Pandemonium Warden - The aftermath theories.

[Colenzo]

I want to preface this by saying that I think adding an NM that you are expected to take 3/4 of a RL day or longer to kill is an entirely unreasonable thing for SE to do (twice now I guess).

But as far as people actually attempting to kill it anyway, the fight > sleep irl > fight > sleep irl > fight thing would actually probably be far less of a burden on the LS than a marathon all-at-once fight, at least for PW. You could conceivably fight it to, say, Acrolith form, kill the lamps then have teams of Lv1 + BRD sac PW overnight, in 1-2 hour shifts, then the next day get it to Vampyr form, kill lamps, and hold again over night, then finish it off the 3rd day. Dying and reraising 40 times and then handing off the responsibility to someone else wouldn't be nearly as rough as actively fighting for such a long time, provided you have 8 people willing to do it (maybe compensate them somehow lol).

>_> Get real, no video game should take that much effort.

[Suiram]

Did you read my first sentence? I'm not saying it should be that way, I was just comparing the two most likely avenues of approach.

[Colenzo]

Did you read my first sentence? I'm not saying it should be that way, I was just comparing the two most likely avenues of approach.

Yeah I did and I was going to edit it what I said. lol but yeah SE go fuck yourself D:<

[RKenshin]

God my sleep schedule is so fucked up now, I feel so exhausted/sick;.

I highly doubt titles have anything to do with this. Personally I never believed it to begin with, but another LS has also tried the theory only to meet failure. I just think this is meant to be a really sick kind of an endurance fight, as last night sort of proved.

Also, on that note I'd like to thank Richardd and his LS as well as others for a lot of the helpful information they gave on what to expect from their experiences. It made things a lot easier on us at the start, and if not for that we might not have made it as far as we did.

Oh, just 10 hours? Duh, np then!

If SE seriously, seriously designed this mob to be beaten in a minimum of 10 hours, with up towards 18+ hours or more being a possibility, they completely fail. It's a completely ridiculous concept that they would expect anyone at all to play for that long a stretch. Do people do this? Yes. But it should not be expected in order to beat this. Expecting their player base to sacrifice that much time on one fight will only alienate people instead. As many fucked up decisions they've made in the past, I refuse to believe they could be this retarded.

No chance, this NM is an absolute minimum of 17-20+ hours.

Damage to lamps is incredibly slow, you cannot get them to stand still. Transitions from each stage are also difficult, and you have to spend a lot of time resting in between each transition or you'll screw yourself over and wipe.

Every mob has horrible TP attacks that often either one-shot people or do massive AoE damage. And they spam them constantly. It doesn't matter how many people you run with, you will take a long time.

Even if we beat it, and despite knowing everything of what to expect, I don't see us ever beating it in less than 18 hours even with a full roster and help from another linkshell. Our damage was very good, we made almost no major mistakes, had a lot of very good recoveries, and this shit still took forever.

The 3 ToA HNMs alone are fucking ridiculous. Khim has access to Fullimation from the get go, runs at faster movement speed than normal, spams TP often, and resist stun more often. Hydra has all 3 heads and never loses them, giving him an incredible regen for the entire fight with really high defense. He also hits harder, can't be stunned, and has access to nerve gas from the start... And spams it. Cerberus has access to GoH from the start and while being the easiest of the three, is still a pain in the ass.

[Therin]

Holy shit. x_X

[Eanae]

Fuck you SE. Way to dig the grave of FFXI deeper.

[Starless]

Count again.

20 forms.

Count again. 20 jobs. Oh wait, AU team doesn't care about DNC and SCH. I forgot.

[ronin sparthos]

So SE basically says 'fuck it, more gear they want with NMs they cant beat'.

[miokomioko]

I just have to pretend I've never seen/heard of Shenlong's :\

[ronin sparthos]

So the Pandemonium Warden video will drop in 2012 then.

[nekura]

SE's solution to getting people away from ground kings: 18-20 hour long fights.

Sorry you guys had to endure such a long trial with the only positive result being that others won't waste their time with it.

[Sylphet]

Long post. Big Pics. Sorry.

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Three Questions:

1. Did you use titles to 'skip forms' of PW or did everyone just go 'as-is'?
2. Were the titles used if any, effective in doing anything to the forms present?
3. Does Pandemonium Warden 'say' anything when you spawned him, kinda like AV?

no no no

The title theory had already been tried and dis-proven by SapereAude so we didn't feel the need to re-test that. He doesn't say anything when popped, it's just a neverending chain of mobs that pops one after another. They all follow exactly the same pattern: PW pops in a unique form with 8 lamps. The forms are unique but the order in which you have to kill is the same. Lamps need to be taken out prior to killing this warden. Similar to past attempts, we had a single tank party that was kiting the warden with an outside alliance + around 2 other parties. One person would get claim on one of the lamps (NOT an easy thing to do in itself, and some of the forms the lamps un-claim easily). One person calls for help on the lamps and then the outside alliance kills it. This continues until all lamps are dead. When they are all dead, we had 2 outside parties ally with the warden and kill the warden. After that form is dead. it disappears and the Dverger form with the little ... whatever things (no f-ing clue what they are but they look like floating animated sperm) pops, does the aoe stun move, then disappears. The transition from one form of PW to the other was one of the trickiest things for us because we need to make sure tanks have hate on PW and the ally is dissolved but usually after a warden fight you're in a bit of a rough shape. It's not as simple as just making sure you're rested up before the next form because in the last 25% of the warden fights, all of the forms spam evil TP moves so it's not exactly easy to hold it while everyone recovers. There comes a point where you just have to kill it.

Here's an example of what the alliance looked like at the Hydra pop.
http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i3...t/Hydrapop.jpg

This fight is particularly brutal because you have to come with a balanced group. It's not like going in to fight one NM or even one type of NM. You'd be totally screwed to go in with an unbalanced group. You can't plan PW per se because you're dealing with so many different types of mobs you have to deal with everything.

We really thought we had something when the "final" form popped because the chairs had transformed and warden was damagable.
http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i3.../FinalForm.jpg

Here's a shot of the TP move the "final" form PW lamps uses:
http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i3...drisShriek.jpg

We were willing to stay up to push through the final form but then at 75% it did an astral flow type move where lamps were summoned, then we thought they were gone because we saw some disappear but only some disappeared. The rest started casting -gas etc on us.
http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i3.../75percent.jpg

It would have been one thing if he didn't regen back up to 100 but it did. We don't know of any mob that uses a TP attack at 75% that doesn't also use that or a worse TP attack at 50% and 25% (or the like). We calculated that it would take us likely another 4-5 hours to kill it like that based on the assumption that it would not use the same move at 75% (because if it does it's just a stalemate).

Like I said before, we had people who were sick - literally sick at this point. Others had fallen asleep on their floors and desks and it was just past the point of being ridiculous. We all feel like shit today too. This is completely beyond the limits of reason.

[Starr]

bah if u told other ls it was up when u were done they might have been able to finish it lol, sure they shouldn't benefit off ur 18+ hours work but it'd be nice to know it dies after that form

[Hank]

http://img377.imageshack.us/img377/6...0081850pc2.png

[Starr]

WHAT THE FUCK

[Kukuk]

WHAT THE FUCK

O.O

[Aurara]

Holy shit...syl, ruke..i hope you guys are feeling better(since you said that some people got ill ><)And its complete bullshit that they would do this with one single fucking monster.

[Hyan]

I assume hare form will be the last one to kill it.. now how many mob families are there in FFXI again?

[Zoot]

You know those stories about how the soldiers in Iraq were delusional because they were hiked up on energy drinks and sleep exhausted? I'm pretty sure I experienced that last night, I hardly remember half of what happened past the Hydra mode.

I kept repeating to myself that after 18 hours we just CAN'T give up. Around the time I woke up to the sound of vent and people asking if we want to give it another round. People were sick, throwing up, falling asleep, barely able to type and still pushing on, and even though it was extremely admirable of all the people to stick it together...it wasn't worth it. No gear, no gil, no video game is worth making yourself that sick.

bah if u told other ls it was up when u were done they might have been able to finish it lol, sure they shouldn't benefit off ur 18+ hours work but it'd be nice to know it dies after that form

It was 8am CST...Most of the spectators were from large HNM ls on seraph and they were all asleep like sane people by that time. But just to be quite frank, I think most of us were too pissed to even think about that. And to be even more frank they wouldn't have been able to kill it, at least with such little notice. This was no slap together with whatever equipment you have on rush to camp mob.

[Blackice]

I believe with 99% certainty that chair dude was the final form. However I also think that 50% and 25% HP marks would have gotten progressively worse or at least equally as bad as the 75% event which made us watch it Regen to 100% while we picked our bodies off the floor.

Aftermath of our LS is basically this, everyone lost between 15-40k XP, 23k myself. As you saw earlier in the thread Ruke and a few others actually deleveled out of their relics on multiple occasions. A few of us actually vomited a few times before passing out. Regardless of killing it or not, we're all amazed with how long BTL as a team was able to keep the fight going and play efficiently for 16 hours+.