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.