Trial of the Magians & SMNFollow

Well, that is one way of seeing something beneficial with more -dark. Personally I'm usually not too worried about refresh (since it will take you like 300 seconds to regain that Eclipse Bite) but it probably can be useful occasionally.

I've still to finish any, since I'm not sure which one I really want. Ice would be nice for my maxed 75BP avatar, while Earth or Wind would be useful for the stun damage or low perpetuation cost.

Those who are doing the garuda -4 perpet staff, I'm having trouble doing these (the final Trial and I'm @150). So far here is what I do.

/DRG, summon, assault, BP. Melee with pet and save jumps / WS for ticks. Only hurtful thing he uses the paralyze but that usually doesn't last long. Sometimes I can go right to the next mob or I have to sit and heal for MP.

My question is if there's another area someone found or another method I could use to let things go a bit faster.

Me and my wife completed out wind staffs by sync to each othere in the highlands i went as 15 Blu and ripped them down to 10 % and she would BP or mele them down and vice versa, was a pretty pleasant experiance and alot of seals :P

I aimed a little lower when I was working on that trial - I went with my wife's level 12 BLU to Zegham Hill in North Gustaberg and killed sheep there. At level 12-14, the sheep on the lowest tier check easy prey and have extremely low HP. By level 15 though, all of the sheep on that tier check too weak, but that is easily remedied by moving up to the 2nd tier of the hill.

At first I was using my wife's BLU to round up as many sheep as possible, bring them to my SMN and help beat them down to low HP so I didn't have to waste too much MP keeping Garuda out unnecessarily, but in the end, I resorted to running from one side of the hill to the other with Garuda out the whole time, killing every sheep along the way - all the while chugging Yagudo drinks to minimize downtime (I'm so glad I raised cooking to 60, lol). I even stopped using my wife's character for damage. I would start each run by engaging a sheep, hitting it once or twice with my staff to deal damage and trigger Garuda to auto-attack, then I would unlock from the target, run to the next sheep and start attacking it before moving on to the next sheep. Kills were extremely quick, and Garuda was guaranteed to get the killing blow each time. I forget how long it took to complete the trial, but it wasn't very long. I would've taken longer elsewhere.

Just wanted to give you a shout out and say thank you for the tip. I just finished my Varuna's staff for Shiva and Vayu's staff for Garuda. Both required killing sheep and I was able to make the experience a lot less painful by going to this camp. I tried West Ron once and the sheep were just too spread out.

I do recommend bringing some kind of juice with you for this trial. The avatars cost 4mp/tick at that level and your MP will drain away very quickly. I made melon juice because I had limited space and could store more ingredients than if I went with Yagudo. In retrospect, I should have muled away some gear and just stocked up on cherries and berries. The melon juices did help a lot but yag drinks would have sped things up quite a bit.

All in all, I am very happy to get these two staffs finished. The only one I have left for SMN is Yama's staff. I'm stuck on slimes and not at all looking forward to doing it. I finished my Shareeravadi (MAB) and Surya's (cure potency). I think at some point I might make a staff for Levi and Ramuh but definitely not any time soon.