Pandemonium Warden - The aftermath theories.

[Ruiner]

I've heard this number thrown around a lot, so I want to get some confirmation: Do each of the PW forms have roughly 120k HP, or was that just Cerb/Khim/Hydra?

[Maxxthepenguin]

First: Even with the 50% damage reduction, you are overall doing 4x the damage you would otherwise.

Second: The only reason I think it might be possible is because of the weird hate, I'm not suggesting 1 shotting them rofl.

[Theenabler]

When fighting pande you are not fighting one monster. In a sense it is it exactly like Dynamis or whatever type of raid you want to compare it to. I think anything over 5 hours for a competent LS is wrong(maybe okay on the first try). But a very long and varied fight isn't bad. That's the way SE should do it if they want to keep it as the highest tier of endgame to which separates the good and the very best(er, dedicated) Linkshells.

Nerf Pande too much and you get another 3-min fight(oh, maybe spread over 20 times, like it matters). I know plenty of people here who want exactly that, but that's admitting to dumbing down the game rather than making this realistically playable.

Anyway, cutting down lamp HP doesn't have to make them vulnerable to ga-killing. Maybe some set of lamps would be(no problem there really, so many to go around), but some could be resistant enough that it would take several volleys for 10 or 12 BLMs to kill them... which means a lot of dead BLMs and a shaky strategy at best.

What i'm saying though is that the gears are the main challenge of the fight, if they did this, all it would be is a long fight, not a challenging fight. I think the level of difficulty of the mobs atm is good, it makes for a very challenging fight, just the time of the fight needs to be adjusted, which i hope would be resolved without affecting the challenge of the fight, hence pop item drops or less forms.

[MaachaQ]

I've heard this number thrown around a lot, so I want to get some confirmation: Do each of the PW forms have roughly 120k HP, or was that just Cerb/Khim/Hydra?

Read Rukenshin's blog posts, he has a ton of good information:

http://rukenshin.livejournal.com/

[RKenshin]

Question: If pande lamps seem to have weird hate, can AoE spells actually be useful? Could some Thundaga III action help make the fight only be 12 hours?

Nope.

It isn't a zerg fight, it's an endurance fight. Spamming -ga IIIs is just about the most inefficient damage over time you can get in the game, it would be considerably slower.

Lamps also are constantly running out of range of spells, not commonly bunched up, and spam bad AoE that would really hurt a bunch of BLMs trying to chase them around and cast -gas. There are also a good amount of NQ mobs in the area that you'd have to deal with on a regular basis.

[Hank]

Not to mention BLM spells start to do very poorly against the lamps. Seeing an 800 damage Freeze II was a pleasant surprise. Though, you'd usually have to ES for that.

[Hanyoko]

Question going out to whomever from BTL bought/traded the PW pop item. Did you have any other seal key items at the time of purchase? At the time of trade?

Off the wall idea that perhaps having any/some combo of the 18 znm seals (15 if ignore the T4 ones) might cause PW to skip forms.

*unrelated observation*
With the exception of Lividroot (marbol), Reacton (bomb), and Velionis (skeleton) all the zeni NM are unique mob families that were added in ToAU. Not sure if this means anything though the fact that its one mob from each 'path' could mean something.

[Suiram]

-Ga spell on one target is the most inefficient DoT in the game. -Ga spell on 8 targets is probably the most efficient magical DoT in the game, since you're doing 4x the total damage for the same MP cost, and depending on the INT of the target, probably 2-3x the damage/MP of a series of tier 4 spells.

Again, not that it would probably matter in this case unless you could figure out a way to keep them constantly grouped with no regular mobs nearby and without getting the BLMs killed, and even then I don't know how much it would speed up the fight compared to one-at-a-time.

Edit: Actually even if it did hit nearby mobs it'd still do at worst 80% of the damage to 8 lamps alone, and still 3.2x the total damage compared to one target.
Edit 2: And this is just compared to other methods of magical damage, which is probably meaningless if, as has been said, magic damage begins to perform poorly on later forms.

[ringthree]

Nope.

It isn't a zerg fight, it's an endurance fight. Spamming -ga IIIs is just about the most inefficient damage over time you can get in the game, it would be considerably slower.

Lamps also are constantly running out of range of spells, not commonly bunched up, and spam bad AoE that would really hurt a bunch of BLMs trying to chase them around and cast -gas. There are also a good amount of NQ mobs in the area that you'd have to deal with on a regular basis.

I personally don't think its a zerg or endurance fight, I suspect that it is a trick fight. I also believe that AV is a trick fight. I think that there is some way to make this fight much easier, but SE isn't going to help us out for a long time, and it will likely be incomprehensible like the AV assistance.

I really think that a lot of people are looking at this completely wrong, including SE. The players need to come to grips with the fact that they just don't know how to fight it, and to stop bitching about the fight being super long or super hard and they need to start bitching about giving us fights that we have no fucking way to figure out.

SE needs to realize that when they make fights like this people aren't going to experiment, they are just going to say fuck it and do something else. There is a decent comparison to be made to ZR frogs, the reason that pop conditions for ZR frogs were discovered was because things were made easier in the zone for clearing and getting the unlocks and killing extra mobs. As much as players wanted to figure out the frogs, they didn't have a way to do so the way things originally started. They couldn't even really test things out. We just stumbled across the answer. We aren't just going to stumble across the answer for PW for the same reason that we wont for AV; nothing has changed. We don't even know where to start.

[meson]

At least AV has the common courtesy to kill you quickly for not knowing his secret.

If there is indeed a trick to PW, the fact that you are still allowed to advance through the fight by other more traditional means is an unforgivable design flaw.

[zoobernut]

At least AV has the common courtesy to kill you quickly for not knowing his secret.

If there is indeed a trick to PW, the fact that you are still allowed to advance through the fight by other more traditional means is an unforgivable design flaw.

If there is a trick and there is not a quest to do for information, how else will the trick be found out without letting people fight it. So many times we have seen people complain about AV for the exact opposite reason. It kills everyone so fast and xp is lost so rapidly that no one fights it for very long to test out theories.

[meson]

Does PW even get mentioned by any other NPC besides the two ZNM ones?

[zoobernut]

I have not seen any clues or hints from npcs or a quest that indicates any trick to beat PW which leads me to the point that if there is a trick it will either be found out by messing around with the mob or by having SE tell us what the trick is.

[Mugmug]

I highly doubt their is any "trick". The Devs have always wanted to make long, difficult fights that pushed players to their limits.

They made Kirin with this in mind. In 2004 with the gear/understanding of the game people had, he was insane. Kiting him, while having to deal with the sky gods was tough. This was the first example of them trying to make "insanely tough" fights.

Once people outgeared/learned how to make easy work of him they decided to up the anty and create AV. Being spawned in the same fashion as Kirin (Sea is Sky v2), except this time people wouldn't be able to easily blow through all the content they made. Afterall they're a business, and from a business standpoint making these types of fights are great. You don't have to spend a lot of time making new content, and you keep your customers occupied trying to think of strategies.

This is where the Devs go crazy and make PW. The simple fact that they let you progress through the fight, form after form is proof enough that their is no trick. If I'm wrong then SE is more fucked up than I imagined.

Everything points to SE having crazy Devs who think it's ok to make people spend 15+ hrs on a single encounter.

[Shinsei]

It started off with Kirin, then it became Vrtra, then AV, now pandy

[Charismatic]

They could have at least waited for the community to figure out AV before putting another one in there, eh?

[fndragon]

They could have at least waited for the community to figure out AV before putting another one in there, eh?

They're still waiting for us to figure out hidden latents and Almighty Apkallu. The Goblin Drink and AV Video are a bit of anomalies, them helping out the playerbase directly.

[Indalecia]

They're still waiting for us to figure out hidden latents and Almighty Apkallu. The Goblin Drink and AV Video are a bit of anomalies, them helping out the playerbase directly.

I'm still waiting for the video to be "helpful".

[Eldelphia]

Question going out to whomever from BTL bought/traded the PW pop item. Did you have any other seal key items at the time of purchase? At the time of trade?

Off the wall idea that perhaps having any/some combo of the 18 znm seals (15 if ignore the T4 ones) might cause PW to skip forms.

I already asked this back a few pages

[Max™]

I think if there is a trick now, it's that we weren't supposed to advance that far, and they didn't expect anyone to push it so far before they got a chance to fully adjust it.

If it was 1 random selection from each set, it would be a rough, but doable fight, as has been said.

If the HP was adjusted dramatically, it could be doable too, but given the ATNM Test debacle, I'd say we're playtesting it for them right now.