Each NM has three weaknesses you can proc, and by procing a weakness once you can increase the droprate of things (depending on the type of weakness). There's three weaknesses, red blue and yellow, all visually represented by a rather cool "!!" of the colour of weakness popping out of the NM and a message.
Red weakness: makes every key item drop 100%, including atma, abyssites, and key items to pop NMs. Proced by one of these weaponskills, entirely random: Red Lotus Blade, Seraph Blade, Seraph Strike, Energy Drain, Cyclone, Blade: Ei, Tachi: Jinpu, Tachi: Koki, Sunburst, Earth Crusher, Raiden Thrust, Freezebite, Shadow of Death. A NIN/WAR w/ event polearm Pitchfork and some staff merits can do 11 out of 13, making it the ideal red proc WS job.
Blue weakness: makes goodies drop. Rare items especially gain a huge boost in droprate when blue is proced (for instance bullwhip belt goes from 3% to 50%ish). Proced by either a blunt, slashing or piercing WS depending on the time of Vana day.
Yellow weakness: seems only used for AF+1 and AF+2 materials, but it's really good there, speeds up farming tremendously. Based on Vana'diel day, proced by magic (list, again, on weakness page; there's a lot).
Atma and abyssites:
Abyssites are key items that are always in effect. There's a wide variety of them and some of them have multiples that stack. For instance, there's 6 different abyssite of merits, which each increase your abyssea HP by 10% and MP by 5% (so 60%/30% extra). For starting up Abyssea stuff, which is what you seem to be doing, getting your abyssites of celerity is really handy; they make your traverser stone stock accumulate faster. Abyssites are sometimes quested, sometimes drop off NMs (proc red !! on them for 100% drop) and a few drop off regular monsters. Check the Abyssite page on Wiki. Recommended abyssites to work towards are the celerity, merit, furtherance, and most importantly, lunar. Lunar, because of…
Atma are key items you can 'equip'. You can equip one atma per lunar abyssite in your posession, there's 3 to get max (read up on how to get 'em). Atma give a wide variety of stats but some are so incredibly good you're going to want them and you'll be expected to get 'em. Getting 'em isn't even hard since you can red !! proc for 100% drop.
Some good atma for melee: Razed Ruins (50 DEX, 30% critrate, 30% crit damage), Gnarled Horn (20% crit rate, 40 AGI, 10% counter), Voracious Violet (50 STR, 5% DA, 2/tick regain), Stout Arm (40 STR, 50 attack).
Mages: Minikin (50 INT, 10/tick refresh), Stormbird (wind ACC, 5 refresh), Beyond (30 MAB, 30 ice attack), Ultimate (50 MAB), and a whole lot of situational ones.
Also handy are the two regen atma.
Cruor buffs:
Always get your cruor buffs. Free stats for very few cruor.
shawnturner replied
412 weeks ago