Ambuscade Volume 1 - May 2017

I haven't tried SCH strat yet this month but if you're using a WHM trust then it must be a pretty relaxed run - especially on VD.

interesting note but it will still do the summoning animation even with sabotender dead but just will fail. Also it's summoning seems time based so really have to kill it fast if you are trying to avoid adds

So free nuke sabo with fire. Then skillchain mega? Should fire be used on mega also?

Ice or fire SC as fast as you can. 2-3 decent MBs should be enough to kill it.

It helps to have all GEO luopan/bubbles down and ready to go prior to pull (BOG GEO-Acumen manually placed in center area, Indi-Focus, entrust Malaise on tank).

There's really no time to waste.

Have everybody camp in the center area. We tried pulling to corner, but the Sabo's pathing gets a bit funky there, and it makes it harder to chain. In the center, he just does a tight loop around the main NM, and doesn't run out of range.

We switched to wind for the Antican.

this may be odd but, with Very Dificult mode, I found the adds sometimes dont spawn if you dont feed tp? well at least this what happened today when we tried with RUN WHM SCH BLM BLM GEO, was 3m:38s fight. the chance of adds spawning seems random.



also, a note on KI, the quickess way by far is using waypoint right from mahura to quicksand waves, costs 300 units but it's fast.

Lots of recent talk about SMN but dawn mulsums are still overpowered! The next batch of 'adjustments' need to focus on medicine usage/cooldown. BST is able to exploit this too easily.

I don't see SMN doing this...


This person is also making other people wait for so long. Other people want to do ambuscade too...

Have you try to get a cor do ranged attack + wildfire to kill it?

I sent my rng autos after it. They can ws and shoot while running and follow just fine and daze even actually stuns a decent amount of while I attack the main and have my trusts tank it in the meantime. Also from what I've seen there tends to be a kind of sweet spot where you can avoid the anticas aoes but still be close enough that the sabotender will try for a drive by which gives more time to kill if you haven't already

It's just a matter of killing the sabo fast enough. As long as it's dead before the boss finishes the summoning animation you won't get adds.

i just wonder why the dmg spikes up on the boss from time to time . regular MB t6 goes for like 40k . but from time to time it does like 70 to 80k

That guy did it once for the video and He used like 200k worth of mulsums. I guarantee you people aren't doing that on the regular, if at all. Get over it.

So I've tested Melee and Mage strategies. All information has been said already about this fight, just adding my personal experience with PUGs. I'll be talking about VD of course.

Melee strat
1 Tank
1 WHM
2x DD
2x Buffers

I've always done this with GEO + BRD, but I assume different combination of buffs would work too, like 2x GEO for instance, or BRD+COR or GEO+COR. Not sure BRDx2 would work, likewise CORx2.
Scherzo does work on the 10k Needles and makes the healing requirements much easier. Without that you're gonna need a fast WHM who knows how to play his job. GEO's luopans help sinking the 10k damage too, make sure your GEOs are aware of it and recast the luopans if necessary.
I've seen two dangerous things that can hinder PUG's success rate.
1) Boss has an AoE move that does a lot of damage (Sodstorm?) if it happens close to a 10k needles, it's basically a wipe. This can be avoided with one of the DDs being a DRG and stunlocking the mob with Leg Sweep, as Ruaumoko showed (or with luck! :P)
2) A lot of PUG tanks seem to be unaware of how enmity works with legion. Adds that pop do not have hate on the tank so the first action anybody in the pt performs after adds pop will get their enmity on them. This usually resulted in the healer dying :( Make sure the tank is aware of alliance hate mechanics and behaves accordingly.

If you have Scherzo and stunlock the megaboss as said before, you can likely survive with non-WHM healers as well, to be fair. In this scenario damage becomes almost irrelevant, as long as you kill the boss fast.
If you're slow and too many adds popped, you can wipe and reraise, as long as the megaboss is dead.
Regardless, once the megaboss is dead make sure the healer goes out of range from the rest of the group, so that BLMs won't sleepga him (they can be silenced anyway, and they have the tendency to poisonga too, so that kinda helps lol)


Mage Strat
1 tank
1 WHM
1 GEO
1 SCH
2 Nukers

Nukers are tipically BLMs but I guess there's options here.
The approach here is to all move together where the boss is, the Sabotender will start moving around the boss, you need to do a Fusion on it and then nuke the Sabo down as fast as possible.
It can be annoying because he can *** up SC and MBs with going out of range etc. I've noticed that after the pull the Sabo seems to be staying more in range of the megaboss compared to prepull where he literally moves across the whole area.

Once the sabotender is dead boss won't summon adds and he will die fast to SCs and MBs.
Didn't happen to me but I heard if you don't kill megaboss fast enough, he will summon another Sabotender, and once that happens he regains his ability to resummon adds as well.

Dunno this strat is more hit or miss. People being slow at running in, slow at nuking or Sabotender *** up the SC can really make your group wipe.
I've managed to kill the Sabotender just with pure nukes without any SC actually working, but that was quite a lucky run.



Melee vs Mage
Personally I liked Melee strat more so far, but I guess it might depend on the PUGs I had to run with.

Whm is a waste slot in magic setup, curaga2 from geo sch is enough after 10k, same for stona, etc.

So let me get this right... melee style:
- Deal with 10k needles,
- Deal with Sodstorm,
- Deal with (potentially all of the) adds,
- Requires an alert, competent tank,
- Requires an alert, competent whm,
- Requires multiple support players,
- Possible unavoidable wipe scenarios.

And that's less hit or miss than mage, where you just have to kill Cactus asap to avoid all of the above?

Hmm.

Melee start is much simpler then that.

Tank
GEO
BRD
COR <= Functionally the 2nd DD but needs to work with the primary
WHM
Real DD <= Someone who knows how to multi-step a SC, not a bandwagon BLU / WAR / DRK / ect.

After buffs tank runs up to the boss and Main DD starts their SC, I did Steel Cyclone -> Upheaval -> King's Justice -> Upheaval. What I've noticed is that whenever we do a T3 SC, for a short period of time afterward he takes ridiculous damage. So that final Upheaval does 60K+ to a 99K Radiance while the previous light was only 30~40K. Immediately after the Radiance goes off the COR does Savage Blade and ours was hitting 50~60K and I follow with another 50~60K Upheaval and it's dead. Then I proceed to fell cleave the adds dead. The whole fight is over with pretty quickly.

This is all on VD Intense.

My nukes on blm were doing about 38k max dmg on boss. No clue why. My blm is geared well. Not the best, but good enough.

I know that the boss takes double damage when the cactuar is stationary next to him, but if you're also getting spikes in a mage setup where you presumably kill the cactuar first, thwre must be another trigger.

He gets 1 off at the most, sometimes 0 if you kill the boss fast enough. Even if it gets off, all your WHM has to do is cast Curaga.

Stopped doing ridiculous damage once we started zerging him down. Possibly a part of the ability's mechanic is based on damage dealt? Note we're using Idris Wilt.

We've only had 3 waves pop once. Most of the time it's 2 waves, and sometimes it's 1 wave.

Not really. WHM usually just does 1 high-tier Curaga and maybe a Paralyna after Thornball throughout the fight. And as tank, I don't bother generating hate on adds until boss is dead; they don't hit hard, especially with the Wilt mentioned earlier.

BRD/GEO/COR seems like the standard for melee groups. Not sure what the issue is here. It's not like they can't DD. We have all of our RUN, BRD, COR and BLU DDing throughout the fight.

Care to specify? Yet to experience a wipe that was out of our control.

Our fastest clear time from entry to exit is 1:58, usually around 2:15. If mages are killing faster than that then I might care to try it out, but as it is now, melee strat is rather simple provided you're not going with random PUGs.

Huh? We don't even do that, lol. Same exact setup that you posted but we never needed to bother with SC. Ran with SAM + my BLU though and after SAM left it was me and another BLU.

Buff up
Mages move to the side
Tank grabs Boss and pulls it to start corner
I tag it with Tenebral Crush for extra Defense down
We mercilessly destroy it.

Runs were perfectly smooth, maybe 4-6 adds give or take and the only oddball deaths we had was from the BRD. For some reason the Cactrot would deliberately 4k needle only him. We could not figure out why.

After the SAM left he was replaced with a very weak BLU and I was stuck doing 50-70% of the damage. We were still winning but was a grind.

Tldr;
Yes, your SC method is certainly best but it can be very effectively done just throwing death at it. Just have to check your People at the door

Edit*
This is Vol.1 VD

Sounded like Sechs was going w/ PUGs.

Mage method is limited by SCH strats more then anything. Had several LS mates try it and it just takes forever in VD. On D their HP is low enough to blow up quickly.

Also I think people need to clearly state whether their discussing D or VD for intense. D is piss easy to smack down, it's on VD things get a bit hard as they got a quite a bit more HP. Everything I've stated earlier was on VD and spamming WS's took longer then opening with a quick SC with SAMs roll.

Bring 2 SCH, (potential) bottleneck relieved. No adds pop, so just need to SC the cactus and main down.

1 SCH can easily do it if they know how to precharge Immanence and work the timers.

Once?
HAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHA!
He does this sort of stuff for fun all the time.

My apologies. This was Vol.1 VD I'll edit my post to reflect

??

Honestly, we've just been not really caring if adds spawn, and do volleys of Aeroja/Aeroga III for bursts and they just poof anyways. The adds aren't really dangerous to a proper tank, and BLMs should manawall anyways. Bonus, the nukes are free with spak. coat

As I said in the premise, there's plenty of effective strategies discussed in this and other threads.

I wasn't trying to offer the definitive method to approach this month's VD intense. My intent was to share with others my experience. Nothing more, nothing less.

figured out that if the boss has this summon animation going on you will have a 3-4 sec window to do double dmg with nukes and ws . even tho he doesnt summon anything

Yes, I know. But calling for a nerf to BST because arguably the best BST around can do a thing super slowly while spending a whole bunch of gil is a dumb argument.