Time to share strategies: Garuda

[Griss]

Wait, you only have to take garuda to 70% hp remaining to skip phase 2? i've always heard it was like 30% hp remaining, and wondered how anyone but the best of the best parties could skip phase 2 at all.

No no. you bring her down to 70. the blm's rest up mp while the dd's do there thing and get her to the pre af plume spam(third jump with competent dd's). Blm's go beast mode and burn her down as much as possible. The goal here is to drop enough damage on her so she will skip straight to the clone phase after astral. At minimum it will shorten the time she is in her second phase.

[Alkimi]

No no. you bring her down to 70. the blm's rest up mp while the dd's do there thing and get her to the pre af plume spam(third jump with competent dd's). Blm's go beast mode and burn her down as much as possible. The goal here is to drop enough damage on her so she will skip straight to the clone phase after astral. At minimum it will shorten the time she is in her second phase.

We've tried something like this. Our BLMs are really well geared and would just pull hate far too easily though if we went all out at the start, maybe our PLD needs even more +enmity gear or something. We opted to take it easy until after the 2nd set of plumes is dead and then zerg her down from there with a spell cycle, similar to how people used to BLM burn before they patched it.

Usually get her down to 30% ish once Aerial Blast goes off, sometimes she starts in phase 2 but it always takes us a mere few seconds to get her straight to phase 3. All BLMs are in red enmity for most of it. We've not beaten it yet though, Chiralda drops in no time at all but Suprana in particular giving us all sorts of problems since BRDs finding it difficult to bring her down without dying. Setup we're using atm is PLD BRDx3 BLMx3 WHM.

Another big thing you need to do is make sure that the bards are getting 3000 tp to do rain of death out of combo.

I'm assuming everyone knows this but exorcism beans (or any cheap throwing item) are a godsend for getting to 3k TP quickly. Just alternate throw and light shot.

[Zdenka]

Usually get her down to 30% ish once Aerial Blast goes off, sometimes she starts in phase 2 but it always takes us a mere few seconds to get her straight to phase 3. All BLMs are in red enmity for most of it.

If you are sometimes hitting P2 you are probably hovering around 37-42% when she astral flow, and not 30%.

BRD 3x is rough since theres no one to really tank Suprana, and BRD requires 8 yards for combo. BRD can do huge burst with Quick Nock comboed and Barrage but it requires some threat built on her by someone else (WAR DPS is usually a preferable offtank) to continue doing WS's etc.

Side dupes are probably incredibly difficult with that set up. I'd suggest dropping 1 BRD for a WAR DPS that can offtank her, or assigning positions for BRDs so they are spread out enough so Suprana is always running around.