Had to draw upon the ls for help, but it turned out Xarp needed it too, when I always had assumed he had it all completed. The strategy was simple enough, but it didn't exactly execute smoothly... NIN, WAR, SAM, MNK and 2 RDM's, we intended to have each DD's solo one gear/set of gears each while the RDM's kept them healed/buffed and the main boss slept. Easy enough, just gears have some rediculous AoE attacks so we ended up spamming cures and taking alot of hate throughout. Somehow, the NIN was tanking worse and taking more damage than the other DDs combined (sigh) and managed to run in and die in the second room before we (the RDMs) even entered. No big loss, we just bound the extra gear and let the other DDs carry on as usual. Raised the NIN, and buffed up for the final boss.
Soulflayers are not supposed to be in the game, they are just a bad joke made by SE that was taken too far. This one in particular seemed to be immune to any debuffs I tried (not that I had much time to try sticking any before having to spam cures again). I gave up on status cures since they just got hit with them again over and over, so I just kept people alive and pray they'd kill it.
They did. I ended up pulling way too much hate and tanking towards the end (gogo blink cycling), so was unable to convert :/
We later attepmted 44 as well, which was a hell of a cool fight, although we lost in the end. :(
The first part went pretty badly, we relied on magic too heavily in the first few phases so in the final phase he was immune to stun so we just had to eat his nasty spells. Couple of deaths later, we killed him and rested back to full before engaging the mega boss. But by this point we had already wasted far too much time.
Ultimately, we simply took too long to damage him which was basically down to a bad set up more than anything else though (PLD/NIN could not keep hate, and the DDs had to hold back/die so we didn't get anywhere fast).
The music for this fight is pretty epic though, I don't mind repeating this a few times. Besides, it doesn't look too hard if you have the right setup.
Assaults!
I muscled my way into Arc/Soli/Flam's usual trio static to leech a clear on Escort Professor Chanoix, which was great fun.
We just stormed through the zone, sleeping (<3 Repose) anything the senile old bat ran into, which included many dead ends. Being forced to backtrack into the mobs we just slept was rather discomforting.
From what I noticed during that assault (I could be wrong) was that anything slept with Repose (the skellies) that we didn't bind as well would lose aggro eventually, and the ghosts which we were using Sleep II on would continue to chase, ruling out the possibility of the mobs in this assault being particularily lazy and losing aggro faster than normal mobs. So Repose generates less enmity than sleep? Possibly alot less cumulative enmity, as I think that's what keeps mobs chasing. Obviously I'm too lazy to test it.
If this is true, and I wasn't imagining things, it would be much more of a useful spell for escaping any unwanted aggro you get (of which there is plenty in assault missions).
I also did 'Stop the Bloodshed' with a pickup party, which involved bullying some chigoes (seemed to have 100% crits on them) until the rune pops, whilst avoiding some mean lamia. We did bully the chigoes, but the lamia were not avoided as efficiently.
A few melee died before I could get to them after we split up (oops!), I managed to aggro a lamia trying to raise someone, but they slept easily enough (but they do start to build resistance, unless I just got an unlucky sleep II resist), I ran back to the rune when it poped, got hit by a tier IV from the lamia on the bottom floor (!) and just about survived thanks to stoneskin. Crap loot, 1k assault points, 5 points to next rank (10/25), disbanded and went to sky. All smiles.
I forgot to take screenshots, the tier IV was a good moment too. :(
