Inky and the Sneeze

Made in the Shade

Last night was a night entirely devoted to Final Fantasy XIV as Monday nights are the raid night for the Greysky Armada the free company we are all a part of.  As such I forwent logging into World of Warcraft at all and just milled around aimlessly in game until time for raid.  I say aimlessly but there were a lot of things that actually happened, not the least of which was convincing @CurlyWench to hang out with us on Teamspeak.  I asked if she needed anything run, and next thing we are pulling together a group to run Haukke Manor…  with me healing it.  Honestly Haukke is one of the easier ones to heal, apart from that final boss fight.  She was tanking, and uncertain of her abilities, and fortunately or unfortunately she ended up in a group with two tanks who were more than happy to share secrets.  The run went extremely smoothly, and I managed not to let us die.

When we got out of the dungeon run, one of our guildies Cylladora was up to some Shenanigans.  She said over Free Company chat that anyone that came and sat in our pool with her would get a present.  So over the course of a few minutes our pool was full of people reclining wearing spiffy new sunglasses that she had made us all.  It was an extremely awesome gesture, and managed to create a moment when we were all inhabiting the same place at the same time, and talking through /say instead of tells or free company chat.  One of the things that Final Fantasy XIV has mastered is creating situations where players need to interact with one another.  The housing district we are part of is extremely vibrant, and I cannot go to the market board down from our house without receiving at least one or two /cheers and /hugs.

This has admittedly been a bit of a stark contrast from World of Warcraft lately, and it has been something weird to get accustomed to.  The Garrison system is awesome, but it has done an extremely good job of isolating players and keeping them from mingling.  We might all be sharing the same actual space but we are each phased into our own instance of it.  As such we really have no need for Ashran or Stormwind or any other player hub, but instead spend the majority of our time hanging out in our private town.  Admittedly I am mostly fine with this, because there is a lot of negativity in my Warcraft server community that I really don’t feel like exposing myself to on a constant basis.  That said it is nice to see the same people every time you go to the bank, or hit a mailbox…  and instead we just see our collection of scripted bots.  Final Fantasy on the other hand has somehow mastered the ability to bring people together… and ultimately keep them together.

Inky and the Sneeze

The 2.4 Final Fantasy XIV Patch introduced the continuation of the Hildebrand storyline.  For those who are not familiar with this name, he is a bumbling investigator and international man of mystery that solves mysteries by quite literally falling into the correct answer through pure accident generally speaking.  This is essentially how Final Fantasy XIV introduces pure absurd concepts from previous games, and brings them into this world without completely breaking cohesion.  The Final Fantasy series has several completely silly bosses, and one of the more memorable ones from Final Fantasy VI is Ultros.  While I love Ultros, he might be a bit dated for modern sensibilities… since he is essentially a walking tentacle hentai joke.  This time once again he is paired with his “buddy for life” Typhon.  Some of you might remember the pair working the Coliseum in Final Fantasy VI, and this time around they are working at the Coliseum in Uldah.

The quest line leading up to Dragons Neck is absolutely insane, and as such the fight itself is equally insane.  Basically the crux of the fight is trying to stay in the arena.  Various fights will knock you out of the ring, at which point so long as there is ANYONE else in the ring you can run right back in.  However there are some absolutely horrible attacks that can knock everyone out of the ring if not interrupted.  I won’t go much further into the strategy other than that, as not to spoil the fight for people.  We managed to get the fight down in spite of ourselves and it dropped the Wind-Up Ultros mini pet… which means we are likely to start doing this as the warm up for Binding Coil each week until all of us get this awesome pet.  It was at times a frustrating fight, but also a really enjoyable break from the standard raiding faire.

Twintania Final Phase

The main show last night was us returning to Turn 5 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut to work on Twintania.  This fight is the great killer of many raids in Final Fantasy XIV and holds the key to unlocking the Second Coil of Bahamut.  I know many people who have struggled at this fight for ages never quite able to push across the finish line.  In our first night of trials we barely made it to phase two of the fight, or more so we barely made progress into phase two.  Last night we polished the first two phases, phase three, and made significant progress on phase four which is really the last major phase of the fight.  The final phase is simply “don’t stand in fire” which is a lesson we have long ago mastered.  There is a thirteen minute hard enrage, but I don’t foresee us getting even vaguely close to that.  In fact we were doing extremely well on the final attempt… and had we not run out of time on the duty timer… we might have downed her last night.

The end result however is that all of us are hungry to get back in there next week and wreck this fight, allowing us to move on to the Second Coil of bahamut.  Twintania is one of those fights that you really have to experience rather than be taught through videos.  Quite honestly I find most fights I need to experience to really learn.  I am not one of those people that can watch a series of videos and grasp the key concepts needed to get through a fight.  I can however read a written description of the abilities and piece together how things work.  The problem that we keep running into is that no one wants to write out a full length description of the fight, or go into any sort of explanation as to WHY things work.  The videos are keen on saying “just do this” or “just do that” without explaining why they are doing it.

This became super clear with phase three of the fight when Twintania dive bombs the party.  All of the guides told us to meet in one place, this little depression and then run to the center of the room.  We tried this over and over before finally guessing at what was actually happening.  It turns out this is straight up a geometry exploit that they are trying to do.  In truth the fight should be exactly like Onyxia during the deep breath phase, where Twintania dive-bombs in a straight line towards the location where the marked player was standing when the symbol appeared over their head.  The geometry hack is dependant upon everyone in the party standing in this little depression in the map, which means Twintainia actually dive-bombs a much lower plane than the rest of the ground.  So all we have to do is run to higher ground and the attack will miss us entirely.

This is totally a hack, but apparently one that Square Enix has yet to patch… likely because they thought it was a clever way of handling the encounter.  The problem is not a single video explained how this mechanic worked, or why doing this one thing negated the attack.  Once we grasped upon exactly what was going on, we got it down in  moments and immediately started progressing into the final real phase of the fight.  Maybe I am old, or more so I know I am old…  but maybe it is starting to have consequences.  I find Youtube as a generally horrible way to learn information, and in all cases I would rather have an explanation of how something works written out in long form… rather than someone’s video of them doing whatever it is that they are wanting to convey.  Maybe I am just stuck on the paradigm of video as entertainment means… instead of video as learning technique.  In any case… we managed to figure things out as a group and hopefully next week will have officially cleared the first coil of bahamut.