Kannagi TrialsFollow

I've just finished the Gargantua trial (a nice JP let me leech the wins overnight), and I'm wondering if I should expect the VNM trials to be faster (per pop/kill) than the lottery NMs? 13 NMs down and 28 to go until Helm-spam; just want to know what to expect.

Thanks.

Awesome, thanks for the info.

Luckily for me, my (WHM + DNC + SAM) roommate is going after Masamune, so we both farm a Briareus and Carabosse set, then lot each others Helms/Gems. Should only take about ~16 runs to get enough Helms/Gems doing 2 of each per run.

Sobek is gonna be the painful part, I think. Hopefully the May update's addressing of the Guku issue will actually make a difference.

Briareus can be duo/trio'd pretty easily as long as you can stun Mercurial Strike. Helms drops are affected by TH only so many like to have a THF tank, but I have had great success doing NIN/DNC along with RDM and at times a BP and release SMN to speed things up a bit.

Build 5 flourish charges and pop him, hit him with all your enfeebs and start chipping away. Stand ready on the stun button.

I prefer to reserve TP to help heal myself, but each time I successfully stun his TP move, I will unload a WS.

Mercurial Strike usually isn't so bad, but if it lands for 1111 he will immediately 2-hour and that can be problematic as its massive damage spam makes things go bad fast. If he does get a 2-hour off the easy solution is to run like hell to stay out of range and kite for 30 seconds till it wears then get back in there. The best thing to do is to DNC Stun it and avoid it altogether, but you gotta be fast and ready. Most of the times I have low manned him, he might sneak a couple Mercurial Strikes in but none that trigger his 2-hour.

When I go without a THF I use C&D, Apoc and Atma of Dread (for TH) and my history is just under 75% of those give me the double helm drop. While not a DD oriented atma selection, I chose safety at the expense of speed as a couple extra minutes killing is a whole lot better than the time it takes to farm the pops, especially low-man. This should play well towards your taru concerns. With these each battle is not terribly long at about 8-10 minutes each.

When I go with a party or more, my atma selections are different, leaning back towards DD.

tl;dr Stunning Mercurial Strike makes this a fairly easy battle.

Good Luck.

Thanks for the advice guys, once I get back into having more playtime I'll give this a shot. I'd be going NIN/DNC for certain, so if I can get THF and WHM friends to tag along, I should be golden. How hard is collecting the KI?

Wouldn't worry so much about not having TH if it's a hassle to bring. From my overall experiences with and without THF, the drop rate on the 2nd empy item seems to be 50% all around, high-level TH or not.

I should note that my experience primarily applies to empy NMs in Visions/Scars. Stuff like plates from Heroes ironclads and souls from Heroes T3 VNMs might be different. I killed the Ironclad in Grauberg many times in an attempt for DNC body seals (all without TH), and the 2nd plate drop rate on him seems a lot less than 50%.

Edited, Apr 12th 2011 9:13pm by Fynlar

You weren't kidding about VNM trials being faster. I knocked two out in a night without really trying, just need the Sheep trial and I can unload my Helm stock to start farming more of them.

I'm sure I'm in for a rude awakening at Sobek(A.K.A. Gukumatz), but so far I've been surprised at how easy these trials have been.

Also, wanted to chime in on /WAR for solo farming Bri/Sobek KIs.

While /WAR does cover all our procs, I'd contend that (weird as it is to do so) /PLD is a better choice for most people, simply because it gives access to all the same procs* as /WAR, but adds Flash and Cures for added safety. /WAR will give a slightly faster killspeed on paper, but /PLD will let you be a lot more reckless because of your safety net (Flash alone can save your hide, not even mentioning Sentinel), and may be in fact faster in practice because of this.

The KI NMs shouldn't give you any trouble as it is, but if you are feeling trepidation from soloing /WAR, /PLD is a decent middle ground alternative, if you have it.

* And Sunburst as well, if you have Hope Torque (Hakke Hachimaki comes from Briareus himself, no excuses for not having it if you already have Torque)

Edit: This is not to say urdoinitwrong if you've had success with /WAR. By all means, more power to you. It's more to say that /DNC is no excuse not to proc, if you have access to /PLD37 or greater.

Edited, Apr 15th 2011 2:19pm by Aliekber

The simple answer would have been '/war alllows you to easily proc red'. Which was in the first line, the rest is just babble.

ITT: Sandmasterr doesn't think through the (valid) reasoning for using /WAR over /DNC, and then gets butthurt when someone (politely and informatively) calls him out on it.

The only point he seemed to have in the first place was, 'my butt hurts.' I have to give credit where it's due; I think he proved it beyond any and all doubt.

wow... just.. wow.

Unfortunately I didn't have a point to make becasue my question was answered. I sensed a tone in his reponce (directed at me which Im not going to pick apart) so I replied with humor. I guess certain ppl took it the wrong way. Did I say anything insulting other than babble? I don't think it is I who is butt hurt. Grow a pair guys, this is the Interent.



/sigh, so much hypocracy in that statement its untrue.

There's the issue. Your response wasn't really that funny.

Firstly, just wanted to appologise to Lyltiao for my initial responces, when I re-read the thread I couldn't find anything I should of taken the wrong way.

Secondly, the methods given for solo-ing these NM's is very good information. Until this week, I'd never fought the 3 lesser Gig's, and briareus I just stood there for win/atma just before scar's came out. I obviously read over the NM's on wiki first, but for my first atempt I went /DNC for all 4 NM's to get to know them. Your on the money too when you say its not needed, and it took me 7 NM kills to make a Briareus popset. The second and 3rd sets I made from 4 and 5 nm kills.

Briareus was many times easier than I expected, I've killed him 3 times now and have still only seen 1x 1111 Mercurial strike. On my 2nd and 3rd kills /THF I had to turn a couple of times to let my HP replenish from atma. Using DD gear with my evasion comming from /thf traits, Yonin, 1x Sekka+2, Ballerines my eva rate seemed capped, I couldn't really notice a difference when I put Kuryami up. I Used full Iga set with the accesories and 2/5 +2's. Atma's for all were Mounted Champion, RR, GH. 4/50 on helms lmao. Anyway, your posts have given me something to occupy myself with over the next couple of months so thank you ^

Well, I got overconfident earlier. I hada few drinks, raised the music volume, popped briareus, and forgot to run at first sign of Mercurial strike. It hit for 1111 then 1.3K ground strike and dead. Just like that :(

Live n learn I guess.

Well, I just finished the 80 trial. Some thoughts for those just starting out:

- NIN/PLD and NIN/WAR work decently, but Grandgousier is basically an enormous bastard who hates me, and whose family I will hunt down some day. With NIN/DRK you lose staff procs, but as long as you're careful to stun Roars, you can take all 3 NMs to town quickly solo, with procs. I don't have a Pitchfork or that would be an additional consideration, and a point against /DRK.

- Getting as many people to help as you can, even if they are just warm bodies to hold KIs and mostly AFK, is a huge speed boost. The days I was solo, I struggled to get 6 Helms in an evening, but the days I had 4 friends come out I'd knock out 12-16 a run easily, if not more.

- This thing is HUGE! Like, the size of a decently-big sword. Crazy.

I hear Resist Death atmas do help with it, but AFAIK Doom Screen isn't gonna do a thing for you, since... it's not doom that Sobek hits you with >_> Not to mention the fact that screen duration (2 minutes) isn't nearly long enough anyway.

Personally, given the nature of Gukumatz camp nowadays (read: a royal @#%^ing pain in the ass, at least on my server), I wouldn't want to risk any Sobek pop like that by trying to solo it unless you have a way of stopping Tyrant Tusk reliably.

Treasure Hunter affects the drop rate of Empyrean trial weapon items?

Edited, May 10th 2011 11:35am by xxPhyrexx

Another note (currently 13/50 Skins, with 4 KI sets waiting to be popped), I noticed that I was getting 1-shotted by Tyrant Tusk every time Sobek used it, and checked my equip for -Dark Resist. After taking off my PCC (-10 Dark), so I had 0 Dark resist, I only got 1-shotted one more time for the duration of the rest of the night. Not rock-solid statistical evidence, but...something to consider.

Still, I'm kind of upset that I wasn't able to finish off my Skins before the merge to Carbuncle. Pre-merge, I only had to compete against a NIN+WHM twoboxer, who was quite easy to outclaim. On Carbuncle, apparently the whole of Japan lives in Misareaux Coast, with settlements set up at Heqet and Gukumatz.

I would say I got death'd about 15% of the time without any resist death stuff up, so I'm not sure what "every time" means but in one of my fights I was death'd twice then in the next one I got death'd. Three in a row was my max for the Sobek stage. If you want to do some testing with sniper's rings and maybe a dark carol bard, I'd be interested to see what you find.

Excellent point.



Inconclusive evidence at best. Unless you have evidence that shows you got a lower drop rate without TH and a large enough sample size for both (with TH and without), then all you have is your opinion and belief.
I could just as easily proc blue, yellow, or red and get a 75% drop rate and say that proccing blue/yellow/red increases drop rate. Would you believe me just as much as you believe in your TH theory?

When I asked the question, I was hoping for some REAL evidence one way or the other. I'm not looking for an answer of "Oh I believe it because it's worked for me"

I had a paragraph I wrote in anger, I decided to go a different direction.

Anecdotal: based on personal observation, case study reports, or random investigations rather than systematic scientific evaluation: anecdotal evidence. (stolen from dictionary.com)

Refer to anecdotal.

I have no idea why you sniped at me trying to get the ball rolling on your question, especially when you stated nothing about wanting a huge case study. That's incredibly bad form. I expected a handful of people to just say that it matters and that would be good enough, as far as I know nobody's actually tracked a thousand or however many you would need to get around the variance and have a margin of error small enough.

Then your post was a waste of everyone's time. You're never going to find "real" evidence regarding drop rates and the effects of TH, especially on something as time consuming as farming for Bri Helms/Sobek Skins/etc.

Your statement is wrong. Evidence would be any information to prove or disprove the benefit of TH on Empyrean weapon drop items. What I meant by "real" was more evidence than just one person's testimony on the matter with eyeballed suppositions.
"I was getting about 75% or higher drop rate" is useless information unless it is a conclusion that is prefaced with data. It shows that he didn't collect any data so he just *FEELS* that he got that kind of drop rate, when in actuality, without REAL EVIDENCE he may very well have got a 50% drop rate and just not realized it.

Now, if you think that it's a waste of time to ASK if there is information to support TH benefiting the 2nd item's drop rate, then that's your opinion, and a terrible opinion at that. Asking if there is information to be found is rarely a waste of time for those interested.

As for the last part of your reply, the evidence does not apply to just ninja trials. It's very safe to assume that the drop rate is consistent for EVERY empyrean weapon trial which are constantly being farmed every day. I think it would be very possible that out of the thousands of empyrean weapons being farmed, perhaps a few people actually wrote down their drop rates with TH and perhaps a few others wrote down their drop rates without TH. If that information were to be accumulated together, we would be able to see the effects (if any) of treasure hunter on the non-100% empyrean weapon drop items.


Of course if this is true, we're looking at a completely different ball game, lol.


If you consider my reply a "snipe" then I will apologize for that, but I suggest you re-read it without the emotion and see if you are still offended. If you will notice, I only responded to one statement you made, and it was the statement where you gave "inconclusive evidence" to support your claim. If I were to snipe, I could have said something like "your response was as helpful as a torn condom" but I'm not interested in offending anyone for the sake of offending. If you are being overly-sensitive then there is nothing I can do, but again, my apologies if I seemed to carry a tone of any sort.
As I stated, I was "hoping" which means I didn't ask for the evidence, but, as is the case with MANY forum responses, a person may reply with a link to another forum post or a different website where data has been gathered to show the answer to their question.

As for my personal experience, the only data that I can remember off the top of my head is that I recently killed Chloris 6 times with TH8-10 on it each time. 3 times he dropped 1 bud. 3 times he dropped 2. This very small sample size leads me to believe that treasure hunter has no affect on that 2nd item's drop rate and that it is consistently 50%. Again, this sample is EXTREMELY small and pretty useless by itself.

Now if treasure hunter DOES benefit the drop rate, but that benefit is very small, then we will most likely never accumulate enough data to see if the benefit even exists (and if it was that small, it wouldn't even be worth it to wait for a thief or sub thief anyway). However, if the TH benefit increases the drop rate from 50% to 75%... it wouldn't take a very large sample size to see a 25% increase in drop rate.