PSO2NGS: Malignant Dark Falz Solus Solo (Pure Bow) (

THANK YOU FOR THE THUMBNAIL KAT
i can finally have my soul back

This was something I went into thinking would be easy and it proved run after run to be absolutely soul crushing. It felt like everything was stacked against Bow in this, from the weapon doing bad damage to the down factor being extremely inconvenient for timings within the quest. I told myself multiple times over the last month that this was impossible, but every time I was just about to give up I'd get one run that would make me think "maybe it is possible". I had a lot of people supporting me too so I'm glad that I finally was able to make it happen, for both myself and them.

I think Hydra is kind of a given for this quest for the weak classes so I won't really talk about it at all, I just want to talk about Bow stuff. Getting rid of the tail as soon as possible was very helpful in my opinion, since Bow has a lot of animation locks and having to deal with random missiles being spammed over the duration of the quest can be overwhelming, especially when sitting at low HP. Clearing the first shoulder before it closed was consistently very difficult. If he turned away from me at all it was an instant reset, since Bow doesn't have an effective way to cover large amounts of distance and the other shoulder would block all of my shots. I tried a lot of different strategies, but found that standing on the other side from the shoulder to bait out attacks from the shoulder I wasn't targeting would help me with being able to consistently pierce the weak point. I just had to be ready for any movements like a turn towards me or the dome attack. Even with this strategy, it was still about a 60% chance of clearing the shoulder, since there were just too many variables and Bow's damage is too low.

Sitting at very low hp for Shortage HP Starling was very stressful, but I eventually started to get the hang of a lot of the hitboxes and stuff so I found myself dying less and less... until the day I cleared where everyone I was streaming and saw me die constantly in every run. Probably the only reason I was able to clear this was because of Unicolon's suggestion to take an Endure Pain PB Boost Abandac weapon into the fight, so that I can guarantee 2 PBs during the 3x3 pod phase at the very end. If I didn't kill those final two pods with that extra PB, I would not have cleared.

And if ALL OF THIS wasn't enough to worry about, I needed to have great crit luck throughout the entire quest and pray that downs lined up, and I am notoriously bad at getting good crits.

This run used 4 very expensive weapons, and they all played pretty important roles. This somehow was a higher gear cost than even my MDFA run which had 3 weapons. The weapons were (they all had Gran Gladia Soul, Lux Halphinale, and Glan Gigas Maste so I didn't write them):

Fixa Abandac 5 Wingard Bow
Anaddi Staspimelra
EX Gradual Pressing
EX Hysterical Strength
EX Shortage PP Burn UP

Fixa Abandac 5 Wingard Bow
Anaddi Staspimelra
EX Endure Pain PB Boost
EX Hysterical Strength
EX Shortage PP Burn Up

Fixa Blastor 5 Wingard Bow
Anaddi Deftmelra
EX Lively HP Starling
EX Hysterical Strength
EX Shortage PP Burn Up

Fixa Unwix 5 Wingard Bow
Anaddi Deftmelra
EX Shortage HP Starling
EX Hysterical Strength
EX Shortage PP Burn Up

The 3 units were Ektasis Units with the unique augment setup to reach 20/20 for Abandac, since I used two Abandac weapons.