Ancient Vows

[DakAttack]

I'll be doing Ancient Vows soon, the Riverne A01 part of CoP, and I was wondering if there were any specific strategies for beating the BCNM? I hear the best strategy involved dieing, which is a bummer, but if it works that would still be great. Anybody else have any other strats?

[katsuoy]

Re: Ancient Vows

Did this one last night, beat it in 22 minutes (30 minute time limit).

Out setup was RDM/NIN (me, kiter) - RDM/NIN (other kiter) - WHM/BLM - DRK/WAR - RNG/NIN - NIN/WAR (tank).

We totally overstocked on medicines (I used only 4 yag drinks and I think 2 yellow liquids), not sure about the rest, but not much was used. All I know is I spent a lot of time muling various pieces of gear and medicines after we were finished.

RDM's kite one Mammet each, while the rest beat up the first one. When the first Mammet died, we were pretty low on HP and MP, so we ran to the start of the BCNM and let the remaining 2 Mammets kill us (we all used reraise spells/potions/scrolls btw).

Reraised, healed up. Both RDM now kite one of the remaining Mammets, while the second Mammet is being killed. After that is done, we all jumped the last Mammet and whooped him silly.

Besides the intentional suicide, we had 3 deaths (4 if you count the NIN 2hour), one RDM (not me) and the WHM (died twice in a row, once after the first reraise due to bad luck).

What I did note (on my part), is that Gravity didn't stick all that often (20% of the time maybe). Bind on the other hand did better (about 80% stick rate). Silence/Slow/Blind had a good stickrate as well (90% maybe). Maybe I read it wrong, but I thought they were highly resistant to that.

Special note, because the entrance cut-scene is pretty long. We watched the scene, and left the BCNM, then re-entered again, making sure we had all the time for the fight.

If you have a solid group (did this as a static), who know how to communicate, this BCNM isn't that hard at all, but you need to keep your wits about you. All in all, in my opinion, the difficulty of this BCNM is highly overrated. The main ingredient is a group of SOLID players, who know what they are doing.

When you beat it, enjoy the cut-scenes. These are the best I have encountered in the game so far.

I forgot to upload my pictures I took, will add them later maybe when I get back from the office.

edit: I just noted the time of the original post. So might not be useful anymore to the original poster, but it might prove to be useful for anyone who still needs to do this.

[DakAttack]

Re: Ancient Vows

I'd like to add that the Epsilons start out as some sort of null job. When your kiters run in be sure they don't engage them because the null jobs don't have any sort of high damage -ga spells or abilities. Once they're engaged they CAN turn into a Blm and spam AE spells.

If you must engage them have the rest of the party fight around the very first room. You want as much distance as possible, ecspesially if you have a Summoner with you who plans on using Astral Flow.

The epsilons have an ability that absorbs all MP in a certain radius around it, so mages should stand as far away as possible. This can be a problem when you're trying to distance yourself from the kiters.

Paladins DO make great tanks here. That's what job I was. We had a ninja but he didn't do much tanking in the end. He helped here and there, but unless we had it stuck on Dragoon his shadows were torn apart. Warrior job attacks very quickly. Blm job spams AE attacks. When it was necessary I used Invincible so the Whm could use Benediction.