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.