the same end, again and again

lmao we didn’t beat Hesperos I on Sunday so we just went home, we’re so bad at this

I was discussing this possibility with HGR before raid. He was like “It’s been so long, we’ll have forgotten everything.” And I was like “No way, we’re experts at this game.”

We are not experts at this game. We kept wiping at first Pinax. I’m not sure what went wrong, besides that newbie kept colliding with other people on poison spreads. (That accounted for like three runs—a small fragment of our wipes. I have no idea on the others. I would just look across the field and see half the team dead because ???) We eventually got a couple of close enrages, but those are not exciting any more, just frustrating. Also KJH’s computer was melting or something. I guess that could account for the wipes. We eventually called the session early because we figured we weren’t going to beat the dps check without him being able to do a smooth rotation.

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We did beat Endsinger EX, though! We did it in two sessions (last Sunday + this Saturday), with Kan subbing in.

Endsinger EX toes the line between being gimmicky-cool and gimmicky-annoying. By the end, I wasn’t enjoying it at all, although I’m not sure how much of that was just me being tired and personally bad at the mechanics. It helped my mood that Kan was being loud about how much he thinks the fight sucks. “Let’s kill this bird!!” he kept saying. We finally managed to kill her at the end of our second session thanks to our last pull bonus.

Her primary gimmick: She spawns two planets on opposite intercardinals of the arena—one faster, one slower. The planets spin around the outside of the arena, and eventually the faster one will crash into the slower one, generating an effect. If the planets are blue, it’s knockback, and you want to run toward them. If the planets are orange, it’s aoe, and you want to run away.

The thing is, you can’t wait until the impact to start running. There’s no time. You have to anticipate the impact site and move in advance. Algorithm (courtesy of numbers): The impact site will always be 90 degrees clockwise of the slower planet. This sounds simple but I am so bad at figuring it out. There were so many times I ran confidently in the wrong direction and then got insta-killed. On one occasion I think I got HGR killed because he was following me LOL.

Also, there’s a half-screen attack at the same time (emanating from the head at the center of the arena). On many occasions, I adjusted trajectory to the side to avoid it, and then the knockback attack yeeted me off the edge because it’s a round arena. Garbage mechanic.