General

I knew putting points into SE was something somebody, if not everybody, was going to chastise me for. I knew that would have made my solo damage suffer long before I did it. It was mainly so I could get into (and stay in) parties at LHC and stuff easier.
Anyway, I'm going to shoot for maxed BE and Hurricane next then, if I can get ahold of the books, and Marksmanship afterwards.

Btw nice bow. Make sure that you only put 29 points in hurricane cuz hurricane can't go over lvl 30 with out CO

Anyways hurricane and bow expert are top priorty to begin soloing. Just imagine you damage is halved ( little extreme but it's for extreme cases when he weapon cancels like crazy)
Bow expert stabilizes damage a little more with 10 attk more and hurricane is like a 50%+ more damage increase.
Zak has a total of maybe 400mill hp so do some math at sone point

max out hurricane before you go :l (which you should have done before SE if you wanted good solo dmg) and max out BE.

BE 30- it'll give you more stable attacks and 10-15 (don'tremember) extra wpn attack. good for your range.
hurricane- it's the main skill you use. and between 1-30 theres a 70% difference. a bowmaster that chose to max hurricane before SE would be hitting on average 70-40% more than you on everysingle shot. roughly 60% of all their shots would be 40% better than yours :l and 40% would be 70% better than yours. that's overall a 55% difference in the end result. which means if you hit 20k's they're hitting 30k. ._. hence the reason hurricane is so much better than SE

Before i upgraded i had roughly 15k range clean, and at 16x it took me around 35min.

Good luck to you man. I can solo in 25min, altho my range is 19xx clean and 23k when bluff no apples and mw15 but i have a 60% boss engaw. O3O

I would say that 16-18k buffed range with max attacking skills would be cutting it very close. Like what has been already stated, your main enemy is w.def. on the bodies. %boss and %pdr will help you a lot if you have either of those at your disposal as well.

Well, I knew I couldn't solo it yet, lol. I gotta get my hands on those mastery books now. I'm probably gonna do Marksmanship next then Hurricane (or vice versa) after I get my BE 30 book I won in a Basil Auction, provided I pass it, that is. I've got 1 apple at the moment, and a ton of Witch Stews I'm probably going to use.

Get max bow expert, max hurricane, max marksmanship so as 1 concentrate and 1 phoenix just for the skills, leave SE on 20 and start working on these, 1 concentrate helps you save some mp and stacks with atk pots, phoenix helps with the summonings, marksmanship helps with the additional hp and %pdr.
The hp you have is enough to survive, i'd suggest you bring hp, mp and also hp-mp pots for the annoying 1/1. Dont forget the all cures and some atk pots.
Finally i suggest a range of 14k+ clean along with 2 energizers, thats if you pretend to finish within the time limit.

[quote=MrEmporer]Q: Why do you have Dragon's Breath?

Don't know too much about BM ranges, but you might have to apple. Take out the second to the bottom left arm out first. That's the curse arm. It is very bad. Then if you can hit 3 or more arms at once with a decent hitting mobbing skill, use that. If not, use hurricane. Order of arms doesn't really matter from there. For body, just stand on the left side on the ground and spam hurricane. Make sure to watch your HP and use your mobbing skills to take out the summons if they're too interrupting. If not, keep them as they hit lower damage on you than zakum and can protect you from stun. Stun can be recognized as the little totems coming out of the ground. Avoid those. Columns will come down from the ceiling and stun you. If using an apple, use it as soon as magic cancel goes up. Continue attacking until you have succeeded. Good luck![/quote]

Dragon Breath does have a few advantages when it comes to training and handling ground-based boss summons. Anyway to get to my point, DB, at least 1 is more than enough to have great mob control against most non-boss monsters during hunting/training due to the likelihood of knockback.

Can't do it yet, I've gone with my gulidies with:
Hurricane 1
Bow Expert 25-ish
Sharp Eyes 30
+Blessing of the Empress 22

This was with a white knight and a bishop. So + Combat Orders (+2 to all skills from 3rd job and up). The DB who was able to take out like 6 arms by himself got DCed. We barely made it within the timer and I used an Onxy apple to help boost my attack to around 11K-14K.

Unless you have some sort of % Boss equips, you'll have to wait a bit. Not saying that you suck by the way. You have more attack than I do unbuffed.

I would say that you stand a fair chance, but that's granted you are insanely lucky with Zakum not canceling physical attacks throughout the run.
My advice to you, max out your Hurricane ASAP, and I mean max as in 30 Hurricane.
Your HP is adequate enough granted that you can survive hits from Zak's magic attacks, and be sure to pack plenty of power elixirs!
12k ~ 15k for an att range seems to be a comfortable range to consider solo'ing Zakum, I definitely could be wrong.

Q: Why do you have Dragon's Breath?

Don't know too much about BM ranges, but you might have to apple. Take out the second to the bottom left arm out first. That's the curse arm. It is very bad. Then if you can hit 3 or more arms at once with a decent hitting mobbing skill, use that. If not, use hurricane. Order of arms doesn't really matter from there. For body, just stand on the left side on the ground and spam hurricane. Make sure to watch your HP and use your mobbing skills to take out the summons if they're too interrupting. If not, keep them as they hit lower damage on you than zakum and can protect you from stun. Stun can be recognized as the little totems coming out of the ground. Avoid those. Columns will come down from the ceiling and stun you. If using an apple, use it as soon as magic cancel goes up. Continue attacking until you have succeeded. Good luck!

Edit: Weapon Cancel is your worst enemy, and the only thing that can really stop you from soloing within the time limit.