[FFRK] Bahamut’s Lair (U+)

Decided to experiment with AirServer + OBS Studio and record the entire encounter. Bahamut wasn’t nearly as bad as U+ Cagnazzo (…in which I pretty much ran out of every single ability and barely scraped by with a mastery). Having literally zero Final Fantasy III synergy hurts though.

[wpdatatable id=11] Roaming Warrior: Lenna (Princess’ Favor)
Notable Soul Breaks: Blade Beam, Air Strike, Shout, Tailwind, Sentinel’s Grimoire, Dreamstage

Two re-dos of this fight were required: The first because I had forgotten to swap out Thundaga Strike with Aerora Strike and the second because I had forgotten to equip Power Breakdown. Aside from that, it was a straightforward encounter. Bahamut hits pretty hard with both physical as well as magical damage even with full mitigation up, but it is manageable as long as you recast Wall/Shellga/etc before it completely drops off. The first half of the fight is physical AoE damage for the most part. I couldn’t fit Protectga into my party configuration but Power Breakdown mitigated enough of the damage to make it survivable. Dreamstage + Air Strike during the second half of the fight = MVP.

I probably should have equipped a damage RM over Ace Striker on Cloud since Aerora Strike was hitting pretty high with Shout, but not at the damage cap. Also, I ended up accidentally fat finger casting Tailwind instead of Shout about half-way through the fight, which cut my damage by quite a bit :3.

[FFRK] Ultima Weapon (Ultimate+)

DPS race. This Ultimate+ encountered required a bit more thought than the bonus battles from the last few events. I had tried 2 previous configurations in an attempt to squeeze Tyro in for a full holy trinity but that wasn’t working so I left him at home. I was banking on the fact that two casts of Sentinel’s Grimoire would be sufficient whereas two casts of Dreamstage would not. Aside from some mistiming on my part, both were true.

[wpdatatable id=10] Roaming Warrior: Tyro (Sentinel’s Grimoire)
Notable Soul Breaks: Air Strike, Dreamstage, Shout, Crushing Blow, Blade Beam

Ultima Weapon was a fairly straightforward albeit messy fight by virtue of the sheer amount of damage that he outputs: Pop Shout + mitigation ASAP, let Cloud, Lightning, and Zack build up their SB bars all the way then go to town. I may have been better off swapping out Drain Strike and Dismissal with something like Power Break and/or Armor Break to mitigate/increase damage.

It is well worth noting that Ultima Weapon is not immune to stun. As such, Air Strike’s 100% stun chance was immensely helpful. Dismissal of course, did not proc a single damn time and ended up just being a waste of space. I am pretty sure that I mistimed my second cast of SG and popped it a turn or two too early because it ended up running out way before I had expected it to. Consequently, 3/5 party members were basically eaten alive during the last quarter of the fight. Having several charges of Dreamstage ready to go effectively saved my ass and allowed Cloud to soak an AoE Magic attack and deal the final blow with Blade Beam.

More Overwatch Musings

Most of my free gaming time this week has been dedicated to playing Overwatch. I have had a huge itch for a while to play an online class-based shooter that isn’t TF2, Battlefield, CoD, etc. Overwatch fulfills that need nicely. As such, it has effectively been the only non-mobile title that I have played over the past week. To be economical, I ended up pre-ordering the standard edition of Overwatch for the sake of playing in the early access beta. I would be lying if I had said that I wasn’t tempted to upgrade to the Origins Edition, but I do not think that a couple of skins and cosmetic doodads are worth an extra $20. If I were still playing WoW I would probably use the Winston pet as justification.

I am interested in seeing how class balance progresses as players eventually learn to play more of the characters. I have sneaky feeling that certain characters aren’t nearly as overpowered as the community makes them out to be by virtue of the general player knowledge still being fairly low, being an open beta and all. People, at least in most of the games that I have played in over the past week, seldom switch characters on the fly, if at all. For example: Switching to hard counter tank + turret camping or to transition into mid/late game defense. Overwatch is obviously designed around being able to play around character strengths and weaknesses mid-match.

As a sidenote: How exactly are the Play of the Game clips calculated? I had assumed that it was based off of obtaining the most points within a short period of time during the match, but I have seen a couple of clips lately where the featured player was literally doing almost nothing (and in one case, according to a Reddit post, literally doing nothing). Bug? This complaint of course, has absolutely nothing to do with me being semi-bitter about the fact that none of my epic team kill clips were chosen over yet another clip of Bastion killing 2 to 3 players 😛