Walk of Echoes: chamber 2 wins

After attempting chambers 1 and 3 before the last version update and losing, yesterday's two runs at chamber 2 (which was already the easiest of the first 3) seemed like a walk in the park. The WoE adjustments made mobs easier, as did the 5 extra levels. Also, the longer 45 min time limit makes it much more forgiving. The slimes are the most popular area because they require the least number of mobs to be killed. Also, the mobs themselves don't have any quircky or annoying abilities. Nothing like a hate reset, stripga or extreme poison to deal with.

During the first run we used the vast majority of the 45 minutes we got. I got about 8k EXP and ranked 3rd doing quite a bit of curing and nuking. Our group consisted of a tank party (MNK,WAR,COR,RDM,SMN,WHM) and some assorted DD's (SMN,BLM,DRK). Tillaert and Tipira took care of the sac pulling of bosses. Lordapm (MNK) and Rayearl (WAR) did the vast majority of the damage according to the parse. Second loot pool looked like this:

It's too bad the prices of the items are dropping fast, now that the zone is being cleared regularly.

The strategy was to have the WHM focus on cures while the SMN and RDM took care of erasing slow and hasting one of the DD's each. With meds and refresh2 on the WHM, durability was not an issue. Slow and Paralyze landed easily and Paralyze proc'd regularly. Damage was steady, except for the very first boss where hate was being pulled off melee. People held back longer during the rest of the run and it became more stable. Only melee stand within range, as bosses cast sleepga and also, you don't want to get hit by the AoE abilities. The bosses seemed a bit spammy with their TP abilities.

Runner behavior
The mobs in the crab and antlion areas used to run towards the spot where one of their buddies died at. I haven't been in either area 1 or 3 since the update, but a video I've seen of 3 seems to suggest they still do that. However, the slimes didn't do this. Not exactly, anway. When a mob dies another random mob or two start moving to another random location in the zone. So it COULD come across someone and aggro, but it could also just end up at its destination where it will hang out. In the same way as runners in the Crab zone (pre-patch anyway) they'll stay at their destination until the aggro someone. If that person dies, they will move back to their original starting position.

During our second run, after killing the first boss, a second boss came running towards our location. No other mob was with him, and so it was a clean pull and it sped things up nicely. I'm assuming it was headed for the starting plateau and just happened to find us on the way there. At the end of the first run I went to the SW corner looking for the final boss, but it wasn't there, while 2 of it's little helpers (Grenade Syrups) were. It had moved around and ended up way down at the bottom on the north side of the map, where we had already pulled the third boss from. So, it seems their destination is random and it is just one giant shuffle that can cause you to aggro if you're not camped together with a sac'er watching your back.

Deaggro
I somehow managed to deaggro one of the Morbid Molasses while pulling it off the SMN sac'er. I'm not sure how that's possible since they're supposed to have alliance-wide aggro. I would expect it to at least have one more target after deaggroing me. The fact that it can deaggro at all is also surprising. The explanation I think is most likely is that upon initial aggro, it will 'detect' alliance members in the zone, but if pulled off the sac'er without it going idle/passive it won't do this 'detect' mechanism again. I can't think of a useful application of the deaggro at the moment, but it's semi-interesting. Compared it to regular mob behaviour, it's very similar. The biggest difference is that regular mobs don't detect across an entire zone. The 'detect' range for Dynamis mobs is bigger than regular mobs', but still limited to a certain distance.