The idea for the last episode of Fist Full of Gil was talk about the changes upcoming in patch 2.1. That did happen to an extent. When we went to retrieve the footage from twitch, the first 30 minutes were gone. Those 30 minutes were most of the discussion about 2.1. The first line we were able to retrieve was me asking if an apkallu actually just threw a fish at me. (It turns out it did.) I ended up playing around on my Black Mage a bit which was level 31 and decide to queue up for Haukke Manor. The reasoning there was going to be a hard mode of the dungeon added in patch 2.1.
Very early in the dungeon, the game reminds the players that just because the dungeon is low level does not mean they can faceroll it. The tank in the party was lowered to level 31 because of level sync. The dungeon cannot be over geared because the level sync takes stats on gear down to a set level. I’m fairly sure the tank was actually 50. I mention in the video that he’s probably wearing Paladin artifact gear, but that’s not possible since he’s actually a Gladiator. It is very likely that he just used FATEs to grind his level up to 50, and then just went back and did the main story quests afterwards.
A little bit into the dungeon I try to see if I can sleep some of the enemies in each pull to reduce the burden on the healer. This turns out to be pointless since the sleep is broken almost immediately. Sleep in Final Fantasy 14 is broken on damage taken. Also, some of the enemies are immune to sleep, and there is no indication of this in game. Also, bosses in FF14 are not necessarily immune to CC. Many times the gladiator will stun a boss’s casts. Diminishing returns will make this useless after 3 stuns in a short period of time, so deciding what to stun and what to dodge becomes important. This is important on the first boss, which is essentially one of the maidservants with more health and ranged area nuke.
The second boss of the dungeon involves two enemies, an imp and a skeleton. The imp does more damage and has less health, so generally that needs to die first. As a Black Mage, I have fairly good magic resistance, more than the Archer at least, so I decide that I’m just going to kill it and not care about aggro. I need to maximize the usage of Raging Strikes in order to do the most damage in the smallest amount of time. The problem is normally the Black Mage runs out of MP before Raging Strikes runs out. So what I did is get my first stack of Astral Fire by casting Fire once after putting Thunder 2 on the enemy. Then I used Raging Strikes for the 20% damage buff before casting the next Fire. Then I spammed Fire until out of MP and hit Convert to squeeze out 2 more Fires. If I used an Ether, I could have gotten one more Fire out I think, but I didn’t have it on my bars. I could have also used a Potion of Intelligence, but it also was not on my bars. I could have also just hit Raging Strikes before the first Fire, but I miscalculated how much MP I had to work with.
And for the record, I was not this aggressive with my cooldowns because I didn’t want to tank the entire dungeon. In Final Fantasy 14, if I want to tank something something as a DPS, I will be able to do it without the tank having any recourse, as was clearly seen with that imp on the second boss.
The final boss takes 3 tries to get down, but the last attempt is as close to textbook as it gets. The Black Mage doesn’t get to do much damage, but gets to use the limit break to kill the final set of adds, so it balances out.
Coming up this week on the stream, I’ll go ahead explore Copperbell Mines on my Conjurer. Copperbell Mines is the other hard mode dungeon being added in 2.1, so it only seems appropriate. Tune in at 8 PM Central and we’ll get started right away.