Escha Setups And Strategies

How would Perfect Dodge hurt a full Ranger setup? Ranged attacks have always hit mobs through Perfect Dodge. If your Rangers are having an accuracy issues, they need to increase r.acc gear and adjust buffs accordingly.

The tiger gets to insane levels of evasion if he roars enough and his level ups are not reset. It does not have to do with accuracy. That is why a RNG setup is not ideal for Vidala. You want either a SCH making wind chains for other mages to burst or you want DDs capable of light with mages to burst wind. It is not a fight that can be done without mage support.

Untrue. Not that it's the norm but I've done it as PLD + THF + BST and as GEO + BST + someone AFK in the corner.

I will say that skillchain + MB is definitely preferable, or just a full mage setup, but the only trick to killing Vidala is killspeed. You never need to proc him, you never need to SC him, you never need to silence him (though it helps), you just need to make him not be alive anymore before he roars too much. However you choose to do that is fine, provided it works.

The problem RNG, and really all DD (mage and melee alike), have in Escha is 100% due to it being higher level content than people are used to. The evasion some of these NMs have is such that it makes AA MR Very Difficult look like a fight that you could eat meat on. Most DD do NOT currently have the gear to effectively fight these NMs without GEO/COR/BRD buffs at all times.

Rule of thumb for ACC before any debuffs (distract/frazzle/torpor/feint/etc)
T1: 1050 (Vidala / Gulltop 1100+)
T2: 1050~1150
T3: 1400+ (this is not a joke)

tl;dr: level GEO or tell someone you trust to level GEO if you want to do Escha. Torpor and Frailty or Malaise and Languor are your friends.

My group has cleared every NM in Escha as BSTx3 GEOx2 COR (except rabbit as BSTx2 PLD GEOx2 COR). We farm T3 in batches of 6~10 pops per kill since update as PLD WHM BSTx2 COR GEO. More than one way to skin a cat, obviously. I think PLD SCH BLM GEO setup is a lot more foolproof and requires less specific gearing. Your mileage may vary.

Edit Re: TH
Either accessory or armor is 100% drop from all T1. With sufficient TH and luck, double drops are possible. It's worth your while to bring one if you can.

T2 have 100% drop rate on either a weapon or accessory, same as T1.

T3 have 100% drop rate on 1x Eschalixir +2, anything beyond that is TH based. Pulse armor/weapons are (not a joke) VW drop rate with TH or without. There is only 1 confirmed Pulse body across all servers, most farm groups have seen 0~2 weapons total. My group is 1/200+ weapon-dropping T3s for weapon, and our only drop (lance) was without a THF.

THF drastically increases chance or Vulcanite Ore / double drop on +2 though.

Yeah, when I bring THF mules (happens sometimes) I will pop Feint occasionally, it is very nice, but the potency does seem to drop off very quickly.

Ideally you want to build strategies around not using bolster and stuff, if you can, because if you don't then it makes farming harder. Every T3 in there will die before SP wear to Dia 2 + non-idris bolster frailty + run wild + unleash from 2x BST, but it's not really efficient.

With how shitty the drop rates are on the stuff people really want, I think it's best to think in terms of what can be easily replicated over and over and over without any hiccups.

Drop rates are bad? I haven't noticed. Not on t1's anyway. I've only seen 1 fight not drop anything but escha's. The gear that drops is def random though. Th only allows the possibility of 2 equip drops, even with th it is uncommon for a double drop.

For Vidala, usually just fealty at start, so break gets resisted.

I did not expect a melee setup to do that well against Vidala, my mistake.

I will absolutely echo the benefit of a GEO. I don't see my group having done the NMs we have in Escha without that GEO support. I highly and extremely recommend a GEO or COR support (preferably both, particularly for pet setups) for any T3. They will make your lives astronomically easier.

The drop rate only come into play for T3. Each HELM T3 has an upgraded version of the Voidwatch Pulse body armor as possible drop, and each non-HELM T3 has an upgraded pulse weapon as possible drop. Both weapon and armor are 1% drop rate or less, with TH. Some of the body pieces are absolutely best in slot, as are some of the weapons if you don't have RME (H2H maybe better than RME?).

http://www.ffxiah.com/item/20523/chastisers
http://www.ffxiah.com/item/20938/annealed-lance
http://www.ffxiah.com/item/20847/router
http://www.ffxiah.com/item/26962/enforcers-harness
http://www.ffxiah.com/item/26960/annoint-kalasiris
http://www.ffxiah.com/item/26959/kubira-meikogai
http://www.ffxiah.com/item/26961/makora-meikogai

That's what I mean when I discuss ***drop rates. If all you're after is ores and +2s then by all means, do whatever.

Anyone can confirm if vudala level up only on roar because a linkshell mate just told me that it would level up after ppl use offensive jas and weapons skill, I m thinking about use skill chains and magic burst on this nm but I'm worried about ws increasing level on this nm

I've never seen Vidala level up due to anything but roar, and have done at least 20 kills on him. That body was being very elusive.

HELM T3? What are these? BGWiki only shows HELM T1 and T2, and it shows those bodies as being dropped by HELM T1. Is there something not on the wiki yet?

Just a matter of labeling things. HELM only has 2 Tiers like you noted. However you could also label all 135 content NM as T3 strength.

Looks like RNG setup isn't too bad for Pazuzu. We're still ironing out the kinks but one RNG with torpor/frailty/precision/fury got Pazuzu to 6% in 15 min. I'm pretty sure if the RNG had not been dual boxing a GEO (and had started shooting closer to 15 min instead of 14 min - we had some repositioning issues) that we would have killed it no problem.

Since this was a test we tried PLD, GEOx2, RNG, trust heals x2. I would imagine that two RNG could support at least a party of 10 killing it - the few light SC from JR to JR did decent (and if you added COR buffs perhaps more). I've seen people on the server shouting for trueflight for this but we found that jishnu's was the way to go (either ws did around 8k but without a magical ws no requirement for hybrid buffs). There were no acc issues in a full acc set (1186 racc before food or torpor/precision).

I also imagine that the RNG strat would work well on pixies.

Does Pixie need 2 PLDs or 1 will work?

So far we've cleared everything as GEO GEO SCH PLD RDM mule and THF mule. Pazuzu was tough even with bolstered idris - clear time around 14mins. Would this set up work on Pixie as well? This and the rabbit are our last ones to be cleared.

We tried pixies with 1 PLD holding everything. It was a bit rough (I think the tp moves get stronger once one is dead) but I think it would be doable with practice (and the right corner). As far as rabbit goes I think your current setup is fine (just have everyone /nin). We also found Pazuzu to be tough with the magic route - we cleared for 9 ppl at the full 15 min mark and both idrises had to bolster.

I've never done pixies with more than 1 PLD. PLD/BLU seems to work well. Depends on gear I guess?

We tried pixies with the melee route but our melee had complaints of constant dispels. The melee also ate a ton of damage and were constantly being blown around the area. As inefficient as mages are on pixies, melee were by far worse (and we had a mythic war and sam).

Tried the RNG strat with the main group tonight. RNG SMN GEOx2 PLD RDM took down Pazuzu in 5:30. Had a second RNG come out who was about 80 acc away from where he needed to be. Took down the pixies with 2 min to spare and did another Pazuzu in 5 min. For those two mobs at least rangers do pretty well. As a sidenote we did a bit of prebuffing. Brought a SCH for Firestorm II, and a COR for chaos sam. We also built up to 3k TP before the start of each fight. Other buffs were torpor/frailty/fury/precision and ramuh's favor.

edit: I'm told to mention that we used 1 hours on those pixies. One RNG overkilled for the 2nd pixie and then bolster x2 for the 3rd pixie and the other RNG overkilled that.

Okay, has this happened to anyone? I was with a group killing tier 2 NMs all night, we had killed the last oboron and were going to disband afterwards. We killed the oboron, and after it died, Pazuzu spawned right after it died. We weren't prepared for it, but we managed to get it down past 50% when meteors wrecked our ***and wiped us. I NEVER heard of that happening. A rare spawn off a forced pop NM.

It's new since the last patch. Lucky.

We've only gotten one spawn and it was rabbit after a Fleetstalker...we were in no mood.

On the fairy do you guys outright kill one fair then work on the others? We used rangers, but staggered the damage and worked them all down then at 25% used Overkill to quickly kill the white one that does all the healing (I believe it was the "A" one) then quickly switched to the dark based one next. It takes a little longer since you have to keep doing damage and some of it gets healed, but they don't seem to go into a super buffed/DT mode and went down much easier, than if we outright killed the healer, then went after the others.

Actually it was 4 mages but 3 players (for the rabbit). The setup was gessho, apururu, geo/nin x2, blm/nin, sch/nin. I think Niv may have geared his geo buffs towards helping gessho live and my mule gave us nuking buffs.

We kill the pixies one at a time. Last night we killed all 3 without bolster or overkill at the 14:58 mark - but Fiv had to intervene for hate at some point. There were 8 of us in the group last night. I think Fiv finds it super annoying to tank the way we do it though - so perhaps we should try taking them all down to 25% first.

Wrathare's attack delay speeds up at around 25% and it becomes kinda annoying to deal with. Gravity helped when hate reset starts to get bad but it made geo bubbles kinda useless...
What's your way around that?