Pantokrator, Apademak and more

A lot of stuff went down that I haven't posted about. Last La Theine we did 5 Ovni's and got 3 Bullwhip Belts of which I got one (yay). Did a few Cirein-croin, an ICP, Amhuluk and finally Sobek. Gukumatz is rough getting claim on. We got a bunch of Abyssites and I'm now 3/3 on Reaper, and Kismet and go the last Sojourn I needed.


Instead of going into details of fights in Visions and Scars zones on which there is already a lot of info available, I'm going to look back on our recent encounters in Uleguerand range.


Ironclad Triturator
Reports made this thing sound very hard. I must admit I was a bit disappointed. The thing only used draw-in twice and I failed to stun the follow-up TP ability both times. I was lagging pretty bad, because, as I later found out, I had a file download on that I forgot to turn off. Anywho, I dont' know if it's reliably stunnable, but it did seem fast with the lag. The rest of the fight seemed easier than the usual Iron Giants. Maybe we could straight tank them all as easily as this or maybe this one didn't hit as hard, I can't say. Having two WHM's was nice, not in small part due to the bad streak of disconnects we've had recently.

Pantokrator
This turned out to be a pretty tough fight. I honestly had skimped on my homework on this mob and knew very little about it. We soon figured out it absorbed damage during WS and magic casting. The first Chainspell made me nervous but curespamming the tanks worked just fine. Hundred Fists was equally overcomable with curespam. I tried helping out the WHM's from outside the tank party, but it didn't feel like it was necessary. It used Colossal Blow twice and since it resets hate a second tank is highly recommended.

So assuming your tanks can hold hate through Hundred Fists and Chainspell and your healers can keep up then what's left is its shield move. I'm afraid I don't recall the name of the ability but it's a large radius paralyze that you can't avoid by standing at maximum casting range. If you can't get paralyze off healers and tanks fast enough there will be trouble. I suppose you can have someone dedicated to paralyna on healers outside of the AoE range. This is something I'd suggest for Apademak as well. Finally, nobody should be standing in conal range of Laser Shower. It's a good chunk of damage and it knocked out a few mages twice or so. It seemed to gain high magic resistance during the shield ability. Stuns were resisted then while they would land normally later on during the fight.

Despite proc'ing blue we didn't get a Zelus Tiara. The Atma is situationally good and the Torero Torque is a nice piece for DNC and NIN looking for an evasion tanking neckpiece that surpasses Evasion Torque. I don't know who got the horn because it went freelot. Seems we have a shortage of 'willing' bards. It's a really nice instrument regardless; upping Lullaby duration by 30% of its base.

Apademak
We failed to stun its spells pretty early on. The third spell went off and it went south from there. Let's just say we made good use of Apocalypse atma. The level-up doesn't go away after it going idle. This meant even after the tank party recovered we had to deal with Fulmination spam which we weren't ready for at any point. After the sac-fest and an attempt to straight tank it again we got red weakness. The tanks did go down and we proceeded to hold it. I eventually hp'd, got a brew and nuked it down.

Khimaira mobs are usually killed asap with as few stuns as possible so Fulmination can be taken care of when the time comes. Another way of dealing with this is having someone stand out of Fulmination range to paralyna the healer so they can reliably cure the tanks. Fulmination shouldn't kill a tank outright, which gives you time to pull this off as long as the 'outside' mage is told/warned when Fulmination is incoming to speed things up and increase survivability. In the case of Apademak simply eating the Fulmination could become very intensive as it appears to have a decent amount of regain. So much so that it would build enough TP for it between 2 sacs, whcih would be roughly 30 seconds. Maybe it can use it several times in a row or it got tp from other sources while sac'ing that I didn't notice. [I later read that it possibly gets TP or otherwise instantly uses a TP ability after it completes casting on a spell]. Someone mentioned that the height difference at the ramp was enough to nullify Fulmination. We'll try and do this the next time out.