Salvage DD selection

[Ryushii]

Yeah, but how do I cut bad players who are dedicated without seeming like a complete asshole? I mean, its not like I have anyone so bad that they make it obvious to the group that they are impeding progress. I just dunno what to do...

[Chupunpupun]

Yeah, but how do I cut bad players who are dedicated without seeming like a complete asshole? I mean, its not like I have anyone so bad that they make it obvious to the group that they are impeding progress. I just dunno what to do...

I rather take the dedicated member that comes every salvage run over a "skilled" player that comes once in a blue moon. Because there's nothing worst in salvage than when someone pulls a no show and you're scrambling to find a replacement.

[Ayn]

I rather take the dedicated member that comes every salvage run over a "skilled" player that comes once in a blue moon. Because there's nothing worst in salvage than when someone pulls a no show and you're scrambling to find a replacement.

I'm lucky to have a group of people who are dedicated, but I think my most used comment next to "pass shit please" is "DYNAMIC ROSTER CHANGE" before each Salvage run.

[Amele]

Yeah, but how do I cut bad players who are dedicated without seeming like a complete asshole? I mean, its not like I have anyone so bad that they make it obvious to the group that they are impeding progress. I just dunno what to do...

if you can honestly say that you think you can do everything you're after with the dedicated players, then they're not 'bad' players.

if, they're the sort of players where you find yourself thinking every other run: 'we'd have killed that if only [name] hadn't blown his tp / nuked too much / nuked too little / run out of range / not run right into a wall while kiting / etc' - well. it's been said alot of other places: salvage is the least amount of headache with a group between 6-10 (depending a little bit on job mix and talent)

if you find yourself with more people than that and some of them are deadweight - especially deadweight that aren't anyone's friends... well. sometimes being a leader means looking like an asshole. If they really aren't competent then I bet the other members noticed too, and won't be all over you for doing what they all wished in their heads they could do too.

I rather take the dedicated member that comes every salvage run over a "skilled" player that comes once in a blue moon. Because there's nothing worst in salvage than when someone pulls a no show and you're scrambling to find a replacement.

well, yeah. the best player in the world is worthless if he doesn't show up. but especially in timed events that require people to be paying attention for most of the event, a bad player can actually be worse than no player.

[Odog]

New salvage groups need interest in salvage more than anything (except reasonable skill at your job). If you have people you feel like you have to beg to get them to come then you need to drop them. These type of people whine when things dont go right and are the first to bail but they also never contribute to helping to make things go right by doing the research outside of the salvage times online and knowing what they are supposed to do.

I would target these freeloaders (they might even be some of the "better" players) because you really need a group that is foucused and WANTS to be there. Anyway, that is just my opinion. I love the people in my group that as soon as I get home from work and say "Odog, look what I found... Check this link.. Think we could do this? What about this strategy?" People that you have to hunt down and contribute nothing to the learning process of the group need to go first imo.

I'm not saying you have those type of people but I know early on in our salvaging we did...

Good luck to you and salvage is just like everything else in this game and all games... It just takes practice and it will come around and actually be easy once you are comfortable with your members and the strategy you are going to employ.

[Hapernack]

I'm with Ryushii on this one... my group is very adept at going through the areas and getting fully geared. We also farm NMs and stuff without a hitch but when it comes to the bosses (we've tried LBC a few times, AC once, and LAC a few times) we just can't seem to pull anything off. One of our MNKs manages to tank/DD LBC with little to no effort involved on anyone else's part. However the other MNK just seems to run into the worst possible luck when trying to tank/DD. We don't have gaiters on our BLMs to do the BLM/NIN kiting thing on the chariots and we just can't seem to figure out what we're doing wrong.

We always have this setup:

BRD
WHM
WHM
BLM
BLM
MNK
MNK
RDM

We're all extremely well-geared but no relic weapons. Anyways we've gotten LBC down to 28-35% on several occassions and the other chariot attempts ended with the chariot around 40% or so. We just can't seem to figure what we're doing wrong... If we put both MNKs on the chariot the damage doesn't seem to be much faster than regular, just the strain on the healers becomes almost impossible to deal with due to the need for the use of cure Vs. Even when our MNKs and everyone are fully unlocked (maybe save for a few select stats) they get hit for 400-500 each hit with crits exceeding 600 damage. Triple attacks and double attacks are of no help and usually end up in a loss of hate due to emergency curing. We just really can't figure out what we're screwing up on at all...

[Ferien]

don't listen to ferien! his group has at least one blackbelt, ridill, and relic! (although I'm pretty sure the ridill isn't coming war... )

>.> yea we have 2 BBs, but the Ridill is on a RNG that only comes WHM and the relic is Excalibur, so they don't really count lol.

[aurik]

I think the #1 place to start cutting people is people who are spotty on attendance. With the salvage "nerf", you should be able to do just about any task with mediocre players if you focus on just that task.

Unnerfed LBC is about the hardest thing there is in Salvage now, so if that's your problem don't worry too much about it. With more experience and sole focus on him, you will get to him with more time, allowing your group to wipe and dot-hold. My group did the whole "hold with dots" our first 2 LBCs, until we finally got the hang of it.

A few general advices for fighting the bosses:

If your tanks are getting hit too much, try giving them march x2. That should get them to the utsusemi recast cap. While the kill will be slower, they will have better shadow timers. Also, slow2 and elegy should be on pretty much 100% of the time. If they can't put up an ichi between his swings at that point, tell them to go practice blink tanking. Monks should not be using counterstance if slow and elegy are on: they should just deliberately take 1 hit in order to guarantee ichi completes uninterrupted.

They should also master the art of recasting shadows while the boss charges his weaponskill, so that ichi/ni will land basically immediately after the AoE triggers, giving the boss no chance for melee strikes. Along this line, make sure your mages are erasing discharge paralyze immediately. While the paralysis effect is actually not that strong (25% rate or so), missing shadow recast due to paralysis can cost 500+ damage if the boss double-attacks after (LBC can also triple attack).

[Hapernack]

Thanks Aurik, we''ll just have to keep at it I guess.

One quick thing I noticed though you said NOT to Counter-tank? Ok that might be a mistake we've been making. They've been counter-tanking this whole time almost 100% of our boss attempts. So we should tell them to stay in normal stance and just concentrate on timing of shadows?

I guess maybe my expectations for a salvage group of 6 were a bit high considering we only began perhaps a week and a half ago.

[Ryushii]

Yeah...we tried our first LBC last sunday and got it to 90%. The way up was kinda hectic cause I don't have any sackies to help me lead yet (I do lots, tell people where to go, port us up, and yell at people to correct stuff, etc. all by myself at the moment ), and like 75% of the people were new to the ls, if not new to salvage period. We managed to get up with 25-30 minutes with everything good but pannus cells (because of bad luck). The RDM I assigned to the NIN tank screwed up royally (he didn't paralyna or erase or anything) and he also stole hate alot. We ended up wiping cause both tanks, and the backup pld/war (for voke in case of HM) died. I guess the major accomplishment was that a single Homing Missle never went off because the tanks picked up on how to tank him quite easily. He was unweakened by the way, and we had 11 ppl: 3 RDM/WHM 1 MNK/NIN 1 NIN/WAR 1 PLD/WAR 1 COR 2 SAM/NIN 1 WAR/NIN 1 BLU. Note that we had no BRD and no WHM and our DDs were /nin. After the fight was lost, several people instantly started discussing strategy, which made me rather happy because that means the fight spurred them on instead of making them discouraged. Some of the big suggestions were /THF melee and definately a BRD (I hope we find one ). Oh, I should probably mention that this is our 3rd run. I just hope that we can keep up this kind of attendence.

[Hapernack]

I guess I should consider my group lucky since it looks like reliable attendance seems to be a problem for a lot of folks. Our static so far has yet to miss or cancel a run due to someone in the group not being there. Our farming runs were ok (except Arrapago... need practice there) but our bosses went like this:
(We're not totally new to salvage, we'd done a few failed runs before. The only one to win any runs in this group so far has been myself.)

-LBC Attempt #1: Hundred FIsted 2x MNK with nothing but full support from the 6 mages. Engaged with 15 min left. Timed out at 45%.
-LAC Attempt #1: Tried same strat as on LBC. Engaged with 25 min left but Brainjack had so much of a time-sink effect we timed out at 35%.
-LBC Attempt #2: Tried the MNK strat again but we ended up with too much strain on healers which ended up in a wipe. Reformed and put one MNK at a time on LBC and if one died, switched them out. BLM Nuke support as well. Engaged originally with 35 min remaining, second time with 20 min remaining. TImed out at 32%.
-LBC Attempt #3: DId the 1 MNK at a time alternating strat again. Engaged with 40 min remaining. Hate got screwed somewhere though and LBC went rampant when the 1st MNK went down and he almost immediately launched missiles which greatly delayed us. Time out at 29%.

As you can tell we've tried a lot of things and I just can't figure out quite what we're doing wrong... the MNKs have been using a Counter-tank setup so I guess I'll have them change that to a pure DD setup but I just don't see how that could make such a huge difference.

[aurik]

As I said, LBC is the hardest of the bosses. He's the only one I've seen use triple-attack. Once you figure out how to handle Brainjack, LAC is a joke--just he takes longer because Brainjack sessions slow you down a lot.

Using counterstance with slow and elegy on is just wholly not needed. With duo-tanking, both monks should be able to keep nearly 100% shadow coverage if they're good at sharing. I only use the ability for a spike of hate if necessary, and turn it off if I feel like I'm being too much of a damage sponge.

[ubermonkey]

3 RDM/WHM 1 MNK/NIN 1 NIN/WAR 1 PLD/WAR 1 COR 2 SAM/NIN 1 WAR/NIN 1 BLU.

I was the Nin in this setup, and from my experience, the problem I had was setting hate on myself, one or 2 hits and I lost hate to a rdm healer. With a brd double marching I'm pretty confident I can keep shadows up enough to solo tank it most of the time, but I'm really not confident about my hate being strong enough to keep it off mages should I take an unlucky TP move etc.

I was wearing a mostly def/-damage gear set, aiming for 420 def, and eating pestacora. My melee damage just wasn't high enough like this, but switching to more DD oriented seems like I'll just get pasted really quickly.

I'm thinking about bringing /drk next time if we have a brd, since i can set my hate threshold much higher and let mages cut loose a little more.

[aurik]

After a few combat rounds, our tanks never lose hate to the mages. And this is generally using DD tanks which wear no +enmity.

I want to know what your RDMs were doing to take hate so fast.

Gear your ninja to deal damage, and that may give you better hate than going with a +enmity tanking hit.

[Chupunpupun]

After a few combat rounds, our tanks never lose hate to the mages. And this is generally using DD tanks which wear no +enmity.

I want to know what your RDMs were doing to take hate so fast.

Gear your ninja to deal damage, and that may give you better hate than going with a +enmity tanking hit.

I dont' see a WHM with them so probably casting Cure 4

[Odog]

If the boss chariots were 1 hr fights like say Tiamat then Enmity builds are good, but fights that last 20mins the only way to hold hate is gonna be with damage. There are times that our whms and rdms have to sling quite a few cures and never get hate unless things like homing missile, brainjack. As long as your DD tanks can do a reasonable good job on shadow tanking and slow, elegy, para, blind are on reliably DD tank is gonna make u much happier.

[aurik]

After a few combat rounds, our tanks never lose hate to the mages. And this is generally using DD tanks which wear no +enmity.

I want to know what your RDMs were doing to take hate so fast.

Gear your ninja to deal damage, and that may give you better hate than going with a +enmity tanking hit.

I dont' see a WHM with them so probably casting Cure 4

This is why you get RDMs that use cure3.

[Amastacia]

After a few combat rounds, our tanks never lose hate to the mages. And this is generally using DD tanks which wear no +enmity.

I want to know what your RDMs were doing to take hate so fast.

Gear your ninja to deal damage, and that may give you better hate than going with a +enmity tanking hit.

I dont' see a WHM with them so probably casting Cure 4

This is why you get RDMs that use cure3.

Oh shit, better leave me home then. >.>

Just don't cast Cure IV until the tanks get a WS in, and for the first 30% or so cast in -Enmity and life is good. After that, it doesn't matter worth a damn with competent tanks.

On topic...

Got to NIN for Salvage for the first time in forever, it worked okay as a DD, but I'd leave me home for a MNK anyway. I'm pretty good at the whole DD tanking thing, but with MNKs like Aurik around, there's no point in bringing any traditional "tank" job since "cheerleader" becomes more appropriate. I carried my weight as a DD, but a competent BB MNK instead of me would've been a better choice.

[Ryushii]

Ok well, first we didn't have the best RDM assigned to Uber. He barely paralynad or erased him at all. Second, Uber (the NIN) didn't have STR unlocked. We got unlucky and only got 1 STR cell from the first floor chest and none from the stat cells mobs. The MNK had it unlocked. A BRD would have helped, and I think now that the other RDMs have a better idea of what they're doing (I've done boss fights alot and stole hate maybe once the entire fight during all the deaths), it will be alot easier. As for bringing a MNK instead of a NIN, I find it hard to find: 1) a good MNK with consistent attendence, and 2) a good MNK/NIN with consistent attendence. From what I saw, the MNK we had with us was doing a good job, but it isn't like we can exactly just shout in whitegate: "Hey! Salvage LS is looking for a BB MNK with very good gear that can blink tank and possibly has a relic!" Also, I went almost the whole fight spamming cure3/2. Don't see why with 3-4 healers you should really need to cast anything else except in an emergency.

[Waef]

I was thinking, how do you think 2 monks would work with 2 bards for them? They could have minuets (or a minuet + madrigal if they needed it while eating meat) as well as the 2 marches that would allow them to have halved recasts. Seems like it would help a lot with the hate issue, and time needed to kill. Then you just need healers to back them up, and you could throw in black mages for even more damage if you wanted. Do you think it would work well?