My PM6-4 Experience as a Paladin

[DakAttack]

I have yet to get past Omega, but I'd like to share my findings anyways. I've met A LOT of resistence while trying to do this as a Paladin, and it's getting to the point where people are just being ignorant. People have completed this with a single Paladin tank in the past, people have completed this with a single Ninja in the past, and people have completed it with a mix of either/or in the past. Putting money into this does make it easier, but that's lame.

First run: Pld, Whm, Rdm, Blm, War, Rng

The mammet strategy here is very nice, and frankly I can't see a Ninja doing it as well as a Paladin. The tactic is the Paladin kites the mammets where they start back and forth from East to West while a White Mage heals them. The rest of the party pulls one off after the other until they're all dead. Mammets don't change targets until they're engaged so it's relatively safe and easy. This goes perfectly.

Omega is where all our problems come together. There's just not enough MP in the world, unless you're downing ethers over and over, to keep a Paladin alive. If possible it's smart to have your Rdm avoid using Convert late in the mammet fight. Debuffs land pretty easily; Paralyze, Blind, and Slow being the most important. His hits have an added effect of Stun, which lasts up to five seconds, and he has an ability that stuns people in the immediate area which can stack with the other stun. As time wears on he begins to hit faster and faster. I'm fairly decked out as a Paladin and I'm being hit for 150-200 damage regularly. We wipe because they run out of MP while he's at 40%.

Second Run: Pld, Whm, Rdm, Blm, War, Rng

Same strategy as above, flawless, but we run into the same problems with Omega. He can chain stun Paladins make it difficult, not impossible, but difficult to heal. His attack speed also makes it a challenge. White Mage and Warrior have to leave.

Third Run: Pld, Nin, Whm, Rdm, Blm, Rng

It was decided the Ninja should kite the mammets and I should pull them off and tank them. Doesn't go well, the Ninja dies and we wipe.

Fourth Run: Pld, Nin, Whm, Rdm, Blm, Rng

See above.

Fifth Run: Pld, Nin, Whm, Rdm Blm, Rng

I'm kiting now, and it's flawless. I'm perfect at it, I've mastered it, whatever. We get to Omega and we actually do really well. We're able to bounce hate off of each other pretty effectively. Sometimes the Ninja had trouble recasting shadows due to Omega's fast attack speed. She took a lot of damage and soaked up a lot of unnecessary MP. Near the end, at about 11% HP, he chain stunned the both of us and managed to take us both down. We reraise, and it's decided they're going to attack again while I'm still weakened. The White Mage and Ninja can't hold it together and we wipe again right as I come out of my weakened status.

Result: Paladins can tank this just fine, but it is very beneficial to have that second tank Ninja. Shadows are extremely useful in avoiding the Stun from his normal attacks, but sometimes it's impossible to get more shadows back up while he chain stuns you, which is where the Paladin comes in. The Paladin can take the hits that need to be taken while the Ninja recovers. As long as you have that Rdm, Whm, Blm, and competant DD backing you up you'll be fine. Unfortunately the Whm and Nin weren't competant and couldn't stick it out so we ended up splitting.

I havn't been able to see two Ninjas go at it, but I imagine they might share the same problems as Paladins, being unable to recover from a bad stun. Ninjas can avoid a lot of damage, but if that stun lock hits them they'll go down fast. Paladins will take most of the hits, but they eat stun locks with relative ease since they're able to take the hits in the first place. Having two tanks is a nice plan because you've got two Provokes to use when the damage dealers get a little bit more intense.

I'll update more once I get to/beat Ultima if that ever happens. At this point it's my opinion that it's good to have both because they compliment each other well in this battle.

[Jei]

Re: My PM6-4 Experience as a Paladin

do you think adding a BRD, or have rdm sub brd will help with the MP problem? Or are there any particular sub job needed for Rdm?

[neighbortaru]

Re: My PM6-4 Experience as a Paladin

check Russta's livejournal. he did it with a PLD tank.

[DakAttack]

Re: My PM6-4 Experience as a Paladin

check Russta's livejournal. he did it with a PLD tank.

Thanks, I'll check that out.

do you think adding a BRD, or have rdm sub brd will help with the MP problem? Or are there any particular sub job needed for Rdm?

I heard from a friend, who was actually our first Whm and came up with the mamment tanking strat, that Bards are very useful for this fight. I'm not up to date with every song Bards have, but he told me that they have a few that increase your parry and evasion rates. He claimed he was able to tank Omega as a Samurai because he pulled too much hate, and he was able to evade or parry a lot of his attacks.

With a Bard you'd lose a few useful debuffs, but gain a few more usefull buffs. Doube Ballad might be more useful for a Paladin, as well as the parry and evasion songs. Evasion is very useful here, and Bat Earrings are a very nice source of it. Equip both and you'll get +30 evasion while blind, and stacks of blinding potions are usually cheap and last from about three to five minutes.

[UnnamedGalka]

Re: My PM6-4 Experience as a Paladin

Yes, having a BRD is extremely useful for this mission, and not just for the usual double Ballad for the mages. Double Mambo for your tank is an absolute godsend. My first time through this mission I played BRD, and with those two songs stacked, our NIN tank became an evasion demon. The Mammets, Omega, and Ultima all had one hell of a time managing to even scratch him.

With a Bard you'd lose a few useful debuffs

Yeah, if you replace the RDM with a BRD, you lose Dia, Slow, Paralyze, Blind and other useful enfeebles...but even so, a NIN can make up for some of those lost enfeebles with his various Ninjitsu, and you'll have Carnage Elegy and Magic Finale at your disposal.


And for a personal story, I think my most interesting run happened a little while back. My LS was on our fifth static through COP, and on the day of this mission, the guy who was heading the static couldn't make it, but the static wanted to try anyway. The leader had already completed COP and entrusted me to help the static if ever he wasn't available.

Unfortunately, the WHM was on a time schedule, and that gave me no room to mule any gear. I barely had time to buy medicines and other things I needed off the AH as it was. Not only was I forced to go as a second WHM (as that was the job I had the most level 60 gear for on me at the time), but I was also asked to sub NIN. The original plan was for the 4 melee to each solo a Mammet in the beginning, taking them to separate corners of the ship, with the RDM keeping the fifth Mammet busy by Bind-kiting it. The WHM was to stand in the middle of the ship and toss heals as needed.

Well, with the static leader (a WAR) out of the picture, none of the melee felt comfortable tanking two Mammets. They knew I had experience with soloing as a WHM, so they asked me to sub NIN and tank the extra Mammet. With just Utsusemi: Ichi at my disposal, I wasn't sure I could do it, but I went along with it anyway. I felt really gimp in just my WHM AF, duel weilding a Time Hammer and a Holy Maul +1.

The actual Mammet fight went a lot smoother than I thought, though. I buffed up before engaging, of course. Hit the Mammet with Dia II, Paralyze, and Slow...Silenced it when I saw it pull out a staff...recasted Utsusemi and Stoneskin as they went down, healed myself when needed...Brainshaker for Stun plus (crap) damage, or Moonlight for (crap) MP refresh whenever I had the TP I actually held my own against my Mammet before the other melee started finishing off their Mammets and came to help me.

The rest of the mission was rough, mostly due to our quirky PT setup...we wiped once to Omega, but we still beat the mission, polishing off Ultima with everyone in red health and about 7 minutes left on the clock.

Oh yes, and our tank for that mission was a PLD. He did OK. For anyone who's curious, the PT setup was PLD/WAR, BST/NIN, DRG/NIN, RDM/BLM, WHM/SMN, and WHM/NIN. Yeah, I wasn't kidding when I said our setup was quirky. I really don't think we could've done it without the CCB Polymers and Benediction.

[DakAttack]

Re: My PM6-4 Experience as a Paladin

Just went on another few runs, this time I managed to procure an Evasion set up. I had a Scorpian Harness, two Bat Earrings, Wind staff, some level fifties evasion headband, and Jack-o-Lanterns. All in all I had +67 evasion, and it did seem to have a noticable effect. Unfortunately it wasn't enough, but I feel this time it was more the players creating the challenge than the game. Anybody who says Omega has bad evasion must have fought him on some certain day, because this thing is pretty accurate.

With an Evasion set up I took a lot less damage from the Mammets. The same tanking strategy works wonders every time, but I usually get hit more than 75 times before we're done, and this time I never got hit more than 50. This is definately the easiest part.

Omega still proved to be a giant problem. It's extremely hard to keep hate using a staff, and backwards tanking to avoid Counter makes it worse. The healer MUST ALWAYS have Paralyna on hand, because all your hate keeping abilities are on long timers and will reset if it's stopped by paralyze. Luckily, flash wont reset its timer if interuppted through paralyze. Our problem the first run was a Whm that dropped a Curaga II right at the beginning for some reason. The second time we wiped at 40%, reraise up and get ready, then it goes sour again. It starts off with a Missile Volley from the other side of the ship, then moves in close to finish me off. When I died the White Mage was at full MP. We gave up after that.


I'm definately getting closer to winning. It's extremely hard to do this with a pick-up party, so we're trying to convince people we trust to help out. Even with a Ninja, this is something the entire party has to be 100% into.

[Jei]

Re: My PM6-4 Experience as a Paladin

I just did this BC second run yesterday.

my set up for both runs were
Rdm(me) Blm Brd Nin Nin Drk

first run we went 0/4 Was so close to winning Omega on all tries.
on the 3rd and 4th tries we got omega down to 10% and 5%.
We didn't plan for wipe, so when omega killed us we couldn't get back up.

We discussed our strategy and thought our blm nuked too much, causing omega to run around making it difficult for everyone to cure and move around.
So on our 2rd trip, we only had our blm regen everyone, cure and stun. nothing else.
Only seal+ancient when omega got below 5%.

It worked out really well.
VS Omega I haste all fighters and brd sing 2 mambo.
VS Ultima, we have no erase so we have brd sing march+mambo instead. I haste fighters whenever they have no slow on them.
We won in 35 minutes, 0 wipes. only 1 death by omega, which was our drk ^^

On a side note, every battle I used many stacks of of mulsum (8 stacks on the last trip alone) so that's almost a million gil spent by me alone. And I had to buy 5 CCBs total for all those runs. I'm the only high level crafter (fishing+cooking) in our static so I wouldn't mind supporting everyone with some gil :O as long as it helps passing the BC.

[Icemage]

Re: My PM6-4 Experience as a Paladin

Medicines are absolutely essential to winning. I think my group used 3 Vile Elixir(PLD, PLD via bazaar transfer, WHM), 1 Vile Elixir+1 (PLD), a few super-ethers(SMN), a bunch of yagudo drinks and around 3 stacks of mulsum (WHM, PLD), plus some random stuff like echo drops (PLD) to win. PLD, RNG, SAM, BRD, WHM, SMN.

PLD weapon of choice here is Earth/Terra Staff, not Wind Staff. For a Ninja, evasion is king. For a Paladin, the -20% damage + 4/5 VIT is more effective.

You don't lose much if you have WHM + BRD vs. RDM. Only thing RDM offers that the WHM + BRD combination doesn't have is Gravity, which is a non-issue in this battle. WHM60 with AF1 body and the appropriate staves (Ice, Earth) can Paralyze and Slow both Omega and Ultima pretty reliably. With WHM you also get access to Viruna, Stona and Erase in this battle, but you need a smart WHM who knows what they're doing and can manage their MP while removing many, many different status effects.

Haste is very important on main tank vs. Omega, but it's mostly useless against Ultima since his Slow effect overrides Haste.


Icemage

[Jei]

Re: My PM6-4 Experience as a Paladin

oh a little more info. I didn't cast refresh at all. I saved all mp for other spells and everyone with mp just carry their own yagudo drinks.
after I spent all 8x12muslums I pop a pro ether. That was when ultima had around 30-40% HP left.
my MP then lasted enough until the end without a single convert.
I also wear full set of crows. I threw in quite a lot of cure 4 and curaga without pulling the omega/ultima to me.