Typically around the time of a new tier I’d start a thread on Twitter/Bluesky sort of keeping track of my groups progression. With how Twitter has become and with the Bluesky administrations recent… questionable decisions, I decided to put my thoughts together in a weekly post here. That and I need to get in the habit of actually writing instead of letting this blog sit around unused.
So, Dancing Mad (Ultimate)! Or DMU for shorthand. I will say I’m not particularly inspired by the theme the devs chose to run with. I think Final Fantasy VI is a fine game, for sure, but I didn’t grow up with a SNES and by the time I got around to playing the GBA version I’d already recognized that the actual best game was FFV. That said I don’t really do content in this game because something looks cool or flashy – I do it because I like the feeling of progging and clearing a fight.
I’ve opted not to lead a group for this go around, and while I have complicated feelings with how it ended up like this I’m also hoping the band can get back together in Evercold. Instead I started applying for DMU-focused groups in late March, and after a handful of applications and trials found a group that I can vibe with. While I was always going to main Pictomancer and Red Mage for this, I did originally want to have Dancer in my back pocket to help fill in gaps. I never got the weapon from savage though, so I’m back to being a one trick – hopefully for the last time with the item level sync changes set to hit in 8.0.
We spent a few weeks in May “blind” progging O8S using Awktrail gear, which calculates a way to downsync your damage output to “week one-ish” levels while still letting you queue in unsynced to have access to all your level 100 skills. I don’t typically try to do old content synced or undergeared so this felt a little strange to me. Again, one of those things that I hope the planned changes to Evolved kits giving you your entire core kit at 50 will help prevent.
Anyway I say “blind” because I did in fact prog and clear Sigmascape (Savage) back in the day, and as we progged a lot of the mechanics came back to me. So my deal was I’d keep quiet unless specifically asked, and even then I’d mostly confirm or clarify something in a mechanic unless something was [i]really[/i] going wrong.
It took about four once a week meetings to get through the whole fight. We cleared phase 1 at the end of the first night, and slowly pushed through P2 the remaining weeks. I don’t think being synced down to the bare minimum was really necessary for what amounted to getting a grasp on the baseline mechanics of both phases.
The basics of Savage Phase 1’s standard/flipped casts and statue mechanics are pretty straightforward, and helpfully the preview video they played at Fanfest shows how the former can apply to the Ultimate version. Peep this bit from the savage P1 analog:
While Savage Kefka will typically call whether a spellcast was standard or flipped on the initial cast (and also saving its state if sandwiched between Mana Charge and Mana Release), it looks like he’s calling out two separate casts based on the spheres orbiting both his top and bottom half. Also notable is that the actual elemental casts are different “types” than in Savage – Blizzard Blitz in Savage is a donut or point blank depending on if it was flipped or not, but here it seems to be two 90 degree cleaves facing opposite points from the boss. All while the first statue looms ominously in the background…
Savage Phase 2 has several different mecahnics over the course of the fight, and a lot of it relies on good positioning from both the tanks and the party. Heartless Arkangel phases are also brutal on the healers which is almost certain to still be the case in Ultimate. Unfortunately the preview video doesn’t really show much abnormal about the phase 2 analog, save for what seems to be either double Wings of Destruction during Trine, instead of the single Wings from Savage.
While I have picked up on some of the datamined stuff I’ll refrain from talking about it now especially since we’ll just… see some of it at some point during world prog, and I won’t have anything meaningful to say until we get to it ourselves.
So, the way this will (hopefully) work is as I prog through the week I’ll take notes on mechanics and how I handled/learned them, and over the weekend have something written to go up on Monday, along with screenshots and some video clips to help visualize my thoughts better. I may also stream prog over on my Twitch channel, but that entirely depends on whether my internet is willing to cooperate. If it does happen, I’ll be on there Tuesday – Friday from 7PM to 10PM CST. And if you’re progging the fight yourself, then I wish you good luck, have fun, and don’t let the game stress you out!