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My group blind-playing each fight from the beginning of the game MiNE just beat Brute Justice this weekend!
Second longest we've taken since Savage Melusine. Rumour has it that those two are the hardest Savage fights in the game.
Soon we will have to test our mettle against Ultimates. Not sure if we'll actually do those blind or if those are hard enough already though.
Trying to completely blind prog ultimates is going to be a waste of your time imo, since there's a lot of puzzle solving that's not going to be fun to try to figure out. I'd read what each mechanic does and then try to come up with your own solution if you want, but I would defintely not try to figure them out from scratch. They're hard enough (well most of them) to do even if you know what each mechanic is and how to do them.
Yeah, I think that's the direction we'll probably go.
We're not militant about the blind prog anyway. Sometimes we get fills that give us hints, and just, y'know existing in the community means you learn things (for example, I already know about the UwU boss awakening mechanic, although not the specifics about how to trigger/fully resolve it).
Have you been doing bosses at min ilvl or just standard level sync?
League of Legends: Sorakanmyworld
FFXIV: Tchel Fay
Nintendo ID: Tortalius
Steam: Tortalius
Stream: twitch.tv/tortalius
0
Sir FabulousMalevolent Squid GodRegistered Userregular
EE2 isn't even hard. the hardest part is the healers getting people healed up enough while still having time to run their ass all the way across the arena
Which has been your favorite so far? I'm very partial to Melusine and Midas 2 with the 4 bots.
League of Legends: Sorakanmyworld
FFXIV: Tchel Fay
Nintendo ID: Tortalius
Steam: Tortalius
Stream: twitch.tv/tortalius
0
Sir FabulousMalevolent Squid GodRegistered Userregular
edited August 2024
ARR:
Favs were Rafflesia and Avatar.
Rafflesia felt like the first time everyone had to know exactly what they were doing in order to clear. Huge step up in personal learning curve.
Avatar was like a big puzzle where we had to pull out a spreadsheet and time out everything in the fight. And it felt like our solution was ours, since every step was catered towards our specific comp with individual player strengths and weaknesses.
Did not care for most of Coils, though. Divebombs locked in differently in each fight and were a huge pain to work with every time.
Melusine was extremely difficult, but I play melee DPS, so I had the fight down pretty early since I didn't have many responsibilities. Meanwhile, the fight is absolutely brutal for rDPS and Healers, so it took forever to get through while being pretty boring for me.
Nael was also very hard, but once we worked out a good meteor dropping strat that part of the fight really started to drag. 3+ minutes where there was absolutely no challenge and we had to wait around a good bit twiddling our thumbs.
Heavensward:
I know people hate Onslaughter, but I thought it was fine. We knew there was a cheese strat for Nisi, but wanted to do it as intended so it felt like a sort of extra little achievement to beat that one.
4 bots and later Brute Justice was perfect. Super fun to prog, since every phase is so different and requires good execution from whole party.
Made me think of the difference between Nael and Brute Justice when they both took us similar amounts of time but Nael felt like agony due to boring first phase and intermission while Justice was a blast from start to finish (plus the best soundtrack in the game).
just met Shadowhunter and have we met any black mask Asians at this point? Everyone I can think of (mainly Lahebrea, whoever he fuses with, and Elidibus) wear red. The camera treats the single white mask as something special so I'm assuming that comes up in the future but he has a ton of black mask and I don't remember seeing any before.
0
gavindelThe reason all your softwareis brokenRegistered Userregular
just met Shadowhunter and have we met any black mask Asians at this point? Everyone I can think of (mainly Lahebrea, whoever he fuses with, and Elidibus) wear red. The camera treats the single white mask as something special so I'm assuming that comes up in the future but he has a ton of black mask and I don't remember seeing any before.
Black masks are the generic bad guys from some of the earlier dungeons. For example, an Ascian summons the end boss to Tam Tara. They're just mooks, don't even have names.
Palace of the Dead floors 180+ have no chill. Just wiped on 191. Man, that place...
iirc black masks are literally random people that the red masks kidnap & subject to tempering/a memory overwrite, along with a big boost of power/aether. but yeah they're mooks. Elidibus even creates a whole bunch of them in the post Shadowbringers quests to serve as cackling antagonists for the newly awakened Echo-bearing heroes, as part of his attempt to force a Rejoining despite your efforts.
just met Shadowhunter and have we met any black mask Asians at this point? Everyone I can think of (mainly Lahebrea, whoever he fuses with, and Elidibus) wear red. The camera treats the single white mask as something special so I'm assuming that comes up in the future but he has a ton of black mask and I don't remember seeing any before.
Ascian hierarchies
There are three tiers of Ascians, broadly speaking.
The highest tier is what the Encyclopedia Eorzea 1 called "Ascians of the Source" back in 3.x (although they've since dropped that). They're the ones in charge of the entire organization. There's Lahabrea, Elidibus (the Emissary, supposedly neutral), and Emet-Selch (who you probably haven't met yet?).
The middle tier is the rest of the red-masked Ascians. That's Nabriales (dead in 2.5), Igeyorhm (dead in 3.0), Emmerololth (gets a shout-out in Eureka Hydatos), Altima and Deudalaphon (the two red masks Shadowhunter has, although keep in mind what it takes to actually kill an Ascian)... and that's all the ones of note you might've seen. Since they're based on FF12's Espers of Light, you may or may not know the rest of the names of the thirteen named Ascians: Loghrif, Mitron, Pashtarot, Fandaniel, and Halmarut.
These guys are all still powerful enough to be a danger, though. Nabriales was something like a ~8,000 year old mage who still wipes Duty Finder parties to this day, and if you did the Warring Triad quests you might've heard that Igeyorhm was the one responsible for making the Void what it is.
The lowest tier is the black-masked Ascian mooks. This is where you get the Masked Mage you kill at level 16, the Ascians of the Twelth Pentacle et. al. in the Summoner quests (they work for Lahabrea, btw, hence the "Twelth"), etc. etc.
These are, presumably, just anyone with the Echo that is willing to trade with the Ascians for the secrets of immortality. Perhaps the Sahagin priest from 2.2 could've been one, had he not gotten eaten by Leviathan.
At some point they kind of stopped showing up, presumably because they're no longer on our level.
(I kind of assume that Travanchet and Corguevais, the Ascians behind the 1.0 Limsa and Ul'dah intro stories respectively, were black-masked Ascians. They might be psuedonyms for named ones, though. Travanchet showed up again in the Alexander quests - he's the guy who gave the horn to Mide's group, and thus helped them summon Alexander.)
As for the white mask you noticed, here's a little image someone made when 4.3 was originally released and people had two and a half months to stew on it:
gavindelThe reason all your softwareis brokenRegistered Userregular
Finally got Necromancer. All three deep dungeon solo titles are now mine.
Overall, I think POTD is the worst one. Heaven on High has a good balance between "merciless difficulty" and "fun tools" with Magicite, petri, and conceal. It has a slight flaw in that the RNG swing on the 90 set's debuffs can just outright delete your run no matter what you're running.
Eureka Orthos has the most "modern" design, playing much closer to modern mechanics. I like how EO is much more open to most classes, though its unique poms aren't quite as much fun. Storms are dependent on no regen debuffs to really shine, and dread combining lust into rage means they're too precious to use regularly. Once you've memorized the mob abilities, its difficulty relative to other DD drops like a rock.
Palace of the Dead has the original experience. Its greatest sin is just being so damn long. I was averaging 15 hours per upper floor attempt at first. Even with practice and optimization, getting to the upper floors took 8 to 10 hours. That's a lot of time to drop into something where you can get deleted by a gloom double crit in a blink. After having done the other two, I keenly felt the lack of the secondary pom powers (ie, magicite or demiclones).
Work has been busy so I didn't have a chance to grind M4S clear parties as hard as I wanted to this week, and the ones I did join were varying degrees of horrible
Joined a random 2 chest clear party this afternoon and we killed it on the first pull; I was honestly shocked.
First time fully killing a tier in PF versus with a static, it was an interesting experience
I've done the whole fight but attempts that make it to sunrise always fail on sunrise. it's so easy too, you have like 20 seconds to get to where you need to go. twilight is a much faster mechanic.
Sunrise is simple yeah, I think people just pay too much attention to other people? You literally just look at your debuff, do your job, and fuck everyone else
Honestly the things that got me the most in p2 were randomly forgetting about the Wicked Special after Midnight
sunrise is like e12s lions, where the positioning is just very strict, regardless of which strat you use. silver lining is that with a few weeks worth of gear, groups with decent damage stand a good chance at just skipping it outright
a combination of lots of failing until there's some muscle memory, doing things like walking jumps to get consistent short ones, and mitigating bad inputs by doing stuff like angling so you bonk into a wall if you go too far or have more runway space
Yeah. There's a bit of a curve on jump distance based on exactly how long you held down forward before jumping - you don't need a ton of time to get full distance but it makes it really hard to line some of them up.
bringing Zenos back twice at the same time is dumb but I don't think I can complain because it gets us more scenery chewing masochist Zenos and we didn't get nearly enough of that in 4.0.
Onto the Crystal Tower
+8
admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
bringing Zenos back twice at the same time is dumb but I don't think I can complain because it gets us more scenery chewing masochist Zenos and we didn't get nearly enough of that in 4.0.
Meanwhile I just cleared M3S yesterday and feeling pretty good about progress. Might be a couple weeks before we start on 4, though... some people getting distracted by World of Warcraft. I really like this tier so far! It manages to feel challenging without feeling unfair, relative to the likes of Phoinix. I like how rare it is for the whole party to be screwed instantly because of one person's mistake.
On the note of recovery during prog, I've been a Red Mage main for a while now and continue to feel very good about that. But starting with M2S, I decided to swap over to Pictomancer once we had gotten up to the last mechanic. And considering my first clears of both the 2nd and 3rd fights were both last millisecond nail-biters, I think I'm gonna continue to do that. Doing that with Black Mage was always kind of a thing, but it didn't really work out in practice both because they frequently wanted different gear than the other casters, and because of the general difficulty of Black Mage. You'd basically have to relearn fights to figure out how to do well on Black Mage for it, but Picto isn't nearly as daunting.
Posts
Have you been doing bosses at min ilvl or just standard level sync?
FFXIV: Tchel Fay
Nintendo ID: Tortalius
Steam: Tortalius
Stream: twitch.tv/tortalius
Switch Friend Code: SW-1406-1275-7906
Which has been your favorite so far? I'm very partial to Melusine and Midas 2 with the 4 bots.
FFXIV: Tchel Fay
Nintendo ID: Tortalius
Steam: Tortalius
Stream: twitch.tv/tortalius
Favs were Rafflesia and Avatar.
Rafflesia felt like the first time everyone had to know exactly what they were doing in order to clear. Huge step up in personal learning curve.
Avatar was like a big puzzle where we had to pull out a spreadsheet and time out everything in the fight. And it felt like our solution was ours, since every step was catered towards our specific comp with individual player strengths and weaknesses.
Did not care for most of Coils, though. Divebombs locked in differently in each fight and were a huge pain to work with every time.
Melusine was extremely difficult, but I play melee DPS, so I had the fight down pretty early since I didn't have many responsibilities. Meanwhile, the fight is absolutely brutal for rDPS and Healers, so it took forever to get through while being pretty boring for me.
Nael was also very hard, but once we worked out a good meteor dropping strat that part of the fight really started to drag. 3+ minutes where there was absolutely no challenge and we had to wait around a good bit twiddling our thumbs.
Heavensward:
I know people hate Onslaughter, but I thought it was fine. We knew there was a cheese strat for Nisi, but wanted to do it as intended so it felt like a sort of extra little achievement to beat that one.
4 bots and later Brute Justice was perfect. Super fun to prog, since every phase is so different and requires good execution from whole party.
Made me think of the difference between Nael and Brute Justice when they both took us similar amounts of time but Nael felt like agony due to boring first phase and intermission while Justice was a blast from start to finish (plus the best soundtrack in the game).
Switch Friend Code: SW-1406-1275-7906
Palace of the Dead floors 180+ have no chill. Just wiped on 191. Man, that place...
Ascian hierarchies
The highest tier is what the Encyclopedia Eorzea 1 called "Ascians of the Source" back in 3.x (although they've since dropped that). They're the ones in charge of the entire organization. There's Lahabrea, Elidibus (the Emissary, supposedly neutral), and Emet-Selch (who you probably haven't met yet?).
The middle tier is the rest of the red-masked Ascians. That's Nabriales (dead in 2.5), Igeyorhm (dead in 3.0), Emmerololth (gets a shout-out in Eureka Hydatos), Altima and Deudalaphon (the two red masks Shadowhunter has, although keep in mind what it takes to actually kill an Ascian)... and that's all the ones of note you might've seen. Since they're based on FF12's Espers of Light, you may or may not know the rest of the names of the thirteen named Ascians: Loghrif, Mitron, Pashtarot, Fandaniel, and Halmarut.
These guys are all still powerful enough to be a danger, though. Nabriales was something like a ~8,000 year old mage who still wipes Duty Finder parties to this day, and if you did the Warring Triad quests you might've heard that Igeyorhm was the one responsible for making the Void what it is.
The lowest tier is the black-masked Ascian mooks. This is where you get the Masked Mage you kill at level 16, the Ascians of the Twelth Pentacle et. al. in the Summoner quests (they work for Lahabrea, btw, hence the "Twelth"), etc. etc.
These are, presumably, just anyone with the Echo that is willing to trade with the Ascians for the secrets of immortality. Perhaps the Sahagin priest from 2.2 could've been one, had he not gotten eaten by Leviathan.
At some point they kind of stopped showing up, presumably because they're no longer on our level.
(I kind of assume that Travanchet and Corguevais, the Ascians behind the 1.0 Limsa and Ul'dah intro stories respectively, were black-masked Ascians. They might be psuedonyms for named ones, though. Travanchet showed up again in the Alexander quests - he's the guy who gave the horn to Mide's group, and thus helped them summon Alexander.)
As for the white mask you noticed, here's a little image someone made when 4.3 was originally released and people had two and a half months to stew on it:
How very glib.
Overall, I think POTD is the worst one. Heaven on High has a good balance between "merciless difficulty" and "fun tools" with Magicite, petri, and conceal. It has a slight flaw in that the RNG swing on the 90 set's debuffs can just outright delete your run no matter what you're running.
Eureka Orthos has the most "modern" design, playing much closer to modern mechanics. I like how EO is much more open to most classes, though its unique poms aren't quite as much fun. Storms are dependent on no regen debuffs to really shine, and dread combining lust into rage means they're too precious to use regularly. Once you've memorized the mob abilities, its difficulty relative to other DD drops like a rock.
Palace of the Dead has the original experience. Its greatest sin is just being so damn long. I was averaging 15 hours per upper floor attempt at first. Even with practice and optimization, getting to the upper floors took 8 to 10 hours. That's a lot of time to drop into something where you can get deleted by a gloom double crit in a blink. After having done the other two, I keenly felt the lack of the secondary pom powers (ie, magicite or demiclones).
Getting all 3 titles took about 400 hours.
I was happy just getting the EO solo (though it has the best title imo... a large part of why I went for it)
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
Fucking finally...
Work has been busy so I didn't have a chance to grind M4S clear parties as hard as I wanted to this week, and the ones I did join were varying degrees of horrible
Joined a random 2 chest clear party this afternoon and we killed it on the first pull; I was honestly shocked.
First time fully killing a tier in PF versus with a static, it was an interesting experience
Honestly the things that got me the most in p2 were randomly forgetting about the Wicked Special after Midnight
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
Onto the Crystal Tower
This is a Good Take and it will be rewarded.
On the note of recovery during prog, I've been a Red Mage main for a while now and continue to feel very good about that. But starting with M2S, I decided to swap over to Pictomancer once we had gotten up to the last mechanic. And considering my first clears of both the 2nd and 3rd fights were both last millisecond nail-biters, I think I'm gonna continue to do that. Doing that with Black Mage was always kind of a thing, but it didn't really work out in practice both because they frequently wanted different gear than the other casters, and because of the general difficulty of Black Mage. You'd basically have to relearn fights to figure out how to do well on Black Mage for it, but Picto isn't nearly as daunting.
I'm guessing it was supposed to be a bunch of poetics but they sure looked like a stack of cell phones