See, while the Dynamis raid was scheduled for today, that wasn't the only thing I had planned.
I was also personally organising a Fenrir run of my own. ^^ Basically, I've more or less given up on /shouting at the last minute when trying to look for help to go do something, as most people generally ignore the /shouts, or just don't help. I mean, heck, I do that myself, so I don't expect the general populace to come running at me for the chance to fight Fenrir. So instead, I decided to try getting people I knew to help out, and then /shout every now and then for missing members. The difference now that is I'd be /shouting Japanese style, which basically let's people know well in advance of a particular event. In my case, I started a whole day early:
/shout {Excuse me...} Looking for members to go on a {Fenrir} run tomorrow, Saturday night 0:00 EST! Please send a {/tell} if interested! ^^
Or something to that extent.
By doing this, I got a few /tells from people who were interested, and I could then jot their names down. Now that they are aware of the time, they can then log back in and we could all set off without further ado. Far better than sitting around Jeuno /shouting for two hours only to have discouraged people leave and the party disband in the end. By Friday night, I had NIN (Thibrebaud), BLM (me), and RNG (Onekomaru) confirmed, as well as a second NIN (Jaxter). I also had a DRK (Nemrac) and SMN (Letum) on the sidelines, willing to help out if I needed more people. Only thing missing was a Bard.
Finding a Bard was hard. Neither Hirushi (who's been away from the game for quite some time) and Zim could make the run, so come Saturday evening, I ended up /shouting for a BRD. I didn't really want to go through all this, only to disband in the end, just because we couldn't find one person. Luckily, a BRD replied!
He was interested in fighting Fenrir, the problem was that he didn't have a moon bauble. Fortunately, he was in the middle of a complete avatar run, and with luck, he'd be finished by midnight. WIth that in mind, I went about doing other things, checking to see if other people were online, and reminding people of the time. Our first hiccup came upon the realisation that the BRD's (Sidant) avatar party's tank could not do Ramuh, which was their last avatar. Fortunately, Thibrebaud could still go in his place, and he volunteered to go tank Ramuh for them, bless his soul. ^^
Meanwhile, I was busy struggling with another hiccup of my own- Jaxter had logged on earlier (at 11:30), and we spoke for a bit. He then needed to log out, saying he'd "be back in 30 minutes". Now, it was 12:30, and I was getting anxious. Regardless, I decided to airship down to Windurst, although in hindsight, staying in Jeuno /shouting for a NIN would've been the better option.
By sheer dumb luck, Junstrife happened to be riding the same airship. Junstrife is another NIN, whom I know has been trying to fight Fenrir again, so I asked him if he'd like to join us, explaining that our second NIN was "Missing In Action". He agreed, although I don't know what I would've done if Jaxter had returned. Junstrife initially thought that he couldn't get the moon bauble, but after clarifying that after getting your moon bauble, one did not need to go fight the entire run of avatars again to get another (which, garnered an "OMG!" out of him ^^), he joined with no problems whatsoever. It was still funny though. ^^
Thib, Sidant, and their party had then beaten Ramuh, and were now on their way back to Windurst to meet up with us. And so, the group was settled.
SMN NIN BLM RNG NIN BRD.
As Onekomaru put it, the party was "foolproof". ^^ I personally agreed with her statement if it weren't just for two "small" problems. The first was that it was a Full Moon. The second was that given travel times and everything, by the time we got to Fenrir, it'd be Darksday. Fighting Fenrir on Darksday, Full Moon is not something you'd want to be doing. We briefly considered hanging around for an hour waiting for Darksday to pass, but decided to give it a shot anyway.
There are a number of things that make Fenrir so difficult. For one, he's ten levels higher than all the other avatars. Secondly, he's of the Dark element, so the WHM has no Bar- spell to cast against him. Thirdly, his 2hr, Howling Moon, is devastating, and finally (the most annoying, I think) he Dispelgas. orz.
Fenrir's version of Dispelga, or Lunar Cry, was by far the hardest thing to deal with. It'd erase everything except food (not just one buff, but everything at one go), which includes stuff like Ballads, drinks, and Reraise. That meant that when I couldn't Stun Fenrir's 2hr (Howling Moon) in time (and ended up being one-shotted in the process), the whole party (eventually) wiped out and none of us could reraise. ; ; In addition, the range of Lunar Cry is ridiculous. In the picture above, I was just barely within casting range of Fenrir, and I still got hit with Lunar Cry. ; ; Letum testifies that there were times where he couldn't even see Fenrir, and still got hit by Lunar Cry as well.
Evidently, Howling Moon can, in fact be Stunned, the problem is that the window of opportunity is so small, it's very hard to actually catch. you literally have about half a second to Stun Fenrir before Howling Moon resolves. Like all the other avatars, he 2hrs when he's around 50% health, so at that point, I stopped whatever I was doing to jam on that Stun macro as soon as I saw the words "Fenrir readies Howling Moon", and I still missed it. ; ; We put up a decent fight, at least, the three of us that survived it, but in the end, Fenrir got the better of us and we wiped out. >_<
Onekomaru bit the bullet and returned to homepoint to change into her White Mage so she could Raise III the rest of us. Soon, it occured to me that Onekomaru had no way to get past the three-mage gate that eventually leads to the Toraimarai Canal, so I homepoint'ed as well to open the door for her. It didn't really matter- I had xp'ed in preparation for dying a lot in Dynamis, and after a relatively clean run, I didn't mind taking the hit. Besides, this was Fenrir we are talking about! ^^
The good news is that by the time we returned, it had changed to Firesday. Within ten minutes, we were up and running, and raring to go up against Fenrir one more time. ^^
And so we went up against him again. Now that Onekomaru was WHM instead of RNG, his life total went down a lot slower, although the good news was that we had four people who could all cast Erase to take off the Evasion and Accuracy Down effects on the NINs when Fenrir uses Ecliptic...something. (All his abilities sound the same to me. >_<) I ended up doing some light nuking to speed things up a little bit, and when hit life total hit 60%, I stopped, and readied myself to Stun on moment's notice.
One thing we decided was that, despite the Darksday, Full Moon, Fenrir really wasn't all that difficult to deal with. Essentially, what the entire battle resolved around was surviving Howling Moon. Once we got that, the rest of the battle would be a piece of cake.
And so, I waited.
And waited.
And waited some more.
Finally, it came: "Fenrir readies Howling Moon!" I hit the Stun macro, hoping to catch it in time. I even removed all the gear-swapping lines in my macro to avoid any possible slowdown. The lines on the screen went by:
Fenrir readies Howling Moon.
Tuufless starts casting Stun.
Tuufless casts Stun.
Fenrir is stunned.
Junstrife>> NICE!
From then on, it was a piece of cake. Thibrebaud died again when Junstrife's Provoke was not up when his shadows went down, but the worst was over. I upped the nuking a notch, culminating in a Manafont-Elemental Seal-Blizzaga III while Letum Astral Flow'ed and readied Ifrit's Hellfire, and with that, Fenrir was defeated!
Ecstatically, we all run back to Windurst Woods, where I got that final cutscene with Carbuncle telling the researchers about the purpose of the avatars and their presence. Personally, I was too excited to pay much attention to what Carbuncle was saying, and just skimmed ahead to getting my item- a pact with Fenrir.
It is done. It is finally over. Fenrir...is mine!
/cheer!
/joy!
/hurray! ^^
Many, many thanks to everybody who took part in this run: Onekomaru, Thibrebaud, Sidant, Letum, and Junstrife. I couldn't have done it without you guys! ^^
No comments:
Post a Comment