Saturday, October 16, 2004

 

Creeping Doom

We tried something new in FFXI this week--BCNMs, or "Burning Circle Notorious Monsters." These are arena battles with special "notorious" monsters. You trade in beastmen's seals to obtain orbs, which you take to burning circles to activate the battle.

We chose to fight Bitoso, a notorious crawler in Balgas Dias. This is a battle for three 30th-level characters. If you go in as a higher-level, your level is "capped" at 30 for the duration of the fight. The fight lasts fifteen minutes. If you don't finish in time, you are transported out of the arena with no reward. If you win, you get a nice treasure chest. If you get killed, you lose about 450 XP each. (Ouch.) It's a real test of tactics, teamwork, and cunning.

Riloth, Dydo and I fought Bitoso six times this week. Here was the initial setup and tactics:

Riloth--ranger/ninja (RGR/NIN)--would stand back and use his archery skills to do great damage to Bitoso.
Dydo--ninja/warrior (NIN/WAR)--close with Bitoso and use his mystic abilities to avoid getting hit, and keep Bitoso off the others.
Gryffyn--black mage/white mage (BLM/WHM)--stand back, away from the others. Nuke Bitoso with Lightning, then cast Sleep. While the crawler slept, everyone would back off and rest. Then I would cast Aspir to drain his magic points and refill my own. Then I'd drink a pineapple juice for further magic point regeneration. Then we'd repeat the cycle.

Why this way? Well, we read on the Net it was a good tactic. Bitoso does two really annoying things in this fight. He casts big cure spells on himself over and over, and he casts a paralysis spell on his opponents. By putting him to sleep and draining his magic points, we hoped he wouldn't cast those spells.

Here's how it went:

BATTLE THE FIRST A complete stalemate. We didn't do much damage to him, he didn't do much damage to us. Time ran out.

BATTLE THE SECOND Change of tactics--just beat the crap out of Bitoso the way we would any normal monster. So I ditched the Sleep spells, and did my usual thing. I started by casting Drown, Rasp, Blind, Poison and Bio on him--all "debuff" spells to weaken him. Then I nuked him with Lightning while casting Cures, Paralynas and Poisonas. I still cast Aspir whenever possible, because I get the magic points it drains from the monster. Dydo pounded him hand-to-hand, interrupting a lot of Bitoso's spellcasting.

This worked great, except that I ran low on magic points very quickly. I ended up using Manafont (cast spells for free for one minute, but I can only do this every two hours) at the end of the fight. That let me finish him off by pounding him with spell after spell. Victory! We got crap from the treasure chest, though--about 1500 gil each after we sold everything.



BATTLE THE THIRD Same tactics, but to save some magic points I didn't cast the debuff spells. Bitoso kicked our asses, and we all died. He cast a lot more Paralyga spells. Dydo just couldn't keep Bitoso's attention and keep him in hand-to-hand range.

BATTLE THE FOURTH This took place two nights later. Same tactics as the second fight, but I switched from pineapple juice to the more powerful Yagudo drinks to help maintain my magic points. We won this fight, though I had to use Manafont anyway. I probably didn't need to, but I decided to do it because we had Bitoso on the ropes and I wanted a quick knockout. We got excellent treasure--a wizard's earring, a singer's earring, and other stuff.



BATTLE THE FIFTH We stuck with a winning plan, but I added Slow and Paralyze to the list of debuff spells I used on Bitoso. I noticed that Slow, Paralyze and Blind were the most effective debuffs, so I kept recasting them. Riloth used his two-hour ranger ability to score the knockout. More good treasure, including a wrestler's earring.

BATTLE THE SIXTH We just got unlucky on this one. About halfway through the fight, Bitoso started casting his Paralyga spell twice as frequently as we'd ever seen before. I couldn't cast Paralyna fast enough or often enough to counter it. Bitoso took advantage of this to wipe the floor with us.

Jefferson 11:57 AM

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