now you too shall go the way of all the earth

Kan beat Eden 8 Savage on Monday. "That was so hard," he said, flopping dramatically on the couch. "It feels leaps and bounds more difficult than anything else so far. I feel like I can't even recognize myself in the tank that cleared E4S for the first time at this point. You know how the story fight buff that makes you into the Hulk says 'breaking limits as a warrior of light should'? That applies to my performance since I got into hard content in this game, I think. It took a hell of a lot of work but I feel qualified for anything at this point."

I can believe it, this boy with his ruby gunblade and purple parses. (He got 69% on Shiva (nice), which is lower than his normal but still very respectable.)

It would probably help the rest of us if we practiced more than once a week. On Tuesday evening, six of us were randomly on FFXIV, and Kan/Silver were active on Discord, so HGR tried to organize an impromptu raiding session. But Silver said he was busy and couldn't raid on no notice, and that was that.

Last night, newbie popped up in chat. "Hi," he said. "I need to do Eden at some point."

numbers told him, "You can do it in the hour between when we are scheduled to raid and when we start raiding tomorrow."

"Ouch," said Dante.

But today, against all odds, we all showed up for raid at the scheduled time. Seven minutes past the hour, we were all online and ready to go. Then, inexplicably, newbie insisted on doing his weekly Eden Shiva run while the rest of us sat around waiting for him. Rude.

Since we got Titan to 6% last week, I was sure we were going to clear this week. In fact, I expected to clear early and then spend the rest of the afternoon fighting EX primals or something. But Voidwalker and Leviathan both took one session longer than I expected, and I guess Titan would not be denied his due. Every run we were like OKAY GUYS THIS IS THE RUN and it was not the run. Rip my potion stockpile. Our best attempts were wipes at 11% and 9% and hitting enrage at 2%.

On the plus side, on one of our runs, I was the top dps for phase 1! ("That's probably not good," said HGR.)

After our raid session ended and we parted ways, HGR took newbie to task for being rude and not respecting people's time. newbie apologized, so we're all cool now. newbie also offered to do something extra to make it up to HGR (slave for a day?) but HGR declined.