Yesterday, our budding static group got to go to the second coil of Bahamut: turn 1, more commonly known as Turn 6. The Rafflesia Reaper, a giant flower is one of those bosses that are part of a group that I consider the “not fun but essential” bosses in the sense that it sucks but it teaches important raid skills. In this case, this fight is all about reacting to everything the bosses do. Deal with debuffs, deal with changing posisiting, deal with boss casts, just be on your toes. It’s not that hard once you master it but it can be really frustrating getting there since the tiniest mistake will make everything spin out of control.
As a raid leader however I was dreading it because I knew it was one these fights that can get people on edge. I was also really looking forward to it because it was our first fight in the second tier of content and I wanted to see how it how group would handle the increased difficulty. In the end we killed the flower a bit under 90 minutes, including replacing a pug, which is blinding fast considering the fight but in the process tensions rose a bit and the evening turned out to be not so great for everyone, a point that does not sit well with me considering that Belghast has been real helpful to us.
That said, people did not start screaming at one another and I think that by the time we started turn 7 everyone was in a much better mood so it might end up just being a tiny bump on the road but it’s something I’ll watch out for going forward.
The one thing that really made me happy however was not the killing of the boss itself but two very important behaviors I saw displayed yesterday that I feel are necessary for successful raids. First, at one point we stopped calling the vines in order to clear up Teamspeak so it was up to everyone to be on point on that aspect of the fight. It worked like a charm and everyone was breaking their vines without having to be told so. Second, and this one happened all by itself, when someone would get caught in a bad position due to devour, the rest of the group would react accordingly and move out of the way even if that wasn’t part of the normal fight dance.
More than the killing of the actual boss, seeing that raid awareness in action was the real victory for me and it gives me great motivation to keep moving forward.
I didn’t necessarily have a bad night, but the tensions kinda killed the happy go lucky mood of our raid 🙂 For me at least FFXIV is this happy place, and for a bit the tension of wow raiding spilled into it. I will be fine, I am just not in the best place myself right now.
I definitively want to keep that Happy go lucky mood going also. I love our FC and for me it’s very important to keep the light mood going on at all times and have people keep helping one another. I’m confident we’ll find a way to make it all work, so far we’ve been pretty great at it.