Weekend Happenings and Skillchains

Didn't do too much this weekend as most of my week-long plans blew up for various reasons. Got a couple ANNM runs in along with the usual Einherjar run (more on that in a bit) and a couple Salvage runs. I also spent a little time trying to finish up my cooking subcraft.

ANNM

I have to say that SE really nailed it with this one. What looked rather bland at first with mediocre rewards has turned out be just the right level of challenging with some kick ass rewards. You can pretty much put a pickup party of 6 together and do these with some moderate difficulty.

Each nation has it's own "crate" you can blow up once per earth day for a total of 3 fights. Buying all three crates involves spending 7500 of your Allied Notes. This is relatively cheap unless you're spamming all three each day you can (which most people probably won't). Each fight has a 30 minute time limit. I've only done Batallia, Rolanberry, and Champaign, but the level of those three fights are such that if you're not mostly on top of your game, it can go to hell in a handbasket pretty quickly. Each of these fights are generally the same in terms of mob numbers. They spawn a big NM and 6 "babies".

The babies are generally pretty weak. Five or six of them beating on one target can definitely kill said target pretty quickly, but a solid skillchain will knock most of the HP off of one. For most of our runs, we went set up as PLD, DD, DD, DD, RDM, WHM. The PLD spent time holding/kiting the main NM while the DDs picked off the babies after the RDM slept them. This sounds a lot more simple than it really is though.

In Champaign for example...a Lynx by the name of Iqi-Balam. Coeurl/Lynx mobs of higher level usually aren't much fun to deal with given they love to inflict status effects through a variety of annoying TP moves. Iqi-Balam has the ability to cast T1-T4 thunder spells (and Burst) on itself then immediately follow it up with Charged Whisker. Now Charged Whisker on a normal Coeurl or Lynx wasn't a super big deal. Worst I had seen was from a War Lynx and that did 400ish tops to me. Charged Whisker from Iqi-Balam basically turns whatever thunder spell it just cast on itself into an AoE centering on itself. Burst-ga isn't fun. It's possible to stun the spell it's casting, but it's generally just safer to run away from him as most of the spells have a long cast time.

Rolanberry's ANNM is just vile. Slugs are some of the worst mobs to fight in this game already, but SE's development team decided making Gummy Guillaume a super hump-happy, AoE status-flinging, flee-speed slug. Weren't slugs already bad enough? Gummy Guillaume will try to sit right on top of you the entire time you're fighting it. If it manages to get on you, it will inflict Amnesia, Gravity and Poison. This is just the icing though. It has the ability to inflict Silence, Bio, Bind and...my personal favorite...Encumberance. Nothing like being stripped naked, humped by a slimy object, bound, poisoned, and being forced into silence/forgetting it all ever happened.

Somebody at SE has some deep issues they should seek professional counselling about.

Einherjar

For the life of me, I cannot figure out how SE managed to make the difficulty gap between the various combinations of rooms so wide. Some rooms we just walk in, point at the mobs, say "boo-yah" and win. Other rooms, like the past two T2's we've done, have nearly impossible-to-win set ups. Personally, I get the feeling every time we see Ormr, Einherjar Brei or Winebibber's, we should just drop our lamps and call it a day. Sometimes they're squishy though, so it's always worth trying. The past two T2's we've done have had 12 super powered Einherjar Brei (slimes) that have basically just AoE'd us to death despite having head butts, stuns and WS stuns firing the vast majority of time. Walking into a T2 room with 34+ people should pretty much amount to a win with some difficulty.

It's really odd that we're dominating T3 rooms lately, but getting raped on T2. I can only shake my head though. Our strat with slimes obviously needs a little tweaking as what we're doing atm obviously isn't working, but as is the case with any strat tweak...what are we sacrificing in order to gain? Is sacrificing a couple DDs for more stuns worth it when you're faced with whatever percentage chance of slimes showing up? It's such an irony. I'm prone to say it's just bad luck with these things...but then I think luck has nothing to do with it and there has to be a way around it. I'm sure I'll think of something at some point or someone will put an idea in my head to try.

Salvage

Nothing super-noteworthy here other than mentioning Ringthree got a Macha's Coat (which seem to be raining for us lately), Kallo got his Freya's Ledelsens and Omoikitte got Hikazu Kabuto. Definitely been a nice week for 35 piece acquisition and congrats to the winners.

(I fully expect a blog entry from Ring with his plan to pay for his Morrigan's Robe complete with old man rants about the cost of the Imp. Wootz Ingots. :D)

However, during SSR last night, Izman started showing off his newly acquired King's Justice weapon skill. Iz had been the subject of a lot of fodder since Blaize and I discovered KJ - Drakesbane just absolutely destroys most mobs in SSR. It is not uncommon for one of these skillchains (which makes light either way) to wipe out 60-70%+ of a mob's HP in this zone. Which leads me to my next subject....

Skillchains!

This is definitely a lost art now with most skillchains happening completely by accident. In this Zerg/Manaburn era, Skillchains take too much effort to coordinate and often times, too much time to execute (SE could fix this by removing the timer between weapon skills).

However, they aren't completely dead. In low man situations like Salvage, skillchains are relatively easy to set up and execute. It goes back to initiative and education though. More often times than not, a skillchain won't be set up at all. Some will think that they can build up TP faster than waiting another couple swings for a SC partner to get to 100TP and thus...do more damage.

Last night's SSR really showed the destructive power a long skillchain can accomplish. Blaize figured out using Killing Ifrit's SC calculator that, Ascetic's Fury - Tachi: Rana - King's Justice - Drakesbane turned out this 4-step light skill chain that generally knocked the shit out of anything we executed it on. Archaic Ramparts on the 4th floor of SSR required to pop Citadel Chelonian? Down in a minute.

Add the 5th step of...Geirskogul for double light and you have mobs like Gyroscopic Gears losing well over 7-8k HP in one sequence (or about 50-60% of it's life). And yes, I understand most Salvage groups don't have a relic weapon at their disposal to do this, but even the 4 step SC was a ton of what amounts to free extra damage.

For most of the run though, we were executing Tachi: Gekko - Drakesbane - King's Justice on practically every monster. It did take a little coordination, but I feel like the results paid off in a big way for us. If this chain becomes second nature, look the hell out.

The bigger point of this section is simply to point out that I feel like everyone should be familiar with a few Skillchains that are common with job pairings. My gut reaction, for example, is when I see someone use Penta Thrust, I'll dump Skewer on whatever we were fighting. If I see Guillotine or Dancing Edge, I'll dump Penta Thrust. If I see Dragon Kick or Shark Bite, I'm using Wheeling Thrust. The list goes on and on, but it doesn't take memorizing the entire chart. It simply takes memorizing a handful of 2-man skillchains and paying attention to who uses what and when. More often times than not, that extra damage from the skillchain itself is more than the damage done by waiting a couple extra swings to see if anyone just unloads.