the emissary

[redacted spoiler discussion in which newbie calls out Elidibus on his BS]

We beat Pandemonium on Saturday. We’re steamrolling this tier (editor’s note: not actually true).

GGG likes to talk about Pandemoniac Bonds 3 being the hardest mechanic in the raid. imo it’s not actually that bad. It works like this: The boss telegraphs a half-room cleave, so you get on the safe side of the arena. From there, it’s either role stacks + spreads, or spreads + role stacks. Simultaneous with the second stack/spread, bits spawn and fire horizontal lasers across the arena, so you have to mind the bits while stacking/spreading. It’s not actually that complicated.

In my opinion, the obnoxious mechanic is bonds 2, which occurs right after the laser cannons. (Counting to 4. Always a challenge.) This one is either buddy stack + spread, or spread + buddy stack. Also not that complicated, in theory. The problem is that if anyone dies during the laser cannons, their corpse on the field will spawn a spread. I keep dying because I go to my spread spot and there’s a corpse there which I didn’t see. Two reasons for this:

(1)   I’m very used to tuning out extraneous visual data, such as corpses.

(2)   If someone is knocked off the arena during the laser cannons, their corpse spawns in my spread spot. It takes a little while for the corpse to appear, so it’s entirely possible for me to get ganked by a corpse that literally wasn’t there a second ago.

ANYWAY that’s why I got a 2% and I’m sticking to that.

* * *

There’s a stereotype of inexperienced players playing white mage (it’s an iconic duo: experienced raider and his girlfriend the white mage). I can’t fathom why this is the case. Healer seems like the most complicated class to me because you need so much raid awareness. You need to keep track of everyone’s health, and who got hit by the last mechanic so they’ll need extra healing before the next raidwide. You need to be aware of everyone’s positioning in case someone is out of range for AoE heals. You need to communicate with the tanks about the state of their mitigations so you know if they need extra healing to get through tankbusters. You need to know the fight timeline extra well so you can preemptively cast regen before raidwides.

As a dps, I don’t have to care about any of that. I hit my buttons and do my mechanics. Raidwides and tankbusters exist only at the very edge of my awareness. Half the team might be dead and I do not notice until HGR says “Wall it.”