The gate.

My WHM is now 69. And in one level I get to start looking like a proper WHM with new Blessed gear. It is still a while off but I did have a party the other night with several good players. We went to the Imp camp on the way to where Khimaira spawns, and we dealt with the Imps handily. Some would die so fast that I would cast Dia II and then only get off one Haste before the puller was off getting another mob. It was very late to be partying so we did not stay for very long, but it is still stimulating to have such a fine party at that level. It was almost a burn party, but it wasn't. I just need a few more parties like this and I will be 75 before I even realize.

I wanted to congratulate Qtipus on finally completing his Gungnir. So far the damage looks pretty impressive, and apparently the WS isn't that bad at all but the damage can vary and the additional effect from the WS is interesting and helpful but it doesn't really stand out as something to me that really sells the Gungnir. I want to check out the defense down effect because it seems pretty massive for just a regular random proc on a swing. Well, outside of the speculation, I just wanted to say congratulations, and now that Qtipus has his relic out of the way maybe he can leverage the leadership of Obsidian to start sponsoring long-time good members (not me, LOL) so that we can get some more relics in the LS.

Late last night we did an Achamoth and it was rather interesting to say the least. Getting to the spawn is pretty easy in general, but the pull from the spawn point to the zone where it should be fought can be a bit rough, and it can be even more rough when you pull the mob to zone before you have someone clear all the mobs out first. This was a simple miscalculation on my part, but it was also a rather obvious problem that I should have noticed ahead of time. Well, we basically had to wipe to make sure that Achamoth made it to the zone but it did and it is surprisingly easy to hold there because it does not move with the same speed returning to it's spawn point as many other ZNMs. We had 7 people, Izman on PLD, Omoikitte on WHM, Ninjafox on RDM, Skooter on BLM, Darkdawn on DRG, Kallo on THF and I was on NIN. The fight is pretty straight forward, with a few exceptions. It summons baby Wamouracampa, but if the person with hate zones, then they will despawn. The person that is zoning the babies needs to be dedicated to this because they do spawn rather quickly but you do have enough time to zone then zone back and be ready to pull the next baby. You do not have to be out of party for this to happen, so this is different from how Experimental Lamia operates. You do not want to debuff it for the simple reason that Exuviation will increase the damage healed by a lot with the more debuffs it has on it. You should dispel it though as it will buff itself often and will waste time recasting buffs if they are dispelled. 7 people can reasonably do this after the pull if you have enough healing, but it should be noted that we did have some MP problems when we had two melee on it, but once they were pulled off of it Iz was easily able to tank it and the mages were able to quickly get MP back. With 7 people the mages are going to build up a lot of hate, so it is important to keep that in mind and have them rotate a bit. Melee damage and mage damage both seemed decent. Finally, at a certain HP level which I suspect is 25~30% it will start using Fire Break and it seemed to use it pretty often. It is a single target fire-based move, and it did quite a bit of damage to Iz (600~700 range in normal PLD tanking gear, I don't think he had switched to magic resistance) and I think it either went through shadows or wiped them. Either way, once it starts using it you will want to kill it quickly, but it should be easier to put more melee on it for a short period of time because it seemed to prefer Fire Break over the AoE moves that tended to cost more MP for healing the melee. I should mention that Evaine showed up about half way through the fight on WHM which massively sped the process of killing Achamoth because the melee could stay on it and take AoE damage and give it more TP without as much worry.

I want to profoundly thank Omoikitte, Kallo, Darkdawn, Ninjafox and Evaine for helping so much with the fight and of course the man himself, Iz for tanking it like a beast as usual. :)