art must be free

WE DID IT. WE BEAT SUGAR RIOT. THE BEAST HAS BEEN SLAIN.

We’ve been struggling with this stage 2 boss since literally the beginning of May. “Encouraging progress on adds” was 6/7. “The glacier that hit the Titanic” was 6/8. To be fair, we had a month-long break: I was in Ireland for two weeks, then Tiro was at a con, then Dante was helping a relative move. This is our first week back from hiatus.

(numbers ran the statistics. 122 pulls of Dancing Green. 381 pulls of Sugar Riot. lol, lmao, etc.)

“How do you feel about Sugar Riot reclears?” Dante asked me. Surprisingly, I’m okay with it. Against all odds I wound up enjoying the fight by the end. It helps that I have an actual mechanical job during the add phase (I grab ray 2 during wave 2 and wave 4). I don’t think I’d like it as much if I were just a miscellaneous dps. But it’s satisfying to execute properly, and it feels like a “real” phase, unlike most adds that are just time wasters. Obviously, gear helps a lot too. I have no idea how much of our improvement has been execution versus gear.

My favorite wipe this session: During wave 4 of adds, newbie was like, “I don’t have my dot on him yet, but I’m gonna.” numbers: “Don’t lie. You don’t have a dot.” newbie: “Higanbana?? What the fuck???” Everyone was shocked/incensed/distracted by this blatant gaslighting, and in particular I was so distracted I apparently forgot to target the jabberwock and instead slung an entire heat gauge into my own ray. The jabberwock didn’t die in time and we all died, which is why gaslighting is bad.

Our clear run was insanely down to the wire. It was the first time we cleared fire phase, so we were straight ad-libbing. Dante and I were dead, newbie/HGR had weakness, the Artistic Anarchy castbar was halfway up and she still had 1.2% health left. Castbar finished, everything exploded, screen faded to black, I thought it was a wipe BUT IT WAS THE CLEAR.

“I don’t even want to upload the log,” said Dante.

“The scuffiest of clears,” said Luis.