Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving has come and gone and now my mini-vacation is over, no more time off til Christmas week.  :(

While I only got to spend three of my five days off playing FFXI (man I sound like such a loser), I did get some things accomplished, but I still have one irritating thing on my to do list.

Wings of the Goddess

We finished up the new Bastok and Windurst quests on Saturday (Sandy was finished the weekend before).  We tried to finish Bastok when we did Sandy, but it turned out to be too difficult for me to tank.  The constant double-attacking left me spending too much time trying to get shadows up instead of hitting her to keep hate, the end result was our mages had to heal the DDs and eventually hate turned to them, then the DDs, and then finally to me.  Our second go-around with Klara went better, we had 6 people as we added a PLD to tank, the end result was a pretty easy win (though the mages were still pulling hate from healing), our setup was PLD, NIN, MNK, SAM, SCH and WHM.  Funny thing happened at the beginning of this fight, when we zoned in I did something I do with almost any NM, I /slap emoted Klara (I have a habit of doing this or /wave).  Much to everyone's surprise she apparently did NOT take this transgression lightly because she attacked me right after I did it.  Now I don't know if maybe I got too close (I had only took a few steps forward from where we zoned in at) or if she really did aggro from the /slap, but we were all caught off guard when she began attacking me.

Windurst was the fight we were least worried about and as you can probably guess it ended up being the one we should have been the most concerned with.  While we are all good players, to tackle that fight with five people is just nuts, you'd have to be l33t to have any chance at a win.  Our first attempt was BLM x4 and SAM, we figured we'd just nuke em down and let the SAM clean up, it was a disaster, we didn't survive the first wave.  Our second attempt was a little more traditional with NIN, SAM, MNK, RDM (kite) and WHM, but once again things went badly.  The problem on the second attempt was the waves are just too fast and we were quickly overwhelmed when the second wave came in.  So after two failed attempts we sent out a distress call and ended up getting 8 more people to help us (this fight is out in the open so anyone with access to the past can help), the end result was...well we kicked the shit out of the mobs.  It was a perfect example of strength in numbers, thanks again to everyone that helped us with that.

The storyline in WotG has been pretty solid, Windy's storyline has been fantastic (with some outstanding cutscenes to go along with it), Bastok has also been pretty good (the seeds for the rise of the Shadow Lord are slowly being sown), but Sandy is dragging things down.  The other two nations are dealing directly with the established histories that have been in the game since its inception, whereas Sandy only teased us with the destruction of Tavnazia.  The last few quests have had nothing to do with the ramifications of that event, it's just been about a bunch of bratty ten year olds trying to act like grown ups.  At this point I've given up hope Sandy will offer up anything interesting, so I'm happy the other two nations are living up to their billing.

Omega

At this point I think it's safe to say we own Omega, he poses little challenge these days.  On Friday we fought him again and none of the tanks died (a first) and we decided based on the last few fights that we'd farm the pods.  We knocked out five pods, but it could have gone smoother once we started kiting him.  Speaking for myself I have never kited him and was out of position and generally confused about what exactly we were supposed to be doing.  I'd imagine (well I know for a fact) that others had never seen this either.  But as far as taking baby steps, we were able to keep walking and this will probably be nothing more than a footnote in a few months.

Project: Shantottofication

What can I say, we tried this fight twice, once on Saturday and again on Sunday.  I was hoping we'd complete it because I'd really like to get to the cutscenes everyone keeps saying are so amazing.  Our first fight with her was NIN, SAM x2, RNG, WHM x2, and as far as first fights go I'd say we did well, we got the BLM version down to around 35% before wiping.  I was holding the WHM version (and actually kited her before the first rage), she didn't pose much trouble.  After the first rage she was still easy to hold, I just voked and cast ninjutsu occasionally until the second rage.  The second rage is where we ended up wiping, too much damage was taken to recover from.  Ultimately though we were not able to get far enough on our first attempt.

The second attempt we changed things up a bit with NIN, MNK x2, WHM x2, SCH.  This time I decided I was going to engage the WHM version instead of just standing around, I must admit I underestimated what I was going to be able to do and ended up getting her down to 80% before the first rage.  At this point I had to disengage as we weren't sure what would happen if they raged at the same time, but the speculation was we wouldn't like the outcome.  Our lessons learned from the first fight we got the BLM version down to 11% before wiping to the third rage.  Thinking that we were good to go from that point we healed up and the MNKs again took to killing the BLM version, unfortunately this is were we made a few miscalculations.  The first was something I wasn't ready for and that was when I went in to grab the WHM, I took a bunch of damage from the BLM.  This led to the second mistake and that was assuming the WHM would be easy to deal with, she was not, she was much stronger at this point and it was a struggle to keep things together at first.  Because I was having so much trouble, our healers were healing me to keep me alive, which led to the third mistake and that was healing me.  Because they were healing me as well as healing the MNKs they were moving up the hate list faster than me and eventually I lost hate altogether, the WHM started picking off our healers and we ended up wiping with the BLM at around 15%.

This is a pretty challenging fight, but I think we are on the right track with our setup, it's just a matter of getting our timing right, minimizing mistakes and just plain getting lucky.  Part of me, though, wants to see what would happen if they were both raging at the same time.  A betting man would say they flatten us, but maybe the key to the fight is to fight them at the same time...