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First Turn of Alexander Downed... In Duty Finder (Spoilers)Follow

#1 Jul 07 2015 at 8:25 AM Rating: Excellent
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Hi all,

Was up early (4:30am, 30 min after patch), figured I'd hop in duty finder and check out the first "turn" of Alexander. Got in around 5am. Was challenging, reminds me of T1 prior to the patch. Downed it at 6am after about 6 wipes with my duty finder group (who I'm pretty sure were all really good players because we figured it out amongst ourselves without a guide), got some loot (bolt and some other part), and 40 law new player bonus + 20 law for the down.

Here's my quick and easy guide for dps so you all can avoid having to learn it yourself. I did not tank or heal it, so this will be from my bard perspective.

Add Section
1. Easy. Focus the "boss" add. He keeps spawning guys that give him stacks. Those stacks give him power. So kill the boss, ignore the adds.

Final Boss
1. DPS as normal at first, kind of behaves like a dreadnaught.

2. Will spawn two adds after you deal a bit of damage to him. Dps (preferably ranged) get a hit on an add and it tethers to you. Move the add away from the group. They don't hit very hard and are easy to solo in few seconds. Kill them and they spawn a small aoe circle. Don't stand in it. You will get mini status, and that is bad.

3. Room blinks red, spawns a second "0.5" boss. The bosses tether together, the tanks need to split them to remove the tether. They do regular circular and big wide line aoe. Avoid this. DPS the bosses equally (2 dps on one, 2 dps on the other). Treat them like the snakes in T1. These things must die together or the other will self destruct.

4. Now the tricky part. Each will use an attack that will put a vertical blue line on the ground (so two lines). These drop meteors like the final boss in WoD (or more the Ascian fight in the main story). The meteors are getting pretty close when the lines turn red. If the meteors hit, it is game over. So you have 2 dps on each boss, and shortly after the meteors each boss spawns two of the mini puddle making adds. Each dps should grab an add. 2 of those dps (as bard I line up with the vertical line in between me and the add) should hit to tether and then drag the add over to one of the vertical lines. Then kill the add and it drops its puddle of mini right under where the meteor is falling. Do it in time and the meteor will shrink down to mini size and do negligible damage. All you need is one add to die under each meteor, so dps the other two down as normal while moving to the middle for a sweet healer medica II / cure III.

5. Get a few more hits on the bosses and they will then become untargetable and fly into the air. They then do a mechanic where they put two big pulsing aoes on the ground and you have to move as far away from both as possible. It usually means moving to the far edge of the map sort of in between the two aoe effects. Do right and take negligible damage. When the bosses drop back down, split them apart again and power dps. This is the time for B4B if you have it.

6. Now the bosses will repeat steps 4 and 5 three or four more times until you get them both down to 5% or so. The aoe attacks will become harder at this point, and the "0.5" boss will begin a self destruct sequence (we may have just hit enrage, i dunno). After a few wipes, we figured out that the only way to beat it with our setup was to let me use my glorious bard lb3 at 5%. I lined up me>0.5 boss > boss in a straight line and unleashed. Took them down to 1% and we finished them off at the same time for the win.

Happy hunting Smiley: grin


Edited, Jul 7th 2015 9:27am by Valkayree
#2 Jul 07 2015 at 8:47 AM Rating: Excellent
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Yeah we cleared em all in about 2 hours. The main draw is the mechanics but it's definitely tuned on the easy side (I think Bismarck or Core will give people more trouble tbh.) Turn 3, that's the fun one. (Literally fun one.) TUrn 1 specifically will probably be a pain for while for those who didn't do Coil or even WoD for example due to similar mechanics.

One thing to note, the Add spawn is basically a "tank swap" in the sense the OT must provoke the new spawn to actually get the hate and hold it away as it spawns full hate on the current MT.



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#3 Jul 07 2015 at 10:23 AM Rating: Good
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Floor 4 is difficult enough, but my PF group was able to do it after a few wipes and a little analysis.

As for F1, the way Self Destruct works is that when one of the two bosses die, the other one will begin casting Self Destruct. If it completes the cast, you lose. So you want the two bosses to die at virtually the same time (Self Destruct is about a 10 second cast).

Our group had two NIN in it and we were able to handle the missiles no problem. I would suggest that ranged dps take out the secondary adds (that are not being used to shrink the meteors) and pull them off to the side so that they don't drop their purple circles in the middle of the room where everyone needs to stand when the bosses jump.

Looking forward to savage. The mechanics I saw in normal are going to be pure evil when tuned for savage.

Edited, Jul 7th 2015 11:25am by Callinon
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#4 Jul 07 2015 at 4:01 PM Rating: Excellent
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Archmage Callinon wrote:

As for F1, the way Self Destruct works is that when one of the two bosses die, the other one will begin casting Self Destruct. If it completes the cast, you lose. So you want the two bosses to die at virtually the same time (Self Destruct is about a 10 second cast).
Edited, Jul 7th 2015 11:25am by Callinon


One started casting self destruct before the other was dead when they were both around 4%, when we tried to dps normally without bard lb. We may have hit an enrage, but I'm not quite sure.

Also, since I only had time enough for the first floor before work, are we agreed that Ravana Ex is still currently the hardest content? Or is it Bismark Ex?

Edited, Jul 7th 2015 5:03pm by Valkayree
#5 Jul 07 2015 at 4:25 PM Rating: Decent
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Ravana EX is harder than F4 which is the hardest Alexander normal boss. I'd say F4 is similar in difficulty to Bismarck EX, maybe a little harder.
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#6 Jul 07 2015 at 10:21 PM Rating: Good
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SO tried T1 in Duty Finder.

I now know that these bosses do indeed have hard enrage. They both just spontaneous combust for 125k damage.
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#7 Jul 08 2015 at 8:20 AM Rating: Excellent
Agree that F4 and Biz Ex are equal in difficulty.

I love Alex story mode.... Wish coil would have been done this way too.
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#8 Jul 08 2015 at 9:45 PM Rating: Good
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wait what? New Raid has DF on day 1? Now THAT i like

Btw is Alex Story AND Alex "hard" out yet, if so whats the difference between Story and Hard considering it seems they drop the same thing(s)?
#9 Jul 08 2015 at 10:48 PM Rating: Excellent
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The version of Alexander that's out right now is the story version. That's why it's available for solo DF queuing right away, and why it's so easy.

Alexander hard releases in two weeks.
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#10 Jul 09 2015 at 3:23 AM Rating: Default
Thayos wrote:
Agree that F4 and Biz Ex are equal in difficulty.

I love Alex story mode.... Wish coil would have been done this way too.


Totally agree. Those who can find a static, want the drops can still do the Hard Mode.

Yet again SE has done it the right way around this time by giving us who want the story and to enjoy the games content the ability to actually enjoy it.

Only time I get to do Coil is with the LS, having not touched 11-13 because finding the time for everyone who actually will stick around to learn it and aim for the win isn't a 5 minute job. Which is why those who tend to whizz through tend to be those in a static. Strangely enough they also tend to be the ones who whinge about the no new difficulty of content. If you stick with a full group who know their job inside out, have experience of actually trusting/working with each other, the most difficult content isn't going to be that difficult compared to joining DF.

A good example for me would be I whizzed through 1-3 last night with ease, two wipes for all the runs. Compared to the night before that had 6 wipes for the 1st.
#11 Jul 09 2015 at 8:51 AM Rating: Excellent
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Beat all four floors finally. Fourth went surprisingly easy in my second group, where the DPS was MUCH better.

My experience is this: Groups in Alex are either really terrible at either healing or dps, or flow through the content like warm butter. The mechanics are the easiest thing ever, the problem is that on the whole, people are simply not pushing out the numbers.

All my DF groups either destroy the content, or die to enrage.

Everyone is healed all the time, or the entire group dies to poor heals.

Seems like good healers are a must with this content. Seen so many bad healers in df lately. And people at least being able to pull 500-600 dps at lvl 60. If I, as bard, am top dps, there is a giant problem (unless it is second floor).

Problem is that we exist in a phase where there currently isn't enough gate content to lock weaker players out. You know, the ones who get by ok in dungeons, but don't seem to have grasped a good rotation or don't handle mechanics well, or who have a crap connection etc etc.

For instance, second coil when it released was gated by t5. Final coil was gated by t5 and t9. Meaning that you can go into df for final coil when it was available and clear the content almost 100%. Why? Two very strong gates that lock out anyone either not fortunate enough to find a good group, or bad enough that they don't perform in good groups well.

Perfect example. Ravana EX. Gated by Bismark EX, which requires that the DPS absolutely be on their game. As a result, ran it once in pf in a learning party, made it past adds. Haven't run it since, but im sure if I jumped in a clear group I would do well. Why? Gate at Bismark.

Edited, Jul 9th 2015 9:52am by Valkayree
#12 Jul 09 2015 at 8:58 AM Rating: Excellent
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Yep, that's why a few of my FC members have said this:

"If you enter a battle and the boss yells at you to pick up a bomb and throw it at him and it will instantly kill him, I guarantee people will still fail to do that simple auto kill mechanic."

That's one of the very telling things about Alexander, especially the first one. Go into DF and you either go through it with no trouble, or spend the next hour and a half wiping if people don't rage quit because...you guessed it, DPS simply can't learn how to either peel off of the boss (tunnel vision) or kill an add under the laser. Every wipe I've seen last two days has been because of the bombs blowing up due to DPS not doing and forcing the healers to do it.

That's why I liked how Alexander was designed with giving specific roles the focus (1 - dps 2- heals 3- tanks 4- better know how to work together), so while yeah tanks and heals are always important, they did it in an interesting way.
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