Vagary Notes 2021

From hammertime on ffxiah

Vagary Findings on FFXIAH

Managed to get wins for the three zones today through mainly ls members and friends. 18 Man seems to be the best way of at least clearing the zones, time sinks seem to be from the volume of adds rather than the bosses themselves though they are a few exceptions. Lower man is very good for farming the codex’s you need for upgrading so it’s not a complete waste to try that either and I’m sure wins can be achieved that way with good groups. I’ll try to describe a few things best I can but there was a lot going on in these so I can’t really be 100% accurate.

Fomors This run is very melee friendly especially for jobs that can take a hit like Sam and Mnk. Tried with a few Thfs first run but they got themselves killed rather quickly, wouldn’t write them off completely but just the experience we had. I’d say you want to take 2 Plds for this, ideally with Aegis and Ochain. Rest of alliance can be your pretty standard DD setups with brds, whms and a few geos are handy. One interesting thing we found was that Bst was doing particularly well damage and survivability wise in this zone. In fact the ones we used did well in all 3.

So this zone is very much like Einherjar the mobs come in waves:

Wave 1 is fomors - cannot remember their exact jobs on this wave but they aren’t too bad overall. We pretty much had one Pld Ochain super tank the mobs on the wall left of entrance while the other supported and helped deal with any wandering re-pops. The Nins were a little bit of a pain in tanking since they throw a few status effects on you from a distance. DDs dealt with the mage mobs first, then the Nins and rest was easy. Then as soon as last fomor was dead everyone gathered at entrance for next round which was very important for each new round.

Wave 2 is Corses and sub boss Dullahan – both tanks used aegis for this. The one that pulls and tanks the adds will need a bit more healing support since those Corses love to spam their silence moves, would advise they use fealt and rampart on pull but not necessary. The other pld should take NM to opposite corner. DDs took down Corses one by one and with very little difficulty, they can charm but they died so quick for us that it wasn’t an issue. Boss can hit really hard, DDs should try to stay behind it and perhaps use some –Dtgear as they pound away at it. We killed it very quickly on this run due to the quality of DD we had available but it can hit hard so just be careful. The most important thing about this round is to hug that entrance wall as soon as that boss is killed. Just one person napping can really mess start of round 3.

Wave 3 is fomors again but a lot more dangerous - tanks switch back to Ochain and hope nobody aggros when they pop. Was our hardest round but mainly because it started badly, the fomors are in 4 groups this time and should be pulled individually by the tanks while the DDs pick them off. The fomor jobs are very varied on this round, there are Geos/Bsts/Drgs/Plds/Mnks and more. Again would start with any magic casters first and just gradually kill the rest. Mnk seemed particularly dangerous as it used 100 fists and WS spammed, also the drgs pet became a Wyvern which of course wanted to paralyze everyone repeatedly. Once a fomor party is down just pull a different one until you clear room for next and last Wave.

Wave 4 Fomors!! And that jester NM thing Palloritus – Honestly this wasn’t too bad its just a case of how much time you have at this point and we had a good 20 minutes. One tank collects adds and tanks them using Ochain while other deals with boss using Aegis. DDs deal with adds then all deal with boss. Boss likes to doom and use some other nasty tricks but he goes down quick enough, long as DDs bring holy waters they will be enough to take him down. Unfortunately I was hit by an instant KO move and missed out on my ROE quest for reward right at end, so guess he had the last laugh. Just to be clear I was one of the Plds for this run so I feel I can’t comment too greatly from a damage dealer or support perspective. The boss dropped a fairly decent DD neck with triple atk on it as well as a crafting material for synergy and 2 items used for Empy ilvl119 upgrading.

Slimes/Acuexs Ok for this zone you might need some luck, area is same as the fomor area but the run is very different. There are a number of Pillars in the middle of area and someone must click on one for mobs to spawn. The target for this seems to be to pick the right pillar 3 times to spawn both sub bosses and final boss. Problem is there are multiple pillars (think theres 7 or 8) and picking wrong gives you a full round (or multiple in some cases) worth of mobs. The mobs is this zone can be taken down very quickly with magic and their tp moves can hurt, but there are a lot of them and without luck you could be taking them out a lot.

As far as setups go we went with two mage parties and one melee one, you may want to just camp in middle of area but we decided to stick to one of the walls which helped more when the bosses popped. Most rounds were the same thing – Pld pulls all mobs and mages aoe nuked everything. One thing i will mention is that hate is very odd in this zone, soon as the pld pulls the adds will generally go for the person who makes the next action even if its reraise or whatever. However thankfully this is not the case on the sub bosses or final boss of the area.

So you know you correctly guessed the first pillar right when you spot a pink Acuex amongst the mobs. You also get a different message than the one you get if you picked the wrong one. The pinky boss didn’t seem too bad, does the same moves as most mobs its type but it just has a lot of health. One thing we tried and did well was take advantage of magic burst damage and skillchains, I think this boss was weak to ice and darkness but again not completely sure.

Once killed its a new set of pillars for you and same thing until you get second sub boss which is a Fistule type jelly. This boss was a little bit more of a pain due to tp moves having long range, knockback and gravity. It also makes a lot of duplicates of itself over time which we made sure to nuke as soon as possible, thankfully they have much less hp. It seems it loses a fair bit of health using the move to dupe itself and eventually it stops doing them completely. Having a aegis pld tank it seemed to work very well though, Nukers were not getting hate on NM at all. Boss dropped a Scythe I believe.

So once that’s dead it’s those damn pillars again until final boss called Rancibus – which is a weird sea monster looking thing you fight on one of the adoulin mission. Again boss didn’t seem too bad, don’t remember it killing anyone at all. Had some moves that poisoned but that was easily manageable and though it didn’t go down fast; with 10-15 mins we didn’t have too much problems. Again we focused on skillchaining and magic bursts this time light skillchain and thunder magic if I recall right. Final parse had a Sch winning and a Bst close behind. Boss also dropped a staff called called Mindmelter as well as empy/synergy stuff.

Probably not important because likely zone will be insanely random but combo of pillars for our run was 325.

Elementals

The zone is even more different than the last two, best way to describe it is a Outer Ra’Kaznar delve with elements. The party must run through the zone to reach and kill the sub bosses that will open up the areas to reach the next boss after being killed. Most of the Eles don’t aggro as you pass them by, but they do magic aggro and link it seems. The ones in the boss rooms might aggro when approached but was pretty hard to confirm on this run as we took two parties of mages again. Killing the elements appear to weaken the bosses to those elements but bear in mind that you can just pass any you don’t want to kill, you don’t have to kill everything to complete the zone.

Only a couple of people in our alliance had tried this zone and knew little about it so we just tried the same setup as the jelly zone with 2 mage parties and a melee one as a test. Also worth pointing out that the elements can be slept, we tried aoe nuking most of the elemental groups and just sleeping any pulls that were too big.

The first sub boss is a umbril, we didn’t have a lot of problems killing it really but it’s somewhat annoying. From a melee perspective its not too fun as you will be getting paralyzed a lot so you may want a geo to change a bubble to help out with status effects. The boss also gets a aoe doom move below 50% so melee will need holy waters ready. Boss dropped some Blm bodies.

When killed there are more elementals on route to the second sub boss which is a pixie. For us this was the thing that took us the most time in the entire zone. Samurai’s looked to be doing some good fudos to it as we again tried to use skillchains and magic bursts to take it down. However there is a lot of amnesia (conal tp move?) and knockbacks to deal with. Sch self Scing also seemed to work fairly well. The pixie seemed to gain resistance to magic at various times, perhaps it becomes weaker to different magic based on it’s tp moves but was hard to tell from one run. There is definitely something more to it.

The pixie took so long that we only had around ten minutes to spare and decided to just try our luck on final boss running past all elementals on the way. Of course boss room had a bunch of elements so we pulled boss away to the corridors to avoid unnecessary aggro. Seeing as we didn’t have a lot of time left we went full out on 1 hours with cors resetting them. The geo boosted bubbles seemed to help a lot as the mages started to do a ton of damage, my quick draw was even doing 7k+ ice shots at this point. It ended up going down in 2-3 minutes with no deaths in alliance, I didn’t notice any particularly bad tp moves from boss or behaviour mechanics seeing as how it was dead so fast. Boss dropped a really interesting Blu sword that I instantly wanted and failed to get but better luck next time.

After getting all three wins you’ll have empy 119 head, feet and hands available as each zone unlocks one type, also setting the ROE quest will get you a onetime reward upgrade item towards them (provided you alive when boss is killed). Returning to Leafallia with the three kis and checking the odyssean passage will prompt a cutscene where you lose the kis and this increases the level of your pops to 130. I also heard that new ROE objectives open up after completing the 3 but having died on the first win I can’t confirm what they are.

The Amorph chamber is best cleared with magic damage. I'd say use 3 BLMs at a minimum. Megaboss - Thunder/Earth Boil NM - Wind did best for me. Don't put melees on him (avoid feeding TP). Acuex NM - Ice did best for me.

The Elemental chamber can be done in two ways: 1) Go through and only kill the NMs using a melee party. Elementals are generally just magic aggro. The only aggressive things to sound/sight are hybrid elemental groups around the NMs, the NMs, and the boss. You can probably clear this chamber with a melee party + a little outside support (like a spare GEO or something). 2) Kill everything and then the boss using a mage-heavy party that could clear the Amorph chamber. Time-wise I found very little difference between these strats. #1 gives you fewer etched codices, but #2 requires more people.

Undead chamber: Melee party + Support. We did it this morning with a MNK/WAR and DNC/NIN parsing ~70% together, a SMN parsing another 18%, and a THF parsing ~12%. We had a paladin pulling, but hate is random after claiming a triplet of fomors. Bring a lot of healing. The Dullahan NM spawned with a Corse wave, so I fought the Dullahan while the Monk took care of the corses. The Corses can charm.

This event is not as difficult as it first sounded. The hard part looks like it will be just grinding out wins to ever see the Tier 4/5 bosses.

Copy and pasted from BG. Credit to Ejinn

Went to sleep last night after doing this all day instead of posting first without knowing for sure, but I think we have it nailed down how to pop Perfidien 100% of the time. Think of it like a hidden RoE objective in order to upgrade the color of your KI

Objectives to pop:

1) To get umbral hue, you have to kill 4-7 mobs with magic. Skillchain kills count, which is why we'd sometimes get umbral hue message in formor chamber. For this to count, the magic might have to be what the monster is weakest to. The monster also has to be claimed to count.

2) To get "an even darker shade of black" message, you need to kill 4-7 mobs with a magic burst'd spell. We did exclusively darkness SC with darkness based spells for MB killshot.

3) To get "indistinguishable from the dead of night!" message, you need to perform 4-6 or so double light(dark might count, but have not tested it) skillchains. Out of the 6-7 kills we did last night, it popped on the first double skillchain once, but all the rest took at least 5-6.

Notes:

•Once you meet objective 3, Perfidien will pop ontop of the person who entered, even if they are far away.

•The battle has a time limit. Perfidien will say something like "Why am I wasting my time with you" and he'll warp out. This happened to us when the person with KI was far away and we wasted time running back to them. Seems to be 7-8min time limit.

•When you pop Perfidien, you will lose your ashen KI, which means the same person can't spam ilevel130 over and over to farm this, but other people can still enter 130 for you.

•Once you beat Perfidien, you will gain an additional 15 minutes inside the zone, not 15min remaining as the message seemed to suggest.

•Perfidien will start out absorbing skillchain damage, then seemingly started doing 0 damage, then eventually started doing damage. Not sure what's triggering this, but a few times we swapped to Shoha only to kill without skillchains.

•Perfidien can level up multiple times and can be red/blue proc'd.

Perfidien: 5 Magic Kills (We use Water on Fire Elementals) 5 Magic Bursts 1 4 Step Skillchain

Plouton: 10 Magic Kills (We use whatever the elemental is weak to) 5x Double Magic Bursts (Try to be around 5k damage, but we did less at times- 2 People Magic Bursting the same skillchain) 1 6 Step Skillchain