Ambuscade Volume 1 - December 2018

Is there a cap?
If there's one it's definitely way higher than that.
I've farmed over 150k Hallmarks and over 40k Gallantry on some months.

There probably is a cap for technical reasons, but whatever it is is far beyond what's needed to buy every single thing available per month. Effectively, there is no cap.

Last month was my record with 550k.

You just need around 250k to get everything though.

good to know, thank yous twos.

What's the gap in difficulty between VD, D, and N? I run with another person who has 2 mules so we don't have the ability to do too many crazy maneuvers (kiting would hose one of us up mostly). We don't mind spamming N if there's a solid strat since we basically get x3 hallmarks anyway through characters vs. only bringing one attentive character for VD.

I actually don't know what the difficulty is, I would assume mob stats, but at least D and VD seems to have all of the same mechanics and number of adds.

Gap in difficulty? Not much. Honestly, the only difference between Difficult and Very Difficult is having your BRD and GEO 1-hour and having enough people with COR unlocked to reset said 1-hours after each run.

And that's really only if your DD are good enough to clear D in sub-5 minutes.

You don't need SP's for VD. VD is almost entirely about DD's able to keep shadows up, and a tank that can kite well enough. Past that there are really low requirements for jobs to bring, don't need NIN even though they help, MNK and THF are potentially the highest DD but not absolutely necessary. Don't even need to bring a RDM to help kiter, GEO can do it fine. It's not nearly as job exclusive as one might think looking at the strategy.

My brother and I try low-manning every month (well, we each play 2-3 characters, but like you said, only actively playing 1). This month has been a little rough for 2 human lowmans.
Ve and E are both doable by with any 2 dds as active. No tanks needed. We then have cor brd and geo alts for buffs and a whm for cures.

Fight the main boss till he pops adds at 80. One dd take one, second dd take other (on E). We were using blu and sam, but I accidentally came thf/blm and still had no issues. 1-2 skillchains killed each add (allowing the boss to run around and attack whoever) then resumed on the boss.

While shadows are nice, if you are active and paying attention, you can out range Gen'ei Ryodan, Genku Bakken, and Sontaku Kyoyo just by running backward 10 yalms or so as soon as it starts charging them.

On E, we never saw triple reversal by doing this strategy. I don't know if that means we did the mechanic correct or if it doesn't exist for VE and E.

We also never saw endeath proc as the MB ran around stabbing whoever he hated at that moment.

Last month we could do D together. This month normal proved to be too difficult. On normal, the 4 adds were too much to deal with. The only time I saw triple reversal was when one person was top of hate for multiple adds/MB. IE me on tank trying to hold all 4 adds. Distance from the MB did not cause TR on VE and E as the MB was right on top of us. On normal,, when the MB was closer we did see TR, but we also had multiple mobs with 1 person as top of their hate list, so it is difficult to say which was causing it there.

If nothing else, you and your friend should be able to 'lowman' E with your alts. If someone has been able to lowman it on normal or D, I would love to know how/setup.

Hey Guys, we put together all the tips from here and did the No Kite strategy. We did the kiting strategy a few times but it was a pain and not really reliable, we found this to be not super duper fast but overall better (9/10 mins).
Hope it helps!

First of all, I just want to say I'm envious of your inventory...

Second your major damage was only from spells, its possible to shield swap to mitigate that if your willing to.

Honestly I think you would have gotten more out of /blu in this scenario, aoe hate, cocoon. I do see the downside of losing Warcry. Maybe Rampart can do the same?

My question was on RUN, you started to mention RUN tanking that in the corner, do you think the SMN would be able to solo support the RUN doing the same thing?

Just did D with this Setup: 11-12mins~

LEGIT STRAT AHEAD

PLD/THF/DRK/COR/BRD/RDM (Will explain LOL)

We figured out that the Qutrub deal BONUS damage depending on # that you have threat on. They also DO NOT have access to Triple Reversal while only on one person. --For example our PLD took 1700 from BlizzagaIII when he had hate on 2, but I (DRK) only took 600 while soloing.

THF tanked boss during Add spawns.

Adds always Spawn in this pattern: Melee > Mage > Melee > Mage

(This gives each designated person time to cast something to get threat on their assigned add.)

RDM silences the Mage(s) specifically to prevent Ice Spikes.

Each DD can hold the adds wherever they want, distance doesn't matter, only threat does.

Biggest issue we had was that the boss has some form of Hate Reset Below 30%. This is easily fixed with Provoke and a NIN tank?

"Heavy" DD should be taking the Mages to kill them faster. Skillchains burn these extremely fast.

Optimal Setup IMO:

NIN(Boss), DD(Mage Add), DD(Mage Add), COR(Melee Add), BRD(Melee Add), RDM (Silence Mages, Slow/Dispel Boss+Heal)

Small Edit:

We were DRK(Mage), COR(Mage), PLD(Melee), BRD(Melee)

DRK did not have NIN subbed. You don't ever have to deal with En-Death

We didn't need the PLD to be honest. It was just slower.

Thats the "right" way to do it(D or lower). people can't kite worth a god damn. They don't know how to do it anymore but insist on trying (and failing).

Yeah you're right, probably the best thing is silencing the Astros (which is pretty easy anyway).

Idk I felt Run being really kinda squishy if not kiting, and as Eiryl says

and I totally agree, I can't kite for $h1t. Buuuuut, the fact the adds also stun, and astros sometimes cast and criss cross on kiting made it doable but just pretty unreliable. Pld just worked easier for us.

Kiting this month is not as simple as running around the pillars with pdt- and movement speed gears. Mostly because if silence wear, adds will randomly sleep stun etc on tank which stop them from running and follow with a triple reversal move which as somewhat big range.

There will always be a window between silence off and recast, worse if you can't tell which one wears since there are multiple mage adds. Since the silencers also stuck with other duty such as haste it can be unreliable because is very likely to have a window that silence isnt up. Then the blm would start casting stuns sleep everything.

Sometimes mob also stop and run towards the opposite side and randomly TR tank.

Tl;Dr: kiting is just not that reliable compare with mew, and mostly not really tanks fault. It just seem easy in a video or 2 because luck or something. But I bet if you do 100 runs, mew method will more likely to have higher success rate.

It's not even pathing its straight up failing, oh I did one action, guess I'm good for the entire fight now to just run in circles

I'm guessing it's because lower difficulty has less mage adds or mobs die faster (so more room for error)or something.

IMO VD kiting is noticeably less reliable than mew because less room for error when it comes to silence timing and what not. A stun/sleep follow up with TR combo is instantly game over, and mobs pretty much start casting as soon as silence wears, while support busy rebuffing DDs.

Mew with 1 smn main or maybe 2 /smn rotate mew is reliable 100% win with pretty much no room to *** up besides endeath.

It's 7pm on friday and there is actually zero queue 3 days after an update. That's how bad they are at kiting.

There should be literally a thousand nin thf mnk dnc mains shouting for this.

The floor inside isn't flat, it's got slight ups and downs that the mobs will occasionally determine to path around, it's why you seem some of them go wide suddenly.

Yeah, you're pretty much at the mercy of your silence-mage.

If they don't reapply quickly, the adds can start spacing out from each other, and it can get to the point where some will start cutting across the middle instead of following nicely around the pillars. It's really easy to get pincer'd.

VD won multiple times in 5:00, including time spent buffing.



Silence was not needed but I agree with the above comments that doing so will remove the chance of being caught out.

Nice one Rua! I like your strat, I think it's the best so far.
I think some things in it are a little luck dependant, like having only /nin is gonna cause some deaths sometimes and the kiting thing remains. (Of course the better the player the less the luck factor as in your case)

IMHO probably the best strat could be:
Add Tank (RUN or PLD)
Boss Tank (NIN or MNK/NIN)
Melee BRD/NIN
Melee RDM/NIN
COR/NIN
SMN

Add tank kites and smn and rdm hit boss until 30%, after which they go to opposite corner and mew and cure.

Gonna try it, I see it as the fastest most reliable way.

If you want the "with SP's fastest run" you'd likely bring a MNK and a THF. THF can larceny PD, giving them 50s of immunity, and follow it with their own PD, so...95s of immunity during the final 50% of the boss. Which is the entire duration really. And Hundred fists in this scenario is insane. In our final run of the night in our series Ruau and I were each over 24k DPS since we blew our SP's.

Do you mean using sp increase dps after all? That means pdif not capped with normal buffs?

It just means they stopped casting shadows. increasing dps.

100% evade and 100% counter etc

Just curious, with rua's method, how do you handle the 'high rate of endeath'. It didnt look like the bard was singing goddess non stop or anything

There's no endeath from 100% to 80% and from 30% to 0%

Endeath is only 60% to 30%, and you just keep shadows up. This is the only true risk to the non-kiter, really. But we didn't really have any issues, so a good team should need to be really unlucky for it to happen.

Couple more tips
Save battuta for when phalanx or cocoon drops to give you some wiggle room. Once adds are lined up, engage on megaboss so you can parry them without feeding tp.