One of the best things about Ultimates and, occasionally, multi-phase Savage fights is how later parts of a fight can be timed to the music. Oldheads sort of remember Ahk Morns being timed to Answers in T13. One of my recent favorites is in FRU, where at the beginning of Oracle of Darkness the drums for The Extreme kick in right as she finishes casting Ultimate Relativity and set the pace for the entire mechanic. It matches the frenetic feeling of the mechanic so well and it always pumped me up when we got there.
I got the same kind of feeling from Forsaken. By necessity God Kefka’s descent from the heavens has to be sped up to keep the general pace of the fight going, which means during the part of Dancing Mad Movement 4 where he’d slowly descend and do his intro in FF6 he’s instead firing off a tankbuster. And then, right as he almost finishes casting Forsaken… the drums and pipe organ kick in.
Fuck the haters and fuck the people who say this mechanic is way too hard and precise. There’s nothing that gets me more excited to see a phase done cleanly than to feel like my movement’s in tune with the music. That’s why it’s such a shame that there’s so few musical transitions in this fight! Phase 1 cycles through Movements 1 through 3 extremely quickly. Phase 3 returns to The Decisive Battle, but it stretches on for two phases and the variable timing that you can clear Phase 3 with means that Phase 4 can’t really be timed to anything.
I know general public opinion has started to turn on DMU, and although I think mechanically this fight has been really fun to prog through I gotta admit that the sparse bits of music syncing compared to some more recent Ults and Savage fights is probably gonna put this one in the middle for me. This is definitely a healer and tank fight more than anything especially going into P3+ so all my baby DPS brain has to do is play paint by numbers for the rest of the fight. I hear some DPS complaining about how rote the fight is post-Forsaken but I’m not really feeling it. Maybe as a caster it’s more fun for me because I get to optimize casting uptime while working on it?
Well, however other people feel about the fight, this weeks static prog has been pretty steady. We’ve broken through the Forsaken wall and’ve been slowly progging through Phase 3.
I think prog could be a lot faster, and at times I’ve been bitten by bits of impatience. Really, it’s not something that’s anyone’s fault, just an awful combination of circumstances that have hit the group:
- The storms hitting north central US have taken a few members out or hit their connections at times that we’ve either had to end early or find a sub for them.
- General lag has hit everyone at different times, including me! Talking to someone else this past weekend I learned a new term – “World Cup lag” – which makes complete sense to me if I think about it but man I wish it wasn’t hitting us that bad right now.
- Life just generally getting in the way. Illness, power outages, and one member burning out and asking to leave. We found a replacement for them without much issue (god knows I needed that smoothness after the last Savage tier) but it’s still unfortunate that they weren’t having a good time.
The constant shuffling of subs has caused us to reevaluate our strats for P2 and P3. While initially we were going with South Adjust Forsaken and non-tank LB3 wind crystals we did end up swapping to the public strats to make it easier for people to sub in. Honestly I think that’s a bit of a shame! I really like South Adjust just because it spreads the responsibility of the mechanic to everyone instead of just the tanks and healers. I’m not exactly going to complain about not having to look for someone as a caster, but, you know, I like having to keep active instead of only paying attention to my shape.
Tank LB3 I’m less disappointed about having to use. I get the pride of doing the mechanic the “right” way, but at least for this specific mechanic having everyone go to extremely static spots for the first half of the phase allows for wicked fast prog and cleanup. It’s not like it’s people using automarkers to solve the mechanic or anything.
Despite the good prog I still took some time over the weekend to hit up PF and it was just as inconsistent as ever. I didn’t hit it nearly as hard as I did last week but still out of all the parties I joined only one even made it to P3 and only managed to do it twice before people started burning out. I do feel a little bit more confident in my positioning for the first bit but I really wish I could’ve gotten some practical runs with Black Holes.
One thing that’s really bothering me about PFing the fight right now is the “30 mins to prog point or disband” mentality. I get the core intent of wanting to spare yourself spending too much time in a party that’ll go nowhere but it’s causing a lot of groups I join to impatiently ram through pulls after wipes that could benefit from taking a minute or two to figure out what went wrong. With the majority of these wipes happening in Forsaken this feels especially important – some of the best PFs I was in during the previous week’s Forsaken prog were ones who would stop and ask questions, give feedback, and run the pull through the analyzer if necessary.
Yes, yes, it’s P3+ prog people should be consistent in their Forsaken execution but this doesn’t track with how the mechanic is run in the real world. A lot of people have sort of lucked into their Bowels of Agony prog point by getting through a Forsaken pull without getting positions they’re unfamiliar with or having other people adjust for them. One sub my static got on Friday was seemingly completely blind in where they were suppose to stand and just seemed to be vibing out where they were suppose to go. This is one of those things that in PF can be fixed with communication, or at least you can judge pretty quickly if they’re not digesting the tips you’re giving them and replace them.
I think even if sticking to PFing 100% of my prog could get me through the fight faster I’ll always favor running difficult content with a static just for the consistency. Keeping the lines of communication open between members, helping each other work out mistakes, and being able to celebrate breaking through tough bits of a fight are always gonna feel good when it’s with other people who you’ve working with every night.
