Final Fantasy XIV

Last night did not ultimately end up like I thought it would, for many reasons.  Firstly this weekend we had a death in the family…  but man is it harder to explain than that.  When you grow up in a small town, families that are connected to each other through a marriage end up mingling an awful lot.  Because of kids birthday parties and school events, you are constantly encountering this whole other family that is not actually related to you.  So when I say a death in the family, it was not actually my or my wife’s family, but instead the father of a brother in law in wife’s side.  So when it happened we made a trip up to Friday night to attempt to offer support, and do our normal thing of bringing paper goods since during a death in the family a household goes through way more of everything.  The funeral itself is today, and because of the weird familial restrictions of bereavement leave policy I don’t get a day off.  Last night was the viewing, which is sort of like a wake but not actually a wake…  and I did not think we were going to go.  However when I got off from work my wife indicated that we probably should at least make a showing.  I thought this largely meant that I would be gone from our normal Tuesday night FFXIV shenanigans.  It was roughly an hour drive either direction, and then by the time we went to the event and ate dinner I fully expected to be about an hour late for fun time.

However we opted to pick up some food and eat it while travelling… I would explain what we got but it probably would not make sense to anyone who did not grow up in a tiny town.  I also apparently drove like a bat out of hell, because I made it home and was only about fifteen minutes late… with folks still trying to pull the group together.  With me it meant we had seven people available to do stuff…  and in some quirk of bravado we decided to pug that 8th layer and keep working on “Mechanics: The Fight” or Thordan Ex.  We got a Dragoon that said they had run the fight on a healer before… and we proceeded to start attempting to make progress.  A few seconds into the fight and the Dragoon was already dead.  During that first attempt I think they were rezzed four different times… and more than likely through the entire sequence of the attempts averaged around three deaths per outing.  As if summoned by our tears…  Kodra showed up and we rejoiced and disbanded our party finder group to bring him in.  The hilarious part about this is that we all started talking about how much we had gotten used to having a good Dragoon.  Then a few seconds into the first attempt…  Kodra died in EXACTLY the same manner as our pug dragoon.

We rebounding from this and started making proper attempts.  The night was mildly stressful because we once again had a slightly different line up than normal.  Muspel was filling one of the slots, and his only level 60 and geared character is his warrior.  That mean’t Ashgar was not tanking along side me and instead running DPS on his monk.  This is not normally a big deal other than the fact that every attempt I have been in the offtank role, and last night was my first night actually tanking the main boss.  It took some adjustment, namely during the dragons eye phase to know that I had to actually step through the boss to make sure I was clear of the effect.  Similarly there was a dance of times I needed to stack up… and then hurriedly run the hell out before he cast a frontal cleave.  I am pretty sure I killed someone at least once during one of these interchanges, or when having to run across the Arena to place to boss so that the dragon eye and boss were in the same orientation.  However on what would have been our last attempt due to the timer, we brought all of these elements together and managed to get our very first Thordan Ex kill.  Now to move on to the Warring Triad Extremes, but hopefully we can keep popping Thordan each week so we don’t actually forget the dance.

In our continued trend of being months behind the curve and happy about it…  last night we worked again on Thordan Ex.  We jokingly refer to this fight as “Mechanics: The Fight” because it this weird amalgam of every mechanic from binding coil and a mix of new ones.  This is a prime example of what I think of as the archetypal Final Fantasy XIV fight… where it relies on you memorizing a DDR like pattern and then everyone in the party completing that pattern flawlessly.  That however is not exactly the sort of fight our group excels at.  When we go up against a “managing sheer chaos” style fight, we tend to be able to pull those out as one shots.  However when you ask us to memorize and execute a specific pattern…  it takes forever for us to memorize the dance.  I am especially bad at pattern matching and memorization…  and as one of the primary tanks this is not exactly a great thing.  We did however get to the point last night where we were getting everyone through the dive bomb phase and through the meteor phase.  There is a whole lot of bullshit that happens at the tail end of the fight and we were noticing that things started to completely fall apart during the pillars phase…. so I feel like if we can get through that… we can get through the rest of the fight.  I also feel like this is the sort of fight that once the pattern is learned and beat into our brains… we will be able to execute it pretty flawlessly from that part out.  Which is a good thing… because there are a lot of us that would like to farm birbs.

Speaking of Birbs…. I can now poop chocobos.  Right now the Hatching-Tide event is going on in Eorzea, which sort of serves as the Easter celebration.  Lets be fair… that like so many Eorzean Holidays…  Hatching-Tide is mostly nonsense.  The yearly event usually revolves around eggs and spriggans…  that often times steal the eggs or somehow interact with the eggs.  None of this really matters however because the important part is the fact that this year there is a mount.  You can ride around on a giant floating egg… and ejects a baby Chocobo on command.  So I think most of us that completed the event spent a good deal of the evening riding around on eggs and hurling chocobos at people.  This is a prime example of why I love this game so much at times, because it is just down right absurd.  There are so many “why not” moments that the game has where they put silly things in the hands of the players… who then do things like create Fat Chocobo parades.  In Idyllshire last night there were a whole slew of people trying to synchronize the ejecting of Chocobos…  which is an extremely aptly named place now that I think of it since so many people go there to Idle.  For now I have fallen off the “get every class to 50” wagon but I hope to hop back on shortly.  I just have too many games I want to be playing… and as a result am sort of playing all of them poorly.