Quests: Diabolos Prime 6 - Pickup Party 0

At least I think it was 6. It was late, I might have lost count. It all started last Thursday evening. I was doing some window shopping at the AH in Al Zahbi when I got a tell from someone I didn't know, Darkdemon, who used the autotranslator to ask if I was interested in fighting Diabolos. While I was looking him up (RDM74/DRK37), a second person, Supertim, asked. He was a SMN75. I looked at my husband and said "Should I?" It couldn't hurt really, so I said yes. At the very least I'd get an idea what the fight would be like.

They already had two BLMs, Ethecent and a Mithra who's name I can't recall, in the party and were actively recruiting a third. I thought this was going to be a piece of cake, and I'd have another avatar added to the list. My naiviety and optimism amuse me at times.

The third BLM, Miracles, was apparently a friend of Ethecent's, and he came BLM/SMN. We waited for Ethecent to head to Windurst and get the quest activated, then headed to Pso'Xja. It was a bit odd running though Pso'Xja in our pyjamas (it's capped at 40, while Diabolos Prime is uncapped), but we made it without incident. When we got to the BC, the Mithra BLM piped up and said, "Which ENM are we doing?" and when it was pointed out we were fighting Diabolos Prime, the response was, "Oh, I can't do that. Good luck!" and she warped out.

We decided since we were there, and it would be Darkday in less than an hour, we'd try the fight with the 5 of us. There was no real discussion of strategy, and no one had thought to bring poison potions or anything. Basically it was "BLMs nuke together to start, tank get hate, everyone keep nuking and try to stun Nightmare". So we did that, and I used invincible to pull hate back after losing it on the third round of spells. Did they go all out at that point and blast him into netherspace? No. I think we ended up getting hit with nightmare and were picked off one by one.

Round two: same plan, a bit more coordination on the stuns. No PLD two hour, but everyone else used theirs. We got him quite close to death, but he resisted stun, we got nightmared, and again picked off one by one.

We decided to wait out Darksdays (and regain our 2 hours), while Supertim tried to recruit another BLM. We'd been so close with 5, we figured we'd have no troubles with 6. Firesday arrived along with our new recruit, Hctlr. Still waiting on our two hours, we decided to give it a try without them. Nothing to lose but exp, and maybe we'd get lucky. Close, but again, we just couldn't pull it off.

When our two hours were back, we went back in. Just like the first fight, I used my two hour to pull hate back after the third round of nukes, but once again, they didn't use theirs. And once again, we wiped.

Fifth round was like the second. And the sixth was like the fourth. We all decided we'd lost enough exp for the night and gave up. It was way past my bedtime as it was.

Every round, we were painfully close to winning. That's probably why we obsessively continued to fight again and again. There were things we could have done better each time, and if we'd been a group of friends who've played together before, I'm pretty confident we would have been better. The lack of planning and coordination pretty much did us in. It would have been nice to have Diabolos, but instead I just lost most of my exp buffer, and got to bed three hours late.

One thing I found interesting: I got dropped to the Diremites below on the final fight while nightmared. The horde of hungry Diremites poking me to death didn't even wake me up.

We did consider trying the strategy that would have me drop from the party, drop down and aggro Diabolos, then rejoin the party, hopefully preventing the mages from being drawn in for a bit. I was reluctant to change things when we were so close each time, especially since as soon as the BLMs pulled hate, they'd be drawn in anyway, so it didn't seem like it would buy us much time.