Missions: Revisiting CoP

Over the past few months, and especially the last few weeks, Venn's been making a concerted effort to shepherd more members of The Ultimates through the CoP missions. We should have a new crop ready for Limbus before our run this Thursday, which will be nice. I've been helping out where I can, but since most of the activity has been taking place late on work nights, I haven't been able to help on a lot of them.

We've made a couple Tenzen runs for people who have just needed that last mission to get Sea, and they were both for one person each time (Goto, who's already quit TU, and Tye). It's really kind of fun to go beat up Tenzen, just as it was the first time. The melee with the biggest e-peen always pulls hate just before Tenzen lets loose with his first weapon skill, killing that run's Mr. Bigshot with a hit for 2800 damage. The rest of us continue on and Tenzen gives up quickly, and the happy person needing the mission finds himself in Sea after a cutscene. This was before the recent update that made a lot of the CoP missions easier, including the Tenzen fight. I don't know why they made Tenzen easier - we've never had any trouble with it.

I helped a group farming Hippogryph feathers in Riverne B last month, and that was rather fun. We had Venn (DRG), Ryken (MNK), Reefermadness (BLM), Albany (WHM), and Uvela (SMN). I've always done feather farming in Riverne A, usually just the easy ones near the entrance. We were getting great limit points on the Stratus Hippogryphs in B though, better than some of my merit parties in Bhaflau Thickets have been!

A couple of weeks ago, I helped on CoP 4-2 for Jarbit and Frostwitch. I went as PLD, and we had 3 BLMs (Jarbit, Neborin, Darsonavin), with Frostwitch on RDM and Albany on RNG. We decided to just head to Monarch Linn without mistmelts and do a dry run before farming for feathers (again, this was before the recent update which made the items available on the AH). We actually ended up doing 3 runs, and winning on the third. We went through a few variations of sleeping and nuking and kiting and fighting in the tunnel, but here's what finally worked, and worked so well it was quite sad when I reflected how terribly hard this was for my static to win.

Albany had to go AFK suddenly and wasn't sure when he'd be back, so we decided to try it with just the five of us. I found this particular strategy on the FFXIclopedia, and it was just a bit different that what we'd been doing, but it was different enough to make it a cake walk. What we did was have me run in and start fighting Ouryu, with everyone helping fight and keep me healthy until Ouryu took to the air. Then the 3 BLMs cast Freeze at the same time, which did a lot of damage, and brought him to the ground right away. They then slept him and we rested until he woke up and took to the air again immediately. Once again, they cast Freeze, brought him down, slept him, and rested. We repeated this once or twice again, and he gave up. I had disengaged as soon as he took flight the first time, and spent the rest of the battle doing whatever I could to keep his attention on me and not the BLMs.

Later that same night, Venn and Goto and I helped a big group with CoP 4-3 in Sacrarium. We already had the keys needed to open the door with two locks that leads to the Reliquiarium, so we didn't need to fight any Fomor or Keremet. Everyone had cleared hate on the way to Sacrarium, so aggro wasn't an issue from them, but someone had the bright idea to just fight our way through the maze. Blood aggro in there with all the undead isn't pretty. We also fought the Teratotaurs along the way, since we had such a big group. We finally got to the Reliquiarium for everyone to get their cutscene, and we left Venn behind the door and set out to check the classrooms and find the old Professor's ghost.

Since we didn't have Fomor hate, we opted to fight in the classroom, which would help minimize the time wasted when the ghost warps around. In hindsight, that may not have the best decision. Somehow Ryken hit one of the Fomor on a weaponskill just as the ghost warped away (autotarget? I don't know). So after we finished off the ghost, we had to take care of that Fomoor. I was hoping one wouldn't give us enough hate to aggro the others, but indeed it did. We had to kill two more Fomor that jumped on us, and then had to use Sneak to get back to where Venn was waiting and everyone could complete the mission.

I feel bad that people missed out on the "fun" of fighting Keremet, but it does make the mission quicker and safer to use the key that someone else had hung onto from when they did the mission.