Absolute Virtue ~ 9/8/08

[Day]

Peace is also a virtue, maybe you aren't supposed to kill him at all?

User was banned for this post.

[Aksannyi]

Peace is also a virtue, maybe you aren't supposed to kill him at all?

User was banned for this post.

AV should have enough Peace built up after 3 years of linkshells just letting him depop after spawn to last him the rest of this game.

[Ramses]

So uh, who wants to Kraken BC with me?

I only have tank/melee jobs leveled.

That BC is a joke, any jobs can do it. I do it pld, drk, rdm and win in 6 minutes easily. The problem is not winning, it's the drop rate. I am 0/51. Yes 51 wins and not one KC. If drk isn't the job you love best, just buy the KC. But drk is my number one job by far so I chose to spend my gil on relic upgrades over KC.

As for the AV strategy mentioned above, the problem I have is there is no way that could be concluded from watching the video. The correct strategy should fit that requirement.

[Geno01]

Most of the ideas people have are well thought out, but does any of the evidence ever fit with these well constructed theories?

No but at least its not they typical shit and shows people still have a brain lol

[Arew]

I am 0/51. Yes 51 wins and not one KC.

My social used to do this BCNM fairly often, and I believe we are somewhere between 0/200-300+, I honestly don't know because I lost count after awhile.

[fndragon]

You have to do a damage inbetween a certain range to keep it tame. Gress (LS member) and myself gave a rough estimate of about 1000-2000 damage a minute judging by his HP and the average amount of time allotted to kill it. Anything less than 1000 damage OR more than 2000 damage and that is strike one.

That's a rather narrow window. That's total damage, from all sources? Does the timer start when he appears or when you first engage/reengage him? If that's the case then you'll need 35-75 minutes to take him out using the "correct" method, and considering he's on a strict timer now, that can be very uncomfortable especially if you accidentally wipe and need to start over.

I think it would lend more credence to this theory if there were different punishments for going over or under this damage per minute line. That's the difference with Dedainsonne: There is no "minimum" damage per minute. Plus there have been reported times when AV just rapes holding parties on a whim. "Oh, look at the time, it's rape-o'clock".

I'd believe the "under x damage per minute" if it didn't flat out destroy holding parties. And as previous zergs have shown, he doesn't get "easier" if you go hog-wild on the damage. He just has animation-lag.

[Belkin]

You have to be inbetween the range. Under 1000 damage per minute you get raped. Over 2000 damage per minute you get raped. Have to find the happy medium.

[Seraph]

You have to be inbetween the range. Under 1000 damage per minute you get raped. Over 2000 damage per minute you get raped. Have to find the happy medium.

If SE honestly expects this, they are retarded. There is no easy way to monitor time ingame without spamming "/clock on", and the lag during a fight like this makes it hard to total up damage over time without outside assistance. It's like saying "Please use the tools we refuse to provide you!"

I can see setting it up so that too much damage makes it rage, but the too little damage issue seems kinda stupid, assuming it's even true. This would kinda explain the goofy nuking, and people meleeing with crap weapons in the SE video though... :/

[Mojo]

There is a much simpler explanation for the way they nuked. It seems to me like they were just trying to reinforce that nuking with element that matched the day broke the regen and it wasn't simply the highest damage nuke at the time. It was Iceday and Thundersday, after all. Anything else focuses too hard on minor details that are mostly coincidence.

[Spira]

There is no easy way to monitor time ingame without spamming "/clock on"

actually, the vanadiel clock works as a pretty useful timer if u can figure out how to count with vana'time...

the damage rate should probably be rather flexible in that you can maintain him in Tame mode and still kill him in <2hrs.

Since Belkin suggests he works on a 3-tier behavior system, the one main sign that you're stepping above the limit would be a change in his 2hr pattern..
I'm not sure if simply lowering the damage again would allow him to adjust back to the previous behavior level. Or maybe if it still exceeds for a certain duration when he moves up 1 notch, it will raise again?
I think ideally what SE has in mind for players is that if they can figure out the behaviour system, do damage at a rate that bounces between tame and level 2... as long as they dont get to lv3, they still have a chance to beat AV...

It should be noted that whilst AV spams 2hrs, he actually can't do them in rapid succession (don't mention the 3 combo thing) and has like timers between, 45s as Mojo's thread states.. so theres sufficient time between his 2hrs to react to his behaviour...

but.. im just saying the theory holds some very solid points that havent really been falsified yet... so it should be tested

[Dagr]

They have like 9 people in their entire LS. I think they pride themselves on lowman stuff, which AV is not. D:

Eh more like 20-24 active members and 2-5 non active members <_< Which is in the realm of the amount needed to kill AV <_<

[Kipling]

It nearly broke my heart when some of the younger members of the linkshell were like "what's that song jacky?".... how could you not know the song! ; ;

._.

[*Shinzon*]

It's all the poor taste in music these days. It'll be interesting to see where this goes though, did you guys have any RNG's in the alliance? How was their damage if any were present. RNG's are sometimes as good if not better in some cases than DRK's for zerg, and could probably help a lot if you don't have that many DRK.

[korgie]

To belkins strat:
This is one of the more solid strats ive seen in a while, and i would love to try it out.
a big thing is that if it is true, you would need to do that 1000-2000 dmg in the very first minute he spawns as well, we've been hit with a meteor as soon as we re-engaged him after wiping, also we've tried to start tanks on him right as he spawned, and gotten meteored after a little bit of tanking w/o much damage.

As for keeping track of it, 1000-2000 is a pretty large margin of error, best bet as far as DD are concerned would be 2h jobs, once you figure out how much your average melee attack does, you can get a guesstimate of your dpm, as well as annoucing your ws damage so your other dd know when to back off. Black mages would also need to annouce your damages. I would figure after about 10-20mins most people would have a general idea how much they could do and when to back off. Also you would prolly need a timekeeper of sorts, who's only job is to keep track of your time, and your damage totals.

A strat i saw before was something along the lines of no overly aggressive actions on him(weapon skills/Provoke/) or he gets "Scared" and wipes you. This strat holds some credibility within belkins strat if that was based off a weapon skill taking it over 2000 damage a minute.

Only thing i see missing with this is the players spaming 2 hours in the video when he does, where they trying to reach that damage range quickly so they had time to recover from his 2 hour? or is it something else that we are still missing.

[Zubuis]

Well, my strategy involves a simple tidbit of information that was released by Square Enix but often discarded as somewhat of a translation error.

"Your kill speed is all wrong" or something of the sort (Too lazy to find exact quote)

Now most nearly everybody has blown this off as "lol these japs dont know english" but I think the statement is the key we've missed the whole time.

We can note that Dendainesonne (The Behemoth in Einherjar) has a system where if you do too much damage in a certain time frame, he gets harder. Do it about 5 times and you are basically killing yourself. I believe Absolute Virtue shares this same trait, but on a bigger scale.

Many times you either have people trying to go EXTREME DAMAGE or just holding it and trying to survive. I believe that you have to hit a certain range of damage for it to stay tame. You can observe on the attempts that have been recorded, Absolute Virtue doesn't unleash the big guns until the 4-7th 2HR. Big guns could possibly be Manafont and Benediction and too a lesser extent Chainspell, Soul Voice and Mijin Gakure. These 2HR's basically mean you are doing it wrong and you need to start over.

You have to do a damage inbetween a certain range to keep it tame. Gress (LS member) and myself gave a rough estimate of about 1000-2000 damage a minute judging by his HP and the average amount of time allotted to kill it. Anything less than 1000 damage OR more than 2000 damage and that is strike one.

This would explain why you see various BLM's in the SE video nuking Tier 4 down to Tier 1. They would Tier 4 to hit the range, then stick to tier 1 to keep its regen dead. After it used a 2HR, they would start back at Tier 4.

This would explain why you never see more than 2 melee on it at a time except for the very end when a DRG comes in for a brief moment.

This would also explain why DRK zerg is successful. Like I said, you have around 5 attempts to mess up the damage range before he turns the lights out. Depending on what 2HR's he uses at the time, you will have roughly 130-225 seconds to zerg it before Meteor or Benediction.

There is a lot of rough draft stuff that is impossible to gather until somebody tries it, but we came up with the idea of spamming 2HR's if you mess up the damage range to "redeem yourself" so to speak. This would give you another chance before Manafont or Benediction.

The hierarchy of Absolute Virtue 2HR's is something similar to

Tame
WAR/SAM/DRG/RNG/PLD/THF/MNK/SMN/BST/DRK

Less Tame
RDM/BRD/NIN

PISSED
BLM/WHM

As said before, you can observe these changes in mob behavior due to damage done in a certain amount of time on the Behemoth mob in Einherjar. Although there is no way of knowing (other than you not getting Meteor'd to shit) that this is actually working because he doesn't have emotes like Dendainesonne.

The damage range and the time you have to do it are the big question marks in this situation, but I believe our hypothetical range is somewhat close, given his HP and the hour and a half you have to kill him (It takes close to 30 minutes to get all the adds out of Jailer of Love, which I believe kills 50% of Absolute Virtue's Regen).

This strategy involves massive communication, organization and most of all, skill at the game. You can't go in with some ragtag group of people no matter how smart you are. I think THIS is the way Square intended it to be and I think THIS is one of the only feasible strategies nobody has ever tried.

The in depths of it are very rough but the concept is what I believe to be the key. Not too slow but not too fast.

I mean after all, Patience is a Virtue.

I've always thought something similar to what you wrote. It seems to me that Absolute Virtue has some kind of "Rage Gauge" as you do actions on him, his rage level goes up and once it reaches a certain point it just Manafont meteors you.

There's one thing I've always wondered that I've noticed from watching the NA video in conjuction with the idea above. If you watch the video you will notice the Redmage in the video spams Dark Magic spells on him. Spells such as blind, dispel, sleep and sleep II over and over again. I've always thought that perhaps these dark spells soothe his rage meter and help him from reaching his max limit.

It is possible that the redmage is simply a RDM tank. But it just seems to me that I've never really seen SE acknowledge RDM as a tank and it seems suspicious that 95% of the spells cast on AV are dark based. You would think if it was simply a RDM tank they would be spamming paralyze, slow, bind, poison, etc as well but they dont.

[Suiram]

The T3 KB seems to have a "memory" of its last state. In a recent run it wiped us and I got up a bit later after it was hate-free and tagged it to see something, and it opened with Meteor on me. If AV works the same way as Belkin suggests, then he'd have a similar memory so you can't assume that retagging after a wipe is the same "mode" as immediately after pop.

[Zekyr]

Over three linkshells I'm a part of, I believe the total drops/wins on kclub BCNM I've heard is in the order of 1/460 or so.

I personally have around 1800 BSes I've yet to use, but based on those odds I just bought my kclub. If the drop rate is adjusted (not likely after this) I might use them all on that (and just sell the second club to make my money back) but I'd honestly probably make out more gil overall spamming UO or something.

It's a shame, but at least oclub is semi useful with level sync now. I wouldn't give up all my 75 gear to make use of one though.

[HadesChubbs]

I've always thought something similar to what you wrote. It seems to me that Absolute Virtue has some kind of "Rage Gauge" as you do actions on him, his rage level goes up and once it reaches a certain point it just Manafont meteors you.

There's one thing I've always wondered that I've noticed from watching the NA video in conjuction with the idea above. If you watch the video you will notice the Redmage in the video spams Dark Magic spells on him. Spells such as blind, dispel, sleep and sleep II over and over again. I've always thought that perhaps these dark spells soothe his rage meter and help him from reaching his max limit.

It is possible that the redmage is simply a RDM tank. But it just seems to me that I've never really seen SE acknowledge RDM as a tank and it seems suspicious that 95% of the spells cast on AV are dark based. You would think if it was simply a RDM tank they would be spamming paralyze, slow, bind, poison, etc as well but they dont.

you're dumb as hell

[Judai]

The T3 KB seems to have a "memory" of its last state. In a recent run it wiped us and I got up a bit later after it was hate-free and tagged it to see something, and it opened with Meteor on me. If AV works the same way as Belkin suggests, then he'd have a similar memory so you can't assume that retagging after a wipe is the same "mode" as immediately after pop.

A bunch of people have stated this with AV. That he is usually easier when he firsts pops then he is after you wipe and try again.

[Oevern]

After considering the current idea and watching the Developers' AV video again, it seems that the 'damage range' idea is possible.

If you notice in the video they only use two actual DD on Absolute Virtue: A DRK and a SAM. This could be because they wanted to keep track of damage. They also never weaponskill (as far as i can see) in the video until the very end. You can see that they back off during the video and come back in at 3:24 in the EN version. This could be because they died, or it could be because they had done too much damage and didn't want to go over.


As for the "timekeeper" job. I found it very weird that there is a BLM and a WHM that just stand around and don't do anything during the entire video. Both the BLM and the WHM are always near each other...keeping track of damage, maybe?

Here is the link to the EN video if anyone wants to look at it again:
http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/dow.../asx/AV_EN.asx