Eorzea Journeys

What a last couple weeks we’ve had. A solid if unspectacular launch filled with overloaded servers and enthusiastic gamers; did you have as much fun as I did? Coming back to Eorzea has been a blast, when I could play, it was a ton of fun. A Realm Reborn is such classic Final Fantasy, but its also classic MMO gaming that manages to be surprisingly newbie friendly. I picked up my character from 1.0 and quickly got back into the swing of things. I’ve been tearing through the main story content as fast as I can. It’s fairly good right now, but I feel as if most of the real meat of the story is ahead of me, though the foundations have been laid out well.

I have to say that getting into Pick-Up Groups for the mandatory dungeons has been a trip. The big Ifrit fight was a study of contrasts. After the long wait for my currently DPS-based Monk I quickly found myself hitting the dirt. We got the ADD burned down the second time but our healer seemed to think he was invincible and kept getting hit by AOE attacks. Twenty minutes later our tank dropped and I spent the rest of the battle trying to tank Ifrit as a Monk. It was certainly not how I had envisioned the fight. 

I failed, many, many, many times. After the party ended in failure I decided to switch to a tank class and take on Ifrit myself. At lower levels in any MMO, a good tank is more important than a good DPS character. I’ve played a tank class in many a MMO, but I would never classify myself as a great tank and it showed in the Ifrit fight. I lost the aggro a few times, forgot to make sure everyone knew how the fight went, didn’t explain myself well asking if they needed my help on the ADD. What I did do exceedingly well though, was in positioning my character to take the least amount damage as possible. I didn’t’ get hit by a single AOE attack. 

Sometimes gamers have so many things running through their heads. Don’t lose aggro, don’t get aggro, watch the circles, watch the positioning, watch out for ADD’s, and on and on and on. Sometimes it’s much more important to focus on what you can do well and forget about the other stuff. I managed to figure out exactly where to stand in the second part of the Ifrit fight to have to move as little as possible to get away from the AOE attacks. I don’t even think I tanked particularly well, but how much less did the healer have to work to heal me, and how much more was the healer able to watch out for the two DPS. Playing a tank or healer or even a DPS in a PUG can be nerve-racking enough, don’t borrow trouble. You won’t do everything right all the time, figure on doing it right most of the time; as Flynn said its not perfection we should strive for but excellence.