Ifrit Battle

[Carraway]

Question; I'm in a quite ARC and mage-heavy LS and we sadly don't have that many people with melee classes. Should we just not bother with Ifrit until we have more of them or is it possible with the correct coordination?

MP will probably be an issue as the fight goes on, but I would say it's certainly worth trying. Your ARCs will have to be extraordinarily careful with attacking, because Light Shot incurs the same animation lock as a WS.

[Sephiroth]

If the ARCs stand near the mage safe spot and only attack during the "safe" times then it could work. Not as good as a LNC strategy but it should be workable. Problem is you're increasing the learning curve right from the start. A group consistently doing it with LNCs could adjust for an ARC or two but starting off with a disadvantage is never good.

The drop system is retarded. Random drop wouldn't be so bad if it only took into account your 45+ classes and checked whether you have it already.

[Zubis]

Well, we wouldn't entirely be going with ARC, we do have melees as well but I doubt we'd be able to go with it exclusively. How is CON/THM damage on him?

[Enygma55]

As with most NMs, magic dmg is crap. Spells just don't scale well in the higher lv fights. My shadowseer dmg was hitting for maybe 250 while every other spell hits for 100. Considering one LNC ws hits for 600+, i'd save all mp for cure/dots and use downtime to regen mp.

[Kaiyoko]

Just got my 1st piece after about 1/30 --; Bow I can't even use. Shits seriously broke when 1/2 your groups is almost fully geared and the other 1/2 haven't gotten shit.

[Actus]

If the ARCs stand near the mage safe spot and only attack during the "safe" times then it could work. Not as good as a LNC strategy but it should be workable. Problem is you're increasing the learning curve right from the start. A group consistently doing it with LNCs could adjust for an ARC or two but starting off with a disadvantage is never good.

The drop system is retarded. Random drop wouldn't be so bad if it only took into account your 45+ classes and checked whether you have it already.

Wouldn't recommend since it'll increase the chance that Eruption will spawn on/around your Mages. It'll cause a lot more fuck-ups.

[miokomioko]

I'm mostly curious because I don't believe they built this encounter to require every player to have Gladiator leveled to 36 just to survive a single attack... Has anyone seen how destroying all four Ifrit's Nail's affects Hellfire damage?

[Vuitton]

I'm mostly curious because I don't believe they built this encounter to require every player to have Gladiator leveled to 36 just to survive a single attack... Has anyone seen how destroying all four Ifrit's Nail's affects Hellfire damage?

i am curious as well. my gladiator is level 1 and i think it's foolish design to require such a high level ability to do 1 fight.

[Karinastar]

It's the fact that you can usually kill the nail closest to Ifrit while still doing damage to him with Doomspike. Because of this, it lowers the amount of time you have to deal with him in the last phase of the battle when he's the hardest. There's a couple of people in my LS who have been pretty obstinate about leveling more classes for a specific encounter like this, and they usually mention the spikes too. I can understand, and I think an experienced group could manage to down the spikes and then kill Ifrit without too much trouble. It's just added difficulty, and as is every time we bring new people we end up wiping several times before we win using the one nail strat, so we tend to just stick with that to make it easier. I guess it's a combination of that and people wanting to follow BG's strategy to the letter to give them the best chance of winning.

Maybe someone else has experimented with killing multiple nails? I think if you manage to down two Hellfire would be survivable with high HP (people can survive it with one nail down if they have full HP, Defender and a fresh SSII I've heard), and I don't think that would be too hard to do. It would add some time to the last phase of the fight though, so you'd need an experienced group that can comfortably handle that part.

[Corrderio]

i am curious as well. my gladiator is level 1 and i think it's foolish design to require such a high level ability to do 1 fight.

You don't need it, but it's a HUGE help.

[Hiroishime]

It only does 2400-2500 with shell2 on and without rampart/emulate/sentinel, any class would survive just fine as long as they have full hp when hellfire happens.

[Sephiroth]

Wouldn't recommend since it'll increase the chance that Eruption will spawn on/around your Mages. It'll cause a lot more fuck-ups.

Could always have the mages at one side and the ARC at the other side. Certainly doable tho, I saw a group come out earlier with an ARC in the party.

[Arximiro]

We've used an Arc quite a few times now. We just have the Arc stand with the DD. If the Arc is smart they will have no problem dding just fine.

[Darte]

It only does 2400-2500 with shell2 on and without rampart/emulate/sentinel, any class would survive just fine as long as they have full hp when hellfire happens.

Thats the problem, you need a certain degree of luck that Ifrit doesn't use any AOE skills between nails going up and hellfire. You may get lucky once or twice but it won't happen often. Short of tacking on ridiculous amount of fire resistance gear, I don't see defender/rampart good enough to guarantee you hellfire survival consistently.

[miokomioko]

These are the reasons that I feel that all of the nails were intended to be taken down within that 60-second window to make Hellfire survivable without entirely relying on one class's mid/high level ability. I plan on taking Gladiator up for Sentinel, but mostly because people are so fucking narrow minded when it comes to strategies that there's very little choice otherwise. I'm just curious how much of a difference the nails make. This just seemed like their way of throwing in the whole "iconic avatar 2hr-move" thing from XI prime fights, except they give the players a little bit of control over whether it 1-shots people or does next-to-nothing.

I foresee Sentinel getting nerf'd because of the complete reliance on this strategy. :3 Other than that, I just think it's a little unfair that half of the DoW classes get hosed because of their melee range vs. that annoying small-range AoE he constantly does.

[Elcura]

Killing all nails is the real strategy (or rather, intended). Hell, even killing 2 nails (which we used to do) brought the basic damage of Hellfire down to about 1500, which is stupid low damage which you can then Sent + SS for basically no damage.

[Liminality]

Killing all nails is the real strategy (or rather, intended). Hell, even killing 2 nails (which we used to do) brought the basic damage of Hellfire down to about 1500, which is stupid low damage which you can then Sent + SS for basically no damage.

I completely agree. We've tried the 2 nail strategy before, and it does work. The only issue I have with the intended strategy is we usually have 2 people to a nail. So, we'd essentially be taking 2 people off Ifrit to kill another nail, which would decrease DPS done and regen up over that 60 second period. Considering our survivability (is this a word? Dammit, Chrome!) factor was based mostly on how we looked and Ifrit's health bar after Hellfire, we chose to still go with the 1 nail strategy.

It would definitely be more conceivable if most of your melee had Ifrit weapons, but that also is the underlying problem, lol

[Manako]

I definetly have enough HP to survive hellfire with 1 nail down, except he always seems to do the AOE move before hand which causes me to die. Its really frustrating because gla is probably the job I am (second to) least interested in ranking up, but here I am forced to do so or I am a huge hindrance on the rest of my team.

I used to say least interested, and then I got ifrits cudgel, which reminded me that I really wasn't planning on taking THM up either T.T not fair!

[Tomino]

I'm mostly curious because I don't believe they built this encounter to require every player to have Gladiator leveled to 36 just to survive a single attack...

That's spot on.
They're leaving people with little to do beside grinding jobs so I wonder if every battle will be designed taking into account each player has around 3-4 lv50 classes. Like everyone having certain "core" skills such as Sentinel, Bloodbath, Punishing Barbs... etc.

[Jamison]

That's spot on.
They're leaving people with little to do beside grinding jobs so I wonder if every battle will be designed taking into account each player has around 3-4 lv50 classes. Like everyone having certain "core" skills such as Sentinel, Bloodbath, Punishing Barbs... etc.

I won't be playing this game if they do that.