unending journey

TEA CLEAR!!!

overall, i LOVED this fight. i enjoyed ucob a lot, but TEA is a lot more complex in terms of mechanics and execution. it's not that the individual mechanics are difficult per se, it's more that doing them every time consistently is the struggle. which is raiding in a nutshell, really. i did this fight with half of the same folks i did ucob with, and it worked out very well; it's great to run with familiar folks who know their stuff.

living liquid was a fun phase but also pretty brain off once we had it down, much like twintania was. we tried doll skip briefly but honestly doing dolls was easy enough so we didn't bother past a few initial tries. we... never did protean 2. not once, LMAO. I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO IT. we would kill living liquid right as he did it every time. limit cut took me a while to get down, and i still made stupid mistakes now and then but that's to be expected.

BJCC is an excellent phase. it's entirely execution-based, and if anyone dies it's generally a wipe, so we had to get it right every time. we had lots of wipes to nisis while progging but it got a lot easier over time. also shout out to our pictomancer: thanks to her moogle death ray i never had to touch CC's shield, LOL.

alexander prime was both easy and difficult. it's a phase that's about downtime mechanics, much like bahamut in ucob, so you have to get it right. i would not have been able to do it so quickly if it wasn't for the TEA sim: i simmed inception and wormhole over and over until i understood them inherently. i still whiffed it a few times in prog, but it helped SO much to do the complete mechanic in isolation to practice. after that it was just a matter of doing it for real.

AS FOR PERFECT ALEXANDER... i really liked this phase! it took me a while to grasp everything in fate A and fate B but i like how they work overall, and it didn't take us too long to prog through them. actually we had more trouble with tankbuster deaths than we did to the mechanics, i think. by the time we were getting to perfect alex regularly, i could tell that we were going to clear for sure: it wasn't a question of if, but when. this was a great feeling! it's really nice to be confident that your group can do it.

we had a few deaths on our clear pull, but managed to lock it down in the end. we're going back in this weekend to try and get more clears, but even if we can't pull it off i'm really glad we were able to do it. i had so much fun! TEA is a fantastic fight and i'm so glad i got the opportunity to do it with such a good group.

I wrote this post on tumblr when I cleared UCoB; this is a crosspost.

I FINALLY CLEARED… my little catboy is finally a legend 😭 i’m so happy, i was so worried i wouldn’t be able to clear before DT came out and now it’s like. my stress has DISAPPEARED i am so relieved. ON WE GO

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i can’t sleep so i’m going to wax poetic about ucob

overall, I REALLY LIKE THIS FIGHT. yeah, it’s janky as hell and just plain weird sometimes. it’s super obvious it’s the first ultimate. i’ve progged uwu to ultima but not cleared; past that i don’t have a ton of fights i can compare ucob to. overall though it’s clear that it’s a fight from a different design era; there’s only one body check and you can still keep going if you fuck it up with a well-timed tank LB3. (that said, finding people in pf that can do heavensfall? actual hell)

but it’s such a fun fight!! i never got sick of progging it. it helped that i had a great group to do it with (we cleared in under 40 hours overall, less than 30 for some folks) and every wipe was just, ok, let’s go again and see how we do. we saw bahamut our second raid night and though it took us a while to clean up nael (and ofc we still had nael wipes all the way through, nael is the wildest phase in the entire fight) but from there it was pretty smooth sailing.

bahamut phase is interesting. there’s only 6 mechanics and they’re largely downtime mechanics so it’s purely “can you move to the right place at the right time” gameplay. once you get the rhythm of it, it’s pretty straightforward to do. and yet we had plenty of wipes to EVERYTHING in bahamut phase, just because one tiny thing would go wrong and it would cascade. (or it was heavensfall. what a mechanic)

adds phase… i saw like 5 or 6 times total, lol. i’m not very good at adds phase yet. the twisters are the scariest part; everything else was doable. the first time we saw golden we cleared; i completely beefed it on exaflares so thank god our summoner was pumping dps.

overall, SUCH A FUN FIGHT. it’s funny how some fights i really enjoy and others i literally never want to do again (LOOKING AT YOU, P3S). i know uwu is the easiest ultimate by a long shot but ucob felt very accessible. it helped that hector’s guides are so accessible and easy to understand; i watched and rewatched every single one repeatedly to study everything until i had it down.

also, a big shout out to our honorary ninth member who subbed in repeatedly and helped out in pf and even swapped jobs to help us clear, 10/10 u a real one.

AAAAAA I’M SO HAPPY