Goodbye present - how to kill AV (before it's patched)

[Dimmauk]

For what it is worth I thought I would share this:

A friend of mine (who's word I trust) was planning on trying this, and called a GM just to be sure it was ok.

The GM said something along the lines of "We are aware of this matter; others have reported it; we are currently investigating it and until our investigation is complete it is advised you do not try it."

Something to that effect. They are on 360 so no SS's, just thought I would pass along the info. Do with it as you will.

Bullshit.

[dejet]

Lets put it this way, ALLa has a big group of noobs that dont want anything done if it seems easy to their brain. Their group will make it a "exploit", even if SE knew about it. Getting 100's of mails a day from the player's will force a change even more so that it seems it can be done on AV. I still do not see this as being overpowered in any way as my last post outlined how its not even safe...

edit: Its not overpowered... Id much rather do hydra with 5 war/nins over 10 schs. less inclined to fuck up.

[willriker]

Anyone thought of trying this on JoL to free up more time for experimenting with AV? Its a wild shot as it would not give time to nerf the regen on AV.

But, it would certainly be simpler to do this to JoL than to do it to AV. As the scholars would not have to worry about... fighting AV in addition to testing this on AV. I would think that if you could get this to work on JoL... Itll work on AV.

Oh, and to those who reported this to GM's... That is the reason why things are kept secret until figured out. People havent even been able to get this to work on AV yet... Its still just theory till it is performed correctly... Yet someone goes out and calls a GM on every single thing that gets released from private knowledge. Even though it has not even been successful yet.

Seriously guys, You take blms to GA burn DM, scnm, ksnm in less than a second. You take SMN to AF mission fights mission fights in less than a second. You do this exact type of thing all the time... and then call a GM on this... this theory which hasnt even been pulled off yet.

I am wondering when purists will learn that they will never win... by definition they are already fighting a losing battle. All you do is inhibit progress, not prevent it.

[drwaffles]

lolpseudo-drama update: Seedz logged onto Nours's second account, deleted all his characters and replaced them with level 1s. He's in the process of restoring them now so no harm done, but oh my what a mad little boy Seedz is. All the more reason to believe that the whole "hurhur I tricked u guys into confessan!" story is a load of bollocks and you were just angry at being made a fool.

[sruon]

Getting better and better, someone got butthurt and deleted characters on my other account.... sucks they're recovered already.

[Virtuous Saint]

Lets put it this way, ALLa has a big group of noobs that dont want anything done if it seems easy to their brain. Their group will make it a "exploit", even if SE knew about it. Getting 100's of mails a day from the player's will force a change even more so that it seems it can be done on AV. I still do not see this as being overpowered in any way as my last post outlined how its not even safe...

edit: Its not overpowered... Id much rather do hydra with 5 war/nins over 10 schs. less inclined to fuck up.

Nah, it is bs just as Souleater zerging anything is (except DL), but the fact is, it should be used against AV because the SE dev team made something where the method to kill it is not even hinted at in any part of the game. The fact that they made something in which the entire FFXI player base could not figure out for 4ish years means that the entire player base is inclined to use any method necessary to kill that one thing.

AV isn't a brilliantly designed monster, it is the exact opposite, it is probably the worst designed battle of any game ever created. It's almost like having a random person fly a space shuttle, of course they aren't going to fly it, they haven't the first god damn clue where to begin. AV would be brilliantly designed if it chatted while you fought it, giving you hints as to how to weaken/lock it (also if it changed color depending on the in-game day which would hint at nuking a specific element and after the regen was locked it just went to normal aern color), but it doesn't. I mean these are just a few things they could have done to give the player base what they needed to know to lock/weaken it, but they were too god damn stupid to do something like that. The only thing that could ever be determined about AV was the fact that it was completely impossible to kill under normal means, unless there was a way to weaken/lock it.

Edit: I like how SE nerfed 'Manaburning' NMs in their own way, and did nothing about BW zergging which is 100% more ridiculous and fast in killing any NM it is used on.

[S N K]

Oh, and to those who reported this to GM's... That is the reason why things are kept secret until figured out. People havent even been able to get this to work on AV yet... Its still just theory till it is performed correctly... Yet someone goes out and calls a GM on every single thing that gets released from private knowledge. Even though it has not even been successful yet.

I'm having flashbacks of the Salvage bans when people post crap like this..

[Tagus]

These discussions about this are getting interesting. People are claiming that GM's have been informed and it could be potentially become a bannable offense to do this... maybe bullshit, maybe not. But seriously... who would report something like this before it's even been tested?

[Arcanesoul]

Not that my opinion matters much, but what other options are there for using MV?

Unmerited solo use is no better than just letting the helix tick over, and you could even lose dmg depending on timing by using it. How many situations are there that are that time critical that even the benefit of a merited MV is worth the time for solo use?

The only option appears to me that this was intended to be stacked. But..

If SE would assume we only know tic duration and that the tic begins at landing (yes this is false), that would mean you could get at most 3 sch unmerited or 4-5 sch merited to get in a tic worth of damage, what would be the point of it? The damage would only be around 4k (130dmg tic *2^5) and other jobs are more than capable of producing more in place of those 5/6 sch.
If SE assume we will work out how tic timing actually works, then they know we could generate these super-helix tics, and even more so because they know people work with third party programs even if they're not supposed to.
So what other options are there?

Another question is that are there extra latency issues with when AV appears? Does he cause more network delay on appearing? Are certain areas of sea laggy and does this contribute?
I assume people may have already tried, but what are the results of assuming a longer helix duration, i.e. assuming the initial helix duration lasts for 60 secs (translating to 4.5 sec for 9 merited MV's)? Is it possible to "randomly" 1-shot him then (basically not have the tic go off if duration is actually shorter)?
Are tics definitely 10 seconds or some stupid fraction that allows it to tic over early?
I must admit, while the math is sound ~3secs is not a lot, to make sure the spell lands so there is less than 3.4 sec to the next tic, and that the rest of the MV's go off taking into account lag from various sources.

To be honest, I'd like to see this become a method available to schs that is just hard to pull off (and even then perhaps multiple attempts needed). If it could be pulled off with regularity to the extent of killing AV everytime, I would rather it be nerfed in the end (since people will then use bots and exploit the shit out of it). Sadly SE has an easy solution, that would make MV considered useless to most as it currently was before the feasibility of the method was released, and that would be sad for sch if they do...

[BerenTebogo]

lolpseudo-drama update: Seedz logged onto Nours's second account, deleted all his characters and replaced them with level 1s. He's in the process of restoring them now so no harm done, but oh my what a mad little boy Seedz is. All the more reason to believe that the whole "hurhur I tricked u guys into confessan!" story is a load of bollocks and you were just angry at being made a fool.

Telling you guys, it's the Sattva. It does crazy shit to people.

[Jesifromgaruda]

These discussions about this are getting interesting. People are claiming that GM's have been informed and it could be potentially become a bannable offense to do this... maybe bullshit, maybe not. But seriously... who would report something like this before it's even been tested?

Because some people get really butthurt when they hear a really good idea that they didn't think up. They think about the fame and the gear/money that these groups would get from killing AV and they get really jealous. So they are trying to squash it as fast as they can before people can pull this off.

Oh, and if people will say that they reported it because other mobs can be killed this way, thats BS. Just about all the mobs in the game are killed easily on the regular and to have an optional way to kill them quickly that you might or not might be able to pull off shouldn't matter to anyone. If you get all crazy about people using this on non AV mobs, you should be calling GMs on melee burning Kirin instead of spending 30-45 mins doing it the "right" way.

Because of apparently how hard this is to pull off and how many SCHs you need and the merit requirements, I highly doubt that this would become the de facto way of killing NMs. It would just be an option that a very very small percentage of LSs would have available to them. Just like Kirin, everyone knows you can melee burn it. But I'm being dead serious here, I don't know a single shell that melee burns it. Proving that not all LSs will have the resources to do a mob the faster way.

[Tagus]

Because some people get really butthurt when they hear a really good idea that they didn't think up. They think about the fame and the gear/money that these groups would get from killing AV and they get really jealous. So they are trying to squash it as fast as they can before people can pull this off.

Oh, and if people will say that they reported it because other mobs can be killed this way, thats BS. Just about all the mobs in the game are killed easily on the regular and to have an optional way to kill them quickly that you might or not might be able to pull off shouldn't matter to anyone. If you get all crazy about people using this on non AV mobs, you should be calling GMs on melee burning Kirin instead of spending 30-45 mins doing it the "right" way.

Because of apparently how hard this is to pull off and how many SCHs you need and the merit requirements, I highly doubt that this would become the de facto way of killing NMs. It would just be an option that a very very small percentage of LSs would have available to them. Just like Kirin, everyone knows you can melee burn it. But I'm being dead serious here, I don't know a single shell that melee burns it. Proving that not all LSs will have the resources to do a mob the faster way.

My LS burns Kirin with a 100% success rate. That's a bit off topic tho. It's kinda funny that now we're in a bit of a situation where, if enough Scholars come together to try this and actually succeed, they could end up causing SE to nerf one of their useful abilities.

[Chaz]

The only way to get SE to release another hint to the playerbase is to keep finding "unintended" methods to throw at AV. At some point one of them is going to have enough sense to say "look, they've found 7 different ways to kill it and none of them were the right way...lets just throw them a bone because they are smarter than we are".

On the Kirin thing, there really is no excuse to not be able to TPBurn a Kirin nowadays. Recently my LS zerged down 6 Kirins in about two hours. I will admit when a newer member was laying the strategy down I was highly skeptical due to the fact he was saying no 2HRs were necessary...but it worked 6/6 times with very little risk. If you have three BRDs, a few WHMs, and 16-18 decent DD, it can be done without 2HRs.

Sath can attest to this in case there are some non-believers, not that there should be any.

[drwaffles]

My LS burns Kirin with a 100% success rate. That's a bit off topic tho. It's kinda funny that now we're in a bit of a situation where, if enough Scholars come together to try this and actually succeed, they could end up causing SE to nerf one of their useful abilities.

Actually MV is an extremely mediocre ability when not used in this fashion.

[Jesifromgaruda]

You guys are helping me prove my point actually. You guys say how easy melee burning Kirin is, yet I don't know any shells that do it that way. I don't do sky anymore but I know people in Sky LSs and not a single one melee burns it.

[Yvonne]

Actually MV is an extremely mediocre ability when not used in this fashion.

What he said.

[Baelorn]

I don't do sky anymore but I know people in Sky LSs and not a single one melee burns it.

People who do Sky a lot will probably build more than one Kirin set before they get around to using them. It's better to do it the traditional way when you have multiple pops. Some LSes can zerg it without 2hrs but most can't so they'd rather not risk losing the pops.

[Tirgen]

Sadly SE has an easy solution, that would make MV considered useless to most as it currently was before the feasibility of the method was released, and that would be sad for sch if they do...

A more feasible solution would be to just give AV a higher resistance to magic, or even to helix specifically, just like they did for souleater.

If you can't land the initial helix for enough damage, then you can't kill it in 1 round. From posts here 9 seems incredibly difficult to time, so if they reduced initial damage to the point that you needed 10+ MV's it would effectively make this not viable, but leave the ability itself alone.

And be honest about it, this is all about AV. If you run around MV-burning Jorm, Hydra and ZNMs nobody is going to give a fuck. The base of the problem is still AV. He's still the un-killable monster, that has an obscure strategy that in all the years he's been ass-raping alliances, we still don't fully understand. Nobody is/was going to the effort of of building sch's to attempt this so they can shave time off their Kirin kills... It's because AV is so poorly done, that we have to resort to off the wall ideas and trickery, instead of the 'real' solution.

[Brill Weave]

It's because AV is so poorly done, that we have to resort to off the wall ideas and trickery, instead of the 'real' solution.

Game, set, match. Are you fucking reading this SE?

[isladar]

The answer tho is yes, there are people who feel accomplished from zergging things to death instantly despite how easy it is.

Easy, yes; but it is immensely satisfying and adrenaline/fun zerging something down the first time.