Legion Guide

=Introduction=
Within this guide, I will attempt to lay out the necessary ingredients for successful Legion runs. Be very aware when reading it that Legion absolutely requires high player quality. Stunners that fail 10% of the time are unacceptable, because they will wipe you. Melee that use a level 95 R/M/E are inferior. 1H DDs, Dragoons without Ryunohige, etc. are just not going to get you optimal results. That said, I will outline several different strategies and you can try to play to your group's strengths. You can definitely get through with a few mediocre players and a few great players, but you have to control who plays what jobs very carefully because some roles are crucial in certain strategies.	__TOC__
= Overview / Design =
There are four lower chambers:
* Hall of An - Lofty Trophy
* Hall of Ki - Mired Trophy
* Hall of Im - Soaring Trophy
* Hall of Muru - Veiled Trophy
When you defeat the first wave of each of these chambers, the listed Trophy will appear in the pool. Trading these trophies to Mayuyu will award a Key Item that is necessary to enter the final chamber:
* Hall of Mul
Monsters in the first and second wave of the Hall of Mul also have a low (~10%) chance to drop their chambers' respective Trophies.
Three things about this design are important to note:
:1) You do not need to defeat the entire chamber to get a Trophy for Mul. It is possible to enter, clear the first wave, cherrypick monsters from wave 2, and then exit within 10 minutes. Given that you fight the unique monster from each chamber's Wave 3 in Mul and have access to their unique Wave 2 monsters when you do the chamber, this is the most efficient way to do Legion unless you have a reason to target a specific drop that's chamber-specific. If you're on the ball, you can rotate through and do about one Mul per hour. When you get good, this will net you >5 scrolls of Meteor/Arise, numerous Abdhaljs's Honors, and probably about one "rare drop" other than that per night on average.
:2) Your leader does not need to hold any extra items. They can collect the Trophies from each night, trade them to the chamber, redeem them for the Mul entry, and trade whatever extra Trophies they have after Mul. No ugly holding-sky-sets drain on the leadership.
:3) There is no need for a second person to hold Trophies. Mayuyu will redeem Trophies for KIs, you can hold up to 2 sets on yourself and if you plan it well then there's no real reason to ever be unable to lot. I have personally gotten through several months of Mul without ever needing a second person.
== Recommended ways to farm ==
Initially, I would recommend that you double-farm full chambers and get people the clears they will need to buy items from Saarlan with Legion Points. This lets you see the same monsters twice in a row and get used to killing them. Also, the starting chambers are less difficult (maybe half as hard) as the Hall of Mul so this will let you get your feet wet and get used to the event's difficulty level without wasting pops.
When you are sufficiently used to working as a group, it will be time to try Mul. I recommend that you spend a reasonable amount of time verbally prepping everyone (see below), going over Bard swaps, Stun orders, Embrava orders, PD orders, what-have-you, etc. and then do your two Mul sets that you've farmed.
After this first round and regardless how well your Mul runs went, you should be ready to move to the second type of farming. In this, you meet and do quick runs of the starting chambers (minus any ones you already have trophies for from the previous Mul) and then do Mul. Unlike the previous full runs, you only need to clear the first wave of the lower tier chambers for the Trophies. Then you will be free to pull and kill high-gil monsters from the second wave (see below) and exit. Repeat this until your event is over. You will probably do about one rotation every 2 hours initially, but you will get better as time goes on. If you find yourself with extra event time but not quite as much time as it would take for a full run, consider doing a full run of a profitable lower chamber (like Hall of Muru). If you get good at it, you can kill ~20 monsters per lower tier chamber run.
= Strategies =
There are several working strategies for Legion that have very different requirements. Some of the requirements are easy to fulfill and some are difficult, so choose the one that matches your group best. Also, be very realistic about the performance of your players. Your DDs should be consistently at the top of pickup Provenance groups. Your mages need to actually have gear beyond AF3+2 (except where outlined below) and know how to use it. Your bards should ideally have at least Level 90 Daudable. If you make too many sacrifices, you will not be winning Legion.
As far as the three strategies go, I will outline them as they currently exist and will not attempt to anticipate the impact of Perfect Defense and Embrava changes. However, please realize that losing those buffs will not make Legion oodles more difficult necessarily, it will just make it more annoying and harder for new groups to start up.
== Perfect Defense strategy ==
This strategy basically boils down to:
:1) Use Perfect Defense on the melee party.
:2) Kill the monsters.
Downsides:
Because of its simplicity and the relatively few ways it can fail, I recommend this for starting groups. However, the problems with this strategy become apparent on long farming runs where you either end up leaning on Corsairs for resets or simply quit after a certain number of monsters.
Upsides:
The Italicized jobs below have fairly minimal requirements (no Relic, Mythic, etc. - some could even be mules), making this the least demanding Legion strategy by far in terms of real-group size and player resources. It only requires one good Bard, one good (enough) Paladin, and five good DDs. Your experience will be enhanced by a solid SCH/BLM too and your healers can't be so bad that they let players taking moderate damage die.
=== Party Setup ===
* DD Party: WAR, DRK, Strong DD x3, WHM
* Healing/Odds&Ends: THF, BRD, PLD, SCH/blm*, SCH, SCH
* Summoner Party: SMN x5, COR
*This denotes subjob, not two options for the slot
It is important that you make the party leaders (especially in the DD party) people that are going to invite the correct person quickly.
Specific Information
== Stunning strategy ==
This strategy boils down to:
:1) Stun every action the monster attempts.
:2) Kill the monsters.
Downsides:
This strategy relies on near-perfect stunning by scholars with near-perfect Stun sets, which few people are geared for or prepared to do. Stunning is something of a lost art in general, but it's even more apparent how "lost" it is when you've got to stun >90% of the TP moves to avoid a wipe. That sounds like only one problem, but I'd actually break it in to two:
* Few people are geared well enough to reliably Stun all the Legion monsters. (- Though this problem can be rectified in a few weeks -)
* People dramatically overestimate how good they and their friends are at Stunning based on vague memories of level 75 cap events where you were waiting to Stun a specific move that had a fairly long use time.
The last "downside" here is that this strategy requires more real players and the requirements for players are more stringent. Everyone has to be better to make this work. The Italicized jobs below still have fairly minimal requirements (no Relic, Mythic, etc.), but the un-italicized jobs have to be better.
Upsides:
This setup puts out more damage in the same amount of time and you are much less reliant on a 2-hour recast timer. When my group switched from the Perfect Defense method to this one, we went from killing 1-2 Wave 3 Mul monsters to killing 5. If you have the people and you have the skill, this is the better option.
=== Party Setup ===
* DD Party: WAR, DRK, DD, COR, BRD, WHM
* Option 1) DD Party 2 (Melee): WAR, DRK, DD, COR, BRD, WHM
* Option 2) DD Party 2 (Ranger): Relic RNGx4, COR, WHM
* Odds and Ends: SCH/blm* x3, THF,, PLD, WHM or RDM
*This denotes subjob, not two options for the slot
It is important that you make the party leaders (especially in the DD party) people that are going to invite the correct person quickly. Players have success with both Option 1 and Option 2 "DD Party 2" setups. The difference there is that In my experience, Rangers cannot put out enough damage and losing a second bard hurts you. If you exchange a RNG for a second BRD, then you're definitely getting less damage out of the second party than you would in an Option 1 setup. Still, it may be the case that your group has 3~4 dedicated Rangers and only one dedicated BRD, so this kind of setup might be the best for your group. If going with an Option 2 group I would actually swap the WHM to the "Odds and Ends" party and put the PLD in the Option 2 party so that they can drop and make an open slot for the BRD to swap in.
Specific Information
= Helpful Tips and Tricks =
No matter which strategy you pick, resetting your 2-hours will be a necessary part of your Legion ritual. We have found two ways to do it:
* 1) Mules sitting in Rolanberry on COR - This is the fastest way to reset, of course, but you can get unlucky and run out of mules.
* 2) MMM #09 "Revitalization" - Enter with 3 CC points, then spend the CC points at the goblin inside the maze on medicine. This will get you a Revitalizer. You get your first CC point 32 hours after first ordering a maze and accumulate another 3 every 24 hours thereafter. Also, you can only use a bought maze (from Duplidoc) 5 times before it is burned out. Thus, you need someone to have bought a maze 48 hours in advance of your Legion run in order to be able to reset people. This is basically inventory minus one for some mules.
As far as payment for the glasses, I've found the easiest way to distribute it is to put 17 items up in Bazaar at a price of 10k/run. So if I'm doing 5 runs that night, the items will cost 50k. It's helpful to have the bought item be something useful-but-cheap, like Holy Water or Shinobi-Tabi, so people can either add it to a stack they already have or use it when needed.
Auspicious Entities appear throughout the run and can give useful temporary items, but if you attack one and do not kill it then the monsters of the next wave will link to it and attack whoever had hate on it. This can be used by Paladins to pull waves easily, but means that melee and mages should treat Entities very carefully.
= Concluding Statement =
Legion is a terribly designed event with mediocre rewards, but the coordination and successful execution of Legion runs is probably the most difficult event in FFXI at the moment so it can still be fun to do. Best of luck.
Category:Event Guides