Dances with Fish

A Good Insanity

greysky_thirdplace So this happened yesterday… and I am completely floored by it.  Firstly I thought last weeks 6th place was pure insanity, but to see us jump to third place in guild activity in a weeks time is just surreal.  For those wondering this is gauge is based on guild activity, or moreso the guild going out into the world and doing stuff.  This means we are leveling, crafting, doing fates, running dungeons, in apparently huge portions.  But to think we are the third most active guild on the server just seems so strange.  Anecdotally I did notice a few weeks back that regardless of what crystal I teleported to, there seemed to be some [GREY] members nearby so I knew we were getting pretty huge, but I guess this simply quantifies that.

The thing is I still feel like this has very little to do with me, and more to do with getting a critical mass of people in the same place for a long period of time.  We have been growing extremely fast, but at the same time very organically.  I invite someone, who has fun and invites their friends… and then they go off and want to invite their friends and so forth.  This all just seems to have snowballed into the amazing situation that we currently have on Cactuar.  It is a combination of a great game with great people, and the end product is this upwelling of awesome.  Last night Tam our fearless leader ran some numbers.  We currently have 135 members of Greysky Armada, and of those 89 have been online within the last two weeks…  and even more impressively 63 had been online in the last 24 hours.  We have a really huge active population of players… and it is pretty damned awesome.

Turn Five Revisited

ffxiv 2015-04-13 21-14-39-12 We have been struggling a bit to get our turn nine ship righted, as it seems each week we have been down some people required to make that happen.  Last night we opted that rather than standing around waiting and hoping for an 8th to show up… that we would do something more proactive and key another guild member by running them through turn five.  I still find t5 an extremely enjoyable fight, and it was a little challenging given that some of us were playing different roles.  We had to give up Kodra’s insane dps in favor of him picking up the mantle of the Paladin tank.  He did a great job at interpreting all the random commentary I said by not really understanding fully the job that Ashgar does on a regular basis.  Ash just takes care of so many details that it took us a bit to replicate all of them with someone else.  The funny thing is at this point in our gear level… the dive bomb phase seems to be far more forgivable.  I think we managed to defeat the turn on the 5th or 6th try…  but most of the attempts were really us trying to adjust to the twister phase.

ffxiv 2015-04-13 22-48-09-34 While the first coil is not exactly a great way to get people gear, they do have some nice looking items in there.  Last night I managed to get some achievement for defeating turn five multiple times in a row.  Ashgar has always been super awesome about letting me pick up the various pieces of plate gear that drop in there because I liked the look of it.  After the raid last night I went rifling through my inventory and realized that I had all of the cosmetic slots.  As such I opted to pick up a brand new glamour to show off my Heavy Allagan gear.  Now the weapon from t5 doesn’t really go with this set of gear, so I opted to use the 110 weapon instead.  I am sure I will get tired of it eventually, or I will complete some other set of gear that I want to use…  but for the time being I am pretty happy with looking like I spent a lot of time grinding the early coils.

Dances with Fish

ffxiv 2015-04-13 21-45-59-44 We took long enough last night to defeat turn five that we didn’t really have enough time to start in on turn nine.  Instead we opted to set our sights on the  lord of the whorl, Leviathan extreme.  We had made attempts on this in the past but struggled a bit at the time, so never really came back and revisited it.  However in the meantime I have run a lot of Leviathan hard mode for various guild members as they needed it for their storyline.  Each time I have pretended that I was doing it on extreme, and have gotten significantly better at avoiding “stuff”.  The challenge for extreme mode is that during the middle of the fight Leviathan knocks the barriers off the platform you are fighting him from.  This means that if you are not careful and do not adjust to his deck slams… you will slide directly off the platform and into the water… where you will be unrecoverable just like on Titan.  All of this pretending to not have rails seems to actually have made the real thing significantly easier, because for the most part we were not dying to folks sliding off the platform.

On our best attempt we managed to get Leviathan down to 24% and largely we were dying to either insane amounts of damage…  or the horrible add that fears players off the platform.  Mostly the timing of the stuns is a bit odd there, and Kodra was doing this for the first time.  After looking at a quick guide this morning it looks like we need to start stun locking that add around 70% health.  Essentially if you see a castbar at all.. it is apparently already too late.  There will be nothing you can do to stop the fear effects from going off.  I feel like on this fight I have the easy job which is just soak up a lot of damage and be ready with cooldowns if it looks like I am taking a burst of damage.  The offtank does pretty much everything else… stun the adds, pick up the adds, tank the four blue balls of doom etc.  Thought I feel like given a solid night of attempts that were not abbreviated… we can totally do this fight.