The New Ambuscade Isnt Easy ......

As far as OAT I'm talking about my double attack rate. Just about any weapon I throw on feels like a joytoy.

I stated just about anything I use has oat during the tp phase and weaponskills. I didn't say I was using an oat weapon.

Using the term OAT around here is always going to imply use of something that Occasionally Attacks Twice. It's not interchangeable with DA, and people aren't going to read it that way.

This has been foretold.

Judgement Day has come

I should of worded that better, but I see what you are talking about.

Biggest issue with this Ambuscade is the delay between fights. I'm just having bad luck with afks and stuff.

Right after I did 48k Stardiver to the bird. It didn't summon the add till 20%.

Hi.

Ive been hearing this ambuscade needs the 4 types of damages, and the advise is war. But my only job that can hit mobs over 119 is sam so wondering if he can do well as in theory he can do all 4 types of damage (fudo, judgment, koki/jimpu and namas).

And mobs can be sleeped?

Thanks in advance.

4 Types of damage helps alot. The main NM is weak to Piercing but gets a high DT when the adds pop. Colibri weak to Slashing, Cocktrice weak to Blunt and Apkallus weak to magic damage.

I was unable to sleep the Adds with Dream Flower or Sheep song on my BLU with pretty good M.Acc gear so they could resist sleep. But its generally better to kill the adds as they pop, unless you have the gear/set up from Saevels post where you can zerg the main NM so quickly it hardly pops adds.

Anybody has info to share about the Goblins?
I'm really not used to spam the 300 points fight. Did it only during the Quadav/Demons month and it was horrible.

They're a pain. There's things they'll do to punish and kill you for both splitting them up (Hear No Evil) and keeping them together (Divided We Fall). Divided We Fall is 1500 damage from each of the Goblins being kept together thus killing anyone with less than 3000 HP. This move isn't always seen however. Hear No Evil is 6000 damage divided by the number of people in range. Neither are mitigated by EA and/or Scherzo. All of them are immune to Lullaby (Incanter might not be since he's the only Goblin that doesn't possess an aura)

Splitting them up at least 15' yalms away gets rid of their aura and weakens them a bit, but as mentioned, will usually result in people dying to Hear No Evil. Don will occasionally spawn a Bomber who is untargettable and will perform the "Hear No Evil" ability mentioned above pretty much always targeted on the WHM from our experience. Killing the Don prevents the Bomber from spawning the rest of the fight. Basically if you can both kill the Don and then separate the two aura Goblins before anyone dies it's easy from there on, but the fight is pretty rough before then. We've only gotten maybe 4 wins in maybe 15 attempts (a few being test runs) and just ended up resorting to the Birds.

There's probably things that trigger the 2 bad TP moves, but we didn't see anything obvious. Posted our strategy for the fight on the previous page.

That's an MS stardiver?

If gobs are immune to sleep, what about other debuffs? I heard quadav (never did them) were suceptible to petrify, yagudos to sleep. If gobs follow this trend, maybe they are suceptible to terror (spectral floe) or stuns?

All their TP moves are instant. Hear No Evil takes a while, but the gob that uses it is untargetable so you can't stop that either. To answer your question, though, one of our BLUs did report Sudden Lunge landing on the Don without Focus or Languor. May be recommended for repeated use, though.

I was thinking about the new summoner update that reduced the bp timer iirc. Probably trying to go with shocksquall/chaotic strike.

Yes, normally Stardiver does 20~30K (highest non-MS was 29K) before it use's impenetrable barrier and pops an add. We open the fight with Tomahawk (5/5 + 119 Boots) which reduces the DT such that I can hit it for 7~9K SD's. After we dumped the PUG MNK and get our Mythic DRG in we changed Chaos out for Fighters roll and KG started the fight with Angon. Our goal is to get it to around 50% before it pops any adds, which we can usually do. Once you kill the NM' you need to kill any remaining adds, which is where that 32K Judgment came from. The main bird was dead and I switched to Mace + Shield to finish off the Cockatrice and still had MS up. Normally my Judgments do about 20~23K.

Something of note, it's summoning mechanics are weird. We've resorted to absolutely nobody engaging until we're all 100% ready because once you do some action it wont' be long before it does barrier. So right after COR rolls finish we brave heart it and immediately start our rotation / SD spam. Also it likes to put up Dragonfoe mambo at lower HP and is resistant to dispel, our GEO resorts to spamming Dispel on him.

Why do you people need everything to be easy? *** my life, go back to XIV

I don't think everyone needs it to be easy, but consider that even with the free one use seal for triple gains, you still have to do this thing 45 times to get the +1 body.

The issue stems from the time it takes, not the difficulty. I could take a competent tank, myself on geo acting as healer, and 4 random sparks-geared people and beat VD no problem, so I wouldn't say it's difficult, so much as it is time consuming.

To do these very quickly you'll have to spend time:
1) Assembling an appropriate party, if fortunate, this could take moments, but usually this takes 20~50 minutes to get up and off the ground.

2) Time collecting the KI which means
2.a) You'll have to get everyone to the same home point with the correct type of mobs without competition or you'll face longer waits, and kill 10 things while everyone is together. There's also the odd "crap I missed one", "mine is bugged out", and "SoB I set the Daily but didn't set the 10 kill one"

I've found this usually takes 4-6 minutes after warping out of ambuscade if everything goes well, longer if it doesn't go well. In almost every case, when we finished faster, we waited for warp rings to finish cooling down because we'd have to move a significant distance away from home points to get kills.

3) You'll have to wait at the book. If all goes well, assuming there's more than one battleground available, you'll usually tic down a book entry # every minute ~ two minutes, and usually there's 2-10 people in front of you (our average seemed to be 4 in front of us), so there's another 4-8 minute wait.

4) You have to enter the BG and buff, this is another 1-3 minutes depending on how annoying things like rolls decide to be, people falling asleep at the book-wait needing to be woken up, DC's etc (all of these things actually happen, and will continue to happen)

5) You need to fight, and actually win. Average groups will probably do around 5-7 minutes (this is what my first runs were like, before I knew any mechanics). Good groups will learn the mechanics of exploiting the damage type weaknesses on the adds to weaken the boss, and lower fight times down to about 2 minutes. Groups with overpowered billion gil wars and voice chat and familiarity with one another can apparently lower this portion down to 15~45 seconds.

Add all that ***up together.

Do it while dealing with random AFK's, RL stuff, replacing members, re-explaining stuff to new members, etc, and you end up with something like:

For Super Good, everything goes perfect Groups:
Close to 12-15 minutes per run because after waiting on ring (10 min mark) you still have to wait in line for the book (and two quick entries in a row has proven uncommon) x 45 runs =~ Close to 10 hours of non-stop ultra-powered grinding. That's a shitload to have to repeat every single month.

For the Average groups:
Closer to 20~25 minutes per run x 45 =~ something like 18 hours of non-stop 'average' grinding.

For slow groups that take 10 mins to kill... *** forget about it.

Add to that all of the party assembly time and you are looking at another 2-10 hours depending on how many nights this takes you.

I get that not everyone needs the HQ gear, but 45 runs is too damned much as it is, let alone 45 runs that suck up 10 real life hours per month more than I want it to.

Ambuscade is a chore, and most of us want that chore over as soon as possible.

I'm not an XIV fan or anything, I hate the game if I am perfectly honest. But I'm also an XIV vet and some of the extreme fights in XIV are beyond anything ever possible in XI. There are no fights in XI where 1 micro mistake by 1 member results in a full wipe. In XIV there are plenty of scenarios in new and old content where being 10 dps off requirements, or 1/10th a second late in dodging an attack will result in full wipe.

XIV isn't easy because of battle mechanics, its easy because you can spam everything repeatedly without consequence until you've perfected it.

Reisenjima T4's would like to have a word with you

XIV is easy because you never have to make a split second decision, the correct answer is always right in front of you and if you can follow a preset pattern you can do whatever you're trying to do without any higher thought

XI has more room for error and more room for recovery, but if you take someone playing 14 style and just repeating 3 macros with minimal-no gear swaps that room for error/recovery starts to vanish pretty quickly

fortunately, most of those players have long since quit for 14

And how many people clear T4s, with XI's limited population, vs how many people cleared Alexander Extreme when it was released, with XIV's millions of subscribers?

first alexander savage clear took 34 days, which is the longest of any ffxiv content(most took under 24 hours)

first delve 6/6 took over 2 months

first warder of courage took over 3 months

some reisenjima t4s lasted almost 4 months

master trial lasted 2 months until that front page ss, which had no details and there are no swords scanned on xiah so might still be uncleared

I realized I don't hate the game and the content... I just really hate zoning.

Good dodge, didn't answer my question.

your question was designed to support your argument, the reality is you can look at things more than one way

xi's playerbase has 13 years of experience with their content, 13 years of addon design, 13 years of gameplay strategies to work with

xiv's playerbase is mostly teenagers who are impressed by animated boobs

never mind that there's a strong incentive to do reisenjima t4 and relatively little incentive to do alexander extreme

What's this seal? Not done ambuscade since first month.

Item they introduced a couple updates ago, available for free from total hallmark rewards. One use, but will give triple gains for hallmarks and gallantry upon completing an ambuscade (without dying and losing the buff) while the buff is active. Buff is consumed when the ambuscade run ends so you cannot use it for multiple rounds.

http://www.ffxiah.com/item/6500/abdhaljs-seal

You can also get one from a "monthly" (should be daily imo) RoE quest by completing an intense ambuscade. It's a good idea to try the intense ambuscade solo or duo with trust on very-easy to get the bonus seal and experience the content at least once.

... And since you only did it the first month, you should know there are 3 forms of reward exchange. Hallmarks, Total Hallmarks (not consumed, treated as "achievement" bonuses) and Gallantry (consumed, requires party to actually get points, solo it gives diddly squat). Gallantry can be used to purchase previous month's gear, but it doesn't come at a reasonable rate unless you are in a full party spamming Intense Ambuscade on Normal or Difficult (Very Difficult Intense is generally too time consuming to be worthwhile).

Thanks for the catch-up. Not the magical less ambuscades item I hoped for, but every little helps I guess!

Although I'm also not a FFXIV fan, I'm not sure if the amount of time to clear the hardest content can be used to measure the difficulty though. IMO one of the reason why some newer recent FFXI content takes long is because it takes time to gear up people, and you get limited retry to experiment different setup and strategy.

For example irc some groups leveled RNG and spent weeks to gear up for delve when it was just out. To do escha your group needs to level and gear up very specific jobs, and farm super revit for some jobs. So if you used to be melee only, collecting all that mage gears for blm could take quite a bit of time.

Additionally a lot of escha NM pops take time to get so you can't really try it 20 times a day, instead you probably get 4 try a night until everyone is tired and you need to farm more pops.

If I wasn't at work, I'd be joining Saevel's "quick fast runs" shouts, but all I can do is watch from my pc screen :(

Ambuscade just got even more grind happy this past update. You really think we wanna be fiddling with PUGs trying to get a win on this shitty content? nihhgga plz, trying to be done this nonsense asap. I usually finish my 14500 points in 2 days, but I'll have to do a bit more cuz of the total incentives.

You've pretty much summed up why I hate it. They give us all these quality of life things like traveling between home points that cut so much time spent running back and forth which is fantastic... and then they take 5 steps back and make everything about Ambuscade so time consuming.

I've been waiting for the BLM/RDM/BLU/SCH/GEO set to arrive since May and judging how lacking previous months armor looked for whm/brd/smn, I'd doubt it'll have 30~40+ attack and accuracy on it and have some lackluster magic attack crap on it.

Plus, you cannot send the item level salvage style armor you receive to players on the same account, so the desire to partake in this event is dire at best :/