Bannings...+ Cerb ZNM!

I ended up starting to write this post a few days earlier with just a few updates on what we did over the week, full morrigan's etc... but with the events that happened on 1/22...

SE finally got around to banning all the people that had duped the salvage/nyzul/sandworm stuff today. About 950 I think total? Some are apparently temp bans though, or they'll find out in 3 days for sure.

I don't think the glitch was super popular on the NA side of Levi (Salvage isn't even that popular, I think I'm only the second NA with full morrigan's). I know of a few people that did it, who I'm sure are banned now, but nothing like some of the other servers where basically entire shells were banned. It'll be interesting to see what will happen on those servers, where the shells which were banned were the ones that dominated all the HNMs, and now that they're gone, will those camps/endgame scene be like.

I did actually participate in the glitch once, on the starting chest in salvage to see if it actually worked, since it sounded so ridiculous. We never did it on NMs or anything else, since we were scared of the eventual ban. Even if it was REALLY tempting to do it.

The BG thread(s) are kind of crazy. I remember in November when they patched the glitch, and people were saying that everyone who duped was going to get banned. The people who duped retaliated that they were just jealous and they won't be getting banned etc etc.. Now everyone that warned about the bans are pretty much laughing the entire thread.

Anyway next few days will be interesting to see how what happens across the servers, and the full list of people that were banned.


I had to change tons of macros after getting the slops a few days ago. It took forever and there's still lots of mistakes I think...

We did Dynamis-Tavnazia in Alttab finally. Unfortunately, the majority of the LS for whatever reason decided that the win was important to them, and since we only had 30 people in LS 18 went for the win and 12 went to farm. The win group failed, and after they were all complaining how it was a waste of 30k. It's not like we didn't try and warn them that the Tav win was useless...

Our farm run went ok. Got PUP & NIN body to drop, but we didn't manage to get the last extension.

We finally did our Sarameyas that we've had forever. Had 10 people for the fight, including Beni, so I guess like 9.5.

Tsola RDM/WHM
Darkaze SAM/WAR
Shidobu SAM/WAR
Trina BRD/WHM
Beni WHM/BLM(2box)
Thano WHM/BLM

Arc RDM/WHM
Shosei WAR/SAM
Mithroy THF/WHM
Seeko RNG/WAR

Could definitely do with less DD, if you don't care about drops you could drop the THF (but that would be foolish considering it drops multiple expensive and rare items), and would've been easier if our WHMs had /SCH leveled (hint hint!), but overall the fights went very well.

We used SAM/WAR tanks, which proved to work very well. Obviously having fire resist is required. Here's some of the damage they took:

And apparently I forgot to take more damage SS so oh well!

Kasha randomly paralyzing it:(....)


Had poor drops I guess.. even if it was 10m in items.

then,



Me>Sarameya!

Random pics:

(look at party chat)



Random GM showed up in whitegate. All he did was /bow multiple times, then he left.

Poorly formatted post and didn't really edit it so oh well!

Macha's Slops!!!!!!!!!

Finally!

Yay goliard+ ugly/cute hat!

Lots of stuff happened!

SCNM

Solo'd a majority of the NMs again to obtain a second pop set, as well as some money items. Went 2/7 on money item drops.

Coinbiter dropped his gilfinder neckpiece, didn't get a SS of it. Both sold overnight for a total of 450k, yay.

We planned to do the actual BC itself on Thursday, but Arc's internet died, so we postponed it to Friday. We managed to get people 10 people, and I was still a little nervous. The fight was actually very very easy.


I was in charge of kiting the main NM as RDM/NIN, while the rest of the group killed the 4 helpers. Arc easily held the 2 rangers, while Seeko shadowbinded one of the warriors, and Thano tanked the second warrior.

Kiting the NM was really easy, it casts weak spells (Banish II & Flash) often, so you can get distance on it without w legs. I poisoned/bio III'd it, and did 10% of the damage while everyone else killed the helpers. It's special moved "Veil of Chaos" isn't too deadly either. Slow/elegy all work. Once the aura went down, it died quickly.

Perfect drop for me:



(Stealing pic from LS site!)

Second fight dropped the earring so yay to Darkk for that.

We could have easily done the fight with 9, since Rose was taking pics(Soultrapper) through parts of it. Then maybe we could drop a person or two, and with use of 2hours I can see us doing it with 7-8.

ZNM

Mithroy asked if we could kill the T4 ZNMs for him, and he would supply all the zeni to pop them (Tier 1-4) as long as he could keep the PW trophy for his Tizona; we would get to keep all other drops. Since we have no need for the PW items, I saw this as an awesome deal. We managed to do 1 Tinnin last week, as well as a bunch of Tier1-3.

(More pic stealing from site)

Arc beat Thano by like 20points!(930 vs 910ish); so no more saying you have poor lots!


We have another Tinnin set almost ready, so hopefully we'll see another Alkalurops/Enkidu Body.

We've had two Sarameya pops forever, but no LS seems to want to kill it for us... Radiance was supposed to, but that didn't seem to ever work out; and I don't think any other LS would kill for trigger only. I decided we should try and just do it LS only! Going to try SAM tanking it. It'll be more fun this way anyway!

Dynamis


Wasn't even close to winning, but hey at least I beat Sav right?! Really dumb that you can't main lot AF-1. The rule just doesn't make any sense to me, since you earn points by attending dynamis runs, and if you wish to use those points to obtain AF there shouldn't be any reason why you couldn't. I don't see why AF-1 has to be special, and you suddenly can't use your points on it like any other piece of AF.

The awesome valkrum run we had on Tuesday was completely ruined by Saturday's qufim. The pre-boss stuff went about as well as possible, considering the facts that the LS hasn't done qufim in like 6 months at least, that the majority of members had never done the zone before, and that the ls leaders don't really post links/strategies/maps/orders of what our plan is prior to the run.

Couple of people got lost, some accidental aggro, a poor pull of the mega boss which killed a few of us, but we did get the win. The real problems started post boss however..

HPG insisted, despite many of us in the ls trying to convince him otherwise, that we should farm raptors which spawn halfway across the map, instead of nearby monsters. After taking 20minutes just to arrive at the raptors, aggroing/partial wiping to unecessary mobs, we made a poor raptor pull, and wiped shortly after.





We almost all had to HP. Thankfully Alie managed to PD/sac them away giving enough time for mages to get up and out of range.

Huge waste of a run, we were dead for almost 30minutes, and then the last pull we did after we recovered failed as well. While I don't think KC goes about things in the most civilized manner possible, she was completely right here. A leader is as only good as their members I think, and HPG should be extremely thankful that he has people that actually question his decisions, instead of blindly following. If he had taken our concerns seriously, and actually responded with good reasons as to why we should do raptors (not I'm the leader do what I say crap), instead of laughing off as LOLOLOL all you guys care about is that were not fighting the mob that's dropping your AF LOLOLOLOL (which doesn't even make any sense... since the mobs we suggested drops the same armor as the raptors), we could've all worked together and made an educated decision on what mobs to target.

Bubu on Tuesday was just as bad. Run started off pretty well. Managed to do all the NMs in an efficient time, and killed the boss with very little deaths. But once again post farming...

We wasted so much time running back and forth. And of course HPG refuses to listen to anyone. It's just disappointing because we wasted the entire run. ZERO drops. Bleh, so annoying. Just wasted potential.




Nyzul

Random pic of everyone in my party resisting Serket's Bindga. Nobody else in my party seemed to care/notice, but I thought it was cool.

Had some of the worst nyzuls ever. Like seriously how hard is it to activate 3 lamps at the same time?

Also had a mnk mantra after everyone used body boost...

Oh, and then same fight? The melees are like, hey I'm dying, I'll just not use the fanatic's drink I spent precious tokens on for fun! Had to spam cure 4...dead taru.

Random nyzul drama without screenshots!:

I also did a random 80 which we lost when Khim was at 1% with this SAM. We had to kill Bloodsucker during the run, and the SAM got the ??? ring. After the run, I asked everyone to appraise the items. The SAM had recieved another ??? item during the run as well. Everyone heads to the appraisal NPC and trades their item, however the SAM trades his non-ring ???, then disbands PT, and trades the bloodsucker ??? ring solo. I obviously notice this and call him out on it. He replies with that it appraised to a brass ring, and that's he's in a hurry to do assault so he had to join the other PT. He was already at the NPC, so I don't see how the PT couldn't wait another 10seconds while he appraised the ring. He then had someone alliance me to prove that he joined some assault group; whatever. The next day he asked to join my nyzul shout, and I obviously declined.

On to happier times! Robyn sent me a tell encouraging me to stick with Nyzul, saying it would drop soon. I replied that it would drop today, and guess what?!



Yay finally!

Our luck didn't continue in a 100 run :(



At least now I can devote all my tags to RvB or 100 runs for Thano now that goliard is out of the way, and Nimue's Tights removes my need for denali.

MMM

Since a lot of the new weapons and gear (including Koggelmander and Mamool Ja Earring) have been found in MMM, I've been trying to schedule as many runs per week as possible. I've bought my Lost & Found rune, as well as have gotten a Supreme Might rune from the Hoardbox. Have about 200~ marbles left still; if all goes well I should have Koggelmander maze by the end of the week!


Random!

After the SCNM, I randomly decided I wanted an Ixion Cape, and one was up on the AH!

Were doing Omega this week so I should be able to finish paying back by then.

I saw screenshots of people doing the low level level sync astral flow exp thing! So put together a random group in ls to go twice. It worked.. kind of well? Made abour 7-8k in like 45mins or so.

Will probably be better next time we try, if we ever go again.

La Vaule soloing + usual stuff

I was bored recently, so I decided to try and solo most of the La Vaule NMs to complete my set. Really want the hat for town gear/blu big 3 setup too!

A lot of them were actually kind of boring. Run around the river>dot>run>dot. Some took forever also, like over 1hour of just running back and forth. Anyway, here they are:

Agrios

This one was a little interesting. I tried kiting it, but it didn't seem like I was getting ahead of it, even with W legs. I think it has some kind of increased movement speed, it also doesn't spam any kind of TP moves/spells that would pause it to allow you get some space between it. So I ended up straight tanking it.

It's easy enough to slow. I only had 1 resist the entire fight. Paralyze doesn't work, so that's kind of lame, but it isn't really needed. It DOES have double attack, but it didn't go off that much. With slow and some haste gear you should really have no problem tanking it. It also doesn't really hit too hard; without any food or damage- gear of any kind of, it took 2-3hits to break SS.

(I thought this pic was kind of cool)

It only has 2 TP moves: Grand Slam and Power Attack. It seems that once it gets 100TP, or whenever it decides to WS, it would spam both moves like 4 times in a row. Grand Slam takes 2-3 shadows, but only does about 200 damage if you don't have shadows up. Power Attack takes 1 shadow, and does about 500damage if you don't have any up. Basically what I did was as soon as it did 1 TP move, I ran from it, and this locked it up, while I got "No target in range" message. It only did these TP moves like 3-4 times the entire fight.


All-Seeing Onyx Eye


This one was one of longer ones. You don't need to sac it anywhere since it's already in the river, which is nice. It's a SCH NM that likes to spam Cure IV on itself when it's below 33%. It doesn't have a lot of HP, but since it's an eye, has strong magic defense bonus /resistant to nukes. My blizzard 3 only did 295~. Starts off without any kind of fast cast, but the % of it's hp is how fast it casts. So at 100% it's nukes will cast at normal speed, at 50% it's nukes will go off twice as fast, and once you get to like 20-30% it's pretty much instant cast, and impossible to out run them. It doesn't naturally have any -ga spells, but it can Manifestation any nuke, which will make it a -ga spell and wipe shadows. It didn't do this very often, maybe like twice the entire fight. It also constantly spams charm, but you can avoid it by having your back turned. In the event you do get charmed, it wears off within 15seconds.

Fight got pretty tough once it was below 33%. Near instant cast spells+ cure 4 spam made it challenging to keep a balance of nuking it to make sure you're actually dealing damage to overcome the cure spam, while keeping MP to yourself alive.
Cogtooth Skagnogg



This one actually really sucks. Unlike the other solos here, you will be RDM/WHM instead of /NIN. You should also bring a stack (or 2) of echo drops. You have to drag it to the river, but it's definately the simplest pull in the entire zone. Just cast on it, then run off the nearby bridge. You will lose all aggro except for Cogtooth as soon as you hit the water. There's 2 BLM orcs that will link that will try and get a spell off, but at worst it was Poisonga 2, any deadly ga3 you wil be able to outrun with ease.

It doesn't physically melee you at all, but instead spams TP moves:

Scattershot: fancy name for 1000 needles. Acts the same way, shell and magic defense bonus reduce damage. Range for it is about 17'
Tear Grenade: Blind and silence. This is why you needed the echos. Range is about 17'.
Sticky Grenade: Gravity. Range is about 17'. If you're hit with this, erase as fast as possible.
Blastbomb: Just like the blu spell, bind+ small damage. Range is about 17'.
Fountain: Deals about 50-200~ damage. Range is about 20'.
Firebomb: Deals fire(I think...) damage. Does about 50-200. Huge range, about 30'.
Burst: Deals 100-250damage. Range is about 25'. Can be blinked.

Out of all it's moves, the obvious worst one is Scattershot. With shell4, and 0 magic defense bonus gear, it did about 781 damage. With capped stoneskin on, you could get it down to 400ish. If you have a a magic defense bonus set it would be really helpful for this, but since I have crazy inventory problems, I don't.

Tear grenade should be countered quickly with echos. The biggest problem I'd have with it is when it would do sticky or blastbomb (grav or bind), and then silence me while I was casting erase. All of it's straight damage moves aren't too bad with phalanx+ stoneskin on.

Here's some pics showing the crazy range on firebomb compared to the others:



Fountain/Burst damage:


Scattershot damage:



Basic strat is to obviously run back and forth while keeping poison/bio on and outrunning it's TP moves. When you reach the end of the river, and need to turn around is the hard part, since you can get hit it with Scattershot. I'd try and double back a little before I was at the end of the river usually. Like I'd stop, run towards it, if it did a good TP move I'd keep running, and if it did a bad one (sticky/blastbomb/scattershot), I'd run the other way to run out of range. Like this kind of:

I did end up getting hit with grav in this one, but managed to get out before it hit me with another scattershot. I waited till I got it to do tear grenade(silence) before I doubled back.

Occasionally it will deaggro. I used that time to rebuff myself if necessary, and get in a free nuke. It also has some delay in which after you claim it from a deaggro, it won't do anything for about 20seconds.

Try and refresh your stoneskin even before it wears off after you've taken a couple firebombs/burst/fountains. So in case you get hit with scattershot, you have a nice fresh stoneskin to soak up the damage.

It's really not that bad as long as you play safe, just very, very annoying. Definately the hardest solo in La Vaule though.

Coinbiter Cjaknokk



Wasn't too bad. A bit of a pain to get to the river. What I ended up doing was claiming then running south to the river to lose all the adds, then back towards the NM, which would've lost aggro further from it's original spawn. Pull it again, and it'd be at the river.

The fight itself isn't too bad. It's a DRK mob that casts Absorb-TP and Dread Spikes occasionally, so it's easy to gain distance on it. It has auto-regain and will spam Shoulder Charge if you're close it. It can be absorbed by 2-4 shadows though, and you can run out of range from it too.

When it does hit, and if you lack shadows, it can do a decent amount of damage though:

It'll deaggro here and there so you can get a free nuke off it too. Probably one of the easier fights.

Draketrader Zlodgodd

Apparently I didn't take any pics of this at all or something, but it's a really easy fight. Once again, pull it to the nearby river. You shouldn't have any problems losing aggro on the NM, though sometimes the tigers won't be so easy to lose aggro on.

It pretty much only spams Jump, and does a quick melee attack between Jumps. Jump does 400-1000 damage, but can be absorbed by 1 shadow. However, it's really easy to avoid it by just letting it get close to you, then immediately running away. You'll get the "XYZ is out of range", and it'll lock up for about 5 seconds, making it easy to kite even without w legs. You can play this really safe and just dot kite. Takes aboue 50mins with just dot.

Falsespinner Bhudbrodd



The pull is definately harder than the actual fight for this one. It doesn't pop extremely close to a river, and loses aggro very easily since it'll spam dances/counterstance on itself, allowing you to run very far ahead of it.

I ended up just chainspell sleep IIing the mobs around it, then claiming it while allowing it to stay fairly close to me, and stopping when it did the dances so that I didn't run too far ahead.

Once you get it to the river, it's probably the easiest NM in the zone. It'll do Berserker Dance/counterstance on itself, which stops it in its place, allowing you to get a nuke off, or run ahead and buff yourself.


It also takes bonus damage to nukes while under counterstance or something. I got some nice thunder3s on it:

The only damaging TP move it did was Battle Dance, which can be absorbed by 3 shadows. And even if you have less shadows, it doesn't do too much damage.

Rugaroo

This one felt like it took forever for some reason. It seemed to have much higher HP than the other NMs in the zone. Took like 90minutes almost, and unlike the eye, it doesn't heal itself.

Anyway, like the last couple, the pull is probably harder than the fight itself. Similar to Coinbiter, I basically claimed it, then ran and fell down the bridge, while racing back to its spawn. After every pull/deaggro attempt, it would wind up closer and closer to the bridge.

It doesn't really do anything too dangerous. It'll decide to spam Call of the Moon randomly, which basically stops it in its place for like 20seconds, giving you time to rebuff and stuff. Call of the Moon basically is there to intimidate you. It also seems to give it 100TP to use Asuran Claws on you. You can usually out run Asuran Claws though.

The intimidation is really annoying. Something to really be careful for is it will deaggro after doing Call of the Moon occasionally. When it does that, if you try to reclaim it, you might get intimidated and be unable to reclaim it. If you get super unlucky and have it deaggro under the bridge, it'll fly up there and run back to it's spawn. So pretty much if it does Call of the Moon> deaggro, instead of claiming it with a spell, run up to it and aggro it normally.

I got lazy near the end and Asuran Claws hit me, it does hurt quite a bit:


So that's how you can solo 7/8 NMs you need! The last NM, the BLM orc is really tough solo, if not impossible. It summons stupid vial things that will poison/bound/silence/para you constantly. It might be soloable, but it'd be really tough/annoying. I'd just get a melee friend/dnc to kill the vials, and maybe another mage to help speed up the kill.

In other non-La Vaule news, Alttab did valkrum today, and it went really well. We entered at 8:40, far better than our normal cop 9:30 times. Run started out run off when we were clearing flies for our SJ:


Arc somehow managed to die twice doing this, despite never actually engaging anything.

The boss also went really well, compared to Apocalyptic Beast in bubu. I don't think anybody died.

So weird that Alttab has success in the harder zone (valkrum) than the much easier bubu.

We had to clear a couple of normal mobs to get to the NMs too. Nobody listened to me last week when I said how awesome the drop rates on normal AF is.

We actually went and had a 6th mob straight drop AF, though I can't remember what it was at all.

Some people even ended up "accidently" aggroing normal monsters for us to kill.

I lost lot on SCH, and someone actually main lotted PUP so I couldn't get that.

I was really hoping for some RDM hat-1 to drop, but it sadly didn't. Alttab doesn't allow anyone to main lot AF-1 either, so pretty much everyone with rdm af2 hat( which is A LOT of people) can lot. I don't really understand the purpose of this rule, but whatever.

I won the COR-1 originally, but decided to pass since it dropped very early in the run(and another Alttab rule!: 1 af-1 per run!), and even with the HQ, it's still a Phantom Roll macro piece only.

Clown continued to hax and got the belt too:

That was the only accessory that dropped in the run. He also got the only accessory that dropped last week, the RNG belt. At least it's just 1 more COR in my way till I get mine!

Nyzul has continued to be lame. Askar bodies and Goliard hats. Needs to be reversed :(

I was shouting and ended up getting a tell from this Abra person. His name sounded really familiar but I couldn't quite remember from where. It wasn't until 30seconds after I told him yes that I remember Arc had told me he did LAC with him recently, and Abra cfh'd on it. He also didn't seem to understand that RDM could heal better than BLU, and said that if he came RDM that I would have to go SAM(? I don't even have SAM..). Ended up telling him no 30seconds after I said yes to him, but that was apparently enough time for his limbus group to head to Apollyon and enter or something.

Anyway, enemy #1 made:


I have no idea what LS he's in, or how he's going to burn me with everyone on levi, but could be fun I guess?

Thano decided to bring FT to the internet and made us a site/forums. In the 3 days it's been up, it's died like.. twice, been deleted, revived, died, and revived again. It's nice that we can communicate slightly easier though so hopefully everyone in LS uses it!

Link to FT site

She also made a funny banner for us at the top!

Super long post, but can't sleep+ bored!