Defeating the Steps

Family Calls

Over the weekend we had a crisis arise, but not one that directly effected our family.  Early on Saturday around 2 am in the morning, my former brother-in-law while drunk wrapped himself around a tree.  He was exceptionally lucky for many reasons.  Firstly for hitting a tree he managed to get out of it with this life…  but with several broken ribs and a collapsed lung.  Secondly he managed to do all of this without injuring anyone else, and on private property…  so there were no charges.  Thirdly this means he did not get a DUI, and also means he is not in jeopardy of losing his job which in the contract has a morality clause.  The problem is since death of my wife’s sister, a half dozen years ago…  he has managed to systematically burn every bridge he had to rely on.  My wife’s sister was a stabilizing force in his life, and without her he simply went out of control.

The thing is, given the age difference between my wife and her eldest sister this man was in many was as much a father to her as anyone else.  He was this constant force in her life, which has made it impossible to completely write him off like so many have.  So my wife got up at 3 am on Saturday and sat with him until 5 pm when someone finally relieved her.  He never once thanked her for this or apologized for putting her through this…  but nonetheless she feels obligated to be there.  In a way I think she feels like her sister would want her to be there, trying to watch out for him.  Last night she packed a bag, and went off to the hospital to stay the night, and took off work to spend the day there today.  This morning I am a bit out of it because I never really sleep well when she is not at home.  The cats kept me company, but I kept rolling over in bed being surprised that she was not there beside me.  I have a feeling this is going to be a long day for both of us.

Defeating the Steps

With the 2.55 patch Final Fantasy XIV added the rest of the story line to set up the release of the expansion coming in June.  With it came yet another Trial, the problem being that this trial is significantly different than the others.  Instead of a big boss battle, you have an epic fight against a dragon on a bridge in which you with the help of your Ishgard allies use all sorts of machinations at your power to win the day.  There are far more moving parts than your average story mode trial, and this means that players need to know their roles and perform them with split second precision at times.  As such this has become the bane of the duty finder, causing players to simply not queue for trials roulette right now.  I talked about this effect in other posts, since it has seemed to take a significant amount of time to fill trial duty parties.  I myself queued three different times and each time the group failed… and then slowly disintegrated beyond our ability to stitch it back together.

Last night during our normal raid spot we took this encounter on, since we were down a few key people.  I played the role of tank, which is a confusing mess of picking up adds and trying to drag them to the front of the bit dragon…  so that the players with cannons can hit them.  All of this time we are trying to avoid being stepped on and taking around 3000 hp worth of damage, often times being stunned at inopportune times.  As the Dragon nears the cannons he explodes them causing AOE damage to anyone standing around them… and to the adds if they happen to be in range of them.  At key points during the fight two players have to use these pillars to chain the dragon in place… and a third has to target and fire the Dragon Killer weapon.  The timing here is super tight, if the dragon is not chained he will simply dodge the attack.  In any case on our third attempt we managed to get all of the pieces in the right order and defeated the trial.  Now I have waiting ahead of me what is supposedly the most important storyline in the game yet.

Moggle Mog Revisited

When we managed to down Moggle Mog extreme, there were a number of players missing from the group.  As such last night we had four players who had not seen the encounter.  We considered going and fighting Titan Extreme, but honestly none of us really relished the though of throwing ourselves against that.  Moggle Mog and Titan are examples of two very different primal fights.  In Titan it is all about repeating the same procedure over and over until you beat the boss, something we are apparently not great at.  Moggle Mog on the other hand involves a lot of thinking on your feet and adjusting to the situation as it happens… a type of game play that we seem to excel at.  With the new players that had not seen the fight it took us a handful of tries, but we managed to down him once more and got one of our newer players Grace a spiffy pink ribbon.  I got the last one but unfortunately it doesn’t show up under my plate armor.  I would absolutely wear it with pride however if it did show up.

Afterwards I started working through the post Steps of Faith content, but that was ultimately short lived.  I was significantly more tired than I realized and before long I was logging for the night.  I snapped this photo of me hanging out with Tataru, Minfilia’s right hand woman.  Not sure why exactly, but early on in this game I latched onto her as one of my favorite characters.  She is awesome and I feel deeply under appreciated in the Final Fantasy XIV scions storyline.  There have been many times where she has saved the day, and gotten nothing more than a half heated acknowledgement by Minfilia.  For all of these reasons I feel like Tataru and I are buds, and it was a cool moment in the story that allowed me to snap this photo.  I would far rather be working for her, than the often clueless leader of the Scions.  Tataru at least would know how and when to use a linkpearl, and I have actually seen her do things that were actually helpful…  rather than just playing at the whole damsel in distress thing.  Tataru for Scion President 2016!