It's been a while since I posted anything and it's all thanks to Final Fantasy XIV. I've been completely engulfed in this game and when I get home from work I've been wanting to spend my time off in the evenings playing instead of writing. That's just how good this game is.
I've come a long way since writing about defeating the different Primals. I've finished the main storyline of the base game and have started working on the post-story leading up to the first expansion called Heavensward. Along the way I've been defeating even more Primals and have delved into a ton of new dungeons and other group content.
The only thing standing in my way of getting into Heavensward is completing the Crystal Tower raid series that came with the base game. For those who don't know FFXIV is a MMORPG and a classical component of MMORPG's are raids. Raids are group content meant for larger groups, often 10 or more people, to be tackled through teamwork and coordination. In FFXIV most group content is dealt with either as a group of 4, 8 or 24. The Crystal Tower raid is 24-man Alliance Raid as they've chosen to call it.
Raiding was my all time favorite activity during my hay day in World of Warcraft so I was quite excited to get into this. Even though the raid is almost eight years old people are still doing it due to FFXIV's great system of keeping older content relevant. I'll talk more about that in a later post. This meant finding a group wasn't a big problem and especially not since I signed up as a tank.
I was a little bit nervous to be honest. I haven't tanked any raid content in an MMO since back in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion in World of Warcraft. Back then I had an alt warrior that I tanked alt runs with for our guild. My main go to class has always been a DPS caster.
Tanking comes with responsibility and in raids, contrary to regular dungeon content, there's little to no room for fuck ups. This became quire apparent when we wiped a couple of times. Raids are at a difficulty where one single mistake can mean the death of the entire raid party. Your fuck up ruins it for 23 other people. Of course, wiping is both normal and expected. You can just get up and try again but you're still stuck with that feeling throughout the raid of not wanting to fuck up for the others.
The Labyrinth of the Ancients
The Crystal Tower raids consist of several smaller instanced raids, much like how World of Warcraft raids has several wings inside their raids. The first one of these are the Labyrinth of the Ancients. This is sort of a second line of defense before we reach the tower itself. It has four bosses that need to be defeated with some trash mobs in between them.
One major difference from World of Warcraft that I noticed right off the bat is the difference in how the raids are made. In World of Warcraft there seems to be a lot of adds and trash mobs mostly to make the raid longer. It takes about 10 minutes to get to each boss. In Final Fantasy that's not the case. There's a very low amount of adds between each boss and each pack acts as a sort of training exercise for the boss by utilizing the same mechanics as the boss fight will.
The Bone Dragon
The first boss is simple called the Bone Dragon, and it's just that. A skeletal dragon. This is a fairly simple tank and spank boss where each member of the raid simply has to watch where they stand. The room has some raised platforms that acts as safe spots for when the room is filled with toxic fluid.
There seems to be a general consensus that the tank from group A is the main tank,so since I was the tank from group B I was on add duty. My task was simply to pick up adds and lesser enemies to keep them away from the group and boss. A simple task but an important one. We killed this one without any issues.
Thanatos
The second boss, Thanatos, wasn't quite as simple but we still bonked him up pretty easily. In this fight only one of the raid groups can attack the boss at a time. Each group will receive a buff at random that makes us able to attack the boss. The tank of that group then needs to taunt the boss, or provoke as it's called in FFXIV, and start tanking it so that the group can damage it. Fairly simple. There's some adds spawning that the tanks of the inactive groups deal with.
King Behemoth
The fight against Behemoth is another simple one but one where it's easy to spot individual mistakes. At regular intervals the boss will do a raid wipe mechanic that you need to hide behind rocks to avoid. If you die it means you're not paying attention as this is quite easy to do. We had several people die to this which is stupid. Pick up the slack! I mostly tanked adds away from the group in this fight, same as with the bone dragon.
Phlegeton
The last boss was the hardest one. We wiped a couple of times on this one. The main mechanic needs to see everyone working together and it's another fight where individual mistakes are easy to spot.
Most of the fight is tank and spank but at regular intervals the boss will do a raid wipe mechanic. When this happens there's three platform at the back of the room, one for each raid group, that we need ot run to. At least four people have to be standing on each platform to raise a shield that will protect us against the raid wipe. If any players is caught outside of the shield they die, meaning that effectively the whole raid has to run back to the platform.
We had some dingbats who didn't make it back in time due to positioning themselves to far away which caused us to wipe twice. They quickly learned and we managed to take him down, marking the end of the raid.
Although the raid wasn't all that challenging it was a ton of fun. This was just the normal difficulty but the raids also come in Extreme and Ultimate difficulties which ramps it up a whole ton. I'm looking forward to one day trying those.
Now I'm gonna jump into the next raid in this series so that I can progress the story. I'm excited to see what bosses will be thrown at me next!
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.