I'm not 75 RDM yet, and therefore I haven't attempted anything that would be exciting to watch, but I'd love for people to start sharing their most challenging fights.

On retail, RDM straight tank soloing was considered on of the most prestigious and challenging things you could do in the game. That seems to be lost here due to everyone being able to altbox/solo with blm sleep nuke.

I'd love to see some impressive videos with solos of mobs like:

Cactrot Rapido
Big Bomb
Suzaku (only if you're actually crazy, this is a long fight)
Seiryu (might be impossible now with MACC changes)
Byakko. This is something that, to my knowledge, has never been done at 75. It was attempted by Deadwing who had the best possible 75 gear attainable and he still lost at around 80%. For this, I think a corsair magic accuracy buff just to compensate for the magic acc here would make it fair; no evoker's roll or anything else!


... and whatever you can find that you think is a serious challenge for a RDM/NIN. Have fun!

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The red mage solo aspect of the game is a very interesting one. You can't scientifically evaluate a lot of this stuff because the game kept changing. For instance Seiryu was not solo-able when it first came out, but with the addition of enough macc gear to land bind consistently it was solo-able for awhile. SE stepped in and added gradual bind resistance and it wasn't solo-able again. Then with enough added inventory for remedies and even more macc gear it became solo-able once more in WOTG.

For a lot of this stuff there's no way to tell where exactly the mob is and where the player strength is along the timeline. I hope this thread catches on and some people go out to see exactly where rdm is matching up against a lot of this stuff. Things tend towards the difficult side on nas, especially now that field satchel removal puts an upper limit on how much medication you can carry. Good luck out there testing the limits of what is plausible.

All that said a friend of mine and I did go back in the 99 cap to do some experimentation of just how strong red mage got by the very end of the 75 cap era. With out-of-era changes to enspells, ws functions, and Poison II damage (which we couldn't control for) we discovered most of the old avesta solos were playfully easy; however we were able to discover some interesting things about red mage's capability of solo holding HNM. You see in retail (and on nas) it is occasionally necessary to hold claim on an HNM while you stall for time as the shell arrives. It was very hard to get definitive data on how strong red mage was in these situations because on the off chance you were actually holding alone, by the time your first shellmember arrived (usually around 12 minutes) you weren't holding solo anymore and it cut the experiment short.

In 99 cap retail though we were able to go back and tune up a "best possible" rdm with a gear/augment limit of march 2010. We discovered a few things very interesting.

1) The TOAU hnm were all able to be solo-held for over an hour. Cerberus was the hardest, Khim was the easiest.
2) The flying COP wyrms were able to be held in the half-hour range, the limiting factor often being adds.
3) Ixion, Sandworm, Fafnir and King Behemoth were all solo-holdable until they raged barring unusually bad luck.
4) Jailer of Temperance, Jailer of Faith, and Jailer of Hope solos were all possible on extremely lucky runs
5) There is no world in which Byakko is soloable under 75 cap.

Hope some folks out there found some of that interesting. I've included a ~24 minute Tiamat solo hold video for viewing pleasure. Clock starts when the mob is claimed and ends when the mob is unclaimed (which, in retail, means you cannot cast on adds that aggro you).

https://youtu.be/z2Zg0NVqXds

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdneKLhsWOQ

I'm not convinced yet, Deadwing. I think there's a glimmer of possibility. In reviewing your 8 minute video (and yes I know you were using BiS every slot), it was not iceday, and you did not land the Zephyr on it. Now I know these are two very small factors, but iceday is easy to attempt on. The big luck factor would be in you landing the zephyr to dispel his very damaging light effect.

And let's also address the elephant in the room here which is the massive INT gap between mithra and taru. I believe a fully merited taru RDM would surpass mithra by around 9-10 INT? When you're looking at a 1-3% higher chance of bind on THE toughest solo in the game, it's not something to overlook.

Still not saying that it can be done, but I think all of the options have not been explored, at least by you, Deadwing.

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In modern retail the int gap on races was reduced to next-to-nothing. Byakko's enlight is less damage than the other gods due to his triple attack, phalanx either totally cancels it or near as makes no difference.
Iceday would help for sure as would pushing into even later era aptant gear or post 75 cap gear and augments. At that point it's not really legit anymore though at least to me.

A big thing to remember is the poison II from that video is drastically buffed. A bona fide era solo is going to take over an hour. That's a tall order when the bind builds resist with each cast the way it does. The exact mechanics of the bind resist are unknown, but you feel it kicking in fast. Reasonably you should expect to be straight tanking Byakko in excess of 45 minutes. That's a really tall order even with limitless meds. Nuking isn't really feasible, full eva gear and bat earrings isn't enough to get you eva checks, sub blu just doesn't fly. Between the two of us we tried it over 30 times in 30 different ways and that 8 minute video was the best one. I hope macc gets sorted on nas accurately enough that people could get in there and try stuff but eh. I don't think it's happening.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdneKLhsWOQ