(Art by Blain Simple, from "A Crap Guide to Races" by Jocat)
Unfortunately, as FS we cannot smite the heathen of the realm (That you have to wait for Pork to make another DPS cardi guide). Instead being FS cardi in a party is like being the heart of the body: pumping life force. Just as a heart is a vital organ you are also the most important person in the party and thus get a first dip on getting res, AP regen and women. If anyone dares to talk back to you on this matter you have a perfect tool to remind them where they belong : Beneath your feet.
The side effects of picking this build include: nausea, bad RGN, cardiac arrhythmia, and god complex.
Welcome to A Scrap Guide to [Full Support] Cardinal
==================================================================================================
1. ABOUT ==================================================================================================
Once again as with most jobs FS cardi is by no means a first-character pick. While you can start as Cardi do not expect to be carried as most players will focus on "git good" at what they do first before carrying you. So it is best that you carry yourself with another money-farming character first. That being said, while the entrance is quite high it is still much lower than any dps build in exist: A grade A nebula armor can easily fund every piece of starting equipment for FS cardi with extra money to dress up yourself with costumes because if you going to do God's work might as well look πππ’ππππππππ ππ’ πππ when doing it.
And what God's works are? Stat buffing, damage buffing, health buffing, shielding, tanking, healing and dropping "yo mama" burns so potent it shatters the enemy's ego, making them take double damage. Your job is to keep everyone in top shape condition so they can perform MAX DEEPS.
PROS:
- All kinds of necessary buffs.
- Very tanky.
- Sub-dps actually.
- Health dispenser.
- Low gear requirement for end-game content
CONS:
- Need others to actually be useful
- Low gear requirement but still has a high bar to pass
- Clearance cannot clear stupid
- God complex
==================================================================================================
2. REQUIREMENTS ==================================================================================================
- High HP: Mediale Votum (Mediale), your new HP regen skill heals based on your HP, thus the more HP you have the high the heal over time will be. This is your main way of healing now so drop Heal, Highness Heal off your bar, most jobs at this point will have too much HP that those skills cannot keep up. Also, burst healing is not our job anymore, it now belongs to the doram.
- Seven skills cast per sec: You need to keep everyone in top condition at all times: at the beginning and during a run, and especially after a (or all) member(s) go down. In the current fast-paced action state of the game that means you need to dish out all the buff as fast as you can, and boy do you have a lot to buff. Thus you need 100% variable casting time reduction (vct), 1.5 fixed cast time reduction (fct), and 95% after cast delay (acd). While attack speed is also needed usually, our casting animation is actually quite fast so we do not really need 193 apsd.
- Recovery rate: As much as you can. Mediale Votum is still affected by it so stacking both HP and recovery rate will significantly increase our regen capability.
==================================================================================================
3. STATS AND TRAITS ==================================================================================================
A. Stat
- STR: Stay at 1. Due to the change to Gym Pass it is not even worth putting points into this for weight
- AGI: Dump stat. Any point left after can go here
- VIT: Get max 130. Your most important stat now that you regen with mostly HP. Besides that, it increases your tankiness, increases your resistance to a lot of debuffs.
- INT: 120+. Increase your SP and SP recovery rate. We will be in Offertorium all the time so you need to get high Int.
- DEX: Due to Redemptio requiring 100% vct from equipment and stat, which we aim for, DEX is actually no longer required. No defensive boost (flee is useless) nor debuff resistance.
- LUK: 90+. Increases your resistance to a variety of debuff, increases Perfect Dodge and critical hit shield. Get around 90 so that with the bonus it reaches 100.
Priority: VIT > INT > LUK > AGI > DEX > STR.
B. Trait
If you are new here's a quick rundown on what traits do:
- POW and SPL are offensive traits
- STA and WIS are deffensive traits
- POW and STA are physically oriented
- SPL and WIS are magically oriented
- CON increases both physical and magic offensive ability, hit and flee
- CRT increases healing power and critical hit power
Looking at these it seems obvious that we should take max CRT and leftover points for STA and WIS. However, Gravity being Gravity, the sub-trait Heal Plus (H.Plus) is supposed to increase the final healing power, well, does not increase the final healing power but only a small margin.
Another reason, the best armor that gives the most HP, the highest priority for us now, is scaled with the STA traits, which means we should actually max out STA instead, and whatever is left goes to WIS. With the new level expansion, we have enough trait points to max out both STA and WIS, the leftover points will go to CRT because a small boost is still better than no boost
So our trait should be: 100 STA - 100 WIS - 35 CRT and 0 on everything else
==================================================================================================
4. SKILLS ==================================================================================================
==================================================================================================
5. EQUIPMENT ==================================================================================================
While every job in the game has no gear progression, support classes like Cardi are extra special in that most of their requirements remain unchanged over time: VCT and FCT to instant cast, high enough ACD and ASPD to spam skills. As long as they meet these requirements, they can choose not to change gears because they already performing at 95% efficiency, and such requirements can be easily achieved with low gears.
There are a wide variety of mixing gears to achieve requirements and what I show below is what I believe is the cheapest way possible.
From here on you can start aiming toward end-game gears, such as nebula armor, plain rune pieces, the mvp cards, etc. but remember that when replacing a piece you need to meet the requirements.
==================================================================================================
6. PET ==================================================================================================
Angeling: MHP +2% and 8% recovery rate. Simple basic healing pet
Blue Moon Loli Ruri: Vit +2, MHP +5%, auto-cast Kyrie Eleison when being attacked. Tank-oriented pet. (I like this one)
==================================================================================================
7. TIPS ==================================================================================================
a. Buff order and skill bar organize
I usually use different tags to add priority to my skills and organize my skill bar from there: higher priority skills are closer to my index finger and are cast before other skills
- Critical Situation, Pre-battle and In-battle: In order of priority of course. Examples for each tag are Ressurection, Clementia, and Lex Aeterna.
- Self, AoE and Individual: Your survival is your party's survival, so skills that help you have the highest priority, then skill that improves the entire party's efficiency, and finally skill that only help one player. Of course, skills that target you and your party is on top. Example: Mediale, Assumptio, Clementia and Acies
- Defensive and Offensive: Pretty simple defensive means you and your team can survive better, so you can actually continue with the buffing and then come the offensive buff to actually clear the content.
- Long duration and short duration: Pretty self-explanatory, examples are Clementia and Lauda
There are exceptions like Epiclesis is a ground-targeted skill that you cannot cast most of the time because of Land Protector's uptime, or Competentia which is an AP skill and if your party's cat or EM do not quite well at their job you will not have AP to keep 100% uptime.
So in a party, you will first cast pre-battle, AoE with long-duration skills such as Clementia, Canto, Praefatio, etc., and after that are skills that buff you, like Offertorium and Assumptio, before buffing your team with defensive buff like Assumptio, then individual offensive buffs Acies, Telum, Vita, then short duration buff, and finally in-battle buff. At any time the "Critical situation" happens you cast those Ressurection, Redemtio or Reparatio.
This is of course a very generic, catch-almost-all-situation explanation, but it should be a base for you to build your way to buff comfortably
b. Party window (Alt+Z)
- Always have it opened so you know if someone died and rebuff them
- Right-click on the name and choose "Open Mini-party window" create a status bar of that character that you can organize for convenience. Example: group all crit abusers together so you can cast Acies and Telum w/o taking too much time finding them. Put Physical damage characters below those guys so you can continue with just casting Telum.
- Click the lock icon at the bottom of the window to prevent accidental "double-clicking to open 1:1 chat" and reorder the mini party windows.
c. Visual clarity
RO has a lot of visual effects, but too much skill spamming, damage numbers popping, it creates a lot of noise on your screen
- Use @dd 4 to disable all damage numbers. Since you're not doing damage, those numbers are meaningless to you and can hide your melee party member
- Use /mineffect or /effects to reduce or remove visual skill effects entirely. Skill spamming creates so many visual effects it is like watching 20 fireworks explode at your eyes
- When using /effects turn on @lgp to be able to see where the AoEs (like Land Protector) are.
==============================================================================================================
And that is it for this guide. While it is a scrap guide I do have the honor of a Cardi main to uphold so I gave many details more than "that" guide.
The spirit of scrap guide instead lies in the unfunny and extreme bias opinions, but I do take advice, corrections and criticism for this one because like that one wise saint said: "Life is a never-ending study." and the first condition to change to 5th job Saint is to follow the teaching. Disclaimer there is no 5th job at the time of this guide written
Big thanks to Pork for guiding me when I started playing here as a Cardi and continuing to advise me at all times.
And now you 'may' know how to play Full Support Cardinal, you're welcome