bad boys big donuts

HGR had a dream that he was doing trial roulette and somehow got Titan Savage. But it wasn't just Titan, it was a whole Praetorium-length dungeon with midbosses and such, and Titan was the final boss. Two of HGR's party members hated each other for some reason. When the team finally got to Titan, one of them (HGR's co-healer) got fed up and left. Frey came in to replace, saw what duty it was, and immediately also left. Then the party slowly disbanded without ever actually fighting Titan.

I feel like this is the HGR version of my recurring dreams about failing all my classes.

Meanwhile, Kan, our resident hotdogger, posted his Eden's Verse stats: 95% on Ramuh, 97% on Ifrit/Garuda, 96% on Iconoclasm, 88% on Shiva. "Getting there," he said. "Next week I get the Edenchoir gunblade and I think I go hard on Shiva parsing. I want that all-orange lineup."

Today, I was the asshole holding up raid, because Mom and Dad stopped by to deliver a load of groceries. (Their area: 200 covid cases. Our area: 50K+.) They had planned to arrive at noon, but got delayed until 12:55 pm, and I didn't finish sanitizing every item and putting it all away until 1:35 pm. Our scheduled raid time is 1 pm. Oops. I did warn everyone I'd be late, but I didn't expect to be that late.

By the time I arrived, Silver and Kan had left to do other stuff, so we waited another 20 minutes for them to return. While we waited, we checked out the very exciting fellowship board. Dante showed off his sweet admin badge for the Arkwright family fellowship. numbers joined a fellowship for "dummy thicc bad boys." newbie, who's addicted to virtual Youtubers, created a Hololive fellowship and then deleted it before anyone could join.

Eventually we were all together and ready to tackle Ruby Weapon EX. "Maybe this time we'll figure out the first attack," said HGR.

We did figure out the first attack, and then we beat the raid in a single lockout (with around 90 seconds to spare), so I guess the first attack really was the limiting factor. Surprisingly, the first phase was way more mechanically intense than the second. Nael isn't what she used to be. But I did love the callbacks to the original Nael fight. LUNAR DYNAMO GET IN (me: "man I want a big donut")

After that, we had extra time, so we screwed around doing Stormblood EX primals. We did Susano EX first and found him trivial at our item level, despite being synced. numbers said he would leave if we didn't min ilvl the next one. Then Luis, the party leader, started Byakko EX without setting min item level. numbers, true to his word, left. Five minutes later, after we wiped, Kan was like, "Where's numbers? He disconnected?"

We explained the situation. So we all left the duty, numbers rejoined, Luis checked the min ilvl box, and we re-entered the duty.

We beat Byakko in a couple tries. Afterwards, we were like "that was awfully forgiving for an EX primal" so we double-checked and found we were not actually at min ilvl. Luis swears he checked the box, but apparently he didn't confirm his change of settings. Oh well; at least it wasn't a curbstomp like Susano. Plus, the flying minigame is hilarious. Best moment: During the flying minigame, for science, Kan decided to test if the edges of the arena were lethal. They were. (I love the dead animation, you just spin around on your head like a top) Then we're like "what is the narrative justification for this" "turbulence" "meisnewbie, what is turbulence"

Also we did the Ridorana Lighthouse alliance raid for newbie and Kan was discussing its merits as a terrain compared to Draklor Laboratory. you're the best Kanzaris