Einherjar: tips for a new LS

[Arthars]

BRD rotation is far from needed.. simple is best.

i like that ^^

can rotate as a bonus factor, but why rotate when you can already win w/o

simple is best!

and dear lord, dont propose brd rotation to new LS seeking setup helps..........you are actually hurting most of them trying too hard to rotate and fail in general

rotate, sure, but do it when you reached the veteran level and actually boost your performance than do more harm

bard rotation takes 2 good hands(brd and leader) to clap.

[Suiram]

and dear lord, dont propose brd rotation to new LS seeking setup helps..........you are actually hurting most of them trying too hard to rotate and fail in general

Depends on who is asking. If it's someone saying "hey we just started Einherjar, what do we do?" then you're probably right, no need to overcomplicate things when they don't really have any experience. If it's somebody saying "we got T1s down, and T2s with some difficulty, but we keep losing T3s despite getting 20-25 people a run, how can we fix this?" then brd rotation could (and very likely would) be just what they need to make the difference.

"Simple is best" only makes sense when one method is perceptibly simpler than the other. When you get BRD swaps going flawlessly, then both are simple enough, and then the logic is "four songs are better than two, and six songs are better than four."

I get that if you win every run without bard swaps there's no reason for you to do them. Winning is winning, and there's no reason to inject uncertainty into the process when you could just leave well enough alone. But if someone comes on here who has difficulty winning, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it. It's just like any other "new" method of doing things; there's a learning curve. Give people a few runs to make mistakes, to get the hang of what they're supposed to be doing, and any additional effort put forward to facilitate the swap all but disappears. The benefits from there are self-evident.

[Arthars]

My ein LS had our first run tonight. It went okay, but could have gone better.

What advice can successful LSs give for a new LS?

obviously im replying in this thread with reference to the opening post

first run and clearing T2 and T3 easy and asking for better strat?

i dont think so

it is people in between here and the OP thats suggesting brd swaps to him, complicating things.

to people who kept on suggesting brd swaps to the OP:
do you do bard swaps in your first ever einherjar T1 runs? is that a true guide to do well for a new LS?

[Suiram]

I guess I wasn't really responding to you specifically anyway, as much as I fixated on something you wrote and used it in a response to the general bard-swap backlash I've seen cropping up around here lately.

[Suiram]

I take back one part of what I said before. Thinking about it more, I actually do think I would suggest brd swaps to LS just starting out T1. Here is why.

1. I believe that when executed properly, bard swaps are superior to no swapping (I think everyone agrees with this part, clearly more buffs with no penalty is better than not).

2. I believe that with enough practice, almost any LS can do flawless BRD swaps (at least how my LS does it, 4 songs for waves, 6 SV/Troub/Night songs for boss), the only thing standing in the way is getting everybody used to doing them.

3. T1s may seem hard enough for a new LS, but anyone who has done enough Einherjar knows that by the time you are winning T3s they are like nothing. Why not get started early with it? That way when things get harder in T2, and finally in T3, you've already mastered it, so those later runs are easier out of the gate, and you don't have to unlearn old habits if you were going to end up switching to BRD swapping anyway.


Maybe it's just me, but it seems easier to tell people "hey, this new event comes with a new way of doing things," than to try to get them to change strategy later. Especially BRDs, who as a group are notoriously stubborn and lazy, I think because the majority of them don't care about the job and only levelled it for merits and resent you for making them play it in the first place lol So the extra effort of "drop party, send someone a tell" is oh so much effort. I'm only half joking here, and I do think it's difficult to get people to change their habits when they're used to doing something one way.


I don't mean to sound boastful here. When we started BRD swaps it took a couple runs to get the regular swaps working without people sitting outside party for long periods, and even longer to get boss 6-song swap down (people joining wrong party, people playing songs in wrong order, etc). But now that we're over that hurdle, I wouldn't want to do it any other way. Now bard swapping is even finding its way into other events as well, just because of how effective it is. This is why I am a strong advocate for it.

[Neosutra]

If people having a macro that says /partycmd add Playername is too complicated, stop playing the game. And the difference between 3 parties with 6 songs each and 3 parties with 2 songs each is HUGE.

And just because you "can" win w/o rotations, doesnt mean that extra 3-4 minutes you save by the significant DoT increase wont help you win some more difficult chambers in the future.

[Eldelphia]

I should just say, we actually prefer to do BRD swaps. This time we only did between 2 parties whereas previously we've gone between 4 (2 pairs of 2). I still think that brd rotation between all dd parties is ultimately desirable and we're still rejigging our setup. Tempted to push my COR up hard right now... love to have one in there.

One of my sacks is interested in pushing out two BLM parties for this and I wondered what you thought?

Right now we're going with 30-32 peeps, sometimes a couple more and I've worked on 4-5 melee parties (inc support) and a 4 x BLM, BRD+RDM party. He's interested in bringing in 2 BLM parties and 2 melee DD parties. The event is short enough and if we have enough fresh for them we could do it but my concern is that it's not a sustainable model... that it would work well for some mobs but on others it would completely screw you. Thoughts?

[Berdysh]

4-5 BLM is more than enough to do what you bring them for, stacking melee is far more preferable. You need slots 34 - 36 to be feather mules anyway, if you want to farm Odin at any kind of a decent rate.

[Suiram]

I should just say, we actually prefer to do BRD swaps. This time we only did between 2 parties whereas previously we've gone between 4 (2 pairs of 2). I still think that brd rotation between all dd parties is ultimately desirable and we're still rejigging our setup. Tempted to push my COR up hard right now... love to have one in there.

One of my sacks is interested in pushing out two BLM parties for this and I wondered what you thought?

Right now we're going with 30-32 peeps, sometimes a couple more and I've worked on 4-5 melee parties (inc support) and a 4 x BLM, BRD+RDM party. He's interested in bringing in 2 BLM parties and 2 melee DD parties. The event is short enough and if we have enough fresh for them we could do it but my concern is that it's not a sustainable model... that it would work well for some mobs but on others it would completely screw you. Thoughts?

The "starting point" I use for setting up alliances for our runs assumes 26 people before mules, and is adjusted from there depending on if we get more or fewer people in attendance. The starting point is:

Ally 1
PT1 : D D D C R B1
PT2 : D D D C R B2

Ally 2
PT3 : D D D C R B3
PT4 : N N N N R* B4
PT5 : M R*

D = melee, C = COR if possible, melee otherwise, R = RDM/WHM, R* = RDM/DRK, B# = BRD, N = BLM, and M = Me (puller)

B1 and B2 swap, giving marchx2 minuetx2 to their parties. B3 and B4 swap, giving same songs to PT3, and balladx2 + whatever else (usually marchx2, just because) to PT 4. For Boss, PT 3 joins Ally 1 and all 3 BRDs rotate through all 3 parties giving two each of marches, minuets, and madrigals.

If we have less than that many, the adjustments depend on who is there and what wing it is, but since you have more I won't touch on that.

If we have a couple more people, usually just have them BLM and stick them in PT5. If it was clear in advance that we were going to have 32+ people, ideal would be a 4th melee PT with two pairs of bard swaps between them for regulars and the 6-song rotation for boss (each brd joining 3 of the 4 melee parties). However, in practice, on the occasions where we do have that many people show up, it's usually been because the last few trickled in as we were gathering, and at that point it's just easier and faster to keep having people come BLM, and we end up with 3 melee PTs and 2 BLM PTs. That's not too bad, but I would always try to aim for at least 3 melee pts and 1 blm pt unless we had less than 26, then what you add from there doesn't much matter so long as they are well-supported.

[Eldelphia]

We're doing Wing II right now. How do you guys rate taking a DRG? We have a guy whose DRG is well geared and fairly well merited v his DRK which shares some of his gear but isn't really merited. Trying to work out whether we're better off keeping him on DRG for Angon etc

[Drex]

Angon is a must, drakesbane is hax, probably do better on DRG since soul eater doesn't work on most/all einherjar bosses

[dejet]

drk gets hit with the gimp bat SE dos less and less dmg each hit(much liek av but not to that point) 1 drg is not a bad idea with the agno or w/e its called.

[Furionstormrage]

We always bring one DRG and one THF, for Angon and Feint.

The DRG actually does pretty well damage-wise.

On the DRK note, we used to bring a lot of multi-hit DRKs to Tier 1 & 2 since *most* of those bosses don't resist SE, but we found that our WARs and MNKs (Some being the same player, with DRK and WAR or MNK 75) were consistently outparsing the DRKs on regular mobs by a fair margin. So we chose to bring jobs that put out more damage on the whole, versus just excelling on the boss but slowing down regular mob kill-speed.

[Neosutra]

Drg is a beast in einherjar. Our drgs parse at the top few spots almost all the time due to alot of the chambers having peircing weak mobs. Add angon being on bosses 100% of the time and much love <3.

[Zigfried]

Behemoth Boss. Go.

seriously. 5/8 on this fucker on our most recent tier 3s. the other 3 were 1) cerb, timed out at 10%. 2)Khim +12 flayers. our puller linked all flayers at once, bad news, 3)Vampire, broke apart at like 20% and people hard too hard of a time working as a team.

how own earth do people take this prick down, i know some groups just drop glass but i wanna know strats.

[Drex]

zerg, kill him before he kills you, spam curagas and pray basically

[Furionstormrage]

zerg, kill him before he kills you, spam curagas and pray basically

This.

We've only gotten him once, on a particularly bad draw so we were severely low on time as it was, but we still got him to ~50 in around a minute or so, then timed out.

[Neosutra]

Yep. And lol at any group that just drops lamp at him. That fight is a healers fight though: Melees just go all out, have your whms and rdms do everything in their power to keep them alive. Meteor wont one shot anyone (other than a buffless taru mage). And he has like 30-45 seconds between recasts.

[Suiram]

Do people actually just drop lamp on him? I thought that was just based on that one screenshot from long ago by Ryko or someone in his LS when they warped out of a wave of Flayers and Behemoth boss because they had claimed a real KB on the outside.

[Chojja]

I dont dread KB much anymore, most recent run ended with last wave being Shadow Dragons and KB. Seemed like a worst possible scenario but managed it fine, I think the kicker was we got Muninn so the lower HP/Def seemed to make the shadow dragons killable before silence wore off.

Only one I still dread is Dvergr because we've only gotten him once, I never have a PLD or BLU and I just worry that everyone will freak out on the pull