Thanks to the incredibly awesome manaburn exp maze(yay for Cymmina for sharing with everyone!), exping BLM was really simple. Even with tons of AFKing in between runs and a slow group, 20k/hr is easy to accomplish. If you can find people that will limit their AFKing, and with some good BLMs, getting 35k/hr is very possible. Another great thing about the maze is that it takes place in Ruhotz, not Everbloom, making getting in much easier than TP burn mazes.
Basically each run gets you about 11-12k exp, depending on COR roll. 9k from the end chest, and around 2k from the mobs.
Oh, and allied ring with this is pretty awesome.
Tried out the new camps, and honestly, only one of them comes close to ToAU exp. Misareaux Coast's vultures are great exp, but there's only 3 camps in the entire zone. Not only that, but if your party is any good, you will most likely lose chain waiting on repops, since most of camps are literally one mob short of an infinite chain.
Promyvion exp is awful. The mobs are just annoying. Wanderer's have ridiculous evasion, that even with pizza and capped merits you won't be capping accuracy. The other mob types are even worse though. Seethers have some ridiculous 20 shadows utusemi type move. Similar to Misareaux, most of the camps are short of an infinite chain too.
Lufaise had the levels of its Greater Birds upgraded. I was here as RNG and died probably 6x or so. JPs for whatever reason wanted to have a NIN with us for a first voke; except for the fact that they have a -25% slashing penalty, so he was totally useless. The birds are no joke; they double attack and have various crazy shadow wiping TP moves.
Uleguerand Range is full of high level ahriman mobs now. These weren't that great. Getting to camp is kind of annoying, unless you want to nexus up. The mobs themselves require a fairly strong backline since they spam -ga spells and cannot be silenced. Pulling is frustrating due to the constant AoE bind TP move spam. Level 5 Petrify isn't fun too, even when synced since it's based on your true job level.
Of course there was always TP burn MMM, if you can manage to get in. I tried it a few times, and after about an hour of spamming, we were lucky to get in once.
Abyssea seems to be the go to place for everyone now. I still haven't tried the exp runs, but honestly it seems like it requires about 90mins-120mins of exping at a rate of 15k-20k/hr. Once you've passed that, you can get rates of 50-100k/hr apparently, depending on how good everyone is. I hate exping for long periods of time though, so not really sure if this will end up being for me.
Walk of Echoes is so weird. It really just needs a major overhaul. I'm not even sure who thought that it was a good idea. It's far too difficult to be a casual event that you can just enter and win with a good success rate. The participation bonus system, like campaign unions, completely favor DD jobs over mages, so I can't even see why anyone would want to come as a mage in a pick up group. It's such a shame though, because there's tons of good gear from the first tier alone. It was fun the few times I did it in an organized setting though.
New magian trials! I upgraded my thunder/ice staves, which are now a whopping 25% bonus and now they have different names making it easy to macro! It's really a huge bonus when you think about it. The upgrade from NQ staff to HQ is 10% to 15% and anyone that has a NQ staff these days is considered gimp. The upgrade from HQ staff to the current final magian staff is 15% to 25%. Plus SE is likely to continue to upgrade these weapons with more trials in future updates. The trials are really not that bad. The more frustrating weather trials have been cut in half making them much less of a hassle.
The two new trials for the thunder staff had me kill 200 beetles, and then 250 funguars. Beetles were really easy since you can do Goblin's Beetles in Sauromuge [s]. Funguars were slow since there wasn't any shortcut I could think of, but Grauberg worked decently.
Ice had me 200 bees followed by 250 crabs. No shortcuts for either path here. I just did the bees in Wajaom, and the crabs in Vunkerl since they were both close to town.
I also did the cure staff. I think it ended up being by far the easiest set of trials I have done, and it went by pretty fast too.
50 mobs during lightsday/light weather took 3 nyzul runs.
50 Arcana during lightsday/light weather took like 40mins in Ro'Maeve during lightsday.
150 kill shots with light magic on beasts was next. I did them on Gigas's tigers in Vunkerl. It wasn't as fast as I would have liked, since you can't just snipe the mobs with thunder 4.
The 25 pixies were annoying. Yagudo High Priest in Meriphtaud have a 100% drop rate on the bottled pixie. Problem is, they are rare/ex, so you can only hold one of them at a time. This means you're constantly running back and forth between in Meriphtaud and the spring in Grauberg. I think it took me about 4hours to do all 25.
Final trial is 150 elementals during lightsday. It takes about 3 lightsday to kill them all, so it really just depends if your playtime matches up with lightsday. Best camp is in Meriphtaud [s], right outside Oztroja. There are 2 Yagudo SMNs there, and plenty of safe spots to rest.
Abyssea is cool. There's actually a ton of good gear to get, and even though they're old zones, it still felt somewhat new when I was exploring the areas. My main complaint is the time limit. The time limit doesn't really work because Abyssea is more like sky/sea than a Dynamis/Limbus type event. There's just too much stuff to do in Abyssea; it's almost overwhelming. Even though you can do the infinite exp/cruor runs because of all the time extensions, you can't farm NMs while doing that, so you're still stuck with the low time limit.
I started by focusing on the NMs for my OAT trials, which require 30 drops from two different NMs for each weapon. Because of the time limit, it takes about 3 weeks per weapon, if I only focus my runs on those NMs.
For my gun, I needed 10 Chasmic Stingers, and 20 Nuggets from Megamaw Mikey. Both really easy NMs.
Chasmic does Frenzy Pollen (Hundred Fists) but it paths poorly around the trees. It doesn't have any regain at all either.
Megamaw Mikey is a worm. Think that should be enough to tell you how easy it is.
There's an entire pop NM/VNM system in Abyssea too. So with my OAT weapon done, time for exploring!
This tiger NM was kind of crazy. It has en-doom and triple attacks. Yay! The fight was actually going fairly well, until holy waters completely failed and we died.
Went after Bakka, an imp NM in Konschtat for the awesome Goetia Chain (INT+8 magic accuracy +4).
There wasn't much info when we first tried the fight. Wiki only said it casts Blizzard V that goes through shadows (which we quickly found was false). Completely forgot to mention Paralyga, instant cast Freeze and..
Blizzaga IV! My super awesome paralyze saved me though!
It's actually not that bad of a fight. So far no drops on the chain!
Became obsessed with trying to pop Karkinos, since JPs were claiming it dropped the Goading Belt. Obviously now that was proved to be false, but I still wanted to pop it since we had wasted so much time trying to figure it out.
Had to kill Nahn first. Trying to pop it made me remember how much I despise fishing. Easy fight. Just kite it around the lake. When it does Metallic Body (stoneskin), it will keep spamming Floodga (with the same extremely long cast time) until you damage through its stoneskin.
The other half of the pop set comes from this Poroggo NM. It spams waterga2, poisonga2, and water bomb over and over. It also has en-charm that lands about 25% the time. No frog chorus at least though. I would say a few melees and some mages to spam cure would make this easy.
Karkinos is basically Krabkatoa +1. Contrary to VNMs, Slow/paralyze/elegy all land without the need for elemental seal. You can't dispel Scissor Guard or Bubble Curtain though, so you're basically stuck fighting it with a permanent shell and defense bonus.
We were so focused on trying to damage it, that it surprised with Venom Shower and killed some of us.
Can kite it around the lake without any problems! I'm really curious as to what it drops, but unfortunately don't have the numbers to take it down.
Rotaru told me about a Cuelebre, so we went to Tahrongi to see if we could take it down.
It's an easier version of Ouryu really. Just need some mdt gear/earth resist set!
I was surprised to see the dagger drop from this. It has a fast repop timer (1hr?) and the drop rate is around 75%+. Should be an easy item to get for most THF/DNC, especially considering how good it is.
Played around with the VNMs. I'm mainly after the T2 VNM Brooder. It drops 2 items I want, the mantle for my RNG/COR and the Serpentes Sabots for my mage jobs!
The NM itself is really easy. Drop rate on the mantle is also high, but the sabots seem rare. There's only one tier 2 per zone though, and they have a repop timer of over an hour. Not really sure how SE expects multiple groups to do VNMs at once.
And then there's all the quests in Abyssea I need to do to get higher fame levels. I've only done a few of the quests in Tahrongi so far.
New MMM boss mazes! These are fun, and worth the time. The main drop I'm after is the Arcane's Robe (MP+30 INT/MND+10 refresh effect) for my SCH, since it doesn't have any other refresh body piece. It drops off the tier4 boss, which requires all tier1-tier3 NM clears, nine in total, before you have access to it. I think this is by far the easiest refresh body piece to obtain for mages, plus all mages can wear it. Assuming no losses, you can get access to the final tier in 9 days. Once you have access, you can spam it once a day until you get the drop. If the drop rate is similar to the gear obtained in the other tiers (15-20%), it's really not that bad. The runs have a time limit of 15minutes max, so they are quick to burn through.
Aside from the gear drops, it's a decent way to make gil too. I've seen everything from cerb hides to angel skins. Plus the new tern gear set, which is nice for mage jobs haste build!
Starting with the tier1 bosses! The one thing I was really shocked at is that gravity lands on some of these.
Gumdrop uses a 2hour at 75%, 50%, and 25%. It uses either Chainspell or Meikyo Shisui. Meikyo is easy to deal with, just run out of range from its TP moves. Chainspell is annoying though, since it can cast ga2s.
Babalu Aye(forgot to take pics!), a diremite, is even easier. It doesn't cast any magic, but it has an extremely potent en-poison effect. It also does hundred fists at 75, 50, and 25%. Gravity works though, just kite and nuke.
The slug tier1 is tough. It normally takes a 75% damage cut to all magic; melee damage works fine. It has a en-slow on melee attacks that overwrites haste. All its TP moves are random AoEs that give bio, slow, HP down. The tricky part happens when it does Meikyo Shisui. For the 30 seconds its active, all melee damage will heal it. It also gains an incredibly potent regen (healed about 8%~ of its HP). The only upside is that it doesn't attack during this phase, and magic damage works normally. Our problem is that it kept doing Meikyo every minute or so, and not just at certain HP %, so we couldn't keep up damage. I think next time we try it, might do something like RDMx2 BLM DDx2 BRD, and maybe just have RDMs chainspell nuke during its Meikyo phases to counter the regen.
The second tier NMs were all really simple. The gobbue boss can't be slowed, and is immune to gravity. Its 2hr is Mighty Strikes, which also gives it the ability to triple attack. It absorbs water magic too, but all other spells work fine. Just keep shadows up and this should be an easy win.
Hippogrph boss can be slowed/elegy/paralyze. No gravity again. It casts random wind based magic like aeroga3, aero4, silencega. None are too damaging though. Its 2hr is Perfect Dodge. Just make sure to always face away to not get hit with the terror move (Jettatura), and dispel Fantod (boost) asap.
The last tier2 is a golem. It casts random wind based -ga spells, and tornado. It does do Crystal rain, which deals about 800-900damage.
Tier3 bosses is where things start to get hard. The easiest of three is the dragon.
Its 2hour ability is Blood weapon. It also has a permanent (but weak) en-drain effect and dread spikes. I think the way to go for this is to just gravity it and kite/nuke. It has all the annoying dragon tp moves like voidsong,body slam, and chaos blade too.
This corse is awful. Our first attempt was with a manaburn which we quickly learned would not work. It has some innate magic defense bonus, so even with 2hours we got it to 47%. The difficult lies with its manafont. During manafont, it casts Drainga 2, dispelga, sleepga 2, and death.
The other dangerous thing it does is meteor. Every time it does Memento Mori, it immediately follows up with meteor.
Stun lands obviously, but it was spamming the spells (particularly death) that three stuns weren't enough.
The last tier 3 is a gnole. It has a 100% double attack rate, and a strong en-paralyze effect. It also has a very high counter rate, and it does mighty strikes. I think manaburn is the way to go for this. Even with all the runes that boost our attack, acc, etc... it's difficult for melee to do damage. Its counter makes it easy for melees to die just trying to damage it. Avoiding giving it TP would also be a wise choice. Plenilune Embrace can heal it for a ton of HP, pretty much a mini benediction. I would avoid doing this on full moon...(stolen JP screenshot!)
Here are some of the random drops we've gotten so far:
Final WoTG quests!
Windy was fun. Both BCs were pretty easy though.
I think the reward for Windy is the best of the three nations. Zodiac performed better than an INT ring during the correct day.
Bastok was much harder than Windy. We did the final BC without any kind of Stona which wasn't so smart when it spams AoE petrify...
Bastok's reward is also nice. I'm not sure how much better aspir/drain is, but it's not like there were very many ring options for aspir/drain prior to this ring.
Sandy BCs were the easiest. I just duo'd with a random WHM.
The weakest ring I think. I doubt it would be worth using instead of a PDT ring.
Apparently there are a bunch of fake Tsolamogola running around! Still confused on how people can mistake my awesomeness with some random impostor! They're not being very nice!
