Quick SSR question.

[Kaylia]

Ok... I started leading a Salvage group, we've done pretty good so far. Tonight will be our first SSR run. I have a bit of experience in this zone, but just happen to have 1 question.

We plan on going East on F1 and skipping Hammerblow, then doing SE on F2 and doing Powderkeg. This means we will be on South section of F3. In the central area, is it possible for us to go East and do GG3, then go back west to the porter so on F4 we can skip and go straight to LAC? Or once I open the East door for GG3, the West one locks? That way we dont gotta mess with the chariot on F4 (we don't wanna do CC tonight).

Thanks.

First thing I've to say, dont skip Hammerblow. Unless none of you can equip it, you have more than enough time to beat Hammerblow, Powderkeg, GGs and mega in a single run. We generally have 10+ min left when we are done with this zone taking that path with 7 people.

It always takes a few weeks (at least 6-7 runs with same people) before the group learn how to handle the zone. You might do few mistakes at first, but it's better on a long run to learn how to do it properly, then skip NM and do an half assed job most of the time.


Not sure if it will help you, and Suiram pointed most of those already, but here is how we do it.

First floor:
The only difficulty on this floor is the 6 fomors pull. It's not that hard, but if people arent paying attention, they can make you waste lot of time. Basically, have anyone (thief works, but I do it on blm) pull with range from max radius(if you got a 2nd one), blood aggro it from 20 radius or just walk it and sneak aggro (10 radius) or run back to entrance. Unless your kiter get owned by bind, he should be able to run away and unaggro everything. For safety purpose, have him use a Dusty Reraise scroll you got from one of the 4-8 chest. Right after the pull, have 2 of your melee pull the fomor in the south end of the room, where you can fight them without linking/aggroing the other. With new group, make sure everyone is out of the way before doing the pull...saw too many people afk there.

Also, make sure to give the 4th and 5th magic to melee tank. Mobs on next floor fucking hurt, and nothing good will come out of tank without magic. If you're taking hammerblows path, clear 1-2 rooms at most

Second floor:
Very easy again, but fomor linking with imp and imp linking with fomor is going to get you eventually. If the group is on their toes, it's easy to avoid any damage caused by link if the puller kite the fomor away while the group kill the imp. Mage need to be careful with resting aggro on link. At this point, you should have around 50min when this floor is cleared. (20min to kills 1-2 room +6 fomor + NM, 25-30 to clear the whole fomor room)


Third floor:
Everyone need to hurry up to pass the first room. Rampart will pop undead dog 1min after you zone up, and if you dont want to bother with sneak, you need to start running as soon your up.
GGs is easy, as long you have 2melee on it. Adding a 3rd might cause mp issue (unless its 3 mnk with penance)
Timer should be around 70min once you kill GGs

Fourth floor:
Have someone with flee run to portal, other people can go for additional cells while waiting, and build tp for mega.

Fifth floor:
Dont suck at kiting charmed people and mega


It's probably doable to hit all 4 NM and mega in the same run, but start with 3 for now. Going for 2 +mega is a waste of point imo.

[Munkey]

when we're doing powderkeg on floor two, we only clear the first 2 rooms on the 1st floor (hammerblow path) because you know your going to get an asston of cells on the next floor, you dont need one specific job to kite the 6, a thf with no abilitys no HP and no movement + can do it just fine, just make sure who ever is going to do it do a few things,


1. have rr on
2. get a Vicar's Drink
3 get a Dusty Potion
4 get a Hi pot
5. get aDusty Milk

all from the chest, just run in a aggro them and run like hell, never stop, dont try to kite it around the pilar room just keep running, eventually you'll lose aggro use your potions to get your hp back then reaggro the fomors as nessasary. It's not that big of a deal, one thing though. if you die quickly have your mages cross the hammer blow room because if not then the fomors that were on you, pat right onto your mages, thats never good


you can just supertank these, phalanx II makes them hit like a pussy but we just usually have one person run em away. Different things work for different people but with practice you can start shaving time off.


you can easily do Hammerblow> powder keg > Gyro 3 > CC> BOss in one run, we've done it many times with just 8 people

[Koga]

Maybe it's my PT setup but I have been unable to get my group to kill all those NM's and still ahve time for boss.

Current Setup:
WHM RNG COR RDM RDM MNK MNK WAR THF

Gonna drop the WHM pretty soon and have a RNG in place of that so not sure if that gonna help but seems like we can kill 2~3 NM and thats it. we usually run out of time.

Do you guys gear tanks 100% first on these runs or spread them amoung the DPS?

[Wizerd]

Maybe it's my PT setup but I have been unable to get my group to kill all those NM's and still ahve time for boss.

Current Setup:
WHM RNG COR RDM RDM MNK MNK WAR THF

Gonna drop the WHM pretty soon and have a RNG in place of that so not sure if that gonna help but seems like we can kill 2~3 NM and thats it. we usually run out of time.

Do you guys gear tanks 100% first on these runs or spread them amoung the DPS?

Gear 1 melee at a time to maximize damage, and get a bard. <_< You'd think COR would be ok but when you're using 1 roll on Subtle Blow on the higher floors and the other on Chaos, you're missing out on a nice chunk of haste.

[Kaylia]

Maybe it's my PT setup but I have been unable to get my group to kill all those NM's and still ahve time for boss.

Current Setup:
WHM RNG COR RDM RDM MNK MNK WAR THF

Gonna drop the WHM pretty soon and have a RNG in place of that so not sure if that gonna help but seems like we can kill 2~3 NM and thats it. we usually run out of time.

Do you guys gear tanks 100% first on these runs or spread them amoung the DPS?

Melee #1, melee #2, melee #3, rdm, free lot usually. There is a few exception here and there depending of the zone and pieces, but we generally try to gears 3 melees ad rdm for enfeebling on mega. Weapon on brd is important to land elegy too.

[Koga]

I know one time we had a friend of a friend come along for a run just because they had never been and it was nice having MNK MNK RDM BRD COR and they were unstoppable. One of the RDM's can switch to BRD but last time we did that we ran a bit short on healing because we had lots of melee and not a lot of healing.

I figured the excess melee on NM's that don't need it and what not just by one time with just the MNK MNK COR BRD RDM WHM working on the boss we got it down to 65% and then when we hit a brainjack phase and I sent other melee in to kite it thats where it went down.

[Ahlah]

Just did SSR last night with 9 ppl:
MNKx2, DRG, THF, NIN/DNC (me), RDM, BRD, WHM, BLM

Cleared HB > PK > GG3 > Turtle > LAC with less than 5 mins left, the SSR run before we entered with 10 ppl - 3 MNK, I was on SMN and we killed turtle with 8mins left.

Initially I only plan on using NIN/DNC as 3rd tank to hold PK placeholder so that our THF can fast pull without getting himself killed. Was really surprised how fast mobs went down so I looked up for more information on DNC debuffs and this is what I found:
Box step - first level 5% defense down, and 2% for each successive level, total 13%
Desperate Flourish - according to wiki, weight effect reduces mob evasion by 5%

Dia2 (10%) + lv5 Boxstep (13%) + Angon (20%) drop mobs defense by 43%, with Feint + Desperate Flourish, both MNK and DRG were shredding through fomor and gears like cheese. Actually I didn't get to hold mobs well as NIN/DNC since Animated Flourish is a lot weaker than Provoke, however we managed to clear all NMs + megaboss even after our BRD d/ced for 5 mins and both DRG and WHM were killed inside PK room at some point.

I actually joined the MNK tanks to melee LAC. Box step landed everytime but I don't think Desparate Flourish stick once. A naked NIN/DNC has 30% subtle blow effect (25% JT and 5% merit), high evasion and make excellent DD/debuff hybrid job. Curing Waltz II is fairly weak but it works really well on first floor. Healing Waltz get rid of Fomor dancing chain drown effect and I did manage to remove paralyze after getting bit by Discharge a few time.

[Shassira]

Don't get me wrong, it's nice that you like nin/dnc, but the reason mobs died fast was likely to be because of the amount of melee you had. That's 5 melee hitting a mob, those mobs are weak as hell (we've done a couple 4 man runs in this area), so it's no surprisse they die in seconds with so many. Also, if they died so fast, i somewhat doubt you actualy finished the five steps Boxstep needs to to be caped.
Personaly, i see NIN as a pointless job in salvage, assuming you can come another job that has more use. Bosses don't need a NIN, in fact i'd say it's a horrible tank compared to mnk.

As for /dnc, it's a good choice for really small groups, but i've never considered it seriously for big ones. Not that we do anything big if we can avoid it anyway.

[Ahlah]

I am not a big fan of NIN/DNC myself to be honest and I still think NIN/DNC is only suitable for this zone esp if you take SE route on 2nd floor.

The week before my last SSR run we entered wtih 10 ppl instead of 9 - MNKx3, DRG, THF, SMN, RDM, WHM, BLM, BRD and ended up killing turtle with only 8 mins left. By replacing MNK + SMN with a NIN/DNC we actually cleared all the NMs and LAC with 5 min left, the difference is so significant I was really shocked myself by the time we finished SSR.

It did worry me initiatlly, NIN/DNC obviously need weapon/SJ/JA/magic to work but it turned out to be fine since popping PK basically net us all the cells we need. I think what could have helped us is the fact that using NIN/DNC as a mob holder allows our thf to pull nonstop esp in PK room, we had several links and I held adds until party killed imp. I also notice mobs seem to go down faster, took us around 9mins to clear GG3 and by the time we killed all 4 ramparts + chariot gear train was still on the other side of the map which is unsual for us.

Having MNKx2 and NIN/DNC on LAC helps a lot too. I can imagine a Kikoku NIN/DNC will be even better, with proper gear and additional effect from Metsu NIN will have capped sublte blow at 50%. Our THF actually has kikoku but he is the only one with TH4 who can play THF in our group, and hopefully we can get him to come NIN/DNC to test the job combo properly.

p/s: Will be nice if you can share with us your 4 man party setup and farming route for this zone.

[Shassira]

I guess i should clear up that i wasn't implying we did the whole route with 6 people, was just mentioning that we usualy send a group of 4 to farm NMs in that zone (either Dekka or Powder's) because i hate sending 10 people to a single zone, and depending on the setup they finish GG3 or time out before it, so it's nothing special as you can imagine. Was just trying to ilustrate that i didn't think these mobs were specialy strong, refering the fomors. The imps in Dekka's path are another deal x.x;

Anyway, every group has their own style of play, so whatever works for one group can or cannot work for others, so it wasn't my intention to lower the validity it of it, wanted just to point out a couple things to consider. What we do when we link a mob from Powder's room is hold the imp with a BST pet, since we always bring a bst to this area, as it's part of our 6 man strategy for LAC (on another note, it's a rather weak DD for the run compared to others, but it's lovely if you do Dekka's path as the pet will follow and usualy claim the running Imp in 3FN before any of us can catch it). I'd probably give /dnc more chances if it didn't happen that most of our members don't even have it

[Ahlah]

Just did SSR last night with 10 - MNKx2, DRG, THF, NIN/WAR, RDMx2, WHM, BRD, BLM, killed turtle with 9 mins left, kicked from zone when LAC is at 13% hp.

I was on RDM last night, will be doing SSR again on Sunday.