General challenge discussion (formerly NCU United 1-6)

Proudclad 1 -- it only takes 15-20 sec to get the buffs you need (haste/bravery on sazh & fang, haste/faith on vanille). Can skip the fortisol there if you are short one.

Time at Taejin's Tower apex before Dahaka: 5:20:24

Man the vetala is annoying this time around. His damn debuff multicast can screw you over if you get deprotect / deshell, if fang gets pained (stops her guarding), or if sazh gets fog or pain. I finished in 1 minute on the dot. Fortunately hecatoncheir wins the day on m26, so that's relatively hassle free -- you just need either sazh or fang to target the Peng. at the start with some form of com attack before the bats interrupt you so the stagger gauge lasts long enough. 29sec battle time.

I can ALMOST get dahaka down in one stagger, but I usually have ~100k or so of health afterwards. The problem is Fang attacks once and then just backs away instead of using scourge. If dahaka gets up early, she will use smite which also works. I just stay in rav com com after the stagger until I win or get wiped and then just retry. 2:10 battle time is only 15-20sec slower than before.

Barthandelus 2 is obviously win-able but it took me 3 staggers to get him. 3:20 or so battle time which is at least a minute slower than before. May not be much to be done about that one, as str is just so much lower this time. Fang doesn't have 5th atb bar either, which also makes you a lot weaker.

JB -- welcome. You've already upgraded more than is necessary. Also, in SRC, you'll want Vanille and Hope to have the highest str/mag weapons they have, not the belladonna wand. That is a waste in src. I recommend the rod of thorns for vanille and the simurgh / hawkeye (you'll need both to finish all the missions) for hope.

Check back on page 2 (assuming you group your posts by 50) for a farming strategy in the palamecia. I don't feel like typing it all out again. Essentially, you want to run a circuit starting with the 1st four soldiers, down to the elite/destroyer/huntresses, left to the destroyer/dragoons, then reset the fights and start again. Its about 65k/hr or so. Compared to chocobos at 400k/hr you really want to limit your time here mainly for sanity.

Just try bart 1 -- there's plenty of youtube videos showing how to beat him in ncu and even ncu/neu. You've got plenty of equipment already.

Addict -- just checked out your latest videos. First, you da man on recording all this. Second, you fought more than the minimum # of fights in Ch 5. In the first area with the fences, only 1 battle opens the fence. For example, for the very first pen, there is a single wolf and then two wolves (two separate encounters). The two wolves control the fence -- meaning the single wolf is non-mandatory. Didn't know if you knew this or not. Likewise, the 3 wolf encounter that you preempted isn't necessary -- that fence is controlled by the leach things close to the fence. Skipping those battles would save you 3-4 mins easy, putting you comfortably in the lead!

Its also interesting to see you do exactly what I did, arriving at the same solution independently. E.g. -- the two pulsework soldiers in the raise the roof area. You have to hit the first one 2x with sazh and then hit the other one to stagger both.

Looks like you are finding even more time that I left on the table, e.g. Aster Protoflorian. Looking forward to future updates...

The 4 silver lobos is total BS. Sometimes I can waltz right through and other times I have to retry 100 times before it let's me through without an encounter. So obnoxious. Did aster not go down in one stagger as easily? Your strategy sounded pretty good. I have a save there and I was going to test it for myself just to see but I didn't even get a chance to play last night due to MNF.

Was able to get dahaka down right at the end of the first stagger -- you need to do as much damage as possible in rav/com/com (holding vanille's attacks obviously) at ~310% before fulminous firestorm. Also, I atb-canceled right in the middle of an attack wave right as the gauge was depleting to get Fang to actually scourge for a change. That took it out, 1:59 battle time.

5:31:01 in front of Barthandelus 2. My times are ~3:15 or so, and don't seem to be improving regardless of what I do -- may just be the best I can do at this point. Its only about 45sec slower than before, so not terrible.

Also, I am approx +30k in cash vs. my gil calculations, so that's good. Plenty of cash to perform all the listed upgrades and maybe even enough to buy a shroud if I need it in Ch 13. Didn't end up needing the gold bangle at all, so we should cross that off the list.

Unfortunately, my calculations for CP were off by exactly 2000 -- I don't know how this happened. At any rate, I'm 2k short of cold blood with the nodes I've already gotten in my pre-Bart 2 save. Rather than redo most of Taejin's tower I'm planning to take down the lone bulwarker doing circles in the very first screen of Ch 12. It gives 2080 cp and it goes down in ~30sec if you preempt it which is fairly easy to do. A waste of ~45sec but what can you do -- I'm not giving up my good dahaka fight or my run through Oerba, as that can be an annoying circuit. I summoned to clear the 2x varolaci / 2x seeker fight as sazh and finished in 1:10. I'm sure that can be improved upon, but I hate hate hate those stupid hand cieth and didn't want to introduce an additional save in Oerba to test other strategies.

Addict -- the time record is yours for the taking. I'm tiring of this to be honest and just want to get < 7:21 and call it a day. On the bright side I think i'll be safely under that time -- I'm at least 1.5 hrs ahead of my Ch 12 checkpoint from the 8:47 run. I project 7:10-ish, noting that <7 is likely possible if you minimize deceptisol trick usages and limit saves.

Addict -- I tried that strategy but it is tricky to pull off because:

1) you need imperil to stick Asap at the start so that you raise the gauge faster as a rav
2) you end up "wasting" a paradigm slot while doing damage before firestorm bc vanille needs to either be a med or a sab with all debuffs already on
3) during the stagger imperil and/or deprotect will wear off. Vanille can reapply them but you have to shift to another paradigm to get it and your attacks in the meantime will do a lot less. When you main vanille you can (and should) refresh them just before the stagger.
4) It is harder to stagger cancel firestorm bc you either have to hold sazh as a rav (and thus do less damage) or switch quickly and have the gauge very close to 320% to pull it off in time.

If blitz ends up doing a ton more damage you don't necessarily have to wait for firestorm, you could just stagger as quickly as possible. In my experience there is only a round or two of time once I have all debuffs, have enfire, and healed to full (for adrenaline) before firestorm so the time savings is probably < 10 sec. But hey, you schooled me on aster protoflorian, so give it a shot.

Ethereal -- there are two ways to do it in taejins tower:

1) fight the three robots in front of the m21 stone on the second floor then take the elevator to the 6th floor and fight the lone vampire roaming on the inner ring. Take the elevator back down and repeat. You should be able to preempt both groups. Open with deshellga on the bots (twice - once to stagger and once to get deshell on). You should be able to take out two of the three robots in that preempt stagger before you have ruinga and all of them once you do.

2) start with the three robots as before but now fight the pack of five on the sixth floor. I found that by giving everyone an energy sash you can summon Alexander on the group of five and get enough tp back for another summon after taking out the group of three. Others have reset the group of five (and skip the elevator / group of three) by running up/down the stairs but this was unreliable for me. Sometimes when you come down they are back and other times not. You can't win (quickly at least) against the five without ruinga or a summon.

The first method nets you ~6100 cp per cycle and the latter 12800 cp per cycle. Another option is to fight the packs of cryohedrons and hoplites in the mah'habara right near the arch steppe entrance. If you make your way from the side path to the juggernaut (don't engage the battle!) then you can back track and reset all the fights. About 10000 cp per circuit. I find that dazega is basically required for this approach so you may want to work on the robots for awhile first.

Ethereal -- don't know if you are aware or not but there is a lot of info on my and sonic's src run in the "ncu / neu united 6" thread. Search for "ncu / neu" and it should be the only thread that comes up. Src stuff starts on page 5 (assuming you group your posts 50/page). A link to page 5 is:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/928790-final-fantasy-xiii/58130248?page=5

My grind strategy, dahaka strategy, Bart 2 strategy is all there. Check it out of you haven't already. It's got everything all the way through finishing the main game and 5 starring all missions.

On a whim I googled FF13 speed runs, and found a thread on speeddemos, where our own G_Anakin was apart of the discussion:

http://forum.speeddemosarchive.com/post/final_fantasy_xiii_speedrun_176.html

On page 8 a player named "sportlov" claimed to finish in 6:46. That seems possible, but I am dubious, as earlier in the thread that person reported their save in front of dahaka at 5:21x, which is within *1 minute* of my time, and I don't project finishing under 7hrs. I don't really care whether its true or not, but just figured I'd note it here. Its possible the person restarted from scratch to improve time, but there's not enough time checks to verify the final result.

Interestingly, that player made use of the hyades magnums acquired in Oerba -- a good strategy for strength but tricky to keep sazh alive (silk / paper tiger), especially since you'll have to main him. Could be worth trying to see how it changes things if at all.