Levi got access to the Shadow Lord BC! Of course it wouldn't have been possible had I not helped the JPs take control of the areas! If you benefited at all from the BC you owe me a few favors!
Killing campaign mobs without tags on is pretty lame. They should at least give AN or something.
I actually messed up and lost my medal the night before the BC was unlocked, so I was only able to do the fight 8 times. The fights started to get annoying towards the end actually. For a 15 minute BC, it took an average of 60-90mins just to get there, wait in line, and then finally enter.
The fight wasn't too bad, I lost once out of the 8 tries. Seemed like depending on how lucky you got with what TP moves it chose, the easier the fight was. The most annoying thing about the fight, is the sacing. Any time it does "Spawn Shadow", it creates 3 clones of itself. The easiest way people have discovered to deal with this is to have a mage diaga them, and die. I had one fight where it decided to do it 7 times. The EXP loss kind of adds up...
It also has a few other annoying TP moves like a massive HP down AoE move and AoE doom. When I did my runs with JPs, they seemed to save TP to 300%, and only weaponskill when it was dual wielding, and not when it was using his great sword. I couldn't figure out why, but it made the fights last an extra 7-8 minutes longer than they should have.
For the first few fights I did, I was the suicidal diaga taru as RDM. When I went with the JPs they made the BRD (me of course...) sac. I guess it kind of makes sense for BRD to sac, since it's not one of the healers, and can still do songs. The nice thing about going with JP groups though is that they automatically give the BRD any synth items/grips that drop because of sacing I guess. With items like Imperial Wootz Ingots in the loot pool, it could be pretty cool.
The last few runs we did I made Sedna sac as WHM though. With RR3 it's not as bad. I was fine healing by myself as RDM.
Our 1% wipe :( oh well.
The drop rate on the helm/mail is absolutely terrible. Out of 8 fights, I didn't see a single one. Two Nightfalls, 3 capes, and 2 necklaces though.
Picked up my Allied ring after the tally! Saving it for BLM 75->80 I think.
I'm pretty sure the JPs will get access again within the next few weeks. Everyone wants the helm/mail, and allied rings as a bonus is always nice.
After finishing my magian great axe, I went ahead and completed a few more weapons. The quests are terribly boring/annoying, but pretty much the best weapons (aside from relics, and some are better than relics for certain jobs even) come from this. Plus SE has confirmed that they will be continuing the quest line, and the current best weapons will get upgraded even further.
Started with the gun. Took me a little less than a week to complete the whole thing.
All the low level NMs were pretty nice, popping within 90mins each time.
400 arcana! Just had to live in Ro'maeve for a day.
300 Hippos! This took a bit longer, since I couldn't play during the times when a large group of people seemed to be doing them. I did the see the Cradle Horn NM pop several times though.
And then it was time for VNMs again! This time it was Verthandi spam!
The T2s for this path are probably the most annoying. Urd is basically not soloable because it can cure4 spam itself. Skuld can be solo'd, but it's really annoying and a rather long fight (60mins give or a take). Plus a little bad luck with what spells it chooses and you can be dead anyway.
Duoing with a SMN made them both a lot easier. For Skuld, using Ramuh and Chaotic Strike for stun was really nice. I think the nicest part was when it did chainspell. It's like the ZNM imp in which it will try to cast on you even if you're out of range. Since during chainspell, it's constantly trying to cast, it ends up just sitting relatively in place as you are out of range avoiding it all.
It's a still a much harder fight compared to Urd though. I did Urd a few ways, RDM+SMN, RDM+BLU, RDM+SAM. RDM+SMN is probably the "safest" since it won't get TP at all, and thus you won't have to worry about mute/dispelga, but duoing with a melee is just as easy. Once we kind of got the hang of it, and it wasn't been cure happy, we got fights down to 10-15mins.
It spams buffs on itself a lot. You're going to need to keep it dispelled. It doesn't cast any offensive magical at all. Slow lands, and between that and its buff spamming, it's easy to keep shadows up.
At 79%, 59%, and 39% it 2hours. It does 4 TP moves back to back. Zephyr Arrow-->Lethe Arrow-->Cyclonic Turmoil--> Cyclonic Torrent. Zephyr is just knockback + weak damage. Lethe is weak damage+ bind/amnesia. However, getting hit with it would be bad since then you'll be forced to eat the following TP moves. Turmoil does a full dispelga + damage, and Torrent does mute+ damage. All the moves can easily be ran out of range though.
It can start casting cure4 when its HP reaches 48% or so. The fight can be prolonged a bit if it gets cure happy, but overall it's not that bad.
Once I got my abyssites to upgrade, it was back to whitegate for more shouting! Finding help was really easy. I don't know why anyone is doing the gimper weapons where you have to a million more EP-DC mobs. People are much more likely to help with NMs where they can score fancy stat +6 rings or synth materials worth 1-2M.
Verthandi was actually a lot easier than I excepted. The only chance of death was if it did Norn Arrows/Cyclonic Turmoil/Torrent, immediately followed with a holy2. Norn Arrows is really predictable though. It will always (and only) do it as the next TP move following Winter Breeze. When you see it do Winter Breeze, just make sure everyone is out of range until it uses Norn Arrows.
Yay for naked fun times too!
Only 1 ring, and 1 gem dropped in all the fights I did. We did get 13 eyes though, which was more than what was needed.
With my super gun finished, I moved onto the staves. It's pretty hard to pass up 20% mab!
I had to redo treants again for my lightning staff.
Spiders during lightning/fire/wind/light weather. I think this was easily the most annoying in the lightning path set. I just camped weather NPCs for Boyahda Tree/Kuftal. I was fortunate enough to find an Amano that needed kill shots on vermin, so with him kills went by really fast. Also unlike the terrible slime weather trial for the ice, there's plenty of spiders for when weather occurs for you to slaughter.
Next trial was a 100 mobs of any family during lightningday or weather. From here on out, the trials got better since you could plan around them a bit more.
Then a 100 beasts during lightningday or weather! I just leeched off Breaze who was killing beasts for her own staff trial.
150 vermin with thunder magic kill shots! Without day/weather to worry about, it's a lot nicer. You can just work on them slowly/whenever you please. The 150 vermin was actually extremely easy. Chigoes count, so I headed to Aydeewa, and Nosferatu's pop room. There's 10 chigoes in the room.
I just pulled them all at once, and a few ga3s later they were dead! The 16minute respawn timer means this will still take a while, but the pull/killing part only took me about 5 minutes max.
And for the final quest, kill 200 slimes with thunder magic! Yay! Took forever to solo. I couldn't really think of a good camp for this with more mobs even if I could find help. Most of the dungeons with slimes in it have them all spread out across the map with tons of aggro in between. At least with the mire camp there's 2 slimes close together on a 5minute repop, with zero aggro possibility.
So after an eternity of killing EP mobs, my super thunder staff was complete!
Ice staff was next!
The slimes during dark/ice/water/earth weather trial is really the worst. This trial was really the main reason I decided against making a SMN pet mab staff. Even though I love SMN, I rarely play it, and this was way too much work for a job/staff I would rarely use.
Once slimes were done, it was time for any mobs during iceday/weather! Just head to Uleguerand for a bit if you don't feel like waiting for iceday, easy!
Then 100 amorphs during iceday/weather. I stayed in Uleguerand Range and killed worms.
150 skill shots on Arcana! Luckily, a lot of popular trials require arcana mobs, so it's pretty easy to find people to leech off of. Still, getting kill shots in a group setting is really annoying, especially since after a certain point everyone just goes on autopilot and they stop paying attention the mob's HP.
Then finally 200 lizard kill shots! The polearm trial needs these, so I teamed up with Kouk and got it done in a few hours.
Super ice staff done!
Went out to test them on puddings really fast, and I'm pretty pleased with the results.
Thunder4 with Jupiter's:
Thunder4 with Teiwaz:
Blizzard4 with Aquillo's:
Blizzard4 with Teiwaz:
Definitely worth the time! The thunder one is obviously a lot better, especially since you lose the 5 INT and 10 elemental skill from Aquillo's. Now nobody will be able to nuke harder than I can! Not like anyone could before this anyway!
I had a Lord Ruthven pop from a while ago, so I shouted for some people to try and a get a silver, and then finally a HQ medallion!
Yay silver! Now for some pre-synthesis good luck!
Yay finally!
Since my WAR is so awesome now, everyone has been begging me to bring it to einherjar!
Still no sign of KB, but we did get a Khimaira finally!
Random afeet! Yay for useless abjurations!
Odin dropped exactly what I wanted, Nlegs! I don't know what I should ask Odin for next!
Did Pandemonium Warden with Radiance! Or we tried to anyway. There were a TON of people there. somewhere around 55-60. I think one of the biggest problems was that there were so many people. It's hard enough to organize 18 people, let alone 60. I don't even know if some of the people there were even worth trying to organize.
Anyway, finally get there and we pop it! I was in one of the lamp melee alliances. I'm not sure if the killing of the lamps went exactly as they were hoping it would. It seemed like we were all fighting right on top of each other, and everyone was getting blasted with the gears AoE moves. By the time we got it down to 2 lamps, over 3/4 of the people were dead.
It ended up not mattering though, since PW shortly depopped. There was some misunderstanding with having to take action on PW if people had hate on gears to prevent it from depopping. So the entire fight only lasted 2 minutes. Really lame, since I think most people were looking forward to the experience of the fight, but mistakes happen. Even though it was a really silly/common sense one people do make them from time to time (and I can't even say anything! At least nobody had a genius idea like I did to trade the trigger to a ??? in the completely wrong area!). I hope people in Radiance didn't go too emo over it, and maybe they can try again soon!
And my winning never ends! Until next time when I get 100 more drops!
