How not to win an ENM

Completely out of the blue, I was reading the Killing Ifrit forums, when I stumbled across a thread under the Red Mage forums regarding soloing the Monarch Linn ENM, "Fire in the Sky."

As the strategy relies heavily on nuking, I went down to the local AH and rummaged through all my mules to pick up whatever Level-50 gear I could find that added INT. It wasn't too expensive, until I bought a pair of Sly Gauntlets for 650k, and now the total bill came up to be around 1 million. (Guess this ENM had better be worth it, huh. -_-)

I was feeling pretty confident about my chances against the Cluster Bomb in the ENM itself, but the problem was procuring the Giant Scale I needed to get to Monarch Linn, and solo at that too.

Fortunately, TrueRune happens to have a PLD74 who is fairly desperate when it comes to getting xp....heheh.

So I conned Seraphpdh into joining me on my suicide mission. He went down to the storage NPC to pick up his 50-cap gear, and the two of us set out to duo some Pyrodrakes in Riverne Site #B01!

Actually, I arrived there first, so I solo'ed the first Pyrodrake with a combination of Gravities, Binds, Water II and Sleep. It took a while (just under 15 minutes -_-), but a Convert later and some more nuking, it got the job done. No Giant Scale drop. ; ;

Fortunately, Seraph had arrived by then and we set out to duo another Pyrodrake, this time with DoT tactics involving kiting with Gravity and Bind, and DoTs (Bio II and Poison II). Killing the Pyrodrake now was a much more exciting affair, and slightly quicker, too. Strangely enough, not a single Bind got resisted, which kinda makes me happy. ^^ This time, the Giant Scale dropped, and we were off to Monarch Linn!

...That is, until I got lost and accidentally traded the Giant Scale to the Unstable Displacement to get onto that island at (G-7), and then walked out the other Unstable Displacement. >_<

So now we had to farm up another Giant Scale. -_-

Fortunately, it only took three more Pyrodrakes before the second Scale dropped, and with that, we headed over to Monarch Linn for real this time, picking up the ??? for a Rivernwort along the way (more xp!).

Inside Monarch Linn, we restd to full and then prepared to enter the ENM, which then led to the following exchange,



"Oops," indeed. >_<

Armed with nothing but a Warp Cudgel and a Goldsmith's Apron, our fearless duo went in to battle the Cluster Bomb anyway, and got surprisingly close to beating it, except that I didn't have all the +INT gear that would've been nice for victory, and I thought I could Water II, Chainspell, then Fire, and have the timer reset for a second Water II, which...wasn't the case. I should have Chainspell'ed from the start, but oh well. The bomb blew itself up much faster than I anticipated and we were blown out of the arena, Snoll Tzar style. Ah well. But with no xp loss, at least HP'ing back to Aht Urhgan was easy! :D

That, and I now know to come with 40-cap gear... -_-