Free Aeonic Clears

I think most people's minds would be *** blown if they knew how easy melee burn actually was if you mitigate for a few factors (need brd and geo, sometimes two of each etc.)

No one would be amazed how easy it /can/ be.

What would AMAZE me is if you had people /capable/ and /willing/ to do it.

To say its easy, it is, it's incredibly easy.

To get people ready willing and able has always been the only real issue in ffxi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ97o6jukp0&t=464s

A fight with 3 Melees on arguably one of the toughest melee fights in the game. One of them not mastered, one of them not geared, and the other sub BLM... Two of them died. Still won easily. I rest my *** case.

People don't SMN burn because it's the easiest way. They SMN burn because they think it is. People are just in an echo chamber insisting it's the easiest thing when it's objectively not. Melee strats opens up room for mistakes, You don't constantly have to reset your 1hr and *** like that.

That would have been faster and easier with SMNs(resets included)

You can impress upon others the practicality of more inclusive strategies without misleading them regarding the most popular alternative

Reasons why people don't melee burn with ease
1 People would rather get epic gear for their dd then not know how to play the job

2 People don't use gearswap and have too slow reaction time to use equip sets. wait 1 is too long. (looking at you mages and tanks)

3 Knowledge) People fail a run and don't know why, they don't look at what happened and see what needs to be adjusted. ( don't know what pdif is, don't know what their dps should be)

4 Support class jobs they bring are not geared enough for the fight. whm needs yagrush. ( too many debuffs to cure and debuff with out it) Geo should have idris, this late in the game it's not an impossible goal. Brds (usually two) should be REMA (all of them)
Our ls has at least 4 REMA brds.

Possibly, but... You can clear a whole alliance of 18 in a single afternoon using melee burn if your setup is optimal.

With SMNs, you can clear it in an afternoon, but usually not for a group that size. And even if you could it would rely on each SMN having excellent gear, while in a melee burn you can have a completely subpar setup and still win.

Like honestly in that Albumen run you could have done that with only the RUN if you had to, if they had optimal gear and master...

I don't think it takes much to figure out what that ***is like when you have 8 melees.

And lets also not forget that SMN burning really gets old after a while. I did SMN burn on Omen for the better part of 6 months and after a while I didn't even want to bother logging in, it was excruciating.

Don't get me wrong- AC needs to die. But muffling how powerful it is by way of exaggerating the ease of the alternatives is only going to keep it alive that much longer, if not indefinitely

I really think this gets at a deeper issue, which is in order to do melee burn, you can be less geared, but you actually all have to understand the fight mechanics and pitfalls, whereas in SMN zerg it's all about getting Odyllic up and not *** up conduit like a complete spoon. The price you pay for how much less gear you need is having a better head on your shoulders.

I'm really not exaggerating, I posted a video a few comments up with us clearing Albumen with significant issues. If you had problems like that on a SMN burn it would have been RIP run. And again I must stress that setup had less than 1/4th the damage potential that it could have had. When you can do that and still plow through 4 of the 7 T4's without even leaving the zone, that's probably faster than you give it credit for (though granted doing that would require much more optimal gear).

Edit: 5 of the T4's if your WHMs have Yagrush, and possibly 6 if you have a couple of SMN for AC Mewing

The disbelief here is probably due to the fact that an optimal melee shell has not existed, and with the attitudes prevalent currently, probably never will.

Just idriz really... everything else is nice but not needed (very much welcomed tho)

I have multiboxed every t4 using every known strategy, and I think you're full of ***.

Yes, your melee strategy has more room to recover from error. I will agree with that. I lost an Albumen because I wasn't paying attention and forgot to scherzo my SMNs, then later mistimed my sleep, so they died to mijin. There's no recovering once you mess up on a SMN run in any major capacity, that is absolutely true.

However, that doesn't mean melee is 'easier'. To a group that can clear them regardless, it doesn't matter. You might lose a fluke run like I described once in a while, but largely you're going to be sitting between 80% and 99% winrate. I am sure you can agree with that. None of these groups 'need' SMN, they choose it because it's faster and requires less job/strategy change from fight to fight.

You measure difficulty in regards to groups initially defeating the NMs. The amount of knowledge and coordination required to execute a SMN burn successfully is nowhere close to the amount of knowledge and coordination required to execute any other strategy.

The gear argument is a red herring. I have been mercing Rei T4 and WoC with:
RUN GEO SMNx6 Leechx4 (one smn changed to BRD on albu/vini, outside COR)

Only one of my SMNs has Nirvana complete. The other 5 are using Gridarvor. None of them have any AF1+3, and I didn't bother with Helios. I didn't even augment merlinic hands, because apogee mitts+1 are so cheap. With current AH prices, it's less than 100m thrown at a single set to get comparable SMNs to mine.

A better assessment would be to say a 12 man group is easier than a 6 man group. Sure, your 12 man melee albumen setup has more room for error than a 6 man SMN albumen setup. But, my 12 man SMN albumen setup has 4 people doing literally nothing.

You guys are saying the exact same thing, but keep going back and forth for some reason.

Melee burn has more room for error. You dont have to be uber geared.

Smn burn is easier, less room for error. Need HQ gear.

But, we aren't. SMN doesn't need HQ gear. If you aren't using leeches, you can gear 3 SMNs good enough for under 20M each. Even with 4 leeches in a 12 man alliance, you don't need nirvanas. Melee need much more gear.

Care to post a pic of what you would describe to be a "Good Enough" SMN? Also keep in mind that you are targeting 2 different servers. While strats may be the same, getting the characters and gears for said strats may differ based on item availability per server.

My Grid/NQ Apogee/assorted mediocre Merlinic aug SMN can hold my own weight for AC. Can't support carries, but that's not what he's suggesting

Look to be clear I never said SMN burn was a BAD method, I was just trying to say it was not the easiest for most members in most situations (prior to all of this conduit madness that has EVERYONE gearing SMN) because back in the day, everyone had a melee job, and it wasn't even that hard to get a clear in a melee setup, so long as you knew the strategy. Everyone was just told to BLM or don't bother back in the day, and now it's people saying get SMN or don't bother. And it wouldn't have required you to go out and gear out and JP an entirely different job. But I doubt anyone is factoring that into the timeliness of their clears.

Besides, as a few of us have mentioned earlier, SMN is boring. I personally don't know what the point of going through to burn a bunch of weapons weaker than the one I'm already using would be other than to do it for bragging rights, and even then, WHY bother when everyone has them, and also why bother do to it for bragging rights when they method you use to clear is so easy it just requires gear and a pulse?

Personally I like playing in methods that require at least some degree of skill, but we've dumbed this game down to the point where even FFXIV is harder now, even if only because SE refueses to fix an obviously broken mechanic.

So let's be crystal clear this time, I do not think that melee burn is better than an optimal SMN burn, but I do think it's much easier than people think, and to those that don't really WANT to build SMN to cheese the game, you don't have to, it's not even more difficult or slower by a significant margin if you do it right.

gridarvor/elan strap/x/sancus
apogee B/empath/gelos/esper
apogee B/apogee B/varar nq/varar nq
campestres/incarnation/apogee b/apogee b

This is enough to kill any T4 in a SMN SMN SMN GEO RUN COR setup, provided you have job master and all SMNs use their conduit effectively. For albumen and vini, you might start to have trouble with the BRD added in if your COR can't drop, maybe not.

Now, keep in mind, this is just keeping the #s as low as possible. When you start looking at 12man setups, you can bring something like:
SMN x4 GEO COR
SMN x4 RUN BRD
2-3 leeches
and still win with that gear. Just fold after rolling your XI and redo it for the other party, using super revitalizers, so both get the COR buffs.

It might not have been the easiest to organize last April when it was just catching on, but even the small servers have large SMN populations now. The gear is trivial to acquire, the hardest part is capping JP, which most players can do comfortably at this point.

I can agree that it's not fun, and I want it nerfed. It's not fair to claim it's harder in any sense of the word.. because it's objectively not.

This much I know isn't true. We have a LS that tries to SMN burn and many of them have Apogee +1 and WAS, and we even have one with Nirv, and there are no leeches, and it STILL doesn't go that smoothly.

In fact there was a run just the other day on Schah with 5 full +1 SMN that ALL had Nirvana and we almost lost.

Okay, but the problem is that this is not true

Sounds like you aren't timing your BPs effectively or missed a buff. I killed Schah with SMN SMN SMN GEO RUN COR, no nirvanas, no omen, multiple weak slots when this first started out. I've done it countless times since, and routinely do it with:
SMN x6 (1 nirvana)
GEO RUN
4 buyers/leeches
outside cor

I have yet to lose a Schah using this method. Also, Was is worse than Gridarvor, and Was +1 is still worse unless you cap accuracy with it.

Comeatmebro is right Was is horrible, lack of acc on helms is very noticable.
Also parse your smn. Grid smn that is setup up properly should do
360k dmg in a AC.
300k is acceptable, but barely makes up for the extra slot.
Nirvana should do 500-600k per AC.

edit.
Comeatmebro's setup with 12 will do 2.4 mil dmg in a AC.
With revit and apogee he can generate more. 1.2 mil hp is very close to approx amount on 6 man. So 12 would be 2.4 mil.
But this only works if your smn putting out 350k, and nirvana doing 600k

Doing HP math only works if your numbers are accurate. Saying 300k is a gross oversimplification, because I've never had to touch apogee or BP post-conduit on Schah.

It really comes down to whether everyone is timing their BPs effectively(which is something you can do with the most basic windower script). If you are at least 50% SMNs and they are BPing correctly, you have the damage to win. If they have HQ gear, nirvana, etc, you can go even lower.

Parse your smn's then. Watch the numbers hit what i say. I'm sure yours are gear properly and will be at the 350k range.
Sorry to say it that way but i've parsed many a failed runs and wins, and i can see the dmg lack. Its not so simple as everyone makes it out to be.
Also your smn should have almost capped jp.

edit:
vinipata and teles take extra dmg from volt strike.
Zerde can be done with barely any.

My SMNs can break 400k without nirvana, easily. However, I'll see tons of parses in the 250-300k range.. a parse is only representative of how much HP you did in that particular fight. Once the mob is out of HP, the parse stops.

I'm not saying it's a worthless metric, but you can't simplify it like that to any meaning. You should use parses to see who is not pulling their weight so they can improve technique, not to estimate anything meaningful. You need 40-50% of your alliance members to be capable SMNs if not using nirvanas. That's a metric that will always remain accurate.

Yes, sorry i did not explain it well. This is a much better explanation of what i was saying.

Hmmmm... I'll have them try that out, tenks.
Also, @ Kaparu, I dont see one melee DPS REMA on your account, do you have more than one? because I feel like at the very least you should source saying that what I said about melee burn is untrue, because it genuinely looks like you have no clue how that setup even works. Like SMN you can clear the whole aeonic in about 4~5 hours. (mind you, you can't have trash gear for doing it that fast, but still)

Actually for a melee burn you do want at least 1 Yagrush for melee party. Many of the T4's get a bit debuff happy. I mean sure, you dont NEED need it... but you need it.

Every account you can access via one-click has a REMA DD on it, no idea what you're talking about

Annnd I mean if we're gonna go this route, you thought Was was ideal for AC sans Nirvana, so...