August Ambuscade Volume One

Double shield or single shield? I have not tried it this month. I'll post some results when I get a chance.

IIRC from the first iteration of this battle, the fastest reported fights were (gulp): COR COR COR SMN GEO TANK

Chaos/Samurai's/Rogue's/Tactician's/Allies/Hunter's OR Miser's
Frailty/Fury

CORs might need to sub DRG to dump hate occasionally, since they are going to undoubtedly cap it and steal it. Biggest threat to CORs is on the Imps, due to their enmity potentially shifting and then subsequent dispel/amnesia. If shooters can kill quickly or pace out their damage, it should go smoothly. Can alternate for a couple of RNG as well, but I do recall people beating this in as little as five minutes or so with a shooting setup.

Don't shoot (lol) the messenger, I'm just reporting the facts. You're entitled to try it your own method, but this was a pretty annoying month when it first came out and I have a very strong memory of this. Especially when your SMN disconnects and you have 0% chance of winning the fight at that point.

The best setup I ended up using for this last time was RUN/WHM/GEO/COR/COR/SMN.

RUN spikes hate at the start and the others go ham on the Imps then the flayer. Fomalhaut COR can self-skillchain and really wreck the Imps.

It might have been 2 CORs instead of 3, and swap in a WHM instead, now that you mention it.

won vd in 12min smn smn geo rune whm cor.
smn done flaming cush + vs to make sc.
whm had to rebuff rune fast with shell protect after every buff got dispeled and geo smn did cure the rune in that time.
beast drachen roll feailty entrust torper indi refresh.
we tried sc with cor and smn but hate controll in theire is = 0
with all the amnesia/silence ***.

I assume double, but honestly don't know. All I know is killed all the imps and then literally nothing would damage flayer.

SMN the only thing I've seen break the shield in 4 attempts

SMN doing like 25k+ can break shield. We got double shield one run due to a bit of a slow start, and that needed 2x BP to break, one for each shield, so its not over if you get double.

I have not tried the new ambuscade but so far people are reporting that shields seem linked to whether there are imps alive. Has anyone tried sleeping the imps? Or are they not susceptible to lullaby?

Also, just because you see 0 dmg... are you sure that is not working like some sort of stoneskin effect? Did your ranged DDs continue to shoot and then ran out of time, or did the shields eventually drop?

pets did always hit for o no matter if right after bp or before.
But the rune done a few crit hits for 1k each and normal hits for 980 maybee u can only demage him from front idk.and brd may can sleep em i used ghorn brd with n/t in first fight and got message the impfs resist the spell.

10~ min VD fight with COR RNG SMN GEO WHM RUN
Summoner should save apogee until the NM has the shield up for the first time so they can easily break it with 2 volt strikes if needed. That prevents a double shield scenario from happening and locking out all the ranged damage from rng + cor. After it's broken the SMN should have no problem keeping the shield in check for the remainder of the fight.

Assuming it's like a Stoneskin + Phalanx kind of thing, with the Phalanx threshold being pretty high, like 1k+.

An Arma or Gandiva RNG might be able to plow straight thru the shield in a handful of shots with AM3/crit.

If the shield is magical, trueflights/wildfires/QD should have broken them.

Unless it's like a 500k stoneskin

how u upload a picture y.y

Just click the button... and put the url... or post the url and someone will put it up for you

Screenshots on here pending can't be displayed that way, you have to use like tiny.pic

magical ws are treated as magic dmg

Which is happening now it seems with alot of you. Again people pick to follow these because its fast farm and easy to get it done. It's a narrow minded way of thinking just because you don't like a setup means everyone should hate it and try something else. IDK man its the same thing every month with the same 5 people complaining about comps for stuff but arent out trying stuff out.

Finally getting a chance to play ranged DD is the ENTIRE reason to do VD this month.

I just want people to at least ATTEMPT to figure out the mechanics.

before lolsmnburninitagain

I agree with that 100%. This wasn't really targeting you but I see the same stuff in game which it's coming from people who just say I hate smn burns they need to nerf it but don't wanna buy the gear for the DD only jobs they play.

I did a few VD runs with a pick up group tonight. The shield functions more or less as I previously described, there are a few other details.

The shield follows a promotion process. It begins with a single shield. If the shield is not removed by doing some amount of damage to it (not sure how much), it is promoted to a double shield. You can demote the double shield back to a single if you're able to damage it.

Single Shield - Critical hit and weaponskill damage are reduced by 50%. Non-critical hit white damage is reduced by 100%. Will be gained after a certain amount of time passes after killing the last imp. May be removed by dealing enough damage to the Master Manipulator. May be promoted to a double shield after a specific amount of time elapses.

Double Shield - Reduces physical damage by 100%. I'm uncertain how it affects critical hits and weaponskills as I wasn't able to observe this. Some people say it reduces them all to by 100%. There's a few posts in the previous thread that contracts this. May be demoted by dealing enough damage to the Master Manipulator.

I have party member damage filtered so I don't know how blood pacts are affected by the shield, but I'm guessing that they're not affected by it at all.

Some log excerpts (this was when it had a single shield up)


You can see that it had a single shield up that was removed. I bolded a line there that seemed to bypass the mechanics posted above. Maybe it was some strange interaction between a relic 3x damage proc and the shield damage modifier. Idk.

Also, the Master Manipulator had the double shield up immediately after we cleared the imps for one of the fights. It might have been there already or it may have gained it at some point while we were fighting the imps. I don't know. I'm guessing there's some mechanic behind this. I'm not sure what it is. We were doing super shitty and got hit with a million dispels because the tank wasn't far away enough for us to put distance, and he lost hate to the imps several times.

When we did it last stands, coronochs and crits were all still doing zero damage. Must've been double shield. Just need to know how to break it without being forced to rely on smn.

Should've tried hotshot, didn't think about it

Here's a set RNG/WAR that gives you +70% critical hit rate.

ItemSet 360459

Not that you'd want to use all of it. If your natural critical hit rate is capped though, that's a 95% critical hit rate. That should easily let you get TP and break the single shield before it becomes an issue.

I'll get the video up as soon as I can but until then.

Tanks need to carry Panacea for the Bio from Tribulation. It's freaking lethal, 1000/tick Bio. It'll kill you in seconds, save your WHM the heart-attack and help them out.

Remedy took off the Bio in the VD run last night. Is it not standard to have these things with you already?

You'd be sadly surprised... Carrying meds is mandatory for a tank but people missed the memo.

Be nice if a group chipped in for the tanks meds, Panaceas are expensive.