One of the pieces I've been after to round out my DRG is a Cuchulain's mantle. It is basically a Commander's Cape +1, but compared to my current back piece (Amemet Mantle+1), it's got a bit more oomph to the WS punch. Some might say that Attack +15 trumps STR+2, but given that I'm Elvaan with a crappy DEX rating and the fact that Cuchulain's Mantle comes with the added bonus of Acc+5, I think it's a better trade-off for me overall.
Have a looksies for yourself:
At any rate, the place you acquire said mantle is in a campaign op known as "Splitting Heirs." This op is only available when San d'Oria controls all 7 of it's battle zones. This week, Sandy happens to do just that. So yesterday afternoon, I got a group of friends together (Kaylea, Celestria, Blaize, Ozulus and Butcher). We were originally going to take Izman, but he had to go look at his newest 11-fingered/14-toed relative, so we got Butcher instead.
With max tags, you essentially have 14 opportunities to do this BC during the week that it's available. It's not THAT many opportunities when you think about it, but it's enough to generally get a solid group what they want from the BC.
As long as you're successful....
...which SE seems to have gone to great lengths to ensure you aren't.
What is being dealt with in this BC are NMs named Darkheir Grradhod (SAM), Malicearm Razbhobb (MNK), Slitherword Razghogg (BLM), Gorepledge Rozzbrezz (PLD). The objective is to kill Darkheir Grradhod. Originally, you could kite Darkheir to the entrance of the zone, kill off his three cohorts, then just worry about Darkheir. The cohorts would respawn at their original spawn point, but apparently SE didn't include the entrance as part of their aggro range, so they'd just end up sitting there being harmless.
A few updates ago, SE "fixed" this. Now the cohorts aggro the second they respawn. On top of that, you generally can sleep them 2-3 times before they start resisting. Combine this with the fact that Darkheir is very tempermental and has the ability to one-shot any of your tanks at any given point during the fight, and you have the makings of a very messy fight.
Darkheir himself uses the standard orc moves indigenous to the WotG zone such as Orcish Coutnerstance and Shoulder Charge as well as the normal orc moves from every other zone (Arm Block, Aeriel Wheel and Slam Dunk). One particularly nasty move he does is Tornado Edge. If this move lands (shadows absorb it), you're inflicted with max HP/MP/TP down effects.
The general idea to win this BC is to try to control the cohorts as effectively as possible while whittling down Darkheir. This can be accomplished in a number of ways, but we opted to go with PLD (Oz), PLD (Butcher), RDM (Kaylea), BLM (Celestria), BLM (Blaize), and WHM (me) in our first attempt. Fight was a little chaotic at first as we were trying to establish our positioning. I still fail to understand how I cannot see a Galka to cast on it while it's gut and it's ass are sticking out from both sides of a tree, but this is the terrain we're dealing with. As the fight wore on, MP started becoming an issue and the babies were resisting sleep quite a bit. We got it down to 1% before wiping. Sad thing is, we dumped some DoTs on it before we wiped, but Gorepledge decided to spam Cure IV on his boss and that pretty much negated any other chance we had at winning.
Our second attempt involved a bit of a tweaked strategy. Blaize changed to SAM/WAR in order to deal with the babies more efficiently. The notion was that Atonement spam was more than enough to whittle Darkheir down. Especially after he does his Berserker Dance as this lowers his magic defense by a ton. It was definitely easier controlling adds this time, but they weren't being controlled enough to really stabilize the run. On top of that, it added a bit more strain to the MP pool having to cure Blaize as well. We ultimately lost this run too, but it wasn't nearly as close as the first run.
So more tweaking.
Third attempt. Blaize subbed DNC this time. Result was a closer win, but we still lost.
And at this point, some of us came to the conclusion that having a BLM in there was nice, but a RDM could control the adds with the same efficiency and help keep people alive to boot. We changed our set up to PLD, PLD, RDM, RDM (Celestria), SAM and...
/dance4
Gungnir time!
(I swear it feels like I'm putting on a super hero suit every time I change to DRG).
For our fourth attempt, I went as DRG/WHM. I felt that if Blaize and I were going to be on baby control, we both needed to be as self-sufficient as possible while Kay and Cel both focused on keeping the tanks alive. On top of that, my healing breath set has the ability to dump a minimum of 409 HP on whoever is at 50% HP or lower. This comes in very handy for MP conservation.
Blaize and I took the approach of TP'ing on Darkheir, then unloading weapon skills on the babies after they had been slept for the 2nd time. Generally speaking, one weapon skill from each of us was enough to kill one baby with the occasional crit from Drakesbane one-shotting them. This helped our tanks out tremendously in their ability to handle Darkheir. We had the babies staggered out enough so that we could get 2-4 whacks in on Darkheir before we had to kill one.
As the NM got around 50%, it managed to land a lucky TP move on Butcher and one-shot him. That's pretty much the story with this BC almost any time it's done. Luck. Ozulus solo tanked Darkheir like a fkn M-A-N while Butcher was weakened. Even got through Darkheir's two hour w/o much damage done to him. Unfortunately, as it got closer to death, it landed a couple more lucky TP moves and left us tankless. He was at 7% when tanks went down. Celestria had hate and very wisely started the kiting process down around the hut. What happens next simply does not happen w/o Cel being as heady a player as she is.
As she was running towards the hut, I was on Darkheir's tail smacking him while my two hour was active. Kay, Oz, Butcher and Blaize are all down or weakened. Right as Darkheir gets to the hut, he stops to use Orcish Counterstance and then...
Qtipus uses Drakesbane.
Darkheir Grradhod takes 1593 points of damage.
Qtipus defeats Darkheir Grradhod.
To paraphrase Jess:
FUCKING BAM~!
We won!
...with an assist from timing and luck.
I don't have the screenshot, but Butcher's next couple comments were rather funny:
(Butcher) I think I'm just going to HP. I don't feel like losing anymore.
You find a brave grip in the armoury crate.
You find a witch sash in the armoury crate.
You find a sunstone in the armoury crate.
You find a mythril ingot in the armoury crate.
(Butcher) Oh.
(Butcher) We won.
Feeling pretty good that we won, we gave it one more shot with the set up we had knowing full well that luck was on our side for that one. Luck abandoned us for the final attempt of the night though. Again it was lucky one-shot kills on the tanks that derailed us, but it happened much earlier in the fight and unfortunately, no amount of heroism was going to save that run. At least we didn't walk away empty handed for our efforts the entire night.
Overall, SE's "fix" of this BC is retarded. Compared to Plucking/Clipping Wings, this is like fighting AV vs. Jolly Green. There are a lot of strats that people say work consistently...a couple of which I'll try out this weekend, but overall, luck seems to be the overwhelming factor in determing if you're going to win or not. The only thing that needs to happen for this BC to reasonable is for the babies to not build up a resistance to sleep so fast. Darkheir still has the ability to knock people out in one hit. Having those babies resist sleep the way they do pretty much turns winning this BC from improbable to impossible. I don't expect to walk into this BC, wave Gungnir around and instantly win, but I do expect to at least put a reasonable party together and have more than a stone's throw chance of winning.
I know some will say "Manaburning is 100% winning", but all that does is require people to level BLM and I've never been a big believer in "throwing more BLMs at it". Next round of BC's though...I happend to find a strat that might provide a little more consistency. And I get to potentially enjoy one of my most favorite FFXI activities to boot...
KO'ing the Cuban.
YES!!! Q, let's smoke some Cuban tonight :)
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