Zelos Orb: HKCNM 30 Antagonistic Ambuscade

In attempt to furnish ourselves with scrolls of Breakga and Comet (let alone BRD songs) a group of us went to try one of the new High Kindred Crest NM battlefield fights.  We went to try “Antagonistic Ambuscade”, aka the Antlion one. Our group was 90-95 and the 90 NIN’s accuracy wasn’t fantastic but we managed fine.

Furnished with a decent write-up from BG wiki,  we went with NIN, DRK, MNK, WHM, RDM & THF.  It costs 30 HKC to get a Zelos Orb and the fight is in Boneyard Gully in Attowha Chasm.

What we did was pretty simple.  The fight is restricted to 15 mins and we took 13.5 the first time and got it down to 6 or so at the end.  With a less cautious setup, you could easily get it done in 4. We didn’t know that initially so we were a bit cautious.

Buffs don’t drop so you can prebuff. We sent Rin our THF ahead so he could find the antlions. They’re all underground and ambush you as you run around. There are a total of 5 of them, the Boss and 4 adds. The adds can repop.

The Boss has very high defense/damage mitigation until you take out the adds so what we ended up doing was have Rin find the Boss and super tank it. I.e. stand there in evasion gear and just hold it without acting on it, allowing him to be cure spammed if needed. In the end he only needed the occasional cure and was barely being touched. He liked the evasion skillups tho!

On the first run, we had him find all the adds first and we peel them off him but eventually, as long as he found the Boss first, the rest of the group could take care of the adds. Once they were down, you then zerg the Boss as much as possible The first time we tried, we were cautious because we didn’t know how spammy he was with gravitic horn and how much damage he could do. We then get a creepy message….

Alerting us to the fact that the adds had repopped.  So on the first run we refound them and killed ( hence running to 13.5). What we found on subsequent runs was that if the Boss only had a few % to go, don’t bother with finding the others again and if you just went nuts you can kill the Boss before the second wave pops!  I have no idea if you can just kill the Boss, but the adds tend to pop up in the way anyway so, it may be faster just to kill em.

Antiphus

Antiphus will use Draw-in, so that’s why it’s necessary to have someone hold him and Sacrosanctity (new WHM 95 JA) is amazing for Gravitic Horn. It just becomes a non-issue. It was almost as if Sacro ‘blinks’ a magical damage effect.

So we got our runs down to 6 minutes.  Have everyone except the chest popped exit, the run is a pain. Or use nexus capes to get back to the Boneyard zone.

Unfortunately we saw no new scrolls. We did get a couple of new shields and a Bishop’s sash. Easy fight but unless there’s a super rare, uber drop in that fight, I doubt people will do it for long.