1)Initial Time: You can turn in 3 stones for 90 minutes. You can use time from previous runs instead of/in addition to stones, assuming you did not time out.
2)Time Extensions: From some blue chests, 10min/chest. Unknown total time limit. Exiting the area truncates your time to 120min.
3)Lights: Your primary concern. Two main types you need to worry about, pearlescent and azure. Worry about the rest later.
Everyone gets the same light (if any) from a kill. The light status of the person who KILLS the mob affects the drop/drop rate.
- Pearlescent: All sturdy pyxides will appear with greater frequency.
- chance of occurring when a monster is killed by hitting it with a melee attack (excluding WS)(pets are special, go look it up)
- chance of occurring when a red chest is opened.
Azure: Blue pyxides will appear with greater frequency and yield superior spoils.
- chance of occurring when a monster is killed using magic (including ANY blue mage spells)
- chance of occurring when a red chest is opened.
Ruby: Red pyxides will appear with greater frequency and yield superior spoils.
- from red chests.
Amber: Gold pyxides will appear with greater frequency and yield superior spoils.
- from red chests.
Golden: The adventurer will gain experience at an increased rate.
- from red chests.
Silvery: The adventurer will obtain cruor at an increased rate.
- from red chests.
Ebon: A small bonus will be granted to all colored light effects.
- from red chests.
4) Experience: XP starts off low(50-75), increasing over time as you kill more of the same type of monster, up to a soft cap of about 330xp. To go from 330 to 600, you will need golden lights. You can hit the soft cap pretty quickly on a good party, hitting 600 takes usually 2-3 hours.
5) Strategy: Runs can be structured in the following phases:
- Initial Buildup
Maintenance
Rotation
- Initial Buildup: This is the make or break phase, where you are building up your pearlescent/azure lights. You need a high kill speed on this phase, otherwise you will time out.
Two melee cannon, one mage cannon. Everyone in this phase needs to be capable of pulling their own weight.
If you have sufficiently skilled people, have two main assists, one for melee kills, one for magic kills.
Maintenance: Once you have sufficient pearl/azure and TE's are coming in, minor modifications can be done (occasional people swapping to low level jobs, in an orderly fashion, or due to time constraints). High kill speed still needs to be maintained.
Rotation: When you start hitting 600xp/mob, people are leveling and capping merits very quickly. Orderly rotation needs to be performed to prevent having a significant number of people rotating out at the same time, and causing you to go back into the initial buildup phase.
General Roles:
- DD - kill the mobs in the right way. Pay attention to chat log, particularly if you are only fighting one monster, as you will need to swap between magic/melee kills. For the love of god, don't sub /DNC unless explicitly asked.
Mages- Unless you can cast very fast, or very early, large tier nukes are not something that you want to use, especially if you are a solo nuker. Get skilled at sniping the killshot with low tier nukes.
Chest-handlers - once you get rolling, if you are doing it right, you will be swamped with chests, and it will be one or two people's full time jobs just to get the damn things open. Know what chests are worthwhile to open, and how to open them. You'll also need to go constantly go get stacks of keys, and handle loot distribution and /randoms.
Support - Healing, haste, songs, rolls, sambas. Keep em up, and like merit parties, bards make very good pullers.
General Rules of Etiquette:
- Do pay attention. If you want to get good XP, focus.
Do use food. The right food. These mobs aren't colibri, so don't be afraid to pony up for decent sushi (not crab) / pizza / meat (if you can use it). Accuracy is an issue, especially when starting off at 75.
Do give sufficient notice before you need to leave/change jobs/spend merits. Emergencies are fine, and RL>game, but don't say "Hey, I'm 10/10 capped, warping". To keep the party going well, you may need to stay a bit longer than cap so that returning people can get their lights up again.
Do try to be nice. Its much nicer playing with nice people than high maintenance ones.
Do keep in mind that if you start as one job, you can always switch to another if it is needed. Someone is much more likely to say OK to a BRD swapping to a THF after an hour or two, for example, then they are to just pick the THF up.
Don't be a deadweight. You'll be kicked/replaced. Since a good number of the same people rotate in and out of Abyssea parties, this can be the kiss of death, especially if you don't like starting your own parties.
Don't take it upon yourself to bring your friend out, and tell the party that they will be your replacement. If you would like to get someone into the party, have them send a /tell to the leader with their jobs and level. You don't necessarily have a clue as to who is going to be rotating in/out with particular jobs, and the leader needs to be focused on what is needed now, as well as an hour or two from now as people start rotating.
Don't ask to leech. Running the alliance (in addition to everything else you are doing) takes a huge amount of concentration. The last thing they need to be doing is having to /blist some BLM because they won't stop begging for a spot every 30 seconds. If you know the leader, talk with them about it sometime when they aren't doing Abyssea. Keep in mind, 1-2 people out of the initial 18 will most likely end up as chest-handlers (leech spot), so not having any high level jobs to contribute in the initial phase significantly degrades the likelihood of this occurring.
