Defending Ring Get!

Last week Thursday I had planned with 3 other people to do a few KSNM 99 battlefields. I personally did not want to do Turtle or Behemoth because the chance at HQ is so low and the drops off the NQ Kings were of no interest to me. Since I still want a Hecatomb Cap and a Ridill is still a fun toy I wanted to do the Wyrm. However, Korhil needed tongue and egg for Black Belt and a minuscule chance at a Defending Ring is better than no chance at all.

KS99
The setup was WHM (Cyrille), SMN (Korhil), BRD (Jesseblue) and a THF tank (me). Without having used the Scherzo + Earthern Armor before, all I knew about it was how well it worked on the tougher Voidwatch NM's.

I hadn't done this KS99 before at all, so knew very little about it. It casts pretty frequently and so keeping the Scherzo/EA up was pretty important. Sometimes they'd go down just as Meteor hit, but usually at least one of them was up. At just under 1.4k HP I was dropped as low as 200 HP on regular Meteors. I wasn't at max HP at the time as I believe the highest damage for regular Meteors I saw was around 800. Only one of the "final" Meteors killed me and. The others were long gone and EA wore off a second or two before the spell connected and so it was really flukey.

The battlefield clear times were around 11 minutes. I used Red Curry Buns and Aura Stole its warcry for some nice Attack numbers. I was a bit surprised to see a 1.8k Dancing Edge outside Abyssea. I used two evasion Kila's and evasion seemed capped, I don't know how much less I could have done with, but as it stood one cast of Utsu: Ni would almsot always las until the next Meteor hit.

NQ Behemoth
I loved blazing through it at max speed. Everyone joined in and meleed as it was really easy. I tried getting TH upgrades but iirc never ended up with more than TH7. I knew the droprate on HQ pop was low so I was really happy to see one Savory Shank drop.

King Behemoth
It seemed to cast less frequently than the KS99 version and did perhaps a little bit more damage per spell. We fought it the same way as the KSNM version and the results were the same as well. It had a bit more defense and HP and the fight took about 17 minutes (I used Mug timer as an indication).

Then the unexpected happened and a Defending Ring dropped! Since it was Korhil's pop we kind of waited for him to make a decision. We hadn't discussed item distribution at all beforehand since we never expected this. Korhil was the only one there for the BB item so he got it naturally. He suggested we freelot the ring (he's a hero) and I won the lot.

Defending Ring
What it means for my RDM PDT set is that I get up to 50% without using hands, legs (were already obsolete), head and feet slots. My HQ darksteel pieces for those can probably go into storage now as I don't use them on other jobs. That means I get to keep movement speed and two tics of refresh while running away or some melee gear while face tanking. Not to mention I obviously replaced the Dark Ring in my idle set with it, which makes my idle set 41% to 47% PDT (at night) and all I need to do to hit the 50% cap is swap in a Darksteel Harness and augmented Dark Ring. Since I dont'use spellcast I don't think it's worth making a different set for nighttime.

For THF it means 23% MDT (crappy thrown together set) and for PLD it's pretty much fulltime piece. My macros are still pretty incomplete for PLD since 90% of what I use it for is AoE farming.

I don't know if the drop rate was adjusted and you can imagine that at this point I don't really care. I hope it's still rare as hell so that I can feel special! Still: good luck to anyone trying.