red Mage again after losing macros, and by accident, found this thing where Gain spells have a duration cap of exactly 30 minutes. I wasn't aware that any enhancing spells had a hard cap on their durations. Of course, I am only achieving this with Composure active. BGwiki does not make any mention of it.

If this is right, it means for Gain spells you can: 1) Cap 500 skill, 2) Use Relic hands, 3) use as much Duration gear as it takes to cap, and 3) fill the rest with what you like.

It leaves me wondering if there are any other spells with these hard duration caps? Because if so, I would very much appreciate the information. Thanks.

Edit: After playing around with the enhancing duration equipment I currently have, I found that with Compusure, Gain spells 30-minute is around 88-89%. Tough for me to get an exact number.

This is a property of composure, rather than of gain spells. So if you were looking on the gain spell pages, they wouldn't say anything about it.

BGwiki Composure page.
There's also a mention of this on the Enhancing magic page.

Sorry for you loss on the macros. That is the rough stuff


Male/Kraken for quickly farming trash
Male/Thib for farming something that is going to take more than 1 AE that I'm not scared of
Malex2 for something that I'd like to kill in 1 AE with high TP like Mantis horde in omen. (offhand Bunzi is probably the better answer but mine is not maxed to test)

Well that explains it, lol. Thanks for pointing it out.

Tauret is BiS MH for AE. OH BiS is Thib but if you are looking for a specific damage base then, Daybreak, Maxentius and Bunzi R0 all beat out a max roll Malev.

There is really only 1 spell you can reliably get over 30 minutes that doesn't start that high. It's aquaveil. I came across it when I was testing things and my aquaveil timers weren't lining up with what the timers plugin in windower was giving me (which was clamping them down to 30 minutes).

Chiaia went and tested using the sroda necklace and we found out that composure will work even on Protect and Shell as long as their duration is below 30 minutes. It just triples the duration and gives the minimum of 30 minutes or whatever the duration amount is.

Edit: I should add that the composure 3x effect doesn't just apply to Enhancing Magic. If you are /sch and cast Klimaform, it will last 15 minutes, not 5. The set bonus, and enhancing bonus just don't add more to it.

Edit: Other spells I reliably get to 30 minutes with Composure on self cast, Haste, Barspells, Barstatus, Spikes, Blink.

Aquaveil is actually at 32ish minutes and doesn't receive a bonus from Composure.

Thanks for the info. Looks like I have something to play around with.
Orpheus sash and sroda tathlum are considered at all?

Both are BiS, I just do not have them. If you are aiming for a specific base damage, Sroda should be swapped with something more consistent like WSD.

Also posted this in Reddit, but thought it this would be a worthwhile place to ask it since it's a RDM forum.

Looking at resubbing because I miss the game, but I don't have a ton of time; about 1 hour / day.

I'd probably be slowly grinding away at gearing up my RDM, which is Mastered (ML 0) currently has most of their AF at +2 (everything else is +1 for JSE), Naegling/Thibron, Ambu +2, a tiny bit of Oddyssey stuff, 3/5 Malignance, etc. How long would it take me to do things like finishing my JSE upgrades, Crocea Mors, Almace, getting my MLs, etc. so I can use it for all the content in the game? Would I ever catch up?

Honestly not hard to gear up jobs these days but if you only have an hour/day, it's going to take a while. +3 empy is 80k muffins per piece. Entry level groups for sortie are doing good to get 10-20k/run.

Relic is easy to upgrade, just need the gilz.

Lots of great pieces from Ody that just take time. Working your way through the clears unless you have a friend that can take you through.

Crocea = Lots of gilz

Almace = Huge time investment.

All that being said you can easily peck away at any of these. Work on Almace if you're not working on one of the other items.

Do tons of ambu to earn gilz. Currency always sells and ambu is super easy to farm.

My $.02 hope it helps.

Almace is irrelevant nowadays. Just unlock CDC weaponskill for skillchaining if you dont have it and ignore the sword. Naegling & Thibron or Crocea & Daybreak/Thibron will be your main weapons vast majority of the time. RDM is not very hard to gear but it is very expensive.

Citation needed on "not very hard to gear". It requires gear from pretty much every single endgame event and 2-10x as many sets as most other jobs. It's one of the most gear-intensive jobs to play (if you want to do it right)

Hard? No, but it is time consuming to get it to a functioning mid-level. Vast majority of the RDM sets revolve around AF, Relic, and Empy armor, with the only throwaway piece there being the artifact boots. That is a lot of gear/gil investment there, but shouldn't be considered difficult these days to get any of that with some average geared helpers/friends. Sortie being the one holding you back the most since it is not very low man or solo friendly and wanting to +3 the whole empyrean set. None of the RDM REMA's are particularly good, or needed for any of the content, and that is a huge time saver not having to worry about any of those unless you really want to.

Yes, FFXI is not going anywhere anytime soon and it is not likely raising the gear ceiling again. Even at an ~hour a day, you can make progress.



Finish your Almace if you really want to but you will likely never use it over the Naegling\Thibron combo. Maxentius (Ambu club) is a much better/important weapon to make for RDM now (specifically for Sortie with melee setups). The Mpu Gandring (prime dagger) is an interesting weapon for RDM (3 step light SC option) but Empy +3 is far more important.

Crocea Mors is worth it but you can get the Vitiation Sword for like ~1% of the cost (server dependent). Basically, if you know you will not be getting a Crocea Mors any time soon, it can be very worthwhile to RP a Vitiation Sword (especially if it only cost you time in Dyna-D). Depending on your buffs and gear, having a Crocea Mors may not be a damage increase (GEO+COR MAB buffs + Malise = 9s with Vitiation Sword). To be fair, I am rarely super buffed like that, so a Crocea Mors would be a damage upgrade for myself in those non-super buffed situations.

I would recommend focusing on Empy +3 first for RDM. It is a RDMs free nuke set, Elemental WS set and a somewhat starter WS set (feet are BiS for basically all WS). Then focus on JSE +3 for the specific BiS pieces. Learning how to sortie (try to find a group to sortie with) and just running sortie will take up your hour per day though.

Finish RoV, finish Adoulin and finish TVR (if you have not finished\started these). RoV is massive QoLIs, while Adoulin and TVR have rings that are very significant boost to gear.

MLs are a grind past 40 but getting to 30 is a good start.

Unless they suprise us with new content, you'll be able to catch up. Ambu bow Ullr goes well with Naegling+Thib. Empyreal Arrowe > Savage Blade > CDC solves a lot of problems.

Can anybody tell me which of this would be better for Magic Burst? (Solo player so Bunzi Gloves are unavailable).

Ea's Cuffs +1
Amalric Gages +1
Lethargy Gantherots +3

I also have Dark Mattered Chironic gloves to throw into the mix with M.Acc +20, M.Atk.Bonus +20, Magic Burst +10% but I figure at my current level of gear I need to be aiming for MBD2 more than MBD1. Also open to any other suggestions that I'd be able to get solo.

Probably Amalric if Bunzi isn't an option. They still have use after you get something better, unlike Ea's Cuffs, which are only useful for burst. Path D.

Lethargy if for some reason on solo content you need macc.

This statement makes me think you don't understand the difference between these two. Could you explain what you meant here?

The standard burst set prior to odyssey gear basically looks like this:

Ea head/body/legs, Amalric hands, Tenzen neck, Jhakri +2 Feet (Ea technically better I guess, but meh) for 39 Magic Burst 1, 30 magic burst 2.

If Lethargy +3 is an option, then legs imo easily replace Ea legs, and you can drop Jhakri +2 for Lethargy feet as well.

I meant I know about the 40 cap from gear, I can hit that easily enough so I was planning to focus on MBD2. I was mainly looking into Amalric +1 gloves or Ea's +1 gloves and wondering if there was much of a difference between the two or much of a reason to get them over Amalric.

I'm probably going:

Ea +1 Head
Ea +1 Body
Amalric +1 Hands
Leth +3 Legs
Leth +3 Feet

Also thanks for the Tenzen neck suggestion, that's not something I'd looked into.

Thanks for the help everyone. :)

If you don't need macc from the Leth feet, Amalric would provide 22 more MAB over empy

Ea feet are so disappointingly bad. Have some numbers from 3 years ago.

That lack of INT just really, really hurts

There's a sweet spot I think, the goal is still to get to delay cap, but if you have to give up a lot of STP then it may end up a wash overall. Some pieces like aug'd Taeon boots, ambu cape, suppa, and reiki(4 STP helps curb the tp hit some) are fair swaps, but beyond that i think you end up breaking even depending on what your non-dw options are, like carmine legs 5 DW means losing 10 STP, so 5 more DW might drop you 2~ TP/hit but swing slightly faster, while the STP bumps you up 4~ TP/hit but doesnt drop your delay

I don't bother swapping gear out to cap dual wield anymore with 30% magic haste. My opinion is it's not worth losing out the Malignance sets defensive bonuses when in the end there is no real change except in your defensive capability.

enspells block haste samba, so with T1's that activate on every hit, you will not be able to apply the effect, T2's youll be able to apply after the 1st hit but you're taking a hefty dmg hit in return, generally not worth the trade off given how potent enspells have become

Even without croc the composure boost made enspells pretty potent. Just comes down to how many you're benefitting, cause it wont be yourself in this scenario. JA haste caps at 25% so it wont help any LR user, Hasso will see some benefit depending on + gear which gives it anywhere from 12~17% JA haste


Cant use En-I's period iirc since enspells apply to every hit, whether it be MA or OH, you're forced into enspell II otherwise you can't apply the daze effect, thus noone gains the haste.