NidhoggEX farm parties / EX Primal farms in general

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Especially for something like Zurvan, if my co-healer and I are busting our backsides trying to push out as much DPS as possible pre-Soar, and we see it anyway because "I'ma ice mgae lulz!" wants to sit there and do nothing? Yeah. No. I'm not carrying him to a bird, because you know, you KNOW, that everyone else will have terrible rolls, that derp is going to win it, and immediately leave the farm party. I have lost too many birds and ponies to people that can't do DPS, can't tank, can't heal, can't stay on a platform or do mechanics, I'm done. All I need is the Zurvan bird, and I'm not watching it to go another terrible player after countless runs where I carried them. If that makes me a jerk, than so be it.

Funny story about "those players." A group had a LOLgoon who kept making mistakes and lo and behold the bird drops. The guy passed immediately and said in chat he won't touch the bird until he survives the entire fight. Don't think I've ever been so shocked.

[Watachy]

Funny story about "those players." A group had a LOLgoon who kept making mistakes and lo and behold the bird drops. The guy passed immediately and said in chat he won't touch the bird until he survives the entire fight. Don't think I've ever been so shocked.

Screen or fake !

This guys is the real MVP !

[Arutan]

Ehh, yes and no. Chances are, people wouldn't keep doing old extremes if they weren't unsync-able later on. Granted, a part of me almost thinks that would be a good thing. Or at least lock the pigeons behind synced runs.

People only do it for mounts, so wheter it is synced or unsynced, people will keep doing it until they got the mount and stop after that, so unsynced just contribute to kill the difficulty.

[Texa]

Funny story about "those players." A group had a LOLgoon who kept making mistakes and lo and behold the bird drops. The guy passed immediately and said in chat he won't touch the bird until he survives the entire fight. Don't think I've ever been so shocked.

I did that when the Sophia bird dropped on my clear and the person who coached me through the fight managed to get it. It made me smile.

[LineageRazor]

Especially for something like Zurvan, if my co-healer and I are busting our backsides trying to push out as much DPS as possible pre-Soar, and we see it anyway because "I'ma ice mgae lulz!" wants to sit there and do nothing? Yeah. No. I'm not carrying him to a bird, because you know, you KNOW, that everyone else will have terrible rolls, that derp is going to win it, and immediately leave the farm party. I have lost too many birds and ponies to people that can't do DPS, can't tank, can't heal, can't stay on a platform or do mechanics, I'm done. All I need is the Zurvan bird, and I'm not watching it to go another terrible player after countless runs where I carried them. If that makes me a jerk, than so be it.

Be fair. I'm guessing you've never run into an actual "ice mage" in a Zurvan farm, someone whose DPS is low because they CHOOSE to have low DPS. People who farm want to succeed at the farm. They actually DO try to succeed. No, these players have low DPS for other reasons; perhaps because they haven't been able to gear up to the point where skipping Soar becomes possible (believe it or not, there's a LOT of players out there who can only log on for a few hours each week, and for whom capping tomestones on a weekly basis is a pipe dream), or their DPS is under par because they don't know the best ways to maintain their rotations while avoiding damage (this game barely teaches rotations at all, let alone OPTIMAL rotations - and certainly doesn't teach the tricks you can use to maintain DPS even while dodging aoes), or they just plain don't have the reaction time that other players do (whether due to outside things such as server latency, or just the fact that different humans have different reaction times since humans are different from one another).

These players come into the instance with the expectation that they don't need to be the best of the best to successfully farm the content. And, as a matter of fact, they're RIGHT. The content is designed to be winnable, even if the players are not decked out in the finest gear and pixel-perfect in their mastery of their jobs. The trouble with Zurvan is that by making Soar skippable, a very clear and obvious bar was set for DPS requirements, and that bar is MUCH higher than your typical casual player is capable of. So, after the World's First tier players flattened the content never even SEEING first-phase Soar, they dismissed the instance as easy. This gave Zurvan an unfortunate reputation of being a cakewalk, which it only is if you can regularly skip Soar. Far too many folks got into the mindset that if you can't skip Soar, you can't farm.

I've farmed Zurvan a fair amount (still no bird), and not once have I EVER seen Soar skipped in a pick-up party. Not ever. And this wasn't because players weren't trying to succeed, or hoping the rest of the group could do it without them - in fact, most such players have handled the actual Soar mechanic quite well. Players genuinely looking for a "carry" are not nearly as common as folks like to say they are. Rather, these folks are looking for an excuse to exclude the players that don't meet their expectations by pretending that they're being bad on purpose, or out of laziness. "It's not me that's being a jerk for excluding low-dps players - it's the low-dps players who are being jerks because they're not even TRYING to be good-dps, so therefore I'm justified in excluding them!" It's much easier to feel self-righteous when you can pretend that the guy you're stepping on deserves it!

[Neophyte]

As much as people hate to acknowledge it, a lot of the time the dropouts are because people are using a parser andthey notice X player not performing to their personal standard of DPS for X player's job. Thus, they drop out because in their eyes, their time is being wasted by that player's lack of "proper" DPS.

You don't need a parser for that.

A group which neither skips the first dive phase nor the tower phase is not a real farm group.

That simple.

One reason I only do kill groups is that farm groups are usually not above kill group level of skill.

Farm groups are min-max grounds and I can't stay people doing inferior rotations even after 15 runs, because they can't be bothered to improve.
People after 15 clears still act like headless chicken when fang&claw starts.
Tanks who not stack Niddhog on the red tower (or the adds) even after a dozen kills make me cry.
Healers not attacking after 15 kills, but rather doing cumulated 2 mins nothing.

No, thanks. That's ok for a kill group, but farm is 'for quick, optimized kills". You don't need a parser to recognize a real 'farm group'. You only need to know what clear time to expect of a proper group.


And if you're not good enough in a farm group join kill groups!!! Again, again and again, until you feel like you're capable of carrying worse people.
Then you are ready for farm.

[Neophyte]

This is also the biggest problem.
Just having one kill (aka no bonus) doesn't make you ready to join a farm group.

[Chalbee]

Another factor is Stormblood. In just over a month from now, people can do all the bird farming they fancy unsynced. So a lot are likely not putting up with even slight mistakes now since it'll be faceroll soon.

I...didn't even think about this, but yeah this probably makes a difference.

[Sepix]

in fact, most such players have handled the actual Soar mechanic quite well.

I agree with you here. I honestly have never seen a group get wrecked by soar. Some people seem to have trouble with the second pattern but you usually still get through it even if 1-2 people die, especially during the first one that everybody wants to skip. From Soar to the ad phase all you do is run around the boss 1 time. You barely even need to heal. There is plenty of time of recover even if you still have dead people during the ad phase because the time limit on those is more than generous as well.

The thing that destroys people are the tethers. Not because they suddenly make the fight so much harder, since you still move in the exact same way as before but because of the movement delay between players on the screen. I have seen this a million times. 2 players run to the same meteor, then both try to run over, then both stop, and then both start to panic. The true difficulty with zurvan in random groups comes from the game engine itself and not necessarily from player skill.

[RokkuEkkusu]

As one who has all birds, here's my perspective on some party patterns:

In Zurvan Extreme, when Soar does happens, most farm parties I've been in can handle the mechanic for the most part. The main problems occur after the ultimate. Either someone gets clipped by Southern Cross, panic during Broken Seal, and/or get knocked out from the aoe attack after Broken Seal. As a result, it will make handling the next Broken Seal much tougher as at least one person will NOT have a debuff necessary to survive being in a meteor circle.

Oh, did I mention I see people still get knocked out from Soar even with Tank LB2.


For Nidhogg Extreme, people usually panic during the first Soul Tether after being spread out so far from each others, or during the Sable Price patterns.


In Thordan Extreme, most of the problems happen during the towers/aoes in KoTR 2 and the Dragoon in the outer part of the arena during KoTR 3. The Dragoon in the outer part of the arena during KoTR 3 is the one that pushes party members off the stage with a straight line aoe with no indicator.