Ambuscade Volume 2 - June 2017

Starting these to get the discussion out of the version update thread.

Did 2 of these tonight to try it, takes forever to kill, not sure if there's a trick yet to be unable to access your gear on it

you need to be at 20 yalms to equip your gear.
you can't solo AND melee.

Yeah I was doing this thf, brd , and whm takes me about 9mins to kill it on hard.

I did it twice solo as Monk and White Magewith Trust. (Normal/VeryEasy while testing a few things.)

Aside from just taking forever to kill, it doesn't seem to take any extra damage from Magic/Melee.
However I did notice something.
I entered on Darksday and a Dark Skillchain healed it, so I cast Holy and noticed Holy seemed unresisted.

Maybe the day of the week is linked to his weakness?

Yeah I saw the same it healing up from skillchain, I was wondering about magic damage but you seem to have tried that already. I will play with some else nukes of the same day, see if that does anything

It's probably water damage honestly. It's a slug. I've also seen Distortion heal it and it was Fireday.

Don't slug NMs normally heal from water damage anyway?

Assuming you meant level 3 that dark skillchain probably wasn't dealing dark dmg. Skillchains of multiple elements will choose 1 element picking the one the mob is least resistant to or in the case of ties following an order. Mobs with absorption traits almost always have floor resistance to that element (and often the sdts if they have any are ignored as well) to help ensure you will heal it if possible.

And pretty much all enemy slugs are healed by water nm and normal alike. I think the only slugs that don't are jugs

I've only tried as White Mage so far, in a bit me and a friend will go in Paladin and Black Mage and spent the entire 30 minutes casting Magic on it after the notifications it gives, see if those change its weakness.

i'm not at home as of yet to try this but has anyone tried out using RNG's for DD's? slugs are weak to rng's / cor's dagger / polerarm arent they?

Where did you find this information? Usually only things with wings are weak to piercing and slugs don't match that (in before someone finds a picture of a winged slug nope)

If you mean piercing dmg no. They are however weak to actually being able to wear your equipment so rngs might help.

That said if you are taking the effort to build a pt with tanks and healers and rngs and such why are you doing vol 2? Actually this month again seems like a vol 2 just isn't worth the effort time compared to just doing even a normal vol 1

Solod it on COR earlier. The Aura is definetly "only" 15 yalms wide. Might seem bigger if you run out due to the lingering effect. Couldn't find any obivous damage gimicks. Last Stand, Leaden and self light SCs were performing around a normal "resist" level without anything being boosted.

I had my when just over 22 Yalms and she still had the aura on her.

The Aura effect increases after certain points. Difficult to say whether it is as the health goes down, or when it gives notifications.

Difficult when Solo* ^

Killed it a few times earlier on D, it seems to spawn 4 leeches on this difficulty, two (blue ones) seem extremely weak to magic and die in a single nuke - the other two taking more to put down (I only had magical damage available at the time)


Yep, absorbed water based nukes as expected


Found the range on the aura altered throughout the fight, not sure as to why but for large periods <50% it was definitely greater than spell casting range

Seems to go through two distinct modes, one where it "tenses up" and the other where its "skin shimmers" - I'm not entirely sure what the effect of these modes were however the latter seemed to cause its aura to kick in.

What difficulty and trust setup? I tried on D with August and mages got raped by adds, switched to Amchu who opens with AFA and gets hate just to be rammed down in like 4 hits D: I could play with positioning to have her parry but don't think it would work without trust campaign HP boost. I'll try N

Edit: N is doable but <50% it gets encumberance aura past shooting range so the fights gets really slow(snapshot not kicking in and WSing in ranged gear or other way around). Just going to wait till people figure out how to stop aura or, even better, win vol1

Could be another Puppetmaster dominant fight

Would probably still want something else since 6 adds on aggro is kind of annoying

Aura was absolutely at 25.0 or closer for me for a large portion of a VD fight on RNG (further out than max shooting range). Really bad fight unless there is a gimmick to be discovered.

I got the aura effect to come off, though I am not completely sure how it happened, I hit to stardiver and looked away. I messed up big time guys. ;~;
It happened ~35% HP but hopefully this helps figure out what made the aura come off.

In two different attempts on Normal, the slug "began to tense up" when the adds died and then the slug "was tense" when Zeid II MB'd Stun off of a Light SC.

On the third attempt, we tried abusing it by MBing different magicks and it wildly fluctuated between tenseness and glistening.

Furthermore, Arciela I's auto-attack healed the slug, and it reacted with glistening skin.

EDIT: Originally thought it was MB Stun that triggered it, but when we performed MB Stun early (after killing adds), it didn't trigger tenseness. Crazy Theory #1: Once it racks up X amount of damage from skillchains, it gets tense. This count can be depleted by the boss using skills. This would make sense for my group since Zeid II was locking him hard [MBing it keeps him still for so long]. Once it trips that threshold, he's tense. On the run that Zeid II wasn't summoned, we couldn't seem to get him tensed up.

I was wondering about the Magic Burst angle myself. In each of my last 3 runs, I've seen the "Your foe is tense" message in the log shortly after a Flash MB.

But I also ran the fight as SAM spamming Light Skillchains. The Aura subsides after triggering "Your foe is tense" and damage spiked. Double Light Skillchains did 50k and then 99k.

Yeah, after he's tense, you give him the muscle relaxers aka the good ***aka Fudofudofudofudo

Could be like the slime. Need to do equal dmg magic/physical then it uses a tp move which takes off aura. Just an idea I have not done vol2 this month yet.

Think it could be something similar like it requires a certain amount of magic damage(nukes/SC) as I went BLU CDC spam last night on D and it started taking really high damage - around x3 - after the "Your foe is tense" message which also caused aura to vanish. I also killed the adds at start if that matters.

Killing time was around 2-3min depending how fast it started taking crazy dmg.

Ok cracked the code.
Kill the yellow leeches 1st with melee or ws dmg.
Then Kill the Blue leeches with Magic.
NM will tense up (takes uber damage) then zerg it.
Took 3xBlu, WHM, BLM, BRD fight is about 1 min on VD

Recommend using magic aoes from blm and blu after the yellow 1s die to clear the blue leeches

Great note! I did notice that the Frail Leeches were more susceptible to physical damage, and the Dessicated Leeches were more susceptible to magic damage. I'd like to also mention that you don't have to kill them with their weaknesses in order to trigger the uber damage on Delos; cleaving them all with straight physical, or straight magic, will work as well.

Anyone figured out how to get rid of the Aura?