Plucking Wings (Castle Oztroja S campaign BC)

[Shassira]

First of all, this is a lengthy post, i'm sorry for it. I can't seem to be able to condense it enough.

So my server took over Castle Oz and this BC is open to us now. We gathered a couple friends to do this and we've run 5 times now with mixed success. We've won 3 times and 2 of those were with 5 people, but i'm not satisfied with the strategy we've been using because it's easy to break and makes the fight really long.

I'd like to hear about what setups and strategies some of you have used here (yes, I promise i've searched) and what kind of success you've had, in hope of finding something in your experience that will help us with this frustrating BC.

I'll start by explaining what we've done and what i've though so maybe some can point out what we are doing wrong, and then some thoughs of changes which i'm not sure if they would work.


Our setup consists of PLD/NIN, RDM/DRK, BLM, BLM, BLU. THis is the core 5 which we've used and won some of those fights. The last member was BRD.

What we did:
We positioned down of the area near the entrance (in fact, we were using one of the slopes and platforms to make the mobs path longer). The blms would sleep the minions as they came by and when they were all bunched up, they would GA3 them.
Meanwhile the PLD would tank normaly, with the blu and rdm/drk taking turns to stun the IV-ga spells. BRD simply sings ballads and sometimes march, randomly helping sleep the adds if they resist.

How it went:
Now, this doesn't really work as swiftly as we'd like.
First, the BLMs would be incapale of always actualy killing all three pets at the same time, sometimes having to resort to some more extra nuking of singles. Also, the fact that one of the pets is a NIN that likes to stay in range of the tank makes nuking them harder, as you have to sleep them as they come in and sometimes they directly resist the first sleep.

PLD was pretty much unable to make any real use of those shadows half the time, maybe as pets would arrive or wake up to hit her. Also, the boss keeps spaming AoE spells which destroys the shadows. It seems pointless to use this SJ now that we stoped to reconsider it.

BLU can only stun with Temporal Shift. Head Butt never lands, Tail Slap and Frypan suffer the same fate and what's worst, alternatives like jettatura or even crapy ol'Blitzwhatever won't either, all resisted. Temporal Shift lands 90%, so it's reliable... but the timer is crazy.

RDM is over worked. The boss spams Dispel, as well as having a dispelga TP move. On top of this counting the rdm on the stun cycle makes it even worse, specialy because rdm/drk and blu can't cycle correctly given the circumstances.

Our time:
The fights would last way too long, in fact we even timed out on one of them since we had to resort to kitting (which btw works horrible from our experience, boss starts to spam Cure IV). At the end, RDM's stuns would actualy be resisted more often than not.


Observations:
It seems to me that using two BLMs to ga the pets, which respawn almost inmediately, is segmenting the party in two sides that can't help each other much.

Blu and rdm cannot keep up the stunning correctly, needing a hand from the blms often, which makes it harder to handle the pets or keep the blms with MP.

Blu provides low damage on the boss because of the need to help the overworked rdm in curing tasks.

Boss spams dispel moves, making it harder for the rdm to keep the necesary buffs on the pld, let alone the blu, plus healing, plus stuning. A nightmare.

So an aproach that could "fix" this would likely be to take 3 BLMs, remove the BLU and put in some kind of ranged dmg like RNG or SMN. But we don't have access to this setup sadly, so we cannot try it.

From this point, we've been considering other methods which include handling the pets with a melee or two, while having a more traditional backline with whm, rdm and brd, with the whm and rdm /drk to stun spells as they can.
But ofcourse, we aren't convinced with any of the ideas we come up with, hence why i'm writting this incredibly long essay about it <.<

I think that about sums it all, I hope some of you can lend a hand. Thanks in advance.

EDIT: Ah yes, I forgot to say how we handle Tabula Rasa. Basicly all we do is stun it more with the blms focusing on it till he's done trying to do AM after AM. We tried kitting it once, but it was a huge mess XD

[fishstix]

I would sleepga all 3 adds at start, relayer with an ES sleepga2. Keep 1 blm there to sleepga2 it again upon waking. With 1 blm at the spawn, you have 2x stun @ camp and shield bash with the rdm/drk and blm. Save bash for emergencies. You can't really rely on the blu to stun in rotation due to the timer. As for the rdm, it's not completely necessary to keep all buffs on the tank 100% of the time. Haste/shell4 is sufficient. Have the blm @ camp assist in curing, have the blu set curing spells if that's one of your issues.

After the spawn-blm lands the 2nd sleepga2, return to camp and help stun/nuke down the boss. With the sleeping strat, the trick is to kill the boss in a timely fashion that you dont have to deal with the adds too much, you can just keep them slept. Once the adds reach camp, the 2nd blm can now ES sleepga2. This should be about 7 minutes into the BC and the boss should be at least 50% dead >.> If it's not, then your problem is you're not outputting enough dmg to the boss.

If the pld doesnt have atonement, I'd say your biggest issue is killing it fast enough. A slow kill is fine, but then you have to kill off the adds, which you're unable to do effectively. You don't need ranged dmg at all, any type of heavy dd works perfectly fine. As long as your stunners are good, shouldn't be a problem.

The -best- setup I've used was mnk/nin, mnk/nin, war/nin, rdm/drk, brd/drk(2boxed), sch/rdm. The sch handled sleeping the pops twice at spawn and then returned to camp. From there, between him and me on rdm, we kept them slept at camp if they woke. With this setup, we had 2x stun, 2x weapon bash, and I had 1 mnk sit on TP for shoulder tackle, just incase. With the sch and rdm curing, the brd's subjob became free to sub drk for stunning, but tbh, didn't need that much curing. We killed it in about 6-7 minutes with this setup. If people are bad with sleeping mobs as they wake, it'd be best to have people come sam and kill the adds.

[Shassira]

Thank you for the reply!

We finaly got around to trying again a couple times and your second setup encouraged us to take a completely different aproach which seemed to work much better. I'll leave it here for future reference, since it seems these BCs aren't done much, judging from the lack of answers here. That or people prefer to keep it secret I'd understand both.

Our setup initialy was PLD, MNK, MNK, WHM, RDM, SCH, with the whm and rdm /drk both on stun duty. Eventualy we changed one of the mnks for a SAM, which worked better and we'll likely change the SCH for another RDM/DRK on next tries.

We camped down near where you start, obviously, pulling the boss down while the SCH slept the mobs upstairs. SCH went down with us and would resleep the minions as they would come by. Resists were daily order though, so the plan was just to get both melee to inmediately kill every pet that would resist a sleep. What this ended up creating was a situation where pets would slowly come one by one, which was no problem to control. We pretty much were TPing on the boss and WSing the pets for almost instant kills.

This made for a longer fight than you described, ofcourse. Time was around 14 minutes of actual fighting.

Note worthy was seeing some of the stuns actualy be resisted. We aren't sure exactly what to atribute this too, but we noticed there was earth weather when this happened most, which could maybe affect the boss in some peculiar way (just like weather affects gears or other creatures).

As for changes that would make this better:
I assume a MNK could tank this thing instead of a PLD. We had no way to test it out due to job availability.
We'll be changing the SCH for another RDM/DRK to lessen the work of the healers, since pets will be coming one by one anyway and a RDM will definitely have no problem handling that. (Sleeping the NIN can get tricky though, but doesn't matter much )

Well, thanks again for the help!

[fishstix]

Glad I could be of help, with our style of sleep/resleep and tp burn, monk was able to tank easily. It's a balance of kill speed vs the need to sleep. The faster you kill the boss, the less you have to reapply sleep to the adds. If the balance isnt good enough, it would be better to kill the adds, but then that would expose the mnk tank to more danger by prolonging the fight. The difference between mnk and pld tank is the pld can cure itself, shield bash, but you lose overall dot speed. There's other differences, but yeah, just offhand ^^ If anything, just give it a try, find what works for you.

For stunning, do you use a thunder/jupiter staff at the least? I don't remember stun resisting any. I think~ I macro in dark skill gear on rdm, but then again... brd/drk without proper staff was unresisted.

[Shassira]

We finaly got around to doing the rest of the tags on this. So let's see...

About the stuning, it really was weird. Maybe it was just a matter of bad luck kicking in, but i'm pretty sure at least the rdm was gearing up for stun specificaly. We got at least 4 resists that run, while today we didn't see a single one.

This time around we went pld, mnk, sam, rdm, rdm, whm, all three mages with drk sub. Same plan as above, only it was easier for the rdm to handle the incoming pets one by one. Tabula Rasa was handled simply by rotating stuns mid cast (since his AM cast times are normal). Our best time was 14 minutes, which I guess amounts for like 10 minutes of actualy fight from pull to killshot. As you say, we are trading offense with defense here, but it worked well for us since we really felt we had control of the situation at all moments (something that wasn't always true with our initial setup with blms).

Now, this is an interesting thing we noticed. We really cannot say 100% but it seemed to work quite well for us when our rdm started trying out different things. Aparently, if we kept the SCH boss dispeled, he would tend to focus even more on casting storms than anything else. Now I don't know if this is a specific gimmick meant to be or simply that the AI gives priority to buffing; to give any definitive answer I'd have to try this more than today's runs, but we all swore by it today. If anyone tries it and can afford constantly dispeling it, do tell if it works for you~

Overall, it was a fun BC. Now to hope that the campaign fortification nerf doesn't turn this SCH yagudo into a dodo. =/

[Jojax]

Was a while ago now that Leviathan had access to this fight. I had a lot of fun doing it and was surprised that we could only gather 4 people to attempt it.

Ended up going 1/3 on wins, 1st attempt was a loss due to us not realising his manifestation was permanently active and kinda expecting to see something before he casted to know they were aoe or not. 2nd attempt was a win then 3rd attempt was a loss due to one of the stunners being too slow while it was in Tabula Rasa mode >.<

Setup was RDM/DRK, RDM/DRK, MNK/NIN, BLM/RDM.

MNK boosted 10 times then pulled with Chi Blast. I would then stun the boss right away in case of a Sleep cast. BLM then sleepga'd all the pet pops and we would all run down to the bottom of the ramp. MNK/NIN was responsible for all the damage, hence the fight took quite a bit of time (don't recall our winning time but would probably more than 15mins). RDM/DRK's rotated stuns and stunned any nukes. We aimed to keep him dispelled of weather spells in case he did a corresponding nuke that got missed.

The BLM was nearly solely responsible for dealing with adds, which he did by sleepga'ing them after they had initially woken up and ran down to us, then taking them out one at a time and re-sleeping as necessary, then sleeping/nuking the repops as they arrived. RDM's assisted with sleeps if he got into any trouble.

Fight was pretty smooth as long as the RDM/DRK's are on the ball with stuns, so perfectly do-able with 4 people. However I would have very much liked to have a 5th person to either help with damage or with the adds.

We did have to kite at times throughout those attempts (can't remember if we did on our winning run) which was a bit messy due to mobs getting left behind and changing direction around the aerial walkways. Although it was possible for a sole RDM with wlegs (and maybe without) to kite all 4 mobs while people recover in case of a tank death.

Hope this helps anyone. And I hope Leviathan gets this fight again soon.

EDIT: On a side note, does anyone know if its possible to activate the mission, and have it active in your log after the Campaign update at midnight on Sunday, then still be able to enter the fight if the area reverts to beastman control (or if another area reverts to beastman control but Castle. O stays Windy) ?