[Elwynn]

I got to see someone with the magey hat today. As far as its model goes, now that I've seen it, I really don't like it. It just doesn't look right from the front, since the sides of the brim flop down so far. It's certainly not worth ten bucks to me to have it for the looks and inventory -1.

[Armando]

Credit goes to Yellow Mage for pointing the video out to me in the first place, but it's funny how well they predicted what A Moogle Kupo d'Etat would be at least one month before it went live.

YouTube - A Moogle Kupo d'Etat

YouTube - A Moogle Kupo d'Etat

[Ziero]

Originally Posted by Omgwtfbbqkitten

I don't see the fault in wanting to be able to have access to all the missions. Missions are probably what I look forward to more than anything in the game, so I would naturally get the mini-expansions, too. Say what you want about the ACP missions , but the Qu'Nia and Stellar Fulcrum fights were very fun. I'd do them again and there's reason to do them again, so clearly I'm getting my money's worth there.

I can most certainly say that the final ACP fight was *not* fun. It needed a very specific job set up, moreso then any mission BC in game, and especially final mission BCs which generally lean towards having a balanced, classic set up. That crap may fly for cash money BC fights and such, but for a mission line, if you go in with a Tank, healer, support and 3 DDs and get your ass handed to you in record time constantly and consistently, it's a broken fight. The final ACP fight was designed for pts full of Rngs, Cors, Smns or chainstunning Rdms. Without multiples of those few classes in your PT, you can't win. So no, having to climb the tower again and then losing that garbage fight over and over is not worth repeating.

While the Qu'Bia fight was kinda fun, it was only because the mobs couldn't be slept and the Gobby would randomly attack people. And that alone is not worth 10 bucks. Especially since the ACP story on a whole is more or less garbage. The final Serpent General quest had a better story then all of ACP, and the fight you get to do after it is a lot more fun.

I understand people can be completionists about things, throwing money at SE after they've given us these lack luster mini expansions is something I can't personally justify. I could understand not giving us new zones and tons of new mobs and events. But at least they could give us a quality storyline, with more then three fights and a half dozen time sink fetch quests. Give us an epic tale with multiple BCs that are engaging, entertaining and challenging in a fair way and I would be more then happy.

[Aksannyi]

Originally Posted by Armando

Credit goes to Yellow Mage for pointing the video out to me in the first place, but it's funny how well they predicted what A Moogle Kupo d'Etat would be at least one month before it went live.
YouTube - A Moogle Kupo d'Etat

I saw it on BG a few months ago. I would have appreciated it more if the people making it could have taken the time to look some words up instead of just guessing.

[BurningPanther]

Originally Posted by Aksannyi

I would have appreciated it more if the people making it could have taken the time to look some words up instead of just guessing.

Isn't that all people do anymore?

You'd think that in the information age, someone with enough access to a computer to create their own videos would be arsed to take the five minutes to bring up Dictionary/Reference/Thesaurus.com on another tab, and find the proper spelling of a word. Hell, Firefox even highlights suspected misspellings (just saved me twice in this post alone). If you misspell an entry, Google will even correct if for you, saying "Did you mean ____ ?"

The computer and the internet at large give everyone every safety net imaginable, and people still manage to spell like pre-schoolers.





All that aside, the video was pretty chuckle-worthy.

[Armando]

It needed a very specific job set up, moreso then any mission BC in game, and especially final mission BCs which generally lean towards having a balanced, classic set up

I still think this is a load of bull and would like to eventually find a different way to win the fight.

Our community doesn't really try to hard. Just look at the way we tank it now. Have the PLD constantly running/getting drawn in like a jackass. For as much as SE makes lame fights, that really doesn't seem like how it should be fight. The community just tries to look for some easy exploit first and foremost, just like how people would look for as many SMNs as possible when doing Promyvion when CoP came out.

[Yellow Mage]

Originally Posted by Ziero

The final ACP fight was designed for pts full of Rngs, Cors, Smns or chainstunning Rdms.

That is a bit of an outrageous and unfair claim. I don't think the Dev team had specifically those jobs in mind when they designed the final ACP fight. They just designed it stupidly, and in ended up turning out that way.

[Evion]

I lost that fight 3 times (2x zerg 1x Pt style), then went PLD SMN RNG SAM WHM DRK for an easy win. I personally have/will get all the expansions mostly for the gear partly for the completion. My shiny new blue and white sweater goes over very well in all circumstances. When I get the STR4 Haste4 or Haste6 Snaspshotwhatever hat (haven't decided), that will be sweet as well.

[Taskmage]

Originally Posted by Armando

Our community doesn't really try to hard. Just look at the way we tank it now. Have the PLD constantly running/getting drawn in like a jackass. For as much as SE makes lame fights, that really doesn't seem like how it should be fight.

If someone is to tank the fight, that's pretty much how it must be done. If you don't constantly run away you will get nailed with Seed of Turnyouintoacharmedmandy, at which point everyone else starts getting drawn in as they bounce around a hate list with no tank on it. Standing outside of the skill's short range is the obvious, intuitive solution. If there's another way I bet it's some gimmicky BS like /kneel in Odin. Maybe you have to be singing.

I agree with YM. The fight was just stupidly designed, or more likely no effort was applied at all to the design. If it went through QA at all, the test team all used their two hours, the screen faded to black and when faded back in the crystal died and they called it good content.

I'm not going to say there was nothing good about aCP, but I will say it was definitely not worth ten dollars. Whoever said it doesn't stand up to the content we're already getting for free was spot on. If the additional missions were even half the quality per mission of the ToAU or WotG ones, if the story was even half as good, I could feel satisfied. This isn't even close.

[Armando]

If someone is to tank the fight, that's pretty much how it must be done. If you don't constantly run away you will get nailed with Seed of Turnyouintoacharmedmandy, at which point everyone else starts getting drawn in as they bounce around a hate list with no tank on it. Standing outside of the skill's short range is the obvious, intuitive solution. If there's another way I bet it's some gimmicky BS like /kneel in Odin. Maybe you have to be singing.

I'm almost sure its cast time isn't instant. This is where the lazy factor comes in. Instead of focusing on learning to identify the move, and avoiding it, people just come up with some crazy solution that doesn't make any sense from a game design standpoint. I highly doubt this is how the fight was meant to be fought. SE is crazy but it's not like they've got chimps designing their BC fights.

[Aksannyi]

It's a dangerous enough move that I'd rather tank it from afar and get drawn in than take the chances of lagging a bit and getting owned by the move. I can't remember what it was called, but it really did own people's faces.

[Armando]

Sure. I'm not saying it's not a viable strategy. I'm just saying, it's a bit unfair to bitch and moan about the fight's supposed flawed designed and required setups when it seems to me that what's become the "standard" strategy utilizes a pretty questionable way of sidestepping the fight's problem moves.

It's almost sarcastic to say the PLD/RDM is tanking when you can't even do actions unless the boss stops to cast a spell or use TP.

[Aksannyi]

Well as far as I remember, it wasn't stunnable, and I don't think shadows absorbed it either. I obviously don't tank anything, but the first time I did the fight (as RDM, solo main healing.) I definitely remember I got owned as a healer, ran out of MP extremely quickly, though to be fair, we didn't really know what to expect.

And as long as the PLD has hate, the RNGs don't so they can continue to damage. It's not really about how they hold hate, as long as they do it.

[Evion]

Seed of Turnyouintoacharmedmandy... OMG LOL. The PLD running back not only helped him/everyone avoid getting hit by things but, even better, kept the mob wasting all his actions on pulling the PLD back in.

[Armando]

Well as far as I remember, it wasn't stunnable, and I don't think shadows absorbed it either. I obviously don't tank anything, but the first time I did the fight (as RDM, solo main healing.) I definitely remember I got owned as a healer, ran out of MP extremely quickly, though to be fair, we didn't really know what to expect.

Like I said, I'm fairly sure the move isn't instant; Wiki claims that there's enough time to walk out of its range, and from the little I've been able to observe, that appears to be the case.

I've only done the fight twice, both times joining a random pickup group out of pure curiosity. Naturally since I'd never done it before and I didn't want to gamble on the success of people I don't know, I mainly stuck to the default strategies. First group failed due to timeout; the healers didn't seem to have too much trouble. On the second group I started experimenting with the range, to see how far I could get without triggering Draw In (which interrupts spells and happens frequently enough to be a huge pain in the ass.) During that process I got charmed two or three times. It was rather uneventful. I got slept, a DD got pulled in, he kept running away, I woke up, pulled hate back, and the fight went on. Sadly, Seed of Judgment caused a wipe.

I was unprepared because, thanks to running constantly in the first fight, I didn't have a clear look at the Charm move's animation; and I was distracted with testing various distances anyways. But I would like to test it out a bit more when I do ACP and see what the margin of error for getting out of range of Charm is. Standing up close with a Joyeuse and enspells and spamming Atonement is surely a step up hate-wise and in terms of completion speed compared to running around doing absolutely nothing save for throwing out two spells once every 15-20 seconds when the boss stops to do something. Likewise, it would be a step up for the few close range DDs that can't /ra (MNK and DRG?) to go /DNC and simply run out of Charm range, than to stay out of range constantly and only be able to WS the boss.

The PLD running back not only helped him/everyone avoid getting hit by things but, even better, kept the mob wasting all his actions on pulling the PLD back in.

Pretty sure, from tanking it first-hand, that Draw In doesn't really waste the mob's time in any way, and running away only really avoids the Charm move. You'll get pounded with everything else, since you won't make it too far before getting Drawn In. So, if you could avoid Charm without running constantly, you would lose nothing, and gain much more hate and a significant amount of damage output.

EDIT:

ACP Final Battle video

YouTube - FFXI: A Crystalline Prophecy Final Battle Part 1 of 3

YouTube - FFXI: A Crystalline Prophecy Final Battle Part 1 of 3

At 4:06, the Paladin (Knivesx) gets Drawn In, and the boss immediately tries to Charm. Despite having been pulled straight under the boss (as opposed to 2 to 3 feet in front, which is where one would normally melee) the Paladin managed to make it out safely with time to spare. It wasn't until 4:10-4:11 that the TP move "readying" animation ended and the charm's proper animation began. It isn't until 4:16 that the boss appears to be idle again, as indicated by the standard attack it tries to do shortly afterwards.

So that's at least 4 secs of charging time. The move is visually identifiable because of the yellow lines that flow into all mobs when they're preparing a TP move; these aren't present when it's trying to cast a spell, nor in its normal attack animation. Besides that, the message that the boss was readying charm appeared instantly with the readying animation (as opposed to moves like Meltdown where the animation starts significantly earlier) so the chat log can also be trusted. It doesn't seem like it would be hard to move out of range by any stretch of the imagination, if you're actually looking out for it.

For the time being I'll stick with my assertion that the playerbase hasn't really tried to do this "properly" until I try this and fail enough times to conclude that it's less practical to try to manually avoid it than to simply run away constantly.