Cloud Of Darkness HTBF

"Complaining works", "RNG", "just luck", whatever, but I was lucky enough to get 3 masks over the past 3 days, including a double drop today!

I'm done with this BCNM, 6 masks finally on 6 chars.

I'll still help others though, as I kinda got used to spam it :)

I've seen how the SCH solo on VD works.
Anybody else mind explaining how VE, E and N solo is supposed to work on melees?

I tried -only once- E on MNK with capped SB and SB2 with just trusts and I got stormed with adds.
I was using Penance and Shijin > Vsmite > Vsmite but I still got at least 3 adds so clearly I was doing something very wrong.

What's so special about this fight other than the absorb damage thing which you need to avoid so that Cloud of Darkness doesn't heal itself?

For anyone interested:
- lazy trio method on [D] - RNG, COR, RUN.
- Average of 1 item drop per run.

RUN: pull, kite round the ring at 10 to 15 yalms, gambit/rayke lux whenever ready.
COR: Samurai, Wizards, and AFK to avoid tp feed. Sub SCH for aurorastorm.
RNG: Trusts - star sybl, ygnas, koru-moru, Bounty shot, Trueflight spam at 1kTP does 60 to 99k depending on debuffs. If absorbing physical mode (usual case) just ignore and continue damage. If absorbing magic just switch to slug shot until it's off and use overkill to make up for the lost time. Can bounty shot whenever it's up.

Sometimes no adds, sometimes 1 add. RUN can take hate and ignore.

I solo it ton on VE on WAR ML38. War/thf. I've gotten 8 accessories so far (sending sets to my mule alts cause why not).

Basically walk in, summon trusts. I use Sylvie, Qultada, King of Hearts, Iroha II, and Monberaux(Paid).

Run in at an angle to try to engage it sideways then turn so it's facing away from trusts. Warcry for Savagery bonus and Savage Blade. Generally get in two Savage Blades before red orb phase. Sometimes can wedge in a third just as it performs the SUCC in. Turn away til Qultada/KoH reveal if it's absorb physical or not. If it is absorb physical, I kite it, because you can out range both Waning Vigor and Expunge if you're not right in front/way far in front of it. If it's no absorb, I do two more Savage Blades then kite anyway, just to not be weakened.

After first red glow is over, whenever it executes a TP move, it will spawn an add. Sometimes it gets to TP back to back depending on the feed from Qultada/KoH/Iroha. In general it's usually around 60% ish before first add, sometimes a lot lower if I lucked out on a 3 step Savage Blade Light playing off Fusion made by Iroha. My fasted kill is 4 minutes 17 seconds. My slowest kill is somewhere around 20 minutes due to deaths.

On VE it is only capable of spawning 3 adds at all for the entire instance timer. So if you at least kill all 3 adds, even if you wipe, if you RR you never have to deal with them again. Not sure how many more adds get added as the difficulty rises. I did a run on Normal once with a full group, and a RUN just super tanked like 6 of them on the arena's side while I DD'd Cloud in middle.

There was another thread where a WAR posted a Normal solo, I didn't watch it cause I think that even E is beyond me. I wind up getting blasted on VE occasionally, and while I never lose, the fights with deaths taking over 10 minutes feels terrible.

I'm wondering if I'll ever see the Masuqe on VE. One more cape and all 3 of my characters will have all accessories.

Simple - kill the adds, don't ignore them. They aren't hard to kill at lower difficulties so even though it makes each run take a bit longer, its 100% safe.

If you don't care about the Masque, you can easily get the neck / belt / cape from VE runs. I found the droprate to be reasonably generous. The Masque is a different story.

I've gotten one Masque in 87 kills, I need a bit more luck :(

I was going to say that it took me way more than that to get the 6, but now that I see the hard numbers, it wasn't really the case.

First I ensured I'm looking at the right logs, I always use logger:


Then I just looked for the fights for 2025 (because this thing came out in 2025, right? I think...)


So, in reality only 153 fights. Only the first one was "N", about half of them were "D" and about the second half were "VD". All of them with TH9+ if that helps for anything.

I would say you do need some more luck as 87 is a very high number on this context! :(

(This puts thing on perspective for me, if somebody asked me how many CoD I did before looking at the actual numbers my gut response would be "over 250 for sure" which was not the case, clearly. I always felt I did 5-6 per day since the release but maybe the actual numbers were 3-4 or even less? Umm...).

I guess you could say I exist to counterbalance (and hence safeguard the universe) those people who do this BC once and get double drops.

4x VE runs
1x E run
1x N run
3x D runs

zero drops
I mean zero, z e r o.
Lmao, feels like another mini shinryu to me Q_Q


Edit:
TH4 on all runs of course, for what it's worth, supposing it even matters in this fight.

I'm only missing the shawl somehow >.>

Which drops do you already have? I'm under the assumption that at least 1-2 accessories are guaranteed under D/VD, assuming you didn't have the ones that would have dropped.

Here is the funny part, I have absolutely zero drops :-D

I did get REM tales and Beitetsu/Pluton/Riftborn stuff of course.



I must be doing something wrong in this BC though, the Volte Add (just one) always popped in all my 3 D runs, even in the single N one.
I wasn't expecting it to pop...
Different story for my VE and E runs, I did those on melee so I was of course expecting multiple adds and as a matter of fact I did get them.

Adds pop from TP moves after the first waning vigor, so it sounds like your N/D fights involved a strat that fed minimal TP.

Yeah I know that, but wasn't the SCH solo strategy supposed to not generate any TP move at all, and hence no add?

I seem to recall those videos on VD with no add spawning but I could be wrong eh.

Gravity and Bind lasting time is so little, at least on D, it's annoying. I haven't tried VD yet, but while D was surely annoying but still overall easy (I won in like uhm 16 mins?), VD wouldn't.

This is very odd and debunks my theory of this fight and shinryu that D/VD have guaranteed accessories. Maybe it's just VD that has a guaranteed accessory slot and D is just a very high chance.

I'm well over 25 runs on E at this point and have only ever seen 1 Null item drop

Do you move your logs to a macbook to grep your logs? You can also just use GNU Tools for Windows, and put them in your Windows\System32 directory. They'll work right away when you launch cmd.exe (command prompt).

Here's the link: https://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/grep.htm

On kill 108 of D/VD, I finally get Masque #2

I've done the fight 3~6 times a day since it came out, and now have all 3 accessories for my main and mules (haha, toying with the idea of finishing TVR on Vyre now, and my other Mule hasn't even finished Rhapsodies lmao).

1 run on N, no drops.

All other runs on VE.

Someone claimed to have gotten the Masque on VE. Kind of wondering if that's actually possible hah.

Also got my masque on a VE run

Also got Masque soloing on VE with TH4.
I didn't count but I'd estimate I got the first accessory drop within 7-10 runs, next accessory within 7-12 runs, then Masque in around 15-20 runs and the last accessory took a lot longer, would guess I easily dumped around 30-50 runs into VE without drop and then got it maybe within ~5 runs in a party doing D or VD.

So from my admitedly limited sample size Masque doesn't seem to have a special drop slot. I assume they all share a drop slot and with each consecutive piece you already own drop chances get progressively worse, at least on VE.

The exact numbers might be off but should give you a rough idea what to expect for drop distribution.

Is it possible that the drop slot (slots in the case of D/VD) has a certain load rate based on difficulty level and TH and within that drop slots the 3 accessories and mask have their own drop rates within the slot and it is consistent across tiers?

ie: on VE you have 10% chance of getting a drop with TH4 and among that drop you have:
32% belt
32% back
32% neck
4% masque
(these are made up numbers, I wouldnt be surprised if the loot pool within even has a "*** you, get nothing, you lose" drop slot among the pool)

Which is why its always "it took so much longer to get that last accessory"?

I'm pretty sure if someone made the effort to ensure one null piece would be available in every treasure pool, it would be easier to get usable numbers.


Also D isnt a guaranteed drop:

Sometimes you go 98 kills without seeing a Masque, and sometimes you get two Masques in 4 kills.

Is this solo? Also, I must be terrible because every single time I've attempted E or higher solo I get wrecked. Haven't tried VE but maybe I should

Go on SAM and be ready to SP2 if needed. Can mow down E with 4/5 Steps.

I use Dropbox in order to have always my FFXI files (the Windower folder, anyway) synced between the desktop computer where I play and my Windows "ffxi" laptop. I haven't been "on the road" for a few months now, but I never know when I will use it. Since I also have Dropbox on the Mac, I can just access my files there (and very side comment, but FFXI actually works pretty well in Parallels!).

Thanks for the tip about GNU grep. I'm not a "Windows person", I only use Windows to play FFXI and that's it, I've always been a Linux person and since about some years ago (well, since 2017 or so) I just migrated to Mac and never looked back. It's good to know you can have those tools in Windows, though! I haven't given myself a chance to try WSL for example (mainly because I'm not interested in exploring Windows -at all-), nothing of the sorts so far although I've used in the past "Git Bash" and it works well with most/all of the "native" bash commands.

I won E only once, on MNK, completely solo with trusts.
Have to use a different trust setup with lotsa AoE healing and this slows down your damage.
Yes positioning helps but things can become messy fast when adds pop.
Have to kill them of course. I attempted E only three times, 1 on THF (failed) 1 on MNK (failed) and another one on MNK (won, barely, some trusts died, took me over 20 mins)

Same broseph, been a UNIX/Linux user for 25 years :)

If you want to use unix/linux tools then use linux. WSL is the worst thing to be created by humans since Mono. Let that sink in.

Thank you for this. Was able to solo 3 runs on E using this method. A little messy but very fun and exactly how SAM sound be played. I was playing way too conservatively and safe before and it was overwhelming me. This method is more consistent. Much respect to you

FWIW you can use Select-String in Powershell somewhat similarly to how you use grep.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.utility/select-string?view=powershell-7.5