#Blaugust Day 11: Whalers in the Sky

Last night was my regular raid night in Final Fantasy XIV, led by Tamrielo. This is the more laid-back raid of our Free Company, so we tend to be a little behind the most current content. Up until last week we’ve been working on clearing out the remaining raid content from before the patch, the Coils of Bahamut. Last week we defeated Bahamut Prime, leaving us free this week to begin in on the Heavensward raids.

We started out by running the Alexander raids, which are lower difficulty raids designed to be doable by random groups. They definitely still require everybody to be paying attention, but there’s a little room for error. I had only been in the first and second of the 4 wings before, so two of the bosses were entirely new to me. We took them down without to much difficulty, and by the end of that content a number of us walked away with new gear. I ended up with new boots, gloves, belt, and a ring.

Face away from the explosion for maximum cool points

After we finished up in Alexander, we moved on to the Limitless Blue where the flying whale primal Bismarck dwells, for the extreme version of his fight. For those not knowledgeable of Final Fantasy XIV, primals are the summons of previous Final Fantasy games, generally summoned by the prayers of various beastman tribes. Bismarck first showed up as a summon in Final Fantasy VI and is the patron of the birdlike Vanu Vanu in Final Fantasy XIV.

A number of our raiders had tried this fight a couple of weeks ago but hadn’t been able to do damage fast enough to make it through. Last night it took us 3 tries to get the hang of it, but once we all understood the fight, we managed to down him without much difficulty and Tam walked away with a whale-themed two-handed sword to use in his Dark Knight job.

He’s much more impressive these days

After months of raiding near the top of our ability pre-patch, it’s nice to once again be in the period where we’re working our way up through the ranks to see how far we can get. More runs at Bismarck are likely in our future to get weapons for the rest of our raid; next up in difficulty is Ravana in Thok ast Thok. This is reportedly a fight demanding much more precision, so I imagine it’ll take us a little longer than Bismarck did to get a handle on. I’ve been surprised before though.