Escha - Zitah Data

[Saevel]

Capped -delay thfs with low delay daggers would actually be a little faster. Thf/run all the things!

I've done that before, it's very noticeable.

Whenever he has aura up you'll be constantly doing 0's and full resists, with aura down it never happens. Aura is broken by a TP move done from behind but the blue !! procs temporary nullifies the effect so you can actually get TP and deal full damage for a few seconds. If your gonna bring a THF, might as well have them useful for more then TH and opening SC. Even with a 20% floored hit rate, they should hit often enough to make a difference.

[michaeldue]

Still no signs of any sphere bodies except from whats written on jp wiki?

[FaeQueenCory]

Still no signs of any sphere bodies except from whats written on jp wiki?

HA!
I thought they would be from the HELM NMs. (Made the most sense to me, three pulse weapons, three T3s; four pulse armors, four HELMs.)
Totes forgot to look over there to see if they knew anything about it....
Chances are, they probably have similar drop rates to the Tartarus Platemail... Given that Gaes Fete is gonna be one of the last battle contents. (I'm still holding out for A!Rakaznar Skirmish which finishes the Lola, Lorissa, Balamor story.... calling new stone, no new gear, just more augments where only dusk and new stone drop from it... Maybe all stones, given that Rakaznar Skirmish originally gave stupid old stones... which I believe they patched out? idr. Been a while since I've done Rakaznar.)
I'll be more pleased when the second (and/or third too) part of Gaes Fete happens, especially after they less bullshit it up next week.
The system on paper is pretty fine as content in FFXI goes... but the implementation of it was less so... mostly because of the kindness that went into the idea of the zone. (I mean, sure it was a nice sentiment... but... why bother when Abyssea already serves that function and can be "low manned" for about the same exp grind. Not to mention GoV for solo....)
And there only is one zone instead of the 2~3 that there will be when the whole of the content is release... that's a lot of strain on an area... Abyssea had similar strain... but nowhere near as much because they were 3x3x3x1 zones, rather than the 1x1x1 Escha is giving us. (How successful as a whole Escha will be will hinge on that last zone IMO, if it's just a Paradox style zone... bleh. If it's a smaller, but same style zone as Zi-tah, eg: mons and pops, then it will be pretty good. A little cramped at times, but not as bad as now.)

EDIT: Bet would be 119 Heca's is the fae, and 119 Toci's is the DEATH RABBIT.

[BerenTebogo]

What the fuck is this shit ^

Anyway. I'm up at 110+/-5 kills of whale now. At least 70% of those only with TH1, still only 1 lance. Fun drop rates are fun.

[Celebrindor]

English is a second language in the United States. Texting is now our official language, sad to say.

[stamos]

We have only seen one weapon so far as well. Between all the tier 3s. Got the Chastisers a week or so ago

[Avalon]

Well Sath, I have to hand it to you - your advice panned out in spades. It's ridiculous to look back and wonder why we struggled so hard in hindsight, but we were overthinking the strategies (if that makes sense). Once we simplified it, things went much more smoothly.

We still have Coven and Wrathare to clear but that's only a matter of time.

[BerenTebogo]

Glad to hear it's working out!

[Avalon]

Glad to hear it's working out!

Have you defeated Coven and Wrathare with the strategy you've been using so far, or have you had to adjust and change some things?

[BerenTebogo]

Coven we've done as PLD + 2-3 BST + GEO + COR. Grasshoppers > Pixies. We've only done them 3x though since T3 that don't drop +2 aren't worth my time. Wrathare we've still only done one actual attempt of which was to about 35% just dicking around without 1hrs. It will absolutely work, it's just been a question of time management for us as I'm training / gearing up a few newer people in preparation of Escha 2 so a lot of my time has been spent working on lowman vagary / incursion stuff.

For Wrathare specifically our attempt was as GEO/NIN x2 (both being 2boxed) + COR/NIN + BST/NINx2 + PLD/NIN. Neither GEO at time of attempt had capped skills or all spells (I didn't have watera 1, only watera 2 and no meds, lol). Kill plan would be to whittle it down to about 60% slowly so can transition to zerg cleanly. Bolster frailty + indi haste + entrust vex on GEO #1 Bolster torpor + indi slow + entrust attune -> intervene -> RW + spur + unleash -> tab to GEO and cast watera as necessary -> win. Maybe I'll try to round people up to do a serious attempt this week, but none of us give a single shit about his drops so it's a bit eh. Assuming wrathare DEF can be lowered at least as low as whale's DEF, buffet with above buffs should be doing at least 35k per, possibly up to around 46k per. More than enough to counter his carrots. Example:

Spoiler: show

Interesting to note, and not sure it's 100% applicable, but I was testing stuff out in brash gate vagary this week as PLD + BST + GEO mule working on better ways to kill brimboil, and I was getting very annoyed with Murkcrawler en-amnesia slowing down kills. Entrust-vex was incredibly noticeable on en-amnesia proc rate. Since attune won't affect pets I found it to be very interesting how effective vex was on additional effects, even without bolster. I'm not sure if it makes a lot of sense, but I did this over 3 different attempts and it was MUCH better than the 2 attempts I had done prior and the level of annoyance due to amnesia definitely went down.

[Avalon]

Coven we've done as PLD + 2-3 BST + GEO + COR. Grasshoppers > Pixies. We've only done them 3x though since T3 that don't drop +2 aren't worth my time. Wrathare we've still only done one actual attempt of which was to about 35% just dicking around without 1hrs. It will absolutely work, it's just been a question of time management for us as I'm training / gearing up a few newer people in preparation of Escha 2 so a lot of my time has been spent working on lowman vagary / incursion stuff.

For Wrathare specifically our attempt was as GEO/NIN x2 (both being 2boxed) + COR/NIN + BST/NINx2 + PLD/NIN. Neither GEO at time of attempt had capped skills or all spells (I didn't have watera 1, only watera 2 and no meds, lol). Kill plan would be to whittle it down to about 60% slowly so can transition to zerg cleanly. Bolster frailty + indi haste + entrust vex on GEO #1 Bolster torpor + indi slow + entrust attune -> intervene -> RW + spur + unleash -> tab to GEO and cast watera as necessary -> win. Maybe I'll try to round people up to do a serious attempt this week, but none of us give a single shit about his drops so it's a bit eh. Assuming wrathare DEF can be lowered at least as low as whale's DEF, buffet with above buffs should be doing at least 35k per, possibly up to around 46k per. More than enough to counter his carrots. Example:

Spoiler: show

Interesting to note, and not sure it's 100% applicable, but I was testing stuff out in brash gate vagary this week as PLD + BST + GEO mule working on better ways to kill brimboil, and I was getting very annoyed with Murkcrawler en-amnesia slowing down kills. Entrust-vex was incredibly noticeable on en-amnesia proc rate. Since attune won't affect pets I found it to be very interesting how effective vex was on additional effects, even without bolster. I'm not sure if it makes a lot of sense, but I did this over 3 different attempts and it was MUCH better than the 2 attempts I had done prior and the level of annoyance due to amnesia definitely went down.

Interesting, so Randy doesn't do well on the Pixies eh? I'll keep that in mind.

Any particular order that you defeat them in?

[Gaztastic]

Unless I'm mistaken, I don't think it's that Randy does poorly against them, but more that Bertha is absolutely unmatched in terms of AoE damage.

[Avalon]

Unless I'm mistaken, I don't think it's that Randy does poorly against them, but more that Bertha is absolutely unmatched in terms of AoE damage.

Ah, gotcha. So I take it that there's no tanking 1 at a time then? All 3 at once under 1 hours?

[BerenTebogo]

No need to 1 hour, I mean you can, but if you can hit them all with 1 attack, you should. We have our PLD go /BLU for pixies for AoE hate spam. Can kill easy enough without 1 hours, but they obviously make it go faster. Randy would do fine as Gaztastic said, it's just more efficient to use hopper and keep them proc locked while doing damage to all 3.

[Malithar]

Entrust-vex was incredibly noticeable on en-amnesia proc rate. Since attune won't affect pets I found it to be very interesting how effective vex was on additional effects, even without bolster. I'm not sure if it makes a lot of sense, but I did this over 3 different attempts and it was MUCH better than the 2 attempts I had done prior and the level of annoyance due to amnesia definitely went down.

Geo debuffs are nearly universally more powerful than their buffs. Only the spells involving Acc/Eva are 100% even AFAIK. Malaise > Acumen, Frailty > Fury, Vex > Attunement, Fade > Fend, Wilt > Barrier are nearly always better outside of some unlikely scenarios. Always seemed funny that it'd be that way since debuffs essentially "buff" an entire alliance or more while buffs are limited to just your party.

[dasva]

It's not so much geo spells as the whole increasing gains from getting closer to zero in the denominator. The same holds true comparing any def down to the same amount of att up etc. Things like acc/macc eva/meva should be the same though since hit rates are just based on differences in acc vs eva

[Malithar]

The same holds true comparing any def down to the same amount of att up etc. Things like acc/macc eva/meva should be the same though since hit rates are just based on differences in acc vs eva

Right, it's kinda hard to balance any amount of +att to -def when you can actually get defense low enough to cap, while capping attack through buffs alone isn't really feasible, but some aren't even close like Malaise vs Acumen. For MAcc and MEva though, it's been said a number of times since Geo was added that Languor and Vex consistently seemed to provide more of a gain than Focus or Attunement. I'm not aware of any truly definitive tests one way or another, the closest being multiple reports from Damane in the Idris thread, but the eye ball accounting of multiple people in various threads is all we have to go on. Maybe someday SE will figure out how to represent MAcc and MEva in a way that ignores stat and skill based calculations so we can at least have a rough idea of what buffs do for it.

BTW miss your random testing on Bahamut. This server has become pretty shitty as of late. :/

[dasva]

Right, it's kinda hard to balance any amount of +att to -def when you can actually get defense low enough to cap, while capping attack through buffs alone isn't really feasible, but some aren't even close like Malaise vs Acumen. For MAcc and MEva though, it's been said a number of times since Geo was added that Languor and Vex consistently seemed to provide more of a gain than Focus or Attunement. I'm not aware of any truly definitive tests one way or another, the closest being multiple reports from Damane in the Idris thread, but the eye ball accounting of multiple people in various threads is all we have to go on. Maybe someday SE will figure out how to represent MAcc and MEva in a way that ignores stat and skill based calculations so we can at least have a rough idea of what buffs do for it.

BTW miss your random testing on Bahamut. This server has become pretty shitty as of late. :/

Part of that eyeballing might be I'd imagine you are more often going to use geo the debuffs and and indi on the buffs especially when it comes to -meva and +macc and the geo buffs are getting enhancing jas used. And yeah acumen/malaise are night and day.... it would be even crazier if not for the mdb min cap

Yeah got an ls over here on Shiva to do stuff which was nice since Bahamut was getting stagnant... Even got a malothar lol. But no Idrises for testing purposes. We certainly could use some the best pet job with ergon in this pet ls

[Protey]

Right, it's kinda hard to balance any amount of +att to -def when you can actually get defense low enough to cap, while capping attack through buffs alone isn't really feasible, but some aren't even close like Malaise vs Acumen. For MAcc and MEva though, it's been said a number of times since Geo was added that Languor and Vex consistently seemed to provide more of a gain than Focus or Attunement. I'm not aware of any truly definitive tests one way or another, the closest being multiple reports from Damane in the Idris thread, but the eye ball accounting of multiple people in various threads is all we have to go on. Maybe someday SE will figure out how to represent MAcc and MEva in a way that ignores stat and skill based calculations so we can at least have a rough idea of what buffs do for it.

BTW miss your random testing on Bahamut. This server has become pretty shitty as of late. :/

Also, point for point you get more out of reducing defense than increasing attack. Mathematically:

Attack/(Defense - X) > (Attack + X)/Defense

[Avalon]

No need to 1 hour, I mean you can, but if you can hit them all with 1 attack, you should. We have our PLD go /BLU for pixies for AoE hate spam. Can kill easy enough without 1 hours, but they obviously make it go faster. Randy would do fine as Gaztastic said, it's just more efficient to use hopper and keep them proc locked while doing damage to all 3.

How resilient are the pets against Wrathare? I know -DT is obviously a factor - among other things - but in general, how much HP does the NM's TP moves take?