The question for Monday: Why do you need your clear asap?

[Ryel]

a few? a few?
Try seeing this patch after patch when trying to clear it. Try getting it finally done only in time for the next content to rush past you, leaving you stuck in earlier phases while you are trying to learn tethers.

Oh I've seen what it is when pugs are the only thing you have to turn to. night after night after night.

I've been here since 1.0 and it seems my experience has obviously been very different than yours.

There are both good and bad pick up groups and sometimes you just end up having a bad night of runs, it happens. More often than not in my experience I've walked away from parties that I've put up for learning being better at the fights coming out of them than i was when i started, even if the party as a whole did not make significant progress. The experience also allows me to change the conditions of the next PF I put up.

I'll ask myself this question:

Did I consistently get past "x" phase of the fight with the previous learning party and now know well enough to perform in it?

If so then I'll put up a party for the next phase of the fight and repeat this process until I've learned the fight in it's entirety, at which point I'll change the party from "learning" to "clear" and after enough consistent clears I'll change it to "farm" and repeat this cycle with each new update / encounter.

Once again the key is to not get discouraged and to not give up, either that or find a group of players you mesh well with and join a LS or FC that runs this kind of content so you can avoid using the PF and DF altogether.

In fact as I type this post there is currently a clear party in the PF right now on Excal for Nid Ex and i usually see quite a few during the course of the day.