LONGEST WEEKEND Update

Since I called some of my older entries "weekend update" I thought I'd continue that trend. So I've kept up my almost daily ~2 to 3 hour playtimes and got a couple of old goals done over a longer period of time. For one..

I haven't used it much outside of the initial "omg I need to try the WS out right away" testing. I pulled a bunch of mobs for Shield Mastery to feed me TP and wailed on Cuijatender. The WS didn't do much damage and the light SC was reduced as well. I ondly managed to get it between 60 and 70% before dying. Wanted to give it a go in Attohwa, but couldn't find a free NM to try it on. It's a little bit anti-climactic, but I'm still very happy I have that ridicularge sword. Almace on RDM could be pretty good, but I can't get the most out of it that way. Leveling BLU is such a chore though...

I've been doing WoE off and on since the last version update. I'm up to 66 Devious Die for upgrading my Daka (dagger). I only obtained 6 of them myself, the rest were all bought for 100k or less. They're common from Flux 11, but fewer and fewer people do WoE, which means people rarely have the confidence they'll beat Flux 11. They still do 9 quite frequenbtly, but I've been focussing on 7 to get more coins. I got enough for a g.axe, but I'd really like to make a gun for access to Wildfire.

I leveled DNC to 95 to make better use of this Rudra's Storm and because I wanted to stop complaining about how DNC is a better soloist and DD than THF and just jump on the train instead. The DNC train. It's a smooth ride. Soloing a darkness skillchain with two crit hit Rudra's is a thing of beauty. I now understand much better why people say mobs don't have enough HP for it to be worthwhile, usually. NM's on the other hand, I love stabbing those. I have 3 AF3 pieces left to +2, but other than that I got all other pieces I need for TP and WS. A lot was inherited from THF. I can recommend anyone that enjoys THF to pick up DNC unless their principles won't allow it.

I have to say Ochain still seems years away at the rate I'm going. Competition for VNM's is usually pretty high during my normal playtimes. At the very least SE can make T3's repop in 10 min instead of 20. Once someone's worked their way up to a T3 abyssite, why the hell would you need to limit them AGAIN? Also, the rate at which T2 abyssites convert is low enough that you can go on some pretty bad streaks. I was 0/8 two abyssites ago, of which 5 were Gamayun solos. That's a long enough fight to make you really pissed when it doesn't change color. I found someone to team up with, but that means halving your droprate (due to splitting 50/50) and it's not like being with two people doubles your efficiency.

I'm currently without an LS, but still playing and somewhat enjoying the game thanks to some friends. We did some Dynamis which turns out to be fun!! I hadn't done it since they changed cities and northlands. I read about the changes and never thought it'd be fun, but it kind of is.

Awesome music tip #7

Chione NIN solo

Chione is a popular mob due to the higher drop rate of Colorless Souls off Ogopogo. It's often camped and due to the random nature of T2 to T3 conversion you could be out there a while camping against multiple people. On Valefor it doesn't seem as bad as other servers, from what I've heard.

I blogged about trying it on THF/DNC before. It went pretty badly. I used a ton of meds but couldn't overcome the frequent nukes at low HP. After that I did it a few more times with other people and I learned more about the mob. Running backwards in first person, for one, was my favorite way of dealing with Ice spikes. When duo it's really not necessary and just slows you down, but it was something I was determined to use in any future solo attempt.

I saw a BLU do this evasion tanking. It was a pretty smart move to rely on spells to damage it when one of its own spells is incoming. You can Head Butt and interrupt its casting early on when the casting time is not as fast (at around 10% HP its spells start reaching the unstunnable). So at low HP a BLU could make a big light SC to avoid stretching out the last bit.

So, yesterday I gave it a shot on NIN/DNC with Razed Ruins, Mounted Champion and Future Fabulous Atmas. Kiting it backwards meant I only got hit by Ice Spikes once or twice due to running into terrain or being locked from Curing Waltz. It took about 3 Waltzes to recover from Heavenly Strike and about two from Blizzaga3. Freeze2 never hit, but it could have happened. later on while recasting. I saved TP for the last 50% of the fight so I could recover more easily, but I sat at 300% TP for quite a bit, so it doesn't seem very necessary. I tried to make one set of shadows last for all melee between its spells. If I recasted more than that I'd spend a lot of time standing still and not damaging it. I needed to melee in an evasion set for that to work most of the time. For future attempts I'll try to mix and match to make a compromise DD/evasion set.

It starts to cast much more frequently at low HP. So it's not just casting time, but also recast time that is shortened. Unless it starts to very heavily favor Blizzaga3, you should be ok. The amount of damage is easily recovered from through Waltzes and you always have meds to back you up. Paralyze from spikes did proc somewhere late on, but I was so busy recasting shadows and maneuvering that by the time I got around to Healing Waltz, it had already worn off.

During backwards kiting I stumbled upon a few possible pinning spots. Unfortunately they were in high traffic areas so I wouldn't attempt to use them. Especially with all the competition. It took about 18 minutes start to finish, which I don't think is all that bad. Since all three T2 Heroes VNM seem soloable (though Koios being by FAR the easiest) I'm a little but more hopeful about gathering Colorless Souls. Since I could get away with only bothering people for the T3 and gather up to 3 different pops on my own. I'd be completely independent with a second account, but that's not happening.

Leveling Ninja and Gamayun solo

Ninja
The journey I took to leveling ninja involved getting it up from 48 leeching. Pulling in an Altepa party at level ~70 (which went surprisingly well with some random evasion gear). Pulling in a BLU burn leech party from lv 85 to 88. That last one was pretty awesome as I got to use Danzo sune-ate and some more THF-inherited evasion gear to pull all the Tauri in Vunkerl comfortably with only 2 regen Atmas. At 88 I took a break and recently I started skilling up my Katana and Ninjutsu which got me enough exp to break 89, which is where I'm still at right now.

I got me Ninja Chainmail, because it's still very good to TP in and got me Iga legs +2 thanks to some stones I had stored up form many Sobeks. I finished off Iga feet thanks to Argonar and soon after the +2 thanks to Cyrille and Kingcem. My TP set is pretty decent with the exception of still missing Iga head. Lots of other pieces are leftover from other jobs. Yesterday I even got me Iga Erimaki (the neck piece) which makes it look like everything is coming along nicely. However, there is a huge gaping hole in my TP gear where a main-hand Katana should be. I'm thinking about an evasion Sekka+2. Other than there's Oriandori and the new Katana from Dynamis Windurst. that I have a Kamome and Hiwa until I ding 90 at which point I have a Kogara. As cool as two black kunai models looks and as awesome as low-delay weapons are, I will still feel really gimp doing Blade: Jin in a 40 DMG weapon.

Speaking of Blade: Jin. That is quite a disappointment coming down from Evisceration. I almost want to main-hand Twilight Knife at this point. With capped dagger merits and no Blade: Hi, it might not be so bad. An amazing piece of gear if you don't have Blade: Hi is Iga Ningi +2. Stats galore for WS, and so much so that it's sometimes better than Ninja Chainmail to TP in, though I'd have to run the numbers to exactly when and by how much. Right now the numbers are very variable and I've WS'd as low as 400 and as high as 1.8k while skilling up (only had RR for damage at the time). The WS set is thrown together like most other stuff, but I wouldn't call it "bad". Some notables: Aias Bonnet, which carries over. I've also been using Rager Leggings cus they seem intuitively better than anything else I have thanks to uncapped Katana skill. Necklace is Asagaya's, though it should be Breeze Gorget, which is in storage. Pants are Tumbler Trunks. Back is Atheling. Belt is Anguinus. Body is (don't laugh) Byrnie+1. It's a crappy piece for Jin, but I'm really looking to save inventory and I don't have anything better at the moment. Ninja Tekko +1 seem really nice for Jin, but no way I'm going to spend time on that! Gimping it up!

The biggest reason for leveling NIN was wishing I could sub NIN and DNC at the same time while playing THF. It sounds strange, but a lot of THF's want to play like DNC and NIN. SE won't really let them, by giving them no (native access to) Stun, reasonable means of recovering HP, debuffs and damage increasing abilities that apply to solo or tanking situations. I honestly think they could all be solved by giving THF exclusive access to a new set of strong X-Bow ammunition, but that's just because I'm nostalgic for the days when X-Bows were a THF staple and very useful. Acid bolts are still very useful when pulling but that hasn't been relevant for me in a long time. A guaranteed critical hit from any direction that also works on WS sounds like something THF should have had a long time ago and now DNC and soon WAR will be able to do this. I'm digressing. My NIN was meant to solo stuff I couldn't on THF and where TH didn't matter as much. To put it plainly: VNM's.

Gamayun Solo
After all this talk about NIN you might expect me to talk about how I used my freshly leveled/geared NIN to take down Gamayun. However, I used THF. I decided that my THF is so much better geared than NIN at this point that it's still the better choice. Assuming debuffs wouldn't land on NIN and that meds would cover damage taken from Aerial Blast I went out last night to give it a shot.

There was no competition for it. It was hanging out around its endpoint among the Sinister Siedels. The first fight I had most filters on so I couldn't count shadows using log messages. I played it safe for the most part. I recast shadows when I hit 1 shadow despite the frequent double attacks. Gamayun seems to have normal old-world attack speed (240 delay) unlike a lot of new NM's. Evasion from two Kila's was enough to seemingly cap evasion and tanking was comfortable. The few times I did take melee damage it was around 250 per hit with a bit of enaero damage on top. Mounted Champion made up for that comfortably.

Gamayun took very low damage from melee. Crits (with only RR for damage) were averaging around 50 and WS around 500. I used some drinks the first fight to speed it up and they made a big difference, but didn't last all that long. I don't know if it's just piercing damage or all physical damage in general, but the defense/resistance seems higher than Koios or Chione.

Aerial Blast did 1609 damage exactly each time. I had Future Fabulous Atma and was fulltiming Twiligh Torque and Defending Ring. Accounting for those the unmodified damage is upwards of 2800. Which was more than my HP pool at the time. Damage taken from AB could have been regenned. However, to be safe you'd have to stop feeding it TP until you could survive a second AB. Instead of doing that I used meds. Both fights it only used AB three times and Whispering Wind once. With bad luck it could really drag out and become an epically long fight.

NIN would be better at this if it was equally skilled/geared, but right now it's not. I'm still assuming that NIN is needed to solo Chione and that THF can't do it reliably. I might have to go out and try again before making up my mind.

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.

Briareus solo & Brulo duo

Briareus
Nothing special about Briareus solo, you say? Give it a minute. At the time of this writing I've solo'd this mob as THF/NIN 4 or 5 times. Each went down without a hitch thanks in great part to temp item meds.

With the huge evasion double EVA daggers give you on top of THF skill + traits, the only challenge in this fight is regaining HP in between Mercurial Strikes enough to be safe from the next one. Since 1111 is the most damage they can do, you'll want at least that much. However, to cover myself from bad luck I always took a wider margin. To do this I didn't use meds exclusively, but also used Mounted Champion (20HP regen) as one of my Atmas. Colossal Slam can only be done outside of Meikyo Shisui when Mercurial hits for 888 and 999 damage. When that happens you can wait a few attack round until it's close to being able to TP and start running backwards while in first person. This means you'll still be able to land melee hits, but will already be moving away when it starts charging the tp move. Unless you encounter an obstacle while running back, you will be out of the AOE range of Colossal Slam when it goes off, just like when you SHOULD be running when it 2hr's after a 1111 damage Mercurial. This means Colossal Slam can be completely neutralized and the regaining HP, as said before, remains the only challenge. Trebuchet and Mercurial damage will add up. You could easily turn around and hold Bria while you let Regen do all the work, but that will really slow you down.

Limiting TP moves in this fight also greatly reduces the need to wait for regen or the number of meds required. This would go for all solos, so using Subtle Blow and AGI where possible is more of a general advice. I have the following sources of Subtle Blow in my gearset: Asagaya's Collar, Nusku's Sash, Heed Ring and Dragon Harness. That's right, I melee in Dragon Harness. The sacrifice in speed, which leads to longer fights, is worth it when it's not a magic casting mob, and longer doesn't necessarily mean riskier. Plus 10 Subtle Blow is pretty rare in a single slot. There is also AGI on it, which since a recent patch also affect TP fed per attack. For this same reason the AGI on the evasion daggers are extra useful. TP feed is severely reduced thanks to all these factors.

Brulo
Having some close calls while trio'ing this it seemed like a tough fight to duo. The hate cap was reached about 3 quarters into the fight the first time around. This lead to a nasty cycle of the tank needing to melee to get hate while at the same time taking considerable damage from spikes that he would require healing and the mages would pull hate again. With this enmity bouncing it wasn't a big surprise that mages got hit with Inferno. We made several mistakes. No reliable way of dealing with spikes. No way for the mages to avoid capping hate. Not enough defense against Inferno. These three problems only needed two solutions. Using Accession Phalanx a large portion of the spikes damage was nullified, leaving Regen2 to take part of almost all the other damage taken (form spikes). This reduces healing needed and enmity cap becomes much less of an issue as long as you don't cast unnecessarily. The second thing we did was using Future Fabulous Atma which made Inferno do about 50% of the tank's HP (don't remember exactly how much it was). FF on top of no other MDB reduces magic damage by 33%, so taking that into account it should be survivable either way with a decent HP pool and an MDT set.

I think Paladin is a pretty cool guy...

...eh tanks trains of mobs and doesn't afraid of anything. When I took PLD up from 75 to 90 I didn't expect to use it much nor bother to gear it. Someone posted a video of their Ochain PLD tanking a train of Mandragoras while taking 0 damage and I was impressed. I decided to give it a try and it turns out any 'ol PLD can do the exact same thing. I was using Mounted Champion at the time as the only defensive Atma.

I put some more effort into my PDT set and tried different mob types. It works on most melee-oriented mobs as long as their level is below yours. PLD builds TP rather fast through Shield Mastery. Especially when using a small buckler type (size 1) shield with in combination with Reprisal, the TP starts building fast enough to self-SC (requires roughly 10+ mobs). PLD gets access to Aeolian Edge depending on its sub-job. Since I only need Mounted Champion that leaves two Atma slots for boosting AE damage (Gales + Ultimate). I generally stick to RDM sub for the extra MAB and without Ascetic's Tonic I usually do around 1.1k damage per WS. It takes about 5 WS to kill most trains completely.

Easy Prey mobs will often hit for 0 damage when their attacks get blocked, even by a small shield. This means that thanks to Phalanx there is no benefit to a larger shield in this particular application. It's sometimes hard to find a mob family that isn't being killed so you can pull trains uncontested without the mobs leveling up after each wave.

Being able to AoE farm solo has made it possible for me to get my lv90 Masamune done much faster and now work on the La Theine phase of my Almace without bothering other people for help whatsoever. PLD can tank Pantagruel while taking 0 damage on blocks and for some reason I've yet to understand, USUALLY stops its Ice Spikes form showing up when it hits you with Ice Roar. When that happens, the NM doesn't use Moribound Hack. PLD has a decent number of red procs so that's a nice plus. I managed to solo Grandgousier with some meds on PLD, but after changing atmas I found out WAR/NIN can solo Grandgousier just as well (Cloak&Dagger/Siren Shadow/MountedChampion + assorted EVA gear) and with more WS procs available than any other single job. Adamastor is a joke and Briareus is an easy solo on THF/NIN. That takes care of LTP. Thanks to Guku KI form chests my AoE farming on PLD will be useful in the second leg as well.

How was this stuff ever hard

All the while I wasn't making new entries I was still playing FFXI. I find it hard to think of everything I've done in that time as it's not like I write stuff down, take regular screenshots or parse everything. Also, I may be getting old, because my memory is failing me. Since there have been no more LS events in such a long time I've spent time doing stuff on my own or with very small groups. Revisiting old NM's we had done in larger groups and dispatching them with ease prompts me to ask "How was this stuff ever hard?".

Eccentric Eve wasn't hard when we did it as a group. However, people did fail to Stun the breaths at one point. Loads of people hit the floor because of charm and EBB. Getting pops while farming for Dark Rings (still yet to see 6% anything) is a natural side-effect so it's a very acessible NM. It turned out to be a simple duo NIN+RDM. Relying on Violent Flourish is kinda wonky. Subbing BLM on RDM removes status cures form the arsenal which can be a hassle for the tank, but /DNC will take care of that eventually.

Kukulkan was a bit tougher. The terror gaze attack REALLY slows down what is otherwise a very simple fight. The unremovable poison is painful, but at 90 NIN evades most of it and RDM can cure through it. There are some trees that make it really easy to kite if you have to. I believe we duo'd it 4 times. The last one I nuked through the gazes to speed up the fight. Knowing how to kite around the trees means you can go all out.

Isgebind seemed really rough when we first fought it. While getting hearts for Masamune we trio'd it twice, once using the "healer outside of party" trick (avoiding Spike Flail) and tanking it on its tail.

There's loads of stuff like Ironclad Smiter (3 ppl), Ansherekh (solo), Titlauacan (trio/duo), Lusca (duo), Amhuluk (duo) and many more that really seem easy the 'second' time around. However, the biggest difference in difficulty for me personally was doing Glavoid recently. It's clear now that with a tank a healer and a stunner you can trio it very reliably. Each time you fight something you can learn from it to get better at it, but it feels like you learn MUCH faster when you're either soloing or low-manning things. Probably because it's less chaotic and/or you're more focussed. It's fun to see things get easier as you figure them out. Too bad we have to do a ton more of them for empyreans and it gets less fun each time. However, for me there's still a bunch of things left to try.

Weekend update 17

This has little to nothing to do with the passed weekend, but I've started naming these entries this way and I am nothing if not committed to naming schemes! This is just a round-up of random things.

I was playing around with MNK sub-job, seeing if I could get any decent counter rate going. Unfortunately with Gnarled Horn and Counterstance I only got up to 60~65%. It's probably a bit higher. I believe I wasn't always facing all targets. This screenshot is to show the difference between damage taken with and without Counterstance. It's worth noting that Phalanx was on and that against mobs with high attack, the difference wouldn't be as pronounced.


Random picture of Chloris. He's a big boy.


This was the EXP alliance I was in when I was taking PLD up. There was no cleaving/aoe'ing so the number of TE's was a bit surprising. Rocking Vorpal Blade was a lot of fun once I was able to equip that Hannibal sword. It's surprising to see how you can go from basically leeching at 75, to leading the pack at 90.


I've had renewed interest in Salvage because of Dark Depths Atma. I'm not very keen on getting any pieces completed, since that would likely mean a bit of a grind despite the improved drop-rates. It also seemed like fun to go back at lv90 and see how the mobs that gave us a hard time would measure up now. I didn't have as strong a DD class as I do now in SAM, so it's not just the levels that are different. I'm aslo convinced that the group we went in with the last two times was more competent/versed than before. You live and you learn...

Here's parse data of Long-bowed Chariot:
Offense
Defense

That was two weeks ago. Last weekend we did Zhayolm Remnants. Made some poor decisions on the way up, because I suck at Salvage and don't even remember doing this zone ever. I ended up fighting Battleclad Chariot wearing just AF3 head and body because we went up on the wrong side on the first floor. A lot of HP, but otherwise a very simple fight. Going by the number of times I got hit and that the Long-bowed parse shows a low evasion rate, I don't see why we couldn't have done it at lv75. At least, that's what I like to tell myself.

Awesome Music Tip #6 (oldie)

Review of NM on Masamune path

This is perhaps a bit premature, seeing as how I've yet to finish the current set of GK Empyrean trials. However, I can always tag another entry on at the end when I have more experience with Isgebind. Out of the 10 or so times I've killed it I was in a group of at least 6 people. What I've learned about all the previous NM's is that it's easier to notice certain mob patterns/behavior once you've fought it at a slower pace with fewer people.

VNM's
I've posted about soloing Urd on SAM/DNC. If you can't get help this seems like a reasonable option. Thankfully I only needed to do it once. A BST can solo it despite the hate reset. Since Trance is a good warning for its triple WS, any DD+Mage duo should be able to take it out at level 90. The most annoying part is popping Skuld instead and trying to lose her. They fly pretty fast.

Lamprey Lord is a bit annoying. You'll want a "proper" evasion tank for it. Either that or get a bunch of melee to kill it quick. One of the pickup groups I did it with had a DNC and about 3 SAM spamming Violent Flourish, Tachi: Hobaku and Blade Bash. It was a short fight with very little damage taken as it was obviously stun-locked for a large portion of the fights. I'd recommend bringing a bunch of antidotes. They're not expensive at npc's and it's much easier to use it on yourself than to rely on a mage, whose first reaction is probably to cast cure before poisona. Antidotes can make the difference, but tanks should also try and blink tank like it's an HNM. Recast shadows as soon as possible, because evasion is random and it has a very high rate of triple and double attacks.

SAM can probably tank it in a duo due to decent evasion skill rating, but it's more prone to mistakes and bad luck than a NIN or a DNC. The hate reset on the Acid Mist ability is a bit of an issue. I don't recall if everyone hit by Acid Mist gets their hate reset, but it's a good idea to have the mage in range anwyay. Once Acid mist goes off the tank should try and get a spike in enmity to get it off the mage asap or avoid it going after the mage at all. Kiting just prolongs the time it's on the healer. If TP feed can be limited a duo is ok, but at least a trio would be my advice.

Chesma is a step down from Lamprey and can be duo'd without any issues. Losing hate in this fight means very little if the healer is prepared, because its damage output is much less threatening than LL. Just cast stona as soon as you see it charging up. As long as you haven't had to spam cure4 up to this point, the melee should be able to get it off quickly. Chesma and Tammuz were hard to find up when I did them. Japanese groups cycled through them continuously and yet I very rarely saw any shouts for them.

Carabosse
Farming pops for Carabosse solo is very simple if you have something with half-decent evasion and DNC sub or a crit hit WS. I'll tell you why in a sec. Baba Yaga only casts spells and throws arrows. The arrows have very low accuracy, but if they land the Amnesia will slow you down a bit (not dangerous) so some evasion here helps. Since it doesn't attack normally and casts mostly harmless spells like silencega, it doesn't really matter what job you're on. The key is to have some meds to cure if you don't have other sources of healing and a job with a lot of red WS to save time. The fly NM (La Theine Lieje) doesn't do TP abilities unless it successfully casts Aeroga3. In which case it will spam Venom 3 to 7 times in a row. A strong multi-hit crititical WS will interrupt its casting reliably. Moreso than Violent Flourish. However, if you're solo you may not manage 100TP more than once per spellcast. So if you want to try your red WS you need another way to interrupt its casting. Even if it does land the spell, you can outrun the 2nd+ Venom and recover with meds. I did both mobs on THF for the most part. Usually subbing NIN and equiping Mounted Champion Atma.

Carabosse itself has the potential to nuke very hard. However, once you learn that it can only do this under Winter Breeze, then you can forget about it until is changes seasons and then easily swap in some MDT gear if shadows are down or if it's Aeroga3. If you're lagging or not confident you'll be fast enough you can just keep it on until it changes seasons again, which shouldn't take long. You need to do something for each season so just make sure you have your chat-filters off and pay attention.

• Winter Breeze: Stun nukes and/or swap in MDT
• Spring Breeze: casts aoe debuffs. Remove debuffs and keep on trucking. Can wait to cast shadows until it changes out if you want to.
• Summer Breeze: Dispel Regain (or Aura Steal it!!! really nice to have 10 TP/tic). Ride out the the Mute off Torrent and reapply all buffs after Turmoil.
• Autumn Breeze: Dispel Regen. I guess you could stun cures as well, but she's fast.

Heqet
Maybe not worth its own section once you know how to do it, but I guess it can't hurt going over it. Bring some meds. I usually made sure to have Lucid potions 1, 2 and 3. You can get potion3 from Bastion Prefect for 50 credits. Occasionally doing some bastion between pops will keep your credits up. Another thing to get off the prefect is a Fool's Powder. It's not NEEDED, but it casts spells in pairs below 25% and it's nice to just kill it asap at low HP and not risk two Waterjas killing you.

Pulling it requires you to deaggro the train unless you get lucky with where it pops. I didn't bother pulling it when there was competition around. However, it IS possible to get it before it deaggro's and still have Squibs deaggro. Either it takes longer for Heqet to deaggro or it has longer detection range. Also, I can recommend engaging, hitting it once then fleeing away (sprinter's/powder boots/job ability). You'll then stop to put away your weapons as you get out of range. This does NOT always make its name go yellow. If someone steals it at this point, you'll still be the first person to act on it since the last time it was idle and so will get the KI if they kill it. After doing this once or twice you'll know how far you need to run before stopping. It's hard to explain the distance so I won't try. Again, I did this on THF because it has evasion and so will take very little damage from anything but spells. Take it down while doing red weakness WS if you have any. Use your meds. If there's no competition you could repeatedly deaggro it, since it stops to cast. I did not do this because I didn't want to risk running out of meds. SMN's, DNC/NIN's and NIN/DNC's have very little trouble soloing this without meds. I believe BST can too, but have no personal experience with it. I'm just trying to show that with meds other jobs can too.

It pays to kill Ephmeral Murexes (potion2) and Jala (potion3 and fool's) for temp items, it'll save you some cruor and credits. All in all soloing Heqet is just a matter of killing it fast and staying alive. With enough meds you could potentially do a lot of red WS. Something with evasion and a lot of weapon skills like NIN/WAR would probably be the best use of your time. Nobody wants to go 0/8 on the KI like I did. It's not a solo you'll tell your friends about, but it makes lv85 Masamune much more attainable, especially since Cep is soloable too.

Cep Camuy
Yea, why not? I think the reason why I want to talk about Cep is because I bought a Frenzy Sallet especially for this NM. Not having to take a 200-300 damage hit to wake yourself up, which could take a long time, and almost instantly continuing the fight is a big plus. It only cost me 400k and I'm not selling it back. Being able to wake up from sleep independantly is just great.

Seaspray and Leeching current are both annoying. So there's a 50/50 chance that its TP ability will be annoying. However, using some subtle blow (or if you're a Ninja) will make things a lot easier. I've come to appreciate Dragon Harness much more, thanks to its +10 Subtle Blow. It also helps me kill Ancient Orobon (decent amount of HP) for cheekmeat without them doing any TP abilities.

Cirein
Does the same annoying TP abilities as all Orobon with the addition of Mayhem Lantern under 50% HP. It uses TP abilities back to back. Always in pairs.

In all the fights I've done it NEVER used Mayhem lantern as the first ability. So under 50% HP you can run away after the first TP ability and avoid Mayhem Lantern's charm. However, while this is worth doing, if the first ability is Hypnic Lamp and you get slept, then it's pretty much impossible to avoid the charm unless you're constantly DoT'ed and can wake up form sleep asap. I suppose you could use pachira fruits for this as long as you start running each time it TP's. In that case, even if you get slept, you'll have already taken a few steps and be far enough away that you COULD outrunt he charm. Having Treasure Hunter is nice, so a THF+mage duo could use this strategy. If the mage can land gravity and/or the THF wears some dusk pieces to slow them down, charm can be dealt with relatively simply. RDM/SCH or SCH/RDM can save Manifestation Gravity/Bind for this purpose. Don't try to sleep charmed people, the charm is accompanied by drown effect (DoT). Just make sure you realise that if the last person who took action on CC gets charmed it may go unclaimed.

I almost forgot, it also does Deathgnash, which could be dangerous if shadows are down. A follow-up hit would kill you. I'd recommend a DD + THF + healer trio, where one of the melee stays out of range to avoid charm. Going in only for a few hits in between TP abilities. This gives you both TH and a decently fast killspeed. A kite+nuke strategy is just as good, but I expect it to be a bit slower.

Isgebind
So far I haven't really started on this one yet. The same Flail tanking technique as used on Azdaja (and perhaps other wyrms as well) can be applied here. A healer outside the party with claim won't get hit with it. However, it can still use the Wing ability, unlike Azdaja. The main benefit of this is that it won't use any Roar abilities (nor Terror), which is a hate reset and would make it hard to duo otherwise.

Fighting it normally (on paws) is a matter of survival. A pair of evasion tanks with some decent magic defense kits (Atma of a Future Fabulous is exactly that... fabulous) will not be in great danger of getting killed. The paralyze effect + aura will make it a longer fight, but that's pretty much it. Heroes NM's generally have a ton of HP, so it's gonna be long anyway.

Tachi: Fudo - day 2

I had a chance to test drive Fudo some more yesterday. I was sure that given my gear I should be able to crank out some more impressive numbers. So this time I subbed WAR and headed out to Misareaux to assist on some Cirein's and Heqets. I didn't bring food yet gain. I tossed out some kabobs the day before to make room for lanterns and forgot to buy some more.

I only started parsing a bit later on. If I filter out all mobs but Squibs I get the following:


Pretty good average Fudo damage, no? I admit, I cheated a bit by using Atma of the Griffon's Claw. That gives a 20% boost to WS damage, which is something you may use if you're planning on killing mobs with no concern for ruby lights or zerging NM's with 2hr and Sekkanokki. Otherwise RR or A&O will be better choices.

The next one is my latest record for Fudo damage.


The nice thing about this is that it's with Berzerk and Hasso, but not at full TP, without food and without BRD or COR. Guessing my PDIF to be at around 1.4, going to capped PDIF (2.25) would mean a 60% increase in damage. If my estimation of my own PDIF isn't too conservative. A similar Fudo would have the potential to do around 8k damage under more ideal circumstances.

Awesome Music Tip #5

Weekend update 16

I've experienced a renewed appreciation for THF recently. I've spent a lot of time on it while killing Carabosse and farming pops, so it seems natural that I'd want to gear it better. One of the three big upgradeable slots for my WS set was the head slot. I took care of that while in Attohwa recently.


Aias is likely better all-round than Hecatomb cap, though I'd still take the latter if some good upgrades become possible in the future. Special thanks to Anthx and Kingcem for tanking and blue'ing Yaanei.

Not wanting to risk bad luck I brewed Yaanei after we got blue weakness. I wasn't near a flux or martello so I lost some brew time. We looked desperately for stuff to kill, but in the end only managed a Whiro and Ironclad.


Before Yaanei we finished my Titlacuan popset which is what I needed to finish this thing:



I'm finally sitting at 24~25.5% Haste in my TP set on SAM.

We did some Misareaux Abyssea and got me 1 lantern (yay...) and some Coins off Amhuluk. That got me Raider's Culottes +2 which is met 5th +2 AF3.


I gave Shinryu another go, but I'm starting to get annoyed with that dragon. Those two bodies are pretty high in demand, so getting people to share loot with while being very greedy is kind of hard. I want to save the cruor for other Abyssea zones where you can kill more mobs with one brew. That'd mean killing Shinryu without brewing. Several stacks of Holy waters, WAR or MNK tank, a THF and at least two healers should be enough to get blue and kill it several times in one sitting. I've got more Traverser Stones than I know what to do with. Cruor on the other hand...

Solo brewing Shinryu

People have been brewing Shinryu solo for a while, but for a lack anything better to post about I'll try to convince everyone how easy it is so everyone can get their drops (eventually).

Ingredients
1x Primeval Brew
1x Doom screen
1x Samurai sub-job: Sekkanoki
several HP-recovery meds
equal amounts Atma of Apocalypse, Voracious Violet*, Mounted Champion**
copious amounts of cruor
*possible replacement: Sea Daughter
**possible replacement: anything to deal more damage

Instructions
One of the most important things is to go early to regain enough TP to WS twice at the start of your chosen "Blue" weakness time-frame. I try to get there a bit after midnight game-time and I enter at 7:00 for piercing weakness.

Timing your WS is obviously important here. Don't forget to Sekkanoki. When you engage and run in it'll aggro and swing at you from pretty far away. I tried waiting for it to get to me so I could run back a bit and fight+die outside of its aggro range, but you'll get drawn in and it'll make things last much longer than necessary. Besides, it isn't really needed.

Just run into range and WS after the first swing is over, and another time after the second. If you got no weakness Hint-message for a weapon you can proc on then I just die and try again. The reason why I don't try for a 3rd WS is because you need to use some of the better meds for it. I'd rather save those up for when I really need them. The Shinryu fight's cost is negligable when you have a healthy stock of stones. Also, you can try up to 4 times in one fight. You could probably survive long enough to get enough TP from Meditate and melee swings if you used a Fool's powder/drink. The tier4 AoE spells can really hurt.

If you die within aggro range (very likely), it's important to be able to survive 1 attack from Shinryu. You won't be able to move (annoyingly slow raise animation) until after the first attack. I can imagine that as a Taru on a low-HP job this could be an issue. THF doesn' t have much defense and I usually got hit for a bit over 300 damage. I use a regen Atma so I don't have to spend precious cruor on potions between attempts. If you don't go too often, you'll liekly recover those meds slowly from fighting other NM's and regular mobs in Abyssea.

Of course, when you do get a good hint or actually proc the Blue weakness, use your Brew asap. You could macro it, but I'd like to avoid any "accidents". Way too many times have I said "Crap, used Convert by mistake". Brew then screen and go through your Blue WS. After a proc it stops attacking. It may take you by surprise. Iron Giants and Shinryu have regular attacks that count as "special" attacks, much like TP abilities. That's why Amnesia stops them from attacking.

I've never had much problems healing it for excessive amounts. Unlike Rani, it doesn't heal for more than it takes damage due to damage resistance. Shinryu has none, so it'll take full damage from your WS, which makes it a pretty short fight.

Some final notes
I do this on THF which gives me both Blue and Treasure Hunter. Personally I think this is one of the best jobs to do this on, given the low drop rates. Get used to seeing no gear drops and some Apkallu Eggs. So far, of all the armor drops, I've only gotten a Twilight Helm out of 5 fights. Actually, a Helm dropped twice but the second time it went to someone tagging along for the win.

Cruor is your bottleneck. Nobody cares about merits anymore these days, I'm sure. Farming cruor in an EXP alliance sounds like it makes sense, but I recently found out that cruor drops work the opposite way of EXP chains. For exp you want to keep killing the same family of mob, but for cruor you want to alternate mob families. It may be due to Abyssites, but after about 8 fights I capped out at around 480 cruor per mob, while alternating between Sandsweepers and Fear Dearg in Altepa. Ladybugs and Mandies seem to give the most cruor in that zone. EXP alliances should kill really fast so that it evens out, but let's be honest... they usually don't.

Awesome Music Tip #3

Pantrokrator and Apademak revisited

I noticed a lot of people ended up on this blog looking for Apademak and Pantokrator info (mostly Apademak) and I'm sure most of them were disappointed at the amount of actually useful advice. For this reason (but mostly because we recently did another pair of these) I'll go over the mobs once more and try to compress some of the info I've found more than just relaying what we did or didn't do.

Apademak
The first thing that comes up when you look for advice on this mob is stopping it from leveling up. Taking lightning damage causes it to level up and supposedly so does it killing someone. I used to think it casting any spell caused the level up, but on our second fight I stuck around more and saw several single target spells going off on the tanks that weren't followed by level-ups. So stunning self-targeted spells is what you want to do. Self targeted spells could be missed if you have certain filters on, so you should check that out beforehand. It's easiest to just Stun all its spells.

Does it build Stun resistance? According to several accounts it does. However, with two BLM's alternating stuns they continued to land long into the fight and the only resist I remember seeing (I wasn't looking at all of them, admittedly) was of a WHM/BLM casting. I'm estimating 20 Stuns in, the BLM's were still able to land it.

Unfortunately we ended up missing a stun and I can't vouch for it not using Fulmination until after it levels up at least once. From what I read, it is a very tame and simple mob before it levels up. Dedicated stunners being as important as they are, it's worth using some haste and fast-cast to reduce the Stun recast timer as much as possible. At maximum reduction you're still looking at a 22 seconds recast. This looks like it would be short enough in for most spells, but it's not a guarantee.

When it levels up it follows up with a TP ability. Usually Fulmination, but also Lithic breath. Lithic breath inflicts a weakness. A second tank should be standing out of breath cone to take hate off the weakened tank. I read something interesting on BG about avoiding the breath attack. Apparently, despite the ability being instant and unstunnable (on reaction), as long as you're strafing around the mob (moving sideways while locked on to the target) you'll avoid the breath attack. Credit to Arthars for figuring that out and posting it. Someone added that the same thing can be done with Tyrannic Tusk on Sobek, which afaik is also conal.

In my personal opinion, gearing for lightning resistance doesn't pay off. Tanks will take too much of a hit with regards to damage output that it'll make the fight noticeably longer. Also, with barspell and lightning resist atma, the tanks still took considerable damage. I can't be exactly sure if they were 1/2 resists or full damage. In any case, the magic accuracy of Fulmination seems rather high.

Its evasion and defense go up very noticeably as it levels up. So if you plan on doing this with a small group and without a brew, then stopping it from leveling up is not only important, it's THE most important aspect of the fight. Evasion tanking it works fine. Both NIN and DNC at the last fight were doing well holding it. Damaging it became the biggest challenge at that point and we ended up brewing it after we got Blue weakness on it. No dagger drop though.

Pantokrator
Pantokrator's 2hr's are the most annoying part about the mob. After learning that (much like the tiger NM in Uleg) the "chance" of it 2hr'ing is influenced by how much you heal it. While it TP's and casts. The 3 or 4 times it 2hr'd this last fight were all triggered by WS'ing during or otherwise doing a lot of damage while it's in "damage absorption" mode. It doesn't "prove" that that's how it worked, but it definitely seems consistent. If you fail to limit 2hr's, Fool's drink is fantastic for neutralizing Chainspell, and Fanatic's for Hundred Fists. If you have neither, throw in some stuns and don't try to kite it is all I can think of.

Towards the end Colossal Blow can make things rough if you currently only have one tank on it. It looks like its defense does go down as its HP goes down. I managed a 'normal' 2.5k Raging Rush on it when it was nearly dead, while early on I couldn't break 1k. DD's should limit their interaction with Panto to WS only. If you're using NIN tanks and its HP isn't below 25% then you have enough room for error to WS after a TP ability has gone off. As long as its magic casting timer isn't up. Tanks can take it down fast enough, so it's not an essential part of the strategy.

Of these two mobs, Panto is the easier one. It fits the pop-pattern of Caturae in Uleguerand (since there's no Caturae in that zone) and with Triturators different class compared to Smiter and Sunderer, you'd expect a much harder fight. However imho, Apademak takes the cake for most annoying mob in Heroes zones. Even Azdaja has become unimpressive since we tried and succeeded (after a shaky start) at tanking it from behind. I'm positive that making Apademak smooth is also a matter of getting the hang of it. The difference is that Apademak's leveling up and its increase in defense and strength are irreversible and so there's no forgiveness for mistakes.

Indrik and Empousa

I had the pleasure of fighting these two NM's twice each yesterday. We started off trying to multitask and kill Ironclad Triturator while part of the group built lights and did Indrik. That didn't end well.

The big hubbub around Triturator seemed very disproportionate the first time we fought it as we took it out easily. However, the first time we had two WHM's in the tank party and overall more people at the fight. Did some holding of the mob, but it powers up (supposedly after each 2hr). We let it regen to 100%, but it didn't seem to get noticeably weaker. The keys to this fight seem to be more healing power, tanks with a lot of HP, reliable stun for after draw-ins and enough DD to make it a short fight.

Indrik
Another fight that you want to end as soon as possiple is the one against Indrik. That white unicorn will power up much like Ironclad Triturator. Unfortunately I wasn't paying enough attention to notice exactly what triggers it to be healed by melee, but it has a mode where that happens. It's not a huge issue because it doesn't happen often nor does it last very long. The only issue is Scintillant Lance. It starts doing more and more damage as the fight drags out. I opted for the very indelicate approach of throwing bodies at it. Even double weakened my Gekkos were doing a decent chunk of damage so it "worked" in a certain sense. Atma of Apocalypse kind of changes the ballgame.

It seems to Triple Attack a lot, but it doesn't have super accuracy, so it can be evasion tanked. Seigan tanking worked alright, but you still need a lot of cures if you can't evade its attacks or have someone to bounce it off of. Rotating tanks seems to make the most sense, but they should last at least a minute unless you want to bring out a whole army or zombie it like we did on our last attempt. If the goal is to survive Scintillant lance, I'd use a MNK tank with Indrik's own atma. MNK's have a decent selection of MDT/MDB gear (moreso than NIN). Either that or pick a NIN anyway and have him tank backwards with nukes. Limiting TP usage would make it more low-mannable. I don't know if Absorb-TP lands on it. Since it's a light-based mob, I would think so. Big damage nukes and removing TP whenever possible should limit its lance usage to about 4 or 5 per fight and you could kill it before it starts breaking 3k.

If there's a way to predict/stun/avoid Scintillant Lance, I haven't noticed it. Someone suggested strafing. I tried it, but with all the other melee on it, I kept running into people. I want to give it a go with a more defensive strategy. Indrik's lance damage does seem to reset after it goes idle/regens.

Empousa
The flying mode is this NM's only catch. It actually doesn't do any normal attacks in the air and just spams TP ablilty x3 followed by a spell and repeats. Someone said a certain amount of damage done to it while flying will make it drop down, but I think there's something more going on there. Since the damage from melee alone seemed to take much longer to bring it back to earth. Either way, WS and melee during the 3 abilities and turn around for the spell. If it's Dread Spikes have it dispelled/finale'd asap and then turn and hit it some more. Landing a spell on it while it's casting a spell of its own may be a bit tricky unless limit your tries to Apocalypse Atma procs (and interrupting the spell if it's not an instant cast). Doing it the normal way it may take a few tries to get the hang of it, but I'm sure once you do it becomes rather easy and it'll go back to its grounded mode quickly.

Defensively there's not much you need to worry about. Just don't have too many people in range when it starts flying. The AoE abilities don't hurt individually but it adds up fast as he spams them. Dark resist atmas is another route to go, but switching atmas takes time you may not want to spend, unless of course Empousa is the only thing you're doing. It's a quick respawn and requires no pop farming. I'd recommend this to anyone looking for stones and cards of Ardor. It's way easier than Indrik.

Leveling Warrior

This job has been getting a lot of love in the last year. It's always been one of strongest melee DD jobs in the game and I'm sure in many situations the strongest one. However, since Abyssea introduced the need for versatility in weapon choices to proc weaknesses and popularity of AoE farming, it's gotten some extra attention. These make it more useful than simply "a job to kill things with". I started leveling it mainly for those two reasons.

I leeched my way from 45 to 70, after which I tried closing the skill gap with a Great Axe on my DRK, which was already at 90. I got it up to the mid 190's from ~160 before breaking down and deciding to level the rest while exp'ing. To my great relief at ~190 skill, the use of decent acc gear, Razed Ruin + Cloak and Dagger + Horned Beast, Sushi and Stalwarts spam compensated for all my Accuracy issues. I wasn't capped at the start but I gradually got to that point, slowly outgrowing the need for Stalwart's and Food (I'm a cheap bastard). In the lower 80's I had jumped to 270 Great Axe skill.

Skilling Up
I joined Enigmas and Cyrille for some skillups on WAR when I got the idea of trying to do it solo with a defensive build and regen atmas. After one attempt I was hooked. When I found them the first time the Orapodiums they were EP-T to me. In 22 PDT from gear and Mounted Champion + Stronghold + Impenetrable I was able to hold two Orapodiums for an extended perdiod of time. The beauty of this is that I was getting more than double the attacks from retaliation as I was getting from regular swings. To be clear, you CAN get skillups from a retaliation attack. On a good Retaliation streak I could self-sc. Since the vast majority of attacks were landing for between 20 and 30 damage, you could hold many more mobs if you had a capped Phalanx on you. Enough that you could start as low as ~70 skill. I say this because to my great surprise I was getting a decent amount of skillups on g.sword at around that level with only 2 mobs on me.

Using this method (sans Phalanx) with DNC sub I could hold 3 mobs indefinitely. A few trips to Misareaux coast leveled my Staff up to 290 (Cataclysm) my g.axe to 300 (Fell Cleave) and finished my WS points for Steel Cyclone, King's Justice and Retribution. During this process my parrying went from ~217 to 230. I'll be going back again for skilling and WS points on Sword, Club, Polearm and Great Sword. For Axe and Scythe I only need the WS points, though I'll probably still do them this way.

Fell Cleave
Last saturday was my first chance to use Fell Cleave on a train of mobs. First we had to build Amber lamps. Fortunately with Cataclysm and the right combination of Atmas I could snipe the last 10-15% of Thalassonins, doing 900-1300 damage. After that we started with a small train. Using Voracious Violet + Razed Ruin + Griffon's Claw, my 2hr'd cleaves hit for mostly 3000-4000 damage, occasionally one-shotting a bat. I was very surprised at this, since my WS set wasn't that good and I was using a Perdu Voulge. They were respawning Easy Prey which made for less exp but easier cleaving. I started using Blood Rage as I leveled into it. Using every damage-increasing buff in the book except Berserk. Though I'm sure I could have gotten away with it. I learned several things through the process:

1. Two WAR's are better than one, but certainly not needed.
2. Fell Cleave's AoE is centered around the target.
3. The range of Fell Cleave at 100 TP (first WS when using Sekkanoki) is deceptively small.
4. Wait for the mobs to 'settle' around the puller and pick a mob that's somewhere in the center before engaging.
5. Mobs that are on top/inside of you can't be seen, ws'd or retaliated.
6. Getting out of the clusterf'ck is easiest by unlocking your current target and holding back (first person view) and spamming your WS macro.
7. PLD sub is not needed and probably works against you.
8. Pulling using evasion works better than defense/PDT due to how easy it is to cap evasion rate on regular mobs.

Some mobs (possibly due to certain terrain) have a tendency to get on top of you, making them hard to retaliate but easier to hit with AoE. However, you'll get the "unable to see" message when they're on top you. You'll have to back out of the group before being able to WS. If given a choice I'd stick to small ground-based mob types, because my personal experience is that flying mobs bunch up on top of you more often. If you have two WAR's then that's less of an issue. I saw a group Cataclysm'ing raptors in Misareaux and noticed they used the tunnel to funnel the mobs into a narrow space, putting them all on top of eachother but still in front of the WAR. This is the ideal situation if you can manage it.

Without a restore chest I cycled through, revatilizer, fanatic's drink and powder in order to bridge the gap. It never happened that I didn't have any one of these 4 at my disposal for a pull.

In my first post on AoE farming I mentioned PLD sub, but I'm gonna have to almost fully dismiss it in favor of SAM sub now. The simple fact is that two Cleaves with Mighty Strikes up is upwards of 6k damage (and that's with my sub-optimal gear). That's more than enough to kill most regular mobs. There's no need for the whole ordeal to last for more than 10 seconds after the first cleave, and that's being generous. I've read in many places how Retaliation is almost instant TP, which would put SAM and PLD sub in roughly the same league, however this isn't as great as it sounds. Like I said before, unless you use narrow terrain mobs will move around and end up on top of you, making retaliation usless until you can get out of there. I may change my mind again once I get more experience.

Weekend Update 14

The Facepalm linkshell has been on a good run recently, getting a lot of upgrade items for people. Most of which are going freelot due to a recent DKP change that caused most people to reach 0 points halfway through the month, to the dismay of some. Three Bennu and three Orthrus on our last trip to Altepa meant a bunch of nice Atheling mantles and two Kikugosaku great katanas. Special thanks to Rayearl and Yohko, who both outlotted me but then voluntarily passed for me, because they know how much I heart my SAM.

The two farming runs we did in Visions zones allowed some people to level their subs while we got us some NM triggers. I had leveled WAR to 84 and skilled up staff (Cataclysm) and G.axe (Fell Cleave) for AoE farming (among other things). It took a bit of getting used to but on the Tahrongi run I got the hang of it as well as dinging 90. I think I may do a post on the topic of leveling WAR.


In addition to cleaving loads of bats (upwards of 1500 mobs), we did Iratham twice. One body dropped and I won the freelot food fight. I hope people didn't rage too hard at it going to my relatively gimpy WAR. Until I get Ravager's +1 this is nice for capping haste.

Wings of the Goddess
We finally got around to finishing the WotG missions. It took all of an afternoon and early evening to get through the spitewarden fight, the fetch quest and the final battle. The last fight was epic and tougher than I expected, but it was worth it.


There are only a few WS where I would consider not wearing this piece and that's not just because I lack better options! Maybe a little.

The fight against Lillith's second form tested us to our limits. So much so that we wiped with it DoT'ed and at 2% ticking down to 1%. My reraise attempt was ill-timed and inside aggro range. Thinking we had lost when DoT's wore off, Chaess bravely reraised and high-tailed it out of the center area. With RR1 and Taru HP anything would have killed him and yet... he managed to summon a jug who then took out Lillith in one attack.

We had considered using two BST's instead of a melee tank. Considering how much MP I spent on cures I think that may have been a better option. The AoE Death she can use missed Kingcem because we were running around trying to avoid those summoned contraptions. So we lucked out there, but there's just a lot of damage to recover from with the measly MP pool I had. Abyssea really spoils you. I used a Vile Elixir+1 and Chainspell nuked after the MNK went down. Again, had I had more MP I could have finished it right there with another nuke. Fortunately I had the presence of mind to cast Bio and Poison.

Looking back it was a fun story. The ending is a bit... well... I won't spoil it. All I'll say is that I went from hating the main characters (Sandy missions made me hate the little Griffons) to really wanting to see the conclusion. Perhaps not the most satisfying ending, but how can it ever be? Don't click the below image if you don't want to see snapshots of the mission finale.

Grauberg the second time around (Alfard, Azdaja)

Maintenance forced our LS event back a bit, but people logged on pretty fast once servers were up so we still managed to get the NM's we set out for. Those NM's being Amphitrite, Alfard and Azdaja. The triple-A threat! We fought them in that order because it seemed that was the order of difficulty as well.

Zone Boss
Not much to be said about Melo Melo and Amphitrite. It's the same old story of people healing the mob because they're not being careful. This time we DID go for the Atma, because I thought it'd help people do weaponskills for weaknesses without needing a TP mob. It's still a risk, since if you end up doing anything OTHER than proc'ing weaknesses, it'll only get in your way. Melo Melo's atma actually sounds good, but I suspect a very low proc rate. Also, I'm secretly hoping that the damage you absorb is unadjusted by PDT and Phalanx, but that's probably too much to ask for. Some upgrade stuff dropped as well as the RDM sword.

Ningishzida + Alfard
Nothing good dropped! Ok, now that that's out of the way... The info on wiki was right. Tanking from the back guarantees that it will only use Serpentine Tail. While spectating it seemed like it would turn to face tanks everytime after Serpentine Tail. At first I thought this was built-in AI, but then when Nerve Gas went off 3 times and tanks died. I ended up tanking and another reason why it may have turned became apparent. The tail attack has a knockback which will send it running after you and in so doing turn around. So, next time we should try to position it so that tanks can back themselves into a corner while still in range and exactly behind Alfard. If turning around is indeed only caused by it running after you, then this should mean that as long as nobody else pulls hate, the risk of Nerve Gas will be minimized.


Deelgeed + Azdaja
Deelgeed has an Atma! I did not know that going in. Superior Accuracy+ will be nice when I level up WAR with my gimp G.axe skill. Azdaja lived up to its promise of being a tough sob. The plan was to have 3 lines of players like we should have had during Uleguerand fights (Pantokrator+Apademak). The front line consisted of a NIN and a MNK tank. With hate reset two tanks is the minimum. The second line consisted of a WHM, RDM and a BRD support. The final backline consisted of people to wake the second line up from Sleep + everyone else. The role of waking mages was important and it went ok-ish, but with better execution it would probably have meant the tanks survived longer. However, as it was the tanks went down due to a combination of slept support players and Doom. The Wyrm was only down to about 80%-90%. That's when two other DD's and I stepped up and attempted to tank it for the remainder.

Not too long ago I made a decent evasion setup for my Samurai. The motivation was the Urd solo, where my evasion rate was high. Followed by Lamprey Lord fights, where it was not high at all. I realised my evasion skill rating on SAM wasn't so bad, but it needed complimenting. The increasing returns of evasion support this line of thinking. This was the reason why I "for shits and giggles" decided to stack Cloak and Dagger and Siren Shadow atmas. Both have Major Evasion+. Stacked and combined with my evasion gear Azdaja missed... a LOT. I was very surprised at what I was seeing. I was subbing WAR for weaponskills, but with Third Eye I hardly took any regular hits. Of course such a thing can't be relied upon while killing Azdaja because it can dispel the Atmas. It dispelled Atmas on the tanks, but for w/e reason it never did so again.

The three melee tanked it with brave support from weakened mages all the way down to ~20% at which point I died. I HP'd and came back to find it at ~10%. At this point, despite having decent success holding it before, I decided to take it down asap. There were quite a few weakened people around and a single voke got its attention, meaning there hadn't been anyone alive on it for very long. Fanatic's drink, 2hr x2 thanks to a revitalizer did a good chunk of damage. Together with some damage from someone else (I don't recall) it died pretty fast. In the end only 3 or 4 people missed out on the kill and Atma.


The Atma off this seems off-putting at first, due to its innate self-inflicted DoT. However, looking back at the Azdaja fight itself, it seems like it could be useful here for waking people up. The major Damge taken-% is an obvious treat for its big AoE wing attack. Since all its attacks appear to be darkness based and the Dispel magic spell is also dark based, you COULD assume that the dispel effect of its baleful Roar is darkness based. If so, there are two Darkness resist Atmas available that could be stacked to resist its wing, the dispel, the sleep and doom. Before we even bother to try this we need the T3 VNM in Grauberg though.

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.

Shinryu and more

After getting access to the Shinryu fight it took a day before I got to fight the actual thing. With a group of 6 we rotated using brews attempting for red and then blue weaknesses. We got the Atma during the second fight and a blue proc only once for the only 'big' pool. Several belts dropped, a dagger, a few capes and a scythe. I ended up with the scythe which I couldn't equip yet.


Twilight Scythe
On saturday evening I leveled DRK for the sole purpose of trying out Twilight Scythe. The last time I played DRK was in the exp alliance that took me to 85. Now I played around with endark and I was parsing equally to a NIN for the top DD's in the group using Magnus Scythe. I still had a stack of magnus stones left when I hit 90, but of course I immediately switch to Twilight. It took me a while of trying, but apparently Death can not proc with Endark up. That alone was a big disappointment. Without endark it would fire off rarely and although it's eyeballing, it certainly doesn't look like it's anywhere near 10% which was previously reported. If I had to guess, I'd say it would fire every 5th mob. That doesn't say much about the actual proc-rate though.

It's going to be very hard to determine the contribution of Death procs on an alliance's performance. That's why I'm not going to bother saying how good I think it is compared to other options, but I will say it's a good weapon for farming and EXP. However, since AoE farming is more efficient whenever it's applicable, the niche seems pretty small. A thread on FFXIAH forums showed Twilight Scythe bypassing the PDT on elementals as well as going through a PLD mob's Invincible, leading some to believe it hits like Formless Strikes. I can't imagine this being a glitch, so as a hidden effect it seems very useful. Someone else claimed it never proc'd during a Dynamis run, which seems a bit odd.

SAM progress
I've set up some goals for gearing my Samurai. There's a lot left to do, but I'll slowly get there. For example, last week Thursday I got this:

As you can see the STR text on still hasn't been fixed. Truly a glorious day, as it was the same day I got the Twilight Scythe and Apocalypse Atma. A special thanks to Kingcem and Cyrille for helping me out. I've seen it drop once out of 6 fights, but 1/1 with blue proc. Immediately after we killed Chukwa and of course PLD AF3 neck drops without any weakness proc.

With the recently finished Unkai Haidate +2, Unkai Sugemino and Ace's Sabatons, I've made some decent strides in the last two weeks. My WS set is missing 5 key pieces and a few lesser upgrades that I didn't list in this image:

Everything is what it looks like. The Moonshade earring will have Attack and TP Bonus augments, of course. The TP set looks like it'll be harder to finish although it could be done in a short time with some dedicated farming.


The cape in there is Atheling Mantle, which has double attack on it. I didn't put Hoard ring in there (because it's buyable and cheap), but it will be needed for a 5-hit at 437 delay. My progress on Masamune is still stuck at VNM's (Lamprey Lord), but I hope to get those done soon. In the process I found out a SAM can solo Urd at 90. I will make a dedicated post about that soon, as it was a fun and interesting fight.