Carbuncle's Pole for Monk
So, I finally got my carbuncle's pole, and more importantly got another quest done (well 2 actually, this and the followup to storms of fate).
I was the only melee and/or tank in alliance, I did a looong run of all the new avatar battles first, tagging along with my SMN friend Finathlon who organized them, to get all my key items "eye of storms" "eye of flames" etc.
These new avatar fights have much harder versions of Ifrit's Prime etc, and 4 respective elementals (e.g. 4 fire elementals) that cast ancient and firaga3 that damage your alliance and cure Ifrit. They hit much harder, moves like grand fall or heavenly strike do 1k+ dmg on me and 2k+ on fenrir. Utsusemi helps a lot on spells and normal hits but not on these I guess. With 15-18 people they are not too hard though, killing elementals as they repop and having others focus on prime. Astral flow also hurts a lot, they use it at like 20-30% or less.
Surprisingly, both prime and elementals are pretty weak to melee, like normal mobs.
The final battle in Full Moon fountain is HARD, you fight carbuncle prime, then 1 more prime avatar, then carbuncle prime again, then 2 prime avatars at the same time, then carbuncle, so far so good, then 3 prime avatars at the same time, all of which can and will astral flow, even at the same time, and finally 5 (FIVE) carbuncle primes, all of which can astral flow (2 simultaneous astral flows can already wipe your alliance, 5 is a bit overkill...)
You would think BLM would be good for this, but you would be wrong, 80% or more of magic damage is blocked so basically blm is not so good here. Even summoners need to use lvl 70 physical blood pacts because the magic ones are basically useless.
As monk, I thought i could use chi blast, but carbuncle can't be hurt by it and all others also are incredibly resistant to it. However they are very weak to punches, and critical hits just own them, the only problem is that i immediately draw hate and if i die you can't resummon me as easily as one could a fenrir..
I also ended up being the tank in charge of some extra kiting when needed, and especially in holding down 5 vicious blue rat monsters from killing everyone before we had time to target each and separate them (when they are near they use area healing ruby2 for 1850 hp recovered on all 5, which is not good).
The pole itself is really cool. First off the TP Bonus is awesome, even for monk. TP bonus staff used to be 10mil+, since things like mnk/thf SneakAttack+FullSwing with staff can do really high damage on hard monsters like wyrms etc.
The added light damage is REALLY high, i get 60-68 added dmg every few hits. The trick is there needs to be a carbuncle summoned in PT for it to activate. The good news is it doesn't have to be my carbuncle, I can be mnk/war, as long as there's someone in PT with carbuncle out, my staff will activate. The added restore hp charges I didn't try, and probably never will, i feel bad using charges given how hard it was to get lol.
The pole was the reward for everyone, but a few other things dropped from BC, a sword (shiva shotel) and two carbuncle's cuffs (add regen 5hp/tick to shining ruby) level 75 all jobs.
