final exaltation

We finally did it. We killed a bird.

Last week was supposed to be the week. We came close: we saw our first enrage at 3%. On the very next run, we wiped at first tethers. “From the alpha to the omega,” said HGR. We later got another enrage at 10%, but no clear.

This Saturday was destined to be a fracas because Silver couldn’t make raid. Luis decided to swap to healer, and Dante swapped to tank (he’s technically a tank main, but hasn’t tanked since Shadowbringers). Also, GANON decided to debut his freshly geared black mage.

“I don’t know black mage etiquette,” said newbie.

HGR said, “Black mage etiquette is never criticize the black mage. If you don’t understand what he’s doing, it’s too big brained for you.”

“He’s working on his uptime strats,” said numbers.

During P1S, GANON did a very classic black mage thing of staying on his ley lines instead of stacking with the party for Holy. Everyone was like YEAH BLACK MAGE GO GANON. (He said it was a mistake, he didn’t realize there was a stack, he normally stacks naturally with the party as melee so it didn’t occur to him to move.)

Also I got 40% on hippo, which is a personal best, and had the top raw dps!

“Nobody cares about top dps unless you got top parse,” HGR said. Unsurprisingly his parse beat mine at 46%.

Anyway, Phoinix. Saturday’s attempts went better than expected; on our last run of the day, we got a quasi-enrage at 18% which was interrupted by DUTY FAILED because the instance timed out.

Sunday was a bit of a mess on a personal level because roommate's parents were visiting and I was super distracted by them being in the house. Once I completely forgot to attack my darkfire (thankfully team covered, and nobody said anything). Another time I drew a mental blank on what was happening in the fight. What’s going on? We’re waiting for adds to appear? NO WE’RE STACKING FOR DIVEBOMBS. Thankfully I corrected course in time.

At least I wasn’t the only one having focus issues. Dante wiped us twice on Fledgling Flight 1 because he pointed his bird in instead of out. Fledgling Flight, hardest mechanic in the game.

As for our winning run, I am canonically the worst machinist in the world (0% parse, which I did not know was possible) because I died and was sent a revive as the boss was casting Death’s Toll. DON’T ACCEPT THE REZ was the call, so I didn’t. If you aren’t fully revived when the castbar resolves, you don’t get a debuff and can’t survive the mechanic. (Also I thought it might cause the whole team to fail the mechanic, although in retrospect I don’t think that’s correct…it was a panic moment.) So I waited for like a full minute until Life’s Agonies resolved to accept the revive. OOPS. Well, nowhere to go but up. That’s what re-clears are for.