ZM8 - Return to Delkfutt's Tower  

Fought this battle 3 times yesterday.

The first time we had

73RDM
72NIN
71RNG
64WAR
70MNK

We were shouting for a WHM or SMN for a LONG time, so Bummage (our 72 Nin) decides to try it as we were. I said we should find at least one more mage, but he didn't want to wait. Needless to say, we all died. Camel Nuts cast slowga on everyone, and then Bummage starts crying out for haste to be re-cast on him, lol. If he had done any type of research on this mob, he would know that haste has no effect on this particular mob's slowga. I cast haste anyway, just to see for myself, and it did in fact have no effect on our RNG. Then, Camel Nuts hits the Bummage for 1179 damage because he didn't have shadows up...instant death. And what was his reaction? "Nice job Ozment" said extremely sarcastically. First he tries to lay blame on me because I didn't heal him, but the other party members pointed out he was full when he was hit for 1179. Then he claims that I didn't re-cast haste on him, so the other party members showed where that would have been useless since it doesn't remove this mob's slowga. So rather than exhibit any sort of maturity, he continues being an ***.

So we boot the NIN, and shout for a PLD & WHM. Took a few hours, lol, but we did it a second time with:

73RDM
75PLD
71RNG
64WAR
70MNK
72WHM

And with this set-up, we kicked ***! Broke the record on Ragnarok at 5' 38" or something like that. ^^

Tried to do it a 3rd time after that to help a friend, but we got wiped, lol. The person claiming to be coming as a SMN/WHM showed up as a BLM. Needless to say, that was a waste of time & xp.

Edited, Fri Sep 16 21:23:15 2005

broke the record on this on asura tonight:

Cleartime: 4 minutes, 15 seconds.

This was in large part due to my unbelievable Meikyo Shisui which I poppped on the Zilart Duke mid-fight. Needless to say, his focus went right on the Samurai and he plain forgot about the Paladin. In breaking the record for this, I needed some surgery after the fight was over lol

Well, me dont do this mission, but me brother yes and i see him,
have a thief/ninja ninja/warrior ranger/ninja,(me brother) white mage/black mage, monk/warrior and black mage/white mage, perfect strategy but me brother get hate 1 second and do light blade, = death, the party try 5 times - 8 times, the first with 2 hours and failed, this is really hard, all the time hate reset and light blade, if just a moment the hate have other who no are the tank, death x.x, and do double-triple attack all the time, WOW!, if one die, all lose, when me brother win, he die in the begin later then use 2hr again, all die, the thief was alone, and the thief defeat it!!!! good job! was like the hell, honestly, good luck who try this hard mission,

Darksaga (mithra THF28/WAR now)
stingin sophie 2/6,
stray mary 0/0, lol i just try one time and no pop.

Just did this with the following pt:
75Mnk/nin (galka)
66bst/whm (me elvaan)
64 pld /war (elvaan)
64rdm/blm (mithra)
70drk/sam (elvaan)
70smh/whm (taru)

The silence killed 4 of the pt.... TAKE ECHO DROPS!!!! lol the mnk was tank with two hour. He died first then the pld died after saving the mages from dying. The dark tanked after the pld died with 3rd eye. After the drk died all heck broke loose! My pet (HQ tiger) took a few hits, rdm got aggro, then the smn. I didn't take direct aggro so I had almost 3/4 HP near the end when the rdm died. I got off a claw cyclone from my tiger right before he ate that strong light blade move and i got hit and scored a hit for 100+tp and finished him off bst style. I <3 Rampage! me n the smn lived.... Awsome battle! A real nail biter. Just wished we had echo drops like i normally do.

Some friends from my LS and I did this a few weeks ago and the way we finally won was awesome, I just kept forgetting to post about it. ^^

Our setup was:
75 taru BLM/RDM
75 mithra THF/NIN
72 taru PLD/WAR
67 elvaan DRG/WAR
67 elvaan WHM/SMN (me)

Yeah, we did it with five people, 'cuz we couldn't find a sixth and the BLM only had about an hour. But my LS is crazy and we always do suicidal stuff together, so we decided to try it with just the 5 of us. We were doing pretty well till the PLD ate a particularily strong Lightblade and went down. Not too disasterous, as the THF was able to take over tanking (he's tanked Fenrir twice, so he knew what he was doing.) Then something happened, maybe dispell-ga ate his shadows followed immediately by a Lightblade, I'm not quite sure -- but next thing I know, the THF went down.

Now it's just us two mages and the DRG. The PLD was shouting for us to zone out, but just then the BLM used Manafont, so I stayed and duked it out. BLM managed to get two spells off before Lightblade took him down. I took over tanking. X.x Cured the DRG to full, popped off a Banish III, went down to Lightblade with the rest.

So now it's just the DRG and Kam'lanaut, and Kam'lanaut had just a sliver of life left when I went down. I wasn't sure if the DRG was gonna make it, though, 'cuz his HP were going down fast. But then he super jumped -- came back down, turned around so he couldn't see Kam'lanaut to stop doing damage, and his wyvern started tanking. Once his wyvern had hate, he turned back around to start attacking, and his wyvern took the last Lightblade (yes, Kam'lanaut seemed to SPAM it for us, the PLD took 2 or 3 before he finally went down earlier. ; ;) But then the DRG's TP were up, so he busted out with Skewer, and next thing I know, we've won!

Very awesome. We still praise the DRG to this day about his tactics. He was sad he had to sacrifice his wyvern, though. ^^

I kill this guy today with friends and complete zm 8-12 by the time ^^
It was really easy, the setp was :
Pld75
nin71(me)
whm74
blm75
blm75
rdm65

Be sure to always dispel his en- spell and watch out when he reset hate (if blm nuke at this moment or whm heal it would be bad :P)

My ZM pt beat this last night on the 4th try, and that last fight was very easy.

The last run was the first in which we decided that i should kite the nm, and it worked great. The rdm will not even have to use dispel with this strategy.

Party Setup:
69 Pld/war (me)
72 Whm/blm
62 Whm/blm
70 Rdm/blm
73 Drk/thf
69 Thf/nin

Gravity stuck just about everytime and i took one hit every 30-40 seconds maybe. The biggest problem we had with damage before the kiting strategy was the light blade then directly into silencega. With kiting yo dont even have to worry about light blade.

The reason i say this is tha light blade is basically a ranged attack. He would actually fire this from across the room at me while gravitied. What i havent seen anyone post before, is that light blade is very weak when done from far away.

THE FURTHER AWAY FROM THE NM YOU ARE WHEN HE DOES LIGHT BLADE, THE LESS DAMAGE IT DOES.

While i was trying to just straight tank him, light blade did an average of about 600-800 dmn. While kiting and taking these froms across the room the peak damage was around 250 and it actually missed about 30% of the time.

We had one death late in the fight when cover was not up after a hate reset. The drk drew hate after a big ws and decided to melee the nm instead of kiting. Make sure your pt knows that whoever gets hate needs to kite. My pt didnt realize that and we had a few close calls. You can easily get ground on the nm and cast spells or use items if need be after running across the room.

So, this was our strategy and it worked very well for us. We took about 10 minutes to kill the nm and had no problems except for the one death. The rdm was even to melee the nm when we wanted and helped to sc with the thf after the drk wet down. If you'd like to try this, it was easy and if it doesnt work for your group you can easily change to striaght up tanking mid fight.

Meh. This mission blows dong. Shouted in jeuno for 5 hours and got 3/6. Then the only 2 people I got pussed out. Then waited a few hours, and shouted for 40 minutes, not one tell. **** this ****.

74WAR/NIN
71RNG/NIN
69DRK/WAR
64RDM/BLM (me)
68WHM/BLM
74BLM/WHM

Pretty simple if you plan correctly. Everyone brought echo drops (including the DRK) so the mages could focus on more important duties. We even brought hi-potions and ethers, although none were used. After the initial buff, cast a useless AOE buff such as Barfira so that would get dispelled instead of your more important ones. After he does his dispelga, repeat as necessary. Have a back up tank (sounds silly but it was our DRK) so when hate resets they would provoke right after.

We encountered two problems. Right after the hate reset, our BLM landed a Fire III and the backup tank could not get it off him. But the main tank managed to get hate on her. Another problem was the infamous Light Blade. The only solution I recommend for this is a blink tank. Light Blade hit once out of the four times it was used, absorbed by shadows other times. I think Defender was on and hit for 700. I wouldn't know what to do with a situation with a paladin, perhaps a kiting strategy mentioned before.

Anyway this was my party basically for ZM4-12. I got sky at 64, lucky me ^^;

Beat him, with probably one of the most underlevelled parties possible =P

63 Mnk/War
63 Blm/Whm
63 Rdm/Blm
66 Sam/Rng
67 Rdm/Whm
73 Pld/War

It really is all about endurance. The Pld was only taking 500-600 at most from Light Blade. With 2 Rdms they were able to keep him well healed and keep up with Dispel through the fight.

It started getting messy towards the end.. hate was a bit all over the place through the 2 hours, though the Paladin did a good job keeping it most of the time. The hate erase thing caused problems though, and a Rdm ended up eating a Light Blade and dying. The 2nd Rdm was low on MP, and the tank got down to 100 HP... just as we killed it =)

Pretty close near the end. But basically, the key to this is a good tank, lots of healing, and Dispel.

Anecdote

Last night I had a party that made two attempts at this. The first one we failed, but learned. The second was an absolute breeze. There are a couple things I didn't see mentioned in any of the other posts, although maybe I missed it.

First is that this guy can do as much additional damage from his en-xxx effects as he does with normal melee attacks. Our primary tank was a 72PLD, and was being hit for around 60 on non-crit melee attacks, plus an additional 65 from the enspelled weapon. Because this really is an endurance fight, I (blm) chose to support the party with healing more than nuking. As part of this, I decided to use the appropriate bar-xxx spells to try to reduce the additional effect damage.

Review of the logs showed the following: The NM hit us with 32 melee attacks, not including weapon skills. Each and every melee attack where the appropriate bar-element spell was not in place had an additional damage effect. This happened 15 times. For all of the remaining 17 hits, the correct bar-element buff was on the party, and not a single additional damage effect occured. This saved us approximately 1100 damage. I spent a lot of time running back and forth trying to stay out of AoE range.... had I been more on top of things, I probably could have prevented at least another 500 of the 970 additional damage we took.

Another thing to note: I was advised by a knowlegable member of the party that following a particular en-xxx effect, nuking with that same element would cure the NM. I didn't test this, but have no reason to doubt that it is true.

We finished the fight with ease. Nobody came anywhere near death. I had well over 300mp remaining at the end. The only nuke I used was a Fire IV for the killshot at the end.


Mage Strategy

As others have stated, this is an endurance battle. Party hate reset keeps things interesting. Mages should try to conserve MP while preventing as much damage as possible. This is my general advice assuming WHM+RDM+BLM; the situation will of course vary from party to party. The same general strategy should work if the particular duties are split up differently.

WHM: Do things more or less as you normally would. Regen is your friend. If you use a large cure spell after a hate reset, you may get yourself killed, so avoid doing so if possible. Be prepared to recast critical buffs such as Protectra if/when they are dispelled.

RDM: Bring /whm sub if you have it. Support the WHM with healing so that you can both avoid large cures. You know what refresh is for. Avoid nuking. Do enfeebles and party buffs as required.

BLM: Bring /whm sub. If you don't have it, then obviously a large part of this strategy is not going to work as I suggest. Your primary duty should be to cast the appropriate bar-element spell, as this prevents a large percentage of damage. Use Bio II, Drown, and Rasp to further reduce damage. Support the RDM and WHM with curing, especially if the WHM needs to stop and use an ether. It is not necessary to nuke, and doing so is risky. If you land a tier IV nuke following a hate reset, you will probably die.

General:
It seems that the dispellga effect takes down one buff at a time. I didn't get a chance to see if there was a particular order that they are removed, but if they are, take that into considertion. Keep as many extra buffs active as possible to protect things such as prot, shell, stoneskin, and reraise.

Edit: Spelling

Edited, Mon Jul 11 15:08:15 2005

just a thought but, maybe 6, 60+ SMN's could all Summon carbie and keep carbie on him, ( must have Carbie mitts ) or maybe 1 BRD 5 SMN's with yag drinks pluto's staff and V cloak could just get free fenrir and use him, lol.

We did this with a very balanced set up...
BLM 75, WHM 70, RDM 70 and we had a PLD 75 tanking :-) Maperlac, our THF was 70 and Sham came in for us as well DRK- pwned. I spammed dispel most of the fight and enfeebs- then took up healz towards the end- no deaths- just pwn.
Edited a video of the battle and its posted here:

http://www.ffxiphotos.com/

Just finished this mission after ZM6 last night. Went up as NIN69(me), WHM67, MNK66, RDM66, BLM66-68(?), and THF72. We all came with Echo Drops and the mages had some ethers on them.

We beat it the first time. Ran in, I voked first, the THF did SATA Hide onto me. Not sure if Hide worked, but I kept hate a majority of the fight.

Recovering after Dispelga and Silenga wasn't too tough until he shot off that powerful Slowga. Couldn't be erased, couldn't be hasted over apparently.

Light Blade was absorbed by a shadow the first time he used it, missed (when my shadows were down) the second time. However, the third and last time he used it, at about 10% health left, hit me for 895, followed by a critical, so I was down and out.

I just watched as the MNK shot off Hundred Fists while Kam'lanaut pummeled two of our mages into submission. Just as he's about to kill the RDM, the MNK has enough TP for one deciding WS.

Our MNK beats Kam'lanaut. RDM lives with one HP, and we all go onto sky.

I can't really say that it was a tough fight. Until the very end things were going smoothly. I'd definaltely suggest bringing a few Echo Drops and Potions for the fight. AS long as you're prepared and have a few trusty members in your party, Kam'lanaut isn't "too bad".

Thanks for reading.