pudding alone gets awfully dull

Not enjoying the Sugar Riot fight at all. Specifically, I hate the add phase.

• I have aoe in my kit, but I’ve never had to use it in raids, only very casually in dungeons. I was perfectly happy ignoring it. Now there’s all kinds of annoying considerations like “I can’t initiate on the ray with X attack because it does splash damage and Tiro hasn’t moved the rest of the mobs into position.” Some people enjoy this kind of thing (which, fair enough), but not me. I just want to do my rotation without having to worry about grouping and positioning.
• I have to hold my burst for opportune moments, which feels really bad. Standard best practice is to use your big attacks on cooldown. In fact, xivanalysis will yell at you for drifting your cooldowns (chain saw drifted by 2.05s, air anchor drifted by 1.82s). So it goes against years of practice and muscle memory to see my chain saw up and deliberately wait 20 seconds to use it on the ray. It also feels bad to waste my big attacks on trash mobs instead of the boss.
• There’s no elegance to it. It’s mechanics-lite and boils down to “kill them before they kill you.” Just a damage race. Normally, if we wipe, it’s something mechanical that went wrong: the fires were supposed to go to A and B, but one of them got mixed up and they both went to A. Or: two of the spreads on the platform overlapped and they both died. It’s a discrete fixable error. Here, everyone can do everything correctly from a mechanical standpoint (I think??), but the sheep randomly kills the tank and then goes around headbutting everyone for 300k damage. No one seems to know what went wrong or how to fix it aside from shuffling around our targeting. “Let’s focus the sheep first.” Then, two pulls later: “Actually, let’s focus the cat first.” And it makes no difference either way. It’s incredibly frustrating.

I don’t think it’ll be satisfying to clear, just a relief that trash mob time is over and we can get back to a proper fight with proper mechanics. (Though my rotation for the rest of the fight is going to be shot to hell from all the drifting. And every time we wipe to a Real Mechanic we’ll have to do this garbage again.)

* * *

We spent basically all last weekend’s raid sessions beating our heads against the add phase. Sometimes we’d wipe due to a mechanical issue (e.g., I would mess up targeting my ray because I am bad at this game, and someone else would get the tether). Just as often, we would do everything correctly (as far as I know) and we’d wipe anyway. Repeat ad nauseam. Then I spent the work week actively dreading the weekend because we’d have to do it again.

At least I’m not the only inhabitant of Salt Lake City. I don’t think anyone else hates the add phase like I do, but newbie and co. have been playing Doom: The Dark Ages and complaining loudly about the game’s design, so I feel united with them in spirit.

newbie_without_context.txt: “I think carcasses would be really good in the dark ages.”

Anyway, we also spent this weekend beating our heads against the add phase, with marginally higher success. We’ve flip-flopped back to “Let’s focus the sheep first.” On a couple occasions we’ve made it to the fourth (and presumably final) wave of adds (and by that I mean the final person is dying and the screen is fading to black as the fourth wave is being summoned).

Thankfully we’re off next week (I’m heading down to parents' place for Memorial Day weekend). Maybe two weeks from now we’ll have so many gear upgrades we can breeze through this phase. HGR strongarmed me into doing a guildhest so I’m rolling in tomes.