Trials RouletteFollow

If you're going to drop the party after one attempt without saying anything first, do us all a favor and just ignore Trial Roulette. It's clearly not for you.

True you can't be sure it was a roulette, but generally someone who needs a clear is willing to give it more than one go.

What makes you think those people are on this forum?!

Sometimes groups will surprise you.

I joined a random Titan EX the other night with another guy I knew needed a clear. I've already beaten him, and have had HM on farm forever.

The group sucked butt. It took three tries before we even got the echo buff. Landslides, plumes, bombs, people died to everything. I was right on the edge of dropping. We ended up winning on the last try, with 25% echo and about three mins left on the clock with zero deaths that time. Just because a group starts out as fail doesn't mean it can't improve and pull through.

Seriously. Sometimes you just never know.

I did Titan HM in DF the other day for a relic quest and the group was terrible. Wiping on stupid stuff, sometimes not even being able to kill the heart, etc. Then on the fourth or fifth try it mysteriously all worked out. All of a sudden people could dodge stuff and kill goals, and avoid bombs... We won flawlessly. It was magical.

Those people are the worst!

Only those of us with relatively non-important lives should be spending so much time playing video games. And really, I mean that. None of us are that important.

I actually find Garuda to be the hardest of the EXs. I was stuck on her from 2.1s launch until about three weeks ago.

1: So much crap going on. Even Titan with the Gaolers is a simple "gank tank and spank adds" phase. With her you have 2 tanks trying to tank 2 adds and play Voke Hot Potato with the Spiny at the same time, while the field is cut off by AOEs, the healers are getting pelted by Friction, and the MT is constantly on the verge of being oneshotted by DWW.

2: Hate is WONKY in there. I tried my hand at tanking it over the last couple nights. Defiance up, 2 FULL BB combos on Chirada during the tornado phase. Switched to my second bar to Flash the spiny I had just voked, and while GCD was ticking Chirada made a dash for the healers. All the tomahawks in the world couldn't get her back, either. That happened twice. I will never get mad at the OT in there again.

3: Its hard on healers with the AOE Friction damage and interrupted casts, plus the slightly random and nigh-undodgeable rain of feathers that causes Wind Burn that has to be removed, lest ir wear down DPS, tanks, or kill SCH fairies.

4: The weird lag on the spiny bubble that will randomly kill people even if they were the first one inside. Sometimes I get it, sometimes someone else. On every spiny kill it seems about 50/50 that somebody will get greased because it didn't register.

Ifrit is a bit of a pain because of the final DPS race and the massive AOE damage you get from the big nail kabooming. I wiped a few times because of bad timing: At 2 stacks tanking, big nail dies, and Sparky uses fire breath right after and kills me instantly. Or the worst one, when you clear the nails and both healers die to hellfire/plumes because of low HP and/or derping trying to heal others.

Titan's a chump. He's just as predictable as his HM version, and a half decent OT makes the gaolers a complete non-issue. His biggest threat is Upheaval, IMO. Been scooted off the edge a few times when the tank didn't have him pulled close enough to the opposite edge. I'd rather fight him twice than Garuda once.

Garuda EX is easy... for the healer and ranged DPS. If you're anything else, particularly the tanks, you have quite a bit more to concern yourself with. It's a lot more forgiving of mistakes than Titan is, at any rate. The pressure there is all on the DPS and tanks. Having solid DPS makes life surprisingly easy for the solitary healer (for instance, double Wicked Wheel keeps wrecking your MT? Kill Chirada fast enough, and you won't even see it happen. Suparna is only granted access to Wicked Wheel when Chirada is alive.)

The healer (assuming you only use one, which is really the ideal setup) should be making an effort to stay away from everyone else, and everyone else an effort to stay away from him, to make Friction a non-issue. All I do on WHM is just toss a Regen on myself every now and then and I'm good to go.

MT has an easier job overall, imo.

You getting double WW'd is the fault of the DPS not killing Chirada fast enough and/or OT not pulling Chirada away fast enough to reduce her defenses. Other than knowing when to pop a cooldown (which I have noticed is not always at the exact same times, I have noted from several tanks that sometimes she deviates from her pattern) there isn't really anything the MT can do about that.

The OT has to actually worry about aggro because the DPS should be attacking Chirada as soon as they are able to without ******** things up. For the first sisters phase this isn't much of a problem, but after that it can be problematic because it's usually also up to the OT to grab and hold the spiny plume. They spawn apart, making this difficult at times when the DPS start tearing into Chirada right away.

I've wondered at times if it could be worthwhile to dedicate the healer to grabbing the spiny plume at that particular stage (when sisters are out), because I've seen many mishaps occur at that stage due to the OT losing hate on Chirada and going to tear the DPS a new one (which tends to also close the distance between her and Suparna, which just makes the DPS' job harder), but then there might be enmity problems later on when the plume needs to be grabbed by one of the tanks. Or maybe even one of the DPS could do it. I'm not really sure what the best way to handle it is if there are enmity problems. Whenever I've encountered this problem, we usually tried to resolve it by telling the DPS to hold up on attacking Chirada until the OT has got both Chirada and the plume held in position, but sometimes trigger-happy DPS make this difficult.

Edited, Apr 10th 2014 8:37pm by Fynlar