innocence EX

Today we fought Innocence EX. To get the true experience, we fought him at minimum item level (430, a significant cut). Also, half of us randomly decided to switch roles. numbers became our off-tank, while Dante switched to monk. Monk is notorious for having the most convoluted rotation in the game, and Dante has no clue what it is. HGR was like "Okay, what's your damage rotation?" and Dante said, very confidently, "First, I use [move]"—and then he was stumped. Well, it probably turned out okay. He's good at picking things up on the fly. He played samurai against Voidwalker, despite never playing samurai in any serious content before, and that turned out okay-ish. (HGR called him out every time his higanbana expired.)

Meanwhile, Luis wanted to play healer, so HGR obligingly switched to red mage. This was an odd flex because Luis is like the most oblivious dude around. Well, technically, I'm the most oblivious dude around, but that's why I play machinist: I don't have to care about anything except shooting the boss and doing my own mechanics. Luis, on the other hand, tends to play dps classes with a revive (red mage, summoner) and then forgets to use it, even when half the team is dead. Once during Titan I was dead for practically the whole first phase because, for science, HGR decided not to revive me to see how long it would take Luis to do it, and he just...didn't.

Apparently Luis is like this in Apex Legends too. "I think maybe Luis isn't much of a team player," said newbie one evening. "Yesterday there was a bunch of time where me and numbers were in a firefight for like a minute, and one of us was downed, also for a minute. And when the other one got downed, he was like 'Oh you guys dead? I was killing a bangalore.' While we were yelling for help and everything."

Dante said, "Luis hyperfocuses on whatever it is he's doing, and tunes out, uh, everything else."

"Yeah," said HGR, "I think he just doesn't have awareness. It's like those Hell's Kitchen guys who just keep cooking as they get shouted at for a full minute."

Anyway, the Luis-as-healer experiment lasted for around half an hour, and then he and HGR quietly swapped back. numbers and Dante kept their new roles though.

Innocence was a fun fight—he actually has cool mechanics, unlike Titania. (GOD RAY with the triple nuclear symbol blast, so stylish.) numbers was making jokes about Innocence being pregnant with triplets because he summons three sin eaters during the add phase. He talked about it so much he distracted Kan, who died; and then because Kan's the main tank, we all died. It was amazing.

I think the Titan fight has improved my skill as a machinist. Titan's mechanics are just so fast he makes everything else feel slow by comparison. Even on our first lockout against Innocence I was able to go "oh yeah I have time here, I have time there" and casually use overheat/wildfire without needing to sit down with a timeline and script all my spots. I still have a ton of room for improvement, but I'm happy to be making progress.

We beat Innocence on the last pull of the day, right before Silver had to leave. Just for fun, Kan uploaded the parse. I was the top dps!! All our percentiles were kinda garbage because of min ilvl. The healers were both sub-25 and everyone else was in the single digits. I was actually the lowest at 7%. But I had the highest raw dps, and second highest adjusted dps by a big margin! Machinist is just that competitive a class, obviously.

Afterwards, numbers went looking for mpreg Innocence fanart. He couldn't find any, to our relief. But he pointed out that Innocence's human form looks pregnant anyway, so it's close enough.