Sarameya tanking advice needed

[Faxanadu]

What sub for PLD? (can do war, nin, or rdm)

When do you switch to fire suit/-mag gear set? (for certain mob hp %'s or just TP moves/spells?)

Anything else i should know? I read some Cerberus strats but not sure how different Srameya is from him. I have not tanked either of them before. thx.

[Sanoske]

When my LS does it we have PLD/NIN and they last 2 times our other tank has been... NIN/PLD? I could be wrong, but that is what I remember.

Also, I've never done HNM, but from everything I've heard and read... Sarameya is a good deal harder than Cerberus.

Every even number x9% he will use Chainspell. (89%, 69%, 49% etc) and proceed to spam Flare II, Firaga III and whatever the hell else he feels like using. Below 25%, he will begin to use Gates of Hades. He can and will spam this, and can possibly Chainspell it at 9%. It hurts.

So... /NIN, and unless you have a good team behind you... you will become crispy.

Disclaimer: I know nothing of tanking mechanics, so I can't give any serious insight. Only what I observe while watching my nukes do no damage. But I'd assume as much Haste gear as possible for recast on Utsu, and a good Fire/MDB build to swap into for Chainspell and shadows down. Like I said, no clue... just observations/guesses.

[Vejitta]

I haven't fought it yet, but wouldn't Tia fire/MDB set be as good on Sarameyas CS like it is on flying Tiamat? Haste gear won't help you as much once its gonna start spamming -ga III or GoHs.

[Tomiko]

I got to co-tank it this past weekend and I thought it was fun to tank. We did 2x Pld/Nin and had a 3rd for backup, but neither of us died.

Main things:

-If it Howls, it means it'll do Ululation > Firaga (Gates when <25%) > Blaze Spikes (or Magma Hoplon, can't remember). From what I was told, it can't be stunned during this. It will howl again after the 3rd move. Note: Sometimes it either skips or lags with the first Howl, so just anticipate Firaga if you see Ululation go off.

-Fire resist helps ALOT. Feality might be nice for the CS Gates phase, but I forgot to unlock it before I headed there. I would switch to Fire Resist set once I saw Ululation in the chat log due to the above. Also whenever it used Chainspell. I'm only up to 139 Resist from just gear, but with Barfira & Carol I seemed to be able to resist most of the stuff. So I don't think you need as much as you would for Tiamat.

[MarkM.]

I don't have pld leveled, but I know the plds in my ls either go /war or /rdm. /nin is pretty useless for this if I recall correctly due to the chainspell firaga bullshit. Fire resist or MDB is a definite for this.

[Tomiko]

/Rdm would be decent, but /Nin isn't that bad. Plus Sara has en-poison which does about 30/tick (can't remember, but it was alot) which can be annoying for your mages to have to constantly Poisona.

During Chainspell, there's no point bothering with shadows. Just switch to your resist set and wait it out.

[Gunslinger]

Have done this several times, here's a few things:

1) Use dispel right after it does Magma Hoplon, the regen it gets is huge and will really drag out the fight.

2) I know wiki says that it does chainspell every 9%, but to me it seemed to happen more on a timed or % basis. It seems like he'd use it every few minutes (maybe 3 minutes?) if you don't knock him down 9% in that time anyway. I could be wrong on this, feel free to correct me .

3) Tanking on nin/war was pretty easy, fire resist gear is around 155ish... with carol / barspells on I would take about 10 damage per firaga III, etc. Our plds seem to tank it just fine without fire resist sets though, maybe by using -mag% gear (our main tank uses Aegis, but our other plds have tanked it fine as well).

4) Hate is kind of loose on it, he seems to be pretty squishy. When we did this the other day I went on drg/sam instead of ninja, pentas were averaging around 700, with highs around 1200. Rangers can and will pull hate, so make sure they're not standing with your main group of mages.

5) GoH has a large range, make sure your mages stand far enough away since the island is pretty small.

Good luck

[Trevor]

The ZNM group I'm part of has done this NM 10 times now and this is what I can tell you.

He can't be slowed or elegy'd even with elemental seal (found this out our first attempt).
PLD/WAR worked much better for us because of defender and the extra hate abilities.

Chainspell goes off every 20% starting at 89%. (89, 69, 49, 29, 9)
At 9% he uses chainspell and just spams Gates of Hades for the majority of the time.
Not sure how much fire resist, Magic-% gear our tanks were using but the chainspells don't usually cause any problems.

Gates of Hades is unlocked @25% and has a very high resistant to stun, we generally just let whoever is in range take the damage because its quite weak 300-500 damage + burn.

Also when he howls he will do Ululation > Magma Hoplon. There may be a spell between the two moves but I never noticed.
Under 25% he will do Ululation > Gates > Magma Hoplon, when you see him howl we have all the DD's run out of range and let the tanks get his by Gates only.

Magma Hoplon gives stoneskin+blaze spikes, the spikes need to be dispelled quickly. Regardless of whether he uses Hoplon or just casts spikes normally it applies a regen of 1%/tic which can drag this fight out a lot longer than it has to if not dispelled.

(If he regens above 25%, it re-locks gates of hades, so if you get in trouble can always let it regen a bit to recover)

As for damage we take on average 4 SAM/THF, but RNG and SMN also work very well.

BLM not recommended.

SAM TA+WS does roughly 700dmg, SA+WS 1200+.

A good geared RNG/WAR with double minuet and sushi will hit 1500 sidewinders and can stay out of range of all his moves while providing nice damage, the only downside is that theres no hate transfer to the tanks and can become very troublesome as hate seems to shift randomly at times.

Summoner is a very nice job to have for this, blood pacts do anywhere from 700-1200dmg without the hate that a sam or rng would gain. This also allows players to stay out of range and, therefore requiring less curing support to keep DD's alive due to getting hit by gates/-ga and other TP moves.

[Callisto]

1) Use dispel right after it does Magma Hoplon, the regen it gets is huge and will really drag out the fight.

Just curious if you noticed, is he stingy on Dispel like normal Cerb? At least in Nyzul I have to spam it several times in full enfeebling/Macc/Pluto's/Dark Grip to get Hoplon spikes off.

[Gunslinger]

None of the rdms in my LS complained about it, so it can't be too bad. I'm guessing your enfeebling/Macc/Pluto's/Dark Grip set will work just fine honestly, but maybe someone else can chime in on this since I'm usually not doing magey stuff.

If anything, the biggest issue problem we had was people not dispeling fast enough, since most of the time rdms are busy trying to help fix HPs after chainspell, etc.

[Drex]

It does resist dispel, but not a lot. Usually stuck first time, I'd say 4-5 resists per fight. The hate build-up from curing and dispelling spam can be an issue near the end, especially if he does a lot of blaze spikes/magma hoplon during chainspell.

[Judai]

Glad to hear other people's PLDs using /WAR and /RDM, cause /NIN is worthless and sucks ass on him. He really attacks way too fast for it to be of worth, yay you blink out some hits here and there but then he crits you fro 400+ a couple times due to having shit defence.

He hit me so weak most of the time though, that I figured /WAR or /RDM would be doable but we never got to trying it.

Personally, we do Fire Carol/Barfira full time and I swap in my Fire kit(around 310 w/ Carol/Barfira) for ga2/3 and when he Chainspells. 90% of the shit he does while I have my kit on, I resist. Even the 9% CS GoH is a joke with the fire kit on, just have to make sure to keep hate, cause it will rape the rest of the ally with it.

Probably going to try /WAR or /RDM next time now that I hear other people using it.

[Kerberoz]

BLM actually does decent damage on this-- it doesn't have the insane resist rate of normal cerb.

[zagex]

as for the resist rate on dispel, I never got resisted on Rdm. A blm who got bored was watching for dispel, but he said he got resisted quite a bit. I don't recall how finale lands, but I think it was doing fine.

[Tomiko]

PLD/WAR worked much better for us because of defender and the extra hate abilities.

Out of curiousity, how much of a difference did having defender make in regards to taking melee hits?

Also, how did you handle the enpoison?

[Trevor]

I'm not sure exactly how much difference defender was making, because i've always been brd/rng/sam. I just know we tried /nin for our first attempt and it was not happening, without slow/elegy you can't keep shadows up effectively.

We switch the pld's to /war and was a lot smoother fights.

As for the en-poison, I don't believe it's 100% proc so just poisona when it lands, if this is wrong please someone correct me here.

I can ask our tanks what difference it made when they get on later today.

[Glyph]

I have done this ZNM around 10 times myself.
I can say that Pld/nin is worthless on this, Pld/war is by far the best way to go.
Our tank party is like this Pld/war,Pld/war,Brd/whm,Whm/blm,Whm/blm,Rdm/blm.
This is by far best set up we've used, reason being is this Cerb has set moves.
Howl> Ululation > Firaga > Magma Hoplon >Howl above 25%
Under 25% replace Firaga with GoH
Now between Howls it cannot be Stunned, and after second Howl it HATE resets!
a Pld/rdm or pld/nin cannot recover hate quick enough to keep mob in one spot.
Also knowing this lets your rangers and blm's go nuts between howls.
As far as set-up, I play Galka pld. I don't have a fire resist set or MDB set. What i do is stack shield skill and HP and let my whm's handle the cures.
Defender makes a big difference, and why wouldn't it? If your pld/war fighting any HL mob and not using Defender then gtfo! Let the DD take care of the DD!
Pop a Taco, keep Defender up at all times. Cure4 for hate, Flash and provoke after second Howl and this is cake!

[Tan]

Is it entire hate reset for anyone who acted on him or simply for the tank? From what you have said about your tank pt setup you seem to have a lot of support, myself personally I'm used to typically solo tanking, with a RDM + WHM to back me up, and occasionally a BRD if we can spare it. For that reason I would think that PLD/RDM would probably be the better low man tank, simply because you have MDB, can keep up Barfire (if necessary) and could put up Stoneskin/Phalanx as necessary too, the added MP bonus and Fast Cast is also a perk. I can understand if you are worried about hate reset, but if its possible you could save Sentinel for those times and then simply Sent->Rampart/Shield Bash -> Spam Dispel / Blind / Flash / Cures and quickly build up hate rapidly. Maybe its just me but I've always felt that /WAR was inadequate simply because after doing /NIN for so many events/activities I didn't need Provoke to keep solid hate and defender hardly saves you from being smacked around in the face of a High damage weapon.

[Tomiko]

As for the en-poison, I don't believe it's 100% proc so just poisona when it lands, if this is wrong please someone correct me here.

It wasn't 100% from what I remember, but still seemed to proc somewhat regularly when I would get hit.

I can say that Pld/nin is worthless on this, Pld/war is by far the best way to go.

I must be better than I thought then if Pld/Nin is worthless. Yes the aoe stuff sucks, but Pld/Nin is far from worthless. Harder to do, maybe. But not worthless.

and after second Howl it HATE resets!

This part is very interesting.

a Pld/rdm or pld/nin cannot recover hate quick enough to keep mob in one spot.

You make it sound worse than it is. Yeah I/we would lost hate for a couple seconds (and it would turn), but we were able to get it right back on us.

Defender makes a big difference, and why wouldn't it? If your pld/war fighting any HL mob and not using Defender then gtfo! Let the DD take care of the DD!
Pop a Taco, keep Defender up at all times. Cure4 for hate, Flash and provoke after second Howl and this is cake!

Defender full time is an obvious, but I'm more concerned about how much of a difference in damage reduction it gives considering most HNMs still hit hard regardless.



One thing I think I should have mentioned was the tank party setup we used since that could be why Pld/Nin worked well for us:

Pld/Nin
Pld/Nin
Whm/Blm
Brd/Whm
Rdm/Whm
Sch/Whm

With Stoneskinga & Reprisal, it wasn't that hard at all to keep shadows up which is why I don't understand why everyone is saying Pld/Nin is useless. If it does have full hate reset after 2nd Howl, then just have others not do anything for a couple seconds while tanks get hate set again.

[Mojo]

Having done this fight nine times now, I honestly do not believe that there is any form of hate reset following the howl sequence. Hate will be difficult to maintain regardless of what subjob you choose because you can't land Slow or Elegy. However, our lone PLD/NIN was able to retain hate 100% of the time unless our mages had to bomb our melee. That can be avoided if you stun Gates of Hades and make it clear to your melee that they need to back away during Chainspell and howl sequences.

If I had to choose a tank for this fight it would be NIN/RDM although PLD/NIN is far from worthless. PLD/WAR seems interesting but the constant 30 HP/tick poison seems like an annoyance. If you like you can have your melee sub THF(they'll be tanking otherwise, it's really quite squishy) and TA whore your tank. We had one SAM/THF for a few of the fights and it helped quite a bit.

A fire resist build will serve you well. It also isn't necessary to full time Fire Carol if you have a good BRD. The only cases where it would be better to have Carol then a March or Ballad is during Chainspell and the under 25% HP howl sequences. You can easily predict when both of those situations will arise, making Pianissimo + Carol in preparation for them very feasible.