No, I actually did mean the OAT GS, which I admit I did forget many of the trials involved, and was not taking it all into account at the time. Though its not really that bad, the trials are all easy except for Krab shells, and even that is not to bad if you have a few friends or buy the Abyssites.

NM camping trials, thats 3 trials at 3 kills each, say they each take an average of 1 hour and 30 minutes, that means 13 hours roughly.

Kill trials are Plants and Ladybugs, I myself did the plants by joining a FC in Altepa, Mandragoras made it fly by, then the Ladybugs, and they were done in a party with other DRKs who were doing the same thing, so teaming up seems like a viable option, seeing as they were people I had never met before. So I say this takes probably 6 hours total if you do it with some assistance.

Krab Shells are easy to obtain if you do not have to bad of luck, or if you have friends. I myself had friends who were doing VNMs for Emps at the time, and they let me have their Blue Abyssites, so it went by much faster in my case. On average when doing it with my other character I got about 1 pop every 2 hours, so 10 hours for the full trial.

The Bee and Mikey take a few hours since you have to wait for them to repop, but with a THF and WHM you can kill them both in about 1 hour to finish the bee and another 2 hours for Mikey's Nuggets.

Souls can take some time, but if you can get some friends or a party together for Bastion then you will be fine, even solo some jobs can do it in about 5 fights or less, if you win 3 runs you should be finished with that alone so about a hour at least, at most I can not see it taking more than 3 hours unless you are soloing it on a job which is bad at it, or you simply get screwed by the event itself.

Shades should be finished in no time, most people have tons of Dom points from NMs, parties, and more, so this is fairly trivial, I honestly can not estimate the time needed because I never personally have tried to farm these points myself.

Mirrors and Sand can be bought from Bazaars, two Dyna runs should buy all of them you need, so I say 4 hours for this.



So a total of about 40 hours, less than two days to do it. My estimation was way off, I admit, but its still not that bad really. The point of my post in either case was to point out that the OAT is not a ton of work by compare to going through VW, where on average you would have to kill Ig-Alima 1000 times. Assuming you gathered together a party within 30 minutes, and only took a hour from that time to do 6 kills, it would take you about 250 hours, a full 10 and a half days of fighting Ig-Alima non-stop, to get the sword. The OAT would be a much preferred option, I doubt anyone would rather go through VW than to do the 40 hours worth of work involved in an OAT.