Path to Diabolos Part 2

Ok... maybe not that much later.

So we finally made it, 2 days of work and we're at the final fight we need to do so that we can fight Diabolos Prime and get the summon. I was very scared going into this fight, reading up on all the setups and strategies there is a very low margin for error in this fight. To get to the arena for this fight you need to go through a zone called Pso'Xja which is also very neat looking but to get the pass you need to farm a Cyan, Carmine, or Gray Chip. Elov and I went down, later joined by vit and vamp and we got all the chips within a half hour. After turning those in it was time to make our way to the fight.


The setup consisted of our semi-static: elov, vit, vamp, and myself and we were joined by vit's friend Thulius for the stun whoring drk and after a quick shout in Aht Urghan we found battlegod who came as monk. So the final setup was nin, thf, mnk, drk, smn, and whm. Getting through the 40 cap area of the Pso'Xja zone (a series of colored warps) was fairly uneventful, Elov did manage to die once by cancelling sneak or something dumb like that, but we all made it there fairly fast.

In this fight, diabolos has this ability called nightmare which is an AoE Sleep that you can't be waken up from. This ability is.. well.. a nightmare, the one thing you want to avoid. Fortunately our dark knight stun whore was right on que for each and every nightmare utilizing the spell and his weaponskill stuns as well, couldn't have asked for a better performance from him. Elov as thf did his job of SATAing onto Vit (nin) to keep hate on him and, and the monk did an awesome job with damage.


The arena is laid out in tiles, at around 50% Diabolos starts to drop these tiles, if you fall, you're pretty much dead. Although we went over where we were to stand well before entering the bcnm40 it still managed to scare the hell out of vamp and I when both tiles around the one we were standing on suddenly fell. Vamp assisted me with healing as smn and I kept the nin and drk hasted, and erased and at 20% vamp used astral flow to pretty much finish it off. The pickup monk praised us and my LS greatly for the flawless run claiming he failed this run 5 times in the past and overall it was a fun and surprisingly easy fight. Everyone did their jobs perfectly and I can only hope it goes this well on the prime fight next week.

Even though our path to Diabolos is almost over, I look forward to continuing more of the CoP mission series. Riverne Site B next!

Path to Diabolos Part 1

I know its been awhile since I've given a post on CoP but after my Phomiuna Aqueducts (2-3) run nearly a month ago I pretty much put CoP on hold aside from a few other CoP 2-3 runs I've done with the LS.

Tuesday was no different. Started with yet another Phomiuna Aqueducts run for vamp who has her heart set on getting Diabolos as a summon. At this point that run is fairly routine for me, but after that we decided to go around and do the next fight in the series, Riverne Site A.

Killing in Hippogryph in Riverne.

I've yet to see a CoP zone that failed to impress me, Rivern site is no exception. A very unique and great looking zone. For this run we had Vit, Vamp, Elov, Roc, Krile, and myself so we figured we'd do the nin nin nin whm whm whm setup where each nin took a mammet backed up by their own whm. Elov was only a 39 nin and krile had ok gear for his whm but aside from those, we were in good shape with jobs.

All 3 nins wanted me as their whm so they all /random'd for me, the gimp nin Elov happened to win (he later admitted this was the first time he tanked a monster with no other ninjas to help post-37). Krile got assigned to vamp (and she lived!) and roc went to vit. This bcnm40 fight was so much fun we all had a blast. True it was serious and we had to concentrate but there was a lot of pt chat going on and you could tell everyone was having a good time. We didn't bring any yellow liquid that I heard really helps helps (the mammets can change job at any point, the liquid prevents that) but we ran into little problems. The blm forms gave us a run for our money but there were no deaths and we succeeded in the mission.

CoP 2-3 Fight

After that roc and krile left us but vamp, vit, elov, and I decided to continue on. After a few more awesome cutscenes we went to do road forks 3-3 which is a lengthy side mission in which you need to kill 2 popped NMs in Carpenter's Landing and Attohwa Chasm. Also included in this mission is a hilarious side story about the 3 tarutaru with the uniquely colored hair trying to find their father in Windurst that made this mission worth it alone. The NMs were easy for what we had, any one of us there could've solo'd both of them with relative ease. However the main highlight of this mission was after you killed the NM in Attohwa Chasm, you had 1 hour to climb to the top of a mountain in the zone. This is a cleverly designed mountain that requires careful navigation around ledges, over bridges, down drops, it was a very fun and exciting climb (though I don't recommend doing this at 5am) and if you don't make it in time or fall you can start over without having to kill the NM again (like I did.. 3 times).

Mountain climbing in Attohwa

Well more on Vamp's Path to Diabolos later.

5-1 The Moogle Army Way

Last night as I was avoiding writing an argumentative synthesis paper as long as I possibly could I was up late finishing a round of helping people out. I can't remember everything I did but sometime after helping a LS member, Bugman, camp the bomb king in horotuto I went over to help Vitrolant farm his last Bomb Queen pop item, the Bomb Queen Core along with Xenojin, Doctordub, and later Jeangallo. Later on after that Jean and I went over to Waughroon Shrine to help Ronhiroishi complete his samurai AF3 quest joined by Vampslayer, Xeno, and Seyunkaduka. After this busy day it was around 2am and I had thought we were done with everything everyone could possibly want to do, but then Mercades, Aricelia, and Komieheto wanted to do their misison 5-1 bcnm in Fei'Yin.. orz

Now I had told merc I would help him through all the missions that require it and I wasn't about to go back on my word, I was just so damn tired. I didn't remember this bcnm at all, I remembered monks were good for it and there was a skeleton.. or two.. but that was about it. Well by the time this fight was assembled we didn't have any monks, hell we didn't even have any job that could tank. Our setup was drk/war, drg/blu, blm, rdm, whm, whm - my first thought after hearing this: we're so gonna fail.

Preparing to enter the match

Ok well we all got to the bcnm and decided Ari should tank as drk seeing as how she was the only one in the group with provoke and arguably the most successful chance at tanking. Nextly I noticed komie was wearing his whm AF and said he didn't bring any 50 cap gear... things are looking better! When we get into the BCNM we have no real plan except that ari tanks and that we all focus on the main NM, we kind of forgot about the 12 or so other skeletons that accompany the NM running around whacking away at you.

Look at that kickass drk tank!

By this time it was close to 3am and I was half asleep so I don't remember much details of the fight. But we really had no plan of what to do with the links, only kat decided to sleep them with his blue mage skill sheep song which would've worked, had they not been awaken by multiple AoE attacks. Ari, Kat (drg), and Jean remained focused on the NM while komie and I kept them alive while dodging links and merc ended up kiting the links for as long as he could since he had all the hate and lasted for the majority of the battle. Eventually we ran out of mp, the links caught up to the kiting blm merc, ari died, followed shortly by the backup drg tank kat, so it was just us whms and jean left.

During the fight, Merc kiting the adds.

The NM still had a good 20% or so left by the time every DD died so jean and I took out our club and sword and began whacking away at the NM. Two benedictions and a few cyclones and seraph strikes later.. amazingly the NM died and we won. That was the craziest 5-1 run I did, the setup was so.. awesomely bad. It was seriously madaru.

I've been as busy as a Wespe

I managed to get charmed and kill who I was aiming for! Too bad Jedi went all crazy on me.

I finally finished Promy-Holla and get to Lufaise Meadows where I was promptly mugged. By those dirty taru.

I don't know where I am but it's neat and it took us a hour to get there.

And finally we got Vampslayer her Evoker's Horn early this morning ^^. This is why I should keep a stack of Echo drops on me at all times, so Elov doesn't die.

Death and Challenge

I suppose you could say I'm spoiled because I have the ability to raise III myself everytime I die but I don't mind death, and I didn't long before I had the ability to cast r2 and r3. If you ever wanna test your ability to cope with death, I suggest you level bst to 20, that's a true test right there. What I mean to say is I don't mind an honest death, a death where everyone involved knew what they were getting into well before the fight, everyone knew their role, everyone put forth their best effort, and overall an honest attempt was made yet the result was unsuccessful. An honest death is acceptable to me, as opposed to a stupid death which I'll save for another post. These honest deaths are made possible because we're presented with a true challenge.

Bermont, Kiris, and I dead in an attempt to trio a rdm AF3 NM.

Challenge is something I've begun to experience ever since I started getting more into the Chains of Promathia mission series. This is a huge huge change from when I did the Zilart mission series. In Zilart, we were able to walk through those missions in 2 days with the help of a few level 75's for the missions. And once Jean, Merc, and I were done with our 2-day sky run, we went back and brought 10 or so other LS members up to sky too with little difficulty. Zilart is a series where you can have your hand held through it, CoP presents you with a true challenge. First off, the majority of its missions are level capped, right from the start, so there's no lvl 75 hand-holding, everyone's on equal ground for nearly every mission. Nextly for the level caps imposed on you for missions, the difficulty of the missions are understandably much harder. These missions require proper setups, strategy, and coordination to get through, even the very beginning missions, the promyvion runs, require a fair amount of effort to get through.

Moogle Army's Successful Sky Completion

CoP has often been criticized as being too hard and because of this it has been viewed as a failure of an expansion pack. I agree with this to a certain extent, I agree that the level cap put on some missions doesn't neccessarily match the level of experience required to complete a mission. For example on the promyvion runs, a fresh group of players who just hit lvl 30 technically could do the promyvion runs, but they most likely wouldn't succeed just due to the level of strategy and effort required to get through it. In that sense, CoP can be viewed as almost too difficult. However looking at the number of people who do proudly wear a CoP ring or walk around Sea, obviously it's not imposs ible to get through CoP, just challenging. Also due to the level caps it required people to have gear for a lvl 30 job, and a lvl 40 job, and a lvl 50 job, and so on which also frustrated many players.

I recently had the opportunity to do a Phominua Aquaducts run (CoP 2-3) with two linkshell members Jedimasta, and Xenojin. This was the first mission in a long long time where I felt unsure about the outcome. I was alittle unprepared going into t he actual fight as I wasn't expecting to be warped to the area with the Minotaur and have him immediately start pummeling on us but it was a fun fight. We did lose both a pld and a nin during the fight because of an instant-death ability that only has a random chance of being prevented but we did successfully kill the Minotaur. Overall my experience with CoP has been enjoyable. I'm not even finished with the second chapter and the story already shows some promising things to come, also the missions not only being something completely new to me but providing a real challenge just makes the series even better. I look forward to progressing in CoP.

CoP 2-3 Minotaur Fight