Salvage: Bhaflau Remnants

[Lindstrom]

From my experience, Skirmish Pephredo likes to use Pollen more than other WSs, but I've only fought like 5 of them.

[Wizerd]

I'm curious about keeping the bees out as well. I know if you keep all 5 out he just won't summon anything else but continue to lose HP. But I wonder if you keep 4 out. If there's only 5 bees + NM in the DAT files, and it has to choose between however many bees are left + the NM, then perhaps by lowering the pool from 6 possible choices to 2 possible choices, you'll get more pops?

Admittedly, I've only done this rampart once as sort of an exercise to get acquainted with working together, but out of about 50 wasps, we got no pop, and we had 3-4 bees out pretty much the entire time - we were still new and left the first floor earlier than we should have. After reading the entire thread, though, I'm more inclined to think that it simply has a static chance of popping each time it summons, not a lotto based on what's left.

Edit: unrelated, does anyone else go 4x a week to Salvage? I've been trying to get a second group going in addition to my first one, but I seem to have less interest. I have ~10 for the first group.

[Map]

I'm curious about keeping the bees out as well. I know if you keep all 5 out he just won't summon anything else but continue to lose HP. But I wonder if you keep 4 out. If there's only 5 bees + NM in the DAT files, and it has to choose between however many bees are left + the NM, then perhaps by lowering the pool from 6 possible choices to 2 possible choices, you'll get more pops?

Interesting theory. However isn't there a similar theory that most NMs only have 1 place holder? If this is the case, and you have 4 bees out, you could be screwing yourself by repeatedly killing the same bee that isn't the ph. Perhaps if you .dat swap the bees into 5 unique models, you'd be able to see if it only pops off a certain one, and then exploit that by holding the other 4?

[aurik]

Should be easy to find the PH, if it exists. Get the NM to spawn, then let the other bees spawn, and account for which PH is missing. Then, kill off the drone bees and see if the rampart ever spawns the missing PH bee.

[ff_gmr]

I'm curious about keeping the bees out as well. I know if you keep all 5 out he just won't summon anything else but continue to lose HP. But I wonder if you keep 4 out. If there's only 5 bees + NM in the DAT files, and it has to choose between however many bees are left + the NM, then perhaps by lowering the pool from 6 possible choices to 2 possible choices, you'll get more pops?

We've tried leaving 4 out numerous times hoping to increase the odds of a NM pop, but have found it doesn't work to better the odds.

We've done the rampart 6 times now, have seen 7 skirmish peridos, and recieved 1 drop. The 7th NM was bs though cause it popped when the rampart was at 1%, and we promptly got warped out.

[Frodorn]

Killed the Flans just to see if we could Pop floor 2, same South Flan never went into Spike mode, said F' it and moved on

We popped floor 4 rampart on our last run... popped 2 Peryton, no drops and timed out with the Rampart at 24%

[Sci]

Just out of curiosity, how many times have you entered the 4th floor (North) in Zhayolm?

I think probably around 6 times. And around 5 in the South. And of course we've warped back to the N side a couple times on a lot of the runs we were there. Never have seen a Madame on either side. Always widescanned when we entered the floor, and as we were about to leave (often times after we kill certain things as well). Only odd thing we ever encountered was our Ranger's widescan broke once when porting back to the 4F N for the 2nd or 3rd time. He couldn't see anything on his scan, but when a Marid popped from a rampart, he could see that on widescan, but none of the Poroggo Gents and none of the mamools (so I ran around the floor and confirmed no Madame was up). But that's more of a game bug than anything.

[divisortheory]

I had something weird happen once also. One time when warping back to the 4th floor from the 4th floor, only 1 rampart was up. And it wasn't the right one either.

[Suiram]

Killed the Flans just to see if we could Pop floor 2, same South Flan never went into Spike mode, said F' it and moved on

Having popped the flan rampart reliably every time after determining what makes North/South leave spikes mode, I am always skeptical of reports that Flan never go spikes. Are you sure no MNK was using formless strikes? No BLM/RDM cast anything on it? Maybe someone was using a weapon with add effect?

I remember when a MNK used Formless Strikes once because I had forgotten to caution them not to, the flan looked like he was having a seizure, bouncing back and forth between normal and scrunched-face form. Would you describe your experience with the south flan similarly?

[Not Kuno]

So for N/S you can't use magic and for W/E you can't use physical dmg? I was always wondering how to pop those and just making sure if that's it.

I guess stuff like Spirits, Sirocco Kukri, Skillchain dmg etc would make it leave spikes.

[Imitarate]

So for N/S you can't use magic and for W/E you can't use physical dmg? I was always wondering how to pop those and just making sure if that's it.

I guess stuff like Spirits, Sirocco Kukri, Skillchain dmg etc would make it leave spikes.

It's magic for both of them. Spiked physical damage (decent WS) seems to make them enter spiked mode, and spiked magic damage (good t4/ga3/AM2, but even lesser sources of magic damage have done this) makes them leave it. This has been observed, at least. I don't know if it's 100% confirmable, but that's the popular theory as I understand it. It's worked for my group so far (hell, I even had my wyvern breathing on the flans and it didn't break spikes).

It seems to fit with the weird trend in TAU mobs to react differently to large amounts of damage and/or critical hits.

[Suiram]

The way we do it, North/South Flans = no magic damage period. The only two exceptions being that the RDM casts dia at the start of the fight, because it doesn't go into spikes until around 80-85%, and the direct damage from dia probably is insignificant (I think Faranim said in an earlier post that it seemed like it took 1k+ total magic damage to make a difference), and the other exception being that I'll kill it off with an AM2 once it hits 40% or so (used to do it at a higher %, but had a resist once that almost ruined it), which should be enough to finish it off even if you get a 1/2 resist. That's just because it speeds things up rather than having to wait around a few more minutes for melee to finish it off, which would ultimately be the safest route probably. Nobody uses Formless Strikes, or a weapon with add. effect, or even physical WSs, lest they accidentally make a skillchain.

East/West flans nothing seems to matter. Everyone does whatever they want, weapon skills (physical and magical), nuking, you name it. They go into spikes form between 80 and 85% as well, and just stay there. If it's possible to knock these out of spikes mode, I don't know what it is, but it certainly isn't physical damage, and I've never seen it.

[Wizerd]

The way we do it, North/South Flans = no magic damage period. The only two exceptions being that the RDM casts dia at the start of the fight, because it doesn't go into spikes until around 80-85%, and the direct damage from dia probably is insignificant (I think Faranim said in an earlier post that it seemed like it took 1k+ total magic damage to make a difference), and the other exception being that I'll kill it off with an AM2 once it hits 40% or so (used to do it at a higher %, but had a resist once that almost ruined it), which should be enough to finish it off even if you get a 1/2 resist. That's just because it speeds things up rather than having to wait around a few more minutes for melee to finish it off, which would ultimately be the safest route probably. Nobody uses Formless Strikes, or a weapon with add. effect, or even physical WSs, lest they accidentally make a skillchain.

East/West flans nothing seems to matter. Everyone does whatever they want, weapon skills (physical and magical), nuking, you name it. They go into spikes form between 80 and 85% as well, and just stay there. If it's possible to knock these out of spikes mode, I don't know what it is, but it certainly isn't physical damage, and I've never seen it.

That's a little too much caution on the North/South flans. We've only gone through here 3 times, but I've monitored spikes each time.

The first run, we did plenty of skillchains on the flans, all 4, but no "nukes" during the fights. The RDM did enfeebling, Bio, etc, and it didn't affect any of their spike forms. They all entered spikes mode within 4-5 melee hits (so about the first 1-3%). As we were being cautious this run and didn't know how much nukes would do, I told my 2 BLMs to wait until 15% to nuke. One got a nuke off on the north flan around 19% and it killed it - 3600 damage or so with almost no equipment locked. Of course the rampart popped. What scared me the most was that the BLM had cast Drain on the north flan, and it left spikes mode for about 10 seconds. Went right back in, though.

A little more research was done for the second run, coupled with the idea that we wanted to get more acquainted with getting to the boss, as opposed to farming pephredo. We went with 9 for this run I believe, and gave magic cells to WHM RDM NIN from the first floor. I told the RDM to nuke the first flan about halfway through and he did something like 1600 with a few unlocked pieces and was mesmerized at his damage lol. This flan had gone into spikes mode about 96% and was at 40% when he lost spikes mode to the RDM's nuke. However, it re-entered spikes mode around 30-35%. We gave the magic cells to a WHM and the BLM (we only had 1 BLM this time) and the RDM+BLM nuked/gravitied the rest as we tried to melee. Even the East/West only takes a couple nukes as they have normal flan magic weakness.

The third run I watch the %s more closely and pulled the west flan first to give our BLM a magic cell. He ended up killing the North and South flans both within 30 seconds. An AM2 with nearly full equipment was doing ~4800-4900 on those things, which seemed to be almost 50%, which leads me to believe they have 10,000 HP if that wasn't already confirmed. The melee weak flans took about 30 seconds also. This was with 8 people. North/South died with no spikes as they both dropped to 10-15% from a nuke and got owned thereafter with another nuke or a WS. West/East I wasn't sure, the animation was flippity flopping a lot from what looked like nukes landing and waiting.

I assume it's because the West/East ones take less magic damage, so they have a smaller chance or losing spikes with a nuke (and I do believe it's a chance based on proper magic damage done, based on the fact that a Drain took spikes away on the North flan).

Does it even matter though? I thought it was determined that the bee is utterly useless until we figure out the Poroggo Madames somehow.

[Almalexia]

Tried popping the third floor rampart today, but something very unusual happened.

I've tooled around with a lot of triple gears in Bhaflau 4th floor and in other zones. We know already that, assuming no Restoral is used, an Archaic Gears will lose one gear at 50% HP (loss of 50%) and a second gear at 25% HP (loss of 75%). We also know that Restoral will regenerate exactly one gear if any are missing at the time of Restoral's use. I had come to realize that every time an Archaic Gears uses Restoral, it also recuperates this HP "cushion" of 50% before it will lose a gear again.

For example, you reduce an Archaic Gears to 30% (2 gears). It uses Restoral and recovers to 55% (3 gears). You must now reduce the gears' HP to 5%, the cushion being 50%, before it will lose another gear.

Another example: you reduce an Archaic Gears to 10% HP (1 gear). It uses Restoral and recovers to 30% (2 gears). You continue to reduce the gears' HP to 20% (still 2 gears) and it uses Restoral again, recovering to 40% (now 3 gears). At this point, the gear now has less HP than the HP cushion and you can theoretically massacre it without risk of losing a gear on the way to 0%.

This second example was my approach to killing the 3rd floor gears properly. We would melee until a single gear remained in the neighborhood of 10-15% HP. Then we spammed Stone to feed TP until Restoral was used. After that, we melee a bit more into 10-15% again, spam Stone again, and proceed to beat the shit out of it after it used Restoral a second time. This worked on the first Archaic Gears, but failed at the last moment on the next.

Somehow, even though Restoral had recovered into the neighborhood of 40% HP and triple gears, we managed to lose a gear during the death animation. This is the only instance where I've seen a gear disappear in under 50% damage after using Restoral. So I am wondering whether this is a glitch, if abuse of Restoral has diminishing HP cushions, or some other factor causes gears to vanish.

tl;dr-- looking for observations of Archaic Gears behavior in order to pop the third floor rampart.

[divisortheory]

I'd still like to see some reports of people one-shotting some triple gears with 3-4 bursted Freeze IIs and a Distortion/Darkness chain.

I know you can almost one shot a single gear with Distortion and a single Bliz IV burst. Probably wouldn't take more than 4 bursted nukes to one-shot a triple gear.

[Almalexia]

Well, the thing about that is how perfect the timing would have to be. You either need to bring 7 BLMs and overkill each gears or have a few BLMs with perfect timing. I was worried that if there's even a quarter-second of peace between 51% and 0%, a gear would drop off and it would be over.

[divisortheory]

Well, the thing about that is how perfect the timing would have to be. You either need to bring 7 BLMs and overkill each gears or have a few BLMs with perfect timing. I was worried that if there's even a quarter-second of peace between 51% and 0%, a gear would drop off and it would be over.

Well Restoral does have a "wind up time". I don't think it would be so instantaneous. Worth a try anyway, but we probably won't be going back to Bhaflau (especially for Ramparts) for a really long time.

[Stellar]

quick question, as i cant seem to find where it was posted in this thread.. but what are the distance ranges on homing missle / other tp moves?
is it 25' on homing missile and 15' on all other AOE moves, with diffusion ray being conic?

It was in this thread somewhere, but hard to find. Homing Missile 20, Inertia Stream+Discharge 10 is what I think was agreed upon.

If you mean the actual AOE from homing missiles target, anyone have proof of 20'? I was under the impression it was 10' or at most 15'...

[Keider]

I'd still like to see some reports of people one-shotting some triple gears with 3-4 bursted Freeze IIs and a Distortion/Darkness chain.

I know you can almost one shot a single gear with Distortion and a single Bliz IV burst. Probably wouldn't take more than 4 bursted nukes to one-shot a triple gear.

Why one-shot them? I'd figure it'd be a better idea to take it as close to 50% without going below, sleep it, then try and take it out with the timed Freeze IIses and maybe have some non-BLM toss out a stun if you're worried about it doing something

Haven't fought these gears in a while, anyone parse how much HP they have?

[Terrifyingstorm]

Finally, After 7+ trys at the Rampart, we Finally get this stupid bee to pop, but not pop once, it poped 5 times. lol puts us 5/700 bees.. lol...

http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b1.../nmbhaflau.jpg

all in all, we got these~ And now 1 less time we ever have to go back for that stupid NM..

http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b1.../ramyfeets.jpg