I decided to count how many classic dungeons I have left in order to catch up. I think it clocked in around 45. So many dungeons.
I'm staring at the mountain of stamina needed to clear the Expert dungeons...
The only thing pushing me forward is the thought of "Thar be mythril in dem hills!"
I'm envious of those of you who still have so many mythril to collect from the classic dungeons. For those of you keeping track, get ready to add another 16 more (8 classic, 8 elites) because DU21 drops in 3 days.
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
Finally bit the bullet and made Curaja R5. Bye bye all the holy orbs ever!
Now that we're on "normal" greens drop rates, it seems pretty impossible to keep up with these rotating orbs. I wasn't even able to get all of them from the last batch that just expired. I was saving for the Major Summon.
Of course, I don't do stamina refreshes when I'm farming daily orb dungeons. The drop rates are so poor that it isn't worth it. The only time stamina refreshes is worth it is during Orb Fest, and greens don't drop in Orb Fest.
If it wasn't because of the White Mage Nightmare, I probably wouldn't have even bothered if they were saaay, Lightning, Wind, and Non-Elemental. Wind and Lightning are generally in high demand, but I wouldn't bother wasting 10000 greens for a singular orb. The new daily has decent drops rates such that you can luck out and get 1-2 over the day. 1 Orb when you need 40 or 60 to upgrade a skill is poor returns. Better to go for the stamina shard for long term utility.
I mean, I only really run daily dungeons on 3 specific days: Tuesdays for Power Orbs, Wednesdays for Wind Orbs, and Sunday for XP. On all the other days I use my stamina for event battles, story dungeons, or other things going on. I will only run the other daily dungeons if I literally have nothing else to spend my stamina on.
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
Getting 1k each week for the mythril is fine. I'll be happy there.
There's a bit of hyperbole to Beasteh's post, but by and large, you can never be too overprepared. Kongbakpao's site does have links to videos of people beating the Nightmare without things like Raise, and only 1 medica albeit, it's an h85 level medica (Minwu, Selphie SSB, Relm, Porom, Penelo SSB, etc.)
I'm going in with the following team:
Y'shtola: Curaja R5/Diaga R4. Wall, Medica, Dr. Mogs
Beatrix: Saint Cross R3 (for mirrors, mainly, but also against P3 Evrae)/Shellga
Relm: Diaga R3/Raise R2. Portrait of Lakshmi
Penelo: Diaga R3/Esuna R3. War Dance
Lenna: Curaga R5/... something? She's just here because she has the highest base MND stat, unless I pull something else from the Lucky Banner for a different WHM.
RW: Likely Garnet SSB, as it RES magical mitigation stackable with Shellga, haste and heavy regen, it's win-win.
EDIT: To note, would poison breath be considered physical or magical though? Because that would necessitate a Protega if it's physical, at the very least.
If it wasn't because of the White Mage Nightmare, I probably wouldn't have even bothered if they were saaay, Lightning, Wind, and Non-Elemental. Wind and Lightning are generally in high demand, but I wouldn't bother wasting 10000 greens for a singular orb. The new daily has decent drops rates such that you can luck out and get 1-2 over the day. 1 Orb when you need 40 or 60 to upgrade a skill is poor returns. Better to go for the stamina shard for long term utility.
Sort of? But one stamina shard is actually worth surprisingly little. Look at it this way: if your max stamina were one point higher, how much extra stamina would that be? Well, to get any value out of that one extra point, you'd have to let your stamina fill completely up, then drain it all, and you can't do that more than about three times per day. So, one extra point of max stamina is worth, best case, about three stamina/day, or something like 1/50 of a mythril per day.
So now you're looking at spending 50,000 greens for about 1/50 of a mythril per day, versus spending 50,000 greens for five major orbs. (The five shards also come with a stamina refresh, which is worth one mythril.) How many mythril is a major orb worth to you? Farming one up during orbfest costs around 100 stamina on average, so maybe 60% of a mythril? Five orbs would be about 3 mythril's worth. The stamina shard investment will give one mythril's worth of stamina up front, and it'll take 100 days to earn another two mythril's worth. So it is the better long-term investment, but that's a pretty long term. (Also, orbs now are worth more than potential orbs later.)
Of course, this is all complicated by several factors, such as the fact that major orbs will lose value relative to stamina over time, as they become more common and the meta shifts toward 6* abilities. Even so, it's surprising how little value you actually get from the stamina shards.
Granted, I'm still personally going to buy the 10k shards eventually, because that makes the number in the top-right of my screen bigger, and I like it when my numbers get bigger.
There is a WM Lucky Draw that can potentially fix any weaknesses.
"potentially"
Brb asking mods for bigger quotation marks.
No kidding. I'd seriously consider skipping that one if I weren't interested in Cid's Missions - a native medica seems to be a major step towards success. I've got HotF, DG, MG8, and Oerba; so it looks like my gaps are shared medicas, native in every realm (not happening), and a medica for a Dancer (for AoE debuffing). And SG would be nice, for Nightmare synergy Tyro for role filling.
If it wasn't because of the White Mage Nightmare, I probably wouldn't have even bothered if they were saaay, Lightning, Wind, and Non-Elemental. Wind and Lightning are generally in high demand, but I wouldn't bother wasting 10000 greens for a singular orb. The new daily has decent drops rates such that you can luck out and get 1-2 over the day. 1 Orb when you need 40 or 60 to upgrade a skill is poor returns. Better to go for the stamina shard for long term utility.
Eh, I'm at around 145, and given my usual schedule that's a point where it very rarely has a chance to fully refill and 'waste' stamina. The occasional refresh is more beneficial for me now than extra stamina for the very, very rare days when I'm allowed 8 hours of sleep.
As for the WM nightmare, if I had a natural WM hastega, particularly one like Garnet's SSB, I'd be feeling pretty ready with only one diaga/diara each since I could RW an ether. I expect Tyro will be able to come close enough to capping Diara with the help of Basch's shield, and I already have two powerful medicas (Relm and Aerith's SSBs), so using Raise on the lens in the second part is a very viable strategy for me that'll significantly ease off need for deep dia* hones. Don't forget that it's undead, so Curaga/Curajas work for damage too, although obviously a lot less than Dia* will do.
I guess maybe that's yet another reason to try to draw on Kuja2. Two hastegas that'll be boss for the fight. I could always bring Quistis and leave her on permanent low-end healing/poisona duty though.
Mid/High regen effects are very handy too. White Staff (FFT) is a workhorse for Cid Missions.
I feel sometimes Portrait of Lakshimi is almost overkill. I was doing fine with Aerith's Healing Wind for a long time. Relm casts her Medica once, and spends the rest of the time being skipped in favor of someone else performing an action.
Since the white mage nightmare only gets you the right to craft an awful spell, and the crystals towards it, I'm just going to punt on it for now.
I have 2 Medicas (Vanille and Relm) so it's probably doable, but I'm not going to dump that many resources into Diagas that don't really have value aside from this one fight that has no real rewards yet and comes back every month.
Isn't the Reraise Nightmare realm still approximately a month away?
I want the crystal just for completeness, but I'll probably never craft the spell. Not when there are plenty of RW's out there with Reraise + Heal on them. If I encounter a fight with a guaranteed death effect that I need Reraise for, I'll just pack an appropriate RW and not sweat it.
I'm going to have to give some serious thought to this white mage dungeon. I have medica SBs on Yuna, Vanille and Penelo so healing should be covered. I'll have to look over my ability pool and see what I can field.
The nice thing is Diaga at least starts out with 4 casts at R1. You only need to hone it two more times. You probably already have one honed up to R3 or 4 by now, so in theory, you only need 2 more.
At 5 White, 3 Wind and 3 Holy, with escalating costs, one R3 Diaga will cost you 35 Whites, 21 Winds and 21 Holys. Times two for 70/42/42. Greaters, of course. There should be an abundance of White orbs from the SSB orbfest since there's very little to actually use them on. Wind and Holy orbs may be much lower if you honed Thief's Revenge or Saint Cross at all, making Wind orbs forever at a premium. Check your 2 and 3* stockpiles because you can probably upgrade a bunch of them to 4*.
Breaking it down, it doesn't seem as resource intensive. Extra diagas are completely unnecessary for anything but that fight, but at least after the event, you can get 50% of the resources invested back, making the cost/pain of it all not so terrible. I realize I'm forever an optimist though. Not everyone shares that view. :P
Phew, I was starting to get worried since it had been a month since the last update. I vastly prefer that PDF to trying to find things in the monster spreadsheet (mostly because the spreadsheet takes a lot longer to load).
Buy them all. White Mage Nightmare is around the corner and I think we all need a few extra Diagas/Cura**s.
At this rate, I'll never save up 100000 for a stamina shard, let alone 500000.
I'm not made of greens. I have way too damn many Major Whites that I will never use already, and I have a pretty substantial pile of Major Earth as well. Holy is a good buy for MOAR SAINT CROSS though.
Also: who cares about the white mage nightmare? I still haven't bothered finishing the first two nightmares, because the rewards are not anything I'm going to use for a long, long time: just a few crystals, and the records for abilities I probably won't ever craft. Reraise seems even more useless than Ultima or Crushdown.
Do summons work in the Reraise Nightmare? Would it be worthwhile to craft Alexander? Many of the White Mages in RK are also 4 or 5 star summoners. Yuna, Aerith, Eiko, Arc, Relm, and Tyro are all 5-star WHM and at least 4-star SMN.
Do summons work in the Reraise Nightmare? Would it be worthwhile to craft Alexander? Many of the White Mages in RK are also 4 or 5 star summoners. Yuna, Aerith, Eiko, Arc, Relm, and Tyro are all 5-star WHM and at least 4-star SMN.
Isn't the damage tied to MAG though? So they'd have to sacrifice some MND in order to do any damage.
I seem to remember reading that the medal conditions for the Reraise nightmare include things like "don't use Summons" and "don't use Black Magic." And if you could use them, there probably wouldn't be so much complaining about the number of Diagas needed.
I think the Adloquium nightmare doesn't explicitly disallow summons/black, but the enemies have super absurd ridiculous RES, so they don't work well (also, it has a pretty vicious counter for physical, black, and ninja). There's a special encounter condition that vastly amplifies the damage of white magic, which is why those still work.
I seem to remember reading that the medal conditions for the White Mage nightmares include things like "don't use Summons" and "don't use Black Magic." And if you could use them, there probably wouldn't be so much complaining about the number of Diagas needed.
Yep. Ninja magic is fine though. As is physically murderating the lens with Saint Cross for example.
And white magic does triple damage on both, I believe. Definitely on Evrae. I assume on the big gun six months away too.
Looks like only a few more hours for me to down Mateus. It's not the end of the world if I don't beat it, but it would be nice. Sleep is such a pain to use a skill slot for.
Also: who cares about the white mage nightmare? I still haven't bothered finishing the first two nightmares, because the rewards are not anything I'm going to use for a long, long time: just a few crystals, and the records for abilities I probably won't ever craft. Reraise seems even more useless than Ultima or Crushdown.
Honestly, the biggest appeal of these fights for me isn't the abilities, it's that the fights require you to be at least a bit clever and pay attention to what you're doing, and for 1 stamina I can actually play around and try a few things.
I feel like, in a better world, this is how the entire game would be.
Looks like only a few more hours for me to down Mateus. It's not the end of the world if I don't beat it, but it would be nice. Sleep is such a pain to use a skill slot for.
Ramza can use Lullaby, which leaves a spot for Full Break.
Looks like only a few more hours for me to down Mateus. It's not the end of the world if I don't beat it, but it would be nice. Sleep is such a pain to use a skill slot for.
Ramza can use Lullaby, which leaves a spot for Full Break.
I don't have Ramza at a respectable level, and i don't have any full breaks yet. Settling for a like 67 Shadow and Phantasm, which is unfortunate that I couldn't bring my lvl 77 Terra. I'm pretty sure winning this fight is going to be a long shot, i need to focus on getting full break and saint's cross finally crafted.
Also, I need to get Mog's Teaching. The Hall of Rites is the only place to get Tyro's MC2, right?
I'm pretty sure I used Tyro for sleep on that fight. Equip him with Lullaby (Bard AoE sleep) and an AoE BLM spell. I gave him Ruinga. AoE spells cannot be reflected, so the boss's reflect is not an issue.
Then just use physical and spellblade to kill the adds and the boss.
It's been a week since I fought that boss, but if I were going to re-make a team for it and fight it today, my team would look like this:
Agrias - Thundara Strike / Saint Cross / Cleansing Strike
Ramza - Full Break / Magic Breakdown / Shout
Lenna - Curaja / Shellga / Princess's Favor
Tyro - Lullaby / Ruinga / Sentinel Grimoire
Zack - Life Siphon / Power Break / Air Strike
If you don't have native wall, bring Wall as your RW. If you can bring your own wall, bring Lightning with Crushing Blow as your RW. She'll obliterate the Azers very quickly.
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Dark Orbs are the bigger hurdle. Swimming in Black Orbs right now.
I'm staring at the mountain of stamina needed to clear the Expert dungeons...
The only thing pushing me forward is the thought of "Thar be mythril in dem hills!"
Oh and the stamina shards are also great
If I clear all of these, that's 11 potential 3* pulls!
Steam: TheArcadeBear
The FFRK PDF has been updated
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Tube: This must be what it felt like to be an Iraqi when Saddam was killed
Bookish Stickers - Mrs. Rius' Etsy shop with bumper stickers and vinyl decals.
Mythril, Major White, Holy and Earth orbs
At this rate, I'll never save up 100000 for a stamina shard, let alone 500000.
Steam: TheArcadeBear
Of course, I don't do stamina refreshes when I'm farming daily orb dungeons. The drop rates are so poor that it isn't worth it. The only time stamina refreshes is worth it is during Orb Fest, and greens don't drop in Orb Fest.
Steam: TheArcadeBear
Some form of aoe regen is handy as well, in white mage/bard flavor, then you need raise, some form of hastega, and shellga
And every single medica that it is humanly possible to acquire (pray for lucky draw luck), which is why I'm shooting for Selphie's SSB tomorrow
It is brutally hard even with all of this, and without a single one of these things you may as well not even bother because you will lose
Oh
Well
Guess I'm fucked, then
I have 2 shared SB medicas and that's it
"potentially"
Brb asking mods for bigger quotation marks.
I'm going in with the following team:
Y'shtola: Curaja R5/Diaga R4. Wall, Medica, Dr. Mogs
Beatrix: Saint Cross R3 (for mirrors, mainly, but also against P3 Evrae)/Shellga
Relm: Diaga R3/Raise R2. Portrait of Lakshmi
Penelo: Diaga R3/Esuna R3. War Dance
Lenna: Curaga R5/... something? She's just here because she has the highest base MND stat, unless I pull something else from the Lucky Banner for a different WHM.
RW: Likely Garnet SSB, as it RES magical mitigation stackable with Shellga, haste and heavy regen, it's win-win.
EDIT: To note, would poison breath be considered physical or magical though? Because that would necessitate a Protega if it's physical, at the very least.
Steam: TheArcadeBear
Sort of? But one stamina shard is actually worth surprisingly little. Look at it this way: if your max stamina were one point higher, how much extra stamina would that be? Well, to get any value out of that one extra point, you'd have to let your stamina fill completely up, then drain it all, and you can't do that more than about three times per day. So, one extra point of max stamina is worth, best case, about three stamina/day, or something like 1/50 of a mythril per day.
So now you're looking at spending 50,000 greens for about 1/50 of a mythril per day, versus spending 50,000 greens for five major orbs. (The five shards also come with a stamina refresh, which is worth one mythril.) How many mythril is a major orb worth to you? Farming one up during orbfest costs around 100 stamina on average, so maybe 60% of a mythril? Five orbs would be about 3 mythril's worth. The stamina shard investment will give one mythril's worth of stamina up front, and it'll take 100 days to earn another two mythril's worth. So it is the better long-term investment, but that's a pretty long term. (Also, orbs now are worth more than potential orbs later.)
Of course, this is all complicated by several factors, such as the fact that major orbs will lose value relative to stamina over time, as they become more common and the meta shifts toward 6* abilities. Even so, it's surprising how little value you actually get from the stamina shards.
Granted, I'm still personally going to buy the 10k shards eventually, because that makes the number in the top-right of my screen bigger, and I like it when my numbers get bigger.
No kidding. I'd seriously consider skipping that one if I weren't interested in Cid's Missions - a native medica seems to be a major step towards success. I've got HotF, DG, MG8, and Oerba; so it looks like my gaps are shared medicas, native in every realm (not happening), and a medica for a Dancer (for AoE debuffing). And SG would be nice, for Nightmare synergy Tyro for role filling.
Eh, I'm at around 145, and given my usual schedule that's a point where it very rarely has a chance to fully refill and 'waste' stamina. The occasional refresh is more beneficial for me now than extra stamina for the very, very rare days when I'm allowed 8 hours of sleep.
As for the WM nightmare, if I had a natural WM hastega, particularly one like Garnet's SSB, I'd be feeling pretty ready with only one diaga/diara each since I could RW an ether. I expect Tyro will be able to come close enough to capping Diara with the help of Basch's shield, and I already have two powerful medicas (Relm and Aerith's SSBs), so using Raise on the lens in the second part is a very viable strategy for me that'll significantly ease off need for deep dia* hones. Don't forget that it's undead, so Curaga/Curajas work for damage too, although obviously a lot less than Dia* will do.
I guess maybe that's yet another reason to try to draw on Kuja2. Two hastegas that'll be boss for the fight. I could always bring Quistis and leave her on permanent low-end healing/poisona duty though.
I feel sometimes Portrait of Lakshimi is almost overkill. I was doing fine with Aerith's Healing Wind for a long time. Relm casts her Medica once, and spends the rest of the time being skipped in favor of someone else performing an action.
I have 2 Medicas (Vanille and Relm) so it's probably doable, but I'm not going to dump that many resources into Diagas that don't really have value aside from this one fight that has no real rewards yet and comes back every month.
I want the crystal just for completeness, but I'll probably never craft the spell. Not when there are plenty of RW's out there with Reraise + Heal on them. If I encounter a fight with a guaranteed death effect that I need Reraise for, I'll just pack an appropriate RW and not sweat it.
At 5 White, 3 Wind and 3 Holy, with escalating costs, one R3 Diaga will cost you 35 Whites, 21 Winds and 21 Holys. Times two for 70/42/42. Greaters, of course. There should be an abundance of White orbs from the SSB orbfest since there's very little to actually use them on. Wind and Holy orbs may be much lower if you honed Thief's Revenge or Saint Cross at all, making Wind orbs forever at a premium. Check your 2 and 3* stockpiles because you can probably upgrade a bunch of them to 4*.
Breaking it down, it doesn't seem as resource intensive. Extra diagas are completely unnecessary for anything but that fight, but at least after the event, you can get 50% of the resources invested back, making the cost/pain of it all not so terrible. I realize I'm forever an optimist though. Not everyone shares that view. :P
Steam: TheArcadeBear
Phew, I was starting to get worried since it had been a month since the last update. I vastly prefer that PDF to trying to find things in the monster spreadsheet (mostly because the spreadsheet takes a lot longer to load).
I'm not made of greens. I have way too damn many Major Whites that I will never use already, and I have a pretty substantial pile of Major Earth as well. Holy is a good buy for MOAR SAINT CROSS though.
Also: who cares about the white mage nightmare? I still haven't bothered finishing the first two nightmares, because the rewards are not anything I'm going to use for a long, long time: just a few crystals, and the records for abilities I probably won't ever craft. Reraise seems even more useless than Ultima or Crushdown.
Isn't the damage tied to MAG though? So they'd have to sacrifice some MND in order to do any damage.
I think the Adloquium nightmare doesn't explicitly disallow summons/black, but the enemies have super absurd ridiculous RES, so they don't work well (also, it has a pretty vicious counter for physical, black, and ninja). There's a special encounter condition that vastly amplifies the damage of white magic, which is why those still work.
Yep. Ninja magic is fine though. As is physically murderating the lens with Saint Cross for example.
And white magic does triple damage on both, I believe. Definitely on Evrae. I assume on the big gun six months away too.
Nintendo ID: Pastalonius
Smite\LoL:Gremlidin \ WoW & Overwatch & Hots: Gremlidin#1734
3ds: 3282-2248-0453
Honestly, the biggest appeal of these fights for me isn't the abilities, it's that the fights require you to be at least a bit clever and pay attention to what you're doing, and for 1 stamina I can actually play around and try a few things.
I feel like, in a better world, this is how the entire game would be.
Ramza can use Lullaby, which leaves a spot for Full Break.
I don't have Ramza at a respectable level, and i don't have any full breaks yet. Settling for a like 67 Shadow and Phantasm, which is unfortunate that I couldn't bring my lvl 77 Terra. I'm pretty sure winning this fight is going to be a long shot, i need to focus on getting full break and saint's cross finally crafted.
Also, I need to get Mog's Teaching. The Hall of Rites is the only place to get Tyro's MC2, right?
Nintendo ID: Pastalonius
Smite\LoL:Gremlidin \ WoW & Overwatch & Hots: Gremlidin#1734
3ds: 3282-2248-0453
Then just use physical and spellblade to kill the adds and the boss.
It's been a week since I fought that boss, but if I were going to re-make a team for it and fight it today, my team would look like this:
Agrias - Thundara Strike / Saint Cross / Cleansing Strike
Ramza - Full Break / Magic Breakdown / Shout
Lenna - Curaja / Shellga / Princess's Favor
Tyro - Lullaby / Ruinga / Sentinel Grimoire
Zack - Life Siphon / Power Break / Air Strike
If you don't have native wall, bring Wall as your RW. If you can bring your own wall, bring Lightning with Crushing Blow as your RW. She'll obliterate the Azers very quickly.