Sunday, January 28, 2007

Cactrot Rapido and the Pick of Trials

As I logged in on Friday night, Feon greeted me with two questions. Do you have any plans? How do you feel about participating in something that might kill you?

I'd say that's one of the more excellent ways to launch an evening in this game ^_^

He planned on grabbing Cactrot Rapido that evening, but was at first dismayed that the NM wasn't up, which rarely happens on this server. Almost no one goes out of their way to kill this thing.

So we initially changed plans to break my Pick of Trials latent in Kuftal Tunnel, which was also fine by me. As we made our way to the tunnel, however, Feon spotted Rapido and we quickly reverted to the earlier plan. He was two-boxing Ishmael on his Bard.

He wanted to try inflicting as much damage as quickly as possible, which was going to be especially crucial since we didn't have any stunners. Feon lent me his Berserker's Axe, and brought a couple of Icarus Wings. He came on his Warrior and equipped a polearm for Impulse Drive -> Steel Cyclone -> Darkness. The plan was to launch the fight with 300 TP each, hit the L3 skillchain twice, as quickly as possible, and have the 2 mages (Cozmos and Audessa) chainspell nuke the rest of the HP away.

And we almost did it.

It took awhile to claim the thing, since he would never run through the area where we happened to be holding a cactuar captive..but he eventually did and we launched into our plan. Unfortunately 10,000 Needles just hit us too hard, and Feon barely had time to get the 2nd Impulse Drive off before we hit the dirt (along with Ishmael). The mages fended for themselves for a bit, but couldn't get the HP down quickly enough and we wiped. Cozmos re-raised and came back on her WHM to R3 us, and we evaluated the fight.

Our initial damage was nice: Impulse Drive for 843, Steel Cyclone for 1182, Darkness for 1300. Our main problem, I think, was the lack of numbers to spread out the 10k damage; and of course a stun-lock might have worked here, but we didn't have that option. All in all we did a decent job. I'd say with a couple extra bodies, we'll be able to take him down on the next attempt.

We dusted off and went down into Kuftal for a bit to work 50 points off of my latent before calling it a night.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Resist Stun Sleep Bind and Gravity x.x lol but we did nice ass job for 1st time lol

Paul Bauman said...

Damn, even tougher than I thought. We'll get him!

Unknown said...

Well, a friend once commented that if you have 9 people, you can spread out in 3 alliances, and deploy your NPCs to help soak the damage (everyone's npc should have 556 hitpoints or above to withstand more than 1 hit though).

or one could do the uber rdm solo thingy hrm.

Faulsey said...

Ah well, better luck next time. 10k damage is quite a lot to get spread out :P

Good luck in breaking the latent... Am I right in guessing thats for Decimation?

Darrett said...

Don't you love those cryptic tells? What are you doing tonight? lol. I've seen that NM running around all the time but never fought him. Good job on the bravery factor and better luck next time. I think that having your NPCs out will reall help to absorb that 10K needle attack.

Have fun breaking the latent. I'm working on the heartsnatcher latent right now (damn 500WS) and trying to get dagger high enough for evisceration.

Paul Bauman said...

Thanks for the advice, folks!

And good luck on Evisceration and breaking the Heartsnatcher, Darrett.

Yes, I'm indeed planning on unlocking Decimation, for the sake of completeness. No sense in not having the WSNM weapon skills on both of my primary weapons, although I'll rarely use Decimation.