Endgame raids in FFXIV reward players with some of the best gear they can get, as well as a few other cosmetics or collectibles. However, once these wild raids are no longer current content, finding many to run the content and learn the necessary mechanics becomes a hurdle.
Why Farm A4S?
Personally, I find Alexander’s raid gear to have some of the best skins for my favorite jobs, and battle includes Gordian armor and weapons that can be dyed. I knew I wanted to get the oomph out of these versions so I could add color versatility to them.
It’s also the source of the Gobwalker mount, a cool little tank that looks a bit goofy when piloted by Hrothgar.
Finally, A4S will drop crafting materials. You can use the Gobwalker shield to create followers. Also, you’ll likely get big, quick and dirty platforms for making furniture, specifically desks and chairs (more like benches, really) that animate when you interact with them.
How many players do you need?
I grow A4S with 2 other friends and we run about 5 minutes each. We cleaned up a few times as we learned what mechanics we needed to pay attention to and how we wanted to deal with them.
We easily did it enough times to get our 8 tokens (and some additional random chest armor drops). Our combo is Tank (WAR), Healer (WHM) and DPS (SMN), all level 80. It may be possible with just two players. If I had to try, I’d probably go with tanks and healers.
What mechanics should I know?
At first, it doesn’t seem to matter which leg is attacked and in what order. The mechanic happens in the same order each time, based on how many legs you kill, not what specific legs they are. Just make sure they all attack the same leg, as any damage to the other legs will heal after one leg dies.
The first two legs are easy. you can ignore Disc sphere and slaughter Tethers as they are not super dangerous for level 80, especially tanks. The healer may just want to put the player on the field afterwards.
When you have isolation The first two legs, just kill the Panzer Doll addon. It should only require a few GCDs.
Occasionally a leg would smoke. The leg can be stunned by tanks or melee to prevent it from draining the player’s MP, but we didn’t do that so I guess it’s not really necessary.
For the last two legs, there are new additions. Three Jagd figures will appear at the edges of the arena and a Straf figure in the middle. This mechanic would kill my team before we could decide what to do with it.
Jagd Dolls deal raid-wide damage proportional to their health when sacrificed. If you kill Jagd’s figures without sacrificing them for Straf’s, they will respawn after about 10 seconds. If a player absorbs Jagd Doll’s area of effect debuff too many (4) times, the team will be eliminated.
We had Healer and DPS completely ignore all adds, while I grabbed the Jagd Dolls with the Tomahawk and made my way through killing the Straf Doll centered away from my party members to avoid splitting them up.
When I kill the Straf Doll, the Jagd Dolls sacrifice themselves, and the healers and DPS just continue to damage the next stage (while healing damage from the exploding Jagd Dolls).
We did the same with the mobs that spawned on turn 4, we just did the nice test The stacks mark and drop from the player who gets them.
After all the legs are ready, burn the boss while clearing and healing. royal pentagram.
Can you only A4S?
Unfortunately, you can’t do it solo in brutal mode. I tried doing this on my level 80 fighter, but once you get to the fourth stage, the boss edicts you Nisi A and B at the same time, which is an auto wipe.
I guess you have to do enough damage to kill the leg very quickly to skip the debuff cast. This may not be possible at level 80, but maybe at a higher ilvl later in this expansion pack the DPS job might have a chance, if they can get to 4 on their own.
Which Gordian armor do you prefer? Have you had fun trying out this out-of-sync fight? Let me know in the comments.
Categories: Gaming
Source: HIS Education