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.