Absolute Virtue ~ 9/8/08

[Marcin]

First, congratulations! Secondly, make sure you whore that retarded NM's drops out, I'm very impressed. We tried AV earlier tonight, twice. Unfortunately the lowest we ended up getting it to was 70 something before he used benediction.

Honestly from my experience tonight the biggest problem with doing AV without Drk zerging it is the charm spam when it uses SV. It just spammed it on us, each pld we swapped out that was charmed to get in a fresh pld didn't even uncharm by the time the new pld got charmed. We lived through the mets and the Aeroga spams easily, charm was our undoing. Hundred Fists was also laughable with Phalanx and Aegis.

Big grats again on your kills, Apathy too.

[TummieGaruda]

Emergency update making AV undead thus not draining back HP for drks go

Then all you'd have to do is get him to Bene and he'd suicide...

[Ramses]

First, congratulations! Secondly, make sure you whore that retarded NM's drops out, I'm very impressed. We tried AV earlier tonight, twice. Unfortunately the lowest we ended up getting it to was 70 something before he used benediction.

Honestly from my experience tonight the biggest problem with doing AV without Drk zerging it is the charm spam when it uses SV. It just spammed it on us, each pld we swapped out that was charmed to get in a fresh pld didn't even uncharm by the time the new pld got charmed. We lived through the mets and the Aeroga spams easily, charm was our undoing. Hundred Fists was also laughable with Phalanx and Aegis.

Big grats again on your kills, Apathy too.

Shadowbind that. If SV is the only thing giving you trouble, shadowbind and wait it out.

[Talint]

wow SE fails hard. RIP COP the bitching masses have won again.

...wow.

...just, wow.

...fucking, wow.

Troll much?

[Bregor]

Currently uploading the video, will edit once done... :3

Done, Video here >>> Clicky!

Love the song choice. Even though it's been said a bajillion times, congrats.

[Lebzile]

...wow.

...just, wow.

...fucking, wow.

Troll much?

Just ignore him, he seems to be mad because he wasn't part of an LS that killed him.

[MillionDollarMan]

SE can't find any balance in this game.

[Toksyuryel]

Fuck Pluto's Staff, go Diabolos's Pole and a sch to give you Voidstorm.

[Deadgye]

Ahahahahah.. This if full of pure awesome. SE's initial reaction however, will of course be full of fail. If they do anything other than just tell us how to kill him, we all need to boycott. Or something. <.<;

[Diomer]

First, congratulations! Secondly, make sure you whore that retarded NM's drops out, I'm very impressed. We tried AV earlier tonight, twice. Unfortunately the lowest we ended up getting it to was 70 something before he used benediction.

Honestly from my experience tonight the biggest problem with doing AV without Drk zerging it is the charm spam when it uses SV. It just spammed it on us, each pld we swapped out that was charmed to get in a fresh pld didn't even uncharm by the time the new pld got charmed. We lived through the mets and the Aeroga spams easily, charm was our undoing. Hundred Fists was also laughable with Phalanx and Aegis.

Big grats again on your kills, Apathy too.

You guys did do really well. Dohl and you both survived everything he threw at you but the Charms really messed things up :/ I noticed that it seemed to repeat the Call Wyvern > Soul Voice sequence 3 times in a row though and thought it was a bit odd that it did that. After that sequence 3 times in a row, your alliance wasn't in very good shape and the Comet/Meteor spam ended that attempt :/ If you could avoid the damage that Virelai was causing, who knows. It was a nice attempt anyway and hopefully you'll keep trying!

[Tempestwolf]

SE can't find any balance in this game.

Hi post count number 9 guy, I'd like to point out that VERY few LS's are capable of using so many well geared DRK's, and ask why is it wrong for a group that is so well geared to reap a little reward for it?

People need to stop acting like K club zerging is new and cheap and welcome to reality, Souleater is being used (as is the K club and other weapons similar to it) the WAY THEY WERE INTENDED TO BE USED IN CONJUNCTION WITH ONE ANOTHER.
Their not easy to get and therefore the people with them have earned the right to things like this.

I'll restate the biggest point, Zerging IS NOT NEW, yes on this mob it is new but so many other mobs can already be zerged, I don't see why it's such a big deal, rather, why don't you all enjoy that this is finally kill able again after so many years, and HAVE FUN WITH IT.

Grats to everyone on the kill, sorry some people feel they have to always complain that it is both beautifully sunny outside, and warm.

[fussel]

If anybody wants the raw data from Kparse I have it saved. I'm just less savvy on where to host that file for public comsumption

Attach it to a post. New function of vBulletin (compared to phpBB)

[Lordwafik]

You're welcome Kaeko.

This is not the thread to talk about how you dislike K.club zerging AV. If you don't like it, bad luck, make another topic about it in newbie or anywhere else how you do not like K.club zerging. This topic is about finding info on what's changed, on behaviours which *gasp* will help people kill it without the zerging.

Don't make me bring out captain planet.

[Oulanbator]

congratulations on defeating AV. That's a real accomplishments and a real step forward for the whole player base.
I find it quite sad that you used a zerg method but I'd rather see it dead than alive.
I really feel you avenged all these players that failed for years. Thank you so much for this.

I hope you guys are proud of yourselves, you really have reasons to be.

[Kaeko]

<3 the all caps 72 font.

One interesting thing if anyone wants to try crunching through those winning videos (even the losing ones) is to see how many 2hrs AV actually gets off. In SA's win video (the first kill) AV doesn't look like it does anything.

I still feel that it's their killing speed that sort of locks it up like Bahamut 2 if you zerg that really fast.

Also, for HOLDING in case you wipe and weren't able to compete it... Remember that nuking the same element of the day nerfs the regen (I think we can all agree that's pretty sound and accepted at this point). If you say wipe early, couldn't you hold AV by using like say Fire I on Firesday to sac yourself? You get the benefits of sacing and holding while getting some benefit of regen nerfing while you either recover or send in your second gank group. If you can amply null regen with hold/pulling with T1 nukes, you can sort of just gank > die > hold with T1 nukes > gank > etc.

[Shamaya]

I can see how SA's killspeed meant all the difference. It'd be good to see if apathy had a similar kill speed, and I imagine they did. If it takes you just a little bit longer, you might not be able to do this at all. But If you can take out a huge chunk of its HP at a time, the T1 holding idea isn't without merit. It would just mean that your 2hrs wouldn't be up again when you started back up. Just how much might the T1's nerf it's regen though? I don't know the exact numbers, myself.

[Tirgen]

Attach it to a post. New function of vBulletin (compared to phpBB)

Even compressed it is too big to attach.


Back on topic, I fully agree that this is not the way SE intended AV to be killed. There is another solution out there. I do not feel bad for killing it this way, it is not easy. Duplicate our effort and then we can talk about how easy it was. Even when you club DL, there is a chance you will lose, and this fight is even more uncertain because you cannot pair your clubs with a chainspell stun. Every one of our AV fights could have easily easily ended up as a loss. Since Monday, we are 2/5 on AV. And in each of the 5 fights, something has been learned. Here is a recap -

Most importantly, it is a FACT that he can be killed. It is not impossible

There are no new suprises that will wipe you. I'm 99% confident we have seen all his tools.

AV has roughly 65K HP.

He is evasive. For drk club skill with BW active, you need fient and SV-Madrigals to reach 85% accuracy. Sushi and SV-madrigals also got to 85% without feint. HP food, no feint and SV-Madrigals was horrid sub 50% accuracy

AV has very high rate of parry, you should try to attack him from out parry postion when possible.



In addition to the things I list as fact above, here are also a couple behaviours I noticed in our first attempt, that I encourage others to look at and test further.

1. Nuking the element of the day enfeebles his regen. It also appears that when you stop nuking the element of the day, his regen comes back. DD's reported that their mellee damage improved when the correct element was being nuked.

2. Nuking the wrong element seems to trigger some kind of retaliation. Mellee damage decreased, and he often responded with a TP move. The nukes ice/thunder on firesday did land for 'good' damage, 300-500 for a IV spell, which was on par with the spells of the correct day adjusted for the expected drop off.

3. We saw strong evidence that 'countering' an AV 2 hour with a 2 hour of our own would increase that time between AV using 2 hours. Its not a huge increase, but having a 2 hour come your way every 2 minutes, is much prefered to having a 2 hour coming your way every 50 seconds.


Even with that information, he was still very difficult. We were able to tank him for 10-15 minutes at a time, but eventually he picks a 2 hour that we just can't handle gracefully. Charm Spam takes away our tanks, and even our back-up tanks in some cases. With a MDB build Meteor is survivable, but barely, and recovering from it really taxes MP.

In the end we have not yet come up with an answer for how to ride out his continued use of 2hrs over time. This has always been the problem. So far the only 'answer' we have is to do so much damage, he only gets to use 1, and just hope that he doesn't choose a show stopper.

Even though we can club it to death, I still want to know the 'other' answer like a lot of you.

[Rya]

Great job on the Kill guys !

I personaly dont think that SE will care that it was Zergd down as this method simply isnt going to be available to every ls that wants to kill AV and there is still a chance that you will wipe.

you should try to attack him from out parry position when possible

What exactly is defined as "out of parry position" ? simply stood behind it?

[Mega]

It was probably like:

Hello, my names Absolute Virtue, I have come to rape you and your families, are you prepared? Oh fuck I'm at 8%, *meteors*. Fgts

So much win in one post should be a bannable offense.

[Byrthnoth]

I'm with Tirg on this.

There is probably some stupid thing that we haven't tried and SE wants us to do, and I've love to know what it is. However, in the 10 minutes that it takes to do it, even assuming it completely locks down AV's regen and slows his 2-hours to a crawl, he may well have killed all of your tanks twice.


Random strategy note:
I sort of held AV for a few seconds every once in a while on RDM/NIN during our first few attempts and I think I noticed something useful.

You can use AV's new draw-in to your advantage now. As long as you're far away, you won't be hit with whatever nastiness he decides to throw at the other tanks, but you can spam him for hate (or cure the other tanks then spam buffs like Barspells). Then when the other tanks die, he pulls you in, doesn't really move, and business is normal.


Edit: Parry range is a 60 degree swath in front of the person/monster, I think.