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.
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