Turn 5 Downed by JP Group? Exploits or Legit?

[Xilrasis]

No offense to your Free Company, Xilrasis, as you do have a lot of our respect, Legacy of Sargatanas have beaten Modified to Turn 1 on 2013-08-31. I believe we've both completed Turn 2 on the same day 2013-09-04 (I think we'd actually need the time of day to figure that one out) and you've overtaken us on Turn 4 as that is for sure 100% your world second record. We're not very active on the Lodestone forums as we tend to keep to ourselves mostly, but I only speak to correct you mostly as a matter of personal pride as a member in the Free Company to which I belong.

Thank you for correcting me on those. I can understand the pride associated with those achievements (obviously!) -- I'll happily modify Caduceus to first non-legacy rather than world second and flip a coin on the ADS date when i'm actually back on my PC.

[Gonzothegreat198]

I'm sure you're the genius who is coming up with strategies that no one has tried in thousands of failed attempts.

Please.

Hey moron, don't be a fracking asshole to someone making a suggestion when all of yinz running turn 5 have already said you are not going to share your information regarding what you have tried and haven't tried.

[Nosiahk]

I'm sure you're the genius who is coming up with strategies that no one has tried in thousands of failed attempts.

Please.

Seems like you got butthurt? Why so sensitive? Just a mere suggestion. Need to take a chill pill and calm yourself.

[Onolock]

Which encounters/exploits would you be referring to? Genuinely curious -- wracking my brain and can't recall which they may be.

He's talking about Ensidia(iirc) bugging the valks on HLK with grenades so you never have to dps the valks since they can't drop you off. They knowingly exploited and got the ban hammer/lost all respect in the raiding community. That was probably the biggest example.

[Onolock]

FF14's endgame is jokecity when it comes to mechanics in comparison to WoW encounters (even moreso if you raided at the bleeding edge @ top 5 US guilds due to gear vs encounter) - I fully believe that Twintania would have been downed weeks ago if the tornados didn't decide to randomly kill people even if you move asap & update your position via jumping/starting a cast. It's apparently in the accepted bugs forum now so who knows, maybe SE will actually change how it works when they open up Turn 5 again.

Then again, November's 2.1 update is right around the corner (hello nerfs)...

They aren't nerfing coil....CT will be easier than Coil(and possibly drop worse gear) and probably cleared within the first night or two.
2.2 is likely any kind of progression raiding sadly =/

[BlossomRose]

It wasn't "just a suggestion". The guy literally said "hey how about trying this, hint hint". The last part? That's HIM being an ass implying other people haven't tried every strategy under the sun and he's somehow come up with a miracle cure.

[Pinch]

As for Yogg, it was touted as a mathematical impossibility (rather than a mechanical one) and stars simply mathematically stacked more affliction warlocks than everyone else. :P. Eventually gear levels reached the point that this was no longer necessary, but hardly an exploit.

Since Yogg 0 holds a special place in my heart, let me go off topic and enlighten you. Everyone here probably likes a good raiding story anyways.

Back in Wrath of the Lich King, and probably still now, EJ (Elitist Jerks - theorycrafting website) was filled with wannabe raiders that felt the need to theorycraft absolutely everything, regardless of whether they had actually done or were ever going to do the content. Yogg0 being touted as "mathematically impossible" was due to a few of these people.

For the uninitiated, in the final phase of Yogg0 (from 30% HP to dead), an unkillable monster named an Immortal Guardian would spawn every ~10 seconds. These mobs dealt more damage the higher their health was; At 100% HP, they dealt around 20,000 damage (half a tank's health at the time), to something like 100 if they were at 1 HP.

Every ~45 seconds, Yogg would place an icon (called a Beacon) over the heads of half of the Immortals (up to a maximum of 5). After 10 seconds, he would cast a spell that would cause all marked Immortals to buff themselves and all nearby Immortals (and Yogg himself if he was close enough) with a heal over time spell with a 20 second duration. This heal over time was 5% of an Immortal's health per second, and around 0.1% of Yogg's health per second. This buff stacked.

The "mathematically impossible" saying comes from it being impossible to do enough AoE damage to keep an Immortal at low HP when it had 3 or more stacks of this healing buff. That part is true. 3 stacks meant a wipe, since the Immortal would gain health too quickly, and start dealing too much damage that made it impossible to heal through when compound with the damage from the other Immortals.

The hard part of the fight was getting the marked mobs away from the boss and spread out in such a way that no Immortal would take more than 1 or 2 stacks of this healing buff (depending on your strategy). No one on EJ really considered this a viable option, but that was probably because they hadn't actually attempted the fight.

My guild (world 3rd, US 1st, 6 days after the first kill) used a split strategy with 3 tanks, where 2 tanks would alternate picking up Immortals for most of the fight, and the 3rd tank would pick the new ones up when the other 2 tanks were spreading the existing mobs for the beacons. When the two tanks ran to the outside of the room because the beacons went out, we had 10 seconds to figure out which tank had 3 marked adds in their add pile, and which had 2 (or 4 and 1 if you got unlucky). Then, a Hunter with Distracting Shot (10 second temporary fixate - mob attacks you but you are not top threat, so it will go back to the tank when the debuff fades) would get a marked Immortal from the pile of 3, leaving every pile of adds with no more than 2 stacks of the healing buff. Then we would group them up on the boss and AoE the crap out of them, which was barely possible.

The really tricky part of the fight was near the end, when you had 30+ immortals. It made it very difficult to split because there were an overwhelming number of monsters. It was also very difficult to deal AoE damage through their healing buff, because WoW had an AoE damage cap (After 10 targets, your total damage on an AoE spell would not increase. I.E. if an AoE hits for 500 normally, it will hit for 250 on 20 targets).

There were a few other mechanics, but they weren't nearly as important as the Immortals. There was Sanity, which was a buff you had 100 stacks of, and could not regain. Various spells in the fight would remove Sanity, and if you hit 0, you would become Mind Controlled for the rest of the fight. One of those spells in the final phase was "something Gaze", which would deal damage and remove sanity if you were facing the boss. Sanity and Gaze meant the tanks had to be careful when picking up the adds. Warlocks were powerful here because they could use one of their primary high damage spells while not facing the boss.

STARS had a lot of Warlocks, that is true, but their strategy revolved around using more Hunters for Distracting Shot, so that they'd only have to AoE through 1 stack of the healing buff on most mobs. This was easier on the raid since they didn't have to deal as much AoE damage, but much harder on the Hunters, since they had to coordinate their fixates very quickly. Warlocks were not as important as most people made them out to be; good beacon splitting was the most important thing.

Gear levels never reached the point where it made the fight easier, since everyone had nearly full BiS by the time the first kills were happening (like 2-3 months after the rest of the instance). It was nerfed 2 months after the first kill because only 12 guilds had killed it. The nerf was to cap the number of beacons at 3. This meant that you could have a single tank pick up everything, and have a single Hunter pull one beacon out of the pile. The rest of the fight was not that hard, so a lot of guilds killed it the night of the nerf.

At the time, I don't think many raid guilds were seriously attempting Yogg 0 until STARS had killed it. STARS released their entire strategy minutes after their kill, since they didn't want to be called exploiters (Exodus, a US guild, exploited the fight about 3 weeks prior and got banned for it). I know for a fact that Paragon, the 2nd kill 3 days after STARS, only put in about 2 days of attempts by using the written strategy. We had theorycraft going on internally, but didn't start putting serious time in to the fight until the day after Exodus had exploited it (to be honest, that really kicked us in to gear). Ensidia, world 4th, tried to argue that Yogg 0 didn't matter, and probably didn't start attempting it until after it had been killed. The rest just slowly floated in over time.

This is completely unlike Twintania, where a ton of guilds are actively attempting it. If it wasn't bugged, you'd expect someone to kill it by now!

[Zdenka]

Thank you for the story Pinch, I was interested reading that.

[Xilrasis]

Thanks for the refresher on Yogg. It's been a while and my memory isn't what it used to be. My statement was more of a tongue in cheek reference to the circumstances, though, and how widely professed this mathematical impossibility was at the time STARS killed it. I had totally forgotten about the Exodus and Ensidia exploits, also. I do not miss healing it as a paladin.

Also -- Pinch -- what guild were you in? For some reason, I draw a line to vodka. I don't remember who was US first on Yogg 0, and I'm on my phone so its tough to check that far back to Yogg-0.

[Pinch]

Premonition

Still in that guild, stuck on turn 5 too. Not as hardcore as we used to be, though.