Extreme Whales

Last night I got a little piece of advice from Syp, who said that I should take care of myself and that no one would care if I took a few days off.  I greatly appreciate the sentiment, and while I feel like this is probably the most brilliant idea…  I am not likely to do it.  In part this “every morning” thing is a much needed routine in my life.  Much like dreams are a way for us to sort through the days events, in many ways this morning blog post is a way to reorder my thoughts before I start a new day.  While it started with the goal of “write more content” It has wound up somewhere in a therapeutic space.  Getting up every morning and writing something…  is important to me in ways I don’t fully grasp.  Additionally I have now done this two and a half years roughly, so another part of me simply does not want to “break the chain”.  I am however likely to fiddle with my format a bit until my wrist is fully healed.

Extreme Whales

ffxiv_dx11 2015-07-02 19-43-23-05 Right now we are in this limbo area where people are still in the process of gearing in order to be able to do higher level content.  To do Alexander the first raid you must be ilevel 170, which means you need to have a full set of Tomestone of Law gear with at least one upgraded item.  Since I only hit 60 a few days ago I am not quite there yet.  As of last night I managed to hit ilvl 166 and in theory should be able to upgrade another piece of gear tonight if I manage to get any play time.  For awhile now I have filled in for the Wednesday night raid group, which was admittedly a bit of an imposition when I was still raiding in World of Warcraft…  but now is not so much.  Wednesday night is generally speaking a pretty good night for me to raid considering that my wife is off at church for a large chunk of it.  So as we move forward into Heavensward I am probably going to offer myself as a more permanent part of that group.  Since we could not do Alexander we set our sights last night on Bismarck Extreme, which only has a requirement that individuals be level 60.

The fight is in essence a series of dps checks, because apparently the island we are standing on gets more and more battered as the fight goes on.  At a base level the fight works pretty much the same as it does on hard, except for the fact that you realistically need to get down the back scale during the first chain phase.  I feel like Wulf and I made a lot of progress on learning this fight as tanks, with the hardest part being the elemental snake swap.  The snakes send out a debuff that makes it so that players need to be dpsing the snake of the opposite color of the buff they currently have.  This means tanks also need to swap targets, and at first we were trying to meet in the middle and trade off, but it seems that quite honestly this is a job for provoke.  Right before a potential swap Wulf and I would target each others snakes and then hit the taunt if we saw that we needed to.  Thankfully it seems to work magically, because normally speaking “just taunting” has minimal effect in this game when it comes to swapping targets.

ffxiv_dx11 2015-07-07 17-46-06-52 While we beat the first dps check, we consistently failed at the second one… which is burning down the elemental snakes before hitting the point of no return where the skies to dark… and Bismarck nukes us into oblivion.  Thankfully each of us still has a lot more gear we can get so we are simply hitting a gear wall.  I think if we get enough upgrade pieces in the next week we will totally rock this fight and down us the first extreme primal of the expansion.  Then we will move on to Ravana Extreme… that happens to drop the best weapons in the game currently.  I have to say I had a blast with the fight, and it was awesome working with Wulf.  The few times I had tanked for the WoW raid, it was when he happened to be out for the night, so I think this might be the first time we have actually worked together in progression content.  In part I somewhat hope we have the people to pull this together for an attempt on Saturday during the pre-podcast raid block.



Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Extreme Whales

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