Antican Ambuscade V1

Diff is easy enough for decently geared PUGs. Really any works, /nin and you should be fine to Sand Rush. If Boss is killed before Adds, you have very little risk of a wipe from Rush.

Did a few setups, mostly GEO WHM PLD/RUN COR SAM SAM. Advantage to COR can shoot ws at range. Much easier fight than I originally anticipated. Probably a 5~8min clear for most groups, assuming no wipes.

We was doing D with Pld Geo Whm Brd Rng Cor can almost 2 shot the cactus if the cor opens savage for rng last stand also if you kill him before adds spawn not sure if people knew about it but when he calls for aid with no adds up and you ws during hes animation for summing adds he takes x3 dmg so if you time it right like we was doing was doing 70k savage to 99 last stand to 99k light around 5 min kills

If you stun sand trap it probably wouldn't sand rush, since sand trap is the ready move for sand rush.

I noticed that "WS miss" too when using a melee WS on the cactus. I observed it would happen right before he takes off again post needles.

I don't know if it's a client server mismatch on being out of range or what.

Ok so petrify from sand trap landed with odyllic on, maybe petrify is 100% land rate(is it even possible in game), or I'm just unlucky.

I've yet to see it miss even with odyllic + idris bolster vex/attune so I'd assume it's just 100% at this point. Could be some awkward new type of petra -- sort of like how we have nightmare zzz's. Honestly even without barspells, etc. I've never seen the duration increase or decrease. ( Or I don't pay attention :v )

So... it can totally do Sand Rush back to back, so it doesn't have to use sand trap before sand rush (every time)

Totally this, there's a HUGE difficulty gap between melee D and VD. Melee D is very very easy, VD is aids :X.

Did another night of melee D/VD with run, drk, cor, geo, brd, whm.

Even with nq geo, we manage to clear D in 3:50 min including buff time with 100% win rate. With a more elite pt sub 3:30 D clear should be doable. On the other hand VD has much lower win rate even with Idris. So despite we pushed fastest melee vd clear to 5:30 min the actual efficiency on vd is much lower compare with D.

There are entirely way too many possibility that melee vd could go wrong. And lag has always been a problem to land ws on sabo. Sometimes the game would force my character to disengage when sabo in range doing tp moves. That's because sabo run out of range 0.5 sec ago but disengage animation lagged. Not sure if 3rd pt tool could fix that as I play on vanilla.

If you want fast and consistent win on VD without ever rely on SP, mage is the way to go. Sabo dies to nuke so fast that adds will never pop, and they don't have to deal with lags.

https://youtu.be/OjSECXuJM20

NIN, SCH VD no adds. How?

Was it something to do with the SCH casting Break in the beginning? Did that glitch out the mob or something? His Notmal run video had adds so not sure why VD didn’t.

He cheated lol. Dotted the cactus and wiped before adds spawned. 5496 pretty weak helix took like 28 ticks (140k hp)

Once cactus dies it can't spawn adds. 5:13ish it dies off screen.

Super *** lame. I love it lol. (too slow though)

Looks like they put up a heavy DOT in the cactuar deaggro'd from the main boss by dying so it didn't spawn adds and then waited for cactuar to die before starting the fight again. Guess it's a clever way of getting around the mechanic.

Okay so that wasn’t Break. Google translate failed me. I should have looked at animation. Nice though!

I wonder if VD melee style is more do-able this time around or if SCHs and BLMs are still the way to go. I don’t think I ever did a ranged style group for this either on VD.

With all the absolutely ridiculous power creep we've gotten since June 2018, yeah, easy as ***to melee.

BLM/nuke is really slow but pretty free.

Conduit works

Melee/Ranged builds tp on first add/boss and ws's cactus when it's close enough (high evasion)

Why not replace a BLM with RNG and just trueflight the thing?

*haven't done ambu yet*

I was curious about the helix so I tried this myself, and originally I could only get an initial helix of less than 2000 on it - no where close to what he did.

My gear is up to date I could not explain the huge difference between his helix and mine.

If you look at his weapons - it appears he is dual wielding clubs - Daybreak + Maxentius - which give a total of whopping 458 magic damage - and helix spells are sentitive to magic damage.

Once I changed to sch/nin - used these two clubs - my helix went up to 5000.

His helix was not weak at all - it was extremely impressive outside of a magic burst, or geo, or any other buffs on the mob in question.

Did it with my mnk a bunch of times. Raging Fists's spike dmg works great in bringing down the cactuar fast. You gotta bring it down within first two 10k needles, otherwise there is gonna b too many ads and situtation can become unmanageable rather quick. Grab the rngs attention fast so the whm doesn't get 1 shot with EES. For mega boss, light based dispels work, and seems very resistant to dark based dispels. Used bio III instead of dia to lower it's attack to avoid getting 1 shot by it's tackle or MS sand squall, but I think using BoG + EA wilt bubble can allow me to use Dia instead of bio.

Context: Not a 10k helix. It has really high stats eva/meva etc.

I actually think PLD will be a beast this month, but we'll see if I'm forgetting some of the mechanics that'll stop that.

This is very interesting actually. Once i was wondering if i could cp on apex with sch + tank by casting helix on multiples foe and leaving the tank holding them till they are dead. My helix was about 2k and took a long time to kill it. Nice to know how higher is the potential of helix with dual wield new clubs.

Always something new to learn on those jp random niche strats.

sand squal is just..... ruining my day

Did a few D runs yesterday and our melees went /NIN and fulltimed hybrid sets. Kill the cact, then the adds, then the boss. Shadows help a lot of squall.

I actually noticed that eatlier on his other video, when he soloed kei on sch.

???

I saw he has a Ou and Fu solo video but could not find a Kei solo

Probably thinking of lutes solo kei vid on sch

Did several VD runs last night as both RNG and COR. The times I was on RNG was sadly without COR rolls, hence the final choice on my part to go COR. I think a RNG+COR setup could work wonderfully on this, but-

When not stopping to do the 10k needles, the cactuar itself's evasion is off the charts. At first I tried strictly TPing on the Cactuar with the intent of using triple/quad shot to be able to leaden him every other attack (WS-tripleshot-WS, etc) and fill in any misses with quickdraw for dmg+TP. Well, with sublime+1, my midACC ranged set that while using Rostam(A)+Tauret that buff-less puts me around 1400racc on COR, entrusted Precision and two preludes...saw several full misses (4 shots, all missed) in a row trying to TP on the cactuar.

The solution, while slightly awkward, is to TP on the boss, saving WS's (magical) for the cactuar. We were able to slaughter the cactuar in one skillchain between SAM and COR of TP'ing on the boss, cactuar runs in for 1st 10k needles. SAM opens w/ Fudo, COR closed with a full 3k Leaden Salute, launched 2 Fire Shots in high TP set to reach 1k TP, and close double darkness with Wildfire.

The cactuar will be on the way out, and his evasion will have skyrocketed again, but that first Fudo will be during the "low evasion" window it has, and after that everything is magical and will land on him, giving you great WS numbers and a huge initial Darkness...the two Fire Shots don't really even need to be huge damage, just the TP for Wildfire (which even w/ DP over Arma was still 20k leading into a 30k+ double-darkness). First time we executed it, there was about 4% left on cactuar after the wildfire/doubledark, but a quick tripleshot on the boss and a free wildfire after that took care of it before a 2nd 10k needles.

After the cactuar was dead, swapped to Fomalhaut to abuse Light/Radiance on the boss. Easy 2 or 3 steps between COR and SAM. The SC damage was so good that it far out-performed Savage Blade spam (w/ naegling and Ataktos).

Once the boss is down, just pick off the adds one by one. A single 2 step chain either solo for the SAM or COR, or between them, was enough to kill any add in a single round.

Buffs for cactuar phase: Samurai/Wizard(Crooked) rolls, Wilt/Haste/entrusted Acumen, 3 song bard using March/Mad/Scherzo.

Buffs for Antican phse: Samurai/Chaos rolls, Frailty/Haste, March/Mad/Min.

A 4song bard would have made this just a cakewalk, able to maintain the scherzo full time. Its far from necessary, but WHM was being dualboxed by our tank and really made life easier.

Was he beyond 25 yalms by the time your shot went off? Pretty sure Ranged Accuracy drops to 0% if you aim at something within 25 yalms, and it moves outside of 25 yalms when your shot goes off.

No. My lua prevents even a shot attempt outside of 25'. This was during his "roadrunner" mode in between 10k needles and he would be in range for weaponskills (under 21'). I know this because at first I was attempting using tacticians/samurai rolls to compensate for bad racc on the cactuar and still be at least creeping towards that 1k mark.

So I'd be in range to land a Leaden, yet at over 1600 racc I would miss literally 12 shots in a row (3 quad shots back-to-back-to-back, all 4 shots missed each time). Even with lag I'd start the shot(s) at 5' as it ran by close, and at most be around 12' at the end of the shot animation.