Lack of New Updates

Updates have been quite slow lately and I apologize.  The last 2 months have been pretty hectic with a vacation to Asia and then immediately starting medical school a few days after getting back.  My playtime has really taken a back seat as real life starts to get busier and busier; however, I'm still looking forward to at least making 1 new post a month of possible.  There is still a great number of topics I have really ready to post on, it's just the amount of time it takes to write a quality post nowadays.

I hope this post is worthy of the 2 month long wait.  This topic was personally one of the most exciting for me.  Anyways, let's begin!


Overview

Ever since completing a successful solo of Apollyon NE on BLM/RDM around November of 2007, I've been constantly searching for an even more difficult, unique solo to challenge myself with.  I think this obsession with unique, "first to accomplish" solos started back 2 years ago with Apollyon NW, and it's really given me another fun thing to focus on in game as well as greatly improved my ability to solo.  The only problem is you run out of things to solo that are actually possible...

Around April of 2008, I perhaps accidentally stumbled across this next challenge while doing a low man Arrapago Remnants run with 3 people.  After a terrible run of cell (non)drops, we reached the 5F Archaic Chariot with basically not enough cells and time to kill it in conventional fashion.  After some really badly timed deaths, I found myself holding the Archaic Chariot, and eventually killing it alone while the others in the party were dead without Reraise.

5 months later, after a great deal of planning, and 6 actual attempts, I was finally able to complete a success solo of Bhaflau Remnants - this means killing Long-Bowed Chariot (the title-giver) and exiting through the portal.  For those familiar with Salvage, I think the difficulty of this is pretty apparent (it definitely was to me when I thought of the idea) as I didn't even know how to survive 2 minutes solo against Long-Bowed Chariot when this started.

 
 

This is easily the most difficult thing I've ever done solo.  It took literally 4-5 months of planning, numerous attempts, a ton of medicines, and requires essentially 'perfect' play for at least an hour (you'll see later why).  My hope is to just chronicle where this idea came from, the large amount of planning involved before ever making a single attempt, and of course, the specifics of the solo itself.  More so than any other topic, I hope to write this as a series of events, revelations, and bright ideas which turned an "impossible" solo into something feasible, and eventually a reality.  It will be split into parts as there is really no way I can write it all in 1 post without LJ capping the size. 

This post will focus on the idea of the solo and all the planning involved prior to the first attempt.

Enjoy!

Bhaflau Remnants Won Solo (Part II)

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Where did this Idea Come From?

As I alluded to in the Overview, this idea came to me unexpectedly while doing an Arrapago Remnants run.  The Archaic Chariot on 5F drops up to 3 pieces of LVL35 gear so it's a very high priority target when you farm or low-man farm this Salvage Route.  Due to some unexpected complications, I found myself the only person alive with not enough time to raise, regroup, and kill the chariot - the only chance get any drops was to solo it.

I was on SCH/RDM at the time and was hoping to just kill the Chariot with DoTs and Helix spells while kiting it in the teleport room at the center of 5F (the one that leads you to 6F).  Oddly, however, I found that as I ran in circles around the porter, the Archaic Chariot would deaggo itself about every 30-45 seconds!  After I saw this, the strategy was obvious as I just spammed Blizzard IV after it deaggroed and just ran in circles until it happened again.  Using this really simple idea, I soloed a 15,000 HP Chariot on SCH/RDM in about 18 minutes.  This attempt and the idea was chronicled here on BG after it happened.

They key thing I learned from this was that chariots can be deaggro'd quite easily if kited properly around sight-impeding obstacles such as the thick pillars in the teleport room I used in this case.  Knowing that it was possible to both survive and be given free nuking chances made me feel that a solo of an entire Salvage zone was possible.

 
(Only screenshot I could find from this run.  This also just happens to show how versatile SCH is, since I was
supposed to play a Light Arts backline healer's role in the fight, but ended up soloing it on Dark Arts.)

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Bhaflau Remnants and Long-Bowed Chariot

My original idea after wanting to solo a Salvage zone was actually to try Silver Seas Remnants.  Immediately, I knew it was impossible to solo Zhayolm or Arrapago since 6F on both floors requires you to kill too many mobs just to reach the final boss.  I felt that Silver Seas would make for the easier solo since Long-Bowed Chariot is by far the scariest of the 4 Salvage bosses.  I quickly found that it was impossible to solo Long-Armed Chariot (Silver Seas boss), however, since it turns out that Brain Jack is an instant effect with no charging time and it was impossible to outrun.

This left me with really only 1 choice in Bhaflau Remnants and Long-Bowed Chariot - something I was not too happy about.  For those not familiar with Salvage, here are some quick notes on both the 4 Salvage bosses in general and more specifically Long-Bowed Chariot (commonly called just "LBC").

All Chariot Bosses have...

      -  Exactly 50,000 HP
      -  No natural regen
      -  Immune to Sleep, Bind, and Gravity
      -  Builds Resistance to Stun after a certain number of uses
      -  3 Basic TP moves - Discharge, Inertia Stream, and Diffusion Ray
      -  1 Special TP move unique to each boss

Long-Bowed Chariot...

      -  Runs faster than the others at +12% speed (same as a W.Legs PLD)
      -  Special move "Homing Missiles", a 20' AoE hate reset, throat stab (-90% HP)
      -  Double Attacks
      -  More than the others, hits like a truck (can easily 1 shot a mage)
      -  Is generally considered the most difficult of the 4


 
(Something like this isn't all that uncommon for LBC, especially on a mage.)


The most noticeable things here are that it runs faster than normal, can 1 shot a mage, and has a whopping 50,000 HP.  Keep in mind Salvage is a timed zone - you only get 1 hour 40 minutes to both get cells, scale all 5 floors, and kill the boss.  Unlike say a RDM/NIN that solos Seiryu (another extremely difficult solo) where you're pretty much given infinite time and only have to out-last your opponent, in this case, you're in an instance and you have to not only avoid death, but also deal damage at an incredible pace.  To make matters worse, you're not even at full capacity in Salvage since you're given so many Pathos and can't possibly remove them all by yourself.

So where do you even begin in trying to attempt this solo?  The best place to start is survival.

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Kiting Long-Bowed Chariot

Really most of the good kiting strategies and habits still apply for this mob.  Just as a reminder for those not too familiar with "proper" kiting, there are a couple of keys to remember besides just trying to outrun your mob...

      1)  Make tight turns!  Mobs in FFXI have a hard time moving around obstacles and take long turns.
      2)  Mobs have slightly delayed reactions to position changes by players (can lead to some odd strategies)
      3)  Movement speed effects are not active until AFTER the blink animation when changing gear.
      4)  "Blink Cast" all your job abilities so you can use JAs while running without animation lock.

There are really 2 difficulties to get beyond as far as kiting Long-Bowed Chariot assuming you use good kiting technique.  For one thing, it runs at +12% speed, so you essentially MUST have movement speed gear on to prevent it from catching you.  Movement speed is not a luxury in this fight, it is 100% necessary.  I've actually goofed around on this before without movement speed and I couldn't survive 15 seconds kiting.

The other difficulty comes from correctly using the teleporters as obstacles.  The teleporters are not normal "circular" kiting obstacles since the middle platform is open for mobs to run through.  This means if you are on the other side of the teleporter, LBC can simply cut across and reach you in a couple of steps.  The teleporters are also very small while LBC is very large (essentially the exact size of the teleporter).  This makes it very hard to circle around.  Unfortunately, there isn't really another option as far as obstacles go since the 5th floor of Bhaflau Remnants is pretty small.

The general kiting strategy looks like this...

 

Essentially, the main room most groups fight chariot bosses is not used.  The back area and the 2 teleport rooms are used and simply alternated over and over again.  The key here is changing directions without being caught at either teleporter room.  How this is done is described below.

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Kiting Around the Teleporter

This is easily the most difficult pat of the kite.  LBC's melee attack range is about 10'-11' (using Windower Distance Plugin); this is abnormally high, but due to LBC's large, bulky size.  This, coupled along with the small, cramped room means there is very little room for error when switching directions in the room.  Because it is cramped, however, it also means that LBC will have trouble navigating around it if you can amply confuse it, allowing you to pull distance from it leaving the room.

Let's run through a situation where you would do this.  You are currently kiting LBC and have a rough ~20' distance on it.  You enter the teleport room...

      1)  Pick a side - go either left or right.  Preferably the side closer to you.
      2)  Making tight turns, reach the back corner of the back pillar of the side you chose (pic provided).
      3)  Alter your camera angle so you can see LBC enter the room.
      4)  Wait for LBC to turn towards your direction.
      5)  Making tight turns, circle the teleporter and exit the room.

I've highlighted the keys here.  The main point is to coax LBC into making a turn around those bulky pillars instead of using the middle of the teleporter to cut across to reach you (this is instant death).  This prevents you from being cornered.  The camera angle usage is incredibly important since there is a very slim window of about half a second between seeing it make the turn around the pillar and having it actually reach melee range.  Usually when doing this, I'm purposely letting LBC get in the 13-14' range.  You need to move the instant you see it make that turn.

 
(Wait for LBC to make the turn at the back pillar.  Be sure to adjust the camera angle so you can see this.)

Once LBC makes that turn you can pretty much just make tight turns around the pillars without worrying about LBC's location.  Remember 2 of the major flaws mobs in FFXI have in pathing - 1)  they have trouble making tight turns, and 2)  they have delay reactions to player position changes.  LBC cannot catch you if you make tight turns because LBC itself cannot make tight turns.  To add to this, LBC will not cut across the middle now if you do this correctly since even though the shortest path between mob and player is now across the middle, the delayed reaction will prevent it from making this decision quickly (you'll be out of the room by then).

There actually is a case where using this kiting strategy will not work - this pertains to situations where LBC decides to attempt a TP move right when it is supposed to make a decision to turn towards you.  Sometimes, it can over-run its route and end up using its TP move directly at the center of the teleporter.  These situations are pretty rare until the final 25% of the fight where LBC gains TP-regain, but can prove disasterous since 1 mistake usually means death.

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Deaggroing Long-Bowed Chariot

So far I've just gone over survival and kiting paths, but this will only prevent you from dying.  Somehow you have to be able to do 50,000 HP worth of damage within a pretty small time limit of give or take 1 hour.  I think many players already knew you could deaggro chariots - the point of emphasis here is not simply to deaggro it - but to deaggro it quickly.  A deaggroed chariot is essentially a free shot as well as a small mental break from kiting.  As you'll see later, the frequency and number of deaggros you can produce is the key to beating out the time limit.


(Deaggros occur typically around corners and areas where sight is impeded.)

The strategy here is actually nothing you have to really think about if you use good kiting technique.  Deaggros occur on sight tracking mobs like LBC when the mob loses sight - which typically occurs around corners or obstacles.  Simply just try to make the tightest turns around obstacles as possible - which is good general kiting technique anyways.

When done properly, you can deaggro the chariot anywhere from every 30 to 50 seconds.  This is only when you use tight turns!  If you do not use very tight turns, it can take on the order of minutes to deaggro the chariot.  So kiting technique becomes really the key to this solo - it both keeps you safe, and gives you offensive chances.

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Response to Deaggro

One issue I found early on is simply knowing when LBC has actually deaggroed.  Often times, it will deaggro without any DoTs on and you must reapply them quickly before the 10%/tick regen kicks in (occurs roughly 20 seconds after deaggro).  If you wish to cast longer spells like Tier IV nukes, you need a good deal of time to get the long casting duration off.  Basically, it's very important to react as quickly as possible to a deaggro chance.

The way I found to do this relys on Windower Distance Plugin.  I personally could not have done this without the aid of this plugin - which probably diminishes the solo a bit.  All you do is keep constant track of its distance from you (which you'll want to do anyways because it's your only safety net).  If you start pulling a lot of distance very quickly, then you know it's probably stopped.  I then quickly get back in the casting range - about 24.3' on LBC and use whatever I plan to use.

So now we've determined how to stay alive and a source of dealing damage in these deaggros every 30 to 50 seconds.  Now we can finally move onto casting strategy.

 

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Damage and MP Analysis

At this point I still did not know much beyond how to stay alive and that I could get a deaggro (free shot) every 30 to 50 seconds.  I still had no clue as to how I was going to deal the 50,000 damage or what job I would be doing it on.  This became a mathematical and analytical exercise that focused on 4 things to limit my possibilities and develop the most viable DD strategy...

      1)  Layering of DoTs
      2)  Deaggro frequency, estimated fight time, and total "free shot" chances
      3)  Damage Requirements
      4)  Concept of spell "cycles" and MP Management

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Layering of DoTs

The first thing I did in the analysis was to just ask, how much 'free' damage could I get off DoTs?  DoTs like Poison and Bio are incredibly MP efficient, fast casting, and prevent 10%HP/tick regen chunks during prolonged inactivity of the mob.  So I started by presenting the best possible DoT situation - a full 100 minutes to fight.  Obviously this is impossible since you have to scale the 5 floors first, but this gave me a good estimation on how much I could rely on DoTs...

      -  10 HP/tick Poison II
      -  8 HP/tick Bio II

          [ 100 Minutes ]  x  [ 20 Ticks / Minute ]  x  [ 18 Damage / tick ]  =  36,000 Damage

Even if you had the full 100 minutes to fight, you could not kill LBC straight with DoTs.  In fact it's not even close.  Another quick calculation I did was by asking how much DoT damage per tick would you need to kill LBC solely on DoT?

          [ 50,000 Damage ]  /  [ 20 Ticks / Minute ]  /  [ 100 Minutes ]  =  25 Damage / Tick

Given a perfect situation you would need 25 damage per tick at least to kill solely by DoT.  This is difficult to produce without using the shorter duration DoTs like the Elemental DoT wheel, which were not feasible to constantly maintain in my opinion.  This proved to me that a good percentage of my damage had to come from actual damage dealing spells - most notably Tier IV nukes.



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Deaggro Frequency and Number of Casts

Because I can only cast at specific times during the fight (when a deaggro occurs), I could pretty much estimate the total number of actions I had to complete the solo if given the amount of time to fight.  As I mentioned earlier, a deaggro occurs about every 30 to 50 seconds given good kiting technique and no deaths or mistakes.  I estimated this to say I could produce a deaggro event every 45 seconds, or every 0.75 minutes.  I then looked at the total number of actions I could perform at various fight times...

          [ 100 Minutes ]  /  [ 0.75 Minutes / Action ]  =  ~133 Actions

          [ 90 Minutes ]  /  [ 0.75 Minutes / Action ]  =  ~120 Actions

          [ 80 Minutes ]  /  [ 0.75 Minutes / Action ]  =  ~106 Actions

          [ 70 Minutes ]  /  [ 0.75 Minutes / Action ]  =  ~93 Actions  *

          [ 60 Minutes ]  /  [ 0.75 Minutes / Action ]  =  ~80 Actions  *

          [ 50 Minutes ]  /  [ 0.75 Minutes / Action ]  =  ~66 Actions

Remember I this point I don't know how long I will have exactly to fight since I haven't actually experienced what it's like to solo for cells on 1F or even what cells I'm hoping to collect.  I actually repeatedly went back to make this calculation later on while weighing what cells to go for and what not to go for.  Using this math to tell the number of actions I could get, coupled with the later ones to include damage, gave me a good estimate of how long it would take to complete the solo before ever attempting it.

At this point, I figured I would have roughly 60 to 70 minutes to fight LBC so I was aiming at 80 to 93 actions at this point.  Those were the number ranges as far as actions go I focused on for the next section involving damage.

So hopefully this math and logic is easy to follow still.  It gets more complex still.

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Damage Requirements

So now I had a good estimate of how many actions I would have to kill LBC (80 to 93 actions given a 60 to 70 minute fight).  The easiest thing to do at this point was to see how much damage would I have to produce on average PER action to kill LBC...

          [ 50,000 Damage ]  /  [ 80 Actions ]  =  ~625 Damage per Action

          [ 50,000 Damage ]  /  [ 93 Actions ]  =  ~538 Damage per Action

      -  Bio II gives 8 damage per tick for 2 minutes, or 360 damage (plus small initial damage)
      -  Poison II gives 10 damage per tick for 2 minutes, or 400 damage

This calculation shows about what I'm going to need per action - about ~625 for a 60 minute fight to about ~538 for a 70 minute fight.  In addition, I had to be able to produce this average over an extended period of time, which requires a good amount of MP management.  At this point, I had narrowed my choices for the solo down to SCH/RDM and BLM/SCH for access to the MP conservation traits and abilities of Scholar in addition to access to Blizzard IV as my damage ability.

Unfortunately, it was difficult to estimate the amount of damage I could produce every Blizzard IV on either job.  I knew going in that SCH/RDM would produce less damage per nuke and likely have more resists, but provide much better MP management due to a 1 minute timer Parsimony (1/2 MP cost charge).  It was not until I actually tried real runs that I was able to determine which job was better for this.  I actually tried both during my series of attempts.

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"Spell Cycles" and MP Management

In order to determine which spells I would be using, I had to consider both the damage average I needed as well as how much MP I could consistently spend over a long duration fight.  Without getting into too many specifics here, I essentially broke things down into "cycles", or a series of 3 "free casts" after deaggro events.  I did this because if I assumed 45 seconds per deaggro, that's a total of 2 minutes 15 seconds per "cycle", or about the time a DoT lasts (2 minutes).

After some mulling over the possibilities and considering MP management, I went with these 2 possible casting "cycles" for the 2 jobs I considered were best suited for the solo...

      -  SCH/RDM

          Parsimony Blizzard IV (82MP)  >>  Parsimony Blizzard IV  (82MP)  >> Blizzard IV (148MP)

Remember in Dark Arts, the MP cost is lessened by 10% (that's where the 148 MP number comes from).  In this rotation, I'm strictly using Blizzard spells with no DoTs.  I would only use DoTs if I needed a break for whatever reason.  I figured this would produce the most damage possible.  In this situation, assuming no resists, all my nukes have to do is ~538 a shot and I would get a kill in 70 minutes.

The MP cost per "cycle" of this was 312 MP every 2 minutes and 15 seconds.  Given 3 MP/tick refresh (Sanction, Body, Balrahn's Ring) and 2 MP/tick Sublimation, this is a total of 225 MP regened per cycle, or 87 MP lost a cycle excluding Conserve MP.

      -  BLM/SCH

          Bio II (33MP)  >>  Parsimony Blizzard IV (82MP)  >>  Blizzard IV (Blizzard IV)

The MP management of this comes out to 263 MP a cycle, or a 38 MP loss per cycle.  It also includes a DoT which is good in case of mistakes.  Under this type of "cycle", I would have to produce an average Blizzard IV damage (assuming no resists) of about 627 damage to complete a 70 minute kill.

The choice to use which job was undetermined at this point.  I actually was leaning towards Scholar - not because it was favorable in analysis, but because I just wanted to solo something new and interesting on SCH.  BLM/SCH in general is also a pretty 'gimped' job combination that lacks Stoneskin in addition to casting slower.  If you can't tell by the screenshots, though, the solo was eventually done on BLM/SCH.

 

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Conclusions

As mentioned earlier, I had to break these into parts due to length issues.  In this first part, I just wanted to introduce the concept of this solo as well as my thought process and analysis before ever even physically attempting the solo.  The amount of planning that went into this solo was pretty immense compared to some of the other uniques I had dome previously like the Apollyon North solos.

When I first came up with this idea, it was more like a passing thing that I deemed frankly impossible.  Even after figuring out a way to survive kiting Long-Bowed Chariot, the massive 50,000 HP coupled with Salvage Pathos and a time limit just made killing the boss in time seem impossible.  It was only after seeing how often I could actually deaggro LBC that I began to realize the feasibility of the solo. However, as I hope to go over in the next part, all the math and hypothetical analysis really wasn't nearly enough to get by.  It took a huge strategic change to eventually get me over the hump. 


(Near miss on 3rd attempt... timed out at 1% HP...)

The true difficulty of this solo really dawned on me once I actually started attempting.  The number of tiny errors you're allowed to make, even in the more difficult solos, is still pretty forgiving, especially with downtime, Stoneskin, and even Utsusemi if using Ninja as a main or sub.  For this, because you're constantly moving, you're not afforded any chances to recover yourself or give defensive buffs.  Couple this with the fact that LBC can and probably will one shot a mage with no buffs just makes it very difficult.  Actually in my winning attempt, I only make 2 mistakes, meaning LBC only got 2 melee attacks on me, over the course of about 65 minutes - both resulted in death.

In the next part I'll jump away from the hypothetical analysis and start going over attempts.

Lastly, I just want to thank all those people who've helped me constantly get in Salvage (6 man requirement sucks...).  So thanks to Ashira, Payu, Tabite, Myshella, Wyred, Cyphun, Kotraz, Emmaliz, Espera, Yuchi, Aable, Fatkat, Dmons, and the others that offered to help.  I also want to thank Spekkio, who helped me a lot in throwing ideas out on doing this solo for the last two months.

Bhaflau Remnants Won Solo (Part II)

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Pic of the Day

Just a small teaser for a future post this time...




Drama Thread of the Day

This is a semi-old one that pretty funny for me.  Back when the whole Enmity Testing business started and got popular around November 2007, it was posted in quite a few places like BG (where I still post the newest and most relevant testing before formally posting it on this blog).  One of these was Allakhazam...

Enmity Testing thread turns into a massive derail


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