Today I’m proudly showing the video of our first Omega 1 Savage clear as header. We’ve started up raiding as a static and we have been slowly progressing through the content. It started with some ex-primal farm (untill everyone had their weapons and accessories) and now we’re tackling the current hardest raiding difficulty bit by bit. Now honestly I have to say that O1S isn’t the hardest fight out there. They added maybe one or two new annoying mechanics but overal it’s mostly knowing about when to slide to the sides and when not to. It’s a great fight to get you warmed up for the harder content later on and even though I died in a very silly way here I’m still proud of my part in the play.
We cleared this last week and recleared it again last night where I didn’t die and pulled much better DPS than I did before and afterwards moved on to O2S. We had been struggling with O2S on our first night of trying it mostly because people kept on dying. It’s a lot more complicated a fight than it is on the normal version and if you don’t really get the “dance” you will die to silly mechanics. Last night however things started to click together and we killed it on our 5th or 6th pull of the evening. On our kill we actually only had one death if I recall it correctly and the rest of the run was done perfectly. We cheered, the beast was dead. I also got lucky with winning 3 pieces of loot from that particular boss. The Ninja headpiece dropped (yay!), I won the Dragoon boots for my offspecc (yay?) and I won the token that will allow me to purchase my 330 weapon the moment I manage to scrape together 1000 Creator tomes. All in all I was pretty content. Then we peeked into O3S and all the sense of achievement kind of fell away as we got obliterated. Hard.

It feels like the ramp up in difficulty of Savage is quite steep. Where we killed O1S in about 3 pulls we had been struggling on O2S for almost 4 hours of pulls over 2 nights before it finally went down in the end. While in theory O2S isn’t actually that hard it’s just the damage that is punishing and any mistake made will immediatly result in death. Have too many people die and you will eventually hit enrage due to lack of DPS. It was hard to figure out and we had to replace a few people in our first week but eventually it seemed to come together. The new challenge, O3S, is a gigantic ramp up again. The first phase alone is riddled with mechanics and we’ve seen up untill she summons the dragon in the second phase. It’s a mess really. There is so much to remember. Stack, stand away, sprint to corners, stand on the right tiles, kill adds. We barely made it to 75% health on her and I was already overwhelmed with the complexity of the fight. It takes me back to raiding days in Coil where learning mechanics and timings was the most important thing you’d do in progress and there was almost no way you could brute force through stuff. They’ve brought that back in Creator Savage and I can’t wait to learn the rest of the O3S fight before advancing onto the big boss: Exdeath. We’re raiding again tonight and although I don’t expect us to down O3S I do hope we will progress farther into the fight while also perfecting the mechanics of earlier phases.

Next to progressing as a static I’m also learning to be a better Ninja. For the first 50% of the O2S fight all of our DPS were over 4k. For someone that’s barely played Ninja and is still perfecting her rotation and timings it’s a grand feat. I’m still miles away from the best of the best but I’m slowly climbing up getting better at my class as I play it more. Ten-Chi-Jin is still an ability that I need to get used to but I’m learning to incorporate it into my rotation better and my DPS is going up for it. I still have some issues timing TA/Bhava right but I’m getting there. I had briefly thought to give up Ninja and go back to Bard instead now that the class is actually fun to play again. But persistence and the fact that I’m completely in love with how Ninja looks while you play it (seriously it has the best battle animations) I’m sticking to the class and will aim at improving myself as the expansion goes on.

Another type of progress that I’ve been making is in leveling my alt jobs. I have gotten Red Mage to level 60 and am now turning my focus on White Mage. I’m not sure what happened to my love for Astrologian. It’s still there, I still think it’s a great job, but for some reason I’m enjoying White Mage a lot more right now. She’s currently sitting at level 53 and I’m mostly running roulettes for the experience instead of spamming PotD like I did on my Red Mage. Instant queues help a lot with that and it’s less boring than running the same 10 floors of PotD over and over. I’m in no real rush to level either since I met my goal of atleast one level 60 battle job per month. However if I could get her a few more levels over the coming days that would be nice.

All in all I’m content with how FFXIV is going now. I’ve set clear goals for myself and I’m hoping I can stick to them. Breaking them down into weekly chunks has been nice because I don’t have to look and plan ahead that much. It also means that I’m putting less pressure on myself to actually attain stuff. It mostly helps me focus on doing one thing at a time. Static raiding will take away some of that time but it’s time well spent. I really hope we will down O3S soon and that we all get a little better geared so that we have an easier time clearing and reclearing the content.