Endgame SoloingFollow

The problem is that there isn't some generic "Learn to solo End Game on BLM." guide, every fight is different and is approached differently. You'll likely have to ask on a case-by-case basis, which is something you can do a bit of on your own.

When I need info on a solo, first I look up the mob on FFXIclopedia.org. Since UFOs are what you specifically asked about this time, I linked to the article. When you go to the article, you'll notice a tab on the top right of the page labeled Discussion. That's where you will pick up most of the good solo/low man information you are looking for.

So after you've read the article, and the discussion, it's helpful to search the mob on Allah's search, as well as go back a page or two in the appropriate job forum to see if the same thing has been discussed recently.

At that point when you post there are some residents that will have the missing information you are looking for.

Very true since most things that need special strategy generally exclude them from the list of soloable things.

I suppose a generic "This is how you DoT kite." strategy would cover a lot of things.

Can has lamprey strat? Does one need movement+?

Oy, long one, this will be ><



I'll have to disagree with some of these. There are several issues that will provide slight changes on a soloing strategy, in a way that a "solo event" is hardly ever similar to another. You can, however, compare isolated fights, but hardly ever the mob alone is your only issue. I'll try to clarify:

* Immunity or high resistance to nukes and / or debuffs, or simply to specific elements, Wind, Ice and Darkness being the 3 to be worried about

* Natural or sporadic Movement increment, which can change drastically the course of the fight, due to how often you'll need to Sleep / Bind - both having an unpleasent CD

* Use of Magic or Ranged attacks. While Magic user monsters aren't a real issue, an unfortunate resistance on Silence can provoke an unpleasent link situation. Same for Ranged Attacks, not to mention that this last can null the beneficts of Gravity

* Summoners and Beastmasters monsters, which not only will stress the soloer with the necessity of watching the pets, but also will consume more time and mana to deal with.

* Presence of aggroing / linking mobs on the kiting path

* Regening mobs can be a pain depending on the DMG/min/Regen rate

I'm sure there are many other strategy changing issues that I couldn't remember of, but the fact is, BLMxMonster fight is not the only issue you need to worry about. The surrounding is far more important in many situations. In the end, what I mean is that you'll need to decide what you want to fight, study him and his surroundings, prepare a basic spell rotation, figure out if day or weather will play a major influence on the mob's behavior or on your DMG, define your basic kiting rout, and go have fun, wait for the encounter of all or most of the specified conditions, pull and go have fun.

If you know the mobs abilities you can formulate emergency strategies to deal with any "table-turner" TP move or situation.








Now, about the Yovras specifically:
First, understand that soloing a Yovra isn't particularly a trivial task. Be sure that you aquire some good skills and knowledge about BLM and your friend's gear before you venture over that path.

1st thing to remember: those mofos are highly resistant to Thunder spells, so don't bother casting them. Have in mind you be doing some major kiting and eventually resting during his regen, be sure to use only mana efficient spells (so no AMs, or -gas). I'd suggest going through Blizzard and Fire 3 and 4 while Gravity's on.

2nd, while duoing I didn't feel the necessity, I was never able to solo those without several uses of MP drinks and Ethers. HP pots were also quite handful, but not at all necessary.

So to the strategy. /RDM is absolutely needed for this. Buff up, pass under one, cast Grav and take himitto land to lower his Regen rate and to avoid Phuabo incidents. I don't remember exactly but I think you may loose aggro while running him to land. If so, you could cast some Stuns on the way, or keep him somewhat close to you.

My suggestion when you get to land is to sleep him right away. He should grow resistant to it in time, but if you manage well enough the BLM, you'll be casting only 2 or 3 sleeps during the fight. If you're unsure of your skills, wait for Grav to wear off, recast, take distance and wake it up with a Blizz 4, follow with Blizz 3, Bind, take distance, Fire 4 and if time's needed, Fire 3. Bind, Grav again if needed, and repeat the process until you're almost out of mana. When that happens, toss and ES Sleep and rest while needed. Note that Sleep lands easily, even without ES, but you'll be wanting to use that CD early so that maybe you can use it again towards the end of fight.

Have in mind that he'll regen a LOT while you rest, just don't be scared by it. Just make sure you're doing more DMG between 2 sleeps then he can regen. This process should take you about 20min, I think. Don't cheap out on the medicine if you're determined to solo that shizz. Buy them, and use them. The drinks in special.

While you have high MP, you also have the option of debuffing him hard with Elemental Debuffs and even Bio. Be, however, very careful when mesuring you MP wasting rate.



Edited, Apr 27th 2010 10:10am by sbrubles

Edited, Apr 27th 2010 10:26am by sbrubles

Works fine for me...

I see your point, tho I think it may be a bit harder for a BLM do deal with some of those situations then with whatever job you usually do - I'm assuming RDM(?)...

Just a quick example using the answer you gave to one of my comments:

If you've soloed Aern organs (just one example) you'll understand this quickly. Depending on how they are positioned, you may need to choose not to pull with Gravity. Sometimes, if you know a caster poped (or 50% chance) and another has the potential of crossing your path as you run him to safety, you may choose to pull with Silence.

Of course, you're right that on a generic case, changing the order of the spells does not imply on a major change in strategy. How harder then the others some of them can be shows how much that strategy is not suited for that mob. Fact is, at some points you may need to decide to do a totally different pull/disabling instead of dodging the possible links.


That depends on whether or not you need to sleep the NM as well. Sometimes you may choose to keep it the pet asleep as MP source, sometimes you may choose to kill it asap because it's immune to Sleep (dark elementals for example) or simply because if it wakes up it'll give you too much trouble, etc..




I could go on narrowing hundreds of exceptions to your answers to me, but I said it myself, they'd be exceptions. As I 1st said, it's up to the BLM to figure out when he needs a change in his plans.

Bur if your refering to major strategy changes as only stuff like Kite/Nuke x Bio kill, or that other one that you linked and that I didn't read yet (it's not lack of care, but mainly because I don't play anymore) then I don't need to argue with it anymore, cuz we're just classifying "changes" in a different scale (I'm being a bit more picky about changes while you're being a bit more practical)

Edited, Apr 27th 2010 3:46pm by sbrubles

Edited, Apr 27th 2010 4:04pm by sbrubles

Thanks for the replies gents! Been a great help!

Just some small advice for yovra's in particular.

Although very possible to solo as blm, it is much more efficient and will likely cause you less deaths if you get a mnk and brd buddy, or a rdm buddy to trio/duo with. Kills are drastically faster and safer and there are many uses for the organ so you will have little trouble finding ppl to participate with.

2c

Or someone who inherited a blm char and has never played a mage job?

How is that different from being one of the worst BLMs ever?

Edited, May 14th 2010 9:16pm by svlyons

In the paper this is very true. Maybe for some DD jobs it's still true in practice. BLM solo is a little be more complicated then that because it'd take you a lot of solo practice to master your reaction to adversities. I'm sure other solo jobs and job combos have the same issue.

I'm also pretty sure that for a tank it's also pretty complicated.





I suspect that DRK72 had an Octave Club while the 75s didn't have K.Club (or B.Zaghnal in the case of extremely evasive HNMs), in which case having knowledge of leveling would be unnecessary because it's a completely different play style, one that you'd only be able to have when you reach that level, and not before.



Someone who inherited a BLM char should 2nd of all learn his escape tools. From a Yovra it's rather simple, as you can disable it pretty easily giving you enough time to take enough distance to run to the nearest area exit, assuming you're absolutely against using Manafont / Warp, or just Warp if it's at least bound or asleep.

I say 2nd of all because 1st of all he'd need to gather at least a minimum experience of soloing. That's to be able to count on luck tho. If anyone ever gave you the impression that soloing a Yovra as BLM was easy task is because he has done it enough times to be cold and calculating about the Yovra's strength, speed and abilities.

It is not easy, you have around 20min of full concentration, 20min during which you cannot screw up, but that makes it a fun task to accomplish.



Edit: I'm not gonna say I've never died to a Yovra, it'd be a terrible lie. I've died quite a few times, even after I got enough experience with it. Fact is there are only 2 ways to die to a Yovra:
1- Terrible lack of knowledge of escape tools and lack of practice (yes, combined)
2- Overconfidence

Edited, May 14th 2010 9:52pm by sbrubles

Edited, May 14th 2010 9:57pm by sbrubles

Right on man, the more seriously I take a solo, the more likely I am to fail. The time I was stupid enough to agro Faust just passing through was one of my cleanest solos.

Like i said, thinking is slow. You can't afford to be slow, you need to react as soon as something happens. If you take the time to think about what to do after something happens, it might be too late by the time you do something. Thinking isn't always good. Subconscious instinct is always faster, and just as accurate. If you see a car about to hit you, do you think about which direction would be better to jump to avoid it, or would you just jump away?

Also, i lol'd at mentioning ixmnk. I never concentrate while soloing. Never. And i've soloed everything from Charybdis, to Suzaku.

Assuming there is no other cars around that you could jump in to >.>

Both rdm and blm. Blm doesn't really do anything significantly different than rdm. The biggest differences are blm can't survive forever if they can't kite, and they kill faster, unless you're fighting something that takes a while, and can't rest/aspir, and of course that blm can only manage to do a relatively small amount of solos compared to rdm.

Ixmnk is a joke. All you have to do is run, and the only time you should ever get hit, is while nuking (unless you time it right (on rdm), then you won't even get hit then). Charby on the other hand has a manta nearby, so you have to avoid that. The easiest way to do so, is by kiting it back and forth through the tunnel. You can actually avoid it when going into the room, if you bind it at the right spot, but when you go out, you can't possibly avoid it, and will get hit repeatedly. Plus there is a water elemental that can spawn there. The other way to completely avoid aggro, is by binding it right near the npc sahagin, and taking a single step back. This allows you to completely avoid aggro, but prevents you from kiting if you get a short bind. Fortunately charby attacks really slow, so it's not terribly hard to tank for 30 seconds if you have to.

I've only done faith, a simple dot->zone fight, the ixaerns, all obviously very easy, fort, again a fairly simple kite fight, and prudence, yet another simple kite fight.

I meant assume for this hypothetical situation. You already knew there was no other cars on either side.

You know nothing about rdm solo. It's far easier to keep your mp up when you know you won't be able to recover it fast enough to spam nukes than it is when you can recover mp somewhat quickly, and can sometimes afford to nuke 500 mp away in 30 seconds. Running out of mp can be just as devastating for rdm as it can be for blm.　Although rdm recovers mp faster, they also use it much faster tahn blm. There aren't too many things blm can solo where they may take a thousand damage, and need to cure it asap before they take even more damage. Blm generally relies on bind (8 mp), gravity (21), and sleep (19/29) to survive, with stoneskin and blink often being used more for an extra layer of protection than because they can't possibly survive without them. Rdm often relies on stoneskin, phalanx, cures, slow2, paralyze, haste, etc, etc to survive, which can use quite a bit of mp depending on what you're fighting.


Temp is not possible to solo afaik. Prudence is pretty simple really. Have a thf depop one, and then simple dot/kite the other. I believe the spot i use to kite is at K10?

I pretty much solo'd my first UFO last night before sea - 1st time I took BLM out of the bad (except for K Club BCNM - easy). I loved it.

RDM Chucked a Grav on because im 74 and SMN gave Diab a go for my MP. Just to speed things up. Was simple.

I have done enough end game and watched BLMs in action. One thing I would always suggest in BLM endgame things is watch and learn. Watching BLMs in stuff like Dyna and Solo on sky back in the day (ele's) and solo'n a lot through levels, duo even mana burns all gives EXP to you and not just your Char.

Its pretty simple to do a UFO, Avoid the sharks, Grav, Nuke T4 spells (normal IV spells) and chuck a Sleep. Keep stoneskin/blink on all times just incase. This means if casting a spell and it gets to you it will hit you and your spell will not be interrupted.

Run away and Rest mp if needed, Grav worn? No, chuck a nuke on and sleep again. Grav worn? need mp? No sharks about?

Pull a UFO to the shore and get on land to play safe is a good tip. But yes, UFO didnt resist my sleep once and that was 74, I am guessing grav wont be resisted either and when im 75 should be a lot easier. I plan on meritting BLM hard out and capping Enfeeb, Elemental which will help out a lot. All i can say is Practise Practise Practise on easier mobs then give UFO a go.