the oppressor

numbers organized a second static that meets on Friday evenings. It's mostly the regular group, minus Kan and Silver, plus Tiro and KJH. KJH is new to FFXIV, but he's very enthusiastic about it. He's already midway through Stormblood; he's leveling a bunch of classes of different roles and is also working hard on his crafting and gathering classes. That's dedication. I've never crafted or gathered a single thing.

The Friday squad had two sessions this weekend, one on Friday night, and one on Sunday because Silver couldn't make our usual raid time (he's moving out to DC for his new job). We're working on Alexander Savage, starting with the Oppressor. It's a robot. They're all robots. The whole raid cycle is steampunk-themed. HGR has been complaining about the aesthetic, but I think it's great.

It's a fun and wildly chaotic fight. The main mechanic of chaos is alarums/missiles, which works like this: Four small robots (alarums) appear on the field. They will tether to the first player to attack them, and chase that player until they die. Upon dying, they will drop a purple-colored puddle. Step into that puddle and you'll be mini'd. So don't do that.

Meanwhile, four towers appear at random locations onscreen, with descending missiles that will do huge raidwide damage on impact. So here's what you do: Each dps grabs a different alarum, lures it to a tower, and kills it there. Then the missiles will all fall into the purple puddles and become mini-missiles and do no damage.

This is super cool but also super messy because there are also poison puddles and giant lasers to avoid. There are also coordination issues, e.g.: one dps accidentally grabs two alarums, or someone accidentally kills someone else's alarum in the wrong spot, or two dps are running toward the same tower and have to adjust on the fly. It's wild. So this is what we were working on for the majority of today's session.

We're also having some healing issues that may or may not be related to Luis playing healer. It's the return of combat cleric. Every time I get a res from Luis I'm surprised for a second before I remember that he's a healer now.