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Desert of Shifting Sands
-Cid and Mid may be able to devise away around the conveyer belt sands. A bridge! Won’t that take a long time?
It’s hard to dislike Mid. Such enthusiasm and optimism.
-Oh. LOL. I guess not. By “a bridge,” they mean that they’ll summon a giant sandworm for us to kill, and we can walk over its corpse.
50% chance of “Beetlejuice”-related nightmares for me tonight.
-Ranger and bard seem extremely weak rght now, so for this fight I’ll go back to my normal set-up.
-Just before engaging, Mid’s like, “Oh, btw, don’t use magic this fight. Trust me.” THANKS MID, GLAD YOU WAITED UNTIL MY PARTY WAS FULLY SET BEFORE LETTING ME KNOW. Jerk. Now Galuf is just gonna be window dressing, since he’s set with Gaia and Black Magic.
-Here we go. Ugh. Giant monsters so creep me out. Boss time!
-Aaaand I die.
-I died for two reasons. The first is the “do not use magic” reason. It made 25% of my party obsolete. More, considering that I was hoping to have Lenna use “Gravity” as a time mage, but kind of doubt it’d work on a boss.
The second reason is the way the boss works mechanically. There are three holes, and she migrates between them randomly. Attacking an empty hole did nothing. My primary damage dealer was Faris, who was a Ninja with “Berserk” equipped, so every turn she attacked a random hole. 66% of her attacks were on empty holes.
After dying, I adjusted by making faris a Knight with Two-Handed equipped, and Galuf a Monk with Time magic equipped to help get the party hasted. Let’s see how it goes.
-Victory! (Also, I was wrong. It turns out that attacking an empty hole provoked a “Gravity” retaliation. Ow. The berserk ninja was even worse than I thought.
-Can I just say that I LOOOOOOVE the Sandworm boss? Beating it wasn’t about grinding out more hitpoints, or higher stats. It was about strategy! About learning the boss’s mechanics, and utilizing the job system to adapt my party to fit the situation.
This is what I love so hard about MMO raiding – strategy, adaptation, execution. And as a side note, I’ll admit to being really excited to see the Final Fantasy world in that MMO setting with XI and XIV. It’s probably a year away or so even before FFXI, but still.
-Movin on!
-The worm’s corpse serves as a bridge across the initial sand hemming us in. Mid will take care of the Black Chocobo while we pursue. This whole thing makes me miss Boko.
-Into the true maze of the desert, having to navigate the conveyor belt system.
Amidst the shifting sand.
-LOL! Galuf’s “Gaia” here casts “Sandstorm.”
