Feb 2018 Ambuscade Vol 1

I mean geigei or whatever his name, is the same guy that said "lolsam" so I wouldn't take anything he says too seriously.

Actually ya get better through the help of friends with better gear, then you realize the job you love is situational (here's looking at you left at the wayside DD's) and most people want specific jobs. The truth is some jobs need viable modifications to make them relevant, and that you will need to level a support job. While thief is my main, I currently have brought up a Gjallarhorn Bard, am working on SMN/PUP, and have come to realize that for the casual gamer your really SOL unless you have the time to invest in multiple jobs. MONK is dead, BARD needs to be geared well to be relevant, otherwise a GEO beats it for most (not all) situations, SMN just AC and are now PET magic bombs when combined with a GEO, BP-WARD kicks *** with 6+min haste 2 , but do you see many SMN out there doing it, nope, because they NUKE NUKE NUKE. Aeonic runs, SMN BURN, that doom tree, SMN BURN. Oh you want to nerf BST because your a sniveling BLU, well SMN burn. You don't need to nerf any more jobs, just make some other jobs more relevent with better JA , primarily in the Defense Department , secondarily with Damage for MNK and PUP. I'd incorporate a once a week ambuscade (4x monthly) that allows the casual player to get some decent points without having to be balls to the walls geared (upper 20th percentile). I feel for the casual gamer because when i came back to the game I was freakin gimped, but thanks to tons of time farming Dynamis Currency to upgrade pieces, and well geared friends help, I am coming along. The casual gamer without these options comes into the game, realizes the game gear snobbery, and leaves. Not a very welcoming system for a game I enjoy. Next time you see a person who could use a run under their belt to pickup that +1 ambuscade set, invite them along, tell them to pop an Abdjhalis Seal and take em for a couple of runs with your rocking group, my friends did it for me and a buddy, and we appreciate the help of the Hardcore gamers.

/bows. Nicely Put.

wall of text; tl;dc

Probably incorrect anyway

Oh and some info for my run with Bard on Ambuscade:

Throwing Debuffs on Unicorn seem to get it to use its ERASE like ability more often though not all the time.

I removed the following buffs from Bozzetto Retributionist:
DEX bonus (From Absorb-DEX)
STR bonus (From Absorb-STR)
Haste
Magic Defense
Attack Boost
Avatar's Favor (I believe Stolen from our Avatars)
Endark II

I removed as many as 5 different buffs from him.

Carnage Elegy and Pining Nocturne stuck well and slowed him considerably.

Lightning and Light Threnody are rare to stick using maxed Gjallarhorn

Move 30+ out of range when he Uses his Miasma attack, didn't do so once (at around 20) and got one shot. If you pull hate on him as i did sometimes after our tanks deaths it best to use the kite around the pillars strategy til tank reestablishes hate.

In a nutshell: remember that you were, at one time, dependent upon help from others to get where you are, so pay it forward instead of being a jerk.

That's not incorrect; it's a decent rule of thumb.

Re: my gimp Nixxer PLD- guess I'll just have to tell everybody that I can no longer main tank because some random person on AH.com said so.

OK, yeah, he's not wrong. A little hostile....I don't do wall-o-text.

FFXI exists on multiple planes. Players experiences will be dramatically different.

...and player intelligence varies... wildly Never going to change.

This only /mildly/ relates to ambuscade.

Point attempting to be made is yeah, smn works great, fantastic, but lets not all just go smn. There are people that need to know how to do it without smn.

COR works great >:(

The majority of the jobs in the game are DD

Every month needs a viable strat for them.

(semantics, cor is a dd, don't do it.)

Gotta love the passive aggressive horn tooting.

Hehehe horn tooting, /busts out Gjallarhorn, puts you to sleep with a Lullaby, runs back to moogle changes to thief steals all your stuff and NPC's it.

trying to help the bleeding eye wall-of-text

he's a redacter for the DoD!!! I knew it!

I've seen it use Miasma about 3 seconds after the message on VD once, so the window probably isn't as generous as 10-secs. Could have been an anomaly, hard to say tho.

Can anyone point me to the ambuscade info? >.>

I mean the past two pages spell out the exact strategy, but the guy I quoted above here explains it pretty clearly. Afaina posted a pretty awesome strategy with random dealing corsairs and brd setup.

Honestly, this month is by far one of the easiest in a very very very long time. Any combination of dd/support/tank/mage will work. The key to remember is: kill ixion, kill dullahan, unless charging, then pay attention to its further behavior. Boil = run, Charge = keep swinging, Miasma = keep attacking until boil. Boil = run 20, spam t1 to force nether, then repeat. Can't imagine it's any simpler than that.

no one has mentioned that it grants a potent regain to players in an aura when in the boiling over mode.

This is obvious and probably not adding much to the topic, but mixed pet setups will work this month, though of course it's slower than other strategies. Did D with SMNx2 PUPx2 GEO COR, no AC or Overdrive. One PUP on dullahan, one on unicorn, kill unicorn with SMN, switch pets to dullahan (I swapped my auto to SS/SS at this point), kill it. Could use BSTs instead of SMN or 2nd PUP if you wanted, just need one automaton for tanking the Retributionist. Well-geared and mastered groups could probably do VD.

So! Relevant info;

The whole red light/green light thing is spot on.

Pretty simple to win if you follow the "don't hit it at the wrong time" method.

Charging > safe
Boiling > is pain sync > GTFO

I CANNOT figure out what makes it boil over though

My current theory is that it is TP based and increases in line with it's TP gained. Have to unlazy myself again to test out a bizarre tactic that should effectively neuter the boss if it actually works this way.

It's seemingly very random.

Charge > nothing
Charge > boil 3 seconds later

it's not directly caused by anything I can see in chat

it's got nothing to do with ws or sc as far as I can tell nor damage dealt

tp fed from spikes?

Im still convinced there is something w/ the unicorn, current strats pretty much make the unicorn a pointless mob in the entire fight and that doesn't seem like SE

Can the Dullahan even boil etc with the Pony still up?

It can, i had a dnc solo the pony in the corner w/ a mage debuffing it. We got boss to about 60% b4 we realized it wasn't making any changes in the fight so we switched and kill pony

There doesn't seem to be any specific reason to cause boil over.

I don't know if it's pure random or what.

Everything about charge/boil/miasma is seemingly random as ***

But breaking miasma is always 1 ws, then it boils over

Like it's kinda fun trying to figure the ***out but irritating as *** when you have no clue at all whats causing it

I have done light sc many times and it not break miasma, just got out of a fight where i did double Light sc (1 w/ sekkanoki, then followed up by a meditate making double light, kasha->shoha->fudo) and it was with in 10-12 seconds b4 the final one went off. didn't break miasma

VD though?

N/D it's breaking on 1 ws 100%

that was on Easy

We just did 5 N and 1 D it broke every single time with one ws

Bulwark doesn't start the charge up cycle

working theory; if you ws fast enough after charge up > no boil

Nothing specific causes charge, nothing specific causes miasma, breaking miasma (one ws...? chance...?) causes boil, no way to do anything about boil other than feed tp and for it to be low damage.

I don't know what the most common-place strategy is atm. But here is what we did last night:

Mythic Smn, Mythic Smn, JP master non-mythic Smn, Idris Geo/Whm, Epeo Run, Cor.

Ambuscade V1 VD
- - - - - -

Smns use Ramuh Volt Strike for horse -> once horse is dead swap to Ifrit and use Flaming Crush along with Astral Conduit on Boss.

Geo does Geo-Fraility and Indi-Malaise on main boss. (I didn't catch what he did for horse, but you cannot use debuffing Geo spells on it)
-Geo also healed Run, though Run kept alive mostly with Regen and Vivacious Pulse; turms mittens + Battuta might also help, though I didn't apply them during these fights.

Cor did Drachen/Beast's roll for Horse -> Drachen/Puppet's roll for Boss.

Run did Lux and buffs to maintain enmity -> swapped to Ignis for when horse died and applied Rayke/Gambit accordingly to when Smns did Astral Conduit.
-Run subbed Pld for Sentinel.

Main boss was dead before it could do it's KO attacks. 5-8 min clears, including buffing times.