why do you suffer this pathetic existence

Athena is perilously close to surviving 2023, since Dante and I will both be away over Christmas weekend, and I don’t know if people will be available over New Year’s weekend. We saw enrage, though!

(It was a 15% enrage obtained by chain reviving through our first attempt at Gaiaochos II, A Real Mechanic. Well, you know. The point is, we are CLEAR READY)

To back up, it turns out that the 2x4 strat doesn’t work for Caloric Theory II. If the potato starts with the person diagonally adjacent to the three-stack dude, there’s no way to pass it to everyone and have the three-stack dude receive it last. So we needed a new plan. HGR volunteered to draw a “slightly irregular” seven-sided shape for us, and we said sure.

1. Actually he just copied it from the GGG raid strats channel (he may have been the original drafter, I’m not sure).
2. It’s irregular as fuck.
3. Technically, it’s an irregular pentagon, because two people are standing along straight lines instead of vertices.

Anyway, the new strat: The three-stack person stands in the middle, and the remaining seven people stand in an IRREGULAR PENTAGON around him. One of the seven will receive the potato, and we pass it clockwise around the outside, and then the last person brings it to the person in the middle. easy. mechanic. for. babies.

(There’s a slight edge case: newbie’s spot is in Narnia, meaning that he has insufficient movement to bring the potato mid. So if the potato starts with the person clockwise from newbie, we pass the potato counterclockwise.)

This is fine. It’s actually fine. We got here twice during this weekend’s session, and we cleared it the first time, and the second time I wiped the party because THE DUMB POTATO DIDN’T HAND OFF TO THE NEXT PERSON but hopefully that was a one-off issue.

The real problem, the true final boss of the fight, is classical concepts 2 (PS2). how do cube rotate??? tbh I think everyone is watching me because it’s obvious I’m impaired in this regard. On two pulls, I stood in a spot and like five people yelled at me NO ACHAIUS GO OVER THERE so I did it and the pull was saved. But on a few other pulls, I got it right (more by happenstance than skill) and other person(s) were quietly in the wrong spot(s) and we wiped.

Oh yeah, we also saw Gaiaochos II, but not enough to really talk about it coherently in my opinion. There were, like, tethers and stuff.