The other night my static (which now includes the awesome personalities of Kooki (RDM) and Flick (SCH)) were making the push to 50 the other night.  Our sixth member was a Thief**, so of course we wanted to allow for Sneak Attack + Trick Attack (SATA).

Setting up SATA proved to be a tricky situation.  With Ardra as Samurai/Thief, we had no secondary provoke.  Ardra, being a very well geared Elvaan, has no problem stealing hate from me.  Initially we tried having the Thief pull monsters back to our camp and allowing Ardra to take the monster attention through sheer damage (I would avoid provoking).

That strategy proved far too dicey and we quickly abandoned it.  If Ardra didn’t connect on the very first swing, the Thief was left taking a beating.  This leads to Darrian needing to toss out a medium to large Cure to the Thief and thus stealing Enmity.  With this scenario, fights got to be far too chancy in the beginning.

What ended up working fairly well is having Ardra pull.  This technique needs some fine tuning, but it works well because of the enmity bonus the player with the first action gets.  The person who does the first action gets an extra 200 Cumulative Enmity (CE - only decreases by taking damage) and 900 Volatile Enmity (VE - decreases at a rate of 60 units per sec.)

(for reference, please see this thread on the Dreams in Vana’diel forums.)

This allows Ardra to maintain hate even if her first swing misses and I happen to connect.  It also allows some room for a small Cure if needed.  Likewise, by the time the SATA is performed, Ardra’s CE has most likely evaporated, and my Provoke (1800 units of VE) plus the SATA should easily over come any enmity that Ardra has built up.

This particular technique really only works because Ardra is Elvaan and Samurai.  Without that nice racial VIT bonus and Third Eye this really wouldn’t work very well.

(**)  Actually we had two players come as Thief that evening.  The first Thief wanted to SATA, but couldn’t set it up quickly (requiring me to take enmity before the SATA).  His solution was to SATA off Ardra.  Despite numerous requests to stop that, he wouldn’t.  Eventually we kicked him.