Tales from Duty Finder: Some make you laugh, some make you cry. Let's vent. 2.0

[Packetdancer]

Pretty uneventful lately, haven't been playing as much. But getting a comm in Ridorana as DNC after I made 0 mistakes and had good mit timing did give me a warm feeling in my cold heart.

Playing SCH, however, remains painful when I have a SGE co-healer. Please stop letting them overwrite my deploys SE I beg of you.

I get why E. Diagnosis is considered a higher priority shield, just like DRK's Blackest Night is, because there's a proc on it. And prior to 6.1, I would argue that the only place a SCH should defer to a SGE for shielding would be pre-pull, so the SGE can stockpile some Addersting charges for movement during the fight.

But ever since 6.1 SGE starts a pull with 3 charges of Addersting, so all pre-pull shielding does is add some extra damage reduction for the first raidwide. SGE has so many other good options for mitigation than just Eukrasian shields -- and things like Haima or Panhaima do stack with SCH shields -- as well as HoT options. There's really no excuse to not let the SCH use the dominant feature of their kit, when SGE optimization has you avoiding Eukrasian shields post-pull where possible anyway. (With, admittedly, the exception that E. Prognosis + Pepsis to crack the shield is actually a decent chunk of AoE healing and should not be overlooked.)

What would be really nice is if shields just plain stacked... or failing that, if roulettes would specifically match full parties such that you get one barrier/mitigation healer and one pure healer and aren't sitting in Orbonne going "Welp. Guess we're doing this then" with two barrier healers preparing to overwrite each other.

[Cubsbane]

LOL SPOKE TOO SOON. C Alliance tank in World of Darkness flat-out refused to do anything, and never ended up getting kicked. I saw him standing around and purposefully running into things to die. When we asked him to tank either Cerb or adds, he went "no" both times. When we finished, he simply said "".

What was worse is this was a very messy WoD. A wipe to Angry Mango (and very nearly a second because a HUGE number of people stood in the death AOE). Nearly a wipe to the dragon, saw a mechanic I never saw before. Cerb was only fine because someone decided to explain mechanics.

I get why E. Diagnosis is considered a higher priority shield, just like DRK's Blackest Night is, because there's a proc on it. And prior to 6.1, I would argue that the only place a SCH should defer to a SGE for shielding would be pre-pull, so the SGE can stockpile some Addersting charges for movement during the fight.

E Diagnosis has a proc. E Prognosis does not. So when Prognosis overwrites deploy shields, there's no gain. In fact, it's as if the SGE cast a raidwide.

And even if they notice, because how SGE casts is so different from SCH (no cast times but you have to press 2 buttons), it's very easy for them to accidentally overwrite them immediately after SCH's are put up. It sucks.

[Packetdancer]

E Diagnosis has a proc. E Prognosis does not. So when Prognosis overwrites deploy shields, there's no gain. In fact, it's as if the SGE cast a raidwide.

And even if they notice, because how SGE casts is so different from SCH (no cast times but you have to press 2 buttons), it's very easy for them to accidentally overwrite them immediately after SCH's are put up. It sucks.

Oh, we're in absolute 100% agreement there's zero reason E. Prognosis should overwrite SCH shields. Honestly, unless the shield is tied to a proc of some form, I think the blanket behavior ought to be "higher shield wins" -- which is, I believe, the behavior if you have two SGEs shielding or two SCHs (though I haven't checked that). Shields shouldn't be given blanket priority over another just due to job.

And you're painfully correct about accidental overwriting. I have done it on several occasions in alliance roulette when it looks like the SCH in my party is busy trying to pick up or spot heal someone else before a raidwide, and I happen to be out of Addersgall (so, y'know, Orbonne monastery, where unplanned healing is part of the fun!), so I try to help out by shielding... just in time for my shield to go out and wipe out the shield the SCH managed to apply.

Thankfully, "Feel Regret" is an oGCD, so at least I don't lose a cast when I see that happen...?

[Cincierta]

To the war tank we had in Wiping City on the last boss: you had ONE job. ONE. JOB. To keep Calio off the godsforsaken wall and not facing the entire alliance. You also had ONE JOB at making sure when you were dragging her around the arena to keep her from going over the puddles and enticing people to walk through the Entanglement traps. Guess what? You managed to get nearly everyone killed and caused a near wipe because you were derping so hard you decided to shut down your inner unga-bunga.

I hope you get a 98 on all of your needed rolls and someone beats you out with a 99 every time.

[Kolsykol]

I dunno why but this week I had a bunch of groups one after the other who had weird ideas about what to do in P4S.
Probably the least weird albeit something I've never rly seen before ( since every1 basically just uses the standard macro ) is uptime towers.
NO ONE except the leader did it lol, and he ended up wiping us.
Not gonna lie I dunno wtf that was until I quickly looked it up after the wipe I dunno why it's even an issue in PF the standard way in the mid works just fine if people understand how tethers work which they should in a weekly clear group it's not hard at all...
In PF I am not really worried about a gcd either I am more worried about whether the people in the group can count to eight or remember to run at 12s.

The leader was kinda wtf about it but was quick to just let it go and say that we could just do it the standard way if it's easier.
But then two other people started arguing with each other, for some reason one of them wanted to do the uptime towers now even tho he didn't do it when we were supposed to do it the first time.
And then there was another person who didn't want to do it and others who didn't know what it was either and hadn't looked it up.
It turned into a gigantic argument that went on for like 10 min with no pull lol until the group just disbanded, it's so weird because the person who wanted to do it to begin with and the only one who did it just let it go and didn't care.
But then someone who didn't do it all of the sudden wanted to do it and was very aggressive about how important uptime towers was all of the sudden.


... Also my 1-40 roll curse is still a thing lol.
It's unreal, every single week...

[Anarnee]

I actually had a very nice moment just now taking one of my alts through EW.

Did the Deadends with my PLD girl, and didn't say much other than hello, but when we got to the end, my healer said "you were too good tank surely you know the fight xD"

Made me very happy cause honestly tanking is my least favorite role to do, and I felt like I was very clumsy. I even got clipped by the aoes in the first fight that give you the debuff and I was sweating trying to make sure my pulls were clean, and I got a vuln stack in the second fight and I am half asleep on the way to the finale.

Made my night.

[Packetdancer]

I hear you. Especially when you're running and then the other person keeps running after you. I suspect the reason most people continue to run is because on their screen, they see themselves as ahead of us, while we see ourselves as ahead of them.

You are 100% correct on this. Aside from the "this is what you would theoretically see" aspect of things with regards to networked movement systems in general -- and FFXIV in particular -- I've actually seen it in action directly.

There was one night where a friend and I were running the same thing and each of us happened to be streaming simultaneously. At one point, we ended up bulls-eye'ing each other with a set of AoEs, and if you looked at my stream he was chasing after me with his AoE as I tried to adjust... but if you went and watched the same moment in his stream, I was chasing after him as he tried to adjust.

[Imora]

This one's more a "what the hell, Pax" than PF, at least not directly.

So, my static is stuck hard in phase 1 of P4S; I would really like a clear, and to unlock DSR, so I'm forging onwards in PF as well. This is sometimes frustrating, because as anyone who has PF'd P4S knows, a frustratingly small number of parties will make it to phase 2.

Anyway. We had a party that almost beat the enrage DPS check with a couple of deaths, and so I had high hopes for it. There were the usual PF mishaps, and several pulls in, my housemates returned from stuff with dinner, having stopped by Panda Express.

Yay, General Tso's chicken! (This is relevant, trust me.)

Then we had a truly tragic pull where right as the DRG was about to hit melee LB3... the SAM got disconnected, and the LB3 vanished. (Nooooooo why.)

We had to stop and wait for the missing SAM to reconnect, and I settle in to eat some of the chicken.

Another pull or two, and I find myself starting to make mistakes that I know better than. I'm puzzled, it feels a little like I'm having trouble concentrating. Well, wait while someone goes to bio, have another few bites of dinner. Weirdly, I seem to be getting progressively worse.

I go to take a deep breath to be like "okay, focus up" and realize I cannot actually breathe properly. I note "Hold on one sec, I need to deal with something." in party chat and poke through the chicken.

Now, one last detail relevant to this story: I am very allergic to mushrooms. Like, "you are supposed to carry an epi-pen (why did you leave it in the car)"-level allergic, though not quite at the "one bite and you need an epi-pen within a minute" levels. And evidently there was just a bit of cross-contamination from other dishes, because there were a few tiny little bits of mushroom scattered throughout the chicken.

I had not only been slowly going into anaphylactic shock, but accelerating the process every time I took a bite of the chicken between pulls. And it was just slow enough and I was just determined/focused enough on the instance that it took me a while to notice. (Hence the "what the hell, Pax" I started with.)

This did, admittedly, at least explain why I was finding it progressively harder to focus, since evidently part of my brain was like "UHM BREATHING IS GOOD LET'S FOCUS ON THAT". Unfortunately (but unsurprisingly), it also put an end to my PF adventures—or anything else—for the night.

Wow. Hope you're OK now.

[Packetdancer]

Wow. Hope you're OK now.

Yep! It was not a pleasant night, but sadly it is also not the only time I've had Surprise Death Allergy! as a bonus for take-out (just the only time I managed to be nearly oblivious to it happening); I have learned where the level of severity is that I can still take a whole bunch of Benedryl and just pass out, versus "epi-pen to stabilize and an ER visit". This was, thankfully, the former.

But "take a bunch of Benedryl and crash" was... let's go with "not going to be terribly conducive to good performance in savage." Especially not in PF.

(Though people doing that and attempting to still PF savage would explain a few of the more surreal PF experiences I've had...)

[Avatre]

Just got out of a WoD where my co-healer(both of us SGE), didn't do anything other than cast Dosis. If anyone was hurt, they kept casting Dosis...non-stop, from the entrance of each boss arena(or wherever they were able to actually cast from at max range). They didn't even heal themselves. They died on the very first trash pack, and when I used Swift Cast + Egeiro, they just respawned. It got to the point where I purposely went out of my way to be out far enough that none of my AoE heals would touch them. The only thing they did right, was had Kardia on the tank.