Stellar Fulcrum: Elemental Fetters

Synopsis:
Under 50%, the NM pops PW-like elemental fetters. The reason why these fetters need to be destroyed is because if too many fetters pop up, the NM will clone himself and proceed to wipe the party. The fetters are elemental and must be destroyed with the element that they are weak to. This being said, unlike PW fetters, the type of element you cast on the fetters matter.

Question:
I'm having trouble distinguishing the difference between the Ice Fetters and the Water Fetters because the colors are so similar. Anyone have a workaround to distinguish the two?

It was my understanding that the Ice Fetters are lighter blue (whiter) in color and the Water Fetters are darker blue, but perhaps individual monitors and graphics can vary considerably.



In this video, it appears that they get hit with 2 Ice Fetters at different points of their run. I may be mistaken, though.

Maybe you could determine which dat each one is and just turn each element into an elemental or avatar? I'm not sure if that would work, though i'll say we don't normally have a problem because depending on difficulty, 3 or 4 can be up before the fetters start to spawn into clones i think, and we just have a SMN using diabolos do most of the dmg to them, then a low tier nuke to finish them, since a resisted low tier nuke wastes almost no time anyway. This is even more efficient if the SMN has nirvana and some nuking gear. Can just start with a low tier nuke to be safe in any case.

For reference, we farm difficult on NIN THF(or MNK) BRD SMN WHM SCH, and very rarely do both melee get hit by hate reset, if it happens the SCH can plant hate, the THF can collab the WHM if it happens again. Our usual clear time on difficult is 16 minutes, and this has been good enough for farming haubs.

I'm pretty sure each element has its own ID, you could just rename them by # and learn the #s then adjust it to be elements if you really needed to. Never seen 2 of the same element up.

Stellar Fulcrum's name dat is ROM2\13\118.DAT, it's 0 terminated hex, and 32 bytes per name. If that's not enough information, open it in xvi-32 and resize the programs window until it's 1 name per line. Add numbers past each entry, DO NOT press delete or insert characters or you'll break the format.

You can edit it while ingame, just zone once after saving.

I'm going to look at your setup. I've been wanting to farm the Haubs for a while now, but there's rarely any PUG's. This gives me an idea how to set things up.

Can you PM me your strategy? (So we don't furthur derail this thread)

Thanks!

rng/nin x3 in a triangle
brd
smn
rdm


braindead easy on difficult, can win vd without cheat buffs but it's not easy

i fulltime terras staff on both, on vd also fulltime dring and twilight torque

don't let scherzo/ea drop and nothing will kill you, smn and rdm kill fetters

I don't mind discussing this also in the thread. (It is kinda relevant). There seems to be a large degree variation on party setups that all work for this fight which is really neat because the fight is so dynamic.

My group doesn't depend on SMN while many groups do. We run with PLD/NIN PLD/NIN RNG WHM BRD and we are able to win on D. I'm actually interested on how the NIN stays alive against Light Blade Spam when the NM constantly does AOE dispels for Fiv's strategy and the same thing with Comeatmebro's 3 RNG/NIN strat. It's not exactly easy to AOE EA when 3 RNGs are spread apart.

daurdabla scherzo and gather for a second for armor

there's room in the bc to have rngs in an equilateral triangle with 18' sides, resulting in any spell only hitting 1 rng, so dispel is almost a nonissue

light blade is also reduced based on distance to mob, so once you get hate cap whenever it gets tp(from someone's shot) it'll also be turning to the rng that shot most recently from 10'+ and throwing a weak light blade

the only way you can die on D is to get dispelgaed > meleed > light blade point blank, but hate should be moving enough that it doesn't matter and you can hold D fine with 2 rngs just reposition a bit

great wheel on VD can approach one shot territory if you don't fulltime a decent bit of pdt though.. would not really recommend VD in general, i have the luxury of 3 perfect galka rngs and i still can't win with any reliability

At 9:12, what element is that? Is it Ice or Water? You simply can't tell on a VE fight because the RDM clearly casted Stone on it. On anything higher than D, this simply doesn't work. You'd have to cast Fire if it's Ice or Thunder if it's Water.

Where do you position your mages using the equilateral triangle? My shell now has a large amount of rangers thanks to DM2 and new Delve, so this is a strategy I'd like to try.

I was under the impression that Light Blade is magical damage. Does Terra Staff decrease this as well? (Or mainly used to counter regular physical hits + Great Wheel?)

It's either physical or hybrid of both ? Only died to it on pld when I wasn't facing it

I'll just post this here since more then one person seem curious.

NIN THF(or MNK) SMN BRD WHM SCH

The two DD just blink tank it and trade hate, the THF is more likely to get hit with hate reset then the NIN because great wheel is 1~3 shadows, NIN has 5. The SMN and BRD keep scherzo and earthen armor on and its important that they do because of light blade, they need to watch out for dispelga and reapply. The SCH can embrava around 50% to speed things up, the SCH should be BLM sub and stun when able, he can help with fetters if the SMN isn't a decked out SMN with a nuke set. Once it gets lower HP, it casts faster and cant be stunned, but the SCH can still stun after spells to allow the DD enough time to apply shadows before TP moves. The SMN should be SCH sub, so they have high enough elemental skill to damage fetters under 50%. The SMN can PD above 50% because they likely wont have time or MP later, so anytime above 50% is alright. Under 50% the SMN uses diabolos to do the majority of the hp of fetters with night terror, then he or the SCH finishes them off with a low tier nuke. If the SMN needs to reapply EA then the SCH should handle fetters in the mean time. Other then that its a melee burn w/ shadows and lots of erases, its not easy but its do-able. Our last run got us double haubs from difficult, the run before that we used MNK+NIN and finished in roughly the same amount of time, so DD are def interchangeable, 2 NIN might be best, but THF also provides TH.

-Scherzo and Earthen Armor is more efficient then migawari, and they all 3 don't stack so don't use miga unless its an emergency or something.
-For the majority of the fight, the i use accuracy tp set on thf, and the nin uses his acc tp set, the goal is to not get hit by great wheel since light blade is handled by EA+Scherzo, normally this is no problem, though he does occassionally get a great wheel off after a spell before shadows are up if Ni was already down, but again this is more likely to hit the THF, who can regain a good portion of that hate back with collab on the whm and SA+Mercy(or Rudra).

Edit: Light blade is physical, sentinel makes it do 0, but i've seen it do pretty severe damage through ochain so i wouldn't rely on PDT alone.

This is interesting because your NIN would be attacking with EA + Scherzo in a low PDT set. I have information that, without EA/Scherzo, Light Blade at point blank would deal about 4k damage. With Scherzo and in an Acc Set, it would deal 2k. I was not expecting light blade to be affected by -PDT so when I did NIN, I was PDT-light (heavy acc).

I had abandoned NIN at that point because even with Scherzo, Light Blade still did 1.9-2k. If what you say is true, adding -40%-50% PDT would make NIN highly survivable with only scherzo. I'm interested if this is the case.

Sounds plausible, though we just use both scherzo and armor since SMN seems excellent for handling fetters, which allows SCH to then stun, and then we can also use THF for the second DD which means TH, but its very likely that may work and you could easily tweak the setup then, but if your going to use more PDT in place of having earthen armor, you may have to worry about time since accuracy is still important here, and theres only 2 DDs. As i said earlier i think, we clear in about 16 minutes, and i think anyone trying this can be extra cautious and try with NIN x2 first, that way if either of them dies, an arise and a mijin gakure away from being ready to start again.

Also i forgot to mention, impact doesn't need elemental seal to last full duration either, so the SCH can apply/reapply this at will(mp pending).

Edit: We haven't done that many runs because we capped out on haubs fast and had no reason to really go back, but we could certainly do this even faster if we spammed it half as much as we did any of the arks.

It's difficult to tell. The top layer of the Fetter looks like ice (white-ish lighter color), but the bottom layer that flairs out is clearly a darker color.

Yeah I can see that the RDM didn't know so he just went with Stone to get rid of it, but from what I'm reading with the above strategies, SMN damage constitutes a significant portion of Fetter damage. It would only take a second beyond that for a SCH to tier 1 fire or thunder to see which is the correct element.

I've been trying to picture Bro's 3 RNG triangle strategy. From what I can gather, Kam's AOE's must either be conal or target central (?), so being that they are spread out in a triangle, it reduces the chances of everyone else getting hit with it?

I definitely see the value in having a SCH though. In addition to having stuns available (where applicable), it's vitally important to have Animus Augeo and Minuo for hate management. I kind of feel these spells are really underrated and not used as often as they should be, particularly in battles where hate reset moves are prominent.

A hybrid ws would calculate damage physically and then add that same amount in magical damage as well wouldn't it?

Yeah, this is exactly why I wanted to see if anyone else had a solution to this.=/


Kam's AOE is usually caused by Enfeeeble-ga's and Great Wheel. There are no conal attacks: just general AOE.

I thought what he meant was how some "magical WS" are usually annulled by things like Fanatics Drink and thus also PDT. I could be wrong though!

Are most hybrid attacks multi hit though with the physical checking before the magical? I would assume it would be more then 1 hit if it were hybrid cause i don't think i've ever seen them make any specific 1 hit attack thats a true hybrid. That said, if it were multi hit, EA+Scherzo shouldn't help as much as it does, so i want to lean towards physical still!

In this case, as far as I know, hybrid ws will calculate damage using physical traits, then however much that would do is added in magical damage as well. So if you use sentinel and it reduces the damage to 0, then the magical damage added would be 0 as well. Sentinel doesn't have a fanatics property or anything that will annul ws. Unlike fanatics, additional effects will still land during sentinel.

I don't know if the magical part is in a separate hit or anything but I if I were going to guess, I'd say no because if it was then I would think that missing the first hit of something like tachi: Jinpu would result in a 0 damage ws. I'll fully admit that I'm pulling all this from memory and could be wrong or perhaps just misinformed.

I suppose if i presumed the magical bit was a whole nother hit then i would likely be impossible for jinpu to completely miss, which im pretty sure it can, where as a pure magic ws i don't think can miss, so i think your likely correct in that regard. I do however still tend to beleive this is just physical damage, because im stubborn, but in any case it hasn't mattered with both scherzo and EA so i can't say im dying to find out either.

Neat. Back on task!


I used xvi-32 and opened and it shows me two windows with Names(on the right, which I had resized the program window to fit) and a series of numbers on the left. I don't understand what it means to Add numbers past each entry.

Do you mean to change
Esoteric Fetter to Esoteric Fetter1?

Wouldn't that be adding a number which would break the format?

----
Instead of delving into the names, a solution would be changing the fetters to their corresponding elementals. (Similar to Conflux .DAT swaps because conflux lag destroys my FPS). Elementals are much less laggy than Fetters so FPS boost would be nice as well. Anyone know the .DAT names for Elementals and Fetters?

Honestly, it doesn't really matter. If you treat it like a physical, then you are already reducing the damage pretty well since any reduction to the physical side would have a mirrored effect on the magical and any magical reduction would only have an effect on the magical side. I just like to know how stuff works. ^^