It’s astounding; Time is fleeting; Madness takes its toll. But listen closely…

<Not for very much longer.>

<I’ve got to keep control.>

I remember doing the time-warp; Drinking those moments when the Blackness would hit me

<And the void would be calling…>

Let’s do the time-warp again.

Let’s do the time-warp again.

– Let’s Do the Time Warp [Again] from The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Several members of my current linkshell, Paradigm, had expressed an interest in getting access to Chains of Promathia content, but had thus far been depending on pick-up-groups (PUGs) to get past the inital Promyvion battles.

The problem with PUGs is that you’ll never know what kind of player you’ll get, and in the the case of my linkshell mates, they seem to have only managed to come across the worst kind.  I listened to horror stories of groups giving up because they couldn’t make it to the spire, or of multiple attempts to kill the boss only to wipe.

So I suggested to my linkshell mates that we, as a linkshell, take on the Promyvion battles ourselves, and I’d lead them.  I wish I could say that was met with a resounding cheer, but alas this was not the case.  I think the most positive comment was “I know we’ll die, but I need them.”

I’ve been through the three initial Promyvion battles scores of times on Gentoo.  I enjoy them.  In my last round of getting past them with Suquamish, our group was led by Hripthe when he was part of the lolCats linkshell.  I previously mentioned how much Hripthe taught me about how to get through the Promyvions like a real team.

I organized our fights like I always have — Promyvion-Dem as the trainer, Promyvion-Holla to put the skills to test, and then Promyvion-Mea for the real fight.  It’s only the last one that I think requires a bit of luck, thus the one I leave to last.

When the day for Promyvion-Dem rolled around, morale was low.  We had to fill-in absences.  Because no one had a map of Promyvion-Dem, the team was convinced we’d get lost and die.  When we made it to the Spire, without so much as hiccup, people started perking up.  Just like with Hripthe, I talked out the entire battle-plan before going in.  Also, just like with the lolCats, everyone listened and made sure they understood their role.  When we went in, we took things very slow before starting the battle.  When we finally engaged, we were prepared, and things went off like clockwork.  Even with our careful/slow start, we finished the battle within a hair of the server record.

So Paradigm handed itself it’s first Promyvion victory.  With that, all the negativity evaporated, and everyone was charged to go after the next ones.  Lessons learned by me: Blue Mages are simply awesome in these fights.  With their ability to stun and heal, they end up being the key utility player.

For Promyvion-Holla we had to go without our Blue Mage; which made the fight slightly fairer for the boss.  We also traded a Red Mage for a Black Mage.  However none of these changes much mattered as Paradigm handled itself with grace.  Promyvion-Holla fell with the same smoothness that Promyvion-Dem had.

I’ve always considered Promyvion-Mea the hardest of the three, and it didn’t disappoint.  To make things harder, we had more substitutions that left us low on damage dealing.  On our way through Promyvion-Mea, one of our team-members suffered a disconnect just as we made our way to the final level before the Spire of Mea, causing us to back track.  The boss didn’t disappoint me either — I opened the battle; upon connecting with my Great Axe it responded using Murk immediately.  Nothing like have a boss charged to 100%TP before the battle.

Things only got harder from there.  Our animas were partially resisted, and the Delver starting to spam other TP moves with only 25% of HP removed — which meant we had to start using our Hysterioanimas VERY early.  We pressed on sucessfully, but when we had wittled the Delver down to ~5% of it’s HP left, we were out of hysterio and psycho animas and the Delver decided it didn’t want to lose.  It pulled out a Carousel, and immediately follow that up with Promyvion Brume (does damage and resets all enmity levels).  This left our White Mage in a tough spot, with all our of team membes low on HP, and enmity in complete chaos.  Everyone affected by the TP moves started downing Hi Potions, and our cool headed White Mage (Marthamoonbeam) Curaga’d us and braced for the coming beat-down.

We got things temporarily under control again, only to have the Paladin get hit with Impalement. Another big cure an the Delver was stuck to our White Mage like glue.  It was at this point I was worried we wouldn’t beat this boss.  Evidently the Delver sensed this and decided to use Material Fend (evasion bonus) to remove the last shred of hope I had.

To counter, our White Mage was brilliant under pressure.  She stuck herself into a corner — the Delver followed — and just before getting KO’ed, hit us with Benediction.  With full HP, we wailed away taking the Delver down to 1% of it’s HP, and with it cornered and our remaining team surrounding it, I hit it with a Terroranima.  For the final 30 seconds of the fight the Delver quivered before us as a we flailed away.

It wasn’t a decisive victory, but we won.  Lupellus, Marthamoonbeam, and Baritan all managed to get access to the CoP areas.

More importantly, Paradigm did an excellent job of peforming under pressure.

…and the bartender says “What is this, a joke?”

Last night started off as a bad joke.  I put together a Valkurm Dunes party with some of my Paradigm linkshell mates, so my buddy Xai could get some levels on his Thief.  See my previous rant about Valkurm Dunes.

The party consisted of MNK/war (me), THF/sam (Xai), NIN/war, DNC/mnk, WHM/blm, and fellow LS mate Rukkia coming as BLM (no subjob).  No power leveler.

We were a little light on damage dealing, and I was the co-tank with our Tarutaru NIN/war, so our WHM had their work cut out.   The party started off with three near complete wipes.

The first one was a complete accident.

The second one was the leaders fault; the bone head was filling the role of “veteran player that forgot how low level parties work,” and tried overhunting.

The third one was some combination of n00bery, overhunting — though we had moved to lower level prey, and plain bad luck (the crab used it’s version of Stoneskin EVERY time),

Experience for those the first hour was slow if it wasn’t negative.  The poor performance of our party was compounded by mistakes and people AFK’ing.  I swear that Valkurm Dunes drains experience from the minds of players. Xai, whose pulling expertise I’ve witnessed first-hand ran into links (which left me agog) - though he handled them with aplomb, they still slowed things down.  Our rank 10 WHM wouldn’t rest during battle.  Besides continuously overhunting, I contributed most significantly by not using Provoke fast enough allowing our Tarutaru Ninja to take too much damage (which caused more MP issues).

The beginning was so rough, and dis-satisfaction with our party was so high,  I could taste failure in the air.  With dissention was setting in via /tells, and I had pretty well resigned myself to the party falling apart.

Miraculously everyone was stuck it out long enough for us to move all the way back to the lowest area in Valkurm Dunes and we went after tier one Goblins. This was the one solid thing I did as party leader, and I managed to pull this move off because of my Linkshell mates (I’ll discuss that later).

From here we started making chains.  Once this happened, we settled in a bit of a groove, and you could feel the regret of being in “one of those d00nz parties” lift and get replaced by confidence.

Once all the frontline jobs had managed to get to level 14, we starting to opperate like a team, and we moved back to crabs.

With just a little dose of confidence and a dallop of experience, this too went smoother — which only increased our confidence as a unit.  Soon we were able to take on fights at the very edge of our abilites.  Once party chat went from uncomfortable silence to joking and bravado I knew we had fully turned the corner.

When the party finally ended, the result was everyone making at least 2 levels — if not three.  Not stellar, but not craptastic.

The coolest part, however, was being with Linkshell mates.  Had it not been for them this party would surely have fallen apart, but Rukkia and Xai hung with me.  As a result, I found my footing as the party leader.  Likewise, their staying put enough peer pressure on the other three players to stick with the party.  As a result we managed to make progress not by quitting and finding a better group, but by forging ourself into a better group out of determination.

I am very fortunate to be acquainted with some skilled players that also happen to be lolCats.

I really enjoy the Promyvion boss fights, and I’ve volunteered to help with them a lot when I played Gentoo.  However they’ve always been skin-of-the teeth, adrenaline rush inducing victories.

Last night some lolCats made a run at another Promyvion; Holla to be exact.  Our Promyvion-Dem run seemed almost too smooth.  None-the-less, Promyvion-Holla was just as smooth and ended, in victory, even faster than Promyvion-Dem — and we even had 2 pick-up members

So what’s the difference?

Primarily coordination.

First and foremost, everyone knows Hripthe and Briseia are the leads on these events, and act accordingly.  Without them I’m sure these fights would be far more chaotic.  Hripthe has an understanding of Promyvion boss fights that really should be labeled as uncanny, and organizes our fights with swiss clock accuracy.  Briseia, a seasoned player and is able to fill us in on any gaps of knowledge.

Second, we take the time to prepare.  My previous linkshell, TheBanished, elevated the art of winning Promyvion fights without the use of medicines (poison, holywaters, animas, etc) into an art form — however, the balance of the fight was ever so precarious.   So while it is completely doable, we take a different path.  We make sure every member gathers up medicines (Hi Potions/Ethers, etc), Food (Au’Laits, Yagudo Drink, MP/Accuracy food), and chemicals (Animas).  The preparation allows us to enter the fights so that it’s harder for it to get out of hand.

Third, and finally communication.  On each level enroute to the Spire, we talk about what’s going to happen, and what to do if something unexpected happen (e.g. Aggro).  Before entering the Spire, we talk about the role that everyone will peform, what order we will use our animas (and when) and what.   Finally, inside the spire, Hripthe times our use of animas, and we report back that we what we are using, and when used it.

In short, leadership, preparation, and communication allow us to function like a well oiled machine.

The other night my static (which now includes the awesome personalities of Kooki (RDM) and Flick (SCH)) were making the push to 50 the other night.  Our sixth member was a Thief**, so of course we wanted to allow for Sneak Attack + Trick Attack (SATA).

Setting up SATA proved to be a tricky situation.  With Ardra as Samurai/Thief, we had no secondary provoke.  Ardra, being a very well geared Elvaan, has no problem stealing hate from me.  Initially we tried having the Thief pull monsters back to our camp and allowing Ardra to take the monster attention through sheer damage (I would avoid provoking).

That strategy proved far too dicey and we quickly abandoned it.  If Ardra didn’t connect on the very first swing, the Thief was left taking a beating.  This leads to Darrian needing to toss out a medium to large Cure to the Thief and thus stealing Enmity.  With this scenario, fights got to be far too chancy in the beginning.

What ended up working fairly well is having Ardra pull.  This technique needs some fine tuning, but it works well because of the enmity bonus the player with the first action gets.  The person who does the first action gets an extra 200 Cumulative Enmity (CE - only decreases by taking damage) and 900 Volatile Enmity (VE - decreases at a rate of 60 units per sec.)

(for reference, please see this thread on the Dreams in Vana’diel forums.)

This allows Ardra to maintain hate even if her first swing misses and I happen to connect.  It also allows some room for a small Cure if needed.  Likewise, by the time the SATA is performed, Ardra’s CE has most likely evaporated, and my Provoke (1800 units of VE) plus the SATA should easily over come any enmity that Ardra has built up.

This particular technique really only works because Ardra is Elvaan and Samurai.  Without that nice racial VIT bonus and Third Eye this really wouldn’t work very well.

(**)  Actually we had two players come as Thief that evening.  The first Thief wanted to SATA, but couldn’t set it up quickly (requiring me to take enmity before the SATA).  His solution was to SATA off Ardra.  Despite numerous requests to stop that, he wouldn’t.  Eventually we kicked him.