its head comes off?! take care!

Dante couldn’t make Saturday’s session, so GANON (aka FANDANIEL1025 the reaper) subbed for him. For this week’s Eric clear, I parsed 22% and had the highest raw dps on the team! GANON parsed 1%, which was not his fault since he was new to the duty and picking up the mechanics on the fly. Also, he did more raw dps than newbie at 25%. Reaper is busted.

(Meanwhile, HGR did more damage than last time and had a lower parse [67%] because his competition is better geared by now. He’s very salty about this.)

Then we were back to progging hippo. Saturday was largely a cleanup session: we didn’t see any new mechanics, but we understood everything better and got in some good practice. Dante rejoined us for Sunday’s session, and on one of our first pulls we saw enrage at 14%. A couple hours later (including an enrage at 0.7%) and we got our clear. It was down to the wire. The hippo was charging up his final attack; we poured on every bit of dps we had. As the bar hit full, the screen blacked out. “Did we die?” said numbers—but no, the victory cutscene loaded a second later. I was the one who struck the killing blow.

“I love clears like that,” said Dante.

numbers said, “I hate clears like that, where I jump off the edge of the arena.” That happened near the end of the run (dragoon, you must jump). He was quickly revived but was worried that weakness might’ve kept us from clearing. RIP numbers’ hippo parse 2022-2022.

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Meanwhile, the GGG squad is doing the coils of Bahamut. I was looking forward to hearing tales of them dealing with Allagan Rot, but there were no tales to tell; they just cleared on their first try. Although the vets aren’t spoiling mechanics for the new players on the team, there were enough vets that they just passed the rot among themselves without the new players knowing exactly what was happening.

Now they’re fighting Twintania. Early on, one of the new players was like “Why would there be three random dragons at the start of the fight? Surely we have to keep them alive until later” and the vet players quietly rolled their eyes but went with it, so they spent their entire first session on the hardest Twintania fight of all time. Eventually the new players caught on that we want to kill the adds and they’re making progress now.