My typical workflow for when I make a blog post is to make notes on stuff that happens throughout the week and then over the weekend between Criterion, Forked Tower, and potential PF runs I’ll draft out something based on the notes. Lastly I’ll do some light editing on Monday over my lunch break and then when I get home from work add in any media. I mostly just try to make sure I’m not rushing it all out Monday night like I’m trying to make some exam due date or something.
That didn’t happen this week though, but not because I didn’t want to write! In fact I have been writing just, like… not a blog post.
Part of the problem with the Kefkabin fallout from last week is that the maintainers have pretty much abandoned any updates to the resources that had been posted. The dust is pretty much settled on the first three phases, but it’s clear that at least P4 was very very much a work in progress and, well, I’m not gonna mince words here.
I think this is shit from ass.
I’ve vented enough about my problems with the P4 raidplan to my own group so I won’t retread that ground here, but essentially what I wanted to do over this past week was break down the mechanic in a way that made sense to me, because between the weird labeling, the dark void, and the spelling mistakes on the raidplan I was just not having it. The goal here was to have something I could share with my group to help them piece together P4, focusing first on what they need to keep track of themselves and then what the general flow of the mechanic is like.
It’s not, like, secret or anything. You can go look at it if you want. Note that it’s tailored to my static so some phrasing around macros is directed at the group, but I’ve also just not been slacking!
I actually did this a couple weeks ago too, when my group was trying to hammer out how to place arrows during Graven Image 3 back in phase 1.
This one’s a bit more of rambling nonsense and was cranked out over the course of a late night but it did help a couple people out back then.
Lastly late into the weekend I was working with our shield healer to concept out a series of swap macros for handling callouts for the party and for the self in chat. You’ve probably seen those macros people have that act as a menu to change jobs or something. Usually you store those macros on a separate hotbar palette, either on an unused bar on a crafter/gatherer or on one of the classes you may have forgotten have their own set of hotbars. I spent a solid couple hours trying to figure out what I’d want it to look like and how the logic would look moving between bars.
Even before I started blogging I’d try to write out my thoughts on a fight or certain mechanics in a way that I can share with others. I wouldn’t say Google Docs will save my stuff forever but it’s way more preferable to me than writing out something in a Discord post, and infinitely more shareable. I also just like to store thoughts locally, like the aforementioned weekly notes or that tab you see up there titled “ftb notes” when I was first learning how to do Forked Tower: Blood.
I like being able to break complex mechanics down like this. Guides and raidplans and sims can tell you how to do something, but rarely do they explain why you’re doing it that way. Knowing the constituent parts can make it easier to diagnose where problems came up and just make it easier for me to click things into place, which I can then turn around and use to help others catch up.
So with all that taking up my weekend, no deep insights on current prog or events in the wider raiding space or whatever. Our prog is still steady, hitting the last towers mechanic of P3 late Friday which helped to prompt me trying to make sense of P4 to begin with. We did lose our regen healer to IRL circumstances over the weekend and while we do have trials lined up I’d be lying if I said this didn’t worry me a bit. This is an extremely healer-intensive fight and part of the formula for success is two healers who perform well with each other. Losing one suddenly like that makes it a bit harrowing to find a new one, and I can only hope that at least one of these trials works out for us.
