Monday, December 6, 2010

Weekend update 13

It's been a while since my last update, so I haven't posted about a very sweet achievement yet. Namely...

6/6 Abyssea wins
Now, of course some people missed out on a few wins, but for a handfull of us that have shown up for all the zone bosses the zone quests are finished. Just in time for the Heroes of Abyssea add-on too. Cirein-croin was the last one we needed and it was accompanied by a second Cirein-croin and two Amhuluks. We got yellow weakness on all 4 of them which lead to a ton of upgrade items as well as the faux relic axe (Cleofun) and club (Molva).

Cirein is a pretty simple kited fight, though that makes getting weaponskills off a bit of a problem. We still managed blue and red, but it was chaotic. Especially when Cyclone tagged some flytraps. As some people may or may not know, when you attack a mob for the first time (it was idle before) it detects alliance members by its normal means (sights, sound) and puts them on its hate list. So that meant we had to kill the adds, since they wouldn't go idle after killing the person that attacked them with AoE.


Amhuluk is a pretty fun fight. AoE Tornados look very cool and it's got a bunch of other really flashy abilities. Using height difference to avoid the AoE's made it very straight-forward. It's still a high level mob that will hit very hard when given the chance, so you still have to top up your tanks asap. The need/desire to get more upgrade items by proc'ing yellow !! is the only thing that makes this fight drag out. If that was not an issue you could have 4+ melee all whacking it (as long as you have the healing power to back it up) and take it down in under 10 minutes.



Cleaving
Having gotten some experience with AoE farming in La Theine, our Vunkerl farming run was going to be our first 'real' try at Cleave burning. I subbed BLU this time for safer pulling. We used bats, which are IMO the best cleave targets in Vunkerl. Harlecin was on WAR/PLD and we had a single WHM to curebomb. With Mighty Strikes two Fell Cleaves took out a large percentage of the train. That was fast enough to wipe 20-some mobs before Sentinel was low enough for there to be any real danger. However, without Mighty Strikes it takes up to 4 Cleaves before you start seeing any greyed out names of "felled" mobs (pun intended). We found out that a single WHM is not enough to keep the WAR alive during this. We got a second WHM later on, but most of the pulls we had at least 1 restore box or revitalizer in chests. The three people cleaving were seperated from the rest after we built up pearl lights. The rest of the group started getting quite a few ruby kills which noticably lowered the efficiency of our cleaving endeavors. I don't really see a way around that other than more discipline on kills. Although Fell Cleave takes mobs out much faster and requires fewer people, I like the added survivability of BLU's and the azure kills they get too.

At the end of the Vunkerl Farming run we didn't manage to get key items off all the NM's we claimed, so it was a bit disappointing. However, we did get a Pluviale to drop.

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