Idling in a Red Cap

With Maat knocked out of the picture I'm starting to feel like I'm at loose ends.

Back when I first got into this game I had very simple and realistic goals for myself.

• Complete my Arfifact armor
• Beat up Maat
• Reach level 75

With the advent of Abyssea and the recent patch to exp, the last of my original goals will be met in short order, leaving me in need of a new set of accomplishments to strive for. What sort I haven't decided yet.

The obvious choice would be to find myself a complete set of relic armor, or to be more precise: pimp hat 2.0. But then, that's just another list of gear to get and while satisfying, it isn't really what I want my main focus for the game to be. To go through the game with nothing but the intent to get more shinies seems like a good way to burn yourself out.

My previous list of stuff to do was more about the journey to the top, but now that I'm getting up here I find myself losing perspective. When I was a small and inexperienced Red Mage I used to be all about the running around to dumb places to exp and couldn't understand why folks wouldn't want to sync down. But now that I'm all the way up here at level 70 I'm starting to understand. There's an definite appeal to keeping all of your abilities and spells, because they're a lot of fun to use. The higher you go the more you can do with the job and the more fun it gets. On the other side of the coin is a gradual erosion of that mystical sense of adventure you had when you first joined the game. No longer do I run headlong into Dangruf Wadi to smack bunnies and evade goblins for the thrill of it. Instead I find myself sitting in exp parties wanting to strangle my various party members for being horribly inept.

Somewhere in that journey something changed in me, and it's not a change I like. My fear is that if I continue playing primarily for the acquisition of shinies that it will only cause that change to fester until it turns me into a very bitter player.

He really is just an old man

For years and years it has been commonly accepted that Red Mages have the toughest time fighting a certain snarky old man in Jeuno. I've heard from just about everyone I've talked to how this guy is the biggest badest fighter around and how he'll turn you inside out at the drop of a hat.

Well tonight I threw my own pimp hat in the ring against this trouncer of intrepid travelers and there's something I need to set straight once and for all.

The Maat fight for Red Mage is not difficult.

Yeah, you heard me.

The only people Maat is going to break in half are those folks who are utterly unsuited for the job. You know the kind, the ones who like to pull out their wand and beat on gobbies during a party. The ones who are better off leveling a less complex job.

It really irks me how there's been this aura of fear cultivated for this one specific fight and it has totally failed to deliver. I was really looking forward to having Maat wipe the floor with me and force me to rethink my strategies. You know, something to challenge me to be a better Red Mage. Instead, I got a mewling kitten of an opponent who did not teach me anything.

The fight itself was really quite simple.

Once I got in the arena I regained my Composure and proceeded to apply most of my normal buffs. Then, mindful of the importance of recast timers in a fight like this, I dropped Composure and ran in to find Maat casting some buffs of his own. Well we certainly couldn't have any of that, so I hit him with Sleep and proceeded to strip him of all his buffs. It took a fair chunk of mp, so afterwards I dropped Sleep II over top of the original sleep and grabbed a few ticks of mp for myself.

Brimming with mp, it was now time to knuckle down and start smacking the elderly around. Maat didn't take kindly to Gravity the first time around, but it hardly mattered. If you drop an Aero III from far enough back then he won't even make it through Blink before you've slept him again. Scoot back, nuke again, Sleep II and grab mp, repeat.

Heck, even when the old man let loose a Chainspell it didn't matter, he slept right through that too. When I readied my own Chainspell he called for a time out after the first nuke. It was quite sad really.

This guy has been built up as some sort of monster in the guise of a little old man and it just isn't the case. I'm sorry, but this was not a challenging fight.

The silver lining to all this was learning about Maat's past. The fact that he was a fisherman, and therefore absolutely crazy, makes everything fit into place for me somehow.

Still searching for a worthy adversary.

Things I have learned from Dynamis

1. A disproportionate number of mages are incompetent

It's very discouraging to be a Red Mage helping with Sleeping large hordes of mobs only to see one of the Black Mages open with Sleepga II, thoroughly preventing us from keeping the horde in check. We are not going to be able to maul everything in 90 seconds. You're just making it harder to stagger the influx of assailants, so cut it out.

Another horrendous choice I saw made: White Mages not using Sublimation when we're encountering mobs that are continually sleeping the whole alliance. Yes that Refresh II is appealing, but you know what's more appealing? Being able to wake up the alliance so we don't risk a wipe and lose more time.

My own failures in all this boil down to not being on the ball enough. I've done a shamefully poor job of keeping up Refresh and Haste cycles with people running all over the place while simultaneously trying to make sure everything is slept. I feel some of this could be alleviated if the alliance was a little more coordinated, but I also know that I need to step up my own game, or maybe just mess with my chat filters some more.

2. Communication is the most important thing ever

Our shell leader insists on using Vent when doing Dynamis. I was reluctant at first, but I'm warming up to the idea. The problem however, is that this leads to there being almost no communication in-game. This coupled with the fact that the vast majority of the shell is not on Vent means that the whole thing is very poorly coordinated, which leads to all sorts of frustrations. We really need to take some time before the next run to just sit down and make sure everyone is at least listening in on Vent even if they don't own a mic. It would make it easier to issue instructions and keep everyone on the same page rather than having half the alliance left in the dark for most of the run.

3. Not everyone is suited to lead a Linkshell

Without going into too much detail, our shell leader had IRL issues last night that forced him to abandon the run early, and those issues are likely to do so again. If your situation outside the game is such that you cannot consistently be there during the event, then maybe you shouldn't be leading a shell. I'll stick with the shell for now, but last night raised a number of red flags for me.

Dynanonymous

Some folks from my social LS roped me into joining a Dynamis run tonight. Let me transcribe part of the thought process:

Oh this is neat.

Wait, why is there no map? Oh god this is going to be terrible.

No, we're all moving in a group that's good.

Wait, these groupings make no sense. Why are you moving up there?

Oh god why are all the party members moving in different directions? I'll never be in range now.

Oh hey, some orcs...OH DEAR GOD WHERE HAS MY FACE GONE!?

Tonight was definitely an interesting experience to say the least. Thankfully everyone managed to keep their pants on through the many many many wipes that were had over the course of the evening.

If I had to give a brief description of Dynamis I'd say it consisted of battling a large army in small chunks while slowly making your way through a city.

The whole run felt very disorganized from start to finish. We got off to a rocky start when our first pull consisted of the puller bringing back a boatload of statues, each of which proceeded to spawn approximately eight thousand orcs apiece. We were very very dead very very quickly. After everyone got back on their feet and re-buffed we tried again, with similar results but we were at least making some progress in reducing the number of orcs in San d'Oria. By our third go round we managed to not wipe. I wouldn't say we'd settled into a good rhythm, but we managed to not die horribly and that was progress for us.

The arrangement of who went where in the alliance didn't make a lot of sense to me. I think in my own party there were at least three mages, a puller and something that pretended to be a tank, all of whom went in different directions making it damn near impossible to organize them into a cohesive unit that kept itself within casting distance for me to support. I have no idea what was going on in the other parties, no one bothered to really stop and explain who was in charge of what.

Ok that's not entirely true, the alliance leader kept yelling at the four Red Mages to cast Sleepga.

Would you like to see what those Red Mages looked like?

90 RDM/WHM

90 RDM/WHM

90 RDM/SCH

66 RDM/SCH

Yeah...about casting Sleepga, and it totally not happening.

That definitely lead to a few wipes. Manifestation + Sleep II from a single RDM doesn't cut it. There was a Summoner helping though, so we managed to not Die Horribly all the time.

Overall I just would have liked to see more organization to the whole thing. My friend kept trying to apologize throughout the whole thing because it was such a terribly executed run, but he really didn't need to. I could definitely see how Dynamis could be a fun thing to do if it was with a group working like a well-oiled machine, rather than a crowbar stuck in a block of cement like this run was. But even more importantly, this run let me get into Dynamis to see what it was like without having to hold any real responsibility, which is how I've wanted to get my feet wet in Dynamis since I first heard about it.

At this point it's very difficult for me to say if I'll enjoy it. If runs continue to be painfully slow, inefficient and filled with stupid leadership choices like tonight's was, then I'll probably stick it out for a piece of gear or two before making my escape. However, I'd much prefer to see the shell get itself smoothed out and have some proper runs, because I think I could get into it if it was done right.

My biggest concern right now is actually the leadership. I think I'm still holding a grudge against the LS leader because of that Summoner burn I helped him with that took two hours and kept me from my delicious dinner. That's like a cardinal sin with me. You don't keep me from my food. It ends badly for everyone.

The rumblings of my stomach aside, this guy just hasn't really laid out a clear system for how the shell is going to be run, or how gear is distributed. Maybe I missed the memo, but the shell's pretty young and I can't get him to tell me how the LS bank is going to work. He's said we can access the gil in it, but has been vague about how. At this point I think I'm going to press the issue and if possible abuse the existence of the bank to pay for some of the stuff on my shopping list along with my consumables until some concrete rules are laid out.

Likewise I'd like some gear acquisition protocol. Is this crap freelot for everything, or are we gonna have a points system? Or worse, is it going to be a "because I said so" rule of distribution?

None of this has been established yet as far as I can tell, which raised a ton of red flags for me tonight. I'll probably end up being the problem child of the shell and bother them about it constantly until they put something together. Or at least that's the plan.

My first Dynamis. I think it went well.




Did you know they put Tarutarus in treasure chests? If anyone has the Bastok one I'll trade you my San d'Oria one.



Shadowlord's home turf. I'm so glad no one managed to spoil the cutscenes for the rank 6 mission. It was so awesome.



A sense of impending doom.