Dancer - 3rd Impressions

More playing around with Dancer...

Fan Dance may be more useful than I initially figured. Besides being a "save my butt" ability, it did let me tank 2-3 Yag SAM campaign mobs at the same time. In Einherjar, Fluid Spread nearly killed everyone from the many slimes, but Fan Dance kept my damage down to be managable. Even with the effect decaying by the number of hits it "absorbs", it was still good to keep up as a survival tool.

Saber Dance is also pretty good. With Saber Dance and Drain Samba III, I could basically go all out on a single campaign mob, WSing whenever possible and the double attack + Drain would easily keep me alive.

So... now I'm debating how to spread my merits out. Still doing 3/5 on NFR... but I might end up doing 3/5 for both Fan & Saber Dance. Closed Position is definitely a solo-type merit... +evasion & +accuracy while face-to-face... It'll have it's uses, but I'm still not sure if I should put one merit into that, or bump either Fan or Saber Dance's recast down another 30 seconds.

Gearring up Dancer
With these new merits unlocked, I'm starting to experiment a little more with other Dancer possibilities besides main healing. Saber Dance usually means I'm spamming WS's, so I've been investigating how to maximize Dancing Edge damage with Toku's help. Need to change a bunch of macros around to get this to work, but hopefully it'll be worth it.

Fan Dance opens up quite a few new possibilities... low-manning, or soloing mobs that I previously couldn't... initial testing (via aggro) has already shown that I can solo an EM Gnole now, while pre-update, we'd be locked into an endless dance as we'd both use TP moves to heal up to max. To further adjust this, I'm going to finish gearing up on evasion gear. I've already purchased an Evasion Torque and Velocity Earring... need to get a Boxer's Mantle with Ancient Beastcoins, and get lucky on some Denali drops in Nyzul. >.>

Besides the boxer's mantle and Denali gear, the main things I still need on DNC are:
- Enkidu's Leggings
- Etoile Tights
- Etoile Tiara
- Etoile Casaque

Week of FAIL
Seems that last week was a complete week of failure. From wipes on stuff that we normally handle without a problem, to complete crap in drops, the whole of last week since the update should basically not have happened. In fact, we're further behind now than we were during the update due to lost pop sets, lost exp, and lost time. Not a single event I'd consider "successful", and that's getting really, really frustrating.

About the only thing I'm still finding "fun" is either doing the WotG missions, or playing around with Dancer... Unfortunately, SE in their infinite wisdom decided to make WotG missions impossible to get a group to do since you need people in YOUR nation to do quests to advance to the actual missions, and the actual missions have nice little annoyances where you have to spend hours farming EX items.

That leaves Dancer as the only thing I'm currently finding fun.

So... for at least the next few weeks, I'm going Dancer exclusively for events unless someone can give me an absolute good reason why I should be on Blue Mage. Right now, the only event where I'm using BLU to the fullest capabilities would be Nyzul Isle. Everything else I'm either a DD spammer, or Curebot, neither of which really does the job's flexibility justice. Dancer can fulfill both of those roles, and I think it's time to do some serious experimentation on the job!