Dancer - Category 2 Merits, 1st Impressions

Whee... first, early impressions on the new category 2 Dancer merits. After ZNMs last night, I went to campaign to try them out in a non-exp-loss situation and also went with Zurar to help Karou with that "Purple, the new Black" dragon killing mission to see how well they worked. Here are my early impressions.

Saber Dance
Double Attack seems to start off at 50% when the job ability is first activated. From 0% TP, it takes me about 30 seconds to get 100% TP with Saber Dance up in full haste gear! And that's still missing my leg piece since I still don't have anything yet for that. When it's first activated, it almost feels like having a Soul Voice Double March Bard effect on. I'd like to see what happens during next week's Einherjar when I actually do get SV March and put up Saber Dance.

DA seems to taper off gradually, getting full effect of about 50% for... I think a minute or more. Around 3 minutes, it's not as significant as it was before, but DA still happens even at the very end of the 5 minute timer. Together with a Brutal Earring, Saber Dance is a lot of fun! Plus you can use it with Haste Samba for swings! I need to do some experimentation with /WAR to see how much DA I can get. Self-skillchaining isn't even a question anymore... it's easy to do!

The 5 minute recast timer is a little painful as I'd be looking to when I can refresh the full effect again pretty often. This is definitely a good ability to put up when a fight is first starting to build TP ASAP, then keep up whenever I don't need to heal. I may end up meriting this timer down so I can put it up as frequently as possible. I need to do a few events to see how this changes my play habits on Dancer.

Fan Dance
Well, the good news is that the damage reduction is really significant at first... I was fighting Yagudo Samurai, and their hits went from 70-90, to... 9 when I first put up Fan Dance.

The bad news is that the +enmity isn't really noticable. I tried holding hate in two situations: Campaign with a bunch of DDs going all out on the mob I was tanking, and in the Dragon Mission fight. In both cases, it was harder to maintain hate compared to how I would normally do it. The problem was that by taking less damage, I have less HP to cure up, so I actually end up generating less hate compared to just straight tanking without the ability and curing myself in campaign. For the mission, I tried Fan Dance + Animated Flourish + some curing, but that wasn't enough to hold hate against a WSing SAM.

So, the big gain on Fan Dance is the damage reduction really. It'll make a good emergency ability to throw up if I get the attention of a mob when Third Eye or Utusemi is down. Definitely not going to bother putting any more merits into this.

No Foot Rise(NFR)
Of the 3 new abilities, this one was the one I had originally not thought much of, but I'm finding to be the most useful! Besides the most obvious benefit of being able to gain TP & Finishing Moves outside of battle, I'm finding that I'm using this to insert Flourishes, or add Finishing Moves during battle... A few ways I've used it already:

- Getting 1 Finishing Move, then starting a battle with Violent Flourish while people get situated
- Topping up 4 finishing moves to 5 so I don't waste a step when I want to self-skillchain
- Getting a Finishing Move so I can do an Animated Flourish to at least pull a mob off a mage desperately fleeing for life

NFR definitely has the most use of the 3 new job abilities. I'm going to merit this ASAP to level 3 as that seems to be the right balance. 5 would be overkill since I'd be stepping all the time anyway. 3 would let me pair NFR with one step to get to 5 FMs, or be able to have a full strength Animated Flourish or Building Flourish at any time.


Closed Position
The one category 2 that I don't have any merits in yet... seems straightforward, just make sure you're face to face with the mob for accuracy & evasion bonuses. Definitely useful for soloing since we have pretty good evasion to begin with, but in party or event situations? Probably not...


1. Chances are the mob is going to be turning all over the place... except when there's a tank, and...
2. If there's a tank, and there's a THF... chances are I don't want to be Trick Attacked!


So... it's going to be useful, but not *that* useful. I'll throw any leftover merits into this..



What to merit?
Now the big question on how to sort out my merits! So far, I have 3 merits in each of the abilities. Add two more to NFR, and I'll still have 5 Dancer Category 2 merits left to assign. I don't really see any point to upgrading Fan Dance. The +emity isn't enough to really be a tank, and it's more of a "for fun" ability.


With 5 cat2 merits left... At this time, I'm thinking I'll probably end up meriting Saber Dance down to 3 minutes so I can basically turn it off whenever I want and still have it back up in a reasonable time. The last cat2 merit I'll throw onto Closed Position for at least... some use. :)

So, that's... 4+5 for NFR, 4+5+5+5 for Saber Dancer, and 3 for Closed Position for a total of 31 merits, or 310,000 limit points. I currently have... 1... so, that's 30 more to go! Now I remember why I never merited Diffusion down >.>

Side note: So far, I don't think I've seen a single good guide to Dancer online at all. It seems that the people who wrote them all looked at Dancer on paper, but never actually played it seriously or experimented with it. Some choice quotes... "only useful for Steps with /THF", "Sit at 300% TP", "Only a B weapon with accuracy problems", "must sub ninja", "cannot main heal". The podcasts aren't any better either... Part of me doesn't mind because it means that I'm more unique, but another part of me is annoyed at them spreading blatantly wrong information >.>