20. Rock Solid Adventure, Part 1When I was unsubbing, I silenced every single discord channel. I didn't check any message either. The best way to deal with FOMO is to disconnect. There is nothing to be missed out if you don't know they exist in the first place.
The second day after I resub, I opened discord and noticed that there was whole branch of messages in the Syncademy channel. In the latest one, they were looking for people to sub for E4s that evening, because a few people drop out at the last minute. I thought maybe I should help. The free login only last 14 days. There a load of things I wanted to do, but I guess I should have a few hours to spare.
I offered to sub for E4s, but instead Turael put me in an A5s group.
I didn't mind. It had been a while since I have been in A5s. It wasn't a difficult fight. However, it did leave me wonder just what E4s looked like. It happened, there was a PF party out there said that it welcomed newbie to join. I tried to read a guide before joining, but it wasn't useful. The fight was much faster paced than I expected. We only had like 2-3 pulls before the party quickly disbanded.
Who knows? Maybe I got kicked.
To see the fight once more, I signed up for the next raid in Syncademy. Because they have been progging that fight before, I needed to catch up with them somehow. I read their text guide and a text guide written by Seigi Telayo, watched MTQ raid guide and a clear video prior to showing up to the raid.
The raid leader was someone named Yarr Harr. I might have run into him before. However, with the sheer amount of people in Syncademy, it is just impossible to remember who is who. He asked us on who was new to the fight and apparently I was the only one.
So for my benefit, Yarr Harr talked about the mechanics. What do we do if we get yellow debuff, where do we go if Titan transformed to a car, landslide, blah, blah, blah. He was just on and on for 5 minutes, if not 10 minutes before we can even start the first pull. It might be just me, but his voice was a bit monotonic. I definitely spaced out by midway of his speech.
Anyway, no matter how many guide you have read or watched, practice is still essential. The misleading part of this fight is damage is probably calculated before the animation goes off. So if you wait for the animation to finish before you move, you are likely to be killed by the next mechanics. I think, we spent most of the first hour to practise the movement on the 1st phase. Then, Fuja had issues with her computer and we had to find a sub. Then, we were tying to sort out who was going where in the uplift in the second phase. I did read a few guides but really cannot remember exactly what they said. We knew what the debuff markers mean and tried to improvise. By the end of the raid hour, with help of a healer lb3, we got to the last phase. There were combination of fist, expanding aoe and what not. I think none of us survived by the time there was supposed to be some sort of merry go round thingy.
Well, it wasn't too bad. I was very dodgy at the beginning, but hopefully I somewhat managed to catch up with the rest of the party in term of progress. I probably still need a bit more practice on the movement in phase 1. I am a caster and sometimes it is not convininent to move for mechanics when I have something mid-cast.
A day later, I got a message from Fonsius. He asked me if I would be interested in subbing for his static for E4s. I told him that although I have seen all the phase on Wednesday, I really only did this fight once and was not too confident. He told me that he static was doing the fight blind and they were working on the uplift part, so I had time to pick up.
How can I refuse? More practice time to sort out my movement problem.
I can't remember exactly when did I first meet Fonsius. I think it was O8s, but it could have been earlier.
It was Dec 2020 when I resub. Before Syncademy went into winter break, they were progging on the Sigmascape savage. I caught on the last run on O5s and O6s, and got carried into O7s. I cleared O7s with two teams within a week and we were all railroaded into O8s. Turael told us that the first week will be blind prog, so we went in without reading a guide. I think there was a phase where you cannot target the boss, but you have to stack here and side step next to a puddle and walk into it at some point thingy? I had absolutely no clue what the hell was going on there. I think Fonsius was my stack partner back then, so I just followed him to stay alive.
I mean, O8s was a hell of a fight to do it blind. I still remember there was those meteor circles with some weird dots, and we got this funny debuff to reduce healing debuff to zero. We were searching every single pixel on the screen to try to find out what's going on. Then someone came up with this plan where we need to run out of the circle right before it hit and cast heal as soon as the debuff fall off. There was not even 1 second in between and even Indomn can't go off fast enough before the next damage came in. Oh, I will forever remember Turael told me that those dots on the meteor circle has nothing to do with mechanics because they were so tiny. Next time I should bring a sign saying "you said this is not part of the mechanics" in big bold letter.
The biggest lesson I have learnt in O8s was: Never go in as a healer unless I have cleared this fight with another job. Initially I was a bit like "why not" when I joined, but it was just a horrible idea.
Back to the present, here came Fonsius' group. We spent a few pulls to tidy up the first phase before we got into the second phase. When they said they were doing it blind, I think they were serious. After a wipe, there are discussion going on what to do.
Here is a problem, I have read the guide. Not one guide, but multiple guides. Not only that I know what the strat was supposed to be, I also know why and when their strat not work. Obviously, they had done remarkable well to figure out that far without any guide. I felt I shouldn't spoil it by telling them what the guide said.
Well, it was difficult. In the end, I ended up in suggesting improvement to their strat, pretending that it was my idea, instead of what was written from the guide. I might have sounded very intelligent but it was definitely a dellusion.
The upside of it was, I need to convince them based on some sort of reasoning instead of just "this is what is on the guide". As a result, the positioning on two uplifts mechanics made a lot of sense. There was only one sensible way to position those who get the blue marks. This limits what you can do with the yellow and orange marks.
I think we only made it to the last phase once. Most of the time we were working on the second phase. Overall I think it was time well spent training with their group. I got better perspective about the fight.
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Table of content of this series is
here
