I know you’re all dying to know how the rest of my Indiana trip went. But now I have to share something else.
So, there’s a not-so-short list of things in FFXI that I want to do, but are very difficult and can’t do without significant help of a large group of capable people who aren’t morons. Fortunately, I happen to only associate with people who aren’t of the sort, the only restriction being when we can actually manage to get the right people in the right place at the right time… fighting server instability and individual ISP crappiness all the way. Today, we (Mjollnir) tried doing Divine Might.
A backstory to what is one of the most difficult fights in FFXI: At one point in the Rise of the Zilart missions, there are five Ark Angels, one for each race, who are crystal warriors created to… I forget exactly what, something evil… and you have to fight them. Each one has two jobs, not like players have a job and subjob, but they have two full-fledged jobs and can use all abilities of both. Normally, to progress past the mission, there are five floating platforms around Tu’Lia, one with each fight in it, you collect the keyitems from defeating them, and you progress in the missions. Each fight varies in difficulty, and you get six people maximum to fight them.
Or you can be insane, and do the optional route and fight all five at once. Fortunately, you can bring a full alliance of 18 in, but unfortunately, the arena is the same small area, and the five AAs all have various area of effect spells and abilities that can interfere with people, even if they aren’t focusing on that one. A good strategy requires a specifically crafted group of 18 level 75 characters, each with a specific set of tasks and goals, and an overreaching strategy… but everyone must have the capability to act on the fly, for if something goes weird or wrong and someone dies too soon, you have to act quickly.
I’d tried it once before with a pickup group, which I can’t remember or not if I described, but long story short: it was one our of organization and travel, another hour of being dictated strategy, and 5 minutes of running around like chickens with our heads cut off inside the arena and mass death. (This sounds familiar, I think I must have talked about it already.) The guy who organized it wanted to go again, but people couldn’t stick around (or didn’t want to…) and he said he’d be doing it again the next day.
But this time, I was with non-random people (aside from two people who were vouched for, because we were missing two key jobs… those people didn’t show up even though they said they would). We had three Ark Pentaspheres, the item needed to spawn the Divine Might battleground, so we did a dry run first, not using any consumable items or two-hour abilities, just so people could get a feel for how the fight would go. My personal job was to keep Gravity on Ark Angel HM, and cure and nuke anywhere else needed. During the dry run, I realized that HM, being a Ninja, had cast Utsusemi, which absorbed my Gravity. Not being able to cast it for another 45 seconds, the Paladin who was kiting him went down quickly. I vowed to wipe his shadows with Banishga the next time (I was RDM/WHM), not Diaga as that would make it impossible to sleep the pets if they got hit with it.
The second try, we went in with the purpose of winning. We got in, and everyone had a better idea. We start fighting, I managed to get the banishga/gravity thing going, but we had a key player lost connection at a critical time, and we ended up folding, unfortunately after using some of our two-hour abilities.
Before the third attempt, we modified our strategy a bit. Now, in addition to gravity on the HM, I was responsible for chainspell nuking TT at the start as well. So, we ran in, I got the initial gravity on HM, then ran up to TT and hit chainspell. Blizzard III a few times, and collateral damage from MR… she did a AoE sleep move, to which I simply unclicked my stoneskin and my posion potion woke me up and I kept nuking. A few more hits, and TT did an AoE petrify move, which ended up eating the rest of my chainspell. Between me and the BLM, we did more than half damage to TT, and he went down shortly thereafter. After that, it was pretty smooth sailing, I used banishga to keep shadows off HM and kept gravity on him… had to sleep a few pets I woke up doing so, cured a few people… died when I got hate from EV and had to reraise and go rest on the stairs.
By the time I was unweakened, GK had been defeated by the team of three up by the exit focusing on him, TT was long dead, and MR had just been defeated… then, as I was healing up trying to get to full, HM did a final Mijin Gakure as he went down, knocking a few people dead (who promptly reraised) and only leaving EV. EV was WHM and PLD, and does both Invincible and Benediction, so it takes a bit to kill. We bound and kited her a bit so people could rest up, then we laid it in to her, pounding through Invincible with nuking, then after Benediction, emptied out weaponskills.
We got the record because there was a server reset on Thursday. And of course, there’s the reason why you do this fight in the first place. If you fight each of them separately, you just get to advance in the mission, but if you do it this way… you get to keep one of their ears:
Appropriately, I have HM’s ear. Because he is a Ninja and a Warrior, it has abilities reminiscent of that. The other four are similar. Unfortunately, you can only choose one of the five earrings, and once you get one, you don’t get another. So the choice is difficult for some people. I actually wanted the Abyssal Earring too (TT’s ear, who’s BLM and DRK), but Suppanomimi is awesome for RDM/NIN, and it’s been on my list of things I wanted for a long time now.
And now, something completely random, but I just have to share:
Hamster is another player on my server, we always sort of nod to each other whenever we see each other. Ironically, I think he’s Japanese. Here, he was just standing around in his White Mage artifact armor, so I put on my Black Mage AF and stood next to him for a while.
I guess that makes me the evil twin.