Monday, July 11, 2011

Apademak trio

I finally got the chance to use up the Apademak pop I had been holding on to for months. Since Kingcem has his Kannagi now and could use the horns, we went out there trying to "prove a point". Namely that Apademak is not hard.

The setup was RDM/DRK + NIN/DNC + WHM. Why DRK sub when you can get stun from /BLM? I've cast stun by mistake before, reacting to something I'm not supposed to, so I was thinking of using Weapon Bash from DRK sub in case that happened. The damage from a single NIN took about 15 min to kill it IIRC. However, I'm not sure if evasion gear was used. I should probably find out. Kingcem's NIN is pretty well geared and I'm not sure an average NIN could do the same. Why is that important? Because Apa builds stun resistance and towards the end of the 15 min I would start to see resists. I used both Future Fabulous and some Haste gear to lower my Stun recast. I could have done with less and can switch to something like Ultimate to increase my magic accuracy. The second fight I nuked a bit to help take it down faster. I had my damage filters on so I wouldn't miss Apa's spells in chat spam. Because of that I can't really see how hard my nukes hit. I'd cast Haste and Addle between stuns when needed, other debuffs don't seem to stick to the point that I just gave up.

With only Tenebrous Mist and Dreadstorm (beause it was tanked from the side) the WHM didn't have much to do either. So there's some freedom there for if you want grellow weakness. A second melee kills it faster and so Stun resistance would be even less of an issue. I'm thinking a Duo is very possible but enmity cap might become an issue.

During the last fight I tried letting Thundaga3 go unstunned towards the end to postpone resistance build-up, thinking that AoE's couldn't be self-targetted. To my surprise it was and it DID level up. So even though I expect that you could fiddle around with your chat filters (making only self-targetted spells show up) to make sure you only stun the necessary spells, I'll personally stick to stunning everything and killing faster.

A few weeks later
We did another 5 Apademaks and we had some extra help this time. With the damage from a BLM and THF the fights did seem shorter, but again I didn't time it precisely. On the last one I would estimate it took 8 minutes because when it was at 20% my composure timer (which I used at start) was just reaching zero.

This time I didn't have my own damage filtered and with Ultimate on the Bliz4's were doing a respectable 1.2k damage. Towards the end of one of the fights I pulled hate with a nuke which could be disastrous if you get hit with Dreadstorm and it nukes right after. So I toned it down and limited my nukes to about 4 or 5 per fight.

This time I used Ultimate for the extra magic accuracy, MM because always... and Future Fabulous for recasts again. It seemed to happen at least once per pop that it would start casting before my timer was up. Sometimes as much as 5 seconds were left on the recast. Fortunately with Addle on it takes long enough to cast that no spell got through. I would consider equiping AF2 body and Goading Belt for the recast reduction next time, but all in all a single stunner seems a safe bet. Not a single Stun was resisted this time around.

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