Which weapon?

[Leoheart]

I don't know if many other blms do it, but during the last plume phase, I pop a mega/hi potion of INT for that extra push so you don't eat Phase 2.

[Hanabira]

lol thats a great idea.. would probably have massive hate issues with 450+ INT..

[Eruantien]

Well the longer excruciate is up the more chance you get a crit, and I do the same, excruciate on thundara with af body On, thunder without.

[JDR388]

You can probably get that 20k even higher by re examining your rotation. I run a Garuda group on Excalibur and when we really push it we can generally pull out a 90% win rate. We use a 4 blm burn and so I have grown accustomed to teaching newcomers how to up their damage.

Make sure you are doing the following:

Cast a comboed thundara on cooldown or as close to cooldown as possible.

Use blizzard and freeze as filler spells to fill the time in between thundara casts.

Always bring elixirs and use sanguine rite for AB. No other potions are necessary.

Only ever cast thundaga when you can force it to crit with Excruciate and get your mp back wiith parsimony. If you can work it out to hit these two abilities with burst instead then do so. Do not, however, go out of your way to use them with burst as it would become a dps loss.

If you use a 4x blm burn like we do then you will want to burn the boss to 65% before the 2nd teleport. To achieve this regularly we give the 2 brds and the paladin time to get hate and tp before the blms start to nuke. Since the fight doesn't really begin until Garuda goes below 90% you could essentially have the tank get hate for the entire duration of the fight timer and never see a teleport. With just the brds and the pld on it we end up giving the tank about 2minutes to get hate before I call for the dps to get ready and the whm to begin hitting it with stone. I have the blms hit it with thunder once to get het below 90% so that they can all begin their main dps rotation with a combo thundara ready to go.

If you stop at 65 percent you may want to keep one blm on her that can keep hitting her but can keep an eye on her percentage so that she does not go below 60% which is the actual cut off. The reason we do this is because when Garuda sends out her plumes she cannot do a teleport, send out more plumes, or do AB until all current plumes have either exploded or been killed. However Garuda goes into what I call "AB mode" when she goes below 60% HP. At this point she will send out two more waves of plumes before triggering AB. So if you have her as close to 60% as possible without risking going over before the 2nd set of plumes you want to wait for these plumes to come out before you resume dps as you will essentially have the time allotted for 3 sets of plumes to bring her down instead of two since she cannot start "AB mode" until all plumes have gone. Typically we bring her down to 25 to 15 percent before she ABs (once it was down to 10).

At this point all you need to do is focus down the boss before the clones disappear, reappear, and blow everything to smithereens. The tank is going to take a ton of damage and get stunlocked a lot so the whm needs to be aware of this. Hate can be an issue here as the whm may pull the clones. As long as the tank has the boss facing away from the rest of the party you should be able to pull of easy wins with little issue.

One other thing: we have the Brds only protect 2 pillars. The brd on the Mage pillar Needs to do the acc song and be prepared to re apply stone skin if a plume goes off on the mages. The other brd has the first battle voice (for AB) and the mp song. There are a number of reasons we only do 2 pillars, but the most obscure of which is that it can significantly increase our dps time in letting the plumes on the other pillars run for their full duration.

I would write more but my iPad battery is about to die.