Absolute Virtue - Other Discussion

[Ramses]

You're playing this down too much, Fealty doesn't help that much. A Paladin with full magic damage reduction and Fealty can still easily die to Manafont, and any mages in Meteor range too.

This is a good idea. 2 Rangers should be able to outlast Manafont with proper co-ordination.

Also a good idea, but who has that many people with magic damage reduction equipment?

What I'm saying is pld with fealty will survive meteor. It should go like this: AV uses manafont. As soon as that message appears, pld uses fealty, rng shadowbind. Pld run in one direction out of range, everyone else run in the exact opposite direction to maximize range. AV may even use comet first. Pld should survive while everyone gets out of range. As for aeroga IV, even melee not using resists should be able to survive with 10 people sharing the hit. They will be quite hurt and should run out of range to be cured and regroup after, but should help survive the random aeroga IV. Use shadowbind for the CS version.

[Maxxthepenguin]

Theory outside the context of science means what people think it means. Don't be stupid about it

[Durden]

The solution has nothing to do with the stupid weapons.

That could be a hint in the AV video, blatantly showing you that the jailer weapons aren't needed, hence the PLDs with staves, RDM tanking with staves. When sword/shield is obviously better for PLD. Idk

[Colenzo]

yo gais i have this pretty cool theory

[Max™]

I'm still 100% against this, primarily because this is the wrong thread for this.

(aside Remember, Max is interested in damage per second, so make sure you have a running average that spits out a number every single time AV's AI tries to make a decision. Because otherwise this information is useless. And make sure you start your calculators the second that AV pops otherwise this theory won't be useful.

No, it is an untested variable which (as suggested by SE) could have an effect on his behavior.

Rigor demands it be accounted for before any theory can be proven or not, dislike it if you will, but you can't claim it isn't important to know every condition which could possible effect the AI and it's behavior when trying to alter a single condition and determine the outcomes.

Happily, Neo knows about scientific rigor and will probably understand where I'm coming from.


Ideally you would track EVERYTHING, right down to your fucking S/R speeds, but honestly just a running parse with a general DPS/DPM counter would do wonders.

[Max™]

NOTHING IS OUTSIDE THE CONTEXT OF SCIENCE!

Well, except God, but that's only because he's apparently outside of the Universe AND CURRENTLY UNTESTABLE.

[Maxxthepenguin]

Regen is not torques
Whining about the scientific method is not torques
Telling people to actually test is not torques

People will notice when they deal more or less damage
People will be smart if they have the ability to test

[Ultimagi]

Hmmm... you have a point there. With my Mirror Party, they could have a White Mage whose sole purpose is to Curaga them after every Aeroga. Or an outside Scholar could do it with Accession too.

Edit: A Scholar could give them all Stoneskin and Baraera too, this is so win.
Another Edit: Why did this get moved?

[fndragon]

No, it is an untested variable which (as suggested by SE) could have an effect on his behavior.

Rigor demands it be accounted for before any theory can be proven or not, dislike it if you will, but you can't claim it isn't important to know every condition which could possible effect the AI and it's behavior when trying to alter a single condition and determine the outcomes.

Happily, Neo knows about scientific rigor and will probably understand where I'm coming from.


Ideally you would track EVERYTHING, right down to your fucking S/R speeds, but honestly just a running parse with a general DPS/DPM counter would do wonders.

No, I totally understand scientific rigor. However, you then follow up by advocating a general DPS/DPM counter is sufficient. Sure, I don't claim to know the AI, especially when it is such of a black box example.

I only take umbrage when it's suggested that this "damage it slowly, but not too slow or you'll lose, but not too fast or you'll get wiped" tactic has some merit or real-world application. Humbly, I concede that I've not tested it yet, but then again you have not either. But I posit that the boundary conditions for what is an acceptable "DPS" are not known, and my postulation is that they don't exist. I could very well be wrong, but for me to be wrong would imply an example of some group FINDING those boundaries, even by accident. And to date we haven't seen that at all. The only cryptic message has been "The speed of the fight is all wrong" which has myriad explanations/translation errors.

Of course I'd suggest building off of what we know for any test bed situation. Kill JoL's spawn until only phaubo, cast elemental magic of the day on AV, and try and use the OP's suggestion of using the sea Torques combined with retaliatory 2hour abilities.

And yes, sure, why not record the DPS that is being done for fun. However, all I want you to agree is that keeping DPS within a magical, UNKNOWN range is not part of the simple test suggested by the OP. Rigor does demand that the party's DPS be recorded, but not that it has any bearing on the outcome of the fight.


tl;dr: Max's theory should not be in this thread. Record the DPS, sure, but don't try and magically lower your damage output to fit his whimsical (my opinion) theory.

[Max™]

...

Asking for advice and giving a game plan isn't torques then either.


Also: I didn't say he should raise or lower his DPS, I simply said record it.


Then I suggested that if you run out of variables to test, try changing it and see what happens.

[Tubbers]

Max: Your idea seemed extremely familiar to me, in fact, here:

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.

[fndragon]

Max: Your idea seemed extremely familiar to me, in fact, here: (insert belkin quote)

Yes, this was what I was referring to earlier. Belkin went on and on at great length about this theory.

Also, I see we've been moved to this thread now. Hurray for consistency. The other thread should have a title of "Torques or GTFO" for posting there :D

[Max™]

Yeah, he posted that while I was reading the thread and posting something along those lines a few pages later waaaay back in the big huge cluster fuck thread.


My thing is that while I fully recognize my pet theory could be wrong, it isn't about my theory.

It is really about an undocumented variable, which stands out like it was in enormous bold red font to my mind, so I suggest, repeatedly, to record this variable.

If nothing else, we should eliminate it as a possible factor.

[Ramses]

Hmmm... you have a point there. With my Mirror Party, they could have a White Mage whose sole purpose is to Curaga them after every Aeroga. Or an outside Scholar could do it with Accession too.

Edit: A Scholar could give them all Stoneskin and Baraera too, this is so win.
Another Edit: Why did this get moved?

I think you are replying to me, things have moved. But yeah, that's the idea. Maximize survivability and should be able to last a good while to test stuff.

[fndragon]

Yeah, he posted that while I was reading the thread and posting something along those lines a few pages later waaaay back in the big huge cluster fuck thread.


My thing is that while I fully recognize my pet theory could be wrong, it isn't about my theory.

It is really about an undocumented variable, which stands out like it was in enormous bold red font to my mind, so I suggest, repeatedly, to record this variable.

If nothing else, we should eliminate it as a possible factor.

I agree 100% with this. What would be a good test to eliminate it as a possible factor, though?

[Max™]

This torque idea struck me as a good test.


Start the parser when JoL is popped, start another when AV pops so you have two logs which overlap, one with the entire fight, one with just AV.

Take note of AV's behavior after his Regen is broken completely and he is simply tanked with no damage dealt for a minute.

Take note of AV's behavior after his Regen is broken completely and he is slowly damaged.

Take note of AV's behavior after his Regen is broken completely and he is severely damaged.

Replace the above tests with attempts using the 2hr with torques on when he 2hrs.


If the theory is wrong, and you simply tank him without dealing damage beyond what it took to break his regen, he will flip out and facerape you, and 2hring with torques may or may not work.

If you tank him without dealing damage beyond what it took to break his regen and he does flip out, ideally you could recover and attempt to ramp up the damage first to the minimum amount possible to kill him in the time given by SE (roughly 1000 Dmg per minute, at 45 minutes to milk JoL + 66k HP) and see if he flips out.

If at any point the damage dealt remains constant, but his behavior does not, the hypothesis is likely incorrect.

If at any point the damage becomes inconsistent, but his behavior does not, then the hypothesis is almost certainly incorrect.

If the torque+2hr is tested and fails without knowing the damage that was dealt up til that point, the results remain inconclusive, as there is a chance that it could have worked if the damage dealt was varied.

[fndragon]

This torque idea struck me as a good test.


Start the parser when JoL is popped, start another when AV pops so you have two logs which overlap, one with the entire fight, one with just AV.

Take note of AV's behavior after his Regen is broken completely and he is simply tanked with no damage dealt for a minute.

Take note of AV's behavior after his Regen is broken completely and he is slowly damaged.

Take note of AV's behavior after his Regen is broken completely and he is severely damaged.

Replace the above tests with attempts using the 2hr with torques on when he 2hrs.


If the theory is wrong, and you simply tank him without dealing damage beyond what it took to break his regen, he will flip out and facerape you, and 2hring with torques may or may not work.

If you tank him without dealing damage beyond what it took to break his regen and he does flip out, ideally you could recover and attempt to ramp up the damage first to the minimum amount possible to kill him in the time given by SE (roughly 1000 Dmg per minute, at 45 minutes to milk JoL + 66k HP) and see if he flips out.

If at any point the damage dealt remains constant, but his behavior does not, the hypothesis is likely incorrect.

If at any point the damage becomes inconsistent, but his behavior does not, then the hypothesis is almost certainly incorrect.

If the torque+2hr is tested and fails without knowing the damage that was dealt up til that point, the results remain inconclusive, as there is a chance that it could have worked if the damage dealt was varied.

I think you're putting too much faith in "45 minutes to milk JoL". Your mileage may vary there. I'd be happy for a timestamped log of any fight. Aren't there any timestamped logs available for you to parse Max? You can easily discern the amount of damage done that way, post mortem.

[Max™]

Ya know, I've actually COMPLETELY forgotten about timestamp, as I'm a ps2 user and it doesn't occur to me.

Anyone have any timestamped logs of AV fights they would care to share for us to pore over?

I know it could take more than 45 minutes for JoL, but the big thing is that it won't really take less because of the rate he pops pets at.

Really though, my own "do the damage he would have regened" idea is just one of many which could benefit from having confirmation of if he responds to the rate at which he is damaged or not.

[Ambir]

There are a whole lot of timestamped logs transcribed, linked into the first (huge) threads after the video came out. Noone was doing much damage though, they were mostly trying to either lock 2hrs or regen their own 2hrs.

For the record though:
- They never locked an AV 2hr
- They never affected the speed AV uses 2hrs
- They never reset their own 2hr

and I've still never seen any evidence that it's possible to actually do any of these.
Certainly, in the video, there's no evidence a 2hr was locked, there's no distinguishable damage pattern (if there's significant damage at all), and there's no indication that AV has a "mode" where it's easier to damage, or even easier to survive...

[Mojo]

I had a gut of timestamped logs at one point, but they were recently lost when my computer died and I simply reformatted over them. Rest assured, any kind of 'steady damage' theory or what have you is simply not true.

Either way, I know the secret now, and I'm not telling.