AV Developers Strategy

[Alhanelem]

You two are ignorant as the ZNM developpers themselves said you can avoid astral flow.

Uh, no, to my recollection they never said this. Even if there is a way, since he only does it at set times and does it contiously til the group is dead, people just accepted that you have to die each time. I don't see anything wrong with an NM for which death is a requirement.

[Leonlionheart]

I was under the impression it could be done fairly easily zerg style with Alexander soulvoice BRDs and a ton of WARs?

Maybe that was just hearsay.

[Sparthos]

I was under the impression it could be done fairly easily zerg style with Alexander soulvoice BRDs and a ton of WARs?

Maybe that was just hearsay.

We're talking cap when the content was relevant and at its peak.

Pretty sure any group of competent DD can just run in under an Alexander and clean house.

[Kyte]

Uh, no, to my recollection they never said this. Even if there is a way, since he only does it at set times and does it contiously til the group is dead, people just accepted that you have to die each time. I don't see anything wrong with an NM for which death is a requirement.

Actually I do recall them saying something about the Astral Flow, but I think they were just referring to having someone sac it.

[TybudX]

BLU/THF was better against PW due to not suffering from double weakness.

Also, I know at least one group was able to hold AV indefinitely at level 75. It required pretty much perfectly geared Aegis PLDs idling in mdt/mdb/int gear, but it could be done. The problem was that no amount of heavy DDs were able to damage it fast enough while surviving Meteor. Even combining two of the best geared LSs in the game at the time they didn't have enough relics to throw at it.

Alexander was released shortly before the level 80 cap raise, if I remember correctly. The idea was there to use heavily buffed WARs in combination with PD to kill AV within the 90 second time limit, but the server merges had happened by this time. Neither LS had the active membership to pull off the fight (3 alliances plus rotating buffers) by this time since one LS had moved to a different server in order to be more active in HNMs. Shortly after the 80 cap increase a member of the first LS who had been leading the push to defeat AV moved servers and joined what had been Volume, recently merged with another LS in order to have more active members. Shortly after that they recorded their first 'legit' AV WAR kill, using the super-secret tech of DNCs and SMNs that is now well known.

Maybe other groups were doing similar things around that time, but to my knowledge Failure's group was the first to pull it off.

[Hashmalum]

I would like to know this too, while PD has made it doable, I highly doubt that was how we were supposed to deal with meteor, it would be nice to at least have a hint as to how we were to mitigate damage from that, on the same note, I don't think we're supposed to include dying as a strategy for PW and wonder if there's a way to mitigate the last form as well. Hell, while I'm at it, I wonder if other HNMs have hidden factors to their behavior that we just never figured out and just worked around.

Old dynamis relic fragment NMs had some sort of complicated system to determine their "mood" and whether they would Warp out and end the fight or not. The developers at some point mentioned a long, long list of things that could affect it. We never figured it out and never cared; they just got zerged down. About the only part that was understood was that using the appropriate relic WS helped.

why would they decide to make AV pop 100% instead of 10% of the time after JoL if AV couldn't be defeated? that's like killing JoL inflicting a doom timer on the whole alliance.

Because players asked for it. Which of course proves nothing either way, as it isn't as if it they haven't screwed us with our own requests before.

I'm kind of curious myself about whatever AV's secret is, but if they want to jerk us around with more obscure hints, or they decide to do some BS like release the secret but make AV harder to "compensate", then to hell with it.

[Schrute]

THROW US A BONE ALREADY

[Sureal]

bone was thrown, suck less

kthxbai

[Anethia]

The way I look at it, AV was never supposed to be defeated by just anyone. AV was the ultimate boss of CoP: FFXI. Every FF game has had that ultimate boss fight that was never really intended for the main storyline, it was just a test of dedication and skill. FFVII had the Emerald and Ruby Weapons (part of the story but not necessary fights), FFVIII had Ultima and Omega, FFIX had Osmus and so on and so forth. They were that additional challenge which was supposed to encourage the player to explore everything, obtain every item, gain every skill. Unless you did these things, it was nearly impossible to beat the hardest boss's of the game.

This was the same with Absolute Virtue (and his ToAU equivalent Pandemonium Warden). Unless you were willing to spend the time and effort necessary to obtain the best of the best gear, and learn every possible strategy, you weren't meant to beat them.

If you think about the AV fight as a whole, its kind of like an alliance version Maat. He has his own attacks he does, even when he's mimicing the job you use. But he forces you to play the job with all of your abilities. AV was the same way, but with a small twist. In most situations job's use their 2hr's as emergency measures to survive damaging attacks or take the mob down faster, against AV you had to use the proper 2hr to lock his and keep him from using it again. This meant that linkshells couldn't just go with select jobs they prefer'd to run with.

As an example, you could do entire dynamis runs without some the original 15 jobs and still win (you didn't have to have a brd, drk, mnk, etc). While fighting AV you needed to have all 15 jobs available to lock his 2hr's. That was the point of SE releasing that "hint" video. It was pretty much SE saying, "you're doing it wrong if you only run with certain jobs rather than all of them. If you really want to win, learn how to utilize all of the jobs".

Long Story short: Unless you were willing to accept that every job had a use, AV couldn't be defeated.

[SpankWustler]

Maybe I'm remembering something incorrectly, but wasn't successfully locking Absolute Virtue's 2-hours based just as much on guessing correctly and using OnEvent (or something similar), as any palpable strategy?