Rab is your final spellcaster, and serves as the middle ground between both Veronica and Serena in terms of offense and support. This results in him having a more generalized spell pool that doesn’t really offer anything that the other two can’t provide until you gain access to his unique abilities within his Character Builder, such as Infinite Wisdom and Clear Your Mind. Unfortunately, due to his low HP and AGI values, there won’t be many times to see such skills put to good use without the appropriate protection to back him up.

In short, he can’t outperform either of the other mages in their own specialties, but offers far more versatility.

Pep Effect Bonuses

M.Might +20% (40%), M.Mending +20% (40%), Magical Critical Rate Up (Magical Critical Rate further increased)

Regular Skills and Abilities

As you can see, his spell repertoire is split down the middle between Veronica’s and Serena’s. In particular, he lacks the various fire/non-elemental spells of the former and the support spells of the latter. It’s not like he’s particularly crippled by this though, having just enough healing, debuff and offensive spells to be useful regardless of the situation. Also, getting access to Multiheal a full five levels before Serena is huge in the mid-game.

Character Builder Skills and Abilities

Heavy Staff

This is where you should start investing points in with Rab. He doesn’t get many new abilities worth noting beyond Zing Stick (remains effective even after getting Kazing since it counts as a skill), but it provides a good amount of boosts to Magical Might, Magical Mending and MP which he will need plenty of. Pick whichever you think will be more useful to you and run with it.

Claws

Just because Rab has some martial arts know-how doesn’t mean that you should use the weapon that allows him to use them. Between his low strength and the low attack power of claws in general, don’t expect to see him do much damage when he has them equipped. Furthermore, he’ll lose all those M.Mi and M.Me bonuses you unlocked in the Heavy Wand tree, meaning he can’t even perform his specialty adequately. The only value this tree has is as a backdoor to the Enlightenment tree, allowing Rab to unlock either the AGI+ or MP+ panels and then using Rectification to get the SP used in the Claws tree back to use elsewhere.

Though if you are adamant about using them, Wild Animal hits multiple times, making it good for killing Metal Slimes.

Enlightenment

This is where Rab will have most of his SP invested by the end of the game. That Strength +5 isn’t going to do much of anything, but everything else certainly will. In particular, I’m very fond of M-Pathy for when my other characters are running low on MP, Right as Rain for the party-wide health regeneration and the AGI+ panels to help him act sooner in battle. Unfortunately, those AGI+ panels mentioned before are on the opposite side of Clear Your Mind which allows Rab to dispel enemy buffs, meaning it will be awhile before he can acquire both that and Infinite Wisdom, which buffs both his Spell Offense and Spell Defense.

There’s always the option of going for spells like Kazammle (high level AOE dark spell) and Kacrackle (high level AOE ice spell), but they might prove to be too expensive to cast non-stop if you rush them and I think Rab is better suited to support anyway.

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That’s it for Rab’s role in Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age. He doesn’t necessarily excel in any one area of magic, but he has just enough in everything to always find a use in your active party regardless of the situation. To see him at his best, use him in conjunction with other casters (Luminary, Veronica, Serena and Sylvando) to allow him the time to make use of his versatile movepool.

Need help with something else? Head to the Luminary’s Tome for more Dragon Quest XI guides.

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