Black mage solo EXP in Xarcabard [S]

This may have gone under the radar for many considering the hype surrounding fay weapons, Igqira Weskits with INT+6 that you'll never get, and the rat race to finish A Moogle Kupo d'Etat (what's the acronym? AMK? MKE?), but this latest version update actually provided an alternative to Ebony Puddings as a solo EXP fodder for level 75 black mages and scholars in the form of the five or so LV 75+ Gigas's Tigers with only 1,400 or so HP within striking distance of the Xarcabard [S] teleport point at (H-9).

Considering the interval between the start of the ToAU expansion and now, this is totally (un)characteristic of SE depending on your point of view, whether you're a fucking retard for fulminating about the "exploiting" the generally low HP of BST pets or a realist.

Perhaps "alternative" is a gross understatement since chain #19 has been achieved on these tiger pets with BLM/SCH (and the attendant MP-efficiency advantages) and the ability to one-shot these tigers with the appropriate weather (ice) or day (Iceday or Lightningday). Not only that, there was the suggestion that these can be chained indefinitely! This seems like a pretty good case for /SCH at this camp if you can one-shot (you have Bind and Sleep anyway).

As for the bread-and-butter /RDM sub, I don't know about you, but even attaining chain #5 on Ebony Puddings (even though I can't three-shot, as in three tier IV), my average EXP/hour doesn't even approach 10K per hour (more like 8K).

In contrast, even without day or weather bonuses and basically lolly-gagging, after trying my hand at these Gigas's Tigers I still managed to average about 8K/hr over two chains with BLM/RDM as summarized in this parser output:

Experience Rates
Total Experience : 2538
Number of Fights : 17
Date             : 7/26/2009
Start Time       : 11:46:32 AM
End Time         : 12:05:28 PM
Party Duration   : 0:18:56
Total Fight Time : 0:04:33
Avg Time/Fight   : 66.85 seconds
Avg Fight Length : 16.07 seconds
XP/Fight         : 149.29
XP/Minute        : 134.00
XP/Hour          : 8039.97

Moreover, after achieving a chain #10 (cheating with Manafont), I averaged over 9.6K/hr on this chain while still not being able to one-shot tigers:

Experience Rates
Total Experience : 1773
Number of Fights : 11
Date             : 7/26/2009
Start Time       : 12:12:18 PM
End Time         : 12:23:18 PM
Party Duration   : 0:11:00
Total Fight Time : 0:03:31
Avg Time/Fight   : 60.03 seconds
Avg Fight Length : 19.20 seconds
XP/Fight         : 161.18
XP/Minute        : 161.10
XP/Hour          : 9665.87

I would argue that, at least for me, at worst the EXP/hr in Xarcabard [S] is equivalent to that in Mount Zhayolm, with the potential to clear 10,000 EXP/hr easily with /SCH and enough oomph to one-shot these tigers.

Personally, I would rather not rely on the crutch of having the benefit of the right weather or day effects to be able to one-shot tigers, but my gear or merits do not give me the flexibility to one-shot anytime. After determining that these tigers have 55 INT, I determined that I would need to acquire Selenian Cap with INT+4 and MAB+2, a Novio Earring, and 4 INT merits to clear 1,400 damage with Thunder IV.

With this in mind, those players with Novio and full Morrigan's would have a field day at this camp.

Milestones

Somehow I managed to update sporadically this testament to a lack of priorities for almost one year. To be honest, I wrote foremost for myself so I didn't really bother to spend much time making these entries easily digestible for a wider audience. In particular, I found an excuse to apply some basic probability and statistics to FFXI, the playing of which is also a testament to a lack of priorities and extremely poor taste. On the other hand, I did try to focus my attention on the mechanics of the game so that these entries would have some informative value--at least some people thought so--instead of being just some masturbatory self-chronicle.

I would really like to maintain this conceit, anyway, but there is not much of an empirical mentality among the so-called playerbase to provide persuasive support for any theories that are developed or serendipitously discover non-trivial things about how the game works. Maybe some dead-enders take great pride in running their mouths without putting their bullshit to the test, but I find legitimizing claims with real data and observations to be far more interesting. I thought about turning this blog into a "digest" of sorts to summarize both new and old findings and give credit to the individuals that shed some light on some aspect of game mechanics, but actually it is just too tiresome to comb forums with crap search functions and garbage "intellects" for shiny nuggets of insight. So I will just continue talking about things that interest me enough to commit to blog, even though the posting frequency based on that criterion will be very low.

Anyway, this wasn't supposed to be just some navel-gazing exercise. Instead of making individual posts for the following topics, none of which really warrants standalone status, I decided to throw them all into a single entry.

Thoughts on Aspir

I managed to finish collecting some data to check the effect of Pluto's Staff and magic accuracy +12 on the potency of Aspir and updated the dot plot:

I think it's safe to say that INT or magic accuracy (MAB too, based on tarblm's results) have no role in the potency of Aspir (and by analogy, Drain). Note that I am not bothering with statistics and just arguing informally that none of MAB, macc, and INT increased the maximum in these samples.

As far as accuracy is concerned, that is much more inconvenient to check. The main purpose of my collecting data was to visualize the distribution of Aspir values. It seems here that the range of possible values of unresisted Aspir is fairly wide. The low values of Aspir observed may also be the result of a half-resist, which may cut the unresisted Aspir value in half. Unfortunately, you can see how partially resisted Aspirs are easily confounded with unresisted Aspirs if these ideas are true. Going back to tarblm's data though, the observed Aspirs generally have much greater variability, which could be attributed to partial resists.

Chocobo racing

Haven't talked about this in a while. A few months ago I actually canceled my content ID, but I let myself get pulled back into this pit of mediocrity that is FFXI. Since then I made some effort to maintain more detailed information on my Chocobo Circuit results, particularly whether my chocobo was competing against other PCs.

Not surprisingly, few of my C1 races were uncontested. In fact, 16 of the first 20 after I returned had at least one PC chocobo and 7 of those 16 had 2 PCs. I won only nine of those races, with a pretty abysmal 3-3-1-1 record against only one other PC.

During this time I came across a testimonial of another chocobo racer, also with a SS/B/B/B chocobo, who claimed to have won 67% of his races (128-41-22). This kind of pissed me off because farming chocobucks is extremely boring and here this guy was getting nearly 2 million more gil with the same chocobo profile and similar number of races. I thought perhaps he faced much less competition on his server and that his use of leather saddles may also have been a factor in his great success. But rather than shell out another $25 bucks to SE just for a server transfer, I tried the Sheep Leather Saddle for another month to see if taking the receptivity hit would be worth it in races with one or more other PCs.

My results were even worse with the leather saddle. In 20 races, I went 8-10-0-2 with 11 contested races, and in four of those contested races, an NPC chocobo won (I placed 2nd in all four) and in one case, two NPCs actually placed 1-2. (I finished out of the top 3 in this one.) Even worse, I won only four of the uncontested races, races in which I really "needed" to win to blunt the annoyance of losing chocobucks.

I then went back to the elm saddle and am now nurturing a nine-race winning streak (four contested), by far the longest streak I ever had. During this streak, I also reached the 10-million gil mark in net earnings. I am now going out of my way to race only in "off-hours" time slots to try to get my win rate back to 50%. My current record is 107-78-24-15.

Having reached 10 million in net earnings, I calculated an approximate rate of gil per hour earned in chocobo racing based on the time (one free race per 5 minutes) and gil spent to accumulate enough chocobucks (5,846) to enter the races and the gross earnings. Including this nine-race winning streak, chocobo racing has yielded an average of 74,644 gil per hour. (I admit this figure does not include time spent running to Chocobo Circuit.) Not as efficient as the guy winning 67% of his races, but still a nice reminder that even though chocobuck farming is a real pain in the ass, at least this huge barrier to entry allows chocobo racing to provide a steady income to those who actually put up with it... assuming the C1 races aren't so congested.

Thoughts on the possibility of chain 6 solo on Ebony Puddings without Novio and Manafont

I was extremely disappointed to find out that I had died 957 times between Adventurer "Appreciation" 2008 and A.A. 2009, the majority on black mage. (If I am really appreciated, can I get a Chocobo Wand in fewer than two weeks without being lucky?) I had considered myself more risk-averse over the past year (I did not even do Dynamis at all), but in retrospect this was not true, since you tend to die a lot in pickups, soloing, and poor event linkshells.

The pain of losing experience points on black mage (never mind the bullshit conceit that losing experience points on top of losing the time and resources you wasted is a reasonable penalty) can be blunted somewhat with efficient rate of gain of EXP. But what is considered efficient? From experience, the best I can do is around 8,000 EXP/hour (estimated by the time required to burn off an Emperor Band), and that's when being somewhat vigilant about achieving chain 5 (which is trivial if you are paying attention). Anyone who claims rates of 10,000 EXP/hr solo is full of shit until proven otherwise.

Is it possible to achieve chain 6 solo without Novio, though? By the time chain 5 rolls around I almost always have insufficient MP without Aspir to mount a chain 6 attempt, an indication that my maximum MP is not high enough. Moreover, even three "tier 4" nukes tend to leave a sliver of HP (on off-weather days), meaning that I have to rely on Drain to finish off a pudding. Casting Drain on chain 4 and 5 wastes MP that could be used for chain 6. These factors, along with half-resists and weather effects, conspire to make it really difficult to achieve chain 6. If it is easier than I am pondering, I'd like to know though, but not from shit Morrigan's users who still cast AM II on puddings.

Benevolent Despot

With the advent of Fields of Valor, the prospect of not spawning Despot in a timely fashion is less unpalatable since a training regime awards 1,550 EXP in about an hour of killing 11 placeholders. And maybe those tabs will actually be useful someday. Also, soloing without desirable rewards has grown pretty tiresome. I still have a Fenrir solo (ninja) on the back burner now that Lunar Roar supposedly does not dispel reraise, but I haven't been motivated to do that yet. At the moment, Despot is the only remotely appealing "get out there and kill shit" profit opportunity with a relatively high barrier to entry (actually being able to solo it under 30 minutes to lower the chance of vultures finding you and trying vainly to MPK you).

Though not quite as enjoyable as killing Despot and hardly a consolation prize, watching hapless groups kill Despot can provide some humor to brighten the day. Not a few weeks ago, I had the "pleasure" of witnessing this quartet of PLD/NIN, NIN/DRK, BLM and MNK struggle with Despot for over 40 minutes! Apparently, it didn't occur to these people to shed enmity via teleport in order to expedite the kill. Unfortunately, even inept players win eventually, a testimony to the dominance of the lowest common denominator in FFXI. Throw infinite time and resources at something and you can triumph! (Except for Absolute Virtue.)

Spending time farming gems of the west also has given me an opportunity to "get back" at the MPKing Tarutaru Duo That Shall Not Be Named by dispatching Despot in 22-27 minutes while those oblivious assholes continue to kill placeholders long after I'm gone.

Not the path of least resistance

For players obsessed with rewards through safe, unadventurous busywork with long-established best practices, "beastman stronghold invasion" (FFXIclopedia) in "Shadowreign" areas draws almost zero interest, which is also the case for most of WoTG that isn't Campaign so far (deserved or not). Most of the items are lackluster or useless, but it's precisely because of that (nothing lootwhores want) that a group of players shouldn't have too much trouble obtaining access to the culminating battles (18 members maximum) in each of the beastman strongholds. The potential rewards from these battles aren't all that enticing, either--marginal rare/ex items aside from beastman headgear and low-value auctionable stuff--but the battles seem like a fun diversion, and if your group doesn't operate during Japan prime time you shouldn't have any problems with competition for scarce resources. (The NMs are timed spawns and are slow to respawn after being killed.) And even though the items aren't all that, you can still hope "early adopters" blow their gil on these latest toys.

Let's not forget the dealbreaker of having "friends" to do this with, but that wasn't going to stop me from frittering away the exp buffer I unintentionally built up while auto-attacking fortifications last time.

Starting with La Vaule, six of the eight NMs are monks, rangers, or mages (SCH, BLM), automatically ruling them out as feasible for ninja soloing, at least without a dancer sub ("Easy Mode") to try (in vain?) to counter a steady loss of HP. I looked for Coinbiter Cjaknokk (DRK) to see first hand if it would actually spam Shoulder Charge, but it was nowhere to be found.

Dismayed, I shifted my attention to Beadeaux, where five of eight NMs are rangers, monks, or mages, leaving Mu'Nhi Thimbletail (THF), Ga'Lhu Nevermolt (PLD), and Di'Zho Spongeshell (DRK). Spongeshell alternates between melee-absorbing and magic-absorbing states (absorbing meaning healing), and I didn't feel like committing inventory space to elemental ninjutsu (assuming I could even make inroads on it). Thimbletail was nowhere to be found, leaving Nevermolt.

Not unexpectedly, these NMs can be found among the general population, which can make isolating them very time-consuming, but Nevermolt will separate from nearby Quadav, making a pull easy. But, it was painfully obvious after several single-digit katana swings (most for 0) that I had no chance. Even worse, committing to any sort of evasion setup is completely pointless: out of 45 attacks, I evaded exactly 2 and parried 3 and I used my evasion setup exclusively. Paladin spells do consume shadows, yes, but the only reason I even lasted that long was that Nevermolt turns its shell on you periodically, giving you some time to recast shadows. Hojo resisted several times, too.

I hold out hope that I can see Thimbletail in the next 24 hours so I can proceed to get dumped and give up the futility.

Fleeting fortitude

With no real occasion to use my ninja, having given up the filler activity that is Campaign, all my ninja equipment and tools have been collecting dust in storage for the past month. But in my fervor to realize my remaining modest goals before I limit my FFXI time-wasting mostly to chocobo racing, I turned to my ninja for yet another ridiculous hours-long soloing attempt.

Having sat on two stacks of virtue stone pouches for over a year, I've wanted a Fortitude Axe to play with for some time now, but I've never had any reliable connections to mine so that I could leech one, only BS promises based on a quid pro quo, but where I did all the giving and ended up getting nothing in return.

My interest in getting the axe was rekindled recently when I came across a thread on BG discussing various NMs for ninja to solo. Prior to that, I only vaguely remembered Jailer of Fortitude (JoF) as soloable by a black or red mage, but I wasn't familiar with the tactics involved, so I was surprised to hear that ninja could also solo JoF. Upon further investigation, I discovered that having some form of movement speed is important to maintain separation between yourself and the jailer so that you can actually have an opportunity to do damage to it, and that even a corsair with movement speed could kill JoF alone. But since I wasn't ever going to come across a pair of Herald's Gaiters for use on my black mage, ninja it was, but where to get ghrah chips?

The prospect of having to farm 12 ghrah M chips was really the only reason I didn't try Jailer of Fortitude sooner, but after several weeks of trying to find these chips in bazaars (I found none), I resigned myself to mind-numbing farming in Hux'Zoi. I managed to cobble together 12 chips from 60 ghrahs, including a nearly four-hour session when I got 7 chips from 36 ghrahs (38-40% waxing moon).

While the general approach to kiting Jailer of Fortitude is well-documented (if not widely documented), there are a few specific things that may be worth considering based on my observations:

After you find the ??? to which you trade the 12 ghrah chips, it's actually possible to trade the chips and run out of the room so that JoF and its assistants have neither hate nor aggro, as long as you open the door right before you trade the chips and immediately run outside (so you don't get impeded while opening the door on the way out). (I had both the quickening effect from Sprinter's Shoes along with the movement speed from Ninja Kyahan.) Thus, I don't know if JoF actually spawns claimed and whether what happened to me was merely a fluke.

For my attempt, I kited from the "elvaan tower," where the ??? was located, directly to the "hume tower" without any problems shaking JoF's assistants, so I think there isn't much need to go to such extremes as zoning. You could probably use the elevators as a safety net to shed aggro from ghrahs and possibly zdei, though.

As a ninja, I relied entirely on elemental ninjutsu spells ("the wheel") to deal 26,264 damage, broken down by spell as follows:

Spell                Spell Dmg  #Spells  S.Low/Hi     S.Avg
-----------------------------------------------------------
Doton: Ni                 3748       38    15/143     98.63
Huton: Ni                 4862       39    16/138    124.67
Hyoton: Ni                4644       41    17/143    113.27
Katon: Ni                 4577       42    15/143    108.98
Raiton: Ni                4466       39    16/138    114.51
Suiton: Ni                3967       42    14/143     94.45

After turning each corner, I would cast one ninjutsu given enough distance between me and JoF. Otherwise I would continue moving until I felt I was safe to cast. While JoF usually pauses movement to "reflect" magic back at you, the "reflect" move can be "overridden" by Actinic Burst (flash effect). I didn't feel like taking a chance that I would get sliced and diced by a Vorpal Blade instead of being hit with Actinic Burst.

The upside to soloing JoF as NIN as opposed to BLM is that your rate of damage output will be higher with ninjutsu than with Bio II alone. Using Bio II alone, a black mage should take at least 2 hours, 45 minutes, or 83 casts of Bio II (320 HP per 2 minutes), to take down JoF. (I assume JoF is immune to magic-based Poison, as opposed to Disseverment Poison, but I may be wrong.) It took me about 2:10 to kill JoF, and I have mediocre nuking gear for ninja (only Ninjutsu Torque and Ninja Hatsuburi, 72+25 INT with Cream Puffs, and a Moldavite). In fact, I had to wait out two daytime periods during this time (first nighttime period, ~32% damage, second nighttime period, ~43% damage).

(2 hours, 10 minutes? And to think I was complaining about Cheese Hoarder Gigiroon the other day...)

The downside to doing this as NIN is that for half the game day (at worst) you can't safely do any damage to JoF. Since you don't have movement speed in the daytime to help create distance between you and Jailer of Fortitude, it's not a good idea to let JoF close on you while casting ninjutsu. Unlike other mobs in the game that you might consider kiting to kill, JoF actually has good path movement around the circular ledge that you're supposed to kite along, so it can be troublesome to maintain distance. But even if JoF does catch up to you in the daytime, as long as you don't take wide turns around each corner it should never get close enough to hit you actually. (I have seen Powder Boots suggested as a safety net in case it's getting too close for comfort.)

As is my wont, over the course of suffering this "game" I've found progressively more tedious things to solo--from firedrakes for giant scales to Promyvion mobs for white memospheres to rank missions (the infamous Bastok 9-1, for one), and so on--to the point that I've actually gone out and done things like soloing Genbu and killing JoF that really deserve a bit of ribbing. Sure, we all covet shit to some extent, but is it really necessary to go to such extremes? Ugh, I even started a blog partly to cover such things. I think I've finally reached the limit of what I can endure. Finally!

My worst anomie

Casting about for things to do before the next version update comes around (15k for NW Apollyon and ABCs, go!), I first settled on taking a shot at Genbu.

Not much ado is made anymore about soloing Genbu, at least not after Genbu has been shown to be defeated by players using Chi Blast and offensive ninjutsu. Not unexpectedly, Genbu is handled more efficiently and more safely as a monk (when you have tools such as Boost and Chakra, you have to be shit-for-brains to get killed) than as a ninja (five hours to kill?!) or a black mage (no native, MP-free healing that allows you to leave Poisonga II untreated). But since I don't have monk leveled I decided to try my hand at Genbu with my black mage and get this crap done in under five hours.

While those other players may have been motivated primarily by vanity (vain enough to put some videos on Youtube, anyway), I was just fed up with other people who don't know how to return favors. Last time I checked, you don't need a tank when anyone can kite something that moves as slowly as Genbu does, and Genbu "only" has about 20,000 HP (from my estimation). Also, now that chocobo racing is my everyday source of income, I'm much more receptive to buying triggers (forget farming) even though in the case of Genbu I had to resign myself to taking a net gil loss given the value of the money drops. So ultimately I decided to take a shot at doing this on my own, after finding what I thought was an ok deal (relatively speaking) for a Winterstone (400k).

This thread on Killing Ifrit, which I consulted for planning, has a good overview of things to consider when soloing Genbu, but from a red mage perspective. In my case, as a black mage, I decided to forgo the safety net of cures from /RDM or /WHM and instead went with /NIN under the assumptions that I would never get hit by any direct-damage spell (including Waterga III) and that shadows could absorb any non-AoE spells for the sake of depleting Genbu's entire MP pool (thereby all but eliminating the risk of death after that point), save the MP gained from its auto-Refresh (enough for Drown at best).

The first assumption held. I had carried 12 Hi-Potions with me in case of an "emergency," but I ended up using a few just to offset the HP lost from poison. (I used 28 antidotes, to give an idea of how many stacks to carry.) But by the time I finally killed Genbu--1 hour, 45 minutes later--it was still casting the big nukes.

Still, were I to try this again actually, I think I would still sub ninja in exchange for the opportunity to sneak in a Thunder IV whenever Genbu casts Flood. I had intended to stick to a strict regimen of Bio II only for the sake of conserving MP. (My source of refresh was the Yigit set.) At 8 HP/tick for 120 seconds, Bio II should do about 320 damage from damage over time alone depending on whether the "ticks" occur at either end of the 120-second interval. But I also had 12x Yagudo Drinks with me (I could've brought more in retrospect) and I was getting frustrated with the pace, so I threw in a tier III or IV spell (paired with ES when available) whenever I felt I had an opportunity. In the end, I did 4,861 HP of direct damage (16 nukes), and ice-based nukes were resisted terribly compared to thunder-based ones (contrary to FFXIclopedia's article that claims Genbu is weak to ice), so sticking to Thunder IV seems to be best for the purposes of balancing MP efficiency and kill time.

Had I kited Genbu differently, I probably could've avoided using Stun at all for Waterga III. (I ended up using Stun 28 times; Genbu cast Waterga III 43 times). From the monk video (which I saw after I killed Genbu), note that waiting for Genbu to cast around the halfway point of the kiting path allows ample time to run away in case it casts Waterga III, and there is still enough room to run past Genbu when reversing direction.

Given the cost of obtaining the Genbu triggers, I definitely wouldn't solo Genbu again, but my success at killing Genbu this way emboldened me to take a shot at killing some lower-tier ZNMs on my own time with some combination of dot/kiting/nuking. Sprinter's Shoes, the only thing worth a damn from Campaign, are extremely handy for spawning and kiting some of these ZNMs to a safe location.

Unfortunately, the only ones that can actually be soloed in a reasonable time frame (read: less than 1 hour, 30 minutes maximum) are Brass Borer and Iriz Ima; they don't resist Poison II too often, and they move so slowly you even have time to cast nukes and get separation afterwards.

But to get to Iriz Ima, a "tier 2" ZNM, the only tier 1 ZNM I could actually solo is Cheese Hoarder Gigiroon, which is immune to poison, has about 15,000 HP, and runs at normal speed. Without any realistic opportunity to get any nukes off (no Herald's Gaiters), I had to rely almost exclusively on Bio II for damage, so you can see how tedious that would be. Once is enough for me.

Yes, I'm really scraping the bottom of the barrel for things to do. It'll probably be weeks, months, if at all, before I find a competent group (that I don't loathe) to fight a tier 3 ZNM using the Apple Green Seal I obtained. The real challenge in FFXI has always been to befriend motivated, knowledgeable players as opposed to running into do-nothing chickenshits all the time.