FFXIV – Where I Hate Dive Bombs

It’s been a big week in FFXIV.

I finished out the 2.2 and 2.3 main scenario quests, getting through both the Leviathan and Ramuh trials with relative ease. Both PUGs beat them on the first try despite me not knowing what to do when Ramuh tethers you to someone else (hint: pick up 3 blue orbs like Pac-Man).

Over on the Dragoon class, I finished the first relic quest to get my Zenith Gae Bolg spear, and also picked up the Onion gear set from Labyrinth (well, all but the belt, but you can’t see that). It’s nice to have a dragoon set that doesn’t make me look like a terrifying robot.

Just so you know, you young whippersnappers doing those three Hard Trials for the relic quest have it soooooo easy now. I blew through all three in heavily overgeared PUGs without any sweat. You barely have to worry about the mechanics now. There was only one wipe on Garuda when the DPS wasn’t quite high enough to burn down the boss while ignoring the adds. It was nuts.

Back on my Bard, I finally picked up the last of my Atmas and upgraded my Artemis Bow, which was pretty cool until I noticed that it doesn’t glow anymore. Now there’s a whole new grind of books to make it glow again. And then apparently there’s a hundred more upgrades after that. So, yeah, no shortage of tasks to work on there while waiting for queues. (Sadly everyone is camping the mobs you need to kill.)

Saturday I finally delved into the World of Darkness for the first time, which went surprisingly well. I lucked out and got a really nice group that helped me (and one other newbie) with the mechanics. I still died a lot, but overall it could have been a lot worse. And I picked up the Demon Tabard of Aiming so I have nothing to complain about. (If I’m not mistaken, that continues my streak of getting a drop in my first run of all three Crystal Tower raids.)

And I’ve been continuing to level my Black Mage class, which is now up to 40. I don’t know why I’m doing it, though. Black Mage seems to be the new Bard-everyone has one. Probably because it does ridiculous damage and it has that sweet, sweet AoE Limit Break.

In the crafting department, I think I’m either going to level Alchemist or Leatherworking next. And after Black Mage, it’ll be the dreaded Gladiator/Paladin, the most terrifying of roles in FFXIV (for me, at least). Especially now that all the DPS people are over-geared and doing Low-Level Roulettes, so it’ll be that much harder to hold threat.

Bahamut Turn 5

Wednesday night I joined a guild group doing Bahamut turn 5. It was kind of a comedy of errors for me. I plugged in my USB headset to get in TeamSpeak before we started but of course I forgot that FFXIV has never been able to detect when to switch to headphone audio so I had game sounds coming from my speakers and voices coming through the headset. Then I discovered that despite checking and double-checking all the settings it refused to broadcast when I did push-to-talk. So that was annoying.

As far as learning the fight everything seemed okay until the accursed Dive Bombs, where I seemed to have a complete mental block on how to avoid getting hit. “Run up the hill after you hear the beeps” seems like a pretty simple concept but it sure wasn’t working for me and it’s probably just as well my mic wasn’t working at that point for all the variations of dubya-tee-eff coming out of me. I can’t believe it was because I was too slow because on my screen it looked like I was among the first out of there every time. Which makes me think I was too fast, but if the objective is to dodge an AoE how can you be too fast? Maybe I was laggy and didn’t realize it. The only thing I can figure is that I must not have been accounting for my position relative to the targeted player. (Conceptually it seems similar to one of the dragons in Syrcus Tower where one guy gets a target and you have to move away from him.)

Whatever it was, based on reading and watching videos afterward, it didn’t seem like it should have been that difficult. It was especially frustrating because it didn’t feel like I did anything different between the times I was hit and the times I wasn’t hit. (I wish id recorded it so i could see what i did wrong. Think I will do that from now on, if I don’t get summarily banned from ever going again.)

Anyway despite that it was fun. I like the approach FFXIV takes to raids. There is a component of learning what to do, but even if you know exactly what to do, the execution of it often takes some practice to get it right.