CoP 3-5: Diabolos.



This fight is a bigger joke than the quality of that picture above. The reason for which is that we beat it on our first trial run without trying so I naturally wasn't taking many pics. If this BC isn't having it's difficulty "adjusted" by Square as I type this I would be very, very suprised. I think this has to be the lowest ebb the Promathia missions have reached for me thus far as this was neither a challenge nor particularly fun. When you do all that annoying prep work, which involves a trip up to the Cradle of Rebirth, you expect more than this. I guess looking back over the video we did get somewhat lucky only taking one Nightmare but I still fail to see how we could've lost even with the half-assed attempt we made. I think around the fifty percent mark it dawned on us just how stupid this fight was which prompted Ethan to announce what we were all thinking and to go all out. He does attack really fast and hit's a decently equipped Paladin for around 70 damage so be sure to stick Slow on him and Elegy if you're stupid enough to take a Bard. I strongly suggest taking a Paladin for this as recomending a Ninja or Warrior would be mere equivocation on my part. We all know how each of the game's tanks work by now and it would be kind of tough for either of the latter two to keep hate well when they have Bio on. Then there's Nightmare and Sleepga to contend with, eradicating Utsusemi and carving through their inferior defence... just go with a Paladin. I suggest one person take some Poison Potions to counteract the effects of Sleepga. Poison will not wake you from Nightmare but I have a theory that I'm basing from our entire one attempt at this battle. I feel that you will awake from Nightmare once you have taken a certain amount of damage, naturally from the Bio III that it inflicts upon you. However, I woke up rather hastily after taking Nightmare and was the only person in our party with Bio III and poison on. Coincidence? Who knows, I doubt anyone is going to want to find out but it's something to bare in mind I guess. The other move he did a lot on us was Ultimate Terror that can drain any of the seven main stats but will only take between two and five from each of you at a time. How derogatory this is I don't know because I didn't check and whether or not he gains the stats from you is unknown to me. The fact that it says "drained" and the difference in damage he was taking leads me to believe that he does indeed get buffed from them. Whether or not they can be dispelled off of him is, again, oblivious to me. Dispelling seven buffs off of him seems about as efficient as Erasing our thirty debuffs though. Aside from Sleep II, Sleepga, Bio II and Blind being his spells, Camisado is a painful and potentially dangerous move to take. It will hit for around 150-200 damage and knock you back, very bad if the tiles are down. Infact when I countered his only Nightmare with Curaga II, consequently getting raped, he did Camisado on me and I should've fell to my arachnoidal death but didn't thanks to FFXI being a gitchy piece of shit. I strongly suggest learning which tiles will drop before going into this fight as they're the same at all times. We just piled onto the far right tile and made sure we all had our back to the wall. No matter where you are Nightmare is going to hit the whole battle field so the convenience of only needing to do a single curaga outweighs the potential extra stats the mages might be needlessly giving him.

CoP 4-2: Ouryu.



Now this fight is a joke, only not in the "haha" Diabolos sense but "holy shit this is impossible" sense. I really think someone at Square was having some fun hierarchically juxtaposing quite possibly the easiest BC with arguably one of the hardest. It's tragic really that the single thing making the battle with Ouryu hard can be avoided by doing one long arduous quest. When Ouryu flies, which he will do with agonizing frequency, the fun really begins as his earth based attack starts nailing your Paladin for 240 damage per hit. And that's if you get lucky. He likes to do a really friendly move up there called Ocher Blast that will drive your entire party from full to red in the blink of an eye. When we finally beat this battle with our tactic nailed down, two hours ready and items plentiful we had to wait two hours after our intial attempt to try again for our eventual win thanks to Ocher Blast. We were obliterating him, everything going to plan then bam, Apoc dead and everyone in red, scattered about the picturesque plateau way too much for a Curaga or Benediction. Our tactic was tight and it had to be because we decided that spending ten hours to get five Hyppograth Tails for a single Mistmelt wasn't going to happen. Our tactic was built around dealing with his aeronautical fetish and quite simply would have been impossible without dual Ranger's Shadowbind. Reading a composite tactic will only go so far for this battle, it's all about building your own and dying till it's perfected. Other than the moves I've mentioned, he has a few others he will do rarely such as Slowga and Absolute Terror. Terror really sucks as the Paladin is pretty much the one who is going to take it and kiting becomes hard while your Paladin is standing on one leg with his Sword in his face. We only saw Absolute Terror once in all our attempts and I honestly don't recall seeing Slowga done at all. When he flies up he will do a move called "Take off" that will do about 100-200 damage and, again, the same level of damage when he lands with "Touch Down". Neither are anywhere near as bad as they were made out to be in all the crap I read before doing this mission. It's also worth noting that Ouryu will give up when he reaches 30% HP and will use Invincible very early on, probably around 85%. Part of our tactic was to exploit this and force him to Invincible early on while flying by using Garuda's Astral Flow. By doing this we could just bind him on the spot for the entire duration and not have to deal with it. Oh and lastly he will always do a fastcast Stonskin as soon as you engage him so be sure the first thing on the agenda is Dispel/Finale. I won't be suprised if the means to aquire Mistmelts is made easier to nerf the sheer difficulty of this BC.

I have a video of our Diabolos battle, one of us losing valiently to Ouryu and one of us beating him, all curtosy of Linaaa. The server they're on is bad and simply cannot take others downloading them so I can't make them available sadly. If anyone can give a chunk of good server space that would be awesome but for now if anyone wants these just grab me over AiM and I'll gladly send. You'll have to be able to stomach pretentious crap on the last one and funky dance music on all of them. I can quite comfortably say that seeing these videos will help you win, I know seeing Mushi's videos did it for me.

CoP 4-3: Sacrarium.



Never going to forget doing this mission for as long as I live. Ignoring everything else for a second, Keremet's room is preceded by two parallel corridors each with six NM Skeletons in them. I really cannot believe that ALL OF US were naive enough to think that this wouldn't happen. It was funny as hell, I must've been laughing non-stop while looking for a comfortable place to die. We were really lucky that we managed to raise up and get to our sanctuary before the true sight Stegosaurs repopped or the Fomor's smelt our freshly unweakened blood. My weakness actually dropped right in the middle of the six idle Skeleton NM's in the hall and they didn't agro me. They also didn't link once we had recovered and began slaughtering them (yes, I'm aware undead don't link but a group of six NM's that react to you fighting the boss in a pact could have special properties.) and that really is a key word as they have less than 500 HP each. Really, really weak to the point where you could risk pulling Keremet then doing a strong ~ga spell or Astral Flow as they come running. Once you kill the Skeleton NM's you have twenty minutes before they repop which is plenty of time to kill Keremet. The Stegosaurs are sixteen minute repops and can see and agro you through the door so be careful. Apocalypse actually pulled Keremet while dancing around them so it's more than possible to do. The fight with Keremet was really tough, especially with our firepower being two Rangers nerfed against him and it really went to the wire but we eventually prevailed for the most importent item we need. We went and viewed the cutscene before finishing for the night. Not sure how we're going tackle the next NM we need to kill in there to finish the mission and Chapter four with only the one party. It was "strongly recomended" that we do even this part with an alliance but we didn't and still managed it so I'm sure we'll do just fine here too. I believe we need another Choral key because of a fuck up we made opening the door last time but I'm thinking of setting my Fomor hate to zero before going in then curing from outside the party. I could go pop the NM from the ??? for us then run for the hills without any agro from the Fomors. Or we could just wipe out the room I guess. I'm pretty sceptical about this Fomor hate resetting thing so it's something I need to hurry up and test. We were planning to hook up with Stormos' group to do this mission but decided to just go on with ourselves when realising we'd have to contend with timezones from Hawaii to Sweden.

Started at 16:25 and now finished at 20:05. I should get paid for this shit >.>