Trial by Ice

Reward: Shiva summon, 10,000 gil, other rewards listed below (when you complete the quest multiple times)
Prerequisite: San d'Oria fame
Repeatable: Yes

The“Ideal” Party Setup for the six avatar fights:

BLM – Never really done an avatar w/o a blm, they serve one purpose, to nuke.
PLD – The damage taker and hate controller.
WHM – Healer and elemental buff (barspells).
RDM – Refresher, backup healer.
??? – Melee one.
??? – Melee two.

The rdm can often be swapped out for a BRD, since the barspells of a whm can be stacked with the elemental carols of a brd to add some pretty good protection against your foe. The two ??? are basically there to deal damage and help perform any skillchain that would be helpful for the blm to magic burst. This setup can also work well with two blms instead of one.

As far as levels go, to make this fight easier, I would suggest a PLD of 63 or higher and for your blm to be not more than 2 levels higher than your pld. Level 60+ is recommended for the rest of your party.

To the strategy:

Before the fight:

• No buffs are lost when you enter the protocrystal, so make sure and buff up, eat food and rest up before entering. Make sure your whm's reraise is on! Nothing worse than being dead at the shiva protocrystal (Fei'Yin)
• Melees and blm should decide on a skillchain.
• WHM should setup a barspell macro for the avatar. Barfira for Ifrit, Barwatera for Leviathan, etc, etc.
• PLD should make sure they have suitable macros for Cover. I've never been in an avatar battle where the avatar has not gone after at least one of the mages.
• Equip any elemental gear that you have (mal-rings from gusgen come to mind).

• The avatar areans are all alike but are drastically different from your regular bcnm arena. You spawn at a landing with a sorta spiral staircase up to the avatar. Midway up the trail, there is another small landing. Have your melees camp there, mages should go further up the trail so that they are overlooking the melee camp, but out of AoE range. Once in position, have your whm buff everyone with the barspell (and carol if you brought a brd).
• One of your melees will pull the avatar and bring it all the way down to the pld. From here on out, it's your regular battle. PLD's job is to keep hate while the blm nukes and magic bursts off the rest of the party. The rest of the mages are there to keep everybody healed and keep debuffs off and buffs on.
• When the avatar is at 50% health, they WILL 2-hour. This is why the whm and/or brd must keep the bar-spell and carol up at all times. No bar, no carol == death.

• Since the mages camp is out of AoE range from the melees, it will be required for the whm/brd to travel back and forth between camps to recast the bar/carol spell. The best strategy I've come up for doing this is using a timer of about 1:20. When the timer goes off, I head to the pld camp and recast. Bar spells usually stick for two minutes, so at 1:20, there's enough of a gap in case I have to cure the tank or mage before recasting the bar spell.
• If your pld dies from the two-hour, don't give up! As long as you can keep hate on a melee and your blm can nuke, you can live. Have your whm start medding and your rdm convert so you can keep your back-up tank alive.
• After the avatar uses it's 2-hour ability, it'll become much more difficult for the pld to keep hate. So make sure your healers are prepared to heal your blm.
• Keep that barspell up!