Final ToAU BC -Alexander fight issues

[Kenji]

Our group has been trying this BC for the past couple of days now, and running into some issues. Our setup is:

PLD/WAR (bought some of that bastok magic defense gear with AN for last attempt)
WAR/NIN (he's wondering if he should use fort axe or Byakkos, has all god gear)
SAM/WAR (has Hagun, but doesn't have RNG or archery leveled)
DRK/WAR
RDM/DRK
WHM/SCH

Our strat so far has been: RDM and WHM nuke Rau, DRK stuns while RDM sleeps him. Rinse and repeat til he's under 50%, then kill. Normal tank and spank for fights 2 and 3. We generally get through this fine, and kill Raz, with 30 minutes to spare.

The main problem is Alexander. The PLD stands at a distance and vokes, flashes, self-cures to hold aggro. However, try as they might, the stunners have a hell of a time trying to stun Gospel of the Lost. Specially watching for it, selecting spell from menu, finger over the button. Even the SAM tried with Hobaku, and despite 3 stuns, he still gets it off. Needless to say, this is prolonging the fight greatly. We generally get him to 50% after 20 minutes, due to all the heals. One time, we managed to get him as low as 15% when we ran out of time.

The melee just can't seem to do enough damage, and they report he has a pretty high defense. Is there anyway to get melee to do more damage? Or have more of a clue how to stop Gospel? Initially, Alex doesn't say anything, but a short while into the fight, he begins /saying things when he does something; not sure what triggers this, but appears to be time. We either need some way to stop Gospel, or the ability to do more damage. The melee are decently geared, though the drk and sam could use more merits.

The other issue, is that our WAR can do more damage, but he pulls aggro.

Any tips and tricks? Is our setup pretty much doomed? Any gear suggestions for any of these? Any recommended actions? Would having a melee log out and back in, work for hate reduction?

Note that we don't have any real flexibility, as these are the only 75 jobs these people have (SAM can be a 72 whm, and whm can be a 75 smn).

[Atma]

Isn't Gospel of the Lost used pretty much instantly after the "Readies" message? I'd be pretty surprised if you actually managed to stun between the message and the use. That being said, no, it's really not possible to stun it. In the two times I've beaten him I never saw him spam it, it sucks, but you may just be getting unlucky.

As far as your setup is concerned, a BLM might be better than one of the melee's (It would allow you to kill Rahf faster and the nukes help against Alex), but with mission statics you kinda have to work with what you have... and I'm just kinda talking out of my ass anyway. I don't see any reason you shouldn't be able to win with that set up, so just keep at it.

One thing I noticed you didn't mention is that you have no problem staying alive. For my two wins, the tank got extremely close many times, or died at some point. I would suggest telling the RDM to pretend he's a BLM and see how that works out, unless you just have a really really awesome tank, in which case disregard this paragraph.

[Valyana]

That seems like a pretty good setup, but your pld should use a different sub; /RDM, /WHM, /DRK would all be better for holding hate. You want to tank Alexander like JoL, basically.

[Vodou]

Our group has been trying this BC for the past couple of days now, and running into some issues. Our setup is:

PLD/WAR (bought some of that bastok magic defense gear with AN for last attempt)
WAR/NIN (he's wondering if he should use fort axe or Byakkos, has all god gear)
SAM/WAR (has Hagun, but doesn't have RNG or archery leveled)
DRK/WAR
RDM/DRK
WHM/SCH

Our strat so far has been: RDM and WHM nuke Rau, DRK stuns while RDM sleeps him. Rinse and repeat til he's under 50%, then kill. Normal tank and spank for fights 2 and 3. We generally get through this fine, and kill Raz, with 30 minutes to spare.

The main problem is Alexander. The PLD stands at a distance and vokes, flashes, self-cures to hold aggro. However, try as they might, the stunners have a hell of a time trying to stun Gospel of the Lost. Specially watching for it, selecting spell from menu, finger over the button. Even the SAM tried with Hobaku, and despite 3 stuns, he still gets it off. Needless to say, this is prolonging the fight greatly. We generally get him to 50% after 20 minutes, due to all the heals. One time, we managed to get him as low as 15% when we ran out of time.

The melee just can't seem to do enough damage, and they report he has a pretty high defense. Is there anyway to get melee to do more damage? Or have more of a clue how to stop Gospel? Initially, Alex doesn't say anything, but a short while into the fight, he begins /saying things when he does something; not sure what triggers this, but appears to be time. We either need some way to stop Gospel, or the ability to do more damage. The melee are decently geared, though the drk and sam could use more merits.

The other issue, is that our WAR can do more damage, but he pulls aggro.

Any tips and tricks? Is our setup pretty much doomed? Any gear suggestions for any of these? Any recommended actions? Would having a melee log out and back in, work for hate reduction?

Note that we don't have any real flexibility, as these are the only 75 jobs these people have (SAM can be a 72 whm, and whm can be a 75 smn).

My group had this fight twice just 2 weeks ago. The first time sounded like what you described in your 2 fights. The second fight we had went completely different.

I don't recall f we fought him on darks day the second time (he is light based IIRC), but w/e it was the fight went like this.

The war and I (as a sam) just teed off on him. We made distortion and the blm dropped ice bombs on him. His freezes did 1k and with our ws doing damage, his life bar dropped really fast. I cant telll you exactly but really the second fight was tons shorter. It might have been just 13-15 mins. Certainly not past 20. We had about 30 mins left to fight him and we were not even close to running out of time.

Remember he cures himself. What I think is that if you let the fight drag out you run low on mp and then lose either from mages getting draw in after they have had to cure the pld or just too low mp.

I pulled hate at times and went /nin, so with blink and then some seigan / 3rd eye tossed in on emergencies I stayed alive until the pld pulled hate back. Same for the war. Ofc, melee stand at odd angels behind / to his side etc and you should just straight up go out and kill it.

Use all 2 hours when he is below 20%. Even rdm if you have one either with DD or stuns if /drk. 1 used my 2-hr at 13% and he was dead from me, the war and blm before I got my third ws off. If you go skill chaiin / burst and also stun even a couple of his self cures, he should go down fast. Maybe do him on darks or ice day althought I'm not sure that was how we won.

[Tulun]

I will say you are going to have to get partially lucky with his TP moves; if he spams gospel, you are probably going to lose (especially if you can't stun it).

But I would do this:

Pld possibly change subs to RDM or DRK (better hate tools over time, this is not a fast fight). But with spamming cure III anyway, you might not notice much difference anyway. What kind of gear is the pld tanking in? (You have to use an abnormal set up if you are tanking at range...)

War should sub sam. DRK should sub sam. Sub NIN is worthless on Alex, and Raub should be managable without shadows.
Use Perdu ideally, or Byakko, you want efficient DoT. More TP you give Alex at lower damage, more chance he'll spam gospel.

I think your best bet will be to set up a gank for him. Thankfully, your DD set up easily allows this. Based on your DD's potential, you could likely do it at higher HP% (20% or so). I can't recall his exact HP, but depending on that, it could be higher...

But, even if your DRK doesn't have a ridill/kris/club, he can zerg somewhat.
Anyway...

Fight it like you are. Just try and wittle him down. Try and be as damage efficient as allowed.
When it's time to gank, make sure your DD's all have 100 tp stored, an Iccy wing, and Meditate ready. CS Stun it, have the War two hour (mighty Strike). He should be able to get 3 WS off in about 10-15 seconds, more if the SAM can Shik at the right time. DRK, same deal. Just make sure he's cured between each WS though.
SAM should be able to get off an insane amount of WS, Iccy+Meditate+100 Tp stored + Two hour is 6, 7 if he was has 200+ tp stored.

That should kill him.

[Thorny]

In my experience, radiant sacrament or whatever the 400ish damage thing seems to be his plain attack and not consume TP, while the other moves do. This means that less melee means less ability to spam it.. my favorite setup is as follows:

RDM/PLD or PLD/RDM(tank)
RDM or WHM(healer)
BRD/WHM
COR/WHM
DD/NIN
BLM/RDM

This setup will do more than enough damage while feeding very little TP, I've won a good half dozen times without any problems using it. The BLM doesn't even attempt to stun gospel of the lost, just nukes.

[Wolfknight]

for one make sure war doing GA byakko's since more damage really for something like this and also make sure all three DDs are eating meat, since sushi is just stupid for this fight if you ask me, and also I've won with similar set-ups you should be able win like that.

[Zilong]

this is a really easy fight imo, with raubahn being the biggest problem since his EoM on lore is fucking recockulous.

What I've done with great success is to just chariot tank him with 2 DD. Just put both of them on distance so sacrament only hit one of them, and just have rdm whm and brd support them, 3rd job is usually an extra support/DD

The last two times i've done it, I've used 2 SAM for the DD and just tear it a new one with constant WS, only real issues being unexpected judgment damage that took out support, but that's really nothing a meikyo shisui wouldn't fix.

Gospel of the lost isn't an issue if you're outputting shitton of damage, and frankly 2 properly supported 2 hander DD will do just that.

[Jingseng]

well... if your pt members are pretty much locked in those jobs... uh, there's not much to say =/

IMHO, your problem is lack of magic damage. 15 min to kill the armor and Raub is too long. You need to shave that down to single-digit minute times.

I'm not sure what else to recommend to you at this point if you literally do not have flexibility in jobs... because you need magic damage.

One suggestion I can make though, is to have /thf, possibly on your sam, and possibly on your drk as well. Alex doesn't move. It's impossible to futz a SA on him, and if you tank is good, wont lose hate (or wont lose it for long).

The advantage of /war and /sam is in drag out fights. Time which you don't have. You need to be able to quickly and regularly put out the spike numbers. With the jobs you have available... avoiding meleeing/tping on alex is sort of unavoidable. 60tp from meditate every 3min not going to help much (especially with time issues; over 30min that's only 6 extra ws)... neither is the store tp, unless they have a large amount of extra store tp gear...

If possible, try to get a blu in your group (possibly to replace the war)... disseverment DoT does wonders, and SATA Cannonball (with decent gear) will do wonders for you.

Lastly, don't bother with using stun-weaponskills. You are really shortchanging the DD output of the sam that way... which is already a problem you are having. Gospel can be stunned, but it's extremely difficult, as you yourself can attest to. Better to simply try to:

1) Deal more damage to overcome it
2) give yourself more time to deal more damage.

[Kenji]

One thing I noticed you didn't mention is that you have no problem staying alive. For my two wins, the tank got extremely close many times, or died at some point. I would suggest telling the RDM to pretend he's a BLM and see how that works out, unless you just have a really really awesome tank, in which case disregard this paragraph.

Yeah, we can stay alive a long time, as the rdm/drk heals while the whm rests up. If the RDM goes /BLM, he can nuke fairly well, though he reported resists. Blizzard is the best spell to use, I think I heard?

Pld possibly change subs to RDM or DRK (better hate tools over time, this is not a fast fight). But with spamming cure III anyway, you might not notice much difference anyway. What kind of gear is the pld tanking in? (You have to use an abnormal set up if you are tanking at range...)

I can't recall off hand the exact gear, but he's got AF, the purple set, and he bought the Bastok AN magic defense set. Also had him using a dark staff to help lessen the damage. Any particular pieces I should have him try to get? I'm not sure what subs he's got, but I'm not sure that he has rdm or drk subs.

War should sub sam. DRK should sub sam. Sub NIN is worthless on Alex, and Raub should be managable without shadows.
Use Perdu ideally, or Byakko, you want efficient DoT. More TP you give Alex at lower damage, more chance he'll spam gospel.

WAR is actually leveling SAM, so we might wait until he has it up. DRK has SAM, he just switched to NIN later because of a death on Rau. WAR wants perdu, but he's only PSC still, so Byakko's for the time being.

Thanks for the tips, everyone! We'll give it another try in a few days, when we're prepped again.

[Valyana]

Dark Staff won't help noticeably with the nukes, and not at all with Radiant Sacrament/Divine Judgment, which are physical. You'd be better off just going Mac+1/Koenig, maybe swapping in Earth Staff for a guaranteed -20% damage on Judgment if Sentinel isn't available.

[Kenji]

Dark Staff won't help noticeably with the nukes, and not at all with Radiant Sacrament/Divine Judgment, which are physical. You'd be better off just going Mac+1/Koenig, maybe swapping in Earth Staff for a guaranteed -20% damage on Judgment if Sentinel isn't available.

I'll do that. I did have hm get a dominus shield for mp recovery and +10 light, but if the Koenig is better, I'll just have him swap shields for the mp enchantment, then swap back.

Radiant Sacrament/Divine Judgment are physical? I was reading that PLDs should use Fealty for the 2 hour. That implies magic. If Radiant Sacrament is physical, too, then yeah, I'll have him switch to an earth staff occaisonally.

Also, since I'm not a melee, what's a good meat food for melees(war, drk, sam) for this? We can afford the good stuff.

[nekura]

Isn't Gospel of the Lost used pretty much instantly after the "Readies" message? I'd be pretty surprised if you actually managed to stun between the message and the use. That being said, no, it's really not possible to stun it. In the two times I've beaten him I never saw him spam it, it sucks, but you may just be getting unlucky.

It's definitely possible to stun it (POIDH!) but as you said, highly unlikely. During the fight where we won I managed to stun it twice, but due to the speed between when he readies it and when it actually happens the moons have to be aligned in your favour to not stun it too late.

Thorny's strat is a good one, something I'd highly recommend. Just be prepared for the final Divine Judgment towards the end, if I remember correctly it didn't go off when we expected it to and our tank didn't have time to swap to HP+ gear.

One of my favourite fights though and I wanna do it again!

[Valyana]

For Radiant Sacrament, leave Shield on; it will give better damage reduction over time than Earth Staff. But for Judgement if the shield block means the difference between living or dying then the guaranteed reduction from Earth Staff is a better bet. It's the same principle as wearing -magic damage taken over fire resist for Bahamut's Gigaflares (in the days before chainstun zerg).

But if Fealty affects Judgement, maybe it is magical after all; I'm just going by what otherwiki says. In which case you'd want to bring your Citadel Buster set for it and throw up Rampart.

Hmm...looking over the logs of my fights, it does seem more like magical than physical damage; people hit by the same move take about the same amount of damage, or about half what others take.