A little help with level 50 theorycrafting pleaseFollow

Planing on duoing with a friend for our G1 items, prefer to do this 'on level' if we can than sitting by while a helpful 99 demolishes the mobs for us. :)

Hardest by far is the Lich, and we're going to try THF + RDM - THF for TH2 due to the horrendous drop rate and RDM because from past experience and a trial run as DNC + WMH the Lich's Ice Spikes caused huge problems with paralysis (my WHM spent most of his time and MP trying to keep the Dancer un-patalyzed). While we were able to kill 2 it was a near thing with my MP, so I figure RDM for Dispel.

With that background, here's my question: what weapon should my RDM use?

I have both Sword and Club capped. My current sword is a Crimson Blade (DMG: 28, Delay: 231) and I have a Tactical Magician's Wand (DMG: 15, Delay: 210). With the sword I have 180 ATK and the club 169. My question is given the Lich's -50% stabbing damage and his +50% blunt damage, with an Enfired weapon which of these two will do more damage? I just don't know enough about the math behind damage calculation to know how to decide.

Can someone who understands this help me out? Obviously I can 'suck it and see' but fighting a T ot higher BLM is not the kind of situation I feel happy using as an experiment. :)

I do intend to use the RDM primarily as CC, dispel and silence being the most important, however I figure the THF's -50% damage even using Corsair's (can't get my hands of the +1s) is going to make the fights very long without the RDM's extra damage. I know from way back that meleeing RDMs are laughed at in normal groups but this is somewhat different it seems to me.

You're not there yet, but if you can find out a way to do the 55 cap with only 2 55's and no higher level help I would love to see that video.

Ah I do remember seeing that in the patch notes a couple months ago. I could even see a way to do it without deaths If you can blink tank it, both ppl click the ??? then the whm tele vahzl's.

Limit break one isn't too hard. I solo'd it on Dancer/Ninja a couple years back. Took like 20 minutes to poke a lich down with my terrible daggers and terrible dancer DPS at -50% damage. Not recommended, but certainly doable.

The biggest thing you have to watch for is Paralyze. Ice Spikes from liches and Spore from funguars provide a nasty paralyze effect which will make you lose your cure casts, waltzes, utsusemi casts, and so on.

As for which weapon you should use, you may be better off just casting a few nukes and taking a knee to get MP back, as opposed to meleeing a damage-resistant mob with nasty TP moves. Keep him silenced and enfeebled. It's gonna be slow as hell. If you're doing it for the challenge you shouldn't mind.

If you want it done fast and easy just ask for help.

If you have BST sub you can charm some of the lower level pets to really help out on the Exorays - even if your BST is level 1 and freshly unlocked, some basic CHR gear and a Light staff will let you charm easy-prey enemies with ease. With a RDM friend there with you, you can sleep them to spam recharm until you have them, and once you have them, an Easy Prey will stay charmed for a very long time (it's been a while, but I think it's 30 mins for EP?). Basically, a crawler or scorpion from upstairs will most likely demolish your THF's dmg, so you can kill one with the scorpion tanking while the RDM friend helps keep debuffs off of you, or you can change it up and just go RDM/bst, THF/bst and send both pets on an exoray - again, it's been a while, but most likely they'd kill it without you even engaging, then you can just tell your pets to "stay" to rest them up, and farm up another one. Even underleveled, bst sub can make that portion fairly easy since exorays can be kind of a pain with some spike-damage frog kicks or dark spores.

BST sub is also a great way to approach the exposures, since you can send an easy-prey pet at a bomb and like 50% of the time they will explode very early for a free kill without putting yourself in danger. It's just hard to get to the bombs sometimes since garage can be a pain if you don't have all the flower-power-past-portals.

For the lich I would just go as THF/NIN and fight it as normal while the RDM plays healer / dispeller. It should be easy. If you are really worried about nukes of any kind, you can go THF/WHM just for the magic defense bonus - but the only real trick to beating a lich is to keep them far enough away from other lich so when you go low HP, they don't all long-distance swarm you from blood aggro. I don't know what your H2H skill is, but don't forget that if you have THF, you can also use H2H weapons on them for blunt damage bonus if you really feel you need it (personally I wouldn't bother if it's not skilled up, daggers are fine even though it will be a bit slower).

Hope this helps!

I applaud your efforts and congratulate you on the victory.
I just helped a group kill the COP Minotaur last night synced to 40 for the same reason, to do something that was a challenge... and it was fun.
Sure, there are times all this new "easy mode" works, but some of us old skulers still appreciate the battles of this game for what they were... a challenge.

We just finished getting the other items so off to see Maat. :)

Have to say SE have made the exorays somewhat harder then I remember them, not in that the mobs are harder but they're now in the tunnel leading down to the donut room and they're no longer in their room in the center. The problem now is that some of them are nestled among flies that con T or higher so making pulling the funguar away impossible. Lower down the tunnel there aren't flies but the funguars tend to pack together in twos or threes and it can try one's patience to wait for one to move away. The bombs were as easy as ever though.

Indeed, yes, I was wrong with the damage modifiers I quoted, somehow I thought the bonus to blunt was 50% like the penalty to 'pointy'. Having leveled THF and DNC my THF friend only had daggers leveled so we thought we'd try to do this without taking the time to level H2H (which of course is a lot easier now of course with the easing of the requirements to get weapon skillups): I thank Fuji for that idea though.

We went to the northern Batallia entrance to the Necropolis and pulled the liches from the side rooms just down the first set of stairs. Not once did I get sound aggro after Sneak dropped when I used Silence to pull them back up the stairs so links weren't an issue: we weren't killing fast enough to ever have to wait for the two of them to respawn.

I used Banish a couple of times, having also leveled WHM to 50 and capped al magic in Besieged, and it did do some useful damage (sadly I didn't make a note and now I forget the numbers).

Thanks for the ideas and encouragement, while I maybe didn't use all the advice I learned a thing or two which I'm sure will come useful later.

/bow


Aaahhhh, the Minotaur, Doom, how I love thee. :D

Edited, Apr 11th 2012 3:43pm by Kragorn

I thought the main point of casting banish was to temporarily remove the damage resistance to slashing/piercing, or is that only for ghost and blunt?

/reminisce about good ol' KRT bone parties suddenly.

I never knew the 'math' behind it when we did KRT parties a long time ago, just that it helped significantly with blunt vs ghosts.

According to Wiki Banish also has these effects:

Banish I :
• Lowers special defense (damage resistance) of Skeletons and Ghosts by 50% for 15 seconds.
• Spell damage vs undead is multiplied by 1.5 (150% damage)

Banish II :
• Lowers special defense (damage resistance) of Skeletons and Ghosts by 70% for 30 seconds.
• Spell damage vs undead is multiplied by 1.5 (150% damage)

Banish III :
• Lowers special defense (damage resistance) of Skeletons and Ghosts by 97% for 45 seconds.
• Spell damage vs undead is multiplied by 1.5 (150% damage)

Huh? The flies don't aggro, they only link. I don't know why you would think they did.

It depends on which flies they're around. The Dancing Jewels don't aggro, but the Dragonflies do. I haven't been into CN in forever, so I don't know the layout after they moved all the mobs around.