FFXIV: Locking Horns
Pictured above: Not the actual Behemoth from the FATE.
Yesterday, I was going about my normal Ixali beast tribe quests when I heard the shout of “Behemoth!!” upon entering Coerthas. I thought about it for a moment, and being upon Amon (who has never done the FATE), I decided to poke around a bit, if only to pick up the achievement points.
I got there and there were a few other lower level folks milling around the first phase of the FATEs. But it was counting down fast, and under 5 mins, with not that many others interested, they scrambled to get a light party up. I was invited and went in on my level 70 bard. Needless to say, I was pulling aggro off the lower level tanks much of the time.
Seeing that the FATE did not level me down, and a few more people joined in near the end, we did somehow down the preliminary FATE, which then led into the real battle. Again, I wasn’t synced down. But seeing that our party was made of two tanks and the rest DPS, I quickly switched out to the only other viable job I had — Red Mage — thinking about the missing heals.
Oh, am I glad that I did. Because I ended up the only source off healing that we had (chocobos get offed pretty fast on this fight). We had a young tank that would lose over half his life for each cleave, and another tank which must have been higher level, because he was doing a pretty good job of keeping aggro and taking hits.
I wasn’t sure that we’d be able to do it — since in my memory, Behemoth used to be a whole lot harder to take down. But with Red Mage heals and enough DPS, we powered through it with no deaths. Well, until the end when Behemoth dropped the scripted meteor that took us all down to a sliver of our lives on purpose.
I tossed out a rez to the one tank who didn’t make it through meteor, and it was all celebration from there. Many of them had not seen the fight before, and the energy from the newer players made it all absolutely worth it.
I walked away from the experience feeling awesome for being a Red Mage, and remembering what it felt like to have one of those neat moments with random strangers in an MMO like this. This wasn’t really anything difficult to defeat, but seeing other people stoked to down a boss FATE felt good. Hopefully with Blue Mage coming next patch, we’ll see more of this kind of thing happening again.
And now I need to level Amon’s Leatherworker next so that he can use the horns to make a behemoth trophy for his room… that way, I’ll remember this fight whenever I look at it. 🙂