Oathsworn Blade Master Trial

I'm a tank only player really, so no reason to make primes. By tank I mean RUN. The rest of the group have stages 5 and 1-2 stage 4s iirc.

And many groups have claimed it feels unbeatable right now, but I won't name since It's not my place to bring others into the argument, their opinion was a private message, who knows if it has changed or not.

What an offhand comment to say our group is "far from the best around, in gear or coordination" with...absolutely nothing to back that claim up. Just wild.

Which world firsts or NA firsts have you guys gotten, exactly?

You're taking a bog-standard RNG setup with a GEO, even though geomancy is almost certainly nerfed, and slamming your head against the wall with it despite it being clear that it doesn't do enough damage to win.

You're using anchor and react, because you care more about the prestige of winning than the challenge of it. You ruled out melee setup off the bat because it requires more coordination than you can put forward, but the damage check makes it obvious that's what will be required to win.

Maybe I should have been more polite, and maybe there are members of the group far more knowledgable than Shiraj, but the posts in this thread do not convey an advanced understanding of game mechanics or ability to coordinate difficult strategies. Shooting something at range with generic buffs is about the most braindead strategy possible.

If you're actually still using rangers and run, then everything he just said is true.

You think it's impossible, because it is. To use rangers on.

I gave you the benefit of the doubt and assumed you changed strats after only needing one attempt to see that.

I mean the goal posts will clearly just keep moving to wherever you need it to be to have a reply here, but uh....Crystal Paradise? Someone on here literally made a video about it.

The rest is not even worth responding to because...we don't even know who you are, you (seemingly) aren't even attempting the fight, so there is little to no point in engaging. There's just baseless claim after baseless claim because you (and others) are just assuming we...tried to melee once and just went right to a ranged setup. Assumption after assumption.

For everyone else though, feel free to try the melee approach with the dispel spam though; maybe we (and every other group) are missing something.

Alright, I apologize. I shouldn't have downplayed your group, I don't know you enough to fairly judge your capabilities, and I was operating in a prejudicial manner based on the forum posts I've seen from Shiraj. That was inappropriate of me, and while I can't unpost it, I can at least acknowledge I was wrong to do so.

On the actual topic:
It seems more than fair to assume you will have to deal with Teodor and a sixth Naakual, at the very least. If landing 2 wild cards and doing a completely clean run with no mistakes is that short on damage, I can't see how that setup is capable of winning. It's possible that RNG is still the way forward, but any loss in damage from reapplying buffs has to be weighed against the fact that a melee orientated setup will gain damage from their tank (PLD) and their BRD as well. There are numerous ways to work around dispel in this game. I don't think you guys have exhausted all possible options, and it's a disservice to say it's unkillable with how few answers you had for the setups I proposed on page 1.

This is never a good idea. I'm the most impulsive guy you'd meet, half the ***I post on here is just not thought through. During actual fights that's different which is why I still have a group at this level of gameplay, they know I take it more serious than "***posting"

Well It wasn't up to me to hold certain info back because I was told to keep some stuff quiet since no one else is talking. And so I'm not going to explain in great detail what we have and haven't tried until I get a yes from the others who also spent a lot of time testing stuff, isn't fair to just share their info without permission.

Absolutely, nobody is required to share any information at all. It is understandable that people want to keep things close to the vest until the first clear. But, there's a difference between being silent about what you know and trying to tell everyone else the fight is impossible while only revealing a small bit about one strategy that has seemingly zero chance of winning. When you start making absurd claims like 'harder than V25' and 'impossible to melee', you open yourself up to scrutiny.

I fully understand that, Do I personally think they are harder than V25? 100%. V25 was tight dps checks due to WS wall and adds having regen, and some setups not using tank cos of add's wonky hate. This fight is similar to those V25 fights in certain ways: Add out = main boss gets regen. Main differences: WS wall, can't ignore adds while you dps some bosses down, such as Kalunga. You're forced to kill the add and offensively, they are much more threatening due to August being there at the same time.

The initial posts I made never claimed they were impossible, just there was a gimmick we couldn't figure out. However later down the line Our group seen posts from JPs, claiming they don't see it being beatable atm. Some members in the group got dms from other groups on other servers talking about how far they got, and how they think it's unbeatable as of right now also. I was just the one who mentioned it. But I still had a bit of hope it was doable until we had a run where we maintained Soul Voice songs for 40? minutes of the 50 minute attempt and still no where near a dps check that bad.

Sounds like SE accomplished what they wanted lol an overly difficult Master Trial that has many groups stumped so far. I have no opinion on the fight as I have not attempted it whatsoever... but if no one wins this for a few months then mission accomplished?

Afterall it took not even a week for individuals to figure out Crystal Paradise if i recall. Months of trial and error I imagine is the goal here.

I wouldn't use either of these to back up an argument about world firsts. Virtue was cheesed with the "wall of justice", which was basically a map hack that prevented him from hitting back. S-E made it a bannable offense to use the wall shortly after they found out about it and patched it out soon after. The intended gimmick to lock his 2 hours away was so time sensitive that server lag could actually interfere. The real enabler for virtue kills was perfect defense and Ilvls.

And Pandemoneum Warden was never killed in its original iteration. After beyond's linkshell spent 18 hours fighting him; only to give up after people got physically ill from exhaustion the backlash of negative publicity forced s-e's hand and they quickly changed the fight. In the following patch they set a time limit where warden would despawn if he wasn't killed within 2 hours and they altered his stats accordingly. Nobody can claim victory over the original warden because that version of him was never beaten.

There were plenty of other examples in my post, though. Those are just iconic fights.


This nonsense always irks me. One group that wasn't known for being particularly good at the time spent a really long time refusing to give up, but they didn't have much for options in terms of refining strategies, and everyone involved was likely exhausted by 2 hours in because they started late at night.

Nobody got a fair chance to fight the original because they *voluntarily* refused to give up for an extended period, and immediately raised a media circus about their own behavior. We don't really know how hard the original boss would have been with a proper setup and coordination, but it's unlikely it was actually designed to require people to stay awake 18 hours and fight in shifts.

It doesn't change the fact that warden was nerfed before anybody could kill him in his original iteration. It may or may not have been feasible to kill him with a different strategy. We'll never know. At this point all we can can do is conjecture about it. I'm not saying he was impossible, merely that the fight was dramatically altered before anyone got a kill. But because of the circumstance he isn't a good example to use here.

Okay, and the second fight still took months to clear. I'm not sure the significance there, you can call it two seperate fights if you want but Pandemonium Warden(B) was defeatable in it's initial release state and took ~7 months to be defeated.

We didn't need to wait for that long for reliable AV kills. It was getting killed with just standard non-PD zergs by 85 or 90 cap. After they nerfed it, it only had like 80k HP, so we just needed enough DPS to kill it before it got to Benediction on its SP rotations, and Empy weapons and their new WSs were enough to hit that benchmark.

The first time Absolute Virtue was killed it dropped nothing...

Why?

*Puts Tin Foil Hat On*

Because SE never intended for any of those NMs, AV or PW, to be beatable in the current meta. They wanted them there as objectives to look forward to as they released stronger gear and increased job levels in the future.

The scene at the time was FULL of epeen endgame linkshells all competing for the biggest douchebag so they created these ridiculous mobs to keep them busy, humbled, and losing while they worked on Abyssea.

But people got impatient, SE underestimated the level of cheese people could produce to win and when the backlash came from these basement dwellers by day / online Chads by night, they caved, slapped the rage timer on them, released some Zapruder film on how to actually beat them "correctly", and the rest is history.

The key to beating PW was to CFH while streaming the fight

Careful, they could always go the 14 route
"This master trial adds the naakuals as mounts, 0.01% drop of one randomly of them"

Cheating is just the meta!

Let's pretend this fight isn't actually overtuned, though it very well may be. From what I gather, there seem to currently be two categories of hurdles at the moment.

1. The Naakual Problem: They result in too much down time.
- Their auras tremendously slow down progress.
- August gains regen while they are alive.

IF there is a hidden mechanic that deals with one or both of these issues, perhaps they would reuse a mechanic from one of the previous Naakual content pieces:
[ Wildskeeper Reives - Delve - Odyssey - Sortie(kinda?) ]

2. The August Problem: It's unclear how to maintain optimal damage output against him.
- Ranged setups aren't doing enough damage.
- He spams dispells, defeating the purpose of using a melee strat.

The only fight August is in iirc is Sinister Reign. In that fight, his gimmick was, if you stunned his powerful AoE, it would lock him out of using it for a couple minutes. Is this in any way relevant?
__________

Being the newbie that I am, I have a stupid question. Would the Prime Weapon Aftermath (PDL+) help in any way with damage output?

You mean in a hidden way? Maybe, but if there was some blatant gimmick about that we would know it by now.

In a "regular" way? Well with a full zerg setup maybe, but you can't resist full dispel more than what, ~2 minutes stacking Perfect Defense and Asylum? And of course that's nowhere enough to be killing August. Not even if you could reset it twice and get ~6 minutes.
Wonder how much HP is it estimated that he has?

Doesn't really matter how much HP he has because the naakuals each need to die first. He's practically invulnerable while one of them is alive. If we want to be sticklers that puts his effective HP between 26~ million (approx 4m per naak and his own hp without even considering regen) and infinite assuming there's no other hidden phases in there beyond naakuals and August himself. Keep in mind no one has been far enough to know if August is the last boss.

I know OP said he dispels every 5 seconds, but he really TPs once every 8-10 if you have multiple melee without SB thwacking away at him. He has 3 different TP moves, so a dispel is more like every 24 seconds on average and you'll have stretches of over a minute without any as well to capitalize on.

BRD's accuracy buffs are too good to go without, so you definitely still need to use BRD and have them resinging honor and mads as soon as dispel goes off (which will give you over 2/3 uptime while engaged on him with a standard distribution between tp moves). But, you should be able to get the remainder of your accuracy using debuffs, food, gear, etc.. theoretically.

Also keep in mind that if you use 2 tanks, you have the option of fighting naakuals away from august so that you aren't eating dispels for the majority of the actual damage you need to deal.

Something like RDM PLD DNC BRD WAR PUP might be feasible. If there's no special mechanic stopping the puppet from tanking august, you have your second tank, enough accuracy, and potentially all 6 members engaged fulltime(BRD and RDM will lose considerable swing time to casting, PLD will lose some).

Likely he goes into daybreak mode at some point in the fight too, though that's probably not any easier to deal with than the dispels.

Singing 10 seconds of every 24 seconds is a lot despite how op songs are.

Ranger still ain't the answer though.

PUP idea sounds like it would be viable, be interested to hear any feedback about that.

Would it not be easier to maintain bubbles over songs and rolls being constantly dispelled anyways? sure its not ideal but maybe RUN,BST,DNC,GEO,GEO,SCH? I get the impression that it could be more consistent with stacking strong defense down and multiple bubbles.

Lots of defense down which makes up for some lack of traditional buffs, bubbles on bubbles. Killer Instinct for all naakuals. Rayke/Gambit Helix to counter Regen while add is up?

Clearly there is more to this fight and full disclosure, I haven't tried. But just throwing ideas out there.

You'd think that their fight to showcase the new Prime weapons wouldn't have some neche setup (like RUN,BST,DNC,GEO,GEO,SCH) you' think that it would be a well rounded party with magic/physical/ranged damages.

If he is spamming dispel and his TP moves all the time, you'd think there would be some kind of mechanic or ability that would prevent him from dispelling or spamming TP.

Have people been using Stage 5s to fight him or only stage 4 or not even using a prime?

Does everyone in the party have a prime equipped?

For all we know there is some weird mechanic we are all missing.

Really not how it works. There's no cryptic ***. (Except of course /fume in voidwatch)

It's just a (lack of) skill issue.

Not for 100% certain there isn't something stupid like use fireworks or eat augusts favorite food or something even dumber, just wouldn't count on it.
(And it may or may not be an impossible dpscheck, but using rangers and calling it impossible is asinine)

Definitely easier, but it's not really comparable. Honor March + Blade Madrigal + Sword Madrigal is 257 acc before any JAs, and you can maintain them on naakuals besides the Cehuetzi with any sort of split strategy and still have at least one song slot left over to boot. Marcato pumps it up to 314 if used on Blade Madrigal.

GEO using both precision and torpor is only 200 acc(probably less, because geo debuffs are almost certain to be nerfed), but it also has no haste to go with it and much shorter/less potent JA. GEO may still be useful for capping haste and raising attack, but if the accuracy requirements are as steep as claimed then any melee or ranged setup will effectively require a bard. If they're not, then many other things may be possible. It doesn't seem that anyone is willing to share(or even gathered) hard statistics.

COR doesn't seem worth it unless you can thoroughly avoid dispels(perhaps by kiting august while dealing with him and positioning intelligently on naakuals, this could be possible).

Yeah my thought process was x2 geo and use fury/haste/precision/torpor(if acc is an issue... if not frailty or barrier if offensive is in fact nerfed). DNC can help a little bit with quicksteps plus natively has very high acc already. BST could use beetle instead of arthur I suppose and still get a defense down while also getting and evasion down effect as well if necessary? Would only need haste 1 from sch or geo perhaps to cap.

Could also potentially substitute WAR for BST and rely more on actively using breaks. Shield Break and Armor break are effective replacements for beetle debuffs provided they don't resist.

Obviously this is not ideal compared to brd buffs but if seemingly the largest issue to overcome is the constant dispelling, have to look at the alternatives available that could hypothetically work.