Tier10 Assault

[rithridan]

Is the following normal for Better then One? (cerb):

Completely immune to all debuffs unless applied with ES (even SV elegy2 resisted);
GoH at will (also above 25%);
roar does not pop/depop elementals 100% (only popped at <20% when we were zerging the last %'s)

[MarkM.]

Is the following normal for Better then One? (cerb):

Completely immune to all debuffs unless applied with ES (even SV elegy2 resisted);
GoH at will (also above 25%);
roar does not pop/depop elementals 100% (only popped at <20% when we were zerging the last %'s)

Nope, that bitched roared as we agro'd and popped eles, trained away from the pt and died. Then he roared 10 seconds later and depopped. Wiped once and RR'd and was able to kill him, even after he spawned a 2nd set of eles. I landed slow and slow 2 np as rdm/drk. I have everything but the sea cape for enfeebling magic + stats along with earth acc merits. And I dont know where this was posted but I'll go ahead and say it here too. A Rdm [b]can[b] stun GoH just like on a normal cerb.

[rithridan]

same situation again this time, he roars but doesn't pop elementals; is practicly immune to all debuffs; spams GoH as if its the only WS he has...

[rithridan]

We did it one last time again yesterday and finally got a win. It howled 4 times for us, I'm not entirely sure what the first 2 howls did but the 3rd howl popped the elementals and the 4th howl made him start to spam gates of hades. The first two tries also had elementals pop really late but he started spamming gates of hades a lot earlier.

From this I assume that each of his howls give him a special effect:
1. pop fire elementals
2. unlock/spam GoH
3. extreme resistance to debuffs(?)
4. increased attackspeed/power(?) thats what our tanks mentioned, though it could be due to slow/elegy2 worn off and unable to reapply.

[Mala]

I think one of his howl effects = 100% magic resistance.

When i did this fight he howled right as a blm was casting burstII(or whatever element he was using), and the spell was flat out resisted (Black Shuck resists the spell!).

[Okuza]

Cerberus has VERY high resists. He outright resists all my debuffs at 310 ninjutsu skill. Hojo is with raiton effect & estaff, too (341 effective skill). I just upgraded to t-staff (356 effective, 386 with raiton effect). We'll see if he still resists then.

It's not his howls that give him extreme resistance. He's born that way. There were a couple tries where he didn't howl until he was down near 50% hp. Full resist on every single debuff attempt. His howl rate seems to be totally random, not TP driven or due to damage. We've had him howl before we even hit him once; ELs were summoned while everyone was still running past to the tunnel fight spot. We've had him wait till 50%. I don't have moon-phase data, but with him being so dog/wolf-like, I wouldn't dismiss the moon as a potential influence on his howl rates.

The one attempt where we tried more melee on him didn't increase his howls. It did greatly increase his spits, though.

[Rocl]

I think one of his howl effects = 100% magic resistance.

When i did this fight he howled right as a blm was casting burstII(or whatever element he was using), and the spell was flat out resisted (Black Shuck resists the spell!).

He resists spells like that when he's in the howl animation afaik

[Okuza]

Still couldn't stick Hojo on Cerberus even with 386 (effective) skill. However, with Raiton earth-down effect, our WHM stuck ES+Slow on him. Finally beat the dog. The key is definitely pong tanking. The only DD we had on him was nin/war and mnk/nin bouncing hate. Even with the ELs causing a few issues for our BLM and a Gates sneaking past unstunned, it was a relatively easy fight using two blink tanks. Killed him with 14m remaining. Party was nin/war, mnk/nin, whm x2, blm, thf/nin. The thf/nin was dual-boxed with one of our whm and didn't do much at all -- just pulled ELs in for the BLM.

[Byrd]

My Assault static took on T10 Mamook (Orochi/Hydra) tonight for the first time since clearing it easily six weeks or so ago. Between tail twitching and Physical Shield, we spent two-thirds or more of our time not being able to do anything to him, as our BLM couldn't do enough damage due to tanks not being able to do damage for hate. Eventually, we ran out of some combination of HP, MP and time. I'm guessing we just got ridiculously unlucky, and I think partly I'm looking to vent, but has anyone else had this problem since the update? It sounds like other people had weird things happen right after the update with regards to some of these Assaults, I thought I would compare notes.

[Hoshiku]

My static tried Orochi on Sunday. It seemed like he was spamming tremble something fierce. Our first attempt was mnk war nin rdm whm blm. With only one two-hander Orochi often had all three heads and so the blm was somewhat useless. We got Orochi down to 13% before all mages were out of mp and he started spamming nerve gas which was game over -.- The mnk had to go and so we replaced him with a sam, the whm switched to rdm and we tried again. Although Orochi had fewer heads that time around we still wiped at 15% when both rdm were out of mp and convert was down for both of them. If the tremble spam had been a little slower so that the melee could have had shadows up for every tremble I think this assault would have been fine. As is we're planning to try again next week with a ton of hi-ethers and we're going to hunt down a brd for our sixth spot.

[Okuza]

Try Orochi with fewer melee or with MNK-Roll from a COR. We were lucky enough to have a COR for MNK+THF rolls. We cut off two heads almost instantly. The wiki says they "grow back very fast", but for us they just stayed stumps spurting blood until around 20% hp (almost the entire fight). Nin or sub/nin cotanking works great on this one and really cuts down on healing needed.

It's really easy to have "too much DD" on this fight, which mostly just turns into "too much TP on Orochi" and healers with very sore MP-bars.

[Sulfurus]

Orochi appears to have tp regain now. After back to back Nerve Gas I was the only tank left (War/Nin) and it was still spamming physical shield. After going into tail thrash mode, it used back to back Serpentine Tail, I was turned away from it during this period. Needless to say, I died;;

[Geddoe]

Just curious has anyone tried to tank cerb from rear(granted if you can position it without it doing draw in)? Will it disable it using those fire based moves and use that rear tp move that can be absorbed by shadows?

Reason for asking cos those fire moves are pretty nasty to deal with for my group and well when my group did khimaira we found tanking from rear worked a treat to avoid the petrify breath move.

[Blackmoore]

Just curious has anyone tried to tank cerb from rear(granted if you can position it without it doing draw in)? Will it disable it using those fire based moves and use that rear tp move that can be absorbed by shadows?

My group attempted to do cerb tank from rear. We weren't able to position it where he was unable to draw him in... That's not to say it's not possible, but we weren't able to do it.

We managed to win the last night before they patched 'Better than One.' We had a NIN/WAR tanking him, a RDM, WHM, PLD/NIN for aggroing / kiting elementals, and 2 BLM's who were basically the lion's share of the damage. We had it much easier meleeburning it originally, just had bad luck with elementals / GOH. Since melee were unable to hit when his evasion got wonky, we switched to doing it manaburn(ish) and got him closer every time. If your tank has a fire build, have them use that, and pray a few debuffs stick like slow. It makes it SO much easier. Good luck on this assault. This one made us Captain when we finished it.

[Amok]

My group tried Sushanoo Shuffle and Bloody Rondo last night after finishing our last SL Assault. None of the static members had any experience fighting Hydra, and we went in kind of unprepared. THF and RNG being the only DD's we were killing it very slowly. Eventually a combination of serpentine tail and something else killed our tank then the rest of us. In tail mode it seemed to hit really hard and was wonderingif maybe pld/nin would be better than pld/war since we do have a BRD at our disposal. Is the Orochi the same as Hydra in that it's resistant to piercing damage?

We decided to kite dracula but were damaging it too slowly. The only thing that was good about it was that our survivability was pretty high, midway we decided to straight tank it (I hate it when you switch strategy on the fly, but it seemed necessary) which was working out ok until our tank got bat'd and a doppelganger showed up soon after. Is it best to just turn and kite as soon as he does Nocturnal Servitude? Dracula seemed immune to gravity and the doppelgangers have insane accuracy and resistant/immune to sleep. I think they were designed so you can't hold/ignore them. They do depop after a while. I bet most of you kill it before then but at one point I was the only one fighting the copy and then it just despawned unprompted. Near the end of the fight when we were running out of time Dracula was targetting me and used Eternal Damnation... which by all accounts (so far) is a sight-based/gaze attack Doom. Well, I'd like you to look at this and tell me if I was too slow to turn or if maybe it's not sight based after all.
http://www.youshare.com/hosting.php?fil ... 20doom.avi
Needless to say, we lost.

[Okuza]

The only FL that we single-tank is Rondo. We kite that one. It's a royal pain to kite because it takes so long, but eventually it dies. Typically takes us about 25m this way. If you have a lot of high burst-DD jobs, you can burn him down fast. When we try that, we always end up en-batted and wiped relatively quickly.

Everything else is pong-tank with 2x NIN or sub/nin. King we have one nin tank him in eva gear until the summons are dead and then we just DD him down. He's the easiest fight, imho, but they're all MUCH harder fights than any of the lower assaults. For difficulty, I'd rate 'em like this:

2*SL < King < Hydra < Khim < Dracula < 2*Cerberus.

Depending on your crew, you will probably shuffle the difficulty around a bit on the middle set. I don't think anyone finds Black Shuck (Cerbie) easier than the other FLs or any FLs easier than lower assaults, though. Dracula isn't really "hard", too. He's just long and thus has a lot more room for error than the rest.

[Alistaire]

Did Cerberus yesterday as BLM with another BLM. I have party damage filtered and other BLM goes "cast bliz", and at first I was like "wtf noob" and he said it did good so I gave it a shot, no resist. Ended up being the best element to cast, probably just from the int/skill bonus.

[Alistaire]

Intersesting. Dont know what I think about this Vampire drain/aspir gear set

While on drop topic: +5stat rings, what assaults confirmed to drop them?

The ones he meant were the r/e ones with salvage: stats not the new crafted ones. I got Epsilon Ring (int+5 salvage: magic acc+3 wind instrument+3) from Deserter (Ilrusi Atoll rank 8 ). Great ring unless you delevel, they're all 75. The DEX+5 salvage: double attack+2% would be particularly nice for salvage.

Edit: fixed (Ilrusi Atoll rank 8) -> (Ilrusi Atoll rank 8 ). Damn smileys.

[Amok]

We went back and beeat Dracula by using a combination of straight tanking and kiting when the PLD died or was charmed. It worked out well for the most part because when I was kiting as THF/NIN around the outside of the columns there was never any danger at all. So the PLD could unweaken for second go. Wasn't a very clean run but it's a win. If I were to do it again I'd say always kite when tank is charmed as part of the plan (on winning run it just happened ot turn out that way). Charmed bats are hella slow so no bind or sleep is even needed. Also, I'd have melee sub nin so they can kite when needed. That makes us 1/5 on FL's.

Cerberus is our next target and the howling has peaked my interest. The very first time it didn't pop elmentals and we took it down to 30%. Second time if did pop them on the first howl and after I magic aggrod them and ran away they stayed up for a long time, like 3 minutes. The howl that depopped them eventually didn't come as fast as some posts in this thread made it sound. So, third run was chaos but it didn't pop elementals again. So far I have never seen elementals pop on any howl except for the first one. Black Shuck doesn't use magma hoplon but CAN get blaze spikes after a howl. So my conclusion is that the howls can mean one of any number of things, buffs or elementals. It might be too soon to say, but I have yet to see elementals pop on second or third howl, so I'm guessing it only happens at the first howl or maybe jsut once in the whole fight. After analyzing the videos I took of the first and third runs I noticed that the howl seems to be based on HP%. It howls on aggro, at 75% and 50% and I'm guessing 25%, but we never got it down that far. Here's 'proof' http://www.youshare.com/hosting.php?fil ... 0final.avi

[Loren]

Has anyone experienced a problem with the first time AP bonus here?

I did Lebros rank 10 the other day, starting with 1050 Lebros AP.
We won, I received 2250 AP (expected result for first time + no band).

I thought to myself "yay, two Salvage tickets" but when I checked my Lebros total, it was 2550.
>:[