Tales from Duty Finder: Some make you laugh, some make you cry. Let's vent.

[nebby00]

Considering you said you were doing this on an alt - implying you've seen the story and fights before - it may have been a better idea to look guides up before going in, if you weren't confident with the content due to lack of engagement with it for so long. It would have saved your parties and you a lot of frustration. Just a note for the future.

I usually do look up guides before I go in.. however it doesn't really help. I tend to learn by doing the content repeatedly myself rather than watching a guide, it's how my brain works. Repetition. If I just look up a guide, watch and read what I need to do and go in, it never goes over well. In fact I probably mess up more and get more so frustrated with myself since I think, "I know what to do, but why am I messing up so much?" Eventually it just makes me get angry with myself and causes me to judge myself more harshly than I typically would do, which cycles back to me doing even worse and so forth. I know I'll get a hang of it eventually, but guides just don't work with me at all.

[DontReadThis]

Just another fun World of Darkness run in Alliance Raid roulette.

About 10 mins had already passed when I got in, and the group appeared to be wiping to that flying eyeball guy. Apparently the other tanks weren't turning away to avoid the doom, so they would end up dying, causing the eyeball to run wild and kill everyone else. Of course I can't do anything to help since I was already locked out when I joined the party. I pick up the boss when the other tanks die the next attempt, and everything goes smoothly.

We had a bit of trouble at the hydra dragon thing with people not passing the prey, causing them to die. Cerberus was also interesting with people trying to wait with the chains, eventually causing it to time out with him going berserk and killing all of us. I almost forgot to mention the tank who would constantly provoke on Cerberus, spinning him around and getting people cleaved or hit by the tail.

This was also one of the few runs where I got to see the snake adds spawn during the Cloud of Darkness fight.

[Kaoru_Nagisa]

I usually do look up guides before I go in.. however it doesn't really help. I tend to learn by doing the content repeatedly myself rather than watching a guide, it's how my brain works. Repetition. If I just look up a guide, watch and read what I need to do and go in, it never goes over well. In fact I probably mess up more and get more so frustrated with myself since I think, "I know what to do, but why am I messing up so much?" Eventually it just makes me get angry with myself and causes me to judge myself more harshly than I typically would do, which cycles back to me doing even worse and so forth. I know I'll get a hang of it eventually, but guides just don't work with me at all.

I learn the same way - doing it and repetition. However, guides at least let me know what to expect and a rough idea of when/where, and put that seed in the back of my mind of "oh, this is happening, I should do this". Even if it isn't perfect, it helps. Everything comes down to practice, I think this is true for most people - but arming yourself with knowledge beforehand, or at least a refresher, saves everyone a lot of grief. You included.

Otherwise you end up being a dead weight because you have zero idea of mechanics or how to handle them. I think that's far worse than having an idea of what to do but still messing it up a time or two.

About 10 mins had already passed when I got in, and the group appeared to be wiping to that flying eyeball guy. Apparently the other tanks weren't turning away to avoid the doom, so they would end up dying, causing the eyeball to run wild and kill everyone else.

Literally every WoD starts this way for me. Angry Mango is where people forget WoD can still actually kill you if you ignore mechanics, which is a far cry from the rest of CT. The same thing happens in Mhach and Dun Scaith, and most of Ivalice. This is why I really wish they'd scale back the ilevel sync for LotA and ST so that they're still somewhat dangerous, because as they are now, they just breed laziness and bad habits from how often the early CT raids pop from ilevel cheesing/new players going into it.

[nebby00]

I learn the same way - doing it and repetition. However, guides at least let me know what to expect and a rough idea of when/where, and put that seed in the back of my mind of "oh, this is happening, I should do this". Even if it isn't perfect, it helps. Everything comes down to practice, I think this is true for most people - but arming yourself with knowledge beforehand, or at least a refresher, saves everyone a lot of grief. You included.

Otherwise you end up being a dead weight because you have zero idea of mechanics or how to handle them. I think that's far worse than having an idea of what to do but still messing it up a time or two.

Fair point. As I said before, I usually do look up guides for trials, but it doesn't help me much. Watching a guide would probably have the same performance if I hadn't watched a guide at all, I usually wind up dead until something in my brain clicks and goes "I finally know how to do this properly". I have no idea why I didn't decide to watch a guide before I went in this time, since I usually watch a guide while I wait for the queue as a DPS, but I certainly won't make that mistake again for trials. I don't like feeling useless to the group, it's the one thing I hate doing more than anything else.

[Kaoru_Nagisa]

Fair point. As I said before, I usually do look up guides for trials, but it doesn't help me much. Watching a guide would probably have the same performance if I hadn't watched a guide at all, I usually wind up dead until something in my brain clicks and goes "I finally know how to do this properly". I have no idea why I didn't decide to watch a guide before I went in this time, since I usually watch a guide while I wait for the queue as a DPS, but I certainly won't make that mistake again for trials. I don't like feeling useless to the group, it's the one thing I hate doing more than anything else.

I feel you. Something that helps for me (perhaps it would you as well?) is to thoroughly watch a guide start to finish, then go through it again but scrubbing to specific mechanics, and watching each mechanic explanation a couple times. Oftentimes for extreme modes in particular, I'll spend 20~40 minutes simply watching and rewatching and scrubbing to specific parts of the guide. Especially on more difficult mechanics that can look overwhelming on first seeing them.

I still get my best knowledge from practicing it live, but this sort of dedicated time and mental noting/step-by-step process has helped ease things a lot for me. I have trouble focusing and can get overwhelmed by mechanics easily, especially if I already screwed something up earlier in the fight; so I tend to take a fair amount of time memorizing what I can outside of the arena so that something will click in the heat of the moment. The only times I practice without guides is on day 1 content drops - in those cases, I just run things a lot during the day until I have it committed to muscle memory. :P

No I did not run each Nier raid early morning on day 1 hour 1 about 10~15 times each, that would be crazy--

[nebby00]

I feel you. Something that helps for me (perhaps it would you as well?) is to thoroughly watch a guide start to finish, then go through it again but scrubbing to specific mechanics, and watching each mechanic explanation a couple times. Oftentimes for extreme modes in particular, I'll spend 20~40 minutes simply watching and rewatching and scrubbing to specific parts of the guide. Especially on more difficult mechanics that can look overwhelming on first seeing them.

I still get my best knowledge from practicing it live, but this sort of dedicated time and mental noting/step-by-step process has helped ease things a lot for me. I have trouble focusing and can get overwhelmed by mechanics easily, especially if I already screwed something up earlier in the fight; so I tend to take a fair amount of time memorizing what I can outside of the arena so that something will click in the heat of the moment. The only times I practice without guides is on day 1 content drops - in those cases, I just run things a lot during the day until I have it committed to muscle memory. :P

No I did not run each Nier raid early morning on day 1 hour 1 about 10~15 times each, that would be crazy--

I think I might try and do that then and see how that helps! I definitely don't even think about touching extreme trials unless I've already done them and know the mechanics for certain while watching a guide, and raids themselves I try to watch guides for them but of course results may vary (and they tend to be bad rather than good). But, hopefully doing that would help my performance a lot more. I'm usually not absolutely terrible, but it's just this occasion it was just bad.

Thank you though for the advice, it's greatly appreciated! ^.^

Yeah no, I would probably lose my mind just even attempting that lmao

[Kaoru_Nagisa]

Yeah no, I would probably lose my mind just even attempting that lmao

To be fair, I did that because I adore the Drakenier series more so than it took me that long to learn them. Also I wanted glamour pieces. I only took days off for ShB patches that included the Yorha raids, since that was the most important content for me outside of the MSQ.

But yep, no worries - hopefully that helps you the way it does me, and good luck.

[Mesarthim]

Pug tank in amarout, along with my friends wife + one of their family members. We get to the first boss and pug tank goes "Stack meteors together, don't spread out".

Normally I ignore stupid ideas like stacking spread markers but I figured maybe they had some sort of brilliant plan. It didn't take long for us to start ignoring the tank and not giving them a comm.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Pug tank in amarout, along with my friends wife + one of their family members. We get to the first boss and pug tank goes "Stack meteors together, don't spread out".

Normally I ignore stupid ideas like stacking spread markers but I figured maybe they had some sort of brilliant plan. It didn't take long for us to start ignoring the tank and not giving them a comm.

Now I’m legit, very curious what actually happened when your group stacked the comets together.

Personally I always place mine rather close to where the boss would start casting their meteor so that melees can have their uptime. I’m aware this is a 50% attempt but when the boss do decide to cast on the right side of the arena, it feels satisfying.

[Jettinson]

Pug tank in amarout, along with my friends wife + one of their family members. We get to the first boss and pug tank goes "Stack meteors together, don't spread out".

Normally I ignore stupid ideas like stacking spread markers but I figured maybe they had some sort of brilliant plan. It didn't take long for us to start ignoring the tank and not giving them a comm.

I had an amarout run where all 3 party members decided to put all the comets at the corners making impossible or seriously hard to get behind from the meteor, enough to say we wiped there but it was hilarious