our utopia will only be complete...

Still progging Eden’s Promise. Raid was pretty much a nothing burger this weekend. We entered with a solid strategy for lions, and exited without ever having successfully executed it. It’s not like we got in a lot of good practice on the lions, either. We just kept dying before getting there.

Important discovery for black mages everywhere: After a bunch of deaths on an early mechanic, HGR gave the call to wall it. KJH did so without moving by aetherial manipulating to someone who had jumped off the edge. This is high level black mage play.

The lions are apparently a notorious mechanic. Back in the day, party finder called it “lions rampant.” It works like this: Four little lions appear on the west and east sides of the arena. Each is tethered to a different player and will breathe a cone of fire at that player. Meanwhile, two big lions appear at the north and south of the arena and will breathe a cone of fire at the closest player. So whoever is not tethered to a little lion has the job of baiting the big lions. It’s a geometry puzzle: how do you point all the cones so that no one gets hit by anyone else’s cone? (The fire breath gives you fire vulnerability up, meaning that anyone caught in two cones will die.)

There are also other mechanics. The full sequence goes like this:

rapturous reach > lions > knockback > lions > release > lions > rapturous reach

Rapturous reach is a mega-cone (240 degrees) pointed directly east or west of the boss. The knockback is arms-lengthable, but also does hefty raidwide damage which I need to tac. “Release” means that Eden releases the elemental magic she stocked earlier, e.g. Ifrit + Ramuh means get to the far east/west of the arena.

I think I pretty much have the mechanics down, though it’s hard to say, because we didn’t get to practice it much. There was one comical incident where I was out of position for the third lion bait and my lion hit the entire arena. haha oops!! But it didn’t matter because everyone else was already dead for unrelated reasons.