Take THAT to all who say you must Ninja this fight! ^^
Of course, I'll leave it up to Seraphpdh to write a guide of "How I entered the Airship fight as PLD and won", if he ever gets around to first, writing it, and then posting it up on all the various forums around the internet. :P
Instead, I'll write about the fight from my point of view.
First off, Chummy arranged that we all meet up at the Sealion's Den at 4pm EST, ready and raring to go enter the fight. Unfortunately for me, now that I have left the United States, this set our run to commence at the ungodly hour of 4 o'clock in the morning. Needless to say, I said my warnings to the rest of the linkshell crew, saying that they had better be ready, lest they fear the wrath of a very tired and cranky taru. ^^
So of course, when my alarm clock wakes me up at 4am and I log into the Sealion's Den, only 5/6 of us were there. -_-
Anyway, after sitting around for half an hour, I decide to turn off the music and go back to sleep, leaving the sound effects on in the hopes that various call sounds would wake me up when the last member decided to show up.
It took an hour, since he was apparently held up by work, but at 5:30am, we were ready to go. >_<
Our party setup was PLD NIN SAM BLM BRD WHM. This wasn't TrueRune's first attempt at the Airship battle- we had attempted the battle earlier this week (I hadn't written an entry on it) as a bit of a pseudo dry-run, and managed to get Ultima Weapon all the way down to 4% before running out of time, but more importantly, getting Ultima down to 4% on their very first try clearly was a sign that this was indeed very possible, despite our initial fears regarding Seraphpdh and the word in the air that PLD sucks in this particular mission.
On an interesting note, we were also half-prepared for that first attempt, too. I basically came on the linkshell after a Dynamis run and said {Airship}{When?}, and eeryone was pretty much up for it there and then, except for Seraph, who we had to pry away from his girlfriend and their real-life plans (fortunately, Ararith is also on the LS, although I don't think she appreciated that. >_<). It's kinda amazing what people can accomplish once they set their minds to it. -_-
So anyway, after that initial first battle, we had our strategy ironed out, and after farming up another set of six CCB polymers a couple days ago, we were ready to try again.
Once again, PLD NIN SAM WHM BLM BRD.
I brought ten Yagudo Drinks, a Reraise Hairpin, a Pro-Ether and a Vile Elixir +1 along with me to the fight. I believe all the mages found room for about 8-9 Yagudo drinks each, which when coupled with dual Ballads from Tumble, would give us a very good flow of mana. Oh, and I came /SMN, too.
Our strategy for the Mammets was unlike the "split-em-up" strategy I used on my winning run a little while ago. We tried the "split-em-up" style on our first attempt, and it got a little messy, and so we decided to simply things out in a strategy we have affectionately dubbed "SuperPLD".
Harkening back to our previous encounter with the Mammets back in Riverne Site #A01, the idea was that Seraph would first run in and aggro all five Mammets, and take them to a corner. The trick here is that he would not engage any of the Mammets, exploting a little loop in the programming that lets everybody else cure the heck out of him without drawing aggro. In the meantime, the other five of us worked at dispatching the Mammets, literally "peeling" them off him, one at a time.
In Riverne Site #A01, Seraph managed to do this to the tone of 29 Hi-Potions, although thankfully, our higher level and better gear now meant that just he and I alone could comfortably manage the Mammets. We eventually cleared the Mammets with about 35 minutes left on the clock.
Omega was up next, and this was the one we were worried about the most. We had decided that Saoirse would open up the CCB order, followed by myself while she casts casting the high-damage Ancient Magic on Omega. In the meantime, the rest of us would try to whittle Omega down, using CCBs to keep things under control, before eventually wiping (yes, wiping once was actually part of our strategy :P).
This didn't quote go according to plan, however. Somewhere before Saoirse got off her first CCB Polymer, Guided Missile from Omega one-shotted Chummy, at which point our plan changed to "just do some damage" without any CCB Polymers. We figured that we might as well do some harm first, and then save the CCBs for once we had Reraised. What we didn't count on though, was getting Omega Weapon all the way down to about 20% hp without any 2-hr abilities, or any CCB Polymers, all with one member down, too. ^^
When the eventual wipe did come, we simply Reraised and waited the weakness out. Something I learnt from our first attempt (and reading more online) is that pulling Omega at this point will cause him to always open with a special move, so I had Saoirse "pull" with a CCB Polymer.
We re-engaged, and things got a little dicey when Saoirse's CCB effect wore off, and Omega was spamming Pile Pitches, but we managed to outlast him with no 2-hr abilites (I was tempted to Bene though ^^;) and with all of us at red health, and Omega Weapon at just a sliver, I did what any White Mage would do.
...
Holy ftw! ^^
(Okay, so I'm still a BLM at heart. :P)
We cleared Omega with about 20 minutes left on the clock, leaving us with an amazing position versus Ultima. We had access to five CCB Polymer pumps, and all six 2-hr abilities. Needless to say, Ultima was a cakewalk, as we were liberally using our remaining CCBs, and everyone was on {Full attack!} mode, powered by Soul Voice-fuelled buffs.
In addition, I think one thing that made Ultima's fight easy was that, for some reason, Ultima Weapon seemed to be doing nothing but Chemical Bomb (Slow + Elegy) on Seraph for what seemed like half the fight. I was literally spamming Erase on Seraph over and over, and each time I'd Erase a debuff, Ultima weapon would put it back up again. -_- Maybe Chemical Bomb is the only move that isn't blocked by a CCB? >_<
In any case, as you can see, we defeated Ultima Weapon with quite a lot of room for random things to go wrong, which, fortunately never happened, although I still think it would've been funny if Aka's killing Mijin Gakure hadn't actually killed Ultima Weapon off. XD
For the record, we cleared the Airship battle in 33 minutes, 18 seconds.
Once again, "Take THAT!" to all the PLD nay-sayers! ^^ (Though to be fair, we did have a NIN in that fight... :P)
At this point, I left to go run some outside errands, and have lunch. When I came back, I found the four of them trying to complete the three NM fights that sets up for the battle with Tenzen. Since they were all very easy and straightforward, I won't go over them in any detail, although I will say that we bumped into another CoP group led by Tyseng, who were evidently at the same point we were.
Putting our two groups together meant that there were seven people who needed to beat Tenzen- THF SAM SAM PLD MNK BRD BLM. We juggled around with various setups a little bit in order to maximise each party's potential. I had originally divided the two runs into PLD MNK SAM BRD BLM BLM and NIN SAM SAM BLM BLM THF. However, I was less confidant with the setup setup than I was with the first, so I decided to have the "B" group go first. Unfortunately, the NIN I was planning to have on the run had warped back to town to get something, so in haste, I had Seraph take his spot instead.
Lo and behold, PLD SAM SAM THF BLM BLM. Otherwise known as "TrueRune" + a BLM. Coincidence? >_<
I'm not exactly sure what went wrong, but we lost that one, although I heard it was close. I know that for some reason, the damn tarus could still see me even though I was standing below them, supposedly out of view. A Stonega III and a few ranged shots later, I was eating the deck of the ship, although at least I had managed to empty my mana pool by the time I died. >_< However, the others couldn't quite deal enough damage to Tenzen before he went ahead and completed his Level 4 skillchain: Cosmic Elucidation, kicking us all out of the BC.
On a side note, Cosmic Elucidation looked pretty, although Tenzen holding up his Great Katana much like the Sand People in Star Wars amused me. ^^
At this stage, Tyseng decided that he needed to get some sleep, which left just six people who all needed to clear the BC. After some thought, we decided to just let the six of them at it. Sao felt that she wasn't doing anything as THF though (something a few of us thought as well), and so she went to swithc to her BLM61, for curative magic. :P I'm not sure how the fight went, although with PLD SAM SAM MNK BRD BLM, two Meikyo Shisuis, a Hundred Fists, Soul Voice, and a Manafont available, all I heard was that they completely owned Tenzen to the point where the Samurais didn't even complete their Meikyo Shisuis. XD
It's finally done. {/welcome} to Al'Taieu, TrueRune.
1 comment:
Grats on sea...now how about getting me there XD
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