my dormant brethren, dream now of a dark tomorrow

We beat Hades EX! Kan was really enjoying his "chunky boi" status. He kept talking about it, asking the healers for extra heals and such. (But this is part of what I like about him; he's so boisterous. Possibly the healers appreciated it less.)

I forgot to get an exaflare explanation from HGR, so instead I asked Kan. He was like, "Oh, it's just like [something] from Midgardsormr" to which I nodded blankly (heck if I remember anything about Midgardsormr) and then the fight was already starting. I really should've talked to HGR. But it turned out to be harmless error. After we wiped twice to exaflares, Kan decided to pull out the cheese strat: he stuck a waymark on a spot near the middle of the arena and said THIS IS A SAFESPOT. STAND HERE DON'T MOVE. And that's what we did.

Sadly, on our winning run, I died right before the final phase, so I missed out on the chains-of-darkness QTE and the blessing of Light. Shout-out to past me, doing Hades Normal on release on my old laptop: I was lagging so badly that I failed the QTE and got killed in cutscene in front of the entire team. It was hilarious (well, more so in retrospect). My death today was less dramatic, but still annoying—I wound up 1.5k dps behind newbie.

Beating Hades means we're back to current content, starting with Ruby Weapon EX. Months ago, Luis asked Kan about this fight, and Kan said that pugging it was "trivial," but maybe he just has a different definition of trivial. (Or, more likely, his pubs all looked up guides beforehand, which we don't do. Gotta get the full experience.) In any case, I spent a large majority of the lockout confused and/or dead. I try to view the latter as a learning opportunity. I'm very bad at figuring things out on the fly, but being dead so much, I get to watch each mechanic a few times before doing it myself.

Silver called the session early, after just one Ruby Weapon lockout. For once in his life HGR was not grumpy about this, because he wanted to get back to Rabi-Ribi. He logged out almost as quickly as Silver did.

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edit: I belatedly asked HGR about the exaflares. Turns out they're really simple, in principle: they're big round buttons with arrows on them, and they shoot a line of aoes in the direction of the arrow. The tricky part (that I didn't realize) is that they spawn on both sides of the arena, so you have to watch both sides. Or, y'know, just stand on the safespot.