Pets 100% immunity to physical damage claimFollow

Interesting findings here.

Claims Atma of the Ducal Guard stacks with 50% avatar PDT to make pets immune to physical damage.

I read the original post 2 days ago and I obtained the Atma of the Ducal Guard yesterday.

Using MM + DG as my atmas and using the MP and HP cruor enhancements, I proceeded to do a test by killing a Glade Wivre IT++ that I found in Abyssea-Grauberg. The Wivre gave me 258 limit points in a 7 person alliance after I defeated it with Garuda (no one else fought) at my current level (90).

She did not lose HP once, not even 1 point of HP, and she had FULL HP to begin with.

This atma is broken beyond belief.

EDIT

Extra note:

After reading the atma's FFXIclopedia's page, I noticed that it mentioned that the atma's latent effect that is triggered when HP<50% is actually activated based on the base HP of the user rather than the actual HP after enhancements. That's probably why it was activate even when Garuda had full HP, as I had the HP cruor enhancement myself.

Edited, Jan 3rd 2011 5:18pm by AmrikValefor

Its generally 8~10 quests per fame rank depending on the actual quests sense some give way more faction then others

I should get this...

Shiva + pull a bunch of linking mobs (like bats) + Minikin + Ducal Guard + Beyond + Astral flow = win.

With Ultimate, Minikin, and Gales, my garuda does ~3500 damage Aerial Blast to all mobs in range. Beyond + minikin will be slightly weaker but, with shiva being immune to their melee hits, she can tank em all, and AF again. If you get a restore chest in there, rinse, repeat. How fun

Currently a BLM friend of mine and I do something similar to this anyways without Ducal Guard.

He pulls a bunch of mobs with mana wall up and sleepgas them all. I use Aerial Blast for ~3500 on them all, he resleeps them. I use Aerial Blast again and kill most of them, and he uses a -ja spell. I find it's more fun and more consistent than Odin is... The other cool thing is, unlike -ga spells where the damage is reduced by the number of targets, astral flow isn't.

But with Ducal Guard, now you can do this easily solo. Even more fun with shiva is the use of Frost Armor prior to pulling... Spikes flying everywhere.

I still haven't understood what you need to do to get it.

Is it a quest that needs to be done? Or a collection of local quests? Or all quests in zone?

Kenshyn is right, those are the quests you need to do. The Egg Enthusiast requires level 1 of fame and Brugaire's Ambition requires level 3 of fame in Abyssea-Grauberg.

I personally did Koruo-Moruo's item delivery quest because it was the cheapest and fastest way to get fame in the area.
I bought one stack of each of the three possible items he may ask and used MM+Fleet Wind to speed things up, but I ended up using Spring Shoes because that saved me from calling Garuda, which was growing tiresome.

From what I noticed, all of the level 1 fame quests in Abyssea-Grauberg force you to zone upon completition in order to retry and most of them (excluding Egg Enthusiast and Koruo-Moruo's quest) require items that cost between 20-40k gil on my server per atempt.

After you have done at least once every quest and Dom. Op. listed by Kenshyn, you should be able to synth it for 1k with any Atma Fabricant in a Heroes area.

Edit ---

Also, the Brugaire' Ambition is an excelent quest but it requires a pop item that can be found in the pool of possible loots of the pots that you need to kill for one of the four Dom. Ops. I was lucky and got a drop and saved 20k myself that way.

Furthermore, I don't think a SMN can solo Brugaire's Ambition or at least, not easily, because the ??? position is found in a reduced area. Also, if you bring someone who can proc blue !! on it, you might get some Caller Seals:Hands out of it. A kind party that was killing it for seals offered me their SMN seals because nobody wanted them and between their popset and ours, I ended up with 4 (or 5?) Caller's seals:Hands! It might be worth of notice that the item Brugaire gives and asks you to use on the NM paralyzes it for a short amount of time with a potent paralyze, so it can be used as safety meassure too. Although a BLU+BLM+NIN can trio it easily without a problem, a WHM may be needed to Cure V or Cure VI from time to time if one of it wasn't possible to stun of its potent spells.

Edited, Jan 5th 2011 12:45pm by AmrikValefor

You mean Green/Yellow?

Lol this is going to get broken fast....

Using this soloed today:

Ayahondo (Ule)
Resheph (Ule Zone Boss)
Vadleany (Altepa)
Hedjetjet (Altepa)

There's something I'm not understanding. (But, I've always been a little fuzzy on how hp latents work.)
Why am I getting the bonus at full hp?

Also, this is probably abundantly obvious, but I'm pretty sleep deprived at the moment so it took me a minute to realize...
If your pet gets slept you have to resummon, because the mob won't be able to wake him up (unless it uses magic of course)
Just a helpful hint for anyone like me who decides to first try this out at 4 in the morning and is scratching their heads as to why Garuda suddenly stopped swinging...

It's easy. The Atma is glitched.
It doesn't factor the conditions of <50% HP when it is applied to an avatar in the case of the -50% pdt nor when it comes down to the -movement.

Basically, the "if" conditional that should stop the Atma from activating when it is above 50% HP didn't count the avatar and it procedes to apply it without giving it much thought.

And its only the ducal guard atma, the mounted champion has nothing to do with it

I tried Bukhis solo today. Any tips on how best to damage him, bearing in mind I'm limited to Shiva and Ifrit to mitigate away his magic? I had Beyond/MM/Ducal on, and Meteor Strikes would barely break 1k, Flaming Crushes hit around 800, Rush and Heavenly Strike even less. Dude just wouldn't take damage, took me an hour to get him down to 33% and then I got caught in a Blizzaga 4 and died.

Doom isn't as much of an issue as I would've expected. Start running when Apoc Ray hits, and resummon when the pet dies. I was /NIN but I think I could get away with /RDM, he didn't hit me that often and only after resummons.

Thats pretty much how it is... No real way to damage it fast, all of the higher level tier NMs are going to take near or over an hour sadly.

Nvm. Had a question but then saw base avatar physical resistance.


Edited, Jan 12th 2011 3:36am by DemonOfHunger

Resheph will kill your avatar even with the atma. I used the atma while my group was killing it the other day. After tarsal slam the very next hit by Resheph would kill the avatar. It didn't matter if it was a normal melee hit or a TP move. It happened every single time. One time I managed to cure Garuda with whispering wind before she was hit again and the next attack did 0 damage. It seems that for whatever reason, the avatars lose the damage reduction at 1HP. It will all be a moot point after this maintenance I'm sure.

Ironically spirits are still more broken than being invulnerable is. I gave it a try with a spirit, with atma, vs a mob. The result was 80% HP left after 3 minutes. Killing a VT mob with spirits that are invincible would then take 15 minutes. Can you point me to any DD job that takes 15 min to kill a VT mob?

I just wish SE put 1% of the effort into fixing negative things, compared to how much they put into fixing things that effect us positively.

I'd suspect the only way to get SE to do anything, is complaining to GMs that share your opinion.

Complain SMN too strong -> GM playing any other job than SMN agrees -> report to office
Complain SMN too weak -> GM must be playing SMN and share the same view -> report to office

I couldn't care less about the atma bug, but I hate when they drop by and fix some of the job, and ignore the rest because you didn't have enough WAR, BLM, SAM etc complaining about it.

If only SE could screw up so my spirits instant kill things with Death. That would make them at least pay attention... though of course they'd nerf them worse than they are now for good measure.

It is fixed tested on a peapuk attacks did 10~20ish per hit. Tested on Lord Varney hits were doing about 30~40dmg 50+ per crit haven't seen any tp move yet before shiva died.

Does the atma give effect when HP < 50 % or still 100% now?

lol well it was fun while it lasted... I'll miss those fun astral flow burns me and my fiance did before. At least we can say we used this to its full potential, and got things done for his warrior so we can duo better together. :) Thanks to this atma we got some HP+ abyssites from Xibablba and Warbler that we had trouble with before, and finished a lot of our leg AF pieces (amongst many other things).

I knew it was terribly broken and would be fixed, but was secretly hoping it wouldn't be until next update. XD

Hmm and has anyone tried stacking on more damage taken atmas with this, since it still seems to give a large boost? Or has it been capped now??

Would you settle for Dark Spirits being able to cast Impact at 99? :-)

Avatar -damage taken is applied first, then gear on the new damage total. So you'd still need about 100% from gear alone.

Edited, Jan 13th 2011 8:59am by jlejeune

I honestly only want my spirits to not reset their spell timer on assault. I still don't get why that bug lives on. It makes your spirits nuke 30 seconds after a mob gets to your camp. How many exp on mobs that live 1.5 minutes so a spirit has any shot at doing meaningful damage?

It is quite ironic that the only thing it is used for is running away, and running away cuts 30 seconds on the casting timer making it a better DD while you run. Like some kind of chicken knife, that gives increased damage if you got flee active.

Although SE fix it , but this atma is good anyway. Yesterady i and my smn friend duo NM Berstuk in Abyssea - Attohwa. I'm using Atma of the Voracious Violet , Atma of the Mounted Champion and Atma of the Ducal Guard. NM hit my Leviathan for 1x dmg , and TP move around the same. It only cast Water based magic so Leviathan can affort it .
During the fight i don't need to recast Leviathan and let my friend to use Shiva to attack it . and Leviathan never lost hate .
The strange part is that SE don't fix the HP trigger problem so that avatar will have the effect even 100% hp



Edited, Jan 13th 2011 9:16pm by sheepdee

The atma's potency is no different than it was, the difference is that there is a 7/8 Max Damage Reduction cap on avatars now. Stacking Ducal Guard, Zenith, and Heavens atmas produced no difference to simply having Ducal Guard on.

But it is just pure PDT or? My Titan seemed to take plenty of damage from a tier IV nuke even at < 50% HP (well, he got < 50% HP from another nuke, if that damage reduction still is supposed to be on all the time).