Looking for the best course to get Trapezohedron "early on"

[Clockwork]

So, I'm still only at the beginning of Chapter 12, but I'm asking in advance,

I read many things suggesting to worry about it post-game, but I'd rather have them earlier than that.

What would be the best way to farm them?

One website mentioned that you could pick one of the few weapons from Vanille or Fang that can be upgraded to turn 1 Trapezohedron into 3 by scraping it. But some other people on Steam mentioned that it's a waste of time because you'll have more than you know what to do later on (except that they seem to be talking about post-game, since they mention farming the Adamantoise and/or Long Gui, which is obviously out of my league for now - the best I could do was to remove about 2 millions health off the one at Eden, before getting one hit killed).

And at the same time, money farming seems to be incredibly tiresome in this game, because it's not difficult at all but way too repetitive and time consuming, because there's just no good way to farm it (take it from someone who was farming 1 level per hour on Tales of Symphonia, when in fact I wasn't supposed to do that).

[Clockwork]

Found it, I'm just going to use Vanille and a team of saboteurs to spam Death, for now.

[Clockwork]

Should I be worried if, after 40 fights against the Adamantoise, I found 16 ingots and 0 trapezohedron?

I mean, I know statistics aren't absolute, but I expected that, at 5.5% chance (both catalogs), I would have at least managed to get one by now. But so far, it looks like it would have been better to set the game to easy and farm ingots and resell them instead.

Edit: 41 fights, 16 ingots, 1 trapezohedron

[MJB]

No, it's just bad luck from the RNG. During one playthrough I had maxed my crystarium post game trying to get a Drop and ended up buying one instead. Plus, I believe the drop rate is only 1% (1.1% with connoisseur's catalog), not 5% unless you are farming Long Gui.

[Clockwork]

Originally posted by MJB:

Plus, I believe the drop rate is only 1% (1.1% with connoisseur's catalog), not 5% unless you are farming Long Gui.

Yeah, I read that too, but I read somewhere that rare drops are multiplied by 5 when you finish with a 5-star rating, which would equate to 5%.

[MJB]

Yes, you would get a 5x multiplier so if you are using Death, then you are correct.

[tiornys]

As far as acquiring Traps goes, Adamantoise farming on easy mode > Long Gui farming > normal Adamantoise farming, so yes I would actually have recommended farming gil on easy mode. Also I would have recommended using Sazh for the kills as it's faster on average than Death spam.

[Clockwork]

Originally posted by tiornys:

Also I would have recommended using Sazh for the kills as it's faster on average than Death spam.

You mean brute forcing by actually fighting? Or does he have some kind of instant kill spell too?

I'm still at the 1st Adamantoise of Eden, so I'm actually not supposed to be farming it yet. But I got the 3 I wanted, so I guess I won't be needing them anymore (only wanted to equip my main team).

[tiornys]

Brute force by fighting. Basically, upgrading Pleiades Hi-Powers to max Hyades Magnums gives Sazh ridiculous Strength. He can further abuse that by spamming Blitz (when all 7 bullets hit--as they will with a huge target like a 'toise--one Blitz does slightly more damage than four Attacks):
https://youtu.be/34t_tVpfvSY

With a little more development you can dismiss Brynhildr faster; ultimately if you dismiss it as fast as possible the kill time drops to about a minute, but it's faster than Summon-Death even with the full Summon time as shown in the vid. With optimized tactics, Summon-Death has about a cumulative 72% chance to kill per battle; factoring across all the possibilities from a chance at a first-cast kill through needing to retry gives an expected kill time of 2:29.