hungry hungry hippo

Many important things to do before Saturday’s raid session: buying crafted 580 gear to replace my 560s, adding materia, buying proper food, getting a good glamour. Glamour is crucial because the crafted 580 set is basically Urianger’s outfit with no pants. I decided a new expansion called for a new outfit, and I went with the scion adventurer’s set and a fancy glowing red gun (though I’ll miss my classic Tremor Culverin, which has the distinction of being the biggest gun I could find).

FFXIV still does that goofy thing where after beating P1S, you have to beat it again every week before you can continue with raid progression. HGR says it’s to help the pickup group scene: someone attempting their first clear can team up with people doing their weekly repeat runs. It’s normally a pain, but I was excited to beat it with non-grief gear and check out my vastly improved parse. Unfortunately, someone messed up temperatures 2 and got us all a damage down. Then I died on Shining Cells 2. Multiple other people died too. After all that, nobody really wanted to upload the log. On the plus side, we cleared on our very first pull. On to the hippokampos!

It was another double raid weekend, and we made solid progress. (Our best runs may have been close to enrage.) Because Kan isn’t with us, we get to figure out all the mechanics ourselves. By “we” I generally mean “not me.” numbers is great at observation and intuiting what is going on; newbie records our pulls so we can review what happened; HGR and Dante are great at analyzing the info, figuring out how to make things work, and making MSPaint diagrams for the rest of us.

The hippo is basically a puzzle boss. His major gimmick is that he floods the field with toxic water. There are four raised platforms arranged in a square, with sewer grates running between them, that are safe to walk on—except that one of the platforms, chosen at random, will also be spewing water and fatal to the touch. So all our positioning is relative to the unusable platform instead of absolute. With little ground to stand on, we have to figure out how to position for knockbacks, spreads, and proximity attacks without getting anyone killed.

The hippo is also a gear check. His raidwides do a ton of damage, even through mitigation. If I walked in here with 560 gear and Shadowbringers food, I’d probably get one-shot. Silver was getting one-shot at the end of Sunday’s session, and we later realized his food had run out.