nyzul isle floor 60!

nyzul isle assault still remains one of my favorite activities. i do spend half the night muttering under my breath about the melee's apparent lack of concern for their hp. (the other half i just swear at them as i try to catch up to heal them before they blood aggro or succumb to something far far away from me.) i'm not knocking our melee cause they are excellent about making sure stuff dies fast. nyzul is just challenging for me as a RDM healer.

i am forever saying RDM can heal as well as WHM but in reality, events like nyzul isle assault really highlight a RDM's weakness as a healer. i know my limitations there so i can play around them but i still want a bigger mp pool (i'm usually in the 900-700mp range), cure V for a less enmity big cure, more curaga's to cycle through, and higher level regens to mitigate damage incurred because of the long timer on erase. and /cry for divine veil and stona. i also wish you could merit down the erase timer. but oh well, i do what i can and it is usually enough.

enough healer whining! last night we had some fun on our way to floor 60. it all started off when we got a kill the leader who turned out to be a frog. while tulaq makes a really cute frog (even loren thinks so!) he is probably the absolute worst person to have charmed. actually our whole setup is kinda sucky for charming mobs cause everyone has shadows, making them difficult to sleep. but froggie tuly is fast and mandau's poison is actually really potent, so he made quick work out of loren. then the froggie leader killed me. and then froggie enna killed az.

the froggie madness was followed by an evil lamp floor with imps that resulted in another loren death. but we did get our first ever free floor! and we were able to complete our climb from floor 45 to 60 in just 3 tags.

our first floor 60 boss was the khimaira who looks like a big flying lion (i'll post pictures another day). khimaira was not too bad for our group considering we don't have a WHM and it does have a cone aoe pertify. az brought a cleric drink which is divine veil + status removal which worked great for the first attack. after that, well, the WAR's were just stoned for most of the fight. tulaq would trick attack on them so hate stayed on them preventing him for getting stoned and me and az from getting killed from healing. it worked pretty well and we were able to kill khimaira with little problem. loren got himself a nice pair of askar hands!

i was unable to land enfeebles on khimaira with my errant gear. i didn't have a chance to check if i could land stuff on him with my enfeebling set because i was just too busy to swap gear around alot. i am always hesitant to wear my non errant gear in situations like this cause i do build enmity alot faster in my enfeebling set. and due to how my macros are set up (ie my refusal to cast enfeebles in enfeebling gear unless i have to), i end up healing at least a little in my enfeebling set. i will have to work that out maybe.

our second floor 60 boss was cerebus. and we lost to him. i think alot of our difficulty came from giving him too much tp which caused him to use alot of tp moves. i know we don't have a choice but to use melee vs cerebus since he is immune to elemental magic but i still feel tp moves were what got us. the one that devastated us was his stoneskin move which cannot be dispelled. (i read it couldn't be dispelled but i tried anyway and its true.) it really cut down our damage output which besides making the fight take a long time also caused hate issues for me. this version of cerebus has flame spikes which do about 18 damage through barfira cast with a decent amount of enhancing gear (i could probably spring for an enhancing torque and reduce the damage to 17). 3 double attacking WARs and a triple attacking THF take a lot of damage with each attack. so there is alot of curaga casting here. since WAR hold hate primarily through damage and cerebus's stoneskin really killed their damage output for extended periods of time, you can see where we ran into hate problems. i rarely pull hate unintentionally and i couldn't avoid pulling hate twice during this fight. once i was kinda behind cerebus, so that was awesome fun!

i think having loren come as PLD/NIN next time would help some with the hate and tp spammage. i know its not the optimal job for the climb up but i can't see another solution for cerebus. i cannot heal less, so we need a way to generate more hate during the stoneskin phases and PLD is our best option. unless we had brought another healer to split hate. but i don't think that's a good plan for the climb since it significantly reduces our ability to do damage. so i guess my thoughts are stuck on loren coming as PLD/NIN.

i think we are fine on khimaira if a few people bring cleric drinks just in case we run short on time and can't afford to have 3 people stoned at the same time. the stoned part really was handled well

i think hydra is the hardest of the 3 floor 60+ bosses and we've yet to fight him. i do want to point out that he does have aoe poison for 20hp/tick so everyone should be carrying antidotes for assault from here on out. outside of that, i am not sure what to expect. other than lots of status effects.

anyway, that's my assault update. i'll post pictures and spruce the whole thing up a bit later!