FFXIV: Summoner Sunday & FC Fun
This was a fairly long weekend for me, with perhaps a little too much gaming. I needed more sleep than I got, that’s for sure, and I’m really dragging this Monday. However, despite dealing with Deep Dungeon dorks and struggling through one too many raids, it was overall a good time.
FC Times
I keep noting that our Free Company has seen a big influx of members lately. This has been a week of members inviting friends and family to join us, some even transferring from other servers to be with us, which is always a happy thing. Welcome!
We’re currently sitting at a few shy of 100 members, which is the largest we’ve ever been. This is with me diligently pruning our roster of inactive folks.
Vix is setting up our first ever social FC event, a Meet n Greet, and we’ll see how that goes. I’ve never been much for organizing or leading events, but I can do the support stuff like toss out ideas, brainstorm, and make the announcement page.
FC Raid Night
Due to Syn being out on a work trip and other scheduling mishaps, we pushed the two big raids, Weeping City and Dun Scaith, back to Saturday night. I now remember why we usually run them much closer to Tuesday. A good alliance isn’t always a given earlier in the week, but it feels like the quality of runs are better closer to reset.
It was also probably not a good idea to do the two back to back, seeing that Weeping City is often enough for me, and we were bringing along newcomers as well. But I was just along for the ride, and it took us somewhere in the ballpark of 4 hours to clear the two.
Weeping in the City
We had a large number of FC folks participating in Weeping City, so much that we had to break into two parties to accommodate us all. We queued up at the same time, and amazingly, we got in the same instance. It was pretty incredible!
We did pretty well until we hit Ozma. As I said, we had some people who were completely new in our team, so we did our best to explain to them. But it’s still that one tricky boss due to mechanics that aren’t super obvious.
After the third or so wipe, someone in one of the other alliance team requested mechanics explained to all, so we did that, too. But, less patient folks got annoyed and, after we wiped again, started trying to force a vote abandon.
Enough people wanted to keep trying, so someone from the C group dropped. Then everyone from the C group dropped. Interestingly enough, we watched as C group regained new members from the refill quickly, and we went on to beat Ozma and the raid that time.
Hm.
Dun that Scaith
Dun Scaith was not as lucky. We got all the way to the third boss in our group before we wiped. However, we had some salty-mouths in the alliance that put a damper on things, and people started abandoning and trying to vote quit… after just one wipe. Hm.
We also ran into this situation where we killed the Deathgaze just as he was doing the move that knocks people off the ship. This took us by surprise and almost wiped the raid. Only a few were left standing, as seen below. It seems even when the boss is dead, he can still throw you off the deck, so be careful!
This time around, people started leaving and we couldn’t get a timely refill, so we did eventually leave that run. The queue was not kind to us after that, it took quite a while before we got into run #2. We did okay on this run until the third boss again.
There we wiped many, many times. We had a few people trying to vote abandon, but we had just as many people in alliance chat who were ready to be patient and stick it out. Eventually, we had the impatient folks drop, then refilled those slots.
We also learned some important mechanics I wasn’t aware of during that boss’ add phase. Once we had a better idea of how that worked, with the newly recruited people, we were able to push on through. We had one wipe on the final boss, and finally a win for the week. Sadly, no bard gear dropped, but by the end of it, I was so exhausted I just settled for some monk gloves.
Summoner Sunday
This was really more than enough raiding for me this weekend. But the FC does Crystal Tower Sunday, so I joined the long, long queue for Lab only since I needed it for my Tails journal.
I opted out of further runs, which was actually a good idea because the queues were super long (due to Super Bowl, I’m sure) and I just needed to take a break from hours of raids and voice chat. Instead, I decided to clear one of my goals and work on my Summoner job quests.
I’ve been a level 60 Summoner since November of last year. I had not cleared any of the Summoner job quests past level 52, though. Part of this was me being lazy. Part of it was because my Summoner gear was miserable. I’m talking level 29 rings. Seriously. I just don’t have gear for magic users (probably need to change that once Red Mage happens).
Despite my terrible gear, quests for level 54 and 56 were super easy. Level 58 is where I started to struggle. I did make it through, but it took forever, and only won due to the fact that I had a tank and healer NPC helping me out.
So I decided to suck it up and spend some money on the very basic gear in Idyllshire. It was probably a good idea, because I did finish the level 60 quest, but that took a good deal of time. The damage I was taking would have probably been overwhelming if I didn’t have the gear I did.
Once that was said and done, I went back to unlock the new egi glamour. This was a pretty short quest located at the Arcanist guild. So, now I have all the colors of the Carbys at my beck and call.
I’ll probably never play Summoner as main or anything, but it’s just nice to have all those quests cleaned up. I’m really making headway on my goals this time month!