how to quickly raise magic skillsFollow

Last night I was running around, and noticed my magic skills weren't as high as I had hoped, so I did the old "cast cure over and over on yourself, /heal, start over again."

Then it dawned on me you get a free mp recharge by entering the mog house. So I spent the next hour or so just burning mp with macro triple cures while reading for my humanities class. It's not as fun as getting xp, but if you have something you need to read, or just don't feel like getting xp at the moment, it's a good way to rise.

To spell it out more easily: Go outside your mog house entrance and cast a spell until you are out of MP. Enter your mog house. Exit your mog house. You now have full MP again, and are able to chain cast until you start hating the cure spell sound. ^^

Curing yourself is ideal, as you still get Magic Skill xp regardless of what your target has for <hpp>, and it's a ton easier than trying to cure random people.

Macro for triple heal:
/ma "Cure" <me>
/wait 7
/ma "Cure" <me>
/wait 7
/ma "Cure" <me>

works with other spells, just insert name of spell of skill you wish to raise, and adjust times accordingly.

Cure 1 = /wait 7 between
Protect = /wait 6 between
I believe Blaze Spikes is something like a /wait 13. I don't really know as I haven't had a chance to really dig into BLM as of yet, but I had a BLM that started doing it with me, and she said it was 13. Just try it out, if it says you can't cast yet, add a second to the macro.

Hope this info can be helpful to you all. Just don't say I didn't warn you to bring a book to read while you do it. Just as a warning, you'll probably get some strange looks and questions once in a while.

*edit* I doubt I am the first to try this, but I hadn't seen a post on it, so I thought I would share my discovery. Good luck.

Edited, Thu Jan 29 12:02:31 2004 by AmbientColours

i haven't seen how the skill affects the magic though

eg, in UO and EQ, when your skill is low, you have a chance to fail while casting it.

in FFXI, i have always succeeded on casting it

eg the max on a heal is influenced by the MND stat, not necessarily the skill level. or is there a combination influence? if there is, the skill level must be a minor influence.

I believe both stat and skill affect the average that you will do. There is a fixed maximum for spells. Especially damage spells.

Take for example my Dark magic skill and using drain.

When I first got drain my Dark magic skill was abysmal. We're talking like level 20ish with a 10-20 dark magic skill. I didn't really have a need to cast Dark magic other than Bio.

Well when I first got drain it did approximately 10 hps of damage. Now I'm level 31 with a Dark magic skill 95 I often drain for nearly 100.

Now with elemental damage spells I notice that they are largely affected by your int attribute. What else I find is that without near maxed skill I have problems doing hardly any damage to VT and IT mobs. With a high skill I can do near max every time. Although it appears that damage spells do have a very defined max damage unless the mob has a debuff.

I see this will all my damage spells going up the chain...Before I got Water II I woudn't even bother casting water on a mob that was weak against it. Because the damage just wasn't worth it.

Take the skill chain for example. Against a mob that was weak against water the magic burst did a whopping 27 damage. Told the melees to switch to another chain that was fire based. They didn't want to do it because the mob was supposedly strong against fire. Well they switched to a Fusion chain and I cast Firaga and the WHM & RDM cast Banish. Results:

Firaga - 248 damage
Banish - 121 damage
Banish - 119 damage

Not a bad chain if you ask me. It just goes to show also that mob resistance isn't always a hinderance.

I am not sure if it works as well with a WHM, but when I need to raise my enhancing for my RDM, I use my bar- element spells. They are cheap, and cast pretty quickly- not sure if the bar- elementra spells are the same. Also, you can make a macro that goes between three different bar- spells, for a little variety.

I also like to raise my enhancing and healing while waiting for airships. Not as efficient as running back into my mog house, but it's not like I am doing anything better.

It affects it tremendously. Maxed healing skills pretty much puts your healing to its potential (at your current level of course) elemental skills gives high chances (and additional dmg if not) of landing your spells at 100% damage, and so on. For enhancing, I practically have no idea how this one works. I know for sure that it increases the elemental defence of bar spells (totally important when fighting avatars) and it also slightly makes stats bar better...but other than that, it doesn't increase the duration of sneak, deo, and invis and p3 and such.

Magic skills though, pretty much makes a difference on what your role is in the game. That's why RDMs are the best enfeeblers since their enfeebles are around 11+ higher than a blm's at lvl 50, and that's why BLM is the designed nuker since their elemental lvl is WAY higher than anyone at lvl 50.