Mnk in Salvage

[Almalexia]

The only times I am without Counterstance in Salvage are when my JAs are locked or when I'm fighting AC. I can't remember a time in eleven months when so many uncountered melee attacks were the reason for my demise that would not have killed me if CS was down.

Unguarded doublecrits right after a Discharge, Utsusemi having been paralyzed, in my Bhaflau Remnants? It's more likely than you think.

[Tyche]

I look at this a lot like I looked at the old bahamut 2 tanking argument. Fire resist vs -damage, MDB, and +HP. A chance of resist (albeit high chance) is awesome and easy on the mages when it works, but if one gets unresisted and you sacrificed HP gear to sub in that resist gear, then good fucking chance you are dead. On the other hand, I'll take my guaranteed (well, barring natural counter/evade) 800 damage and 100% survival rate.

[aurik]

1) shit is situational. Judge whether CS makes your group better or worse. On bosses I use it situationally, not 100% and not 0%. On the way up I use it almost 100%.

2) wtf @ the poster that blinked 15 attacks and took 27. I've been keeping tabs on our boss fights recently, and with no rdm debuffs (we go whm+brd) we take on the order of 5-10 hits total over the course of a 10+ minute fight. L2shihei.

[Zilong]

The only times I am without Counterstance in Salvage are when my JAs are locked or when I'm fighting AC. I can't remember a time in eleven months when so many uncountered melee attacks were the reason for my demise that would not have killed me if CS was down.

Unguarded doublecrits right after a Discharge, Utsusemi having been paralyzed, in my Bhaflau Remnants? It's more likely than you think.

I honestly can't remember an LBC where both of the tank is alive and well by the time it's dead.

LBC is fucking fun like that.

[Zanz L. Barre The 3rd]

Use acc rings instead of STR (Rajas is acceptable).

Use a +Att earring instead of +STR.

WS in O. Hat, Potent/ Life Belt, and a 2nd +Att earring over Brutal earring.

I wouldn't recommend counter-tanking; with march x2 + haste, keeping shadows up is pretty manageable even when solo tanking, not to mention an absolute joke when dual tanking. Obviously cast Ichi when Chariot begins to WS (this is a pretty common idea, atleast I'd hope) so you'll have shadows up right after it strips yours. I generally use Sushi when it comes to bosses (I only have 3 H2H merits), but Att. Food is manageable if you have a decent sum of Acc. gear and H2H merits.

All in all, Chariots are really fun and easy to tank when you've got reliable support; us MNKs rely on excellent WHMs more so than other tanks in these situations, so pray you've got a good WHM buddy! :3

[Churchill]

1) shit is situational. Judge whether CS makes your group better or worse. On bosses I use it situationally, not 100% and not 0%. On the way up I use it almost 100%.

2) wtf @ the poster that blinked 15 attacks and took 27. I've been keeping tabs on our boss fights recently, and with no rdm debuffs (we go whm+brd) we take on the order of 5-10 hits total over the course of a 10+ minute fight. L2shihei.

[Wizerd]

Having tried both, I suggest not using Sushi on boss chariots (or anything in Salvage, to be honest). The damage may be slightly more over time if you don't have merits in Hand-to-Hand, but the chariot seems to unload about twice as many TP moves on you. When I'm tanking, I use meat and I make my partner tank use meat, and the only time we find TP spam an issue with shadows is under 25%. Before that, we're able to do the Ichi for TP moves, and it's always up again when we need it (and this is without 2 marches, I only use 1 March, often a Minuet for the second song). Around 25%, I often stop casting shadows between TP moves, and just wait for the next TP move before recasting, because it's silly to waste shadow timers like that. AC is an exception, where he can own you pretty fast without shadows up.

Also,

100 fists puts you at the melee haste cap, so no need for haste gears

I'm not sure how much truth there is to this, or why you think this, but from my experience HF most definitely does not put you at the melee Haste cap.

Previous attempts at solo HF or HFing with Slow on make me cringe ever doing Hundred Fists without at least Haste. Also, if you try HF at level 1 without more than 1 Martial Arts trait, it's quite evident that you don't hit nearly as much. I always leave my normal TP gear on for HF, and still use my WS macro for Asuran Fists (although I agree Boost is silly during HF and I don't use that).

A more studied MNK can correct me if I'm wrong about HF, but there better be some proof out there for it.


One more thing: If you don't put Counterstance up when using Fanatic's Drink, you're stupid. ^.^

[Whatinthe]

2) wtf @ the poster that blinked 15 attacks and took 27. I've been keeping tabs on our boss fights recently, and with no rdm debuffs (we go whm+brd) we take on the order of 5-10 hits total over the course of a 10+ minute fight. L2shihei.

That's nice. With a 10+ minute fight for that run, we would've timed out, since we were 10 min going into LBC. As I said before, I used 2x100 fist in that fight, that meant a good 2 minute out of that 6 I was not casting -semi. Without Counterstance, I would've been lucky to counter 2 hits that fight (usually under 7-8% counter rate) as opposed to 50%+ counter rate with.

Maybe you have better co-tanks than mine, that can actually share hate, but this wasn't my regular salvage group so the tanking was 65/35%. Actually, my regular salvage group also has a problem, one MNK doesn't have the gear or skill to keep hate properly and shows up infrequently, and the other MNK who is decent decides he doesn't like MNK and comes as DRK or WAR...

[Odd]

min/mar and meat forever
rarely use counterstance anymore on bosses, getting hit by 2 unlucky attack rounds and getting floored because you have cs up sucks

[Elipse]

Some great responses here. Learning quite a bit. I never used counterstance while farming but I'm going to give it a try tonight. I don't think I want to tank chariots with counterstance. I would rather just take it safe. I'm sure its a never ending debate and I appreciate the feedback on it.

If I'm not mistaken 25% haste from gear and 25% from march 2 + haste would put me at the haste cap for recast anyway so switching to minute should be no problem. I'm going to try that tonight if I get enough haste gear unlocked.

As for meat vs sushi, I'm a little unsure. I guess this is another debate that could go onto 15 pages but I would like to see if people could give a little more feedback specifically related to chariots. He has capped hand to hand merits and I'm sure I could go looking for more acc gear for him. When you go meat on chariots are you using accuracy gear like Optical hat and Potent belt during TP gain or the usual merit party build with haste and acc where you can slot it in?

Also on this note, please forgive the real noobie question here. What is the base TP return on Asuran Fists supposed to be? I noticed a bunch of 13-14% tp returns on AC last night when I tanked it with sushi. Which btw, went very smoothly except I had very little gear unlocked. (weapons, body, hands, legs feet)

[aurik]

2) wtf @ the poster that blinked 15 attacks and took 27. I've been keeping tabs on our boss fights recently, and with no rdm debuffs (we go whm+brd) we take on the order of 5-10 hits total over the course of a 10+ minute fight. L2shihei.

That's nice. With a 10+ minute fight for that run, we would've timed out, since we were 10 min going into LBC. As I said before, I used 2x100 fist in that fight, that meant a good 2 minute out of that 6 I was not casting -semi. Without Counterstance, I would've been lucky to counter 2 hits that fight (usually under 7-8% counter rate) as opposed to 50%+ counter rate with.

Maybe you have better co-tanks than mine, that can actually share hate, but this wasn't my regular salvage group so the tanking was 65/35%. Actually, my regular salvage group also has a problem, one MNK doesn't have the gear or skill to keep hate properly and shows up infrequently, and the other MNK who is decent decides he doesn't like MNK and comes as DRK or WAR...

You still fail for taking twice as many hits as you blinked away. At that point, why not just go /war for the DA+zerk?

[LD]

If all hits land, TP return from AF should be 15-16 with Destroyers.

[Judai]

I personally use 2 meat and 1 sushi for Salvage. Meat otw up and Sushi for the Chariot. Even with 7 H2H merits the one time I used meat on a Chariot I whiffed away. With Sushi I swap in Rajas for the S4 lktore TP and don't have to worry about tanking in Osode for extra Def and such.

[Zanz L. Barre The 3rd]

As for meat vs sushi, I'm a little unsure. I guess this is another debate that could go onto 15 pages but I would like to see if people could give a little more feedback specifically related to chariots. He has capped hand to hand merits and I'm sure I could go looking for more acc gear for him. When you go meat on chariots are you using accuracy gear like Optical hat and Potent belt during TP gain or the usual merit party build with haste and acc where you can slot it in?

No, stick with haste gear and use meat. You might want to switch to O. hat if anything, but that's mostly gonna' be based on how much you invest in accuracy gear.

Also on this note, please forgive the real noobie question here. What is the base TP return on Asuran Fists supposed to be? I noticed a bunch of 13-14% tp returns on AC last night when I tanked it with sushi. Which btw, went very smoothly except I had very little gear unlocked. (weapons, body, hands, legs feet)

15 typically, 16 w/ rajas/brutal.

[Tyche]

As far as BRD songs go, I much much much prefer march/minuet over march/march for chariots. March/march has me attacking so fucking fast, the TP gain is sometimes disruptive despite the lower recast times, especially since the mob's "damage taken":"Tp gained" ratio is so distanced.

[Wizerd]

As far as BRD songs go, I much much much prefer march/minuet over march/march for chariots. March/march has me attacking so fucking fast, the TP gain is sometimes disruptive despite the lower recast times, especially since the mob's "damage taken":"Tp gained" ratio is so distanced.

This is why we don't do 2 marches. You're not gaining anymore timer recast, so why give the mob more TP you can't handle as good?


I have another quick question for people who've done this: We're doing Bhaflau tonight, with no boss, just Ramparts, 1F+2F if 1F is up, and 2F+3F if not. I want to try and fit in a full 3F if we can in the first case. I'm considering having MNKs sub WAR tonight, but that might make the two triples on 3F hurt a bunch. The rest of the run isn't a concern because we don't really cast shadows during a Rampart anyway, and stats aren't exactly a necessity when you're only killing a bunch of weak mobs.

I was thinking 20-25 minutes 1F including killing Mad Bomber, 7-8 minutes to pop 2F Rampart, and 7-8 minutes to pop 3F Rampart, which should leave us with the full 20 minutes for each Rampart, I think.

[Alleya]

Hm. Seems I do things a little differently from most.

I've tanked chariots ever since we started doing them, I don't think we've ever done one without me, and I've tried basically every setup I thought would work. This is about, uh, ~45+ bosses, maybe Kuno can correct me on that.

For me the best setup has been mixing haste with counter. Setup:

Cross-counters
Turban
F. Torque
eth/brutal
Togi
Melee gloves (will be usukane when I get them )
Acc rings
Cerberus mantle (enmity etc)
Black belt
B.haidate
Melee gaiters +1 (hp, cstance, etc)

Eat sushi, get double march from the bard (we don't have other people melee it so TP isn't really a problem, rather have the extra dot while not having the mages worry about more than the 2 tanks)

I find that on all bosses the counter rate is far greater than I had anticipated. I can almost entirely rely on counters to pull me through shadow casts. I get far more counters off than chariots get hits, so that seems like a pretty ideal setup to me. Healers only have to focus on the aoe damage and the odd hit from the boss.

I keep hades sainti on hand to use if hate becomes a problem (usually never does).

I've tried def tanking, haste tanking, evasion, pure counter, but this setup has definitely been the most successful for me and the least stressful for the mages. :3

[Elipse]

So are you using counter stance with that set up Alleya?

[Gathzel]

Hmm, interesting read this, apparently people do things with MNK quite differently...

As for my own experience, I always use sushi and ask for min/march to keep my attack up decently, and also use counterstance. Against LBC I get hit extremely seldom this way, and I don't recall ever being hit with a triple attack shadowless and not countering at least 2 of them. Either way the vast majority of damage taken comes from Discharge and Inertia stream. On top of that, *usually* we have body boosts saved up for the boss, meaning some 2400 HP with normal tp gear. That's a pretty safe margin even if you have bad luck as long as your WHMs aren't completely baka.

I think I'd agree however that if LBC is reliably elegied/slow 2/para it would make counterstance tanking, and thus sushi, less meaningful as you won't find yourself without shadows particularly much if you don't suck... I guess I just think of the former strategy as "safer"...

[Churchill]

Cross counters, I may go and try to get them from the Shadow to try that, I usually use the same setup but with Destroyers and counter through shadows being down.