Tartaruga Gigante

[Dimitri Maximoff]

Yea so i did this 99 Kindred Seals run. Twice in fact. 30 minutes was all we had.
3 parties into one alliance.
Party #1: PLD WHM WHM RDM SMN BLU
Party #2: BLM BLM BLM BLM BLM BRD
Party #3: BLM BLM BLM BLM BLM BRD

Round 1:
We entered first run on the day before Ice Day. When the adamantoise had it's head out of the shell, we let the PLD kite, while BLU did occasional damage. One or two BLMs would just nuke from time to time. When the head went inside the shell, chief BLM from Party #2 would shout "@@@ {Full Attack}" and 2 seconds later according to in game clock, all the BLMs would Blizzaga III or Freeze 1 or 2 depending on individual mp pool. The adamantoise would do Silencega (each member had Echo Drops) or Waterga 4 (BRD would Curaga II) with it's head in but we had no wipes. Maximum damage we did and brought it's HP down was highest 25%. When the 30 minutes was up, it had 75% HP left and we ran out of time and lost the first round.

Round 2:
We entered on Ice Day. Same strategy exactly
This time we brought down it's HP to 30% and timer of 30 minutes ran out.

I wonder what went wrong. Am confused.
And for the win, the record held on my server Fenrir for that BC was 3 minutes 26 seconds with a crew of 17 members.

Main aim was to get a Black Belt item for my good friend. He is 2/3 now. Looks like the wind blows in the direction towards going to the HNM camp in Valley of Sorrows and buy this particular item.

Please assist. Any advice would be grateful with all sincerity.
This damn tortoise from hell......if only it doesn't have that Super Auto Regen.....if only...

[Kukuk]

My LS uses a very simple strategy for this bc. Bring 2 melees that can make Darkness SC, we use Sam and MNK, but other jobs work fine also. Have the melee build tp up and then have your blms Time teir nuke, his head should still be out. After the time nuke he should go into his shell, this is when you have your melee make darkness and have your blms MB freeze 2 him. The resulting MB should easily pull him outa his shell. There isa problem of haveing too many blms and the mb would put him back into his shell. If this happens just keep nukeing till he comes out. Once his head pops out stop all dmg and rest and just rinse and repeat. We find that just 5-6 blms works fine coupled with 2 melee a tank and the rest is support.

Also just have your tank stand with his back agains the wall and st8 tank him, no need to kite him around. This helps to keep all the AOE and dmg just focused on the tank/support. We have never lost using the above strategy and we consider this to be the easiest of the 3 bcs, even tho they are all easy. Also haveing a couple rdms in a silence order doesnt hurt to hinder the dmg taken by gigante.

[Aymee]

When the adamantoise had it's head out of the shell, we let the PLD kite, while BLU did occasional damage.

BLU. Can I ask what had you decide to use that, considering the rest of the setup?

The BLU doing random dmg was probably forcing it into shell unpredictably. Random dmg = bad. Focus should be entirely on hard knocking in and out of shell. Tagging some occasional random physical spell dmg from a BLU isn't going to add up to any noticable dmg over the course of the fight since BLUs don't really work well in extended battles anyway.
Since clearly you were doing a manaburn and nothing at all related to anything melee for this, the BLU's "occasional damage" was the equivalent to feeding TP to a mob in a similar way you'd stab anyone who'd use a kraken on flayers or a chariot. You need to keep when you're looking for shell-in to be predictable so you can be MP ready. Since apparently he was going into shell when you were not expecting, then it's unlikely you were always set on your MP and pool eventual ran dry. You were 100% relying on the timed and bulk nukes and probably weren't able to adapt to people being able to change his status in a pinch.

I admit I haven't done this thing in ages--since back when people would lawlSC to darkness. The idea there is that you're doing continuous hard punches, just 1-2, 1-2 to force in and out, whereas you had one massive manadump on half the cycle and must have left him to his own devices enough to stay way regen'd. To me this looks like you had the standard plan set up, but the BLU dmg seemed to toss a wrench into a churning system. Just remember than a BLU tossing out random dmg is the same as letting people melee him, which is generally... avoided in a manaburn style

[zhan]

BLU can solo distortion ... only thing I could say to reason a BLU being there.

[Dimitri Maximoff]

Well at the time we calculated our members availability, we had just nice 8 BLMs, and then we double checked with the PLD team which was having 2 WHMs & 1 RDM, which brings in total to 4 and last 2 slots were empty and we asked again on LS in which a SMN raised his hand and the BLU looking at the last spot, also came along plus he opted to draw out from his inventory 198 seals (2 Themis Orbs). So full house of 18 members and we went to Waughroon.

I didn't feel good initially but i thought again, let's see if the BLU can do his SC(s) to what he claims he could make a Darkness. But in the end, things didn't go well. And the BLU also saw the result of the KSNM, in the end he decided not to use his seals lol, safety measure i suppose lol.

[Shojin]

If you time nuke it so that it goes into its shell, you can have the RDM silence it before he gets any spells off. As long as your RDM has a decent enfeebling skill, he shouldn't have any troubles landing Silence, at least I never did. (We had another RDM rep me for a different run we did, apparently couldn't land silence, but then again she kept trying to land silence in errant body/AF1 hat combo)

If his enfeebling skill isn't reliable enough, you can have the BLMs make a ES silence order.

While silence isn't needed it can help stop the BLMs getting AoE silenced as they try to land that Freeze II MB. It will always cast a spell as soon as it's head enters it's shell, so just be prepared to silence quickly in case it's Silencega.

[Aymee]

I didn't feel good initially but i thought again, let's see if the BLU can do his SC(s) to what he claims he could make a Darkness. But in the end, things didn't go well. And the BLU also saw the result of the KSNM, in the end he decided not to use his seals lol, safety measure i suppose lol.

I think that's probably win. BLU/SAM, bring some sleep pots, w/e ... he won't even need to touch the turtle. Tossing out diamondhide and tossing out stuff like Enervation are other perks I hadn't considered (though I admit I have no idea if a mdef down debuff works or not). Just being able to do self-SC should help a lot. Past that, you might want to keep your BLMs operated by 2 different people so you can more easily have a nuke cycle ready when he shells.


Doing the standard savage > disseverment for distortion is good, and there's safety in multi-hit things where all you care about is the SC effect.
I was also unaware BLU could do darkness

[Rasantath]

Diffusion + Memento Mori might not be a bad idea either.
also, take a corsair for wizards roll

[fndragon]

Yeah, COR for the BLM parties is a big help. Also, the turtle will not cast while out of its shell and walking around. Silence it right before you push it into the shell with a timed nuke or whatever.

[Bakthi]

My LS uses a very simple strategy for this bc. Bring 2 melees that can make Darkness SC, we use Sam and MNK, but other jobs work fine also. Have the melee build tp up and then have your blms Time teir nuke, his head should still be out. After the time nuke he should go into his shell, this is when you have your melee make darkness and have your blms MB freeze 2 him. The resulting MB should easily pull him outa his shell. There isa problem of haveing too many blms and the mb would put him back into his shell. If this happens just keep nukeing till he comes out. Once his head pops out stop all dmg and rest and just rinse and repeat. We find that just 5-6 blms works fine coupled with 2 melee a tank and the rest is support.

Also just have your tank stand with his back agains the wall and st8 tank him, no need to kite him around. This helps to keep all the AOE and dmg just focused on the tank/support. We have never lost using the above strategy and we consider this to be the easiest of the 3 bcs, even tho they are all easy. Also haveing a couple rdms in a silence order doesnt hurt to hinder the dmg taken by gigante.

This is almost exactly what we do, except that we generally have 2 SAMs, use 2 tanks for safety just in case one happens to die, and we do kite. We have also never lost, whereas the other two KS99s have thrown us once or twice before. It's nice to have SAMs because the amount of melee (random damage!) they need to gain TP is almost zero.

It is possible for the BLMs to do so much damage that they force it out and then immediately back in again; you just have to have them keep nuking and hammer into people's heads to stop nuking the second it comes out, which means /heal and stop any nukes in progress. One special child can really mess things up if the other BLMs are low on MP.

[Suiram]

One thing I noticed last time I did this BC a year ago or so was that he doesn't use TP inside his shell, but obviously gains TP so he triggers a TP move the moment he comes out (usually the def boost one). So that's another thing that slow BLMs can watch out for as an indicator to interrupt their spells.

[Shuemue]

Did they make this harder or something? I remember doing this pretty easily with Wafik and the Manaburn crew in 2005 with a darkness SC and BLMs all spread out to avoid waterga wipes. I just looked up our strat on our old forum, no real mention of head in/out, just kill the bitch and run like fuck if you have hate.

[Dimitri Maximoff]

Sigh....this KSNM i wonder how lol....all i know it's making me lose hair.
I shall try it again today perhaps.
But thanks to all and everyone out there for help given.
Greatly appreciated.

[Ayn]

Hi there. Hopefully I'm not being too repetitive, but the strategy my LS used awhile ago (successfully) had considerably fewer BLMs than your set up. It's been awhile since I've updated the strat, but way back in the day (everyone's been on a KS99 Wyrm Kick) we used:

Party #1: PLD, PLD, RDM, WHM, SAM, SAM

Party #2: BLM, BLM, BLM, BLM, BRD, SMN

Party #3: BLM, BLM, DD, DD, BRD, SMN

..I can't recall why we didn't have a BRD in the tank party, but it worked, in either case.

We had positioning set up in a way that if one party pulled hate, the other wouldn't be in as much trouble/any danger. The basic gist of it was:

Start off with the usual assortment of DoTs (back in the day, we also opened with ES silence. . though I'm not sure how effective that is now). When turtle's head is outside of the shell, do an ice / darkness skillchain with the first pair of melees. BLMs are to burst tier IV only. That should create enough damage to force the turtle's head to go into the shell. While it's in the shell, you know the deal with it building massive regen and all the goodness. Immediately when that happens, have your next set of DDs do another ice/darkness skillchain, but this time around, burst with Blizzaga-III (or Freeze II, if that's more powerful. . shows you how long it's been since we've done that).

The key, at least with my group, was coordination. Since the defense of the turtle's relatively low outside of the shell, the melee damage from the weapon skills / skillchains, combined with the coordinated Tier-IV nukes should be enough to force it in. While it's inside, you'll need the damage from the higher damage -ga III / AM II to bring it out ASAP.

If for some reason your people fuck up / can't listen / MP becomes an issue, I think it's been mentioned here, but you can just let the turtle regen until it comes out and have your PLD kite as necessary. It won't go back into shell mode as long as it's not damaged, and you can take the time to recover.

I hope this information was somewhat helpful to you. I apologize if it's repetitive, useless. . or you don't have quite the same access to the melee set up my shell does (back when we did this, we *definitely* had a much higher concentration of melees than BLMs, which has since changed).

Good luck, and I hope your next attempts are more successful. I'll be looking forward to (hopefully) hearing some good news about it.

[Kaylia]

Didnt read thread, but there is two element you need to know.

1st: Melee do well, and SC is decent. Dont fear bringing them
2nd: It wont go in its shell if its not taking dmg. Have your mage rest and your pld kite it when it's out of its shell, dont rush and waste your mp. If mage just spam, it's going to go back in its shell and start regening a lot

[Ayn]

Yeah um, that info was repeated a few times in the thread.

But it's definitely helpful to reiterate the first, without a doubt.

[Dimitri Maximoff]

It seems "timing : damage" is the key essential factor to beating this BC. Too little and it's head will not enter the shell....when the appropriate damage has been done, it's head goes in but i noticed when more than 3 Blizzaga III's got hit on it when its head was in the shell, it jerked itself like it was having an internal orgasm in its shell, then head didn't pop out, i knew for a fact over damage had just been done, our nuking didn't synchronise well with timing...and in return we lost a 3rd KSNM lol.

No more seals already, must go farm more lol.

Oh well....worse to worst, just gotta go Valley of Sorrows hoping to get some LS to sell my friend the Adamantoise Egg.

[Ayn]

Ouch, I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah, timing is pretty big on this one. I'm the LS's resident skillchain Nazi, so I ended up doing a lot of yelling during that BC. Fortunately for us, we managed to get it right in time for the win.

I'm sorry that you were unsuccessful.

[Shuemue]

Oh well....worse to worst, just gotta go Valley of Sorrows hoping to get some LS to sell my friend the Adamantoise Egg.

Or you could just camp NQ with like 2-3 friends?

[Lilswitche]

I did this a while back with an LS on Valefor. The one time we had a NIN to tank it and kite it. 2 RDMs and about 9-10 BLMs. We would time nuke Blizz IV or Freeze II's while it's out of it's shell. Silence it right before the time nuke to ensure it doesn't cast a spell. More often than not, after 1 nuke hit, it would pop into his shell and when the rest hit he would immediatly pop out. Then, just rest while someone kites it. Rinse and repeat. If he stays in his shell after all the nukes, keep tossing nukes (tier III's or something), and the moment he pops out, people need to cancel their nukes quickly. The goal is to have him in his shell as little as possible.

The 2nd time we went in, we didn't even have the NIN, we just bind-kited him while people rested. Very easy and straight forward fight. A blm with decent enfeebling gear can bind or silence this thing with ease.