Absolute Virtue 9/16/08

[ronin sparthos]

Well, SE's own excuse of the video being short "because an 18 hour video would suck to do" is completely out the window. No excuse now.

2 hour live fight - competition to pick the server this goes down on - live feed via POL.

You dont need to speak the language to know a strategy from sight, it isnt like most people wont pull apart / fraps every second of SE fighting live in front of the playerbase.

The best thing would be an accepted strategy, the SE way being revealed and the threads that will erupt forth from whatever the 'omg secret' was. The worst thing would be SE wipes in front of the gamers and people get to stroke their epeens vs SE with some friendly trash-talk

GMs can even show up to keep the peace, it'd be genius.

Oh maybe SE can even see how it feels to fight something with hundreds of people crowding <.< Go go Kings!

They'd definitely get back some respect points if they did something like that IMO, an apology would be too much to ask

[erizo]

I, and I bet I'm not alone, am just tired of SE 'fixing' every little imbalance and bit of ingenuity by cutting something off at the legs instead of incorporating a real solution.

and now they have swung the mighty bat of 'balance' once again. A few people got their krakens by luck. A few by RMT. But most I know got theirs by killing a billion spiders and selling the drops. And with one push of a button it could be turned into a thf knife 2.0. At least it was only made worthless on one mob, but still....this is crap when time consuming accomplishments are neutered just because there are now 10 sashes on all servers after 3 years....

I believe I'll be spending this months 28 bucks on a 12 pack of shiner bock beer and a 3 day rental of Conan the Barbarian. I'll be rooting for the players, if for no other reason than knowing that day will come again where you guys will sneak in the back door and kick SE square in the sack for a few days before they can call yet another maintenance to put the proletarians back 'in their place.'

Just make sure you let SE know that.

Well at this point I think bombarding them with email is the way to go. Be mature, but angry and literally send massive amounts of complaints. Like every single person send like 5-10 every day. The point is bound to get through eventually.

Agreed, although at this point a lot of people are just mad and won't even try to communicate with SE -- which is a big mistake, imo. Everyone should remember how all the bad press got to SE and in a matter of days they responded.

[Colenzo]

Well atleast hes easier than before still? (lol <_>)

[LinktheDeme]

You could name the Linkshell ValidHumanResponse.

With 100+ members we'd need 2+ linkshells

edit: It'd probably be patched anyway like souleater.

[Silenka]

A snow globe featuring AV hovering over an alliance of dead DRKs.

I would totally buy this.

I would not buy the DVD, cause ew.

[Parriah]

Well, its certainly not the ideal fix but I know quite a few people with krakens that are at least relived it was a 'fix' to AV instead of a 'fix' to souleater or kraken club. I fully expected that SE, being who they are, would have just knocked drk zerging off the table completely. At least that didn't happen.


Having said that, I've yet to see one person tell SE what they think about AV with their wallet so I'll be the first. It's not an AV issue for me. It's a customer service issue. There is no other form of entertainment I've ever been involved with where the provider continually took a big dump on the chest of the customer like SE does. But because people like myself have invested RL hours (heck, at this point RL years) into the game they won't walk no matter how badly we are treated. Well, I was on the fence anyway and because of this I'll be spending my 27.95 elsewhere. Not that it matters, next year they will get 10000x that when people want to hit the mog bananza again, which is nothing more than a band-aid over the huge gaping puss ridden wound that reading two pages worth of threads on this board could tell you the bulk of players have been pissed about for 3-4 years.


I, and I bet I'm not alone, am just tired of SE 'fixing' every little imbalance and bit of ingenuity by cutting something off at the legs instead of incorporating a real solution.

-when I hit rng 75 they totally decimated the job and it didn't recover for years
-when I leveled blm they made it where a fully merited/geared blm would get smashed in damage by a new 75 if the newbie's spell landed first by one second.
-when I maxed digging they put the fatigue limit on because they can't stop bots
-when I maxed fishing they put in that idiotic fishing game and fatigue and there are STILL bots.
-when I leveled ninja they made it where a naked war with byakkos axe could clobber me.


and now they have swung the mighty bat of 'balance' once again. A few people got their krakens by luck. A few by RMT. But most I know got theirs by killing a billion spiders and selling the drops. And with one push of a button it could be turned into a thf knife 2.0. At least it was only made worthless on one mob, but still....this is crap when time consuming accomplishments are neutered just because there are now 10 sashes on all servers after 3 years....

I believe I'll be spending this months 28 bucks on a 12 pack of shiner bock beer and a 3 day rental of Conan the Barbarian. I'll be rooting for the players, if for no other reason than knowing that day will come again where you guys will sneak in the back door and kick SE square in the sack for a few days before they can call yet another maintenance to put the proletarians back 'in their place.'

I have a new hero!!!

[Arthars]

this means: never jump onto a bandwagon because 10001 people are already on it

but if u happen to coincidentally lvl those jobs and they nerf before you actually enjoy, i feel for you fu se

[LinktheDeme]

I just thought of another idea on how to zerg AV if I may but it'd require at least 50+ people and I'm assuming something here.

Need two alliances of the following

14 Warriors (Mighty Strikes)
1 Dark knight (Kclub drk since two drks wont really effect it)
1 Thief (feint)
1 Dragoon (angon)
1 SCH/RDM (regen control)

Left one spot open so everyone can get buffs with a brd rotation except thief and dragoon since they are there for this specific purpose

Now I'm assuming that each warrior will do 1000 damage on average in assumption that critical hits will break its defense factor.

The warriors first WS will be 300 TP King's Justice (Not sure how much damage this does at 300 TP and Mighty strikes assume it will be better than a 300 tp raging rush though) Then they will use a TP wing use King's Justice again And then meditate and try to get a 3rd ws off if permitting.

Assuming each WS does 1000 damage at least the 14 warriors alone should do
42000 thats without the Kclub drks help (Following the assumption that 2 kclub drk is the ideal number for no resist). If kclub drk is too much can just throw another warrior for 45000. I'm aware AV has about 65k hp(people estimate 66k we dont know how fast is regen is)
Then that alliance will just die and we'll throw the next alliance at it and they should be able to finish it off with another 42000 damage from wars and god knows how much from the kclub drk. Total damage dealt will be in the upwards of 100 000+.

This is assuming that King's Justice will do about 1000 damage with max buffs food and etc.

Pt layouts would be

WAR WAR WAR WAR DRK BRD
WAR WAR WAR WAR WAR BRD
WAR WAR WAR WAR WAR BRD

one brd sv march one brd sv madrigal one brd sv minuet rotate them between three pts then for the three brds put in sch/rdm, drg and thf.

Bene
Perfect Dodge
and invincible would all screw this up so it'd be slightly luck required

[kwontess]

-when I hit rng 75 they totally decimated the job and it didn't recover for years
-when I leveled blm they made it where a fully merited/geared blm would get smashed in damage by a new 75 if the newbie's spell landed first by one second.
-when I maxed digging they put the fatigue limit on because they can't stop bots
-when I maxed fishing they put in that idiotic fishing game and fatigue and there are STILL bots.
-when I leveled ninja they made it where a naked war with byakkos axe could clobber me.

These are mostly in response to people complaining. SE is slow to react. They are cryptic, they rarely give the player base what they want. But most all of the really big screw ups are in response to direct requests from the players. Usually when I read forums (especially alla, although some BG too) the last thing I want is SE to start listening. Thats probably just me.

Let us be 100% realistic, this is SE, good or bad response they are slow to do anything. It is unlikely they're going to just tell us the hint any time in the next couple weeks. Why don't more shells follow Excellence's lead and post actual logs from their attempts. Its gonna be the fastest method. After years and years are they going to just give it to us?

We didn't get a strat from SE this update, but we did get a 100% pop. I don't know how many times I heard players complain (which I wholeheartedly agree) that its impossible to test on AV because he doesn't even pop consistently, not to mention the fact that virtues weren't 100% drops. We can force him to pop 100%. We've had this for one week. Most of that time people were distracted with the fact that he was now zergable. He has lower hp, his pets are weaker. Why not follow Excellence's lead and post actual data? I don't understand why this is always such a big issue to get people to post detailed data. Quite often when people test something they just report the conclusion "ohh it didn't work", I'm guilty of this sometimes too (often it turns out I'm wrong, that I overlooked something).

Post the logs in the appropriate thread. Every part of the SE video up to the point of 2 hours has a known purpose. Each part explains one component of defeating AV. I don't think SE is screwing with us that much just for the sake of screwing with us. I wish I could be out there fighting him every afternoon (perhaps I'm in the minority, heck I spent 4 days trying to nail down the formula for new weaponskills), but there is only one shell on my server who seriously attempts this stuff and I'm no longer a member.

Write SE and complain, cancel your account and tell them why, but its been one week, most of which was spent with people zerging anyway. There are a lot of smart players here, a lot smarter than I, but I can't see why shells aren't consistently gathering their logs and posting here for everyone to look at and find the patterns.

[Reality]

long post

not sure if it would work but i'd pay to watch something like that, it'd be awesome as fuck

[Kaeko]

Sorry to be such a nitpicker here...

Posting screenshots of logs during an AV fight is not really data... It's just a fairly accurate account of their fight - observational. Data implies you controlled some type of variable etc. and specifically eliminated or supported some theory. This in generally in hard as fuck to do on AV because it's hard to control it period. This is not to say that doing this doesn't help, it's just not as valuable as it would seem because you can't conclusively tell action X led to reaction Y.

Problem with logs is it doesn't give time order of events accurately, especially when we're talking about doing something moments after AV does something. You really have to be there yourself or get it on recording to get any sort of accurate time response.

Also, it's not like people haven't tested this before. So many wasted hours, wasted space here with various threads over the last 3 years... Trying to figure whatever the fuck SE wanted to figure out has really only led to 1 truth - whatever the fuck it is it's the most cryptic thing ever. There are so many BG memes here and I think about half of them are a product of (failed) testing of how AV was 'supposed' to be killed.

Just think about it... bunch of players from 20+ servers pretty much throwing out every obscure idea under the sun for 3 years on this and the only things we've found that were useful were a wall glitch, a goblin footprint glitch, and a wynavs glitch. The fact the player base FOUND these oddities should give you a clue as to how crazy the amount of testing was conducted on this mob. It's nice that it's a 100% pop now so people can test easier, but I would go out on a limb and say whenever the next time AV is killed is, it will NOT be the method they intended.

[LinktheDeme]

It's nice that it's a 100% pop now so people can test easier, but I would go out on a limb and say whenever the next time AV is killed is, it will NOT be the method they intended.

Was this refering to my method? ;o

Cause I'd really like to see how much a 300 TP king's justice does with angon feint SV minuet x2 SV madrigal x2

100 TP king's justice I don't have access to these wses currently ; ;

Raging Rush would probably be the same thing only slightly weaker though at exactly 100 tp

[Reality]

curious why you'd rather use KJ instead of steel cyclone, does it have better mods at 300%?

[LinktheDeme]

curious why you'd rather use KJ instead of steel cyclone, does it have better mods at 300%?

Figured the 3 hit factor with mighty strikes would top if off since the first hit would be 1.50, second 1.00, third 1.00 which would sum up to 3.50 instead of steel cyclones 3.00. Once I get King's Justice though I'll do a test to see which ones actually better at 300% with mighty strikes on something that has high defense or if anyone has data regarding the two that'd be nice as well.

[Parriah]

I just thought of another idea on how to zerg AV if I may but it'd require at least 50+ people and I'm assuming something here.

Need two alliances of the following

14 Warriors (Mighty Strikes)
1 Dark knight (Kclub drk since two drks wont really effect it)
1 Thief (feint)
1 Dragoon (angon)
1 SCH/RDM (regen control)

Left one spot open so everyone can get buffs with a brd rotation except thief and dragoon since they are there for this specific purpose

Now I'm assuming that each warrior will do 1000 damage on average in assumption that critical hits will break its defense factor.

The warriors first WS will be 300 TP King's Justice (Not sure how much damage this does at 300 TP and Mighty strikes assume it will be better than a 300 tp raging rush though) Then they will use a TP wing use King's Justice again And then meditate and try to get a 3rd ws off if permitting.

Assuming each WS does 1000 damage at least the 14 warriors alone should do
42000 thats without the Kclub drks help (Following the assumption that 2 kclub drk is the ideal number for no resist). If kclub drk is too much can just throw another warrior for 45000. I'm aware AV has about 65k hp(people estimate 66k we dont know how fast is regen is)
Then that alliance will just die and we'll throw the next alliance at it and they should be able to finish it off with another 42000 damage from wars and god knows how much from the kclub drk. Total damage dealt will be in the upwards of 100 000+.

This is assuming that King's Justice will do about 1000 damage with max buffs food and etc.

Pt layouts would be

WAR WAR WAR WAR DRK BRD
WAR WAR WAR WAR WAR BRD
WAR WAR WAR WAR WAR BRD

one brd sv march one brd sv madrigal one brd sv minuet rotate them between three pts then for the three brds put in sch/rdm, drg and thf.

Bene
Perfect Dodge
and invincible would all screw this up so it'd be slightly luck required

I have no idea how you expect a Drk to do 100K dmg when AV gains some sort of resistance. We had Swords, scythes, Daggers, Clubs, Great Axes, H2H on AV. This ranged from Drk, Mnk, Wars I have no idea what made his resistance spike the way it did. AV's resistance honestly reminds me of puddings Amorphic spikes or w/e it's called whare melee turn to shyt only AV's was like 90% reduction. This brings me back to my initial question:

Rdm/Xxx Chainspelling Element of day weather it be Tier 1, or T1>T2>T3 to keep his physical resistance down/off. I want to know if that would work. Also multihitting WSes... more chance of missed swings Steel Cyclone onry I'd say.

[kwontess]

Sorry to be such a nitpicker here...

Posting screenshots of logs during an AV fight is not really data... It's just a fairly accurate account of their fight - observational. Data implies you controlled some type of variable etc. and specifically eliminated or supported some theory. This in generally in hard as fuck to do on AV because it's hard to control it period. This is not to say that doing this doesn't help, it's just not as valuable as it would seem because you can't conclusively tell action X led to reaction Y.

Problem with logs is it doesn't give time order of events accurately, especially when we're talking about doing something moments after AV does something. You really have to be there yourself or get it on recording to get any sort of accurate time response.

Also, it's not like people haven't tested this before. So many wasted hours, wasted space here with various threads over the last 3 years... Trying to figure whatever the fuck SE wanted to figure out has really only led to 1 truth - whatever the fuck it is it's the most cryptic thing ever. There are so many BG memes here and I think about half of them are a product of (failed) testing of how AV was 'supposed' to be killed.

Just think about it... bunch of players from 20+ servers pretty much throwing out every obscure idea under the sun for 3 years on this and the only things we've found that were useful were a wall glitch, a goblin footprint glitch, and a wynavs glitch. The fact the player base FOUND these oddities should give you a clue as to how crazy the amount of testing was conducted on this mob. It's nice that it's a 100% pop now so people can test easier, but I would go out on a limb and say whenever the next time AV is killed is, it will NOT be the method they intended.

Much of this was before the video (admittedly that did spark interest again). When people aren't sharing their data they aren't being efficient about this. We have more information, easier ability to pop, easier ability to farm sets now than we ever have.

I don't want to play symantics with you about what data means. Certainly knowing exactly what 2 hours were used, etc is useful information. I've watched the posts, I've watched the testing. Its often the case that it is done very haphazardly. As you said AV fights are hard to control, hard to anticipate (other than saying it ends in wipe). Thats why its so important to have everything recorded. You are correct chat logs are not in the right order, but they are in the right order up to 1-2 seconds when time stamped.

Shells go out and try something and say "it didn't work". What does that even mean? It means they didn't win, well no shit. We're not looking for a solution, we're looking for a pattern. I think people expect to do something and AV just falls to the ground and gives up, or some massive drastic change and thats not necessarily the case.

What I'm trying to say is they're gonna go try something and they're going to wipe, they're going to try again and they wipe. Then they're gonna compare directly, the exact order, the timings of two hours, etc with everyone else who did it, the jobs involved, etc. I have not seen this done on a large scale. I have seen people outline rough estimates of what their fights are like, but if we are dealing with something that is a minute detail (we can probably agree it is) which has small incremental effects then we need as accurate of data/information as we can get. Excellence seems to be the first shell really trying this on a serious scale.

The goal isn't to go beat him, its to observe patterns and reactions. What are the times between 2 hours? Are they consistent? If so how consistent? Does feeding TP increase 2 hour rates (hard to test admittedly)? Why are the 2 hours farther apart? Is there a relationship between the elemental alignment of 2 hours and day of week, etc, etc, etc Do you really think people who are fighting him are going to be able to keep track of everything that is going on, how far apart, what spells were cast in roughly what order, etc? I don't want to sit around and speculate what it is, I haven't a clue, what I want to do is look at the fights and see what the pattern is that emerges, and thats not possible without people recording information.

The goal is not to beat him right now, its to better understand. Chances are it won't be something you understand until after the fact. Shells often go in trying to beat him, but thats not how its figured out, we're not at the step yet.

[LinktheDeme]

I have no idea how you expect a Drk to do 100K dmg when AV gains some sort of resistance. We had Swords, scythes, Daggers, Clubs, Great Axes, H2H on AV. This ranged from Drk, Mnk, Wars I have no idea what made his resistance spike the way it did. AV's resistance honestly reminds me of puddings Amorphic spikes or w/e it's called whare melee turn to shyt only AV's was like 90% reduction. This brings me back to my initial question:

Rdm/Xxx Chainspelling Element of day weather it be Tier 1, or T1>T2>T3 to keep his physical resistance down/off. I want to know if that would work. Also multihitting WSes... more chance of missed swings Steel Cyclone onry I'd say.

I'm under the impression that it was a souleater damage reduction not a total damage reduction to all. I wasn't saying for one DRK to do 100k dmg I was saying for the one drk to put up numbers as well since the general assumption is that two kclub drks max would be at about the cap of souleater damage. The WAR's would be the main source of damage since the only way to get past his defense(actual defense not souleater resist) is critical hits. Assuming each WAR with mighty strikes can do 1000 dmg per ws and 2 kclub drks would be just at the souleater cap then It'd be possible for each alliance to do about 50k damage.

With feint, food and aggressor and buffs it should be at near capped accuracy. (it's about 100 more accuracy than a kclub drk would have if you factor in skill and such)

[HadesChubbs]

WAR zerg

See, the reason DRK zerg worked, as i'm sure you know, was forcing it to lose HP faster than its "AI" could tell the difference between its ass and a hole in the ground. You basically "confuse" AV.

This is done by forcing switches in behaviors at different %'s. DRKs can do a ridiculous amount of damage, fast. Let it live too long, or leave it between behavior changes too long, and your ass gets meteor'd.

Warriors do not have the ability to kill it this fast, thus wouldn't stand a chance past 79% (guessing u could do around that much before your dmg output just disappeared).


Cliffnotes: normal mele zerg wont work guys.

[Parriah]

I'm under the impression that it was a souleater damage reduction not a total damage reduction to all. I wasn't saying for one DRK to do 100k dmg I was saying for the one drk to put up numbers as well since the general assumption is that two kclub drks max would be at about the cap of souleater damage. The WAR's would be the main source of damage since the only way to get past his defense(actual defense not souleater resist) is critical hits. Assuming each WAR with mighty strikes can do 1000 dmg per ws and 2 kclub drks would be just at the souleater cap then It'd be possible for each alliance to do about 50k damage.

With feint, food and aggressor and buffs it should be at near capped accuracy. (it's about 100 more accuracy than a kclub drk would have if you factor in skill and such)

I know we did use Feint had 3 Brd rotation for Accx2, Hastex2, Attx2. I believe what your saying is that is souleater is used the dmg would be resisted... that is possible since everyone WAS /Drk. I really wonder if gungnir would help in this situation since it has perma Angon additional effect. I just know from what it seemed today traditional kill seems to be the way to go AFTER a preliminary mini zerg to take it below 95%. I really want to hear some ideas.

[LinktheDeme]

See, the reason DRK zerg worked, as i'm sure you know, was forcing it to lose HP faster than its "AI" could tell the difference between its ass and a hole in the ground. You basically "confuse" AV.

This is done by forcing switches in behaviors at different %'s. DRKs can do a ridiculous amount of damage, fast. Let it live too long, or leave it between behavior changes too long, and your ass gets meteor'd.

Warriors do not have the ability to kill it this fast, thus wouldn't stand a chance past 79% (guessing u could do around that much before your dmg output just disappeared).


Cliffnotes: normal mele zerg wont work guys.

It would not take anything long for wars to do one pre 300 tpd ws, Wing WS again, meditate and try to hit it twice to ws again. Should take about 20 seconds to do that. The only time period is the transitional phase between the first allys wipe and the second ally of the same party finishing off AV.

edit: Wow I made a boo boo ;o