Dynamis Lord Gives Up the Goods

There's nothing more satisfying in the game than when a large group of people manage to pull things together and defeat mobs that have proven troublesome in the past. We've had two perfect Dynamis Lord fights this month, and he's started coughing up his shadow items.

Our Dynamis-Xarcabard run on the 6th didn't look like it was going to end well. It seemed that everything that could go wrong on the way to DL's castle did go wrong. We had an enormous link and a wipe on the first time statue, and then someone managed to aggro the eyes on the first NM platform while we were trying to clear the eyes and Kindred down below for kiting space. We had another wipe while pulling the eye wall before the dragons.

However, the DL fight itself was a sight to behold. He dropped a silverpiece and a Shadow Ring, which went to Lucrezia. Hurray!

From the Kindred on this run, we got a RDM hat that went to Divinities, and a PLD body that went to PLD75s, since no mains that needed it were eligible. Thom won the Surcoat, and I've been making him put it to good use lately.

Last night's Xarcabard run was much much smoother. The only glitch in the machinery was when Thunderbolt lost connection just as we were pulling the two eyes on the first platform for the time statue. We had to do the sac pull a second time to get the other eye, but other than that, everything went wonderfully. I was main tank, with Thunderbolt and Thom kiting on the NM pulls. They were also on Ying/Yang duty, while Draden and Deathstorm were on crowd control duty. We got to the Dynamis Lord faster than we ever had before.

The DL fight itself was once again perfect. The stunners kept him locked down, and the damage dealers did their work. We have a new Kraken Club DRK in the linkshell, and he showed us why people like having k-club DRKs to zerg things. We killed him so fast that he didn't even get to resummon Ying and Yang. To top of the fight: we got full drops! A Montiont Silverpiece, a shadow ring, and a shadow mantle! Lumikumi and I were the next in line for Shadow items, and I got the ring while he got the mantle. It's hard to believe that we have Shadow items, and it really pleases me that we got them on the same night!

For the past year, I'd been thinking that the Shadow Mantle, which "occasionally annuls physical damage" made the most sense for me, since mobs are always hitting me, while the Shadow Ring, which "occasionally annuls magical damage" was more of a special case item, since not every mob has magical attacks. However, after doing some research, talking with others, and just thinking it over carefully, the Ring actually seems a better item to have in my bag of tricks.

This change in my thinking is partially because I won the Valor Cape last month, and I love the HP, VIT, and Enmity it provides. I might only use the Shadow Mantle against mobs that hit really hard, and most of those I tank /NIN, so I'd end up only using the Shadow Mantle when my shadows were down. I figured Lumikumi might get more use out of the mantle than I would, and even when he's on MNK, he could swap it in and save himself some hits.

Also, PLD has so many job traits, abilities and gear to help minimize physical damage, but little to stop magical damage. The biggest single hits I take tend to be magical - Astral Flow, Mijin Gakure, tier IV spells, tier III -ga spells, and so on. Having the ring annul these from time to time should prove really useful.

Even after using points last night, Lumikumi and I are still very high on the DKP list, and should be able to get the item we didn't get last night relatively soonish. It's really pretty amazing to find ourselves in such a position after such a long time of wondering if we could ever manage to even kill DL consistently. We'll be unstoppable! :-)

Other recent runs of note:

We had a really smooth Dynamis-Tavnazia run on the 2nd. Everything went quite well, except for the fight with the two Diabolii we were up against. I think we got really unlucky with the moves they chose to open with, and they mopped the floor with us. We didn't get any drops on the run either, but I was very pleased with how well everything went. It would be nice if we had enough people with the right jobs to have two full teams for it, rather than having to leave out a lot of people.

On the 13th, we had a Dynamis-Beaucedine flag run, with the unusual twist of fighting an Attestation NMs. To pop the NMs, Goldfish took a special ops team with a BRD, WHM, BLM and 2 SAMs, I believe. They snuck off to kill an eye which would trigger the NMs to appear in the towers scattered throughout the Glacier. Meanwhile, the rest of us continued along our normal path, killing monsters looking for relic and time extensions.

We accidentally aggro'd the NM in the tower near the Orc lake (we hadn't been warned that they'd be up yet and weren't being careful). The NM and his six minions wiped us out before we knew what had happened. After we picked ourselves up and dusted ourselves off, we headed up to another tower and had a control sac pull on the NM that can drop the attestations for dagger, club, and horn. The fight itself was pretty easy, since the NM's jobs were BLM WHM and BRD. And the Attestation of Harmony dropped, making Habanero a happy Bard. We'll probably try doing these on all of our glacier runs going forward, as long as there are people working on relic weapons that need them.

Hunting the Sin Hunters

After talking about it for over a year, ClanBEB has finally taken the Sin Hunters up on their offers of a rematch. The first quest is Tango With a Tracker. For this quest, you fight Shikaree X and Shikaree Y in Boneyard Gully. Once you've completed it, you can go along with other people who need it. It also unlocks the Requiem of Sin quest, which you can do once a week. Shikaree Z joins her sisters for the second fight.

We've done two runs of Tango With a Tracker to get a few people available for our weekly Requiem of Sin runs. We've done three or four runs of Requiem of Sin so far, and we're hoping to get X's Knife for Lucrezia, but have got a whole lot of nothing so far. We typically do the runs right before our Nyzul Isle static on Mondays, with Luc's THF, my PLD, Yobun and Ana's BLM, and Erock's RDM, with Ranzz and Elbryan coming and RDM some times, as does Thoron's BLM.

It's a pretty easy fight for us, but it does take awhile to hike up to Boneyard Gully. Luc aggros the three trackers and their bunny and wyvern, and I pick them off one at a time for the BLMs to nuke. When the Mithra get into the mood for a skillchain though, they don't care about me no matter what I do to try to get their attention.

With the drop rate for the knife being abysmally low, we may be at this for quite a long time!

New titles: Sin Hunter Hunter, Disciple of Justice

Nyzul Isle Investigation, ClanBEB Style

Our new ClanBEB Nyzul Isle Investigation static, with 5 core members and a few of people rotating in as the sixth, has been doing better than I had hoped. We've been working with two Runic Disc (Anastasia and I are holding them), and are currently up through level 20 on my disc and level 35 on Ana's. We're currently planning to alternate farming and climbing.

We've had 8 level 20 farming runs, and have fought Behemoth 5 times, Fafnir twice, and Adamantoise once. The Askar Gambieras have dropped 4 times, two pairs of Denali Gamashes, and only one pair of Goliard Clogs. We timed out on one of our Fafnir fights, so we're 7/7 on actual drops, which seems high compared to some groups. I guess Luc's TH4 is making a difference. Hopefully it will continue to do so on the higher levels.

Our typical set-up for normal runs is PLD, THF or NIN, BLM, RDM, MNK, MNK or WAR, but for the boss runs, we use BRD instead of MNK or WAR, and Lucrezia comes as THF. This has been working out for us quite well so far. Anastasia tried coming as PUP for the first run, but decided BLM works better. Yobun is usually either MNK or BRD, and Erock either RDM or WAR. Our special guests include Thoron's MNK or BRD, Ranzz's RDM or BRD, Lumikumi's MNK, and Elbryan's RDM.

We've been learning as we go along, making some mistakes along the way, like underestimating the Poroggo enemy leader, or continuing to floor 11 instead of exiting when we'd completed floor 10. But you learn more when things go wrong, right?

The stupid levels that make you light the lamps in a specific order are particularly trying, but we did really well on it the last time we had one, so perhaps we've got that pretty well figured out. After all my frustrations with Nyzul last spring, it's nice to have it become something that's quite fun.

One of the nice things about Nyzul is that you get exp for the mobs that you have to fight. The "eliminate all enemies" floors are nice for replacing exp lost to the Raise Is we some times have to hand out, as well as for just general exp buffer maintenance. I think I'll start using my empress band before we start our round of assaults every Monday.

We haven't got any interesting ??? items yet, but it's nice that we're batting 1000 on our Floor 20 boss drops. Hopefully we can get more Goliard and Denali for people. It'll be kind of sad if we have to start throwing away Askar boots because we all already have them. I think next week we'll be climbing on Ana's disc, but we may do 4 boss runs on the 40th floor instead.

The Askar set looks pretty nice for me, at least situationally. The boots have more enmity than any of my other boots, and also have -2% damage reduction, so they are my new kiting boots. With their STR and DEX, I probably should be swapping them in for weapon skills when I'm being all damagey, but so far I'm just leaving on my Homam boots in that mode. I'm not sure the pants are terribly useful for me with the other pants I already have, but if we get enough of them, it would be nice to have the complete set eventually, for the HP bonus when wearing the set.

More Valor Dreams

I've been neglecting this again... But there's been a bunch of stuff going on, so I'll be getting things back up to date again. I "finished" Etrian Odyssey, but have moved on to FFVI Advance, which will undoubtedly start to distract me from blogging, but in the mean time, I'll be posting.

TheUltimates have never seen a Valor Cape drop on its CoP Dynamis runs, but that all changed a couple of weeks ago in Dynamis-Buburimu. We had a really good run up through the Mega Boss - clean pulls, minimal casualties, and more time to spare than on any previous runs, even with only 33 in the zone instead of our usual 36. We even had 5 PLDs on the run, partly through miscommunication, and might have done even better if at least one of them had come on a DD job.

We mopped up the Nightmare Crabs after the Apocalyptic Beast, but didn't get any drops. Next we headed over to the Nightmare Efts, and had an unfortunately large link. I think we had 20 Efts on us at once. But we plowed through them as best as we could before we were all dead, with no reraise, since constant Geist Walls had stripped it off of us. One of the first few efts dropped the Valor Cape, and Lumikumi and I lotted for it, with me winning. We've faced off on 3 items now, and I've won two over him (surcoat and cape), while he got the legs before me (and was 5/5 on the main set first too). I was thinking though, if the cape's big enough for a Galka, couldn't we split it in two between the two Tarutarus? It's a wonderful back piece of PLD, and I'm a lucky Tarudin to have it! I still can't believe Kiki's 6/6 on Paladin relic now.

On a sad note, Amyalfrodo's left TheUltimates, primarily because of family conflicts with Saturday evening runs. I'll miss having her on our tanking team. Draden started on our Dynamis-Buburimu run though, and I think he'll fit in quite well with us. He's also a SAM75, so unfortunately we'll probably have to have him fight the Dynamis Lord as SAM, just as Lumikumi's MNK is needed for that fight. Deathstorm finally has access to Xarcabard, and another new PLD, Cabbyz still needs Jeuno for Northlands access, so it will be awhile for him. He's got access to the CoP zones at least though, so he'll be on those runs.