#or the game i just played had a pretty decent dps on comms so me and the tank (also a woman) started talking

[bobafett]

the catch-22 of overwatch is that games go way smoother when people are actually talking on comms, but also the kinds of people who talk on comms use the most atrocious language you've ever heard in your life

[maximumpenetration]

heavensward: the snacktaku review

My friend, my buddy, my brother in arms for the past year and a half Mettic posted his own Heavensward retrospective about a month and a half ago. And since we all know that originality and creativity are fake news, I’ve decided to do the same thing - I even copied his patch-by-patch breakdown because what is he gonna do about it?

Going into Heavensward, I had been subbed for most of ARR (minus one month). I’d tried forming a raid group in 2.0, telling myself I was only leading it until someone else would step up to the plate, and ended up making a big mess of things. Between then and 3.0 launch I left my FC, rejoined my FC, cleared T5 and T9, and fell behind in Extreme primals, only really catching up with Shiva EX (since it was so easy).

June 10th will also mark the 2nd anniversary of the end of my Quest for Nepto Dragon,  a month-long fishing adventure in catching some of the biggest fish assholes in 2.0. The tag is a sparse two pages, but I can’t tell you how many days I lost tracking weather and trying to catch Kuno the Killer and Shonisaurus - the fact that there’s 20 days between me turning in the first three and turning in these two should be evident enough. But I ended up with the title that I still proudly sport to this day.

With that all said, I ended up going into Heavensward feeling pretty conflicted. I was excited about the content the expansion would bring, but my FC was pretty bare bones, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do outside of “fish more”. I had all jobs at 50, and I’d decided to plow through the Main Scenario as a Warrior for both easy tank queues and because it was the only job I felt comfortable with, so I geared it up as much as I could and stood by for early access to start.

3.0 - Heavensward

I’ve said a few times to my friends that I think Heavensward’s story was heavily rewritten in the middle of production. I have no proof of this, outside of a comment from a presentation at the first set of fanfests that the CG trailers take upwards of a year to complete - it always seemed weird to me that Lolorito is featured looking menacing in the trailer, only to have the entire Before the Fall plotline bottom out early on in the Heavensward main scenario.

Beyond that, though, I really enjoyed the 50-60 experience - even crappy moogle hunt quests couldn’t help keep me down. I blitz through the main scenario - Lodestone tells me I got my WAR60 achievement on the 22nd of June, two days after early access started. Looking back now that seems absurd!

But there’s a weird bit of tranquility that comes with pushing ahead of the majority of people (a lot of whom were busy grinding out the new jobs in Northern Thanalan). Being one of the first people in places like Churning Mists and Dravanian Hinterlands felt like treading on forbidden lands. I remember walking into Idyllshire, recognizing that it was meant to be the new Revenant’s Toll, and just quietly appreciating that very few people were going to get to experience it the way I saw it - almost completely empty save for NPCs, no crowd sounds, no dudes on giant Behemoth mounts crowding around the tomestone vendor.

And even though I felt like I went way too fast, there were still people farming Neverreap and Fractal when I first stepped in there, for the first time really making me appreciate how to pull more than one group of enemies, while also scaring the pants off me in my barely 60, not even fully geared with Law gear setup. 

The very first thing I did after getting to 60 and finishing the main scenario? I went right back to fishing. And then I leveled the other two gatherers for good measure and to get rid of shared gear. Why not? I was planning to level crafting jobs down the line, and I should be able to gather whatever I needed.

Along the way I decided to give this new tanking job a try. My main job was still warrior, though!

Also, in late June/early July I started hearing about this little program called Discord, that made it fairly easy to set up a voice chat server for your groups. I’d been wanting to get away from using the Mumble server of an old, general group of friends for a while now (sometimes the channel names were... not good, and I wanted to invite random people to do group things with and not have them see something stupid and bail immediately).

Now, I don’t mean to brag, but I’d like to personally take responsibility for helping the FFXIV community embrace Discord. In every Extreme party I ran, I’d mention that we used Discord as our VOIP, and that it was free and easy to set up. And then I noticed more and more people picking it up and mentioning it in their PF listings, some of whom I knew I had invited to my server before. So, yeah, everyone make sure to let Hammer & Chisel know how much I mean to them. I’m waiting for my check.

Along the way we also picked up a few new members straight from this blue hellsite! Carlego came a-callin’, and Mettic not long after, and more of their friends after that. People have come and gone since then, but Carlego and Mettic (and Ian, I guess) helped form a new core to our small FC, and the fact that they stick around despite the fact that I’m the FC leader is a testament to their ability and our friendship.

We had a bunch more people in the FC, and a few inactive members even came back. Almost as if we could get a static group of people to do content with. Hmm.

Other quick notes because this section is getting way too long (the others won’t be as long I promise): Bismarck and Ravana EX were fun fights. I had a lot of fun main tanking, off tanking, and later (once Mettic got his Warrior to 60) DPSing and healing Ravana. I still hadn’t planned to do Savage in 3.0, and hearing the horror stories of A3S didn’t make it sound any better. Also I absolutely hated doing A2N, and the thought of that fight being even harder chilled me to the core. No thanks. Gordian gear looks like trash. I’m really proud of this dumb post.

3.1 - As Goes Light, So Goes Darkness

I’ll be real with ya’ll - I get absolutely petrified when it comes to doing new difficult fights. This is a weird thing to say as someone who allegedly leads seven other dudes into really hard fights, but it’s true. I try to get around it by consuming as much about a new fight as I can before we do it, but even then I think there’s no better way to learn a fight than to actually do it, and it’s super frustrating when, in this game, you need to learn the back half of a fight, but you’re still somewhat shaky on the front half.

Thordan EX is alleged to have eleven phases, some of which require more precise positioning than others. I could mostly pick up the first half of the fight, but as a group we barely got to the back half of the fight often enough that I found myself constantly second-guessing my positions for certain mechanics. I absolutely hate this fight - not just because we didn’t clear it before 3.1 ended, but because even today I cannot make the back half of the fight click in my head. It’s a wonderfully designed encounter with great music and cool looking weapons - I’m just not keen on going back without being able to clown it at 70. ᵃᶫˢᵒ ᵗʰᵉ ᶦᶰᶠᶦᵍʰᵗᶦᶰᵍ ᵈᶦᵈᶰ'ᵗ ʰᵉᶫᵖ ᵇᵘᵗ ʷʰᵃᵗᵉᵛᵉʳ ʸᵒᵘ ᶜᵃᶰ'ᵗ ᶠᶦˣ ˢᵒᵐᵉ ᵖᵉᵒᵖᶫᵉ

By this point, Mettic had taken up the mantle of the group’s Warrior, and I’d leveled both Paladin and Dark Knight to 60, but for learning new fights I felt infinitely more comfortable on Paladin. I’d kept leveling other jobs slowly, but nothing really clicked with me outside of tanking. 

We still never touched Savage, and most of our hardcore groupups were for throwing our bodies at Thordan more. Not the best time in terms of progression, but no one was quitting out of frustration or anything, and we had a pretty decent stable of people in the FC covering a lot of time zones, so I like to think everyone had a good time.

I don’t know who the two cats are.

3.2 - Gears of Change

3.1 extreme primal was kind of a bummer, but I think we hit the ground running with 3.2. Obviously, not everything worked out for everyone (you should go ask Yamcha Mettic that), but Sephirot was a strong fight, and one that I found myself really enjoying. The mechanics are cleanly spelled out for you, tanking that wind up punch feels metal as hell, and the 2nd phase music is bumpin. It’s also the first time I decided I should really hash out how to play Dark Knight - it’s the first time I really started noticing PLD was popping at the seams, although I wasn’t ready to give the job up completely yet.

Yes, I know Carve and Spit is off cooldown. I was learning!

3.2 also saw us starting up our raid static! We stepped in there with our shiny new Shephirot weapons thinking we were kings of shit mountain, but I think we were humbled pretty quickly, even if our first Hummelfaust kill was absolutely dirty.

Let me take the time to say that I hate the Faust series of mobs. I realize that having a bodyguard at the front door check your DPS license before you’re let into the club lets weaker groups know that they need to work on their gear/skill, but as a poor idiot tank it’s the most boring stuff in the world. Don’t move, run your cooldowns, and hope the rest of your team can shit out enough damage to kill it before you run out of cooldowns. These fights are fuckin’ lame.

I’ll touch on Midas more in the next section, but on reflection I think 3.2 was when I started jumping into party finder groups less and less. It stemmed mostly from frustration with pubbie Sephirot parties seemingly unable to grasp very basic mechanics, but at the same time I think I was scared - my biggest fear when it comes to public groups is walking in thinking I’m Mr. Big Dick after clearing the content and messing up some incredibly basic thing. I’ve also gotten more and more reliant on voice comms for hard content, so joining a group that doesn’t have a VoIP setup started becoming an instant turn off.

3.3 - Revenge of the Horde

I’m not sure how I feel about Nidhogg Extreme, mostly because I don’t remember much about it. As a group we had some trouble tank swapping the adds, and I know other people (😏) had trouble with positioning and figuring out where divebombs were coming from, but the fight itself seemed pretty trivial from a tank perspective. It’s another fight I went on Dark Knight on after getting comfortable with Paladin, and playing Dark Knight started necessitating that I experiment with dropping tank stance more often. This is definitely one of my favorites out of this expansion.

I think my refusal or inability to put my foot down when it came to people missing days in Midas is what really dragged the group down. It’s something I’d tried to be more proactive about both as Midas continued and we shifted to Creator, but as far as the game goes I feel like a lot of the burden from us not getting farther in Midas is on me. That’s not to say it wasn’t fun - holy shit, some of our groups best memes and jokes came out of Midas, especially T6 with how stir-crazy we were going from being stuck in that tier for so long. But I should’ve been ready to drop people sooner, instead of holding out hoping they’d be able to fix themselves. We ended up eventually clearing A6S, then going in to A7S a couple of times before things started falling apart. After the dust settled, we'd lost one member to personal obligations and the other to the allure of an EU server. We found replacements in-house where we could, but Midas was done. We’d take a fresh step forward with Creator, and hopefully do better.

Also 3.3 added the Novice Network. What a terrible, horrible, no good very bad shithole that place is. I’m pretty sure the chat actively turns new players off from playing the game (at least on Hyperion). Worthless discussions, dudes who think just because they’ve got a crown they’re king of shit mountain, and completely ignoring actual requests from new players for assistance are just some of the dumb shit that goes on in there. Another mentor actually sent me a tell once when I offered to make a new guy some gear that I shouldn’t spoonfeed newbies. What the fuck? Fuck you.

I hear in JP servers the novice network serves its purpose. That’s great for them. Delete Novice Network from Primal and Aether.

3.4 - Soul Surrender

Sophia Extreme was a joke. It also made joining PUGs more appealing to me. Using the fight to kit out most of my active jobs was a nice way to spend time, but the fight itself left zero impact on me and the weapon designs are boring as hell. I did end up going Paladin on this fight more so we could cheese one of the tankbusters with Invincible.

Our Creator static started off extremely well. We downed A9S quickly (fuck Faust fights still) and A10S fell not long after that. Then we. . . kind of stalled at A11S for a while. Mettic says we cleared A11S before 3.5, which I don’t clearly remember so I’ll defer to him on that. There was always something tripping someone up, and I got incredibly frustrated with some of the group seemingly unable to “get it”, or worse acting outright belligerent at the idea of following a laid out strategy at all, and that was if we didn’t suddenly have a last minute cancellation from a member. I did follow through with trying harder to find replacements for absent members, but sometimes you can’t and I’d rather guarantee someone a quick A9 and A10 win than go begging for someone to come learn A11 with us.  It was frustrating for me personally because I felt like we were right back in A6S - all the pieces were there, but we couldn’t put them together. Thankfully we did pull through, but it would take us another four months after our A11S clear to finish the fight in A12S.

What did end up happening during our A11S prog was I stopped pussyfooting around with the idea of playing DRK in endgame content and just dove in. The idea triggered after a particularly nasty wipe that we had gotten so close to winning, and my basic thinking was that if I had been a DRK, that would’ve given us enough DPS to win it. There was an immediate improvement in our times after I switched, and it’s a job I’ve grown from almost hating in 3.0 to considering it my main through the rest of the expansion cycle.

I don’t have a ton of screenshots from this patch. There just wasn’t a lot going on at the time. We were plugging away at our Creator prog, and I’d be working on my Paladin relic (finish what I started) or some other fluff, but for the most part this patch was all about the raids for me.

3.5 - The Far Edge of Fate

I suspect when my FC members heard me say I wasn’t that interested in farming Zurvan, they thought it was because I thought it was too hard. Not really - on paper, the mechanics looked simple enough, and I was sure we could get it done. But at this point we’d had A11S mostly on farm, which meant each week one very special boy was getting a 270 weapon. Suddenly the appeal of a weaker primal weapon was a lot lower. In fact, the rest of my raid group ended up getting their Zurvan clear before me - I don’t remember why exactly, I think I was just busy on the day they wanted to run it. I did eventually clear it, but it’s the one fight I’ve never tanked, having taken in a SCH with ghetto Accuracy melds to do some passable DPS. Not my finest hour, but it’s just so hard to care.

A12S prog continued along. We still had issues with people missing days or becoming busy, but we worked along with it as much as we could.

And then almost in quick succession, we lost two people. To real life obligations - they didn’t die or anything.

Since this is 3.5, and the cross-world Party Finder had just been added, we found ourselves in a good situation where we had the ability to recruit from beyond our server. We eventually ended up picking two dudes, and progress continued. We had a lot less interruptions, and made some good progress. We were dangerously close to getting a clear!

And then one of the dudes just unceremoniously dropped from the Discord server.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll continue to say it - if we hadn’t had so many interruptions in our raid schedule, we would’ve definitely cleared Creator Savage before echo. Everyone knew what they were doing, and even if we clowned around a lot we still got shit done. But there were too many interruptions, too many people having to dip out at bad times. It didn’t help that our A12S strategy drew more from Angered FC’s clear, when Xenosys’ video strat ended up becoming the one most people got used to (side note: I fucking hate video-only guides).

But we, eventually, after enough blood, sweat, tears, and a little bit of echo, were able to get our clear in.

Onward to Stormblood

Two years ago, I wouldn’t have thought that at the end of an expansion I’d be sitting here today, telling you about how much of a failure I felt like trying to raid the game again. I’d honestly thought I was done with prog after my Binding Coil group fell apart, and I really thought I was done when a Second Coil group I joined also broke apart due to infighting. But here I am anyway, and despite feeling like I could’ve done so much better than I did, at the same time it’s a weirdly good type of feeling - I know I can do better, that we as a group can do better, and it’s something I want to push for as we get ready for Stormblood and Omega. And I’d love to say that I’ll be tanking as I always have, but man they added Red Mage to the game and that’s my job, and from the Live Letter and subsequent info it looks so fun you guys - so I’ll be picking that up, with another one of our trusty members jumping in as a tank instead. We’ve got a group that’s mostly stuck together through two raid tiers, and one of our Midas members is even coming back to us!

Aside from actually clearing a raid tier on time, I’d like to dive back into Party Finder and not be so scared of failure on a public front anymore.  Cross-server PFs means that I’m just another faceless dude in a sea of faceless dudes, and even if I screw up royally as long as I don’t make too big a scene the other dudes aren’t even gonna remember me. And hey, if you’ve made it this far and somehow aren’t someone who follows me, give me a shout-out and let’s work on stuff together! (as long as you’re on a Primal server). I’d love to meet new people from this site now that cross-server play is easier than ever.

In conclusion: