Apollyon NW

I haven't been playing a ton in the past couple of months, but when I have it's still been pretty fun. Brian, Camille and myself recently started making runs at Apollyon NW and it's been fun as all hell. Profitable, too.

It started when I tried a couple of solo runs this summer, shortly after the drop in price from 30k to 15k for the soap required to enter. I knew that there had been some BLM's to solo the entire zone but as yet I've never heard of anyone accomplishing that on SCH, so I thought I'd give it a shot. I didn't get close either of the first two runs, though to my credit the first run I killed each of the wyverns on Floor 4 (ABC's x2 guaranteed, and those mobs are paper) and still managed to make it to floor 5 (where I died to the first behemoth and let myself time out).

Once Brian got a hold of Ashke's account - Ashke is one of the best-geared BLM's on the server - he decided he wanted to do some Apollyon runs with me, and to both of our surprise Camille - that's Miori, Brian's RL wife - who hadn't played the game in over a year - says she wouldn't mind joining up as well. She has BLM75 as well, and so with Ashke's BLM, my SCH, and Miori's BLM, we've been trio'ing up Apollyon NW runs for the past couple of months now.

This is a surprisingly effective means of making gil, as it turns out. ABC's are still selling for ~10k each in Rolanmart, and a good run nets us 15 ABC's each. Our standard run is to clear floors 1-3 ASAP, ascending as soon as we get a vortex on each floor, and then clearing floor's 4 and 5. That means killing the Faffy on floor 4 and the KB on floor 5, both of which are tricky fights with only 3.

We've got faffy pretty much down to a science: I will open with a grav, get a couple of helixes off, and then do a standard Gank with Alacrity Tier-4 nukes and popping my two-hour. In short order I can usually get him down to 50-55% at which point I become the grav-nuke-bind bitch and command Brian and Camille to unleash the hounds. Their combined mp pools take it down the rest of the way, and we hit the restore chest if we have any troubles.

Our past two runs have been our first two full clears, ironic since in both runs we've been absolutely screwed on vortex pops - last night's run it hit on the 3rd mob on floor 1, the 4th mob on floor 2, and the fourth mob on floor 3 - and yet we still managed a win, killing faffy as well. Our KB strat is getting better and better.

In the early days against KB with us, we tried a hate-bouncing strat involving tier3-4 nukes where you'd launch a nuke against KB with the expectation of running away and kiting until someone else grabbed hate. This can be done but it's difficult, and all too often you'll get hate before your nuke lands (thanks to decaying VE) and get stomped. Timing can also be tough unless you are patient to wait for meteor casts, which can in turn get dangerous.

Our new strategy, which I came up with myself, is more of an extention of the solo strategy where you DOT it to death. In my best solo run, about two months ago, I actually got KB down to 2% using nothing other than helixes and bio2. MP conservation was the real issue and if I'd been a little smarter about stratagem usage I'd have had the win easily.

In our new strategy I pull and do a couple of laps with helixes to grab a few hundred points worth of hate, then Brian puts shock, choke, and burn up while Camille keeps bio2 on. I try to do a helix per lap, whether or not it's worn, as that's my best means of keeping hate. Usually every helix is done with Alacrity+Parsimony, for half-cost, half cast time. I can't keep up stratagem charges indefinitely with burning two per cast, but I can make the 4 charges last about 10 minutes, after which point I can easily 2hr to get all of them back and get a minute of free usage. With parsimony every cast mp is not an issue, as I can gain it back with Sublimation faster than I'm using it.

Once hate is established pretty well Brian and Camille nuke with low tier nukes - usually Thunder or Blizzard 2 - when they're not DoTing, to speed things up, although occasionally one of the two of them will snag hate and make things interesting (however usually it's not so much hate that they don't lose it after taking a few hundred damage, and I get its attention back).

Using this strategy we can bring him down in around 25 minutes, which is pretty impressive, I think. We can probably drop that by a couple of minutes if we had to, as Brian and Camille can easily take the final 10-15% off by popping an elemental seal burst2 at the end.

The ABC's add up for sure, too. Making 120-130k twice a week certainly adds up; for the first time in a long time I'm up above 3M.