Final Fantasy XIV

It is always bizarre when I make a post on a Monday… and almost everything that I was talking about on Friday has changed.  This is one of those situations.  When I wrote Friday we had a cute dog in our back yard…  but it was still a dog.  We had not slept very well for several nights in a row… because doggo wanted to be barking lots.  There were several times that my wife got up and snoozed out on the back patio in an attempt to keep the dog from waking the neighbors.  While I didn’t get the brunt of it… because the dog latched onto her and not me…  I did get a significant interruption in my sleep patterns because when someone else in the house is moving about I wake up, or at least go into super shallow sleep mode.  Functionally we were following two lines of thoughts… the best possible solution was to find the original owner and in attempting to do this…  we cast a pretty wide net of posting about the dog any place we could think to do so.  The second line of thought was to try and find a “dog person” to take him, and find him a good permanent home.  Saturday afternoon I got a few excited messages from my wife who was out chilling with the dog on the back patio.  It turns out that one of her facebook posts reached the human responsible for doggo, and within thirty minutes or so my wife was walking the pupper back home.  Rocko as the human calls him…  lives about dozen and a half houses away and had probably just escaped when he decided to start following my wife.  We had a bunch of assumptions..  that he was in fact loved, and that he had a female human that looked after him…  and that he had not actually traveled very far based on the way the pads of his feet looked.  All of that turned out to be completely true and while the puppy seemed to be happy enough with us…  once he got in range of his sibling he seemed to get super amped.  Thankfully we were able to connect the dots and find his original home.

As far as the other thing that was distressing me… that had cleared up as well.  When I last wrote about it, I talked about my struggles to find a group capable of getting through the Royal Menagerie trial.  Also at that time there were several of us hung up on that step and functionally high center in the expansion.  The Trial itself lasts for 60 minutes and after the five full attempts worth to get through it….  I had spent roughly 300 minutes of my life doing the fight over the course of the week.  Friday night however Ashgar my usual co-tank reached the point where he was also needing the Trial, and we gathered up two heals, two tanks and a dps to take into the encounter.  Up until this point we had all been talking about our battle scars that had been invoked by the fight…  and then because apparently Ash is super lucky we managed to one shot the fight.  The best part about this is the fact that three of us were stalled in the MSQ and got dislodged by that one victory.  Saturday evening Kodra also reached that point, and similarly we rallied the troops…  this time bringing six players in…  and once again we one shot the encounter.  So maybe I just had a streak of bad luck, but it was maddening nonetheless.  However since pushing past on Friday I have been on a gearing spree and am sitting at 302 I believe now on my Warrior.  When not doing roulettes though I have been working on the Samurai and have that job up to 58 so far.  I need to do some research on the Extreme Primals because yesterday Grace tried to convince me and Tam to do this thing.  I originally thought I would wait until the rest of the group got there as well…  but I don’t mind the through of joining a party finder group…  but I just need to be able to know what the hell is going on beforehand.  Unfortunately there is no MTQ guide for either yet, and I am going to have to rely on one of the other guides to get the basics of the fight.

I am rapidly entering the territory of being unable to talk about things that I want to talk about…  without getting deep into spoiler territory.  Before I get into that sort of thing… I thought I would leave you with this picture of me…  in an 80s music video…  or a Olan Mills photo backdrop whichever way you want to spin it.  Yes I did in fact stop in the middle of a pull to take this screenshot…  no I don’t feel at all guilty about it.  Last night featured some amazing highs… and some crushing lows.  At the start of the evening I rather effortlessly pulled together a group of friends to run the sixth and final leveling dungeon, and it was amazing.  It felt so much like they learned their lessons from the two 8 player dungeons that happened at the end of A Realm Reborn and managed to cram that same sort of epic feel into a 4 player dungeon.  It is weird how people never seem to have a problem waiting for cut scenes in a normal dungeon, but god forbid you watch them in any of the 8 player or 24 player content.  Whatever the case it was awesome, and featured a lot of really cool mechanics and several extremely challenging but still reasonable encounters.  I theorized this as them wanting to make sure a group of random players could complete it since this will of course be part of the expert roulette.  Then after these warm fuzzies…  they dropped the bottom out and pushed me right into the third trial after a lengthy cut scene doing the story set up for it.

Now we are entering the realm of spoilers, because I am not sure how else to talk about my frustrations.  There is a common thread among my Free Company… and that is folks who have technically finished the expansion but not yet seen the credit roll.  For those uninitiated, there is in fact a credits roll at the end of each expansion…  and then again at the end of an expansion cycle of patches.  The reason why we have not seen the credit roll is because so far very few have lucked out to actually defeat the final primal fight.  This is a pug killer, and last night saw me making my first attempts.  On the first attempt we walked in with me playing a tank, Tam playing a Red Mage, Grace playing a Scholar and Solaria playing a White Mage…  and while we got close several times we just could not push it across the finish line.  This is one of those fights where you judiciously hold a healer limit break in reserve…. because at some point you are straight up going to need to rez most of the party.  What makes this fight so much worse than “mechanics the fight” aka Thoradin is that everything literally hits so much harder.  I feel like this is simply an issue of scaling and expecting everyone in the party to have potentially farmed Dungeon 6, rather than to attempt it immediately upon completion.  The amount of damage that the party was taking and the tankbusters when they hit me…  just added up to a frightening amount of healing that needed to be done in perfect situations.  When players were taking damage when they didn’t need to…  it just became more than anyone could handle.

The fight as a whole combines some of my least favorite mechanics from other fights, namely the destructible floor concept that we encountered in Sohr Khai.  The other part of the fight that I really do not like is that there seems to be a significant RNG element to it.  The boss has an aether meter and when it reaches full it does an attack…  but which attack it does seems to be randomed from a large pool of possible attacks.  The problem with this is that some of these are far easier to deal with than others… and this also completely flies in the face of FFXIV encounter design as we have known it to date.  FFXIV encounters are traditionally a dance that is done that the players have to learn the steps to… but once they do it feels like an elegant chorus rather than a win on some chance table.  There are some elements in this encounter that do happen in sequence but then there are others that seem to be pulled out of a hat  that you just have to deal with.  It feels like in order to get through the fight with a PUG we need firstly solid players… but also a hell of a lot of luck.  As a result there is a group of us that might be high center until we can field most of an 8 player group made up of entirely our free company folks.  That might be awhile since everyone tends to be leveling at vastly different speeds… and we have an excessive number of tanks and healers as opposed to some dps.  After last night though…. I think I am going to take the night off and play some Diablo 3 since the Necromancer pack releases today.