King Moogle EX - Text WalkthroughFollow

This fight is fun! We asked for a fight that was random and based on team cooperation, and understanding/reacting to mechanics, rather than memorization. Well here it is.

It took our Free Company two nights of strategy building to figure out the mechanics and positioning required. Here is a decription of how we handled it:

Phase 1:
The main thing to know for the whole fight is that the KING buffs the nearest moogles, making them so strong that you will die to their unique mechanic. The tanks must at all times keep the KING as far as possible from the BARD (and ideally all other moogles as well, except the PLD or WAR they are assigned to). You cannot control hate on any of the moogles except for the moogle PLD, WAR and the KING.

Tanks:
For this reason, the tanks are going to take the PLD and WAR moogles and maintain hate on them, and also swap the hate on the KING at two stacks of the KING's buff. After two stacks the tank moogles hit very hard and are difficult to heal through. During your turn to have the KING, keep him away from the other moogles, especially the BARD, and stay at the outer edge of the map, facing in. If the BARD gets stacks of the kings buffs, it will likely be a wipe.

DD:
First thing to do is Focus Target the BLM - Pomburner. You are required to switch targets to Pomburner when the BLM starts casting POM FLARE for the entire fight, all phases. Damage will interrupt the cast. Stun/silence will not. Do not damage the BLM except during the stun phase, or he will die too early. No one should be running out of Flare range, just stun it every time.

During this entire phase you need to be aware of two things:
- Do not turn your back on the THF, or he will rush to you and do a devastating backstab. For this reason you want to be on the outer edge of the battlefield facing in at all times. He will also steal your healer's MP, which can be easily fixed with a Mage's Ballad.
- There is a Delta attack that the moogles do that puts a very deadly TRIANGLE in the middle of the area. The rotation of the triangle varies. For this reason, ranged, tanks, melee and healers should all be around the outer edges of the battlefield at all times to avoid this near-instant triangle attack that does approx 90% HP damage. You can often see the moogles rush to the triangle positions ahead of time to predict this.

The goal of Phase 1 is to damage every one of the mini mooogles down to 10% health. The KING is invulnerable. Kill the BLM last and make sure he is the only one to die. At the end of Phase 1 the KING will use his own HP to heal the moogles, which is why you want them all damaged as low as possible. Killing 2 moogles will cause the king to effectively take less damage because he does not heal dead moogles, they just revive.

Phase 2:
This phase is identical to the first except for now the KING will do a pair of Ultimate attacks on a timed rotation. The pairs are fairly random and must be handled immediately:

- The pair that always comes together and seems to suck the worst is POM HOLY + DEATH DEBUFF (Moogle-go-round). Remember how the DD need to Focus Target and switch to Pomburner to interrupt POM FLARE? Well you still need to do that, but now you also have to be ready to stun POM HOLY as well. HOLY will turn the whole room purple, is unavoidable, and MUST be stunned by the DD damage before it goes off. DD, when the room turns purple immediately switch to FURRYFOOT the WHM to stun holy.
During the Holy cast, as soon as the room turns purple, the healers MUST find which of the player have the DEATH DEBUFF (Moogle-go-round) icons and remove them before Holy goes off. If it is not removed, the players with the DEBUFFS will die. For this reason, our healers ordered their party lists to match, and one took the top debuff, and one took the bottom debuff. We did confirm that one healer, if in range and fast enough, can remove both debuffs. The key is to know what to do the instant HOLY starts casting.

- This is the pair that is easiest to deal with - MOG RAIN OF DEATH + HATE RESET. First of all, MOG RAIN OF DEATH is the reason the tanks have been keeping the KING away from the BARD the whole fight. If the BARD is buffed, 3 players WILL die. If not, the 3 players that get the very easy-to-spot RoD icon above their heads should find a safe space in the battlefield away from other players and soak up the non-lethal damage.
The other part is hate reset on the PLD and WAR. The tank moogles will reset hate, and shoot off to find new targets, usually the healers. Healers having Shroud available at this point will help. The tanks just have to lay out their combo to fix things.

- CHARM + CHAINS - Two players get charmed, sometimes a healer. Charm targeting is based on the nearest (non-tank?) players to the KING, so healers should try to keep a DD between you and the KING to avoid being targeted. The charmed players will be forced to run into some ground AoE goo. A quick pair of Esuna/Leeches can fix this. There may be more to this mechanic but this was not generally the one that killed us.

Things to remember for Phase 2:
- DD - still Focus Target Pomburner, but now watch for POM HOLY from Furryfoot as well.
- Continue to stay on the outer edges, faced-in, to avoid the TRIANGLE and THF attacks.
- Still get all the mini-moogles down to 10% HP and kill the BLM at the end.
- Do not attack the WHM or BLM except during the STUN phases for flare and holy or they will die too soon, before the others are at 10% HP.
- if you get the Rain of Death icon, finds a safe place to soak it up without hitting anyone else.
- HEALERS, the DEATH DEBUFF (Moogle-go-round) that is paired with POM HOLY is the #1 reason we died in all fights. Be ready! Also be ready to remove Charm as well.
- Fast Esuna/Leeches are the key to winning.

Phase 3:
At the end of Phase 2, STACK IN THE MIDDLE - POM METEOR is coming. You need to be fully healed, stoneskin, SCH bubble, whatever you can to mitigate this. People who are weakened at this point will need SS or will surely die. Healers pre-cast CURE III so everyone's HP jumps back up as soon as Meteor hits.

Phew, ok, you guys are gold at this point. You know all the mechanics and Phase 3 is more of the same. The KING is sitting at about 5-10% health from healing all those moogles. Be ready to deal with ALL the mechanics listed above during Phase 3.

Winning:
Damage all the moogles down to 5% health. Ready? Assign each player a specific moogle to Zerg. We kind of matched job-to-job here. As soon as the first Moogle dies the KING starts casting something similar to ULTIMA. You are timed from here. Kill, kill, kill the remaining moogles as fast as possible.

When they are all dead, have the Melee DD use LB3 on the KING. Zerg, zerg, zerg DPS race to the finish!

--

Team coordination and verbal call-outs were a huge key to success here. If you see them forming up for TRIANGLE, call it out. Healers splitting the debuff removal, call out your target right away. Tanks swapping KING at 2 stacks of mog-tank buff, call it out. KING gets too close to the BARD, say something!

This fight is exhilarating and honestly the most fun I have had in FFXIV so far.











Edited, Apr 2nd 2014 1:12pm by Gnu

This. Each player-tank is assigned a moogle-tank to stick with for the entire battle. One tank starts with the KING as well, and goes to a spot on the outer edge away from the rest of the roaming moogles. The KING gives your moogle-tank stacks of the king-buff. At two stacks, tell the other tank to come pull the KING off you.

Same as swapping Ultima just you have another enemy to tank as well.

There is one other thing about this. Sometimes, we are not sure why, the KING will give 4-5 stacks of the buff instead of just 1. The tanks would pop their cooldowns, tell the healer and call in the other tank right away. So the other tank grabs the King, tanks pop Hallowed Ground (We did switch to two PLD's for this reason actually) and the healers get ready for some massive healing when Hallowed drops. The stacks I think last for 30 seconds, so 15 seconds of unprotected tank getting hit for around 3k damage a pop.

It's manageable, but maybe not on the first try!

I wish there was a write-up like this for every dungeon...