Greetings everyone, and welcome to another edition of /panic motion. We’ve got an exciting show lined up for you all this evening. Today we’ll go over how to dominate the Fields of Valor up in Tu’lia, and get our first taste of the new elite training regiments. Also, new details on the Fei’yin BCNM & massive carnage in the sands of Valkurm. All this, and more today on this brand spanking new edition of /panic motion!
Cut! Cut! All right, all television-related puns aside it’s been a pretty busy last couple of days here for us in the world of Vana’diel. Time to cut to the chase and get down to business.
<<<>>>
This week we’ll start things off over up in Sky, where I had the chance to partake in a few rounds of Fields of Valor. Three of the exercises available in Tu’lia cater especially to the solo black mage, the first of which is to defeat 11 members of the doll family. Now anyone with any basic level of endgame experience should know the rules for dealing with dolls here; basically don’t magic agro the dolls, don’t get close to the detectors, and for fraks sake don’t let them blow up! Thankfully, their magic agro ability does have limited range, and a good black mage will be able to cast and pull them safely from a distance. Difficulty wise, they’re not tough at all & typically go down in 3-4 nukes. Just make sure to pull them to a safe area such as the entrance to the Shrine of Ru’avitu & you’ll be fine.
For defeating the 11 dolls, you receive a sizable chunk of both experience and tabs (1550 EXP, 155 tabs). With only a pair of runs on this training regiment, you’ll have enough tabs to trigger any of the new elite training programs. Accepting these new elite challenges requires you to take a key item, and your choice of either gil, beastman seals, or a piece of equipment to a field parchment somewhere in the zone. Trading these to the parchment spawns a notorious monster for you to fight against. With around 300 tabs in hand, I ended up spending them over in the snowy fields of Behemoth’s Dominion. Trading in the key item and offering up my trusty Qiqirn Sash +1 triggered a battle against Gudanna… you guessed it, a Behemoth!
First thing you have to quickly understand about the new elite NMs is that taking them too far away from the field parchment will force them to depop (you’ll receive warnings if your too far away). I quickly found out that too far away was a little less than 15 to 20 paces from the parchment, so kiting quickly became out of the question. While I was prepared to an extent with buffs, Gudanna pulled another surprise out of his hat & used horde lullaby on me (yes, a Behemoth Bard… creative). Lastly he came pre-buffed with shadows, but nothing a single -aga spell can’t handle. While he did manage to catch me off-guard to an extent, eventually I grabbed the upper hand and scored the win with a couple solid nukes.
For succeeding in this task, I got my Qiqirn Sash +1 back with a couple minor augmentations. In this case, Strength +1 and Thunder Resist +7. Not what I was hoping for, but least I didn’t get any negative stats thrown on it. Other possible rewards can be either experience (100 xp per Beastman Seal traded), or gil (double what you traded the chest, can trade up to 1,000 gil at most). With the elite training regiments accessible once per real-life day. It’s a good distraction from the everyday grind.
<<<>>>
Speaking of the everyday grind, I finally managed to get a decent party on Thief and finally snagged level 66. With level 66 in hand (level sync aside), you finally move away from the Colibri camps outside Al Zhabi, and begin transitioning to more challenging camps such as the Eruca in Mount Zhaloum. I’m hoping that I can get to least 68 before the week is out.
Also in terms of leveling up, I’ve been working a bit on correcting a grievous error on my part, the error of not having any merits invested in bard. My last batch of merit points went toward the merited abilities of Nightngale & Troubadour. With at least those basic abilities in hand, I’ve been working on the tier 1 merits for the job. For now I’m investing in lullaby recast, which will help immensely in crowd control & in minuet effect for the extra pop in attack power.
Thankfully, I haven’t had to deal with much in terms of competition over at the Greater Colibri camps of late. But without access to the really powerful pieces of gear for Bard such as Shi’ar Manteel or Yigit Gomlek, I’ve learned to become creative in terms of speed pulling. My trick, using a ranged attack rather than waiting for songs. But wait a second, Bard doesn’t get any ranged attack skill do they? While that’s true, their are a couple throwing items they can use. Case in point; Lamiabane. Not only does this throwing chakram give a decently short delay, it also has longer range than pulling with songs. Not only do I have an advantage over speed singers, but also the added benefit of the mob coming after you immediately rather than wait for the reflection effect to process.
<<<>>>
Dynamis of late has just been outstanding for us. After missing the patch day run on the 9th, we ended up heading to Dynamis – Beaucidine the following Sunday. I don’t know what it is with this zone and our linkshell, but glacier always seems to shower us with drops. We ended up getting 14 drops in all along with with 3 more 100-pieces for the bank. Amazingly, 5 of those 14 drops were the Ninja body piece, which previously we had seen only once before. Needless to say, the shadow warriors of our team went home very happy that night.
They weren’t the only ones that went away smiling that evening either. I myself ended up with 8 pieces of various currency, a wootz ore, and a free lot Magus Jubbah to top it all off. Not a bad night to say the least.
Next Wednesday then rolled around, and with it another crack at Dynamis – Valkurm. Like glacier before it, the dunes have always proven itself a profitable endeavor farming wise. We managed to snag an early Ninja accessory after a small mishap brought some sabotenders along with the flies. Then, on the way to the Gobbuee NM near highlands zone, we got our torrential deluge of relic. Four pieces within a matter of seconds off the Quadav. Most dynamis LS’s would probably be passing bricks at the sight of it, but for us as Minihex aptly put it, “This is normal”.
What wasn’t normal though was the Morbol boss NM pull. Just as we were engaging the boss, several of us in the shell got hit by a massive lag spike. While it wasn’t enough to disconnect anyone from the game, it was more than enough for the boss to use extremely bad breath and slaughter us. Oh well, sh*t happens sometimes I suppose. We’ll be back soon enough.
<<<>>>
Good news over on the Limbus front as we’re finally starting to get some momentum going after our recent attendance issues. While I had hoped to pull off a split run with NW Apollyon, another LS beat us to the zone. So we ended up heading to Apollyon SE and slaughtered a few hapless weapon resistant mobs. Heh, I should call it more like weapon vulnerable mobs the way we make them into red paste so fast. =D
I’m currently sitting on 21/25 ancient beastcoins needed for the next AF+1 upgrade. I’m most likely going to go ahead and upgrade the Choral Cuffs at this point as part of my efforts to improve my role as a Bard for the LS.
<<<>>>
Last off, we’ve made some more progress in the Crystalline Prophecy scenario. After our little encounter on Qufim Island, your then sent halfway across the globe over to the ruins of Fei’yin. Your task, collect 9 seed afterglows needed to form the “Mark of Seed” key item. The afterglows are scattered throughout both levels of the dungeon, and to make matters more complicated your given 30 minutes from entering Fei’yin to collect all 9 afterglows. Thanks to a map provided over FFXIclopedia, finding the afterglows was fairly straightforward, but it did take me around 25 minutes in total, so don’t daddle around cause there is a LOT of ground to cover. Once you get the final item, you’ll get your choice of either the Mark of Seed key item, or another key for use on the mystery coffer in Tenshodo HQ. For now we’ll stick to finishing the storyline and get the mark.
Once you have the key item, proceed into Qu’bia Arena and check the burning circle for another cut scene. Then hope you brought some decent help, because your in for one hell of a fight. The BC battle consists of 4 mobs, seed versions of each of the beastman races; Orc PLD, Yagudo WHM, Goblin THF, and Quadav RDM. And all four mobs have some nasty tricks up their sleeves. All four mobs share hate with each other to begin with, making hate very difficult. We found this out the hard way when, while our Ninja tank had had on the Orc, I ended up nuking the Yagudo and getting hate from all 4 mobs. To make matters worse, every mob has some special TP moves not found on their normal ilk. The Orc uses Phantasmal Dance (AoE damage, knockback and bind), while the Quadav has an AoE Curse + Plague ability. Worst of all is the Goblin Thief which actually uses sneak attack against you (basically just ports behind who has hate and kicks the crap out of them). Food is also useless here as the Goblin uses a Saucepan TP move which replaces your food with a -10 to all stats food effect.
Needless to say, with our initial setup (nin, whm, 2x rdm, 2x blm). Manaburning them will just not work with hate being so erratic. Also, as they are immune to dark magic based sleeps, you’ll need other means of crowd controlling them. Best setup I can think of for this setup would be least 1 tank (pld/nin preferably), a pair of DD’s, bard, white mage and scholar. Bard & Scholar would be on crowd control duty, using lullaby as well as AoE bind + gravity. Others pull the mobs one at a time to the back of the arena and kill each off one at a time. It’s a challenging fight overall, but a solid setup and people knowing what their doing should be able to win without much issue.
<<<>>>
Some last minute miscellaneous tidbits before we call it quits for this weeks update…
* Finally got my sword skill up to 240 and started the Savage Blade quest. Hoping to get that done in the next few days, cause I really need something to close higher level skillchains if I’m going to make any headway on Death Blossom.
* Finished Gobbiebag Part IX! Bag is now at 75 spaces. Thankfully the prices on the expensive items are coming down to pre-patch levels after a few days of gouging.
* Got clothcraft to 90.8 after a decent streak of luck with giant bird plumes. Should also work on leathercraft since I’m sitting 5 levels from my goal there.
* Lastly, I put in my order for my security token. Should hopefully be in within the next week at the latest. $10 for a high level of account security & the added bonus of the mog satchel to boot? {Yes, please}
All in all, it’s been a very productive week for me in the world of Vana’diel & beyond. I hope you all are enjoying the new version of the /panic motion website, and have a terrific weekend. As always, stay safe & of course…
You stay classy Vana’diel!
Recent Comments