Vagary Findings

Hey guys.

Please post stuff here with you Vagary experience.

I will update as stuff come in that is confirmed.

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POP ITEM (Befouled Water).:
Dropped by fomors in Outer Ra’Kaznar and Ra’Kaznar Inner Court (Spurned xxxx, Spurned Engravers etc.)

Trade the Befouled Water item to the Odyssean passage found in Leafallia to obtain a KI instead.

Shunned mobs in the basement drop the water.

Managed to get wins for the three zones today through mainly ls members and friends. 18 Man seems to be the best way of at least clearing the zones, time sinks seem to be from the volume of adds rather than the bosses themselves though they are a few exceptions. Lower man is very good for farming the codex’s you need for upgrading so it’s not a complete waste to try that either and I’m sure wins can be achieved that way with good groups. I’ll try to describe a few things best I can but there was a lot going on in these so I can’t really be 100% accurate.


Fomors
This run is very melee friendly especially for jobs that can take a hit like Sam and Mnk. Tried with a few Thfs first run but they got themselves killed rather quickly, wouldn’t write them off completely but just the experience we had. I’d say you want to take 2 Plds for this, ideally with Aegis and Ochain. Rest of alliance can be your pretty standard DD setups with brds, whms and a few geos are handy. One interesting thing we found was that Bst was doing particularly well damage and survivability wise in this zone. In fact the ones we used did well in all 3.

So this zone is very much like Einherjar the mobs come in waves:

Wave 1 is fomors - cannot remember their exact jobs on this wave but they aren’t too bad overall. We pretty much had one Pld Ochain super tank the mobs on the wall left of entrance while the other supported and helped deal with any wandering re-pops. The Nins were a little bit of a pain in tanking since they throw a few status effects on you from a distance. DDs dealt with the mage mobs first, then the Nins and rest was easy. Then as soon as last fomor was dead everyone gathered at entrance for next round which was very important for each new round.

Wave 2 is Corses and sub boss Dullahan – both tanks used aegis for this. The one that pulls and tanks the adds will need a bit more healing support since those Corses love to spam their silence moves, would advise they use fealt and rampart on pull but not necessary. The other pld should take NM to opposite corner. DDs took down Corses one by one and with very little difficulty, they can charm but they died so quick for us that it wasn’t an issue. Boss can hit really hard, DDs should try to stay behind it and perhaps use some –Dtgear as they pound away at it. We killed it very quickly on this run due to the quality of DD we had available but it can hit hard so just be careful. The most important thing about this round is to hug that entrance wall as soon as that boss is killed. Just one person napping can really mess start of round 3.

Wave 3 is fomors again but a lot more dangerous - tanks switch back to Ochain and hope nobody aggros when they pop. Was our hardest round but mainly because it started badly, the fomors are in 4 groups this time and should be pulled individually by the tanks while the DDs pick them off. The fomor jobs are very varied on this round, there are Geos/Bsts/Drgs/Plds/Mnks and more. Again would start with any magic casters first and just gradually kill the rest. Mnk seemed particularly dangerous as it used 100 fists and WS spammed, also the drgs pet became a Wyvern which of course wanted to paralyze everyone repeatedly. Once a fomor party is down just pull a different one until you clear room for next and last Wave.

Wave 4 Fomors!! And that jester NM thing Palloritus – Honestly this wasn’t too bad its just a case of how much time you have at this point and we had a good 20 minutes. One tank collects adds and tanks them using Ochain while other deals with boss using Aegis. DDs deal with adds then all deal with boss. Boss likes to doom and use some other nasty tricks but he goes down quick enough, long as DDs bring holy waters they will be enough to take him down. Unfortunately I was hit by an instant KO move and missed out on my ROE quest for reward right at end, so guess he had the last laugh.
Just to be clear I was one of the Plds for this run so I feel I can’t comment too greatly from a damage dealer or support perspective. The boss dropped a fairly decent DD neck with triple atk on it as well as a crafting material for synergy and 2 items used for Empy ilvl119 upgrading.


Slimes/Acuexs
Ok for this zone you might need some luck, area is same as the fomor area but the run is very different. There are a number of Pillars in the middle of area and someone must click on one for mobs to spawn. The target for this seems to be to pick the right pillar 3 times to spawn both sub bosses and final boss. Problem is there are multiple pillars (think theres 7 or 8) and picking wrong gives you a full round (or multiple in some cases) worth of mobs. The mobs is this zone can be taken down very quickly with magic and their tp moves can hurt, but there are a lot of them and without luck you could be taking them out a lot.

As far as setups go we went with two mage parties and one melee one, you may want to just camp in middle of area but we decided to stick to one of the walls which helped more when the bosses popped. Most rounds were the same thing – Pld pulls all mobs and mages aoe nuked everything. One thing i will mention is that hate is very odd in this zone, soon as the pld pulls the adds will generally go for the person who makes the next action even if its reraise or whatever. However thankfully this is not the case on the sub bosses or final boss of the area.

So you know you correctly guessed the first pillar right when you spot a pink Acuex amongst the mobs. You also get a different message than the one you get if you picked the wrong one. The pinky boss didn’t seem too bad, does the same moves as most mobs its type but it just has a lot of health. One thing we tried and did well was take advantage of magic burst damage and skillchains, I think this boss was weak to ice and darkness but again not completely sure.

Once killed its a new set of pillars for you and same thing until you get second sub boss which is a Fistule type jelly. This boss was a little bit more of a pain due to tp moves having long range, knockback and gravity. It also makes a lot of duplicates of itself over time which we made sure to nuke as soon as possible, thankfully they have much less hp. It seems it loses a fair bit of health using the move to dupe itself and eventually it stops doing them completely. Having a aegis pld tank it seemed to work very well though, Nukers were not getting hate on NM at all. Boss dropped a Scythe I believe.

So once that’s dead it’s those damn pillars again until final boss called Rancibus – which is a weird sea monster looking thing you fight on one of the adoulin mission. Again boss didn’t seem too bad, don’t remember it killing anyone at all. Had some moves that poisoned but that was easily manageable and though it didn’t go down fast; with 10-15 mins we didn’t have too much problems. Again we focused on skillchaining and magic bursts this time light skillchain and thunder magic if I recall right. Final parse had a Sch winning and a Bst close behind. Boss also dropped a staff called called Mindmelter as well as empy/synergy stuff.

Probably not important because likely zone will be insanely random but combo of pillars for our run was 325.

Hope the info helps – I’ll post info on 3rd zone and anything else i find out next time I can. If someone can build on this or correct me that’s fine.

Fomors can drop: (very common drops)






Boss (Palloritus) can drop:
Gear:






Items:




To make your empy 119 hat you need: 109 empy hat + 1 defiant sweat + 15 etched memories + 8 Chapter 6's.

There is also a RoE (Content > Vagary > Palloritus) which will net you a defiant sweat when you kill him, as long as you're not dead when he dies.

There's an earring that drops that has magic evasion +9 or something and an insane DRG hands that has Jump+50 or something.

omg i want those pup feet X.X

From BG thread with the same name:

(Pertaining to Slimes/Acuex/Leech zone)

Rant incoming: This concerns Vagary

Lately SE has been giving us content that reward those who win with *SOMETHING* regardless of weather or not you roll higher than your teammates in the treasure pool. The one who popped the orb gets the loot, and who's to argue? But you're sure to get a few Rem 1-5 chapters for helping him. If you win an Arch Angel or Avatar battle, you are guaranteed a certain number of REM 6-10 chapters even though the Fetrilis mask never ever ever drops. Win at delve but lost the lot on the whirlpool mask? You get some plasm guaranteed which you can use to acquire what you could not during the run. Even if everything the pink escelant drops goes to the guy who made the yorcia alluvian KI, you know you've got some +1 and +2 stones and a wing in your own personal rewardbox at the end of the skirmish run. And that makes up for the fact that the Taeon chappeu went to the guy who just joined and spent half the run dead. And incursion? Hell, everyone's given coffers equally.
My point is we've outgrown the old days of level 75 dynamis and salvage where participation and success only gave you a chance at what you needed. I know I have. Delve, incursion, skirmish, einharjar and AA style BCNMs guarantee the player SOME type of progression for his or her efforts if they win.

Why am I wasting all of your time by bringing this good and noteworthy trend up? Because after several vagary runs and 2 wins, my preliminary impression as that there are no personal rewards guaranteed for your efforts, no phantom funnymoney you can stockpile and trade in for etched memories, and even with a thief the drop rates are paltry at best. Here's what I've observed with an alliance of 18:
+ Defeating an enemy results in a low chance (about 20% with TH9, unconfirmed) of a single etched memory dropping to the alliance treasury pool.
+ Defeating an NM results in a gear drop which, given enough time, will become unwanted and drop to the floor as well as a single "codex" which work the same way as pluton cases do for plutons. unknown how many etched memories it creates.
+ Defeating the NM seems to result in a grand total of 2 empyrean upgrade items dropping, a gear and a synth item for SU2 gear. all to the alliance treasury pool.
Without casting lots and allowing the etchings that dropped to auto, I walked away with 2 etchings after 2 successful runs.

Now.... Here's my problem, aside from the painfully obvious supply issue, demand will be high as well. Etchings can be traded and bazaared, which means that they will go for a high price when 15 are needed for each piece you want to upgrade from 109 to 119, plus 1 boss specific item. A lot of players including myself would want to 119 entire sets for several jobs. I don't want to have to grind gil to spend untold millions upgrading an empyrean armor set, I really thought we were past that sort of BS. The drops in Vagary might go to you, or you could get nothing at all and you'll just have wasted 45 minutes with a thousand-ish CP to show for your hard work.
Now maybe some changes are still to come; I know my observations are early yet. We still haven't seen the vagary bosses that unlock 119 upgrade items for the legs and body, but I don't think that alone will entail the changes I'd hope to see. If this backsliding is a sign of how SE wants FFXI to be in its final days then I'd just as soon go back to my steam library.

Rant over. Thanks for your time. TLDR: I've been looking forward to reforged empy for a very long time now, and I'm disappointed in how SE chose to implement the path to upgrade from 109 to 119.

Honestly, im more disapointed with people winning short after update.

Seems Vagary will be more one of those events people faceroll.

PUPgasmmmmmmmmmm. Must have. @.@

This is exactly what people said when AF/Relic reforge to 119 was released and people saw it required Voidwatch drops.

"It's too expensive!"
"Voidwatch is dead content, wtf SE!"
"I can't/don't want to shout for groups!"

I understand some of your gripes but to be honest I think SE have done this well. Vagary takes me back to the days of Legion and old-school Dynamis.

Just to cover the last zone on my first post.

Elementals

The zone is even more different than the last two, best way to describe it is a Outer Ra’Kaznar delve with elements. The party must run through the zone to reach and kill the sub bosses that will open up the areas to reach the next boss after being killed. Most of the Eles don’t aggro as you pass them by, but they do magic aggro and link it seems. The ones in the boss rooms might aggro when approached but was pretty hard to confirm on this run as we took two parties of mages again. Killing the elements appear to weaken the bosses to those elements but bear in mind that you can just pass any you don’t want to kill, you don’t have to kill everything to complete the zone.

Only a couple of people in our alliance had tried this zone and knew little about it so we just tried the same setup as the jelly zone with 2 mage parties and a melee one as a test. Also worth pointing out that the elements can be slept, we tried aoe nuking most of the elemental groups and just sleeping any pulls that were too big.

The first sub boss is a umbril, we didn’t have a lot of problems killing it really but it’s somewhat annoying. From a melee perspective its not too fun as you will be getting paralyzed a lot so you may want a geo to change a bubble to help out with status effects. The boss also gets a aoe doom move below 50% so melee will need holy waters ready. Boss dropped some Blm bodies.

When killed there are more elementals on route to the second sub boss which is a pixie. For us this was the thing that took us the most time in the entire zone. Samurai’s looked to be doing some good fudos to it as we again tried to use skillchains and magic bursts to take it down. However there is a lot of amnesia (conal tp move?) and knockbacks to deal with. Sch self Scing also seemed to work fairly well. The pixie seemed to gain resistance to magic at various times, perhaps it becomes weaker to different magic based on it’s tp moves but was hard to tell from one run. There is definitely something more to it.

The pixie took so long that we only had around ten minutes to spare and decided to just try our luck on final boss running past all elementals on the way. Of course boss room had a bunch of elements so we pulled boss away to the corridors to avoid unnecessary aggro. Seeing as we didn’t have a lot of time left we went full out on 1 hours with cors resetting them. The geo boosted bubbles seemed to help a lot as the mages started to do a ton of damage, my quick draw was even doing 7k+ ice shots at this point. It ended up going down in 2-3 minutes with no deaths in alliance, I didn’t notice any particularly bad tp moves from boss or behaviour mechanics seeing as how it was dead so fast. Boss dropped a really interesting Blu sword that I instantly wanted and failed to get but better luck next time.

After getting all three wins you’ll have empy 119 head, feet and hands available as each zone unlocks one type, also setting the ROE quest will get you a onetime reward upgrade item towards them (provided you alive when boss is killed). Returning to Leafallia with the three kis and checking the odyssean passage will prompt a cutscene where you lose the kis and this increases the level of your pops to 130. I also heard that new ROE objectives open up after completing the 3 but having died on the first win I can’t confirm what they are.

If this information helps a single person I’d be happy, they are just my initial observations of the runs we tried. Hoping to find out more of what can unlock the body and legs empy.

Thanks for all the info Hammertime it's very helpful.

For Brash Gate there are 6 pillars or anomalys labeled #1 to #6. When you click a pillar it spawns a wave of mobs. Defeat one wave and another wave spawns and then the pillars again. There are 2 sub-bosses, Murkcrawler and a Fistule-type NM. Then you have the boss, Palloritus.

For this camp you want to go nuke-heavy. Work out a SC order! Pld x2, Sam x2 for Light SC and a dedicated Nuke pt - Blms, Sch and Brd for magic-bursting Fire spells. Sch is invaluable here for Regen, Blinkga and Hailstorm 2.

Here's a breakdown of mobs and weaknesses.
Draery Obdella - Water
Ravaging Acuex - Fire
Unabated Mush - Ice
Jaundiced Slime - Wind
Gangrenous Leeches - Thunder

As far as selecting which pillars to spawn the NMs, I'm not convinced it's all random luck. There has to be some pattern to it. I'm going to test some theorys I have and report back if I find anything useful.

I see what you're saying, but as for voidwatch, this is another form of battle that rewards all participants in some way if they win. The odds are low that your personal rewards will include akvaan's penion for example, but you will walk away with some sort of reward in any case provided that you win. Vagary does not have this. I suppose I should have included Voidwatch in my original post, thanks for bringing it up.

For Brash we were doing 2~3 blms and a coupld sc'ing DDS(Even just 1 Sam works) with a PLD. Dd's pretty much just stood around until/if bosses spawned. Pld would pull each wave, brd would sleep, and blms would time an aoe. If you go for the element that whatever the wave is weak to, stuff just melts. On the bosses, we had the dds SC and blms would MB. Was stupidly easy.. just need to figure out how to make the bosses spawn =(

*For the fistule NM, make sure you have it in a corner and fight against the wall, otherwise it's knockback/grav move is really annoying. We also had blms aoe nuke the adds down.

The Amorph chamber is best cleared with magic damage. I'd say use 3 BLMs at a minimum.
Megaboss - Thunder/Earth
Boil NM - Wind did best for me. Don't put melees on him (avoid feeding TP).
Acuex NM - Ice did best for me.



The Elemental chamber can be done in two ways:
1) Go through and only kill the NMs using a melee party. Elementals are generally just magic aggro. The only aggressive things to sound/sight are hybrid elemental groups around the NMs, the NMs, and the boss. You can probably clear this chamber with a melee party + a little outside support (like a spare GEO or something).
2) Kill everything and then the boss using a mage-heavy party that could clear the Amorph chamber.
Time-wise I found very little difference between these strats. #1 gives you fewer etched codices, but #2 requires more people.



Undead chamber:
Melee party + Support. We did it this morning with a MNK/WAR and DNC/NIN parsing ~70% together, a SMN parsing another 18%, and a THF parsing ~12%. We had a paladin pulling, but hate is random after claiming a triplet of fomors. Bring a lot of healing. The Dullahan NM spawned with a Corse wave, so I fought the Dullahan while the Monk took care of the corses. The Corses can charm.


This event is not as difficult as it first sounded. The hard part looks like it will be just grinding out wins to ever see the Tier 4/5 bosses.

Anyone figured out how to reduce the Dullahan's damage? He seems to like spamming very powerful AOE's with pseudo random hate. The only minor NM that seems difficult so far.

vex/attunement

People beat level-128, you can up the difficulty after getting all 3 clears the first level then you level up.

Ok so he's basically magic damage then? Keep shell up and basically just keep smacking him. Does skillchains or having light damage on him many any difference?

Atramentous Libations did 450-900 damage to me (not wearing DT gear).

He never used Niahonto or whatever their bad TP move is on us, just spammed Infernal Bulwark and Libations.


IIRC we also had no trouble tanking him with paladins.

For us he was spamming that big aoe move that does 800~1500 damage, also the one that dispel's random buffs. PLDs had no problem surviving but "tank" means jack sh!t when the TP moves are aoe and thus hit everyone around him. We were using +defense/-attack though instead of vex/attunement because we thought his moves were physical, so that should fix that issue.

*bump*

Updated pics. Katana and new pants.

I love Vagy so much, It's so much fun to be in!

Just to clarify this point, hate isn't random but it is exactly like incursion. Aggroing mobs is the same as claiming them, the whole party is on the hate list once you aggro, so any actions will generate enmity.

As long as the pld claim pulls one. And no one else tries to sleep/kite/attack any of the others, you should be fine. Unless your pld is terrible and doesn't try to keep hate... or unless your DDs are overzealous and attack it before the pld actually claims/engages.

For funsies, my brother .dat swapped the Tartarus Mail just to see how it looked. Turns out, it comes with a little something extra:


The wings won't display in AltanaViewer, just like how other glowy effects on armor/weapons won't display. Just to clarify, he doesn't have this armor piece, so don't ask for details about how to get it (or at least don't expect answers, we have none).

Oooh I want that.