Retribution WSNM {Help me out!}Follow

I just 4-manned this last night with 73RDM/WHM (me), 72PLD, 75DRG/WHM, and 71MNK. The PLD popped it with Sneak up in order to avoid getting aggro, stepped back and Provoked it, and ran back to us. Sneak-pull is recommended so your popper can get some distance.

Even though the DRG had that blunt spear (the WSNM is a skeleton), I told him that since he would still get a damage penalty on his WSs anyway, it might be best for him to stick to stun (Leg Sweep) duty and to save his TP for that, which he agreed to do. It worked out very well. We killed the NM, got the key item, and managed to teleport out of there right around the time the first bats we killed (to clear a path) started to respawn. You definitely want to clear mobs between your camp (slightly north past the ???, in that tunnel, is probably the safest place), especially the bombs, because if you leave any you are almost guaranteed to pick up magic aggro at some point.

I think we had some luck on our side for that fight, because I've heard that he can go -ga III spammy at times, and if he did this we likely would have been screwed. However, I didn't see a single one go off, and I'm not even sure he tried to cast one at all. The only fairly tricky part of the fight was near the end when he started to do Blood Saber slightly more often, but since it was only hitting 3 people (sometimes 2 since the DRG/WHM was occasionally putting up Stoneskin), it did not recover as much HP for the NM as it normally might with a typical bigger WSNM group. (We tried bringing a 15+ alliance for the Asuran Fists skeleton WSNM once... we nearly lost to the Blood Saber spam, because he used it nearly constantly due to all the people beating on him, and he was recovering significant chunks of HP with each use.)

Bringing a stunner makes for pretty good insurance for this fight, even if the stunner needs TP to do it, because it does seem like the NM will waste a lot of his time casting other useless crap like Blind, Bind, Rasp, and Ice Spikes (although make sure the Ice Spikes get dispelled, they inflict Paralyze very quickly). Just tell your stunner to only make sure to stun the -ga IIIs, and the tier IVs if your tank isn't a blink tank.

Anyway, not too much point to this post aside from giving you an idea of what kind of manpower you'll want to beat it. Just remember that once you kill the first mob to clear the path, you're going to be on the clock, so have your plans outlined beforehand. Take too long during the fight and you'll end up having to deal with pops, which I'm not sure our party would have been able to do (the mobs there have an annoying tendency to resist sleep =/)