Plague Status vs. HNM's

Jotaru

shinobi-no-mono
FC/Active Member
Hey all;

I first got to thinking about this looking at the Job Ability "Blade Bash" obtained via merit points for Samurai;

'Deliver an attack that can stun the target and occasionally cause Plague.'

I didn't really think much about it, until reading up on some Blue Mage abilities and their potential effectiveness in HNM end-game; in particular, "Lowing" caught my eye;

'Gives enemies within range a powerful disease that prevents recovery of HP and TP'

(It should be noted that both of these abilities apparently inflict 'Plague' status: It not only stops regeneration of, but also decays, MP and TP)

This, coupled with another post I have read: Writeup on Kirin:

From FFXIClopedia.org:

'A more modern method to defeating Kirin is generating so much damage he dies before he can summon any of his sub gods. This "speed-kill" technique most commonly requires many bards and melee jobs to two hour, and normally is successful within the first 3 minutes of the fight. Often this is unattainable without DRKs 2-houring using Kraken Clubs. Before popping Kirin all players should drink poison potions because one Sleepga can waste precious time for any jobs 2-hour. Kirin's low HP but high regen are what makes this possible. If Kirin has time to summon a sub-god this is almost always a sign of failure.'


In effect, it seems to me that quite a lot of HNM's potentially take longer to kill than they should perhaps not because they have a large HP pool, but a large HP regeneration rate. For mobs with little to no regen, you're simply looking at a pretty linear model of kill-time: up your damage, quicken your kill. Less damage, slower kill. However, with large HP regen mobs (Kirin, in this example) your kill time increases at an exponential rate the longer you take, due to giving him more time to regen HP, thus increasing the total dmg you need to deal. [A 1,000 HP mob with 500 HP / sec regen will take 1 second to kill if you can do 1,500 DPS, for example, but if you can only do 1,000 DPS, 2/3 of previous, it now takes 2 seconds- only a one second difference in this example, but DOUBLE the time, just by reducing dmg by 1/3.]

So if these effects work on HNM's, I'd be interested to see how many killtimes could be drastically reduced by using these abilities simply to cut regen; if you're killing a 500hp/sec regen, you may not be dealing a nice round figure in the chatlogs with your spell or job ability, but over the course of the fight you'd be doing enormous amounts of effective dmg to the mob, overall decreasing kill times. Any thoughts / comments / discussion on this would be great, as I'm now considering grabbing Blade Bash (against what most people are posting) just to try this out.


Edit: I am omitting a major part of these abilities; degenerating both MP and TP as well, due only to the irrelevance to this post. Both could be major factors in many fights [Faffhog, etc] and would be open to discussion for that effect as well.
 
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Shikikoyo, go.
 
If the plague actually stuck it would be awesome. My impression is it probably fails near 100% of the time on anything tough. Maybe someone can try it on something that would be naturally weak to fire (Jormun anyone?).

-benny
 
Plague and disease on players has the catch that they cannot regen HP or MP "while healing". Plague just has the added effect of draining TP and MP.
 
Hm.. You're right, that has the potential to throw a relatively large cog in the works then ;;

I guess back to thinking about how useless Blade Bash is, and why its even in the game, with a rather abysmal (50% or lower) proc rate for both the stun and the plague on a (15? 20?) minute cooldown, dealing no dmg.. x_x
 
If there was something surefire that totally inhibited enemy TP regeneration, I think it'd be extremely useful. I'll be honest and say that I've never looked at it.

As it sits now you've only got a few options that have either a high chance of failure or are merely inhibitors and don't totally block it.

Penance
I know Penance is a 25% inhibitor linked to Chi Blast that can't be resisted (with upgrades lengthening the amount of time the inhibit function is active), but I think it only has an effect on TP generation from hitting/getting hit and doesn't stop the auto TP generation some enemies seem to exhibit.


Blade Bash
All of the Bash effects don't have me trusting user estimated stun/interruption effects. I see so many using Bash attacks on TP moves instead of spellcasting anyway. If you stuck with using Weapon, Shield, or Blade Bash to interrupt only spellcasting I think your rate would be much higher than what people have documented. I'm not Weapon Bashing a Bomb Toss, but I will knock one out if I see a -ga III and have had pretty good results with it. Don't take this as me recommending Blade Bash to be merited though, lol.

Lowing
I read the description, but I want to know more. How strong is the Plague? Is it an actual plague or just disease; the spell description has me wondering. Can the Plague effect, if there is a -TP/RoT, be enhanced to become more powerful with Quick Draw? I guess a Ballista test will answer both questions. There is no other job in the game that can inflict this effect, if it does produce an actual plague, so I'm really interested in knowing more about this.

I'm interested in possibly applying Plague to a Chariot or something, I just don't know if it's effective or even a good idea in the first place. I know those BLU's are looking for something to use Convergence with, lol.



You mention something about Plague (TP and MP reduction), but you went into a side thought about fighting enemy HP regen. I'm not sure if I was the only one you confused there.
 
See now I'm confused. I looked at it again and noticed that Plague's decription and Lowing don't seem to match in the first place (which is why it made me think it was a disease effect instead of Plague in the first place).

It looks like Plague is TP and MP and Disease is HP and MP.

Lowing's description by graphic seems to be a disease effect, so I don't know what is going on.

Lowing.JPG


I've never been hit by the BLU version, so I'm not sure I'd get the disease or plague icon.



I almost wish RDM/DRK could do Chainspell + Absorb TP, lol
 
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Assuming this would actually stick, it may be they key to winning the fight against the Marid boss in Einherjar. I'll post on BG and see if anyone's tried it.
 
What does it even mean if an enemy can't "recover HP"? It's not like they're sitting around resting. Does it mean they can't cure themselves? lol.
 
Not sure, but looking at the two which is the description matching more? If that's really the only thing it does, I'm not sure where you could even find a use for it, lol.

Lowing.JPG




http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/Disease

http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/Plague

I do know that when Buffalos do it on me it is Plague, I'm just not sure the player version is the same. I'm really hoping it's just a description error and it actually does give Plague.

I need a BLU for Ballista testing later.
 
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The Marid boss in Einherjar sits there and spams Proboscis Shower constantly curing himself for over 3000 damage. If it means that will turn into 0, there's a huge use for it. If it means you could set Aspidochelone, Kirin, or King Vingegarroon's HP regen to 0, that would also be a huge use. Sounds promising to me.
 
if it means that a mob cannot heal himself with tp moves... i will eat my subligar. kirin and such sound more possible.
 
This is an old post over a month old but I was bored at work and thought I would post on what I have seen lowing do.

I use to xp in arrpogo reef <sorry my spelling sucks> a lot. One time I was there with a blu and he would use lowing on the bone mobs. When the mob had lowing on blood saber and that new tp move they do that is like blood saber but with fix % wouldn't heal him at all. It would still do standard dmg to the pt but the mob got 0 hp back.

So it makes sense that it work in Einherjar on the boss kalia was talking about.
 
I think I speak for everyone when I say that is super fucking hot. Wow.

Now if only I could get an invite on my blue mage >.>.

-benny
 
I always hoped there was some semi-usage for these spells / abilities ^^;

Still trying to get enough merits to get Blade Bash and try it out on some stuff. hehe.
 
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