New content analysis - Magians & VNMs

Besides the chaotic server merger and the exciting new summons, this new version update brought a few new systems to lay with. I've been researching and investigating some of these systems, and I thought I'd bring you some of my findings and thoughts.

Trial of the Magians
This is the new "upgradable weapons" system that allows people to upgrade relic & mythic weapons as well. For us mortals, we can pick up a free weapon and jump through various hoops to upgrade the weapons to much more usable forms.

More information on this is available on the wiki at http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_the_Magians

In general, the weapons come in two notable forms:
- Final form has "Occasionally attacks twice"
- Final form has various stats that push it above and beyond current level 75 weapons. For example, the Marksmanship gun can get "Str+4, Ranged Attack +12", or the dagger can get "Agi+4, Evasion+12" which are quite overpowered compared to anything else. There is a +dmg dagger that has a damage rating of 38, which is just one below the relic/mythic daggers
- While the "Occ. atk. twice" weapons are aug/rare/ex, the stat weapons are only aug/ex, so you can potentially have two daggers with Evasion+12

Now, with such fine weapons, what are the hoops to jump through to get them? Turns out that there are two main hoops, and one extra hoop for one extra-special weapon

1. Kill mobs under various conditions
This starts off innocently enough... the first trial starts of by killing 100 mobs of a certain family, like aquans or rabbits. In fact, the relic condition is similar to this, except you're doing 1500 relic WSs against a certain family.

Things get a lot more complicated as you move through the other trials as you work towards the final form of your weapon. Namely, they add in weather/day conditions and more beasts to kill. Just for example, for the THF/BRD/DNC dagger "Dakini" with the following stats:
* DMG: 25 + 9
* Delay 195-5
* AGI+4, Evasion+12
You have to do the following all with the weapon equipped:
- Kill 100 rabbits
- Kill 100 crabs under fire, wind, lightning or light weather or on these days
- Kill 100 mobs on windsday or under wind weather
- Kill 100 vermin type on windsday or wind weather
- Kill 150 bird-type on windsday or wind weather
- Kill 200 morbol-type on windsday or wind weather

The first couple of trials are actually simple, but the last few basically have you camping specific days to go kill specific mobs. This is what SE considers "soloable" since, yes, technically any solo person could go do this. Keep in mind, however, that SCH weather effects do not count, so you can't cheat that way, and the specific day you want comes about once every 7 hours.

So, let's say you're an awesome killing machine and can kill one mob per minute... and let's also say that you can find mobs to kill constantly. The first 200 mobs would only take just over 3 hours to kill, but the next few... 550 mobs that have to be killed on windsday or winds weather. You camp a zone and wait for it to come up. That's just over 9 hours of killing at 1 kill per minute. However, your specific day only comes up once very 7 hours, so that's really about 64 consecutive hours if you really want to rush through it, assuming you can kill 1 mob per minute average.

1 mob/minute sounds like a TP burn to me, so... if you make it your mission to go out every windsday to kill specific mobs, you can probably finish it about 12 non-consecutive hours.If you take longer, say... 2 minutes per mob, then that would double it to 24 non-consecutive hours. Fairly reasonable by SE standards. Keep in mind that the mobs have to give exp, so easy prey or higher... You can't just farm too weak mobs for this.

However, you *can* do this in an alliance/party situation. In theory, if you gather a group of people who all need the same objective and you mow through a whole zone on a specific day, you can probably complete the objective in a much shorter time. The only stipulation is that you need to be within range to receive exp for the kill to get credit.

Recommendation: Gather a group of people who all need the same trial and go slaughter an area of Easy Prey mobs. A party of 6 killing easy prey mobs close to each other should be able to hit the 100/trial easily within one hour/one game day. This isn't WS points where you have to wait for each other for TP... you're going all out to kill these mobs! In a best case scenario, you might be able to finish one of these stat-type weapons in about 12 hours of "work".

2. Kill NMs
The other trial for many of these weapons is to get kill various NMs with the weapon equipped multiple times. These NMs relatively low level, starting with the ones in the starting zones, and could go as high as the level 80 VNMs. You also have to kill them multiple times too.

For example, for the THF/BRD/DNC dagger, the first three trials are:
- Kill Nocuous Weapon x3
- Kill Black Triple Stars x3
- Kill Serra x3
This also means that you have to wait for their repop times, kill placeholders if they are lottery pop, and wait for pop conditions (such as Black Triple Stars will only pop at night). Good news is that the mobs they chose seem to have short repop times, 1-4 hours, instead of say... asking you to kill Serket 3x. The other good news is that you just need to be in the party/alliance to get credit for the kill, so hopefully this means people will be teaming up for it. I saw a party of 6 DNCs & THFs camping Nocuous Weapon in the ruins last night, so it seems that people are teaming up. I also saw an alliance of SAMs, with over 20 SAMs in Giddeus last night ~.~

If you can get claim every time the mob pops, you could spend between 3-9 hours on a single trial. That would get you past the initial trial. For the dagger "Occ. atk. twice" weapon, your hoops are:
- Hunt the 3 NMs listed above
- Kill 400 Arcana-type mobs
- Kill 300 Hippogryph-type mobs
- Either:
1. Kill 500 Amorphs, 600 Plantoids & 400 Peistes
2. Obtain 10 Eyes of Virthandis

Option #1 would be SE's "solo" option as you *can* do that alone, though it would take a long time... again, assuming the TP party rate of 1 kill/minute, that would only take you 36 hours to do all the kills. However, you can get people to help you kill! On the other hand, I think 36 hours would be optimistic considering how difficult and annoying Peistes and Hippogryph-type mobs are to fight.

Option #2 requires obtaining 10 drops from the T3 "Voidwalker NMs", which is what I'll talk about next. It is a much more difficult path and requires a solid alliance. Why would you want to do this? Well, comparing the two daggers:
Both Athames have:
* DMG 18, Delay 190
* Delay +21
* Occ. atk. twice
BUT the better one has "DMG+13" which brings it to: DMG: 31, about average for a DNC-type dagger except for the attacking twice property. The solo version is merely a TP-gaining piece which has much lower damage.

Recommendation: Truthfully, I think we need to wait to see what "Occ. atk. twice" means. Is it the frequency of the Joyeuse? Or is it a much lower rate? If it is the former, then I can see a reason for doing this path. My other recommendation would be if you decide to go down this path to obtain a double-attacking weapon, you work on farming the VNM items FIRST before you bother camping the NMs. Getting the NMs and killing 700 mobs is a lot easier compared to the VNM system.

Personal Opinion
For the "Trials of the Magians" system, I'm a little mixed on it... I'm kinda interested in the stat-type weapons, but I'm not 100% convinced that it is worth it. My current dagger mix is Azoth/Ermine's Tail, which gives me a combined stat of +4 accuracy, +12 evasion. Doubling up on any of the stat daggers would be pretty crazy, giving either +24 evasion or +16 accuracy, but mixing two of them would be just +4 accuracy over my current combination. However, getting even one of these daggers takes a ton of work... and it isn't even something you can start and unlock eventually like say a WS latent. You have to actively go hunt the different mob types.

The "occ. atk. twice" weapons on the other hand are quite attractive. A Dancer with this and a Joyeuse would be a sight to behold, and would definitely not have any TP issues. However, the effort of the final task is such that I wouldn't even bother starting this quest until I completed the final requirement. I'll talk about this requirement in the next section.

My current conclusion is... wait & see. I'm not inclined to start the stat-based weapons just yet... maybe if I can figure out a way to team up with others to make that part go by quicker... I'm also not starting up the "occ. atk twice" path unless I can put together a team to hunt VNMs to get the final requirement. Finally, with the level cap raise coming up, who knows... maybe there'll be a level 80, 90 or 99 dagger that I can buy off the AH that beats all of these for 1k gil in a couple of months?

---

Voidwalker Notorious Monsters
The new VNM system is much easier to get into compared to the ZNM system introduced 1 1/2 years ago. All you need to get started is 1k gil to buy a key item in Jeuno, then to run around the appropriate zone and hunt for your targetted NM.

More information can be found at: http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/VNM

This system is quite amusing as you can't actually see the NM, but you have to play a kind of "hot & cold" game with it by /healing in the appropriate zone. You'll get a direction and distance to go... Incidentally, this is the first time I think that I've seen "yalm" used as an official distance measurement in XI. All you distance plugin users can rejoice :)

The NM can, and DOES move around invisibly, so you'll have to check if you are on the right path frequently. It will pop into the "real world" claimed when someone with the appropriate crystal key item does a /heal close enough to it. This can lead to some really funny situations where the popper leads the group running around in circles, or... maybe someday some mage in an exp party will accidentally MPK the whole party when he or she goes to /heal for some MP xD

While the Tier 1 VNMs do not seem to drop anything, the T2s drop situationally interesting items, and the T3s drop some fairly good accessories. For example:
- T2 VNM Lamprey Lord drops a Hirudinea Earring which "Enhances effect of Drain & Aspir"
- T2 VNM Farruca Fly drops an Alert Ring which has "Evasion +6" but also with "Accuracy -3"
- T3 VNM Lord Ruthven drops a Strigoi Ring which has "Str+6, Attack+3"
- T3 VNM Blobdingnag drops a Blobnag Ring which as "AGI+6, Ranged Accuracy +3"

Not all items have been found yet since the system is still so new. However, they seem to follow a pattern... each mob has a specific job, and will drop something that relates to that job. The T2 Pixie Skuld does chainspell multiple times, and drops a Veela Cape that "Enhances Fast Cast".

Fuuji & I went out to play with some of these VNMs last night. It started off with the two of us duoing T1s, but we gathered(tricked?) a group of AP people into coming out for the T2 Pixies. In the process, we learnt quite a few things:
- Killing a mob on one tier does not necessarily mean that you will advance to the next. Fuuji could advance on the first kill for his T1, but it took 5 kills before I could pop a T2. We've killed 3 T2s together so far, but neither of us have advanced to the T3 yet
- Each zone has their own VNMs that are roaming around invisibly. Once you kill them in the zone, you have to wait for them to repop. We don't know how long it takes to repop, but it is likely to be an hour or more
- Each VNM "path" can be done in multiple zones...We started in Battalia Downs, but once we killed the T2s in that zone, we moved over to Rolanberry Fields. It also looks like the past [S] zones also qualify, so you have up to 6 zones, or 12 mobs that you can try to kill to complete a T2 before you have to wait for repops.
- You can move from any T1 path to any T2 path, but the T2 mob you kill determines which T3 path you advance to

Now, let's go back to the "occ. atk. twice" weapons. For the good weapon, you need 10x drops from the T3 VNM. Each kill of the T3 VNM appears to drop 0-2 of these, so in a best case scenario, you're looking to kill at least 5 T3s for one person to be able to upgrade their weapon. To get to these 5 kills, you'll probably have to kill... I don't know... maybe... 10-30 T2s, and... 20-60 T1s? Since advancement is random, you might end up spending a whole night killing T2s without being able to advance to that T3.

So... let's say I want to go get those 10x Eye of Verthandi for my dagger... I'd need to gather an army capable of defeating Verthandi at least 5x, probably a lot more considering the drop rate. And in between these relatively big fights, I'd need to gather people to kill the T1 & T2 mobs, of which the T2s have to be on the Verthandi path (aka. Skuld & Urd only). Multiply that by the number of other people who want to go kill their own mobs and we'll have quite a mess on our hands for organizing such an event! Especially since the in between rewards aren't *that* good.

Fighting experience
I can't say for sure how difficult the various fights are, but I can give you an idea for the mobs on the Verthandi path.

T1 - High level elemental
Pretty basic fight... Fuuji & I duo'ed this easily on DNC & MNK. Probably could have gone a lot faster if we just came as 2x mages, but I wanted to be safe on DNC xD The elemental you get is random, so it could be a silly light elemental that spams holy, or an annoying ice elemental with ice spikes.

T2 - Skuld
Skuld was the 2nd T2 we popped. RDM main that uses chainspell multiple times. Also can cast BLM spells like Poisonga, and annoying spells like Paralyga, Gravga, AND hits for a lot of damage, about 200-300 each.

Hate gets reset during Chainspell, making being a mage for this fight a risky proposition. We took Skuld on with DNC, 2x WHM, RDM, 3xSAM. While we took a lot of damage, the fight itself isn't too bad. If anything, I'd bring a BLU for this fight to spam Head Butt to interrupt Chainspell as much as possible. I was doing my best with Violent Flourish, but the timer on that is still 20 seconds.

Our one Skuld kill dropped the Veela Cape, which our pet JP WHM won the lot for :)

T2 - Urd
Urd is the NM that I was going after. She's a Dancer main that uses Trance multiple times and also casts WHM spells. She has some crazy moves such as Cyclonic Torrent that does massive damage (500-600 per person) and AoE mute that cannot be removed using echo drops, as well as some either single target, or conal Amnesia moves. Like Skuld, she resets hate every time she uses Trance, so there's a high chance that WHMs & RDMs will not only get beat up, but also muted! Her amnesia move also means that not even a DNC can guarantee that you will have healing available ~.~

We fought her twice... first time was very nearly a disaster with DNC, 2x WHM, RDM & 3x SAM. Cron died when she was at a low HP. We simply couldn't keep up with the amount of healing going on. We ended up using 5 out of our 7 2-hrs and we barely managed to kill her the first time.

The second time brought reinforcements... I think it was DNC, 3x WHM, 2x RDM & 3x SAM. This fight went a lot smoother, especially with Fuuji & Radack keeping her busy by constantly dispelling her buffs. This lead to her being distracted and rebuffing herself instead of trying to kill us. Still, she does do a lot of damage. While I might change the lineup of jobs I bring to this fight, I think that anything less than a full party would be suicide, and 8-9 people would definitely be safer for her.

The 2nd one we fought dropped a Choreia earring, which "Increases Step Accuracy" and is now part of my Step macro :D

How would you put an event together?
We haven't fought a T3 VNM yet, but judging from various reports, and also from the strength of the T2 mobs, I'd guess that at the very least 2 full parties would be required for the T3, if not a full alliance.

Now that has me wondering... how would you put an event together to get people these items? You'd be looking at recruiting up to 18 people to do these fights many times... especially since just about everyone would want the weapons... The items from the T2s seem to be a common drop, and given how many T2s and T3s you'd have to fight, it's very likely that everyone would get what they want easily... I guess the melee rings would be in high demand.

How about... how long would the event run? Let's say you ask people to go get the T1s solo... this is certainly easy enough to do with most decent level 75 jobs.... A good portion of the time we spent last night was gathering people to fight the T2s. The actual search for the mobs took maybe 10 minutes each, and the fights themselves were around 5 minutes, definitely no more than 10 minutes.

So... you might have an event where you gather up an alliance in a pre-determined zone which people are interested in, then you smash through as many T2s as possible, moving between zones. i.e.: start in Battalia Downs, move to Rolanberry, then to Sauromugue, then to the past versions to kill all the NMs possible. Once we have enough of the T3 pops, we'd do basically the same to farm that tier, just that it would take longer to do. You might be able to do 3-4 T3s in say... 2-3 hours of work.

I'm still not sure if this is worth putting together as an event... I wonder... anyone else out there interested in doing these?