Author: Aydin

Setup

  • THF99
  • 5+ stacks of Skeleton Keys
    • You can buy these on the AH or craft them yourself if you have Bonecraft (43) and Alchemy (31). It is a somewhat tedious craft but all ingredients are available from NPCs except for the Bat Fangs.
  • Some method of sneak/invis
  • Some method of reraise

Macros

If you don’t play THF and just leveled it for TH and picking locks, just make sure you have the following macroed or easily available.

  • Hide
  • Perfect Dodge
  • Flee

Also prepare a macro for easy keying. See below:

Key Macro

This will trade up to 3 keys to a box at once, until either it opens or a mimic pops.

The mimic seems to have a scaling chance of spawning the more unsuccessful keys you try so I stop at 3 for regular chests. I will try more than 3x if I get an upgraded chest though.

Popping Chests

Your entry gives you 30 minutes to play in Odyssey.

  • There are three chests per floor
  • Trading a key will either fail to open it (“However, it has no effect”), open the chest, or reveal a Mimic
  • Chance upon success that the chest will then upgrade to the next tier chest, which spawns immediately on top of it
  • This can happen twice: Chest -> upgrades to Coffer -> upgrades to Strongbox. There is about an 8 second delay from when the upgraded chest appears and when you can actually interact with it
  • Skeleton keys have the best chance of success
  • You can open a chest within 6’ of one
  • You cannot have invisible up while you’re trading it keys

You will want to sneak/invis and run around the floor looking for chests. Be careful of invisible Agon mobs, which are on every other floor + the last floor. If the chest is in the Agon mobs I generally skip it as they are true sight/sound and link with their invisible friends.

If you are /WHM, be careful recasting sneak/invis around magic aggro mobs. If you are /DNC be careful using Spectral Jig around JA aggro mobs. Watch your HP and make sure you aren’t in yellow when passing by undead mobs.

When you find a chest, if it’s in a bunch of mobs, find an opening - as long as they aren’t looking at you when you drop invisible to use the keys, you will be okay. Take careful note of their movement and remember that they will sight aggro in a cone in front of them within 10’.

Aggro

If you pull aggro, getting hit will remove your sneak and potentially make you a lot more unwelcome friends. You can use Hide as soon as you notice that you’ve aggroed something to drop its aggro before you even get hit. Note hide in Odyssey works the same as outside so this won’t work on all mobs, like undead. If you can’t hide, you can flee - if you have enough room to lose them they will deaggro.

If the chest is by a pillar or a thick tree, open the chest “behind” the tree. If it happens to turn into a Mimic it actually won’t aggro because it won’t have line of sight on you. As long as you have room to run 30’ straight back - ensuring it can never “see” you - you will not aggro it. If you ever get back within 30’ of it then it will still aggro.

LOS

Note that you cannot use the porter up if you have any aggro on you.

Mimics

How you handle Mimics largely depends on if your THF can survive the initial Death Trap. If you have gear then you can cheese them and survive as many as they throw at you.

If you don’t and you’re a key THF, that’s fine - just know that your run will end when you get a mimic and that can be on the first chest of the run or never. Death trap will happen when one spawns and will stun you long enough to take you down before you can react.

If you do have gear, it’s a little more work but you can make it through mimics:

  • Summon trusts - Valaineral is required, then fill your party with tanks and healers (healers summoned last so they’re further away from you).
  • (Optional, but helps me a lot) - pull a mob at the start after you summon trusts so they get pro/shell basic buffs up on your guys. Monbruv is bad for this since his pro/shell doesn’t last very long.
  • Get Reraise up

If you get a Mimic, it’ll draw in and death trap and potentially stun you. This will also result in you dropping your sneak and aggroing anything near the mimic. If you have solid MEVA it won’t stun at all. Your trusts might get stunned but that’s ok. Hit Perfect Dodge if you need to. Engage the mimic and hit it once to activate trusts and then turn. Once they unstun, they’ll grab aggro and heal everybody up. Make sure you get poisona’d if that landed on you. If you have mobs you’ve aggroed, Val will do his thing and Uriel Blade to get hate on all of them.

You now have until your tanks die to sort the mimic. You need to get more than 30’ away and make it lose interest in you. There are two ways of doing this.

  • Log off
    • Yeah really. If your trusts can survive 30s of logging out time, you can just log out and when you come back in you can resummon them and move on your merry way. This can be difficult if your Moogle Mastery is low or you’re on a higher floor. Don’t forget to take off poison if that’s still on you.
  • Die
    • Basically go to the next pack of mobs, aggro all of them, and die (farther than 30’ from the Mimic) in a safe location. Take extra care around undead. Die and get back up then resummon your trusts and make sure you’re not in yellow HP while you’re running around.

Remember if you ever get back within 30’ of the mimic it will still reaggro you and draw you in. If you weren’t able to pull off one of the above and you died within 30’, it’s also over as he will draw you in as soon as you reraise.

Have fun!

Don’t forget to hit the Ortherwordly Vortex at the end for some segments and even gil if you had to murder any monsters in your way. And if you plan on doing this regularly, don’t feel you have to go hardcore on it every time - you don’t want to get burnt out.

It’s mostly luck so don’t get discouraged if you have a bad run. I average 1-3 stacks of lustreless items and have gotten up to 7.

Maps

Linked here from BG-WIKI for your reference.

https://www.bg-wiki.com/ffxi/Category:Odyssey#Sheol_A_Maps

https://www.bg-wiki.com/ffxi/Category:Odyssey#Sheol_B_Maps