Gurfurler the Annoying

Last night was event night in my new LS "Prophets" and we planned to head out to Gurfurler the Menacing. Not for any real reason, just to say we did it. He drops a Gurfurlur's Helmet that desynths into a Scintillant Ingot and also some stupid ring called the Mercenary's Ring which is VIT+5 and then phys dmg -5% while in Beseiged. It wasn't for drops, just to have soem fun.

We headed out after what seemed like forever and finally got into the heart of Halvung. We farmed our 3 keys we needed:

• Halvung Brass Key
• Halvung Bronze Key
• Halvung Shakudo Key

Once we got our 3 keys we headed into Gurf's area. We cleared some Trolls to the base of his spawn area and then engaged. As soon as he is engaged he calls 4 Hilltroll Elite Guard which are NMs and can't be slept. On top of that they can't be killed or he will summon another Guard right away. We made a holding party for the 4 guards and a main alliance for Gurf. I was on SMN and in the tank party. My main job was to spam Earthen Ward on the NINs andPLD/NINs. I eventually ended up using "Mr. Thong" for some very nice Mountain Busters.

We stumbled at first, and within 10% we had 2-3 adds. We were able to kill them and recover. He's not too hard from 100% to 20%, but just like all FFXI HNMs the last 20% always has a surprise in store for you. He really only has a handful of moves, but they are annoying ones.

First off he uses a move called Arcane Stomp. Turns ANY magic damage on him to healing magic. That means Drain heals him. That means that doing a skillchain heals him. That means using Diabolos to spam Nether Blast heals him. So BLM are pretty much useless because he resists most stuns anyways. He does a multi-hit move called Incessant Fists that is like a Troll version of Asuran Fists. He has a massive single hit called Head Snatch (1k + damage) and 2 AoE moves he uses. One called Haymaker is damage + Amnesia, the other called Sledgehammer is damage + Petrify. These can do anywhere from 400-800 to mages WITH stoneskin on (yay). Finally, his annoying move he does when he is below 20% is called Pleiades Ray. It's damage + AoE and you get all these effects on you at once:

• stun
• silence
• paralyze
• blind
• slow
• poison
• virus

That's... fun... I mean it's not as bad as something like a Gates of Hades, but if mages don't react to the debuffs right away tanks could drop like flies. Oh yeah, and his 2 hour is Hundred Fists...

Now, like I said we did really really good 95% to 20%. I was spamming Ward, and while Titan was out I was able to get a steady 300 dmg on Mountain Buster (which is VERY respectable versus this high defensive of this mob) and a few times I hit a 633 and a 734! Once we got him below 20% we looked out for P-Ray, but we had a few factors to deal with. First, called for help on 2 of his 4 NM guards so the guards were hitting on the main alliance during most of the fight. Second, we had 2 BLMs which could have been utilized far better. Honestly beyond that I didn't see any glaring mistakes. No screw ups, no stupid moves. In the end we had a PLD 2 hour right as Hundred Fists went off, and we got him down to 3%... but couldn't do the final push. Funny thing was when we wiped he says in /say "I is Gurfurlur, I rule Halvung, you is dead." Now that shits funny... gotta admit. In the end I was somewhat disappointed we lost because I hate giving up, but Narbie told me AD didn't make it past 19% the first time they tackled it. It's not saying "Prophets > AD!! OMFG!!!", but AD is a good LS to use as a litmus test for most mobs, and we still did very well.

In the future if we had 1-2 more people on the guards and we didn't CFH on them, and we had the 2 BLMs come as either SMNs or melees, we can beat that thing. All in all I had fun and was glad that I was able to offer some nice steady damage from Titan.