Missions: One to be Feared, Round One (CoP 6-4)

Our CoP static finally was able to get to the infamous airship fight on Friday. Unfortunately we didn't join the 1/1 club, but things went quite well and there are a couple things we could have done better that give me hope for our next attempt this coming Friday.

Grym and I spent over two hours on Thursday getting ready - shuffling gear around so that we had nothing in our gobbie bags that wasn't going to be used for the mission, making yagudo drinks, buying supplies. It's a level 60 capped mission, and everyone recommends that all the melee sub Ninja to help protect them from AOE attacks. Our set up looked like this:

Itera MNK/NIN
Splinte WAR/NIN
Grymalkyn THF/NIN
Elboron BRD/WHM
Wendell WHM/SMN
Tsakiki PLD/WAR

This mission has a 45 minute time limit, with three different parts. The first has you facing 5 Mammets that are pretty much the same as the 3 Mammets in Cop 2-5. They change jobs (can be kept in one form using Yellow Liquids), they use Transmogrify which causes physical damage to heal them, and they like to spam -ga spells when they're BLMs. The second part is Omega, a mechanical weapon that spams damaging AOEs, and has enstun. You can use CCB Polymer from Cid (or the auction house, but we're cheap, so we farm chips for the CCBs) to supress Omega's activity for a minute. Finally, it's Ultima, another mechanical weapon with a different set of annoying attacks. The CCBs also work on Ultima.

Having done a lot of reading up on different strategies for this mission, we decided the best thing to do would be for Kiki to use as much evasion gear as possible and "super tank" the mammets. Omega also has accuracy issues, so evasion works best for it (which makes people think a NIN would work best), while people say Ultima works best being straight tanked by a PLD. Here's what I ended up with for gear and consumables:

Gluttony Sword
TK Army Shield +1 (Windurst controlled the area)
Dark Staff/Earth Staff (didn't use either)
Bibiki Seashell
Emperor's Hairpin/Gallant Coronet
Fortified Chain/Reraise Gorget/Parade Gorget (didn't use)
2x Melody Earring/2x Drone Earring
Scorpion Harness/Gallant Surcoat
Gallant Gauntlets
Verve Ring
Vigor Ring
Mermaid Ring (didn't use)
Nomad's Mantle/High Breath Mantle/Knightly Mantle
Steppe Belt
Combat Caster Slacks/Gallant Breeches
Gallant Leggings

Consumables:
scroll of instant reraise (for my second reraise - faster than the gorget)
Persikos au Lait
Pear au Lait
Melon Juice (for mammets)
Yagudo Drink x5
Tavnazian Tacos
As many Hi-Potions (+3, +2 and normal) as I could carry, got more from others

We decided to do dry runs on this, for the first time in our CoP career. It worked out pretty well too, since we learned a few things. The idea for the dry runs was to use no items other than melon juices, and get past the mammets and as far into Omega as we could before wiping and having Wendell raise us all.

Our first dry run wasn't so good. We got to the airship, read through the cutscenes, buffed up and headed into the mammets. Elboron gave both Splinte and I double mambo, and I ran up to body aggro all of the mammets. I then proceeded to kite them up and down the airship while Splinte was in charge of grabbing one for everyone else to fight. Since I didn't do anything to the other mammets, Elboron and Wendell could cure me without pulling hate. What didn't work so well with this plan was that I couldn't really cure myself, since I was running the whole time. I got killed, and I think all 5 turned into BLMs and -ga'd everyone else to death pretty quickly.

Reflecting on this as we were waiting for weakness to wear so we could do a second dry run, I decided I should stand in one corner with my mammets, curing myself with help from Elbo and Wendell, while everyone fought the mammets one at a time in the opposite corner. With double mambo and all my +evasion skill/+evasion gear, they barely touched me with physical attacks. This plan worked much better. As the group killed off each mammet, Splinte would come grab another from my group, usually one that was a BLM type to help reduce the spell casting. Grymalkyn was on Yellow Liquid duty (we'd quartermastered her so the yellow liquids from each mammet would drop to her immediately for use on the next mammet), Wendell would keep the mammet being fought silenced and heal people, Elboron kept running back and forth between me and the other group to keep our songs up and help with healing, and we picked them off one by one. It was a bit annoying when they used Transmogrify and we had to stop fighting, but we got pretty good at noticing it quickly and turning around. When we got down to two mammets left, I started fighting my single mammet, and they all came to help when they finished theirs.

We then moved onto Omega, and learned quickly how not to start out our fight with Omega. Again Splinte and I got double mambo from Elbo. Our plan was to fight Omega in the left back corner near our spawn spot, while Wendell and Elbo would stand off in the right back corner, out of AOE range. I ran in to provoke Omega and drag him back, and got hit with Guided Missle for a lot of damage. Wendell quickly cast a Cure IV on me to save me, but pulled hate in the process, so it was a sloppy start. I ended up dying pretty early in the fight, but everyone else managed to get him down to 50% before we wiped.

Satified with what we'd learned on our dry runs, we rested up and got psyched up for the real thing.

The mammets decided to use Transmog a bit more on our real run, which made us take a bit longer than I would have liked to move on to Omega, but we still had over 36 minutes on the clock, so I wasn't too worried. Omega wasn't so bad when we were using items and going all out. We designated Grym, Splinte, and Itera as the CCB users, since they were right there. I think they used them at around 50%, 30%, and 10%. We lost Splinte towards the end of Omega, and he reraised and ran away to recover while we finished Omega.

One of the really nice things about this fight is that you go back to full HP and MP between the three parts of the fight. Unfortunately, Splinte was still weakened when we finished Omega, so he didn't get to benefit from that. We waited for his weakness to wear. Meanwhile, Elbo, Wendell and I traded our CCBs to Itera, Splinte and Grym for the next fight. I switched into my "real" tanking gear, using my High Breath Mantle for the extra enmity, and restocked my hi-potion supply from Grymalkyn.

We headed into Ultima with around 24 minutes left. Ultima was definitely more of a pain than Omega. We were constantly getting hit with paralyze, petrify, silence, and other annoying negative status effects. I ended up dying when Ultima was around 50% (and I was petrified), but instead of deciding to have everyone keep fighting without using 2 hours or CCBs until they wiped on top of me, we decided to keep going full tilt. I reraised, but before my feet were back on the ground, I was dead again. Everyone kept going, and it was so very very close. They had Ultima to a sliver when everyone was dead. They started reraising, but not everyone died far enough back and Ultima spotted them and we were all dead with no reraises active any more. I ended up home-pointing to the Safehold, and came back to Raise I Wendell, who then handed out R2s and R3s to the rest.

It actually is a very fun fight, and instead of dreading it, I'm looking forward to going back next week, and hopefully winning it. I may change my tune if we end up having to do it another 15 times though. We weren't running out of time - Grym's food was still active when it was all over, which means we should have had at least 15 minutes left. That should have been plenty of time for us to reraise, recover and finish him off, had we done it right. Next week, if I die on Ultima before we've used two hours and CCBs, we'll have everyone die on top of me, since I should be right at the wall, safe from aggro from Ultima after he moves back to his starting spot.

We had Elboron use Soul Voice at the start of the Omega fight. I haven't decided if that was the best spot, but it probably made the Omega fight easier than it would have been otherwise. Itera and Splinte used theirs on Ultima after I was dead, and Grym used his after reraising and trying desperately to get Ultima dead. Unfortunately Perfect Dodge only blocks physical attacks, and Grym was dead again pretty quickly.

The six of us headed to Pso'Xja on Saturday night and we all got our new sets of chips within two hours. We headed to Bastok and got our new CCBs, so we're set for Friday, at least as far as that's concerned.

New title: Omega Ostracizer