there’s no “L” in “troubadour”

Another week, another raiding session.

As we assembled, HGR said, “I remember the days when newbie joined FFXIV just because we were spending so much time on FFXIV and he wanted to talk to us using the chat. And now he’s our valued DPS.”

We made good prog on Voidwalker: We started out by hitting enrage at like 23%, then we got to like 15% and 10%, and on our final run we reached 4%. It’s a cool fight, I like it. But I was kinda annoyed that all our serious runs were cut short by enrage. I don’t mind wiping to mechanics, but it feels bad to be in viable situations and then just time out.

Like, our final run: Four of us died to cycles (the slicer/cleaver/guillotine sequences). So we obviously have room for improvement. But we still had four guys up, including our main tank and a healer (HGR); we probably could’ve recovered. But Voidwalker started charging up quad-Quietus and we were just done.

Addendum 1: I guess I’m cherrypicking here. Some of our earlier enrage runs were...less viable.

Addendum 2: HGR says he prefers it this way, since it means you need a relatively clean run to win. He said it wouldn’t be satisfying to eke out a win after half the team died. (A fair stance. I’d be satisfied though.)

Anyway, we’re very close. Just need to get through the cycles a little cleaner. We’ll get him next time.

* * *

But, you might wonder, what does fflogs have to say about all this? spoilers: it’s not great

For our last run, Kan got a 95% parse (whoa). (Though it’s a bit weird; if you set it to exclude events after one player died, his percentile goes down to 75%. Such a big discrepancy shouldn’t be possible?) HGR had a blue parse for most of the fight, then we all started dying and he slipped to 47%. Then there’s the rest of us: newbie/numbers 15%, Silver/Luis 9%, me/Dante 7%.

(I’m losing a percentile every week. v embarrassing. six weeks from now, I’ll have to stand at the very end of the line.)

* * *

We adjourned for dinner (or, in newbie’s case, breakfast) (newbie during the raid: “I’m sooo hungry”). Then several of us reconvened to watch newbie play more Hades. Skelly, with assists from HGR and numbers, twisted newbie’s arm into doing an eight-skull run. newbie used a gun with a five-rocket special that looked like a raid mechanic. He beat Hades on his last life with 20 HP left, so basically one hit away from death. Fun fun.

But HGR and I agree that Hades is getting a little played out at this point. We’ve seen every boss fight and every room type so many times. I wonder how much more content they’re planning for the full release.

HGR also pointed out the intentional irony of the game’s setup, which I love: The more you try to escape, the more housing upgrades you unlock (clean up the place, get posters to hang in your room...) and the more you get to know everyone. And it feels more and more like home. After all that, do you still want to leave?