Soloing as a thief in Kazham at lvl 29. : FFXI General Discussions

Trying a mandragora on your own.

You cannot handle any additional aggro, even for a second, soling here so you must try this near a zone for safety. The mandy I tried was a Tough, 200xp, and fight ended with of my ½ HP left. I then did another and which ended near death 200xp again. I decided to try a T that was low whatever. I found a Tough with low evasion and defense, killed it, got 120xp and ended with ½ HP again. I will get into the tactics later. Below you will find the gear I was using:

Body: Beetle Harness
Back: Nomad's Mantle
Feet: Leaping Boots
Finger1: Balance Ring
Finger2: Balance Ring
Earring1: Beetle Earring +1
Earring2: Beetle Earring +1
Hands: Battle Gloves
Head: Beetle Mask
Legs: Kingdom Trousers
Neck: Spike Necklace
Weapon: Federation Knife
Ranged: Power Crossbow
Shield: n/a
Belt: Warrior's Belt +1

Additionally you should also be carrying the following ammunition:

Acid Bolt
Sleep Bolt
Bloody Bolt
Venom Bolt

My marksmanship was capped and I was not landing more than ½ if my ranged attacks on a T mandy. I picked up an archer’s knife and experiment and I found it helped a lot. If you are a THF/NIN than go Federation Knife (or other high damage weapon) and Archer’s in offhand. Otherwise switch accordingly as to not waste TP using a macro. This is what I did as I had no access to NIN.

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Tactics

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

1) Fight near a zone boundary. One of the 4 that zone into Yhoator, or the one to Kazham, I prefer the Kazham ones as there is a no chance of gobs being zoned on both sides.
2) Make sure your health is almost full at the start of every fight.
3) Have at least 25 sleep bolts before the start of every fight. You can miss a lot of times in a row. This is a terrible hit rate but it happens sometimes. I died once when I ran out of bloody bolts.
4) BE EFFICIENT. Carefully time your ranged attacks between your standard ones. I time my ranged attack at the time when my character starts to swing the dagger. That way the ranged attack is already going off as the dagger hits.

How I did it.

If the mandy was close to zone open the fight with an SA using Fed Knife and switch to archers for a while. The chance of a mandy being close to zone is slim in Kazham so here is the how it’s done 90% of the time.

1) Pull the mandy using a venom bolt and run back to Kazham gate. This way the mandy will take damage over time the entire way back to camp.
2) Once at camp, hit the mandy with an acid bolt.
3) When the mandy’s defense is down from the acid bolt hit it wit a sleep bolt
4) Disengage target-lock (if you use it) so that you can quickly run to the mandy’s back and SA it while it’s a sleep. The odd time the mandy wakes up before you can but it’s rare, it usually just wakes up right away.
5) Hit it with bloody bolts in between melee strikes until your health is full
6) When the mandy is at about ½ HP or depending on how long the fight is taking hit it with another venom, acid, sleep and SA.
7) Bloody bolts, bloody bolts…
Rinse
9) Repeat

Like I said at level 29 this got me 120-200 xp, but it was fairly risky without an archer’s knife. At level 30 I was getting 100-160 wielding the archer’s knife and the fight were ending with nearly full HP at worst over half. So I was doing this at level 30 with virtually no downtime. At level 30 I replaced the beetle gear with Mercenary Gear also. While I found that the fights were almost easy at level 30 with my gear as I didn’t even remember to use mithkabobs. When I did this at 29 w/o archer’s I had to use mithkabobs.

I’m not saying that you should not PT by any means because this can get extremely expensive over time. It is a great way to pick up a few extra xp while waiting for a PT. If you do are seeking at Yhoator/Yuhtunga zone boundary you can easily pick up nice xp there while you wait. In some cases you will get much better xp with this method than with some of the PT’s in Kazam. Go WAR/WHM go!

This works so well because the mandys almost never sleep the enemy when engaged one on one. I got slept once out of at least 30 times that I tried this. Mandys seem to prefer leaf dagger and something that lowers def as opposed to sleep when engaged one on one, smart mandies^^.