Blame

The premise

What is the most agonizing run devised in the depths of the interdimensional rift, and sealed in the void alongside many evil spirits? It is known as Quadzerk, or #blame. After registering with #blame you will be assigned four Berserkers. There is no relief from Berserker, it is your one and only job for all characters through the entire run. The mind numbing tedium of this run is what is truly feared, as in some version the player will need to hit the level cap to stand a chance of muscling past NED.

World 1

Note: the levels here are suggested minimums based on a playthrough of the PR. Due to the random nature of axe damage calculation and targeting in certain versions, you may wish to exceed these levels if you're struggling.

Liquid Flame (Lv. 17)

Grinding the Wild Nakks outside of Karnak is a good way to prepare for this as well as acquire money for equipment.

Byblos (Lv.24)

Remember that Lvl 5 Death is a threat in the Library if you go through at 25, but otherwise you should be able to power through Drain counters.

Sandworm (Lv.30)

Sandworm is one of the most random and version specific bosses in this run. You can beat him as low as level 30 if RNG works favorably, but it may be desirable to level up as high as 40 if you're struggling. Make sure to get everyone a Death Sickle and use them for this fight. The Mobile and old PC versions will be significantly easier, as Sandworm is considered to be in the front row and will thus take more damage and the Zerks always target the front hole.

Soul Cannon (Lv.30)

All of Soul Cannon's attacks deal percentage based damage, so you should remove all armor pieces in order to minimize equip weight and maximize speed. You cannot survive a second Wave Cannon, so the extra speed makes a huge difference.

Purobolos (Lv.31)

This boss can be difficult. The Mage Masher can silence them, but only for a short time. Your best bet is to use the Death Sickles as the instant death proc will quickly deplete their MP from using Arise, until eventually they run out and can no longer revive.

World 2

Barrier Tower

Make sure to pick up a set of Reflect Rings from the Reflect Knights. The 6th floor has the highest encounter rate for this enemy, so search there for them. This is one of the only defenses you have versus magic attacks in this run, so you will definitely want access to them for many fights going forward.

Atomos (Lv.35)

Nothing terribly special about this fight, you should be able to axe him up good.

Crystals (Lv.35)

The Crystals suffer from a weakness to instant death attacks, so the Death Sickles will take care of them with ease.

Exdeath - Castle (Lv.36)

Equipping the Reflect Rings will help you immensely in this battle. Exdeath has a tendency to cast Reverse Polarity, which can mess up your damage output and cause you to lose the race, so if you're getting unlucky with that, you can try pre-changing your party's formation anticipating he'll fix it for you.

World 3

Pyramid

Depending on your version, you have a few tasks here.

SNES/PSX: Don't bother getting the Chicken Knife, as the game will softlock from the random Flee proc of the knife. However, you DO want to get the Thornlet and Gaia Hammer from the Pyramid so you can exploit the Magic Underflow glitch that's only present in this version.

Other versions: It's time to go get the Chicken Knife from Moore. If you are on the PR, you can use the bug in this version to get 2 Chicken Knives which will help immensely. The Thornlet and Gaia Hammer are not needed for these versions.

Phantom Village

You'll need to get your Black Chocobo from the Phantom Village to access the desert area for grinding, and while there, grab the Thief Knife and pick up a set of Hermes Sandals as soon as you're able.

SNES/PSX: Buy 3 more Gaia's Hammers for future use with the Magic Underflow glitch. At this point, you'll need to steal some Thornlets from the Lamia Queen using the Thief Knife. You have 1 from the Pyramid and you'll want to steal at least 2 more. The Thornlet is a rare steal, and your best place to find them is in the Pyramid on the 1st floor as it makes up 70% of the formations there. Whether or not you want to steal a third Thornlet is going to depend on your patience; because Lenna's magic stat is naturally higher than everyone else's, she requires both the Thornlet and the Titan's Gloves (a rare steal from Azulmagia) to take advantage of Magic Underflow.

Omniscient (Lv.39)

While totally an optional fight, this is one of the greatest challenges in the Quad Zerker run. Omniscient counters all physical attacks using Return, which resets the battle. With an improperly geared party, this can result in an infinite loop since every attack from your characters will trigger this counter. That said, he CAN be defeated. Omniscient can only harm you with magic attacks, so equipping the Reflect Rings instantly negates any and all possible offense from the mage. The secret to defeating him lies in the Mage Masher weapon. The Mage Masher has a 33% chance to cast Silence, and Silence will prevent Omniscient from casting Return, thus allowing a window for damage to be dealt to him.

A single Berserker is sufficient to climb the other tower, so you should bring 3 Zerks here. One of them needs to equip a Mage Masher. If you're on PR, you have access to 2 Chicken Knives if you used the bug, otherwise, use whatever your two strongest weapons are (in this scenario, you may need more levels to make up for the difference in damage depending on version). Since this is yet another battle where speed matters and defense is irrelevant due to the Reflect Rings, take off all the helms, shields, and body armors, but leave the rings equipped. At level 39, a fully powered up Chicken Knife should deal around 2,000 damage. The ideal sequence you need is as follows:

Battle Sequence‎
R1-1: Mage Masher user attacks, inflicts Silence‎
R1-2: Other 2 attack
R2: All 3 get an attack in
R3-1: Mage Masher user attacks, inflicts Silence
R3-2: Other 2 attack
R4: All 3 get an attack in

Essentially, you need a sequence that lines up such that your Mage Masher user attacks first and triggers the 33% chance of Silence, and then manages to trigger the 33% chance of Silence at the beginning of the third round of attacks. Each casting of Silence should give your main damage dealers time for 2 attacks before it wears off. As the initial ATB order can vary slightly each time the battle restarts, and there's an element of chance on the Silence procs, it may take a few hours of auto-battling, but eventually you should be able to hit this sequence of attacks which will do enough damage to kill Omniscient.

Defeating Omniscient unlocks access to Istory Falls, which while not necessary to the run, does grant you a second Aegis Shield and the Titan Axe, both very useful rewards for your patience.

Preparing for the Rift - Bahamut's Desert

If you've been putting off grinding, it's time to start. The battles from here on out will be tougher and this is one of the best places to level up, so you should aim to get each party member to at least level 50. This isn't too bad to do, and because you're grinding on the world map, it's easy to heal with Tents. If you stick to the northern part of the desert, you can avoid the Landcrawler enemy and its annoying Maelstrom attack.

At this point, you should have a good arsenal of equipment to choose from, depending on version and whether you've killed Omniscient. Available to you are 1-2 Chicken Knives, the Assassin's Dagger, the Rune Axe, 1-2 Aegis Shield, the Mirage Vest, a set of Hermes Sandals, and possibly a Coral Ring and a Titan Axe. I recommend keeping a few Daggers as well, which will help depending on which strategies you choose to employ.

The Rift

Most of the bosses in the Rift will pose little to no problem for your team of overzealous rage monsters. Be sure to pick up the extra Coral Ring and the Thor's Hammer along the way. Catastrophe may Earthquake you, but your party should be strong enough to laugh it off. Halicarnassus will try to Toad your characters and will mess with your rows similar to CED, but you definitely have the power to kill him, even if it takes a few tries. Twintania is a total joke - You should have at least 1-2 Coral Rings to heal off Tsunami, and Giga Flare isn't even strong enough to kill off your characters at level 50. You're attacking for so much damage you probably don't even need to exploit the vulnerability to Death Sickles / Assassin's Dagger death procs.

Necrophobe (Lv.50)

The last big fight before the final boss, the difficulty here will largely depend on your version. On PR/GBA, the Zerkers choose targets randomly, so you can kill his Barriers pretty reasonably at level 50 with no zombies with just a little luck.

On SNES/PSX, the Gaia's Hammer Quakes will not hurt the Barriers, but they *will* hurt Necrophobe, so the fight just comes down to hitting enough Quake procs.

For Mobile/PC, the changes to targeting mean your zerks will never be able to hit the back two Barriers normally, so a different strategy (and potentially more levels) are required. Let Lenna and Krile get inflicted with Zombie status prior to this battle and equip them with Death Sickles. The trick here is to use Reflect Rings so that when your zombie zerks attack your own party, they can randomly Reflect the Death proc to the back Crystals.

Note that if a zombie zerker manages to proc Death on a character wearing Bone Mail, it will actually heal them instead of damaging them. This does require you to get a bit lucky with the Death procs landing, and they will still take damage from the non-proc hits, but it's one of the few ways in the game to heal your zerks in combat, so keep this in mind as we head into the last portion of the run.

The Final Boss

Only Exdeath left to go, we're close to done, right?? Unfortunately, no. Thus far, all the fights have been relatively easy compared to what awaits you. TED has the threatening White Hole attack, which will instantly down any character not equipped with an Aegis Shield AND a Bone Mail to counter the Petrify + Death status. These two items will also be very helpful against NED's Grand Cross, which can inflict a number of debilitating ailments including Petrify + Death, though you do have a better chance of simply dodging RNG and hoping for something less dangerous. Unfortunately, while the Bone Mail helps immensely with preventing instant Death, it makes you weak to holy damage, meaning Almagest will now deal twice the usual amount of damage. Combine this all with an array of various powerful magic and physical attacks, and you're going to need a lot of HP and luck to weather this storm.

To make matters even more complicated, how you gear up for the fight is also largely going to depend on version, because of the differences in the Zerker's random target selection. You will certainly want 4 Aegis Shields for the Petrify protection and chance to block Almagest. To protect against Death status, you will want 2-4 Bone Mails depending on how much grinding you can stand, and how many Zombie zerks you intend to employ.

Equipment Hunting

Your party desperately wants Aegis Shields and Bone Mails. Bone Mail is stolen from the Necromancer enemy and is incredibly hard to steal, but you really only need 1 for however many non-Zombies you have in your party. The Aegis Shield is a fair bit easier to steal as it's stolen from Gorgimera, which are found on the same floor as the Necromancer, are more common, and are easier to defeat.

Necromancer only spawns on floor 2 and floor 4 of the Inner Rift. On each floor, he appears in 35% of the formations. Floor 4 he is 1 out of 3 enemies in that encounter, and floor 2 he is 1 out of 2 enemies. Floor 2 also has less dangerous enemies overall, so it is the superior choice for trying to find Necromancer. The Thief Knife has a 50% chance of using Mug when attacking with it (though it may actually be as low as 33%), and Mug has a 40% chance of successfully stealing an item from an enemy (that bumps up to 80% if you have the Thief Gloves, however, Berserkers cannot equip them). Necromancers have a 3.91% chance for steal to award you the Bone Mail. So to get an idea of how likely it is to try and actually steal this armor:

0.35 (encounter) x 0.5 (1 out of 2 enemies you may randomly hit) x 0.5 (chance of Mug proc) x 0.4 (chance of Mug succeeding) x 0.0391 (chance of stealing the rare item) = 0.0013685

You have roughly a 0.14% chance of stealing the Bone Mail on each given attempt. That is modified slightly because obviously repeated Mugs in 65% of the encounters are guaranteed to fail, and you generally get multiple chances to Mug in the formations Necromancer does appear in, but that's a good rough estimate of your chances. It's comparable to the odds of getting a Pink Tail in FFIV. The difference is, this armor is absolutely mandatory to this playthrough while Adamant Armor in that game was just a cool, totally unnecessary gimmick. It's likely going to take several hours of hunting to find and the cherry on top, none of the encounters in these areas give you EXP, so you aren't even leveling up for NED while fulfilling this requirement. You will very likely steal 2-3 Aegis Shields during this process by the time you get your first Bone Mail. Also beware, the Necromancer encounter is still very dangerous as he can Zombie your characters, effectively killing them in a single attack, and then they will start attacking YOU with very high damage swings. It is entirely possible that you might steal the Bone Mail, and then not be able to flee before Necromancer just randomly Zombies your party to game over. Hope that luck is on your side.

SNES/PSX (Lv.85)

NED in this version has a number of hidden off screen targets that your zerks can randomly attack for zero damage, meaning many of their regular attacks will simply do nothing. However, the Gaia proc will hit all targets, and this is your primary source of damage, as well as being one of the few ways to potentially avoid NED's Rampage Mode. If you wish to employ a Zombie healer, make Lenna your Zombie, and give the other 3 Bone Mails.

GBA/PR (Lv.85)

Your targets are chosen randomly here, but at least there aren't any off screen targets. Recommended is to have Lenna and Krile both become Zombies, and give them Reflect Rings. If you want to try for Death procs to heal, give them Death Sickles, otherwise give them Daggers so they do basically no actual damage to your alive party members. The Death Sickle will likely deal at least a few hundred points of HP damage per hit, which is not an insignificant tax on your HP should you repeatedly fail to trigger Death, so it's up to you whether to gamble with it. The real benefit though is that having 2 Zombie zerks means you're effectively giving your alive characters 50% evasion from attacks (as hits against a Zombie are meaningless), your Zombies will reflect magic attacks back for extra damage, and if you get *really* lucky, you can reflect a Delta Attack onto the Almagest portion which will kill it instantly due to the Petrify status. This also makes them ideal cover during Rampage Mode, as they can freely soak up hits from Meteor. It is technically possible to avoid Rampage Mode through pure RNG, but chances are high that you will have to survive it for a few rounds. PR technically has it slightly easier than GBA here since you can get a second Chicken Knife from the bug to speed up your DPS.

Mobile/PC (Lv.99?)

This is possibly the hardest version to defeat NED on because of the targeting changes. Your party will focus and kill off NED's parts in this order: Physical->Almagest->Grand Cross->Magical. This sounds great at first, but is actually highly dangerous because you are 100% guaranteed to have to defeat the Magical part, from full HP, in Rampage Mode. And if that wasn't bad enough, the Aegis Shield won't block Almagest in this version, so you will likely need to gamble on Zombie healing with the Death Sickle. Lenna should definitely be a Zombie here, and you can gamble with Krile either being a second Zombie, or you can try to Thief Knife a second Thor's Hammer from a Death Claw and have her as a backup attacker. This version likely requires you to be as high level as you can manage since you're going to be face tanking the most Almagests and Meteors here, and you really need to be able to defeat Rampage Mode as quickly as possible.