Shaolong Gui

Shaolong Gui is a monster in Final Fantasy XIII that replaces Adamanchelid on Archylte Steppe after the player has completed all the missions in the Cie'th Stone circle (Missions 56-62). They appear along with Long Gui that replaces the Adamantoise and Adamantortoise. Unlike its stronger counterpart, which shares the same drops as Adamantoise and Adamantortoise, Shaolong Gui does not share the same drops as Adamanchelid, and is the main source for Dark Matter outside of R&D Depot.

Strategy
The paradigm sets of SEN/SEN/SEN, SAB/SYN/SAB, MED/MED/MED, COM/SYN/MED, RAV/RAV/RAV, and COM/COM/COM can comfortably kill the Shaolong Gui within a reasonable period of time without too much risk.

The player should always begin the battle with SEN/SEN/SEN to reduce the damage from the initial Quake attack, then immediately switch to SAB/SYN/SAB to begin the debuffing. It is imperative that the Shaolong Gui is constantly debuffed by Slow, in addition to all of the debuffs that it is vulnerable to. The party can do double damage to it if it is inflicted with Imperil and a Synergist casts Enfire on the party.

Once Shaolong Gui has been debuffed the party should stagger the enemy and switch to COM/COM/COM to inflict massive amounts of damage. It will usually take two maxed out staggers to bring the Shaolong Gui down, though a maxed out party can do it in one stagger.

Note: The player should switch to SEN/SEN/SEN when the Shaolong Gui is about to cast either Ultima or Quake.

Spoils
To farm for Dark Matter and Golden Nuggets, the best place is in the valley of Eastern Tor behind two Long Guis. After killing the three Shaolong Gui there, the player can exit where the save station is, stick to the wall at the right and jump onto it to find one more Shaolong Gui, wipe it out and return to the three newly respawned Shaolong Gui in the valley. It can be repeated infinitely. It will not be possible to obtain both a Dark Matter and a Golden Nugget at the same battle. Rare drop have higher priority than common and have 5x better chance to drop when the battle 5-starred.

Here are calculations of effective drop rate for 5-starred battle:

Remember:
 * Effects from multiple copies of the same catalog don't stack with each other, however the effects from different catalogs stack because they affect different things.
 * A battle rating from 0 to 2 stars will decrease the rare drop chance to zero, but battles consuming this much time will more than likely lead to death from the Bay+Ultima combo.
 * Using this logic it's easy to understand why Adamantoise is the best monster for gold farming. In the best case, there is a 35.625% drop chance for a Platinum Ingot worth 150,000 gil.

Related Enemies

 * Adamanchelid
 * Adamantoise
 * Adamantortoise
 * Long Gui