rest eternal in the dark depths of this prison

Hephaistos time! I’m liking his theme song. It’s got big La Mulana vibes. It’s not Scream-tier, but few songs are.

But first, we’re still in reclear purgatory. The good news is that we’re officially done with Hegemone reclears. The bad news: Agdistis reclears. On Saturday, numbers put up a party finder requesting a taxi to P7S. We got a bloober who was not fluent in English and unfamiliar with the concept of a taxi. She was like, “Just one tank?” After multiple people tried to explain (did you read the party finder? we just need someone to queue us into P7S while we wait for our other tank), she switched to paladin and then queued us into P3S. We all left without another word. newbie speculated that it was a vtuber trying to troll us. In any case, numbers put up a new PF and we got an all-business boi. “Pass lead.” Fast, efficient taxi service. You love to see it.

To my relief, Agdistis did not take all day. (I died twice. On the first harvest, we’re switching up our strat so that all four bull tether people go north, and the positions are more precise; I stood in the wrong spot and got beaned by a bird. That one was 100% my fault. On the third harvest, I got straight up executed by meisnewbie. However, I can’t complain too much; I got a clean run on our first clear.)

So far, the Hephaistos fight seems easier to conceptualize, but harder to execute, especially the thing with the snakes. It goes approximately like this:

• Two snakes pop out of the ground, executing a gaze attack on the party. (Gaze attack 101: It’s okay if the SNAKE sees YOU. However if YOU see the SNAKE, you are turned to stone.)
• Two people with voice debuffs run out and petrify the snakes. (There is a priority system for who gets what snake. My own algorithm: Starting at 12 o’clock, turn counterclockwise and petrify the first snake I encounter. If there is a snake at precisely 12 o’clock it is NOT MY SNAKE.)
• Two people with poison debuffs run out and kill the petrified snakes (using the same priority algorithm).
• Then you get two more snakes and the cycle repeats with the other half of the party.

Avoiding the gaze attack is the most complicated part. Even with calls (e.g., HGR will call out “northeast-southwest” as the spots where the two snakes will end up) I have trouble calculating which way to face. Sussing out east-west in my head is just a tad slow. Hopefully it improves with practice.

(side note—why do we say “east-west” instead of “west-east”? it really SHOULD be west-east because that’s the way one would read it from left to right)

Also there’s a snakes II phase with four snakes at once but we don’t yet have a strat for that, who even let this man have creation magics, pls ban