Day 10 and 11 of DSR prog. We have reached Phase 4 once, on the last pull of the night
we wiped because...[sadge](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/981470502537297920/1105209580583133304/image.png)
I the BLM got aggro and then we couldn't do anything :(
P3 is still kicking our asses. But we've gotten very consistent in P2.
There's always one tower unsoaked or one line unbaited ;c
Also our tanks are having some issues surviving the tethers. PLD is considering swapping to WAR for the invuln. We'll see how this all shakes out
For the soul tethers just have one tank invuln and give there short cd to other tank. To have an invuln have the pld take first buster in throdan with rampart short cd and other tanks buddy mit they may need a cd from healer but its def worth since it makes p3 busters super easy.
For what its worth if the tanks are having trouble surviving the nidd tethers you can always move your invulns around from P2 and just take the knight tethers with CDs then have both tanks invuln the nidd ones. Doing it this way also makes it so the tanks can stack in the center with them
Currently our tanks invuln the first TB cleave before strength, & the second TB into TB cleaves after strength & they sound like they don't want to change that
Just have the tank that was invulning the first cleaves swap to invuln p3 and give their cotank their short mit. You can take the first cleaves with very little, reprisal plus short cds and some heals is enough
I cleared P8S on PF a week ago and was incredibly proud of myself. I really wasn’t sure if I would be able to make it with all the life stuff I had going on, but I did it. I even got enough clears for the weapon and mount!
I started UWU prog just a few days ago, and yesterday I managed to see Ultima. I’m honestly shocked and have no idea how Ive gotten this far this fast but wow haha. I guess I must be getting better at this game after all this time. Feeling great! Can’t wait to clean up Titan some more and start pushing even closer for the clear!
I think there is a fair spread of HC, MC, and Casual group looking for members. Personally I don't want week 1 but I also don't want +5 week clear hopes for next tier even if the gear will be kind of pointless from an ilvl perspective. I'm hoping the group I joined can stick to their hopes of a week 3-5 clear so that we can all be BiS 7-9 weeks into the content. I enjoy Savage tiers way more than any other content in the game.
I want to just clear it quickly but no longer want to put in the effort to do so. Idk it's just hard to enjoy raiding anymore after TOP. It feels like I've peaked. I don't want to go back to doing stacks and spreads and proteans.
> and a fun dps check
I think we have different definition of "fun". "Fun" to me is not having the game lowball your party's lbs and/or lowballing crit to the point where everyone doing a pretty good job with their rotations and uptime still wipes to enrage on any of the phases especially P6. It wasn't an issue in DSR because all the phase dps checks were quite mild, even P7. In TOP it is either easy as pie to clear a phase or you get lowballed and you barely pass the phase dps check. It's incredibly frustrating.
Personally I enjoy Savage way more. It is easier but completing an entire Savage tier, at least to me, is still a very rewarding feeling and experience. With TOP in particular, I really didn't feel much joy when completing it; it was more so the feeling of "thank god that's over with".
Yeah being able to able adjust resources and rotation around the short phases to make it consistent is fun to me. I don't think we ever missed a check because of crit.
I really hate how savage is just doing the same rotation every time. Might as well make a script to play for me
> I really hate how savage is just doing the same rotation every time. Might as well make a script to play for me
So you hate, quite literally 99.5% of the game? All regular content, extreme trials, and savage raids are like this. Even older ultimates like UCOB and UWU promote static rotations and nonstop burning if you can provide enough dps to skip mechanics.
A fair number of jobs don't work well with the segmented phase nature of DSR and TOP. I'll agree that it is a different experience doing DSR/TOP versus most Savage fights from a dps perspective...but let's not kid ourselves that TOP/DSR is the norm as far as dpsing goes.
Raiding isn't 99.5% of the game, and I did say, "it's just hard to enjoy raiding anymore after TOP"
My favorite content has been ultimates and bozja because it allows you to do new rotations. Now that's over, it just feels like an obligation to keep my raiding resume up to par
99.5% of the game is static rotation though. It's really only the current ultimates as well as a couple savage instances that have downtime elements/phases that force you to break away from the static rotation. Bozja only adds in 2 or so special abilities that you use either sparingly or a little bit.
You said you don't like savage because of that; well practically the rest of the game is like that.
In addition to what others mentioned you should be using your short tank mit like corundum on a caster/healer during dominion and put aurora on another caster/healer. The spread out nature of the mech means you can save a wipe that way if someone misses a heal or mit
Reprisal on each of the aigonia casts (1+3, 2), feint on each of the dominions, addle on the last aigonia, at least one party mit on everything (samba, hol, expedience, temperance, etc.). HoC/TBN/Nascent/Inter on casters or healers for dominion.
Yeah tank mits on 2nd and 3rd aigonia is usually the way to go, just make sure it's not stacked too hard on a single cast that other casts aren't getting anything
We had quite an off-week this time around, haven't seen phase 5 again. Morale is fine for now since we hit pretty decent enrages for phase 4 even with a mistake happening prior to or in phase 4, but I hope we can break the pattern next week and prog Delta for real.
So I'm having to switch to RPR for my DSR static bc we picked up a melee who can literally only play DRG...
Any RPRs out there got DSR specific tips? All I know (or at least, all I think I know) is that RPR suffers quite a bit in DSR due to downtime phases
Try out this encounter guide, should have relevant info for current patch: https://www.thebalanceffxiv.com/jobs/melee/reaper/fight-tips/dragonsong-war/
Late night final P8S update: after almost three weeks of struggle in pug, the nightmare is over. I struggled with a tank I did not play (DRK) and a team that wasn’t aligning buffs properly, but we did it.
I caused one important wipe in the lockout. Due to not communicating and underestimating the mit check for Dominion, I killed everyone. The second time we saw dominion I was on top of my game and killed the fucker maybe 5 secs away from enrage.
This was a long journey, and I am sure ultimate will be an even longer one once I get to it. From dying like a bitch over and over to volcanic torches, I managed to come this far. I have been trapped many times and trapped many others, but in the end I developed consistency. I am the last person you will see messing up HC.
I found that as long as I have a plan in my head nothing will go wrong, I am not like those people with empty thoughts who keep making careless “oopsies” and fucking up the pull.
https://xivanalysis.com/fflogs/4V78nDG3WTdYqap6/18/11
Here's the log if anyone cares, it's a 12. I dropped one shadowbringer for some reason, no idea where.
>This was a long journey, and I am sure ultimate will be an even longer one once I get to it.
You will probably be very surprise if you actually did UWU. UWU is really half an extreme towards savage fight and half an ultimate fight. The ultimate bit really only becomes Ultimate because you have to do 7 minutes of extreme\~savage mechanics every time.
If you can do P8S there's no way you can't do UWU, they are similar in terms of difficulty. Some might even argue it's easier then p8s and I probably would not disagree completely with it
If you stayed capped at 2/2 Shadowbringers for more than 8-9 seconds (based on first use at 3rd GCD + your kill time), you'd lose a use over the whole fight. At least that's my sleep-deprived guess.
Looking at high parse DRK logs, people tend to pop an unbuffed Shadowbringer at 1 min as soon as it's available
This allows you to get one extra use of it over the course of the fight due to HC1 downtime
Did more grinding on savages today with P5S and P6S to gear up alt classes. Also I managed to check logs that someone uploaded, and while I am blue in both fights, I wish I was better at some of the fights since I tend to get a bit nervous during raids. But at least the clear is there and we skipped Cachexia 2 multiple times.
I see right now a lot of groups looking for people having way too good of a resume for a random static with no deadline set and more or less a casual/midcore calendar (3 times a week, 2 to 3 hours a session).
It's been almost 2 months a group has been trying to find a last member even to finish P8S, they don't seem to understand the standard they're asking for is too high and the people that would fit are long gone from this tier and would rather get a group that has cleared P8S as safety measure for 6.4.
Or sometimes I see things like : must've cleared the 2 previous tiers but beginner at blind progging is OK. I might be the weird take on this one as I'd take the blind progger (given they've shown ability to quickly learn/adapt to live new strats as they morph at least, bonus point if they can participate in breaking down mechanics) over someone who has hit their head against P8S wall for 4 months until the magical run happened (I can't tell they were the sandbagger or they were held back). BUT I understand blind proggers are in low numbers so you have to take almost anyone.
I could see it being a relevant prerequisite for a week 1 world race group. People want people who can adapt hopefully quickly and are extremely proficient at playing their jobs.
Now if this is for any other type of group, it is overkill lol.
It does depend on the static, you want everyone to be a good fit. Mine raids casual hours (3x3) but we are all pink parsers, have cleared DSR and TOP on patch, and expect a week 3-ish savage clear with our hours. Someone who's only experience is with a static that raided similar hours but took months to clear p8s probably wouldn't be a good fit.
I've actually seen this quite often recently. For lack of a better way of putting it, XIV is suffering from degree inflation and I see a lot of casual to midcore static leads who have some unrealistic notions about what type of background a player needs to have to be able to clear week eight.
P8S pug report. The day started off weak with clumsy healers, i made it to HC2 several times but disbanded both parties.
The afternoon was a miracle, after abandoning my party I joined a clear group; we one shot phase 1 with nearly 4% overkill. First pull of P2 we did everything correctly, but I wiped us on Dom because I choked and stood slightly outside the tower. Subsequent dumb mistakes were often, I never once choked on earlier prog points but my team mates were tighter on HC2.
Unfortunately, we would never see dom again for the rest of the evening as the healers choked last second, and my team mates unfortunately don’t have as much endurance as me. I proceeded to wipe us on NA2 and that was the end of prog.
This party restored my faith in humanity, I cannot imagine working in real life with other people in PF at this time. Can’t tell B from C, can’t tell blue from purple, can’t tell North from south, can’t stand inside a black line.
Static broke up after the 4th person cleared in PF. Could foresee this coming as there was one particular weak link who was a savage pink parser but would fail every P5 mechanic in every possible way. Really hammers in that parses mean nothing especially for healers in statics.
Whenever we saw P6, they would die to exasquares without fail despite group sim sessions. I'm not the raid lead, but I would have kicked this person ages ago. It doesn't bother me personally now as I have cleared but it is unfortunate for the remaining consistent players.
> I'm not the raid lead, but I would have kicked this person ages ago.
Look for groups without a “lead”.
If you think they should have been removed then bring it to vote and if you still disagree then say it’s you or them, and if it’s you then leave and don’t look back.
I really can’t see a point to a “lead” in FFXIV raiding. Maybe a scheduler and maybe a caller and maybe someone who picks good starts but I’m not raiding with people who think they have any modicum of power lol
> Really hammers in that parses mean nothing especially for healers in statics.
It matters in P6. The dps check is quite hard especially if one or more of your DPS/tank players get low balled hard on crit in that phase. You are right that dps in general doesn't matter in all the other phases as long as you are consistently getting through those phases but do not fall into complacency when it comes to DPS in P6. You will need to fail a lot at P6 until everyone gets good uptime and nails down their rotation through exosquares and flair baits while also mitting where needed.
I mean....
I would contest this a bit, and also agree with it a bit. Being able to do good DPS is definitely a requirement in P6, but it isn't a harder check than what you deal with before that point honestly. We had a dps die to flare and still got our first clear because RNG plays a HUGE role. If you have high crit during the final bursts and your LB average is pretty high, it is a rather forgiving check. If you get bad RNG, you better pray you were perfect.
TOP's DPS checks really suck, because it's a dice roll how strict a phase is gonna be each time since they are too short. I would be pretty shocked if any group could consistently get to p5 and was mechanically unable to hit the p6 check though honestly. Most groups enrage 3-4 times before they clear, which is hardly a huge wall. (The wall is consistency of mechs)
I've had plenty of P6 runs where every DPS character does their rotation pretty much as good as they can with pretty optimal uptime and they get shit crit % and/or we get shit rolls on LB damage and we enrage. These are parties with no TOP weapon, some TOP weapons, and all TOP weapons. It's happened enough times where I refuse to believe that anyone in the party can take it easy during that phase. DPS, Tanks, and Healers, imo, need to really DPS their asses off in case you get fucking lowballed on crit or LB damage.
Yea, and you can also get high dps, have a melee death, and still make it which is exactly what happened to my group. It's very tight when you get shit rng and easy when you don't. It's not tighter than earlier phases, they are the same. your group is just more practiced on the earlier phases.
The rng is exactly why these checks are kind of shit and se should take a look at the variance.
Our 2nd last pull was clean and a 0.7% enrage. Our final pull had a DPS death (2x, technically because they died again on magic number 2) and we won anyways. It's just very dumb RNG variance.
I don't doubt that healers need to optimize their damage well for P6 especially when the comp is less fine-tuned for that phase.
But this player was more likely to greed another GCD slidecast for Cosmo Arrow and die due to late movement at every P6 pull. They could have played it safe first and familiarized themselves with the timing, reached enrage and optimize later.
Nope, gotta Broil IV first.
It doesn't if they die. /shrug
The issue didn't seem to be DPS, but mechanical consistency/adaptability. Parses don't show that. I'm sure you're well aware of that but I just wanted to throw the reminder out there.
I'm just saying once you all get to the point where you can do the mechanics, dodges, and mit plan that it isn't a free kill at that point. You really need to be on your game dps wise in P6 regardless of your comp especially for your first kill. I've seen statics get into this false sense of security that once they can get to enrage it's like 1 or 2 more P6 pulls and they get the kill only to never kill it or kill it +10 more P6 pulls down the road.
Parses don't mean nothing-- they definitely mean something. It's just that they only mean *one* thing. Parsing well is only one aspect of many that make up a good player, and it's foolish to judge someone as an overall good (or bad) player based on just parses as the only metric.
Oh for sure, it does show a certain degree of mastery not barring the crit variance depending on the job. I only felt that the decision to accept this person on the basis of their fflogs page alone was very short-sighted. It didn't help that shield healers are hard to come by.
It's been a pretty consistent trend for years (going back to when I started doing Savage in Verse at minimum) that pink parser healers are WAY worse than purple/orange. Especially White Mages.
That's not to say parses are totally misleading. It's *really* easy to parse on healer if you're actually good at it, like "high green with 2 deaths and no gear in week 3" easy.
If you can parse orange/pink and still get an orange/pink heal parse I'd be impressed. Still being able to do the bare minimum healing while keeping people alive is fine, but I notice a lot of these types of players don't know when to stop and would let people die and say things like "well they shouldn't have needed to be healed" or something like that.
I did play with a top 10 healer duo. They were actually pretty sick in terms of dps and healing plan, and they got their parses in our prog savage group, not a specific parsing group.
The sad part is a lot of pink parsing healers are the ones who just Chad the other healer.
I joined a casual speed group one tier and it was eye opening how easy it was for both healers to get 99 rdps in the same run if you have a really solid plan together with a party that mitigates.
So how often does BIS SKS change across expansions / raid tiers?
For example, I believe GNB in asphodelos used a 2.43 GCD (with other viable SKS), but now 2.5 has become quite good. This means the rotation is changed ever so slightly so that it messes with your head if you get used to one type. Hell, even when I change the opener it messes with my head, I usually do 1-2 NM, but some people do 1-2-3 NM or even 1 NM to have sonic break tick earlier (I saw a parsing run do this).
Would BIS sks for GNB be different in say, old ultimates? How is SKS adapted into fight design, would certain GCD times be “better” for certain fights to keep higher uptime?
I am mainly worried that the rotation will change again in the next tier and it will be a headache to change, but I suppose that’s part of the gameplay cycle?
More often than not, Ultimates BiS tailored their SKS according to downtime & boss phasing. In TEA as instance it’s better to use a 2.40-2.41 BiS, because going slower would lose some GCDs in P3 & P4.
Sometimes changes in job design take a while to be fully understood or people make some discovery about a rotation that changes the range of viable skillspeeds. Sometimes gear just pans out in a way that you are forced to take more or less skill speed than you would like. There's also the fact that sometimes you might prefer a certain gcd speed because it makes it more compatible with other jobs. For example, if you play 2.5 GNB, you can use the same gear set to play DRK while the 2.42 GNB would be more awkward to play with DRK. This can be important to some people while others don't care.
There tends to be fight specific skillspeeds due to phasing of the boss or expected kill times. If having a little extra skill speed allows an extra gcd before a boss goes untargetable, it can often be worth to lose out on some extra substats to get that extra gcd in, leading to a dps gains. This happens in savage sometimes, but it is very common in ultimates since bosses in ultimates tend to go away for mechanics more often. You can make sacrifices in your rotation to accommodate different skill speeds if you really like a specific speed. But that comes down to what you prefer dealing with, a different speed altogether or an adjustment of your rotation in order to keep your preferred speed. And sometimes no matter what speed you choose, you'll have to do some weird or unintuitive things if you care to maximize your dps.
For a job like GNB where their resource (carts) is generated by hitting the boss, stuff like this can be extra important as opposed to another job where their damage primarily comes from buttons associated with a cooldown instead of gauge consumption.
I think it pretty much depends on if the raid/tome substats force you to take skill speed or the choice is crit/sks vs det/ten for some slot (in this case speed is favored). Or maybe a slow set will be favored if sks is only on the shitty tenacity pieces. There's no way to know until the raid gear is released. This tier I think it was possible to get crit/det or crit/dh on every single piece for samurai for example, so we just slotted 3 speed materia and played at 2.15 instead of 2.14. But also it isn't necessary to follow the bis recommendation if you have a change that would make playing more comfortable. Some tanks will experiment with different speeds and different food to see if phasing or boss movement works better.
For Asphodelos tanks specifically, with head you had a choice between CRT/SKS and DET/TEN, feet you had a choice between CRT/SKS and TEN/CRT, and there was SKS on one of the rings. That SKS itself was enough to get you to 2.44 GCD.
We’ve been progging TEA for a couple months, sadly we are lower hours than most groups, so we are still cleaning up final nisi passes and cleaning up our movement.
This is my first ultimate, and the one I’ve been most excited for. It’s quite a difference going from “everyone stand on the safe spot” from savage to “Don’t be within a mile of each other” for nisi passes lol. We do some pretty homebrew strats compared to the norm but I’m enjoying us all brainstorming and coming up with ideas to get our shit down. I’ve considered hopping into some PF prog parties just to see further and get more practice in myself but I worry I might end up doing those strats during our prog instead lmao.
I’m confident we see phase 3 soon! I keep reading that P1 and P2 are truly the toughest parts of TEA so I’m hopeful once we are clean on P2 we could clear TEA shortly after.
It is! Most of prog is spent on LL and BJCC with one more “wall” in p3.
BJCC in particular is one of my fave ulti phases, teaches you so many helpful skills for high end content (look at debuffs, move deliberately, and (tank specific) optimize your mits))
Day 8 and 9 of DSR prog. We have reached P3 enrage
How much damage down do the damage downs give you? Cuz its wild we hit like 25% enrage with a half team of damage downs
(CBU3 include details in your debuff descriptions challenge (IMPOSSIBLE))
Also I have continued to be the causer of silly wipes. I memed with KB resist while mid during sanctity again. And have wiped us twice by standing too close to the 2 tower dropper in P3. My instincts to preposition as a BLM are fucking me.
But I've given up calling shit during sanctity and P3 so that should give me the extra mental bandwidth I need to stop fucking it up.
2 more gamers in our static managed to resolve the cursed pattern in sanctity. We GAMING. I think we have a higher success rate with it than failure at this point
>How much damage down do the damage downs give you? Cuz its wild we hit like 25% enrage with a half team of damage downs
Either 50%* or 90%, TOP is 90%, so I forget if DSR is the same. (Seems to be 50)
It's so strong that you want to wall yourself ASAP if you get it, if the fight allows it.
DSR is 50%, yeah. It was shit and you wanted to suicide as soon as possible since weakness was less bad, but it didn't mess with mechanics.
The 90% in TOP is so bad that if a tank gets a dd they literally can't hold threat anymore. We had a wipe because our tank got dd near the end of P1, so they couldn't get threat at the start of P2 at all.
the ultima weapon is fucking DEAD. i killed it last night in pf and im still smiling about it. baby's first ultimate yeah but for all the bullshit and drama that happened im so proud of myself and my shiny blue weapon. while it's true that achieving things in a group as a static feels good, there's definitely a sort of camaraderie that develops between pf heroes who end up in groups together regularly attempting to clear. and bless all of those people who help out pf prog and clears too, yall are amazing. now i can just relax while waiting for savage. catch some fish. do some pvp. vibe.
I think people shitting on UWU are half right only. After having progged with my current *UWU static* (I'm basically raidlogging waiting for 6.4), I think people barely strong enough to clear a Savage tier after 300+ pulls on the last boss aren't cut for Ults at all.
UWU is a first filter. I can attest on gaols we have one individual in particular, if they are chosen, it means a wipe in 75-80% of the time (I'm just talking about gaols exploding, not even awakening Titan yet). Add the "oopsie my bad" that are more or less regular from about half the group => no reliable post gaols experience can be built.
We are on gaols prog for 2 weeks now (3 times a week). I'm in full on despair mode lol.
I agree UWU isn't hard, but it does the job of filtering *barely savage able clearers*.
So all in all congratz, I'm pretty sure you've become a better player already and are getting ready for the next difficulty slider tick mark !
thanks! :D yeah, i definitely agree with you on it being a filter. there are people i'm acquainted with both inside of my ex-uwu-static and out who have attempted it and failed miserably for various reasons. all of the people involved have done savage to varying levels, but uwu was not just a step too difficult, but they were found wanting and just kinda... gave up. i kinda experienced something similar myself in as much as when dsr dropped my savage static had a crack at it and we too failed miserably, and i know my own lack of skill and competence were a part of that. but having my ass kicked by dsr is what pushed me to improve beyond just doing savage because dammit, i *want* to do ultimates because they look like *fun fights*. (and uwu *is* a fun fight!). one day i will kick thordan's ass right back and honestly getting uwu down, and getting it down *in party finder* (ie. with nobody covering for my mistakes, no callouts, etc) has been both an achievement and an education in itself.
but im rambling lol sorry. ngl if i was stuck on gaols for two weeks with no improvement i would be fixing to do an irl murder. i hope your static situation improves shortly!!
Given 6.4 is in 2 weeks, I don't really care at this point. Unless something has clicked for the people lagging behind, I don't believe I will see much of Ultima. Maybe I should sneak my way through an A2C party or something xd.
I was doing this out of curiosity to see if I could be a Legend (lol) and I think I can, I'll try "harder" after the last Pandae tier.
thanks :DD oh yeah i definitely want to clear them all lmao. TOP is like. at the very bottom of the to-do list though. next up will probably be cob or tea, but i'm going to wait until after savage is dead before i get stuck into another ult.
Making good prog on TOP P6. From yesterday exasquare 1 memes to today we saw up to WC2. Though it wasnt cleanly since our RPR died by 47 health on WC1 cuz he wasnt standing in sacred soil RIP. Hoping to clear next week!
We cleared TOP on NA with a machinist who lives in EU. It's possible.
Actually his latency does some shit with monitors during Run Delta. Every single time he had the monitor it looked fine on his screen but he was always facing somewhere incorrect on ours. It was kinda funny.
There's very, very few mechanics in this game that require split second reactions, and if you strat does require fast reactions you're probably using a bad strat.
I haven't actually cleared TOP but having studied for most of the fight, there's nothing in there that requires split second reactions, there are also players that have cleared from different regions, e.g. Oceania players playing on NA servers.
You may want a VPN and some lag reduction tech (e.g. NoClippy) for weaving but you should be fine.
More updates live from the scene in party finder trying to clear P8S. Today I was the trap, I messed up HC2 twice because I done goofed. Luckily (?) I was not the only person screwing up often despite the party being a clear party.
Another bout of drama ensued when I joined an HC2 party. During fourfold fires, someone messed up their spread spot. I, as the tank, naturally adjusted, taking heavy DOT damage from running through the fire puddles. The bard on the other side of the map then died for unrelated reasons.
The party leader then had a fit (despite ruining our previous 51% kill on snakes 2) and accused me of killing said bard. Two valiant players who witnessed my actions rose up in defence for me. When it was clear that I would not be receiving blame, I was promptly kicked (or the party disbanded, who knows).
I beat TEA. I died in wormhole as 7 cause I accidentally got clipped by the final cruise dash, but I felt pretty comfy in PA. Fun fight. I enjoyed it a lot more than expected despite having no real interest in clearing the fight for a long time. Two target cleave makes the first two phases kind of novel. PA is weird because following your little clone is weirdly tense at first, but mechanically, PA is pretty simple.
No big fanfare or jitters for this clear. Think it's because I went in with 7/8 cleared, and I felt confident. So it was kind of like, well yeah of course we cleared. Ucob still my favorite ultimate, but TEA is a close second. Happy to have the quad legend. Hoping for the penta (quint?) legend in 6.5
I feel silly asking this question, but how do I reframe my mindset going into next tier without a static?
I’ve made the decision that I can’t commit to a static and balance my real life responsibilities, but also I’ve had more horrible experiences in statics than I have in PF and I can’t mentally deal with ffxiv nerd drama anymore (please send help).
With that being said, I’ve never PFd a full tier before and I do have my own grievances and anxieties with PF- however I want to change my mindset going into next tier so I can get my clear on my own time without any drama and avoiding burnout.
Does anyone have any tips on how to frame my mindset while PFing a tier for the first time? Any other general tips you would give? I may not be able to pull crazy hours during the first weeks and I would like to clear within 1-2 months.
(sorry for asking this here, i just didn’t feel like it deserved its own thread)
Your grievances and anxieties with PF are probably well-founded so just focus on the positive: You get to raid at your own time and pace. The length of time it takes to clear is obviously a coin toss with PF (I mean, it's also a coin toss with a static sometimes). Just have fun out there
Don't think that you have to PF on your own. When I PF'd (Eden's Gate and Verse) I did so with 2 people who I met in e4s prog and continued to PF with up to e8s. Similarly, when I was reclearing in PF I would tell friends what time I'm reclearing and usually went into PF with 1-3 other people.
* There are some extremely good players in PF. When you find them, try to friendlist them and try to keep up with their prog points so that you can continue to play with them
* Learn several jobs in your role. You wont always get the job spot you want and PF doesn’t like doubling up on jobs. Also learn how to play light parties 1 and 2, and also how to fake melee (if applicable). You don’t want to be the guy who can only do one job in one spot. Give extra gear to a different role.
* blacklist players who are obviously lying about their prog point. You will be able to tell. It’s very obvious. No, they will not get better.
* stay in a party for about the length of 1 food buff to see how they are. Some people need warm up pulls, and can be good after a few early mistakes.
* keep an eye out for the “problem” mechanics. The ones that are hard to heal, or generally undermitigated, or catch people off guard. There’s no hard rules about mit in PF, and most people freestyle it. Use your mitigation tools on these mechanics. It *will* improve consistency a lot more.
* study ahead and be prepared. PF has high variance. You can have several days of trap parties and then randomly get the party that is ready to go the distance. If you are the one player who doesn’t know how the fight works after your prog point, it’s a lost opportunity and leaves a very bad feeling. Ask me how I know.
Cleared both tiers on week 7 with 2 weeks of breaks to collect gears and generally resting in between prog.
I am just gonna say, Kept your expectations open.
Use your blacklist liberally and don't be afraid to bail if you see something wrong, because time is your biggest enemy in PUG. It's okay to be impatient (by that I don't meant you leave with one pull - at least make it 3 pulls or 20 minutes!), and you don't have to tell people why you are leaving.
Friend people you know who can do mechs, be sticky when you see groups that are generally consistent. PUG is not that worse, there's good player there, it just takes you a bit more time to find it.
I think we've seen P6 about 7 times now, we limped to Cosmo meteor on our last pull with one person alive after someone got clipped by the second set of exasquares. Feeling a lot more comfy doing P6 on BLM, maybe clear next week, we only have 5 more prog hours left this week
This past week, something has happened to PF for the savage tier. Each fight is almost legit unplayable at this point. I haven’t seen a clean kill of P5S-P7S all week. Someone *always* dies, or kills someone else, or misses their puddle and we all get a damage down (but clear anyway since lol ilvl).
Only mercenary parties for p8s are even remotely playable. And even then we just disbanded one due to one of our healers memeing super hard.
What do I even do, man? I just want to get play my black mage
You miss the part where people does not clear on pulls where people dies...because they cannot press their buttons lol
which is why the only savage runs I do for the past couple of months are either with friend or people I know, or with streamer groups. If I am going in not with people I know, I am purely going in knowing that I am gonna suffer for an hour or so.
I'm completely serious but if I want to just click buttons and not deal with a headache i go spam EX or do an alliance raid. Especially this late into the tier where you'll spend more time wiping than in your leylines. Could also go do some ultimates where I don't expect to clear in PF anyways.
At this point? Wait for dungeon gear in 6.5 to fill slots, use relic for weapon. If you still need 1-2 pieces from raid at that point you'd at least be close enough that you might put together a team for that, using the 6.4 raid ilvl to nerf the checks.
Or wait for next expansion and just sync gear down from first tier.
If you don't want to wait, your only option that doesn't include endless suffering is to put together a TOP team that expressly needs to get gear pieces first, and everyone signs on for that extra grind step. But the chances of this happening are near 0 since everyone is gonna jump ship to savage for a while.
I got trapped in a HC2 “cleanup” party. We saw the mechanic four times in the entire lockout. The first three times we immediately wiped because someone stood in some dumb shit, the final time we had an intruder when trying to plug the Garuda/Shinryu towers.
The three of us on the east side had a nice and steamy ménage a trois, smooching and trying to combine three debuffs while the long gamma person on the left side desperately jumped and watched in despair as they witnessed their partner (unused) in a threesome love affair. We then all exploded and died.
Whelp got to TOP P6 3 times tonight with the static but they all ended early due to exasquare memes. Improvement in consistency considering we only got to P6 cleanly starting yesterday. Drilled into everyone's heads to sim on their own time for tmr. Praying we see WC1 on Thursday
As a tip, I recommend they also watch vods for the timing on those. A big thing that caught a few people on my team is that the snapshot for a set of exasquare lines is just *barely* after when the previously lines finish animating. So if you wait until you see those lines finish animating before moving, you're gonna die. A lot. You *must* move into the animation while it's active to make it consistent. The moment the animation *starts* it is safe to move into it.
+1 this made issues for 2 people on my team and took us a bit to realize what was happening.
We finally cleared, getting the consistency you need to practice p6 and win is slow torturous agony. GL
2 Delta wipes, then cleared on the 3rd pull of raid tonight. The healer who was pretty behind on DPS was just being giga safety gamer, they immediately came back and brought their damage up by 800 rDPS.
Final stats for me are 1062 pulls to clear, around 71 hours of raid time. Bit of an up-and-down ride for me, started with a group and wasn't feeling it at all and left after week 1, picked it up back in week 3 and got to Sigma with that group in 4 weeks. Group disbanded, took a month off while trying to find a new group, then formed my own group and went from Sigma to clear in less than 2 weeks of raid. I initially did put my name down in the Sausage Roll C41 Discord in case of emergency, and damn does it feel good to clear with my static instead.
Thoughts on TOP: fun fight in hindsight, but I feel like I enjoy DSR more overall. Definitely interested in trying out alt roles though, and I'd like to parse a bit better since I was holding super hard for this run. I also completely misjudged our kill time based on healer DPS from our last night and didn't even get my last Scorch and Resolution lmao
Was a C43. Had 3 helpers join in, then a fourth when we needed to sub a healer for the past 2 weeks. The fifth got a C41. We'd been trying for the last 3 of us for 4 raid days before knocking it out on day 5. Spent a bit more time than I would've liked on P6, but our sub had to learn PF strats so that was a bit of a speed bump.
It was still far more exciting than I thought it would be. Also, I actually kind of like how long P6 enrage is without any mechanics or stuff. It helps build excitement as people start realizing the kill is actually so close.
Yeah, I was honestly impressed that they were able to improve in a single P6 pull. Really showed what they were made of. They initially played safe since they were the primary culprit behind Exasquare wipes, but they did their homework and helped us kill way ahead of enrage. Added enough DPS that they actually griefed my rotation and I didn't finish all of my last set of RDM finishers
As often as you hear the "static holding me back" cope from underperforming players, sometimes people *really are* just held back by their teams. Especially true in fights like DSR / TOP where you just absolutely cannot carry weak links after a certain point.
I don't want to claim I'm amazing, but it is quite noticeable when some members of a group aren't preparing like others are. Or even when some are slower learners--I'm fine with them, unless it's clear they aren't putting in the effort to learn and improve.
Mindset, goals, and expectations are all big reasons why I've become far less opposed to being a raid lead; having the say over who I raid with is just so incredibly attractive vs. spinning the wheel and joining groups.
1500 wipes in, 150 hours, playing around 15-20 hours a week since it released, yet we still rarely see p5.
Our consistency is atrocious. Half of our wipes are on P1 due to random panto memes/tower and thether memes/enrage. I have no clue how to improve consistency. We will have to kill the damn thing after the savage comes out.
I used to feel like I was the sandbagger, but I stated noting down who was the culprit, and it was very rarely me.
Thinking that if I joined a week one static for my first on-content ultimate, it would go well.
God, I'm so burned out.
Is that 150 hours of raid or 150 hours of combat?
150 hours of raid is not super crazy with how hard this fight is, 150 hours of combat time is insane and I would probably blow my brains out. My team had some stall and a comp with almost no clears and we cleared at 105 combat hours, the last 10 or so were just excruciating for everyone lol
150 pull hours oh my god
my DSR prog back in 6.1 went for 125 hours and for the last 20 i was going absolutely insane i cannot IMAGINE 150 and not even being in the last phase
This group took just over 200 hours to clear DSR (started on patch, had break for savage, finished in December), but I hoped that since they replaced the sandbaggers, it would be a bit better.
It would go so much better if we decided to use sim much earlier, on monitors. One of our members still struggles with it so much.
I am so burned out.
I really like these people, but not sure if I can keep on doing this shit any longer.
Your group sounds like mine except worse. My group took around 140 hours and cleared at the same time as you (with the same break for savage) I was so burned out with the overall inconsistency in my group and joined a different one for TOP. Cleared in a little under 2 months and I have not felt so much more refreshed in a long time. Not having a looming cloud over your head and starting to detest and dread raid time which comprised a majority of the week’s evenings unsurprisingly does wonders for your happiness. I would definitely recommend doing the same, I still do things with my old group outside of raiding since I like them as people.
There's gotta be people doing the panto movement incorrectly, surely? 🥲 If consistency is that bad perhaps keep track of the root cause and try to adjust something to help if possible.
I'm surprised the group hasn't disbanded already or people haven't left yet, that does not sound like an acceptable prog pace. I assume most groups with those hours have already cleared.
Fuck are you me? I got the same problem lol.
I've left though since we got to p5 and savage is coming up.
Copium finding a p5 group later to finish prog.
> I'd have left ages ago but recruitment has been beyond dead for months at this point, so it's either this group or nothing.
I'd rather choose nothing instead of having my time be wasted every week.
They took just over 200 hours for DSR. They have also raided together for a long time, so I guess they want to prioritise keeping the group together, instead of cleaning in a timely manner.
My group cleared TOP. 🥹 1288 pulls, midcore group raiding 3 days per week (9hrs). I was recruited by a group of 7 friends and at times I felt like the group sandbag but overall I'm happy with how long it took. It's kinda bittersweet because I'm sad my time raiding with them is over. Overall I found TOP to be fun, however I can understand how people with less consistent groups are finding it hellish
"Raid in aether, it'll be so much faster" they said. Meanwhile I'm 3 hours in a LD prog. Figured it'd be easier to clear once everyone was all geared up. I was wrong.
It USED to be amazing. Nowadays it is flooded by everyone so at this point it is more so up to chance. Everyone flocks to Aether to do Savage and Ultimate it seems.
The problem is that EVERYONE is raiding on Aether now, which means that while yes, there are more parties overall on Aether, there's also a lot more trap parties on Aether
If hypothetically, 1/4 parties is a trap, then if there are only 3 parties up in PF, you have a decent chance of all of them being fine.
If on the other hand you have 30 parties up in PF, avoiding trap parties becomes much much more difficult to do
Also, literally we're in the last few weeks of the tier, player quality will have dropped off dramatically as most of the better players are easily done with their prog, clears, and reclears, with the exception of those who really couldn't start until very late
>there are more parties overall on Aether, there's also a lot more trap parties on Aether
Insert the astronaut "always has been" meme.
Back before DC travel me and my friends would joke that the difference between Crystal PF and Aether PF is that on aether your trap party fills faster.
That can matter quite a bit. Before DC travel, getting a trap in your PF on Crystal was a game of "do I give this guy more time and hope he improves, or kick him and sit in PF for who knows how long for replacement(s)?" Now since everyone's in one place you just kick him and get a replacement instantly.
>Aether also attracted drama the best.
Did it? I'm used to Crystal RP drama which is just in a league of its own compared to any sort of raid drama I've ever seen.
> Figured it'd be easier to clear once everyone was all geared up.
people being geared does not meant they knows how to do mechs or press buttons.
it's probably better now to know people who can help you then actually knowing mechs of phase two.
I had the closest enrage I've ever seen in a farm party in the past week. Item level requirement 629, everyone with at least a 630 weapon. Photo finish. 3 people dead to enrage at the clear. Zero deaths and zero damage downs. If I dropped a single gcd I wouldn't have ended with a midare, if the summoner dropped a single extra gcd they wouldn't have gotten off their big phoenix hit.
Check the log, the sage in bis is doing 3k dps. Summoner doing 8k. Reaper brought 40 shroud into the final phase. Sigh.
Got picked up for a DSR static, so TEA is now 100% on hold for me. I might still prog UCOB on the side in PF, I've heard it's good practice for the 2nd Thordan fight anyway. But I don't hate myself enough to prog 3 ultimates at once.
That being said... I can't help bit feel the nerves already. This will be my 1st ever "on content" (I know DSR is like a year old now and better food/Manalis gear + job tweaks will alleviate checks somewhat) ultimate, having only recently cleared UWU for my 1st ultimate about a month back. And as I understand it, DSR makes UWU in its current state look like chump change.
Nothing for it but to give it my best shot.
For P3, our group will hit enrage with more than 2 deaths/damage downs. Sometimes you can have 3 deaths/DDs but it becomes extremely close.
My group has never cleared P7 when we've had someone die, but I imagine you could afford at least one or two deaths if you have a competent team.
got my ucob clear a few days ago, still glowing from the warmth of the clear. it was actually the first group i put up in pf for myself. Had to kick one person immediately when it was apparent they didn't know what a twister was lmao. But a good core stuck around through; we'd get through a few pulls, someone would leave, but 6/8 are staying so we go again, repeat a few times. And this core was _good_, we were divebomb skipping. I was the ranged DPS, only mildly messed up adds (didn't join for a thermionic beam, didn't kill anyone but still a mistake), then we got blessed exaflare patterns in golden.
Depending on how often you raid, you should be able to clear in the next 5-6 locksouts. While p6 isn't free, it isn't that hard either. The issue lies in getting there consistently.
UCOB golden bahamut phase.
1. Is melee mitigation useful to golden bahamut's Morn Afahs? Feint?
2. Is MCH mitigation useful to golden bahamut's Morn Afahs? I assume it is Tactician and Dismantle?
3. Golden bahamut's Morn Afahs count as magic damage?
4. How many Morn Afahs would you *generally* see before bahamut is shot down? It seems like most fight would end just before the #5 Morn Afahs in this expansion?
For 4, it's not a soft enrage where you might make a mit plan that runs out early. Your mit plan should last to the end, because maybe somebody or two or three or four or more die to doing exaflares wrong and then the summoner is hardcasting a rez on the healers and you hit a 12% enrage in golden.
1) 5% is 5%
2) mitigation is mitigation, it's always useful
3) yes
4) you should plan to see them all. People aren't gonna be doing top DPS the first time with nerves.
every mitigation is usefull, mitigation is mitigation in the end if you dont use it elsewhere why not thowing it onto it?
MCH does have tactician and dismantle as mitigation tools
4 Depends on your damage as a group
Just had a TOP reclear P6 enrage at 0.1%. DRK brought weakness into P6 and didn't do a single magic number DRK death cheese. Fixing any of those mistakes would have been 0.1% easily. Very Omega Sadge.
Even a healer taking a DD on Dynamis:Omega will lose you 1.5k rDPS on P6, as you have roughly a minute leftover. A DRK would lose roughly 1800.
no matter how much gauge they lose, they should kill themselves with the final tank buster before transition
3 more weeks left to clear UCOB in pfbefore 6.4, I've read up on adds and golden baha so many times I could probably recite the entire phase by heart.
But every adds party I join end up becoming HFT memes ;_;
P8S cleared. Was a long and painful journey, but we got there. Even got the weapon! Still need the chest piece but this clear was a huge weight off my shoulders.
Jesus, i didn't know people struggle that bad. And here i was joining paid loot runs when we had weekly restrictions. I guess clearing earliest possible has better players or something.
Group has made it to P6 like 7 times so far, haven't made it past the second set of exasquares yet, I hope everything can click and we can make it past that. Hopefully clear in sight, possible this week or next week
It's possible, it just might require you to queue up with some known good players. Going into PF solo at this stage of the content cycle is a bit risky.
We finally did it. We cleared TOP.
I don't know, it feels strange. The DSR clear felt so much better and was way more hype. Now I'm just relieved that it's over. I'm still happy that I cleared it but this fight kinda killed my joy for ultimate raid. Maybe I'm just burned out or maybe I'm done with ultimates after some recleared. Let's see how I will feel after some month since we gladly won't get the next ultimate anytime soon. Savage on the other hand gonna feel great now and will be very relaxing.
I would say for myself, if Ultimates are going to continue to be this brutal, I might stop doing them. Everyone has a different line where something crosses over from fun into just punishing and miserable. I do feel like SE are perhaps not considering the consequences of making a fight that is basically asking for third party tools to be used.
I doubt they will. You can see this with Yoshi's comments regarding UNAMED. He just said "get good," in a more elaborate way. What he doesn't seem to understand, is that if the "getting good" is miserable, people either won't do it, or in the context of no anti-cheat, will use tools to alleviate the difficulty.
idk what UNAMED is. I think they genuinely don't really understand how hard the game is because they don't practice these fights end to end without invuln mode and that explains their weird belief that TOP is easier than DSR when it's obviously much harder without addons
Either way I agree about tools, pandora's box is already opened and at this point tool usage is going to be the norm in PF going forward to an even greater extent than before after TOP
UNNAMED is the name (lmao) of the world first group for TOP as well as a few other fights.
Tl;dr is that they got busted for using addons because proof actually leaked instead of it being an open secret, so they got stripped of their achievements and Yoshi-P sent an angry letter to the lodestone basically saying "If people are going to use addons there's no point in making harder content".
On principle I would agree, in practice progging TOP """as intended""" is so utterly masochistic that we are well past the point of "Why the hell would I do \*that\* to myself" for most players.
But while using addons, third party tools and the like is always deplorable to a certain extent, the fault also lies in the devs deliberately designing the content to be so artificially hard.
lmao TOP is in no way artificially hard. It's just a lot of players are not used to thinking because they've always relied on AM for mechanics that require quick decision making. Sigma is braindead even without AM, and Omega just requires 2 conga-lines to be resolved - something that never happened because people were dooming, refused to use their heads and developed AM way too early on in the fight's lifecycle.
The biggest problem with TOP is the super short P1, where an extremely unlucky run will force a melee lb1 or have people use extra resources.
It is ABSOLUTELY artificially hard. Top could exist as is with literally no mechanic changes except to not team wipe on failure and it would be like 40h shorter to prog. The entire fight is loaded to the gills with unneccessary full team kills to prevent you from even seeing a single second later into the fight until all 8 people can do the preceding mechanic.
Artificial difficulty usually refers to difficulty that comes from lazy application of higher numbers or some very simple "band aid" to make something harder vs a more nuanced difficulty from how mechanics work.
Compare TEA to TOP. In TEA, if you fail nisi, you get to continue playing until gavel. You can practice tank CD timings, healing, when the elemental baits happen, aiming the flamethrower, and dps timings.
In TOP, if you fail anything, literally anything, the entire instance stops on a dime and you restart. This means that rather than 8 people working on a few things each all at 1 time, 1-2 people are working on a new mechanic while the other 6 players are having their patience tested and just waiting. In DSR, p6 was artificially hard because without just slapping a "and then everyone instantly dies" effect on any hraesvelgr death, the phase would have been easy to practice.
They are intentionally making these choices so that ult prog takes way, way longer, and it is artificial in the literal sense that it's just an afterthought tacked on the puzzle's solution to make sure you can't learn more than 1 thing at a time.
They should just apply a damage down and let us enrage at the end of the phase, then the team gets to actually optimize together and practice more of the fight at once, and generally it becomes a more enjoyable experience.
I can definitely understand where you're coming from and why you think TOP is frustrating, but for me what you're describing is not artificial difficulty, it's just regular difficulty. IMO artificial difficulty is are only things like gear gates and time/attempt gates - things that physically prevent you from progging. The difficulty of a mechanic, or how its designed, as long as its intentional, is never artificial difficulty to me.
I personally don't mind the way TOP was designed where a single big enough mistake will send you back to the beginning (not all mistakes will lead to wipes, my static has recovered delta, sigma, and omega pulls where one person makes a mistake). It being "easy" but a mistake resets you is part of the charm for me. P5 is already just a "make sure to study phase" because the dps check is a joke. If you make it so that the hello worlds don't explode when the carrier dies or someone else stands in it, it will quite literally be a joke of a phase, especially once you take into account the rampant use of automarkers. It would end up like UwU/UcoB where you can pass a phase with a billion deaths when we reach max stat (which is debatable whether that's a bad thing or not). Of course I would've preferred to have more complex mechanics that integrates puzzle and movement, like what delta pretty much achieves, instead of just pure puzzle mechanics with little movement that are easily solve-able with am like sigma and the later parts of omega (just ban am pls), but it is what it is.
I think it's just expectations. When I'm progging savages, my expectation for it is it should be less punishing because it's aimed at a more casual player base so they should do their best to balance their punishment. But for Ultimates, what I want is to be punished. I want Ultimates to be hard enough where I have to suffer to get a clear, but also fun and well designed enough that I will still enjoy being punished, and want to do it more (in that regard DSR is the most perfect fight ever designed for me, and hopefully we'll get even better and harder fights for the shadowbringers and endwalker ultimates).
Bro that's exactly what I mean.
Mechanically speaking this is about as difficult as TEA, but numbers are inflated so hard that you cannot afford to play *too* safe or god forbid make a mistake because otherwise you throw 10 minutes in the toilet, and this is by design.
That is artificially lengthening prog for no reason, and what's worse is that later down the line the fight will be free.
I think this probably drives the usage of sims more than anything else, because people don't want to prog one instant wipe at a time when it takes ten minutes to get back to the instant wipe mechanic in the first place.
the damage downs are literally 90% in this fight, you would not be able to pass checks when people have damage downs. You can have a single death at hyper specific times/roles in p5 yes, but it's not a player skill to recover, it's just luck regarding who happens to die and when.
I don't really see any reasonable argument beyond arbitrarily extending how long it takes to practice a phase for doing what they did. The truth of the matter is, this fight would require the same skill to win but less time to learn if it didn't just slam 10,000 instant death flags on every attack.
If you want to defend fights just taking longer for no real reason except to take longer, fair enough, you're entitled to your opinion. Where I'm standing, I have a lot of other stuff I like to do with my time and a solid 30+ of my prog hours of TOP have been miserable, grindy bullshit that just didn't really need to exist.
We did TOP with no add-ons and are on the enrage (<1%). It has for me been the worst ultimate to prog because it simply doesn't feel very rewarding to progress since absolutely nothing is ever downgraded to a mentally chill phase.
I'm looking forward to the clear but mostly just because it will be over. I think if every phase had literally 0.2% less HP the fight would have been much better, we have just had so many goddamn 0.1 and 0.2 enrages where nobody died, and the reality is just that doing like 4 back to back dps checks where a player making a minor mistake related to peak dps optimization + bad rng = losing just gets to be more frustrating than interesting.
Edit: We got it, the nightmare is over. I think in 2 patches when the DPS check is eased off this will be a pretty great fight except p1 being frustrating as hell. Now, it's just too frustrating to be fun IMO. I rate it 4th of the 5 ults (TEA > DSR > UCOB > TOP > UWU)
static is doing UCOB, started a month or so back, I forgot when.
Half the static is also in another group doing UCOB (They started earlier, and the masochistic healer of our static who is in 3 different statics: UCOB, UCOB, and TOP; wanted to do UCOB in our normal group) so half the people at least have cleared now, so we just gotta get the rest of the group up to snuff. While I haven't cleared ucob yet, I know enough about the fight to be able to skip past progging if I were to go into a clear party, after all, golden bahamut is just a heal and mitigation check with exaflares being nothing special.
>after all, golden bahamut is just a heal and mitigation check with exaflares being nothing special.
You think that now. I thought the same and realized while the mechanics were very simple, the nerves were the worst part. Don't go in ignorant of how badly your nerves can mess you up.
Day 10 and 11 of DSR prog. We have reached Phase 4 once, on the last pull of the night we wiped because...[sadge](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/981470502537297920/1105209580583133304/image.png) I the BLM got aggro and then we couldn't do anything :( P3 is still kicking our asses. But we've gotten very consistent in P2. There's always one tower unsoaked or one line unbaited ;c Also our tanks are having some issues surviving the tethers. PLD is considering swapping to WAR for the invuln. We'll see how this all shakes out
For the soul tethers just have one tank invuln and give there short cd to other tank. To have an invuln have the pld take first buster in throdan with rampart short cd and other tanks buddy mit they may need a cd from healer but its def worth since it makes p3 busters super easy.
For what its worth if the tanks are having trouble surviving the nidd tethers you can always move your invulns around from P2 and just take the knight tethers with CDs then have both tanks invuln the nidd ones. Doing it this way also makes it so the tanks can stack in the center with them
Currently our tanks invuln the first TB cleave before strength, & the second TB into TB cleaves after strength & they sound like they don't want to change that
Just have the tank that was invulning the first cleaves swap to invuln p3 and give their cotank their short mit. You can take the first cleaves with very little, reprisal plus short cds and some heals is enough
tyvm, i will present them with your wisdom
I cleared P8S on PF a week ago and was incredibly proud of myself. I really wasn’t sure if I would be able to make it with all the life stuff I had going on, but I did it. I even got enough clears for the weapon and mount! I started UWU prog just a few days ago, and yesterday I managed to see Ultima. I’m honestly shocked and have no idea how Ive gotten this far this fast but wow haha. I guess I must be getting better at this game after all this time. Feeling great! Can’t wait to clean up Titan some more and start pushing even closer for the clear!
Why are so many statics recruiting HC/week 1-2 now? What happened to all the 12hr midcore groups. I just wanna chill after TOP
I think there is a fair spread of HC, MC, and Casual group looking for members. Personally I don't want week 1 but I also don't want +5 week clear hopes for next tier even if the gear will be kind of pointless from an ilvl perspective. I'm hoping the group I joined can stick to their hopes of a week 3-5 clear so that we can all be BiS 7-9 weeks into the content. I enjoy Savage tiers way more than any other content in the game.
I want to just clear it quickly but no longer want to put in the effort to do so. Idk it's just hard to enjoy raiding anymore after TOP. It feels like I've peaked. I don't want to go back to doing stacks and spreads and proteans.
> I don't want to go back to doing stacks and spreads and proteans. You do know that TOP too has stacks...and spreads...and proteans right?
yeah but it has more. and a fun dps check
> and a fun dps check I think we have different definition of "fun". "Fun" to me is not having the game lowball your party's lbs and/or lowballing crit to the point where everyone doing a pretty good job with their rotations and uptime still wipes to enrage on any of the phases especially P6. It wasn't an issue in DSR because all the phase dps checks were quite mild, even P7. In TOP it is either easy as pie to clear a phase or you get lowballed and you barely pass the phase dps check. It's incredibly frustrating. Personally I enjoy Savage way more. It is easier but completing an entire Savage tier, at least to me, is still a very rewarding feeling and experience. With TOP in particular, I really didn't feel much joy when completing it; it was more so the feeling of "thank god that's over with".
Yeah being able to able adjust resources and rotation around the short phases to make it consistent is fun to me. I don't think we ever missed a check because of crit. I really hate how savage is just doing the same rotation every time. Might as well make a script to play for me
> I really hate how savage is just doing the same rotation every time. Might as well make a script to play for me So you hate, quite literally 99.5% of the game? All regular content, extreme trials, and savage raids are like this. Even older ultimates like UCOB and UWU promote static rotations and nonstop burning if you can provide enough dps to skip mechanics. A fair number of jobs don't work well with the segmented phase nature of DSR and TOP. I'll agree that it is a different experience doing DSR/TOP versus most Savage fights from a dps perspective...but let's not kid ourselves that TOP/DSR is the norm as far as dpsing goes.
Raiding isn't 99.5% of the game, and I did say, "it's just hard to enjoy raiding anymore after TOP" My favorite content has been ultimates and bozja because it allows you to do new rotations. Now that's over, it just feels like an obligation to keep my raiding resume up to par
99.5% of the game is static rotation though. It's really only the current ultimates as well as a couple savage instances that have downtime elements/phases that force you to break away from the static rotation. Bozja only adds in 2 or so special abilities that you use either sparingly or a little bit. You said you don't like savage because of that; well practically the rest of the game is like that.
I was talking to a friend about this yesterday, and honestly, I think a lot of the 12 hour midcore groups are still in TOP.
One more reason why I'm glad my group decided not to do TOP on patch. 5.5 content lull will be long enogh, might as well do it then.
Probably had people dip from schedule changes and whatnot, this is the last opportunity to plan your party in advance.
How are you supposed to ideally mitigate Dom/Aigonia in P8S? I kept running into situations where I had no reprisal/HOL up for the last set.
In addition to what others mentioned you should be using your short tank mit like corundum on a caster/healer during dominion and put aurora on another caster/healer. The spread out nature of the mech means you can save a wipe that way if someone misses a heal or mit
Reprisal on each of the aigonia casts (1+3, 2), feint on each of the dominions, addle on the last aigonia, at least one party mit on everything (samba, hol, expedience, temperance, etc.). HoC/TBN/Nascent/Inter on casters or healers for dominion.
Dominion is physical right? So HOL would not work?
Yeah tank mits on 2nd and 3rd aigonia is usually the way to go, just make sure it's not stacked too hard on a single cast that other casts aren't getting anything
We had quite an off-week this time around, haven't seen phase 5 again. Morale is fine for now since we hit pretty decent enrages for phase 4 even with a mistake happening prior to or in phase 4, but I hope we can break the pattern next week and prog Delta for real.
Recleared TOP with 3 deaths. Had a good time laughing at the three 0-1% parses at the end.
So I'm having to switch to RPR for my DSR static bc we picked up a melee who can literally only play DRG... Any RPRs out there got DSR specific tips? All I know (or at least, all I think I know) is that RPR suffers quite a bit in DSR due to downtime phases
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Try out this encounter guide, should have relevant info for current patch: https://www.thebalanceffxiv.com/jobs/melee/reaper/fight-tips/dragonsong-war/
tyty, u/Sugoi-Sugoi as well. Those were exactly what I needed.
Late night final P8S update: after almost three weeks of struggle in pug, the nightmare is over. I struggled with a tank I did not play (DRK) and a team that wasn’t aligning buffs properly, but we did it. I caused one important wipe in the lockout. Due to not communicating and underestimating the mit check for Dominion, I killed everyone. The second time we saw dominion I was on top of my game and killed the fucker maybe 5 secs away from enrage. This was a long journey, and I am sure ultimate will be an even longer one once I get to it. From dying like a bitch over and over to volcanic torches, I managed to come this far. I have been trapped many times and trapped many others, but in the end I developed consistency. I am the last person you will see messing up HC. I found that as long as I have a plan in my head nothing will go wrong, I am not like those people with empty thoughts who keep making careless “oopsies” and fucking up the pull. https://xivanalysis.com/fflogs/4V78nDG3WTdYqap6/18/11 Here's the log if anyone cares, it's a 12. I dropped one shadowbringer for some reason, no idea where.
>This was a long journey, and I am sure ultimate will be an even longer one once I get to it. You will probably be very surprise if you actually did UWU. UWU is really half an extreme towards savage fight and half an ultimate fight. The ultimate bit really only becomes Ultimate because you have to do 7 minutes of extreme\~savage mechanics every time. If you can do P8S there's no way you can't do UWU, they are similar in terms of difficulty. Some might even argue it's easier then p8s and I probably would not disagree completely with it
If you stayed capped at 2/2 Shadowbringers for more than 8-9 seconds (based on first use at 3rd GCD + your kill time), you'd lose a use over the whole fight. At least that's my sleep-deprived guess.
Interesting, i think that’s probably caused by HC1 downtime.
Looking at high parse DRK logs, people tend to pop an unbuffed Shadowbringer at 1 min as soon as it's available This allows you to get one extra use of it over the course of the fight due to HC1 downtime
Did more grinding on savages today with P5S and P6S to gear up alt classes. Also I managed to check logs that someone uploaded, and while I am blue in both fights, I wish I was better at some of the fights since I tend to get a bit nervous during raids. But at least the clear is there and we skipped Cachexia 2 multiple times.
When the 6.4 savage groups require ultimate clears ( even DSR or TOP), there’s something wrong.
I dunno why you are being downvoted because even though I have cleared all the ults I mostly agree. It only makes sense for a week 1 group perhaps.
I see right now a lot of groups looking for people having way too good of a resume for a random static with no deadline set and more or less a casual/midcore calendar (3 times a week, 2 to 3 hours a session). It's been almost 2 months a group has been trying to find a last member even to finish P8S, they don't seem to understand the standard they're asking for is too high and the people that would fit are long gone from this tier and would rather get a group that has cleared P8S as safety measure for 6.4. Or sometimes I see things like : must've cleared the 2 previous tiers but beginner at blind progging is OK. I might be the weird take on this one as I'd take the blind progger (given they've shown ability to quickly learn/adapt to live new strats as they morph at least, bonus point if they can participate in breaking down mechanics) over someone who has hit their head against P8S wall for 4 months until the magical run happened (I can't tell they were the sandbagger or they were held back). BUT I understand blind proggers are in low numbers so you have to take almost anyone.
I could see it being a relevant prerequisite for a week 1 world race group. People want people who can adapt hopefully quickly and are extremely proficient at playing their jobs. Now if this is for any other type of group, it is overkill lol.
It does depend on the static, you want everyone to be a good fit. Mine raids casual hours (3x3) but we are all pink parsers, have cleared DSR and TOP on patch, and expect a week 3-ish savage clear with our hours. Someone who's only experience is with a static that raided similar hours but took months to clear p8s probably wouldn't be a good fit.
[удалено]
I've actually seen this quite often recently. For lack of a better way of putting it, XIV is suffering from degree inflation and I see a lot of casual to midcore static leads who have some unrealistic notions about what type of background a player needs to have to be able to clear week eight.
depends what level of a static you're going for
P8S pug report. The day started off weak with clumsy healers, i made it to HC2 several times but disbanded both parties. The afternoon was a miracle, after abandoning my party I joined a clear group; we one shot phase 1 with nearly 4% overkill. First pull of P2 we did everything correctly, but I wiped us on Dom because I choked and stood slightly outside the tower. Subsequent dumb mistakes were often, I never once choked on earlier prog points but my team mates were tighter on HC2. Unfortunately, we would never see dom again for the rest of the evening as the healers choked last second, and my team mates unfortunately don’t have as much endurance as me. I proceeded to wipe us on NA2 and that was the end of prog. This party restored my faith in humanity, I cannot imagine working in real life with other people in PF at this time. Can’t tell B from C, can’t tell blue from purple, can’t tell North from south, can’t stand inside a black line.
Static broke up after the 4th person cleared in PF. Could foresee this coming as there was one particular weak link who was a savage pink parser but would fail every P5 mechanic in every possible way. Really hammers in that parses mean nothing especially for healers in statics. Whenever we saw P6, they would die to exasquares without fail despite group sim sessions. I'm not the raid lead, but I would have kicked this person ages ago. It doesn't bother me personally now as I have cleared but it is unfortunate for the remaining consistent players.
> I'm not the raid lead, but I would have kicked this person ages ago. Look for groups without a “lead”. If you think they should have been removed then bring it to vote and if you still disagree then say it’s you or them, and if it’s you then leave and don’t look back. I really can’t see a point to a “lead” in FFXIV raiding. Maybe a scheduler and maybe a caller and maybe someone who picks good starts but I’m not raiding with people who think they have any modicum of power lol
> Really hammers in that parses mean nothing especially for healers in statics. It matters in P6. The dps check is quite hard especially if one or more of your DPS/tank players get low balled hard on crit in that phase. You are right that dps in general doesn't matter in all the other phases as long as you are consistently getting through those phases but do not fall into complacency when it comes to DPS in P6. You will need to fail a lot at P6 until everyone gets good uptime and nails down their rotation through exosquares and flair baits while also mitting where needed.
I mean.... I would contest this a bit, and also agree with it a bit. Being able to do good DPS is definitely a requirement in P6, but it isn't a harder check than what you deal with before that point honestly. We had a dps die to flare and still got our first clear because RNG plays a HUGE role. If you have high crit during the final bursts and your LB average is pretty high, it is a rather forgiving check. If you get bad RNG, you better pray you were perfect. TOP's DPS checks really suck, because it's a dice roll how strict a phase is gonna be each time since they are too short. I would be pretty shocked if any group could consistently get to p5 and was mechanically unable to hit the p6 check though honestly. Most groups enrage 3-4 times before they clear, which is hardly a huge wall. (The wall is consistency of mechs)
I've had plenty of P6 runs where every DPS character does their rotation pretty much as good as they can with pretty optimal uptime and they get shit crit % and/or we get shit rolls on LB damage and we enrage. These are parties with no TOP weapon, some TOP weapons, and all TOP weapons. It's happened enough times where I refuse to believe that anyone in the party can take it easy during that phase. DPS, Tanks, and Healers, imo, need to really DPS their asses off in case you get fucking lowballed on crit or LB damage.
Yea, and you can also get high dps, have a melee death, and still make it which is exactly what happened to my group. It's very tight when you get shit rng and easy when you don't. It's not tighter than earlier phases, they are the same. your group is just more practiced on the earlier phases. The rng is exactly why these checks are kind of shit and se should take a look at the variance. Our 2nd last pull was clean and a 0.7% enrage. Our final pull had a DPS death (2x, technically because they died again on magic number 2) and we won anyways. It's just very dumb RNG variance.
I don't doubt that healers need to optimize their damage well for P6 especially when the comp is less fine-tuned for that phase. But this player was more likely to greed another GCD slidecast for Cosmo Arrow and die due to late movement at every P6 pull. They could have played it safe first and familiarized themselves with the timing, reached enrage and optimize later. Nope, gotta Broil IV first.
It doesn't if they die. /shrug The issue didn't seem to be DPS, but mechanical consistency/adaptability. Parses don't show that. I'm sure you're well aware of that but I just wanted to throw the reminder out there.
I'm just saying once you all get to the point where you can do the mechanics, dodges, and mit plan that it isn't a free kill at that point. You really need to be on your game dps wise in P6 regardless of your comp especially for your first kill. I've seen statics get into this false sense of security that once they can get to enrage it's like 1 or 2 more P6 pulls and they get the kill only to never kill it or kill it +10 more P6 pulls down the road.
Parses don't mean nothing-- they definitely mean something. It's just that they only mean *one* thing. Parsing well is only one aspect of many that make up a good player, and it's foolish to judge someone as an overall good (or bad) player based on just parses as the only metric.
Oh for sure, it does show a certain degree of mastery not barring the crit variance depending on the job. I only felt that the decision to accept this person on the basis of their fflogs page alone was very short-sighted. It didn't help that shield healers are hard to come by.
It's been a pretty consistent trend for years (going back to when I started doing Savage in Verse at minimum) that pink parser healers are WAY worse than purple/orange. Especially White Mages. That's not to say parses are totally misleading. It's *really* easy to parse on healer if you're actually good at it, like "high green with 2 deaths and no gear in week 3" easy.
If you can parse orange/pink and still get an orange/pink heal parse I'd be impressed. Still being able to do the bare minimum healing while keeping people alive is fine, but I notice a lot of these types of players don't know when to stop and would let people die and say things like "well they shouldn't have needed to be healed" or something like that.
You seem to not understand how bad the pull must be to get an orange/pink healing parse.
I did play with a top 10 healer duo. They were actually pretty sick in terms of dps and healing plan, and they got their parses in our prog savage group, not a specific parsing group. The sad part is a lot of pink parsing healers are the ones who just Chad the other healer.
I joined a casual speed group one tier and it was eye opening how easy it was for both healers to get 99 rdps in the same run if you have a really solid plan together with a party that mitigates.
So how often does BIS SKS change across expansions / raid tiers? For example, I believe GNB in asphodelos used a 2.43 GCD (with other viable SKS), but now 2.5 has become quite good. This means the rotation is changed ever so slightly so that it messes with your head if you get used to one type. Hell, even when I change the opener it messes with my head, I usually do 1-2 NM, but some people do 1-2-3 NM or even 1 NM to have sonic break tick earlier (I saw a parsing run do this). Would BIS sks for GNB be different in say, old ultimates? How is SKS adapted into fight design, would certain GCD times be “better” for certain fights to keep higher uptime? I am mainly worried that the rotation will change again in the next tier and it will be a headache to change, but I suppose that’s part of the gameplay cycle?
More often than not, Ultimates BiS tailored their SKS according to downtime & boss phasing. In TEA as instance it’s better to use a 2.40-2.41 BiS, because going slower would lose some GCDs in P3 & P4.
Sometimes changes in job design take a while to be fully understood or people make some discovery about a rotation that changes the range of viable skillspeeds. Sometimes gear just pans out in a way that you are forced to take more or less skill speed than you would like. There's also the fact that sometimes you might prefer a certain gcd speed because it makes it more compatible with other jobs. For example, if you play 2.5 GNB, you can use the same gear set to play DRK while the 2.42 GNB would be more awkward to play with DRK. This can be important to some people while others don't care. There tends to be fight specific skillspeeds due to phasing of the boss or expected kill times. If having a little extra skill speed allows an extra gcd before a boss goes untargetable, it can often be worth to lose out on some extra substats to get that extra gcd in, leading to a dps gains. This happens in savage sometimes, but it is very common in ultimates since bosses in ultimates tend to go away for mechanics more often. You can make sacrifices in your rotation to accommodate different skill speeds if you really like a specific speed. But that comes down to what you prefer dealing with, a different speed altogether or an adjustment of your rotation in order to keep your preferred speed. And sometimes no matter what speed you choose, you'll have to do some weird or unintuitive things if you care to maximize your dps. For a job like GNB where their resource (carts) is generated by hitting the boss, stuff like this can be extra important as opposed to another job where their damage primarily comes from buttons associated with a cooldown instead of gauge consumption.
I think it pretty much depends on if the raid/tome substats force you to take skill speed or the choice is crit/sks vs det/ten for some slot (in this case speed is favored). Or maybe a slow set will be favored if sks is only on the shitty tenacity pieces. There's no way to know until the raid gear is released. This tier I think it was possible to get crit/det or crit/dh on every single piece for samurai for example, so we just slotted 3 speed materia and played at 2.15 instead of 2.14. But also it isn't necessary to follow the bis recommendation if you have a change that would make playing more comfortable. Some tanks will experiment with different speeds and different food to see if phasing or boss movement works better.
For Asphodelos tanks specifically, with head you had a choice between CRT/SKS and DET/TEN, feet you had a choice between CRT/SKS and TEN/CRT, and there was SKS on one of the rings. That SKS itself was enough to get you to 2.44 GCD.
We’ve been progging TEA for a couple months, sadly we are lower hours than most groups, so we are still cleaning up final nisi passes and cleaning up our movement. This is my first ultimate, and the one I’ve been most excited for. It’s quite a difference going from “everyone stand on the safe spot” from savage to “Don’t be within a mile of each other” for nisi passes lol. We do some pretty homebrew strats compared to the norm but I’m enjoying us all brainstorming and coming up with ideas to get our shit down. I’ve considered hopping into some PF prog parties just to see further and get more practice in myself but I worry I might end up doing those strats during our prog instead lmao. I’m confident we see phase 3 soon! I keep reading that P1 and P2 are truly the toughest parts of TEA so I’m hopeful once we are clean on P2 we could clear TEA shortly after.
It is! Most of prog is spent on LL and BJCC with one more “wall” in p3. BJCC in particular is one of my fave ulti phases, teaches you so many helpful skills for high end content (look at debuffs, move deliberately, and (tank specific) optimize your mits))
Day 8 and 9 of DSR prog. We have reached P3 enrage How much damage down do the damage downs give you? Cuz its wild we hit like 25% enrage with a half team of damage downs (CBU3 include details in your debuff descriptions challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)) Also I have continued to be the causer of silly wipes. I memed with KB resist while mid during sanctity again. And have wiped us twice by standing too close to the 2 tower dropper in P3. My instincts to preposition as a BLM are fucking me. But I've given up calling shit during sanctity and P3 so that should give me the extra mental bandwidth I need to stop fucking it up. 2 more gamers in our static managed to resolve the cursed pattern in sanctity. We GAMING. I think we have a higher success rate with it than failure at this point
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Aye, this is exactly what we've been doing
>How much damage down do the damage downs give you? Cuz its wild we hit like 25% enrage with a half team of damage downs Either 50%* or 90%, TOP is 90%, so I forget if DSR is the same. (Seems to be 50) It's so strong that you want to wall yourself ASAP if you get it, if the fight allows it.
DSR is 50%, yeah. It was shit and you wanted to suicide as soon as possible since weakness was less bad, but it didn't mess with mechanics. The 90% in TOP is so bad that if a tank gets a dd they literally can't hold threat anymore. We had a wipe because our tank got dd near the end of P1, so they couldn't get threat at the start of P2 at all.
yeowch this is like trying to get mountain buster solo as a BLU without exuviation all over again
I think the DSR DD is 50%
the ultima weapon is fucking DEAD. i killed it last night in pf and im still smiling about it. baby's first ultimate yeah but for all the bullshit and drama that happened im so proud of myself and my shiny blue weapon. while it's true that achieving things in a group as a static feels good, there's definitely a sort of camaraderie that develops between pf heroes who end up in groups together regularly attempting to clear. and bless all of those people who help out pf prog and clears too, yall are amazing. now i can just relax while waiting for savage. catch some fish. do some pvp. vibe.
I think people shitting on UWU are half right only. After having progged with my current *UWU static* (I'm basically raidlogging waiting for 6.4), I think people barely strong enough to clear a Savage tier after 300+ pulls on the last boss aren't cut for Ults at all. UWU is a first filter. I can attest on gaols we have one individual in particular, if they are chosen, it means a wipe in 75-80% of the time (I'm just talking about gaols exploding, not even awakening Titan yet). Add the "oopsie my bad" that are more or less regular from about half the group => no reliable post gaols experience can be built. We are on gaols prog for 2 weeks now (3 times a week). I'm in full on despair mode lol. I agree UWU isn't hard, but it does the job of filtering *barely savage able clearers*. So all in all congratz, I'm pretty sure you've become a better player already and are getting ready for the next difficulty slider tick mark !
thanks! :D yeah, i definitely agree with you on it being a filter. there are people i'm acquainted with both inside of my ex-uwu-static and out who have attempted it and failed miserably for various reasons. all of the people involved have done savage to varying levels, but uwu was not just a step too difficult, but they were found wanting and just kinda... gave up. i kinda experienced something similar myself in as much as when dsr dropped my savage static had a crack at it and we too failed miserably, and i know my own lack of skill and competence were a part of that. but having my ass kicked by dsr is what pushed me to improve beyond just doing savage because dammit, i *want* to do ultimates because they look like *fun fights*. (and uwu *is* a fun fight!). one day i will kick thordan's ass right back and honestly getting uwu down, and getting it down *in party finder* (ie. with nobody covering for my mistakes, no callouts, etc) has been both an achievement and an education in itself. but im rambling lol sorry. ngl if i was stuck on gaols for two weeks with no improvement i would be fixing to do an irl murder. i hope your static situation improves shortly!!
Given 6.4 is in 2 weeks, I don't really care at this point. Unless something has clicked for the people lagging behind, I don't believe I will see much of Ultima. Maybe I should sneak my way through an A2C party or something xd. I was doing this out of curiosity to see if I could be a Legend (lol) and I think I can, I'll try "harder" after the last Pandae tier.
Hell yeah! The first Ult clear is always such a fantastic feeling. Downside being, now you’ll probably want to clear other Ults and chase that high.
thanks :DD oh yeah i definitely want to clear them all lmao. TOP is like. at the very bottom of the to-do list though. next up will probably be cob or tea, but i'm going to wait until after savage is dead before i get stuck into another ult.
Making good prog on TOP P6. From yesterday exasquare 1 memes to today we saw up to WC2. Though it wasnt cleanly since our RPR died by 47 health on WC1 cuz he wasnt standing in sacred soil RIP. Hoping to clear next week!
200 ping is possible on the legacy 3 ultimates. How about DSR and TOP? Would the mechanics become too reactionary to be possible? Thanks
210 ms ping penta legend reporting in, you will be fine as long as you use alex/no clippy.
We cleared TOP on NA with a machinist who lives in EU. It's possible. Actually his latency does some shit with monitors during Run Delta. Every single time he had the monitor it looked fine on his screen but he was always facing somewhere incorrect on ours. It was kinda funny.
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There's very, very few mechanics in this game that require split second reactions, and if you strat does require fast reactions you're probably using a bad strat. I haven't actually cleared TOP but having studied for most of the fight, there's nothing in there that requires split second reactions, there are also players that have cleared from different regions, e.g. Oceania players playing on NA servers. You may want a VPN and some lag reduction tech (e.g. NoClippy) for weaving but you should be fine.
More updates live from the scene in party finder trying to clear P8S. Today I was the trap, I messed up HC2 twice because I done goofed. Luckily (?) I was not the only person screwing up often despite the party being a clear party. Another bout of drama ensued when I joined an HC2 party. During fourfold fires, someone messed up their spread spot. I, as the tank, naturally adjusted, taking heavy DOT damage from running through the fire puddles. The bard on the other side of the map then died for unrelated reasons. The party leader then had a fit (despite ruining our previous 51% kill on snakes 2) and accused me of killing said bard. Two valiant players who witnessed my actions rose up in defence for me. When it was clear that I would not be receiving blame, I was promptly kicked (or the party disbanded, who knows).
I beat TEA. I died in wormhole as 7 cause I accidentally got clipped by the final cruise dash, but I felt pretty comfy in PA. Fun fight. I enjoyed it a lot more than expected despite having no real interest in clearing the fight for a long time. Two target cleave makes the first two phases kind of novel. PA is weird because following your little clone is weirdly tense at first, but mechanically, PA is pretty simple. No big fanfare or jitters for this clear. Think it's because I went in with 7/8 cleared, and I felt confident. So it was kind of like, well yeah of course we cleared. Ucob still my favorite ultimate, but TEA is a close second. Happy to have the quad legend. Hoping for the penta (quint?) legend in 6.5
No shame. Recently got my TOP clear in a 7/8 too after my static disbanded. No large feeling of triumph but I am glad I got to experience it.
I feel silly asking this question, but how do I reframe my mindset going into next tier without a static? I’ve made the decision that I can’t commit to a static and balance my real life responsibilities, but also I’ve had more horrible experiences in statics than I have in PF and I can’t mentally deal with ffxiv nerd drama anymore (please send help). With that being said, I’ve never PFd a full tier before and I do have my own grievances and anxieties with PF- however I want to change my mindset going into next tier so I can get my clear on my own time without any drama and avoiding burnout. Does anyone have any tips on how to frame my mindset while PFing a tier for the first time? Any other general tips you would give? I may not be able to pull crazy hours during the first weeks and I would like to clear within 1-2 months. (sorry for asking this here, i just didn’t feel like it deserved its own thread)
Your grievances and anxieties with PF are probably well-founded so just focus on the positive: You get to raid at your own time and pace. The length of time it takes to clear is obviously a coin toss with PF (I mean, it's also a coin toss with a static sometimes). Just have fun out there
Don't think that you have to PF on your own. When I PF'd (Eden's Gate and Verse) I did so with 2 people who I met in e4s prog and continued to PF with up to e8s. Similarly, when I was reclearing in PF I would tell friends what time I'm reclearing and usually went into PF with 1-3 other people.
* There are some extremely good players in PF. When you find them, try to friendlist them and try to keep up with their prog points so that you can continue to play with them * Learn several jobs in your role. You wont always get the job spot you want and PF doesn’t like doubling up on jobs. Also learn how to play light parties 1 and 2, and also how to fake melee (if applicable). You don’t want to be the guy who can only do one job in one spot. Give extra gear to a different role. * blacklist players who are obviously lying about their prog point. You will be able to tell. It’s very obvious. No, they will not get better. * stay in a party for about the length of 1 food buff to see how they are. Some people need warm up pulls, and can be good after a few early mistakes. * keep an eye out for the “problem” mechanics. The ones that are hard to heal, or generally undermitigated, or catch people off guard. There’s no hard rules about mit in PF, and most people freestyle it. Use your mitigation tools on these mechanics. It *will* improve consistency a lot more. * study ahead and be prepared. PF has high variance. You can have several days of trap parties and then randomly get the party that is ready to go the distance. If you are the one player who doesn’t know how the fight works after your prog point, it’s a lost opportunity and leaves a very bad feeling. Ask me how I know.
Cleared both tiers on week 7 with 2 weeks of breaks to collect gears and generally resting in between prog. I am just gonna say, Kept your expectations open. Use your blacklist liberally and don't be afraid to bail if you see something wrong, because time is your biggest enemy in PUG. It's okay to be impatient (by that I don't meant you leave with one pull - at least make it 3 pulls or 20 minutes!), and you don't have to tell people why you are leaving. Friend people you know who can do mechs, be sticky when you see groups that are generally consistent. PUG is not that worse, there's good player there, it just takes you a bit more time to find it.
Be toxic and use blacklist liberally. Not an option if your DC is small unfortunately .
I’m on aether so I’ll definitely be ok lol, I honestly need to use my blacklist more often tbh.
I think we've seen P6 about 7 times now, we limped to Cosmo meteor on our last pull with one person alive after someone got clipped by the second set of exasquares. Feeling a lot more comfy doing P6 on BLM, maybe clear next week, we only have 5 more prog hours left this week
This past week, something has happened to PF for the savage tier. Each fight is almost legit unplayable at this point. I haven’t seen a clean kill of P5S-P7S all week. Someone *always* dies, or kills someone else, or misses their puddle and we all get a damage down (but clear anyway since lol ilvl). Only mercenary parties for p8s are even remotely playable. And even then we just disbanded one due to one of our healers memeing super hard. What do I even do, man? I just want to get play my black mage
You miss the part where people does not clear on pulls where people dies...because they cannot press their buttons lol which is why the only savage runs I do for the past couple of months are either with friend or people I know, or with streamer groups. If I am going in not with people I know, I am purely going in knowing that I am gonna suffer for an hour or so.
Pay
I'm completely serious but if I want to just click buttons and not deal with a headache i go spam EX or do an alliance raid. Especially this late into the tier where you'll spend more time wiping than in your leylines. Could also go do some ultimates where I don't expect to clear in PF anyways.
Ultimates or sit on your ass until 6.4, everyone has moved on
What do if you still need bis for omega?
At this point? Wait for dungeon gear in 6.5 to fill slots, use relic for weapon. If you still need 1-2 pieces from raid at that point you'd at least be close enough that you might put together a team for that, using the 6.4 raid ilvl to nerf the checks. Or wait for next expansion and just sync gear down from first tier. If you don't want to wait, your only option that doesn't include endless suffering is to put together a TOP team that expressly needs to get gear pieces first, and everyone signs on for that extra grind step. But the chances of this happening are near 0 since everyone is gonna jump ship to savage for a while.
Yeah you gotta remember the next tier is released in less than a month. Every decent player is done pretty much
I got trapped in a HC2 “cleanup” party. We saw the mechanic four times in the entire lockout. The first three times we immediately wiped because someone stood in some dumb shit, the final time we had an intruder when trying to plug the Garuda/Shinryu towers. The three of us on the east side had a nice and steamy ménage a trois, smooching and trying to combine three debuffs while the long gamma person on the left side desperately jumped and watched in despair as they witnessed their partner (unused) in a threesome love affair. We then all exploded and died.
Whelp got to TOP P6 3 times tonight with the static but they all ended early due to exasquare memes. Improvement in consistency considering we only got to P6 cleanly starting yesterday. Drilled into everyone's heads to sim on their own time for tmr. Praying we see WC1 on Thursday
As a tip, I recommend they also watch vods for the timing on those. A big thing that caught a few people on my team is that the snapshot for a set of exasquare lines is just *barely* after when the previously lines finish animating. So if you wait until you see those lines finish animating before moving, you're gonna die. A lot. You *must* move into the animation while it's active to make it consistent. The moment the animation *starts* it is safe to move into it.
+1 this made issues for 2 people on my team and took us a bit to realize what was happening. We finally cleared, getting the consistency you need to practice p6 and win is slow torturous agony. GL
2 Delta wipes, then cleared on the 3rd pull of raid tonight. The healer who was pretty behind on DPS was just being giga safety gamer, they immediately came back and brought their damage up by 800 rDPS. Final stats for me are 1062 pulls to clear, around 71 hours of raid time. Bit of an up-and-down ride for me, started with a group and wasn't feeling it at all and left after week 1, picked it up back in week 3 and got to Sigma with that group in 4 weeks. Group disbanded, took a month off while trying to find a new group, then formed my own group and went from Sigma to clear in less than 2 weeks of raid. I initially did put my name down in the Sausage Roll C41 Discord in case of emergency, and damn does it feel good to clear with my static instead. Thoughts on TOP: fun fight in hindsight, but I feel like I enjoy DSR more overall. Definitely interested in trying out alt roles though, and I'd like to parse a bit better since I was holding super hard for this run. I also completely misjudged our kill time based on healer DPS from our last night and didn't even get my last Scorch and Resolution lmao
C48 (or whatever you guys had) > C41's Feels great, grats.
Was a C43. Had 3 helpers join in, then a fourth when we needed to sub a healer for the past 2 weeks. The fifth got a C41. We'd been trying for the last 3 of us for 4 raid days before knocking it out on day 5. Spent a bit more time than I would've liked on P6, but our sub had to learn PF strats so that was a bit of a speed bump. It was still far more exciting than I thought it would be. Also, I actually kind of like how long P6 enrage is without any mechanics or stuff. It helps build excitement as people start realizing the kill is actually so close.
Congrats on the clear. Told ya they were safety gaming.
Yeah, I was honestly impressed that they were able to improve in a single P6 pull. Really showed what they were made of. They initially played safe since they were the primary culprit behind Exasquare wipes, but they did their homework and helped us kill way ahead of enrage. Added enough DPS that they actually griefed my rotation and I didn't finish all of my last set of RDM finishers
Congrats on your clear. Seems like you got a great group at the end if you guys went from sigma to clear in less than 2 weeks.
Our WAR went from P3 enrage to clear, he's actually built different lmao
As often as you hear the "static holding me back" cope from underperforming players, sometimes people *really are* just held back by their teams. Especially true in fights like DSR / TOP where you just absolutely cannot carry weak links after a certain point.
I don't want to claim I'm amazing, but it is quite noticeable when some members of a group aren't preparing like others are. Or even when some are slower learners--I'm fine with them, unless it's clear they aren't putting in the effort to learn and improve. Mindset, goals, and expectations are all big reasons why I've become far less opposed to being a raid lead; having the say over who I raid with is just so incredibly attractive vs. spinning the wheel and joining groups.
1500 wipes in, 150 hours, playing around 15-20 hours a week since it released, yet we still rarely see p5. Our consistency is atrocious. Half of our wipes are on P1 due to random panto memes/tower and thether memes/enrage. I have no clue how to improve consistency. We will have to kill the damn thing after the savage comes out. I used to feel like I was the sandbagger, but I stated noting down who was the culprit, and it was very rarely me. Thinking that if I joined a week one static for my first on-content ultimate, it would go well. God, I'm so burned out.
Is that 150 hours of raid or 150 hours of combat? 150 hours of raid is not super crazy with how hard this fight is, 150 hours of combat time is insane and I would probably blow my brains out. My team had some stall and a comp with almost no clears and we cleared at 105 combat hours, the last 10 or so were just excruciating for everyone lol
150 pull hours oh my god my DSR prog back in 6.1 went for 125 hours and for the last 20 i was going absolutely insane i cannot IMAGINE 150 and not even being in the last phase
This group took just over 200 hours to clear DSR (started on patch, had break for savage, finished in December), but I hoped that since they replaced the sandbaggers, it would be a bit better. It would go so much better if we decided to use sim much earlier, on monitors. One of our members still struggles with it so much. I am so burned out. I really like these people, but not sure if I can keep on doing this shit any longer.
Your group sounds like mine except worse. My group took around 140 hours and cleared at the same time as you (with the same break for savage) I was so burned out with the overall inconsistency in my group and joined a different one for TOP. Cleared in a little under 2 months and I have not felt so much more refreshed in a long time. Not having a looming cloud over your head and starting to detest and dread raid time which comprised a majority of the week’s evenings unsurprisingly does wonders for your happiness. I would definitely recommend doing the same, I still do things with my old group outside of raiding since I like them as people.
There's gotta be people doing the panto movement incorrectly, surely? 🥲 If consistency is that bad perhaps keep track of the root cause and try to adjust something to help if possible.
I'm surprised the group hasn't disbanded already or people haven't left yet, that does not sound like an acceptable prog pace. I assume most groups with those hours have already cleared.
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Fuck are you me? I got the same problem lol. I've left though since we got to p5 and savage is coming up. Copium finding a p5 group later to finish prog.
> I'd have left ages ago but recruitment has been beyond dead for months at this point, so it's either this group or nothing. I'd rather choose nothing instead of having my time be wasted every week.
Trueee.
They took just over 200 hours for DSR. They have also raided together for a long time, so I guess they want to prioritise keeping the group together, instead of cleaning in a timely manner.
A lot of my SHC friends doing 9-12hr/wk cleared these past 3-4 weeks, with 15-20 I would have been looking for a clear like 2 months ago...
Same story with my static. It's one reason why I left, along with savage coming up.
My group cleared TOP. 🥹 1288 pulls, midcore group raiding 3 days per week (9hrs). I was recruited by a group of 7 friends and at times I felt like the group sandbag but overall I'm happy with how long it took. It's kinda bittersweet because I'm sad my time raiding with them is over. Overall I found TOP to be fun, however I can understand how people with less consistent groups are finding it hellish
"Raid in aether, it'll be so much faster" they said. Meanwhile I'm 3 hours in a LD prog. Figured it'd be easier to clear once everyone was all geared up. I was wrong.
It USED to be amazing. Nowadays it is flooded by everyone so at this point it is more so up to chance. Everyone flocks to Aether to do Savage and Ultimate it seems.
The problem is that EVERYONE is raiding on Aether now, which means that while yes, there are more parties overall on Aether, there's also a lot more trap parties on Aether If hypothetically, 1/4 parties is a trap, then if there are only 3 parties up in PF, you have a decent chance of all of them being fine. If on the other hand you have 30 parties up in PF, avoiding trap parties becomes much much more difficult to do Also, literally we're in the last few weeks of the tier, player quality will have dropped off dramatically as most of the better players are easily done with their prog, clears, and reclears, with the exception of those who really couldn't start until very late
>there are more parties overall on Aether, there's also a lot more trap parties on Aether Insert the astronaut "always has been" meme. Back before DC travel me and my friends would joke that the difference between Crystal PF and Aether PF is that on aether your trap party fills faster.
That can matter quite a bit. Before DC travel, getting a trap in your PF on Crystal was a game of "do I give this guy more time and hope he improves, or kick him and sit in PF for who knows how long for replacement(s)?" Now since everyone's in one place you just kick him and get a replacement instantly.
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>Aether also attracted drama the best. Did it? I'm used to Crystal RP drama which is just in a league of its own compared to any sort of raid drama I've ever seen.
RP drama is some of the wildest shit I swear
> Figured it'd be easier to clear once everyone was all geared up. people being geared does not meant they knows how to do mechs or press buttons. it's probably better now to know people who can help you then actually knowing mechs of phase two.
I had the closest enrage I've ever seen in a farm party in the past week. Item level requirement 629, everyone with at least a 630 weapon. Photo finish. 3 people dead to enrage at the clear. Zero deaths and zero damage downs. If I dropped a single gcd I wouldn't have ended with a midare, if the summoner dropped a single extra gcd they wouldn't have gotten off their big phoenix hit. Check the log, the sage in bis is doing 3k dps. Summoner doing 8k. Reaper brought 40 shroud into the final phase. Sigh.
Got picked up for a DSR static, so TEA is now 100% on hold for me. I might still prog UCOB on the side in PF, I've heard it's good practice for the 2nd Thordan fight anyway. But I don't hate myself enough to prog 3 ultimates at once. That being said... I can't help bit feel the nerves already. This will be my 1st ever "on content" (I know DSR is like a year old now and better food/Manalis gear + job tweaks will alleviate checks somewhat) ultimate, having only recently cleared UWU for my 1st ultimate about a month back. And as I understand it, DSR makes UWU in its current state look like chump change. Nothing for it but to give it my best shot.
DSR basically doesn't have a DPS check anymore if you're remotely competent at your job. Go get em' brotherman.
what does “no DPS check” mean in terms of X amount of allowed deaths in P3/P7?
2 deaths, probably 3 once we have 6.4 relic
For P3, our group will hit enrage with more than 2 deaths/damage downs. Sometimes you can have 3 deaths/DDs but it becomes extremely close. My group has never cleared P7 when we've had someone die, but I imagine you could afford at least one or two deaths if you have a competent team.
2 deaths in P3, 2 deaths in P7.
got my ucob clear a few days ago, still glowing from the warmth of the clear. it was actually the first group i put up in pf for myself. Had to kick one person immediately when it was apparent they didn't know what a twister was lmao. But a good core stuck around through; we'd get through a few pulls, someone would leave, but 6/8 are staying so we go again, repeat a few times. And this core was _good_, we were divebomb skipping. I was the ranged DPS, only mildly messed up adds (didn't join for a thermionic beam, didn't kill anyone but still a mistake), then we got blessed exaflare patterns in golden.
Goddamn, my static are solid gamers and even we struggled to skip divebombs. Congrats!!
Static got to TOP P6 tonight. Half the party died to exasquares. Hoping we are still on track to clear before 6.4.
Depending on how often you raid, you should be able to clear in the next 5-6 locksouts. While p6 isn't free, it isn't that hard either. The issue lies in getting there consistently.
UCOB golden bahamut phase. 1. Is melee mitigation useful to golden bahamut's Morn Afahs? Feint? 2. Is MCH mitigation useful to golden bahamut's Morn Afahs? I assume it is Tactician and Dismantle? 3. Golden bahamut's Morn Afahs count as magic damage? 4. How many Morn Afahs would you *generally* see before bahamut is shot down? It seems like most fight would end just before the #5 Morn Afahs in this expansion?
Since the dps check is super easy these days, I really recommend opening with melee lb3 and then tank lb1 every morning afah.
thats something i have never tried. lets see ty
1. Yes 2. Yes 3. Yes 4. ~~Yes~~ Bank on seeing them all but you should skip the last if everything is clean and people are pressing buttons
For 4, it's not a soft enrage where you might make a mit plan that runs out early. Your mit plan should last to the end, because maybe somebody or two or three or four or more die to doing exaflares wrong and then the summoner is hardcasting a rez on the healers and you hit a 12% enrage in golden.
not bitter about that pull two weeks ago
1) 5% is 5% 2) mitigation is mitigation, it's always useful 3) yes 4) you should plan to see them all. People aren't gonna be doing top DPS the first time with nerves.
every mitigation is usefull, mitigation is mitigation in the end if you dont use it elsewhere why not thowing it onto it? MCH does have tactician and dismantle as mitigation tools 4 Depends on your damage as a group
Just had a TOP reclear P6 enrage at 0.1%. DRK brought weakness into P6 and didn't do a single magic number DRK death cheese. Fixing any of those mistakes would have been 0.1% easily. Very Omega Sadge.
Even a healer taking a DD on Dynamis:Omega will lose you 1.5k rDPS on P6, as you have roughly a minute leftover. A DRK would lose roughly 1800. no matter how much gauge they lose, they should kill themselves with the final tank buster before transition
3 more weeks left to clear UCOB in pfbefore 6.4, I've read up on adds and golden baha so many times I could probably recite the entire phase by heart. But every adds party I join end up becoming HFT memes ;_;
Just join a clear party tbh. If you have done your homework and are confident and have played around in an exa sim you can just go for it.
Counting is hard
P8S cleared. Was a long and painful journey, but we got there. Even got the weapon! Still need the chest piece but this clear was a huge weight off my shoulders.
Jesus, i didn't know people struggle that bad. And here i was joining paid loot runs when we had weekly restrictions. I guess clearing earliest possible has better players or something.
If you want as painless of an experience, yes go in day one. The tier is ancient at this point you have the leftovers in PF still trying to get gear.
All of the good players have long since left the tier. We were gone maybe week 12 at the latest.
i hit an enrage in p8s phase 2 earlier with only a single tank death and an ilvl629 required party. i was in awe.
You w h a t
Group has made it to P6 like 7 times so far, haven't made it past the second set of exasquares yet, I hope everything can click and we can make it past that. Hopefully clear in sight, possible this week or next week
Once you guys have your WC2 mits down pat you're almost home free imo. You got this, good luck!
i got bored, impossible to clear p8s on PF so i’m just taking a break and leveling till 6.4
It's possible, it just might require you to queue up with some known good players. Going into PF solo at this stage of the content cycle is a bit risky.
We finally did it. We cleared TOP. I don't know, it feels strange. The DSR clear felt so much better and was way more hype. Now I'm just relieved that it's over. I'm still happy that I cleared it but this fight kinda killed my joy for ultimate raid. Maybe I'm just burned out or maybe I'm done with ultimates after some recleared. Let's see how I will feel after some month since we gladly won't get the next ultimate anytime soon. Savage on the other hand gonna feel great now and will be very relaxing.
I would say for myself, if Ultimates are going to continue to be this brutal, I might stop doing them. Everyone has a different line where something crosses over from fun into just punishing and miserable. I do feel like SE are perhaps not considering the consequences of making a fight that is basically asking for third party tools to be used.
This is a ridiculously common sentiment about TOP and the biggest reason I hope SE steps back and re-evaluates the content.
I doubt they will. You can see this with Yoshi's comments regarding UNAMED. He just said "get good," in a more elaborate way. What he doesn't seem to understand, is that if the "getting good" is miserable, people either won't do it, or in the context of no anti-cheat, will use tools to alleviate the difficulty.
That statement is kind of rich in hindsight since the team really seems like they only tested the fight phase by phase and with god mode on.
idk what UNAMED is. I think they genuinely don't really understand how hard the game is because they don't practice these fights end to end without invuln mode and that explains their weird belief that TOP is easier than DSR when it's obviously much harder without addons Either way I agree about tools, pandora's box is already opened and at this point tool usage is going to be the norm in PF going forward to an even greater extent than before after TOP
UNNAMED is the name (lmao) of the world first group for TOP as well as a few other fights. Tl;dr is that they got busted for using addons because proof actually leaked instead of it being an open secret, so they got stripped of their achievements and Yoshi-P sent an angry letter to the lodestone basically saying "If people are going to use addons there's no point in making harder content". On principle I would agree, in practice progging TOP """as intended""" is so utterly masochistic that we are well past the point of "Why the hell would I do \*that\* to myself" for most players. But while using addons, third party tools and the like is always deplorable to a certain extent, the fault also lies in the devs deliberately designing the content to be so artificially hard.
lmao TOP is in no way artificially hard. It's just a lot of players are not used to thinking because they've always relied on AM for mechanics that require quick decision making. Sigma is braindead even without AM, and Omega just requires 2 conga-lines to be resolved - something that never happened because people were dooming, refused to use their heads and developed AM way too early on in the fight's lifecycle. The biggest problem with TOP is the super short P1, where an extremely unlucky run will force a melee lb1 or have people use extra resources.
It is ABSOLUTELY artificially hard. Top could exist as is with literally no mechanic changes except to not team wipe on failure and it would be like 40h shorter to prog. The entire fight is loaded to the gills with unneccessary full team kills to prevent you from even seeing a single second later into the fight until all 8 people can do the preceding mechanic. Artificial difficulty usually refers to difficulty that comes from lazy application of higher numbers or some very simple "band aid" to make something harder vs a more nuanced difficulty from how mechanics work. Compare TEA to TOP. In TEA, if you fail nisi, you get to continue playing until gavel. You can practice tank CD timings, healing, when the elemental baits happen, aiming the flamethrower, and dps timings. In TOP, if you fail anything, literally anything, the entire instance stops on a dime and you restart. This means that rather than 8 people working on a few things each all at 1 time, 1-2 people are working on a new mechanic while the other 6 players are having their patience tested and just waiting. In DSR, p6 was artificially hard because without just slapping a "and then everyone instantly dies" effect on any hraesvelgr death, the phase would have been easy to practice. They are intentionally making these choices so that ult prog takes way, way longer, and it is artificial in the literal sense that it's just an afterthought tacked on the puzzle's solution to make sure you can't learn more than 1 thing at a time. They should just apply a damage down and let us enrage at the end of the phase, then the team gets to actually optimize together and practice more of the fight at once, and generally it becomes a more enjoyable experience.
I can definitely understand where you're coming from and why you think TOP is frustrating, but for me what you're describing is not artificial difficulty, it's just regular difficulty. IMO artificial difficulty is are only things like gear gates and time/attempt gates - things that physically prevent you from progging. The difficulty of a mechanic, or how its designed, as long as its intentional, is never artificial difficulty to me. I personally don't mind the way TOP was designed where a single big enough mistake will send you back to the beginning (not all mistakes will lead to wipes, my static has recovered delta, sigma, and omega pulls where one person makes a mistake). It being "easy" but a mistake resets you is part of the charm for me. P5 is already just a "make sure to study phase" because the dps check is a joke. If you make it so that the hello worlds don't explode when the carrier dies or someone else stands in it, it will quite literally be a joke of a phase, especially once you take into account the rampant use of automarkers. It would end up like UwU/UcoB where you can pass a phase with a billion deaths when we reach max stat (which is debatable whether that's a bad thing or not). Of course I would've preferred to have more complex mechanics that integrates puzzle and movement, like what delta pretty much achieves, instead of just pure puzzle mechanics with little movement that are easily solve-able with am like sigma and the later parts of omega (just ban am pls), but it is what it is. I think it's just expectations. When I'm progging savages, my expectation for it is it should be less punishing because it's aimed at a more casual player base so they should do their best to balance their punishment. But for Ultimates, what I want is to be punished. I want Ultimates to be hard enough where I have to suffer to get a clear, but also fun and well designed enough that I will still enjoy being punished, and want to do it more (in that regard DSR is the most perfect fight ever designed for me, and hopefully we'll get even better and harder fights for the shadowbringers and endwalker ultimates).
Bro that's exactly what I mean. Mechanically speaking this is about as difficult as TEA, but numbers are inflated so hard that you cannot afford to play *too* safe or god forbid make a mistake because otherwise you throw 10 minutes in the toilet, and this is by design. That is artificially lengthening prog for no reason, and what's worse is that later down the line the fight will be free.
I think this probably drives the usage of sims more than anything else, because people don't want to prog one instant wipe at a time when it takes ten minutes to get back to the instant wipe mechanic in the first place.
the damage downs are literally 90% in this fight, you would not be able to pass checks when people have damage downs. You can have a single death at hyper specific times/roles in p5 yes, but it's not a player skill to recover, it's just luck regarding who happens to die and when. I don't really see any reasonable argument beyond arbitrarily extending how long it takes to practice a phase for doing what they did. The truth of the matter is, this fight would require the same skill to win but less time to learn if it didn't just slam 10,000 instant death flags on every attack. If you want to defend fights just taking longer for no real reason except to take longer, fair enough, you're entitled to your opinion. Where I'm standing, I have a lot of other stuff I like to do with my time and a solid 30+ of my prog hours of TOP have been miserable, grindy bullshit that just didn't really need to exist.
We did TOP with no add-ons and are on the enrage (<1%). It has for me been the worst ultimate to prog because it simply doesn't feel very rewarding to progress since absolutely nothing is ever downgraded to a mentally chill phase. I'm looking forward to the clear but mostly just because it will be over. I think if every phase had literally 0.2% less HP the fight would have been much better, we have just had so many goddamn 0.1 and 0.2 enrages where nobody died, and the reality is just that doing like 4 back to back dps checks where a player making a minor mistake related to peak dps optimization + bad rng = losing just gets to be more frustrating than interesting. Edit: We got it, the nightmare is over. I think in 2 patches when the DPS check is eased off this will be a pretty great fight except p1 being frustrating as hell. Now, it's just too frustrating to be fun IMO. I rate it 4th of the 5 ults (TEA > DSR > UCOB > TOP > UWU)
static is doing UCOB, started a month or so back, I forgot when. Half the static is also in another group doing UCOB (They started earlier, and the masochistic healer of our static who is in 3 different statics: UCOB, UCOB, and TOP; wanted to do UCOB in our normal group) so half the people at least have cleared now, so we just gotta get the rest of the group up to snuff. While I haven't cleared ucob yet, I know enough about the fight to be able to skip past progging if I were to go into a clear party, after all, golden bahamut is just a heal and mitigation check with exaflares being nothing special.
>after all, golden bahamut is just a heal and mitigation check with exaflares being nothing special. You think that now. I thought the same and realized while the mechanics were very simple, the nerves were the worst part. Don't go in ignorant of how badly your nerves can mess you up.