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

[Heliantheae]

I had no idea what was going on for the first ten minutes of the final boss of Ivalice. I gotta say compared to the second boss, the final boss was really forgiving. At one point two whole alliances were down and half the remaining one was down and we pulled it back. One and done. It was crazy.

[KageTokage]

Do Ivalice bosses have an enrage timer?

I was half-expecting the final boss to blow us up at any moment because of how long the fight was dragging on.

[Rita1989]

Do Ivalice bosses have an enrage timer?

I was half-expecting the final boss to blow us up at any moment because of how long the fight was dragging on.

24 mans never have enrages

[Dricent]

Running leveling roulette and got vault. One of the dps was a 57 samurai who jumped blm then went straight for samurai. Entire time up to and during boss 1 he was rocking a max of like 80 dps. As we move on from boss one I asked him why his dps was so low and if his gear broke. His reply was "gear breaks?" Cause all my gear and weapon show red. Then proceeded to ask "quick how do I fix?"

[KeiranOlive]

A while ago I was running Doma Castle as a whm to help a friend level blm and it was the most terrifying run I have ever experienced. I don't usually check anyone's gear when I load in, but I saw the tank had shire gear, so I checked to see if it was just glamour. Nope. Mostly i260 with a few i255 pieces. I didn't say anything because I figured he would stick to small pulls with that gear. Again nope.

He runs off without a tank stance, does the biggest pull possible, and then doesn't use a single cd. I use every resource at my disposal to keep this guy alive. My thought processes were basically, "OMG no, stop! Gah! Please use a cooldown, please. We're all going to die!"

By some miracle I managed to keep him alive, even if his health fell to less than 100 a couple times. After this I expected him to run off toward the boss, but instead he stops, turns to me...and starts clapping for me. I'm just thinking, "You jerk, you know exactly what you just put me through." And that's how the rest of the dungeon went. All I could do at the end was just laugh.

I still thought it was fun...

[Karathix]

A dungeon in 3 lines

'Kara [the healer] let me die!'
'You're wearing crafting gear'
'so?'

This is why we can't glam the new stuff guys. people like this right here

[Cenerae]

To add onto this....

Dear ASTs, if you are paired with a WHM use Nocturnal Sect and if paired with a SCH use Diurnal Sect. It's not rocket science.

As a main AST when I play WHM sometimes I swear every single time I have gotten an AST cohealer lately they use Diurnal. Like...WHY? Shields are great jeez. Irks me to no end.

Strictly speaking, using Diurnal alongside a WHM isn't *bad* per se. Shielding only really becomes critical when you need to protect the group from a big attack that you otherwise couldn't survive.

I go Nocturnal with a WHM co healer anyways because the extra padding can help in case someone screws up, but double regens shouldn't inherently be seen as bad since they do stack.

I do say this as someone who generally prefers to be in Diurnal, though. <_<

[Aldora]

First go at the Ivalice raid was so insanely fun!

Far as I could tell only 2 of the 24 of us had done it before, one of them being my tank. He was amazing! I think he only died once in the whole raid outside of our 3 wipes. He also didn't give away a bunch of things, just some vague advice about "focus more on mechanics than burning the bosses" and told me what the name of the tankbuster on the third boss was. It was nice to do something without a guide or a full explaination.

I was on WHM and my coheal was an AST who was new to healing but did amazing in my opinion. We each died a few times but we were on top of our rezzes when it mattered and were majorly helped out by a SMN who was completely lovely. I doubt we would have cleared without her. If any of you read this know you are AMAZING!

After the second boss the tank of group b left and since it was a premade we couldn't recruit more so after that our 2 tanks handled everything. Several DPS disconnected throughout. In that sense it was actually quite a chaotic run but the positive attitude of everyone involved made it seem smoother than it really was.

I will be the first to admit that I understand almost nothing of the last boss. I love the story thus far and am a huge fan of the games this was based on. I haven't done everything offered in this patch yet but I doubt oneshotting Shinryu EX would feel this good.

All in all this has just been a wonderful patch day. I think I've slept for like 3 hours since the download started this morning. To everyone I've experienced some of this new content with you guys are the best, I hope I encounter you all again!

I love to run content on patch day, since everybody will be new to the content and feel less inclined to rage (quit) if we’re experiencing a wipe or two. Since the Alliance PF was a new feature for this patch, i figured “Let’s give it a go”. Sure enough, the alliance filled up at a steady pace and we were good to go.

There are a couple of players in the Alliance who cleared the content before, so they marked locations on the ground and give us explanations in regards to the mechanics we would need to look out for. They would give us additional information whenever the Alliance made mistakes, which would end up in a wipe. All of this, without any Drama Llama’s.

We ended up wiping once at every boss, but we did progress at a decent pace (for something that was released on that same day). But, we did lose 1 Alliance member, due to dinner around halfway into the raid. This made us realise that you can’t replenish members during the raid if you entered the raid through the Party Finder.

This proved to be our downfall at the last boss, when a 2nd Alliance member dropped after the first wipe. Soon after that, one after another started dropping the raid. In the end we had to disband the group, because there were no means of replenishing the members that dropped the raid.

“Why? We were so close?” was the general response from the people that remained, before disbanding the group.


Since i didn’t have enough time to run the raid again that same day, i just went through the Main story quest, in order to unlock the new dungeon as well as the Expert Roulette.

Last night, i went to Ivalice again, but this time through the Duty Finder. This time, we had less people who knew the raid and i had to use whatever knowledge i got from my previous run to guide my own party.

It was… challenging. But, by the Twelve, it was fun.

Even though there we a lot more deaths during each encounters (as well as several wipes), we still progressed through the raid. Albeit more slowly. Still, no Drama Llama’s present in the raid, so all was good. Words of encouragement were given along the way, by myself and others. /thumbsup

We had a few people dropping out of the raid, but since we were queued up through the Duty Finder, replacements were found rather quickly.

With both runs of Ivalice, i went in as a Paladin, but instead of focussing on DPS i made sure to focus on survivability. Since people were dropping like flies during the raids, i made sure to use Clemency to assist the healers in keeping people alive (mostly the healers themselves and the people with only a sliver of HP left).

With last night’s run, we came to the point where people were starting to wonder if we would even be able to clear the raid, or that we would run out of time. I shouted “Keep going! We can still make it!” in the Alliance chat as the last 5 minutes were ticking away while we were throwing ourselves at the last boss.

On our last legs, we managed to defeat the final boss with only 1 minute and 30 seconds left on the timer.

I can tell you that there was much rejoicing and it was incredibly satisfying to clear the raid at this stage.

If you guys are reading this, you were fantastic! Thanks for sticking around until the very end. /grovel m(_ _m)~

[Frizze]

A dungeon in Haiku

'Kara let me die!'
'You are wearing crafting gear'
'so? what is your point?'

I fixed that for you.

[Ronove]

The second time I ran the new 24-man, I was healing with a friend (plus two friend DPS) and it started off kinda rocky in the second boss. People got mad at each other and said some not nice things but we powered through and some people left, etc. It went well between then and the last boss--the last boss took us like 18 minutes and between me and my friend, we had like 40 raises throughout all the alliances. He died a few times (and almost fell asleep before I raised him), all the tanks died a few times, and I'm sure all the DPS died, somehow I survived tanking the boss for a few seconds until I could get another tank up (apparently, outside tank busters, he really doesn't hit that hard). DPS would die because I couldn't explain the mechanics well enough (but by the end I think everyone got the mechanics), bard would get up, pop refresh, die to something else.

I was just REALLY glad the boss had no enrage or no adds (if there had been adds or a dps-check phase, we would have died) and also glad most of the alliances didn't release so I could get to them to raise. I did healer LB3 once (and then everyone immediately died right after because shenanigans happened). When the boss was at like 1%, the meteors were coming out and it was like THIS IS WHERE WE DIE IF IT DOESN'T DIE because we didn't have enough people to continually cover the meteors.

So it was a kinda laughing kinda making me sad kinda fight but we did it. I just kinda hope the next time I run the 24-man, it goes a little bit smoother.