Limbus: Apollyon NW and SW

With Thunderbolt now available on Thursday Nights, TheNewUltimates started in on a twice-a-week schedule. Last Thursday we decided to return to Apollyon NW, which we had attempted on my first night with the linkshell. We had 9 people, Venn (DRG), Kojita (DRG), Lucrezia (THF), Ranzz (BRD), Thunderbolt (RDM), Meshe (WHM), Ardan (SMN), Neborin (BLM), and Tsakiki (PLD). The run went pretty well. On the first floor, we fought all of the ghosts and then the Doomed boss. On the second floor, it was buffalo with a Ram boss. The third floor has buggards, but we skipped the Turtle boss, since it took us so long to kill the previous time. The fourth floor has wyverns with a Wyrm boss, and we skipped him as well to get up to the three behemoths that drop 5-7 coins each. We mopped them up, and still had plenty of time to try to kill the final boss, Kaiser Behemoth, but we just couldn't do it. He pretty much has to be kited, and we were a bit low on ranged/magic users, and I don't have a lot of experience with kiting. He got me with Meteor a couple of times.

But it was a lot of fun, and it was nice to have no deaths until Kaiser Behemoth kept killing us over and over. We got the AF+1 items for SAM and NIN, and a total of 42 coins for the run.

On Sunday, we had to start a bit late, since we can't get Cosmo-Cleanse from Sagheera until 72 hours after we've last entered Limbus. We'll have to try to get going quicker on Thursdays so our Sunday runs don't run too late. At least Limbus is pretty quick, so I wasn't up to an ungodly hour playing my silly game.

We decided to try Apollyon SW, with a crew of 10: Venn (DRG), Lucrezia (THF), Ranzz (BRD), Meshe (WHM), Thunderbolt (WAR), Ezekiel (SAM), Thar (RDM), Sarntur (BLM), Neborin (BLM), and Tsakiki (PLD). Thunderbolt has so many jobs at 75 that he gets told which is best once we've decided where to go. For this area, there are four floors. You're only allowed to open one chest on the first two floors, so you have to decide whether you need the time chests or the item chests. It's best to not use the restore chests on these floors, just because it's a bit of a waste.

The first floor has 10 Fomor, and they are clumped in groups, so we rarely had one at a time. They were pretty soft though, and went down quickly. We took the time chest on this floor. The second floor has Treants, which spawn another monster when you kill them - sapling, bee, beetle, bird, etc. I ended up getting killed by the sapling spawn, since it had put us all to sleep a few time. The final time, I kept getting interrupted as I tried to cure Meshe to wake him, and I died, but no one else did, so it was OK. We continued on, and I still mostly tanked while weakened. This floor has a boss Treant, and fortunately I got unweakened just as we started fighting him. He was definitely the hardest mob of the bunch, with a nasty nasty AOE poison that nearly ended up killing Sarntur. I think he was down to 24 HP before someone got him unpoisoned. We ended up missing one of the Treants before we headed up to the next level and didn't get a chest for this floor.

The third floor has a bunch of chests that all look alike. Most of them are Mimics, but the time, restore, and items chest are here as well. On this floor, you're allowed to open every chest, so we got items, time, and restoration. The mimics are annoying as mimic always are, but we headed up to the final floor with plenty of time. On the fourth floor, there are trios of elementals. You can kill all of them if you like, hoping for single ancient beastcoins from each, but if time is pressing, the trick is to kill the trio for the element of the current day (or maybe it's the day you entered Limbus). This trio will drop the final chest. It was Watersday, so Ezekiel pulled the trio of Water Elementals, we killed all three, and Ezekiel ran off to open the chest.

We'd cleared the zone, and got the charcoal chip, which is one of four needed for Central Apollyon (Proto Omega). We had a smaller haul of coins on this run, just 26 for the 10 of us. The AF+1 items we got were for NIN, THF, and BST.