With my blind static getting our clear of M12S tonight, sharing how the tier went and our blind strats sounds fun, so let's do this. (I hope that Imgur album of our strat diagrams embeds correctly, but just in case: Imgur: The magic of the Internet. Just our finalized images, 'cause including all our discarded ones would be hundreds.)
A couple general notes first:
- Vamp Fatale
Pretty simple first fight. Personally, I was disappointed that we didn't have to do anything like LoSing behind the buzzsaws in the 2nd small arena phase (it really just felt like the same "random bullshit go" as in Normal), and I really expected hitting 16 stacks early to cause a non-standard enrage - it's weird that the only number that matters is 8.
For Aetherletting, we did initially try doing Supports North/DPS South and rotating around/splitting off as a group, and it took us like 2 pulls to decide that sucked and look for another way. Our waymarks being lined up with the lines of the slices was convenient here, 'cause we already had waymarks assigned for spreads. Drop marks out on the edge of the room, and just stack up center for the lines. (DNC note: getting marked for 3rd set sucks. It lines up exactly with Standard Step, the only point in the fight you're forced out of range.)
Hell in a Cell probably took us the longest to get consistent. It's been a while since we actually did the fight (got skips after we had what we needed for BiS) and apparently we never actually wrote it down, but I think the rule we settled on was "role-based quadrants, if you have a center tower, take that; otherwise, if you have 2 side towers in your quadrant, favor the one AWAY from the large gap."
- The Xtremes
Fuck this fight. It is a fun fight, but dear god the bosses zipping around everywhere kept LoSing us and interrupting GCDs, even on non-casters. Targeting in this fight just felt abnormally finicky.
Insane Air was our bane even all the way through farm. Just people misreading Down (spread) for Side (TB) all the time.
Snaking 1 took us a while to figure out full 3 sets of Fire puddles that a) didn't fully block off 1/3 of the arena to screw us over on Sickest Swell, b) didn't murder someone on the 2nd set from steam explosions, c) didn't require pixel-perfect positioning, d) didn't block off Blue-group melee access to the boss when he jumps to the wall, and e) solved the distance baits of the 3rd set while leaving a safe space for people who already took it.
For intermission, we put Healers in the gaol (after several pulls of thinking it was a Tank mechanic before realizing they barely took any damage). We didn't realize until a few kills in that the people in the gaol don't take damage from the dashes (or do, but barely any? w/e), so we set things up to ensure they had space to avoid everything. Fire dashes first on the cardinal, then inside edges of the waymarks, Water dashes on the outside edges of the waymarks. Worked out well enough that we didn't bother changing it. We held our 2min here until 3GCDs after the bosses came back 'cause it was just a waste otherwise, and also made it line up much nicer for the rest of the fight.
Snaking 2 took a little while to figure out melee spots for the far group that worked for both variants, but once our melees got comfy with that the rest was solved pretty easy. Part 2 with Insane Air was solved the first time we saw it on VoD review, I think. Went with H>R>M + Tank interrupt order for the swaps.
- The Tyrant
So fun thing about weapons; most of the time the "right" group can just chill in the center of the arena. Because he always rotates CW in the first phase it's always on the right side, and with the positions of the triangle, the only time the Sword AoE will pass through that point is if he starts with it. For the Stack/Spread baits, first set we did 2 groups N/S (just based on preference/whichever group made it easier to get to spread positions) and rotated CW around the boss. For the second, we all collapsed on his butt and rotated as a group/split off from there.
Not much to say about Charybdistopia; mostly just more weapons. Was anyone else disappointed that once he broke out the Behemoth attacks, the weapons never came back? That could have been some fun combinations.
Orbital Omen. Tank took the buster South (with invuln) 'cause the boss is already facing that way, and baited the cleaves N/S. Our RDM noticed the pattern of #2 always being in the center pretty fast, so most of us just did the center dodge. I think our NIN was the only one actually reading the whole mechanic to look for an easy dodge by the end.
("He looks even more tyrannical than before!" ...Metem, he's just glowing purple. If anything, he looks like he's ready for a rave.)
Meteorain took a bit for someone to guess at trying to have a rock soak the front of the wild charge lasers, but once we had that the rest fell in place. The diagram for this does show RPR/DNC taking both the 1st and 3rd comet baits; this does work... 50% of the time - it seems to be based on which order the marks go out in (technical game note: there is no such thing as simultaneous actions - even things like look like they happen at the same time go out a few ms in sequence), but sometimes the debuff from the first would fall off just in time for the 3rd, and we had the misfortune of our first pull that saw far enough having someone take both the 1st and 3rd and surviving, giving us bad data. We eventually switched to our WHM taking the first line comet, and RMD taking the 3rd wild charge one for consistency.
Majestic Meteor. Ok, this one took us days to find consistent spots for, and ended up with 4 of our waymarks dedicated to the Fire Breath spots. We went though so many failed ideas that either didn't stretch the tethers far enough or required absolute pixel perfect positioning. Definitely the hardest part of the fight to solve.
Ecliptic Stampede. Targeting for this one is weird, right? "random 2 of the 4 farthest people" is not a targeting paradigm I can think of being used in any other fight in the game. Anyway, Ranged/Healers out to bait, Melee/Tanks inside the hitbox. Targeted ranged players take it out to near the closest safe corner (in line with our waymarks from Majestic Meteor ended up working well) and walk the lava puddles along the N/S walls, other 6 moved as a group Center>North>rotate CW to drop the AoEs; this ended roughly North, then LP1 took CCW prio and LP2 took CW prio, with one person from each assigned as flex if the targets were unfriendly. RDM guessed from DSR experience that tethers would be targeting the people closest to the center of the towers, which ended up being right.
Heartbreak Kick/enrage. Eh, pretty simple. We had our DRK take the first one with LD (it lasts exactly long enough), then just full party with heavy mits for the 2nd and 3rd.
- Lindwurm 1
I don't actually have much to say for this fight. Grotesquerie: Act 2/Cruel Coil probably took us the longest to figure out, just 'cause we were mislead by the debuffs. SE, why the fuck would you call the tether debuff "Unbreakable Flesh" if you're meant to break it? That's just lying to your players at that point.
I still don't actually know if the spread AoEs at the end of Act 3 target the closest or farthest players from the heads (we had some dirty pulls while we were getting data for that), but our positions solve it either way, so w/e.
The enrage is weird. If you get him low enough (sub-5%?), he casts Refreshing Overkill and you need to get him to 1HP before it finishes. If you don't get him low enough, he just casts The Fixer and kills you. No idea why he needed 2 different enrage casts, but for a while we thought it was pulling a FRU - for anyone not familiar, there's a point in the enrage sequence of the final phase where a specific voice line will only play if you have the boss low enough for Melee LB3 to finish her off. Turns out it's not that, just... weird.
- Lindwurm 2
Awesome fight spoiled slightly by a garbage first (second? depends how you count it) mechanic. Took us... 4 or 5 pulls to figure out exactly what was going on with the clones at the start and how to position for them, I think? Our first solution was a bit inconsistent though, so eventually SGE sat down and looked at the distances to find the ones in the diagram that worked perfectly. The second part though... fuck this shit with the blink-and-you-miss-it fast movement, this is just as bad for players with any sort of visual impairment as the orange-on-orange-on-orange fights (P3S). Get your shit together SE.
After that though, everything about this fight was a blast to solve. Staging/Reenactment 1 a good half the group was immediately "What the TEA?" We were thrown off a little by the tethers being strange; before they lock in, it's possible to have multiple tethers, and even pass them to corpses - they'll jump to valid targets and behave normal once they lock, but that threw us for a bit 'cause it took a while for us to get there with everyone alive. As for the actual assignments/Reenactment, once we saw how the copies behaved we mostly solved it pretty fast, though it took us an embarrassingly long time to realize the Reenacted Firefall Splash (boss tether) always targets the same people as the first time, regardless of distance. I suspect our solution is about the same if not identical to how most groups do it; everything else we looked at trying just seemed like way more tight movement for no benefit. Being able to just use static positions for Netherwrath was also a nice find.
Mutating Cells/Blood Wakening was actually a little disappointing. We were deceived at first by the graphic of the Wind AoE into thinking it had limited range, which actually would have made the mechanic harder by allowing all possible combinations to be valid, with different safe spots. With our DRG's realization that Wind/Fire + Water/Lightning were always paired together in the "template" set, that being the only combo that gives a safe spot ended up making the solution simple. Just weird that it effectively meant we never actually interact with the Water or Lightning AoEs in any way. I was expecting this to come back in a more complicated version later.
Idyllic Dream. Hell yes. This one was a blast to solve. We had one person helping us secure a skip say something along the lines of "I wouldn't want to do Idyllic Dream blind."\*, and I couldn't disagree more. This mechanic should have been the entire fight.
The memory game was definitely intimidating at first, but once we figured out exactly what was going on everything fell into place really intuitively; the hard part was just execution of the memory game. The mechanic essentially being 2 completely unrelated (until the end) phases playing out simultaneously is so cool as an idea. The hardest part of the solve was actually just which tethers everyone needed to grab, and how to make that easy in the moment, which is what we ended up using our waymarks for; copies assigned you into color quadrants, where you would always take one of the two tethers in that quadrant. If your copy is in line with a Circle/Letter waymark you take Mana Burst/one dot (defamation), if it was in line with a Square/Number waymark you take Heavy Slam/four dots (stack); this gave 2 stacks nearby the position of both platforms for easy solve in Reenactment later. Once we got that, the only thing left to really solve was Meteor elements, and the only part of that that tripped us up was the Fire one only punishing movement (so Healers could still cast Esuna, mostly), not a full Pyretic that punished all actions, and also that the Fire and Earth timers were only half the length of the Lightning ones. (I did work out a solution to Portents that assumed both that Fire couldn't move at all and the location of Earth stayed unsafe, but it was... messy. Glad that ended up not being the case.) First time we got a clear view of what Wind did was also fun - our WHM just being yeeted off into the void. We did come up with a variant of Portent positions that could easily accommodate all 4 being Near or all 4 being Far, but that ended up not being needed anyway, so meh. For Reenactment we ended up going with Platform groups for the first set (LPs, except the people swapped by the Wind meteor stay with their new group), and "melee far" for the second set (so they could grab some uptime while they ran through the boss, also no cast times). It was also just a nice flavor touch that even Metem gets confused at the end when he starts mixing up Blue and Green mechanics (platform clones in Blue only being solvable via movement during Green, and the portal clone in Blue coming back out in Green, just to mix things up a bit).
\* Don't do this, by the way. If someone tells you they're working on a fight blind, that's your cue to shut the fuck up about it. You aren't as subtle/clever in your comments as you think you are, and meta spoilers are still spoilers.
- Closing
Awesome tier, nearly every fight/mechanic was great to solve blind.
I always encourage people to give blind prog a try, rather than always relying on outside guides. Start with EXs if you don't want to commit to a Savage tier, just going in on day 1 either before guides are out or looking for/making Blind parties and figuring things out as a group. I promise it's fun, and it'll make you better at the game too.
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A couple general notes first:
- I have not looked at PF strats for anything. I have no idea where what we came up with overlaps with the common strats, or where we're doing weird shit. It all works, so w/e.
- Waymarks. We didn't always go back and change waymarks in earlier strat diagrams if they changed later in prog; the latest image for each fight has the waymarks we went with in the end. For M9S and M10S, the inter-intercardinal waymarks are a holdover from what we used back in Pandaemonium, specifically P10S and P12Sp1; we found they work really well for 4*4 tile arenas especially, giving us a lot of ways to do quick callouts for specific areas of the arena (specific waymark, [Color], inner/outer [Color], Letters/Numbers, Evens/Odds).
- Blind prog for newbies: LOOK AT THE FLOOR! Unless the fight just has a generic ground texture (M8S my beloathed), those lines and patterns are there for a reason. Knowing your distances also helps a lot; nearly every arena is either a 40y*40y square or a 20y radius circle. Waymarks are 2.5y across, and 4x4 grid arenas like M9S are generally 10y*10y tiles. More specific to this tier, M11S's smallest tiles are 2.5y, M12Sp1's tiles are 3.5y, and M12Sp2's tiles are 4y. Abilities like En Avant that move you a fixed distance are useful as measuring sticks. There's also patterns to boss AoEs; cones are almost always either 30°, 45°, or 90°, and circle AoEs almost always have radius of 3y, 5y, or 8y. The boss itself (assuming not a wall boss) is usually 5y radius, and line AoEs are nearly always the same size as their origin - frequently the boss itself. There are exceptions of course, but those are good starting points. Very useful to keep in mind when making your own diagrams.
- Vamp Fatale
Pretty simple first fight. Personally, I was disappointed that we didn't have to do anything like LoSing behind the buzzsaws in the 2nd small arena phase (it really just felt like the same "random bullshit go" as in Normal), and I really expected hitting 16 stacks early to cause a non-standard enrage - it's weird that the only number that matters is 8.
For Aetherletting, we did initially try doing Supports North/DPS South and rotating around/splitting off as a group, and it took us like 2 pulls to decide that sucked and look for another way. Our waymarks being lined up with the lines of the slices was convenient here, 'cause we already had waymarks assigned for spreads. Drop marks out on the edge of the room, and just stack up center for the lines. (DNC note: getting marked for 3rd set sucks. It lines up exactly with Standard Step, the only point in the fight you're forced out of range.)
Hell in a Cell probably took us the longest to get consistent. It's been a while since we actually did the fight (got skips after we had what we needed for BiS) and apparently we never actually wrote it down, but I think the rule we settled on was "role-based quadrants, if you have a center tower, take that; otherwise, if you have 2 side towers in your quadrant, favor the one AWAY from the large gap."
- The Xtremes
Fuck this fight. It is a fun fight, but dear god the bosses zipping around everywhere kept LoSing us and interrupting GCDs, even on non-casters. Targeting in this fight just felt abnormally finicky.
Insane Air was our bane even all the way through farm. Just people misreading Down (spread) for Side (TB) all the time.
Snaking 1 took us a while to figure out full 3 sets of Fire puddles that a) didn't fully block off 1/3 of the arena to screw us over on Sickest Swell, b) didn't murder someone on the 2nd set from steam explosions, c) didn't require pixel-perfect positioning, d) didn't block off Blue-group melee access to the boss when he jumps to the wall, and e) solved the distance baits of the 3rd set while leaving a safe space for people who already took it.
For intermission, we put Healers in the gaol (after several pulls of thinking it was a Tank mechanic before realizing they barely took any damage). We didn't realize until a few kills in that the people in the gaol don't take damage from the dashes (or do, but barely any? w/e), so we set things up to ensure they had space to avoid everything. Fire dashes first on the cardinal, then inside edges of the waymarks, Water dashes on the outside edges of the waymarks. Worked out well enough that we didn't bother changing it. We held our 2min here until 3GCDs after the bosses came back 'cause it was just a waste otherwise, and also made it line up much nicer for the rest of the fight.
Snaking 2 took a little while to figure out melee spots for the far group that worked for both variants, but once our melees got comfy with that the rest was solved pretty easy. Part 2 with Insane Air was solved the first time we saw it on VoD review, I think. Went with H>R>M + Tank interrupt order for the swaps.
- The Tyrant
So fun thing about weapons; most of the time the "right" group can just chill in the center of the arena. Because he always rotates CW in the first phase it's always on the right side, and with the positions of the triangle, the only time the Sword AoE will pass through that point is if he starts with it. For the Stack/Spread baits, first set we did 2 groups N/S (just based on preference/whichever group made it easier to get to spread positions) and rotated CW around the boss. For the second, we all collapsed on his butt and rotated as a group/split off from there.
Not much to say about Charybdistopia; mostly just more weapons. Was anyone else disappointed that once he broke out the Behemoth attacks, the weapons never came back? That could have been some fun combinations.
Orbital Omen. Tank took the buster South (with invuln) 'cause the boss is already facing that way, and baited the cleaves N/S. Our RDM noticed the pattern of #2 always being in the center pretty fast, so most of us just did the center dodge. I think our NIN was the only one actually reading the whole mechanic to look for an easy dodge by the end.
("He looks even more tyrannical than before!" ...Metem, he's just glowing purple. If anything, he looks like he's ready for a rave.)
Meteorain took a bit for someone to guess at trying to have a rock soak the front of the wild charge lasers, but once we had that the rest fell in place. The diagram for this does show RPR/DNC taking both the 1st and 3rd comet baits; this does work... 50% of the time - it seems to be based on which order the marks go out in (technical game note: there is no such thing as simultaneous actions - even things like look like they happen at the same time go out a few ms in sequence), but sometimes the debuff from the first would fall off just in time for the 3rd, and we had the misfortune of our first pull that saw far enough having someone take both the 1st and 3rd and surviving, giving us bad data. We eventually switched to our WHM taking the first line comet, and RMD taking the 3rd wild charge one for consistency.
Majestic Meteor. Ok, this one took us days to find consistent spots for, and ended up with 4 of our waymarks dedicated to the Fire Breath spots. We went though so many failed ideas that either didn't stretch the tethers far enough or required absolute pixel perfect positioning. Definitely the hardest part of the fight to solve.
Ecliptic Stampede. Targeting for this one is weird, right? "random 2 of the 4 farthest people" is not a targeting paradigm I can think of being used in any other fight in the game. Anyway, Ranged/Healers out to bait, Melee/Tanks inside the hitbox. Targeted ranged players take it out to near the closest safe corner (in line with our waymarks from Majestic Meteor ended up working well) and walk the lava puddles along the N/S walls, other 6 moved as a group Center>North>rotate CW to drop the AoEs; this ended roughly North, then LP1 took CCW prio and LP2 took CW prio, with one person from each assigned as flex if the targets were unfriendly. RDM guessed from DSR experience that tethers would be targeting the people closest to the center of the towers, which ended up being right.
Heartbreak Kick/enrage. Eh, pretty simple. We had our DRK take the first one with LD (it lasts exactly long enough), then just full party with heavy mits for the 2nd and 3rd.
- Lindwurm 1
I don't actually have much to say for this fight. Grotesquerie: Act 2/Cruel Coil probably took us the longest to figure out, just 'cause we were mislead by the debuffs. SE, why the fuck would you call the tether debuff "Unbreakable Flesh" if you're meant to break it? That's just lying to your players at that point.
I still don't actually know if the spread AoEs at the end of Act 3 target the closest or farthest players from the heads (we had some dirty pulls while we were getting data for that), but our positions solve it either way, so w/e.
The enrage is weird. If you get him low enough (sub-5%?), he casts Refreshing Overkill and you need to get him to 1HP before it finishes. If you don't get him low enough, he just casts The Fixer and kills you. No idea why he needed 2 different enrage casts, but for a while we thought it was pulling a FRU - for anyone not familiar, there's a point in the enrage sequence of the final phase where a specific voice line will only play if you have the boss low enough for Melee LB3 to finish her off. Turns out it's not that, just... weird.
- Lindwurm 2
Awesome fight spoiled slightly by a garbage first (second? depends how you count it) mechanic. Took us... 4 or 5 pulls to figure out exactly what was going on with the clones at the start and how to position for them, I think? Our first solution was a bit inconsistent though, so eventually SGE sat down and looked at the distances to find the ones in the diagram that worked perfectly. The second part though... fuck this shit with the blink-and-you-miss-it fast movement, this is just as bad for players with any sort of visual impairment as the orange-on-orange-on-orange fights (P3S). Get your shit together SE.
After that though, everything about this fight was a blast to solve. Staging/Reenactment 1 a good half the group was immediately "What the TEA?" We were thrown off a little by the tethers being strange; before they lock in, it's possible to have multiple tethers, and even pass them to corpses - they'll jump to valid targets and behave normal once they lock, but that threw us for a bit 'cause it took a while for us to get there with everyone alive. As for the actual assignments/Reenactment, once we saw how the copies behaved we mostly solved it pretty fast, though it took us an embarrassingly long time to realize the Reenacted Firefall Splash (boss tether) always targets the same people as the first time, regardless of distance. I suspect our solution is about the same if not identical to how most groups do it; everything else we looked at trying just seemed like way more tight movement for no benefit. Being able to just use static positions for Netherwrath was also a nice find.
Mutating Cells/Blood Wakening was actually a little disappointing. We were deceived at first by the graphic of the Wind AoE into thinking it had limited range, which actually would have made the mechanic harder by allowing all possible combinations to be valid, with different safe spots. With our DRG's realization that Wind/Fire + Water/Lightning were always paired together in the "template" set, that being the only combo that gives a safe spot ended up making the solution simple. Just weird that it effectively meant we never actually interact with the Water or Lightning AoEs in any way. I was expecting this to come back in a more complicated version later.
Idyllic Dream. Hell yes. This one was a blast to solve. We had one person helping us secure a skip say something along the lines of "I wouldn't want to do Idyllic Dream blind."\*, and I couldn't disagree more. This mechanic should have been the entire fight.
The memory game was definitely intimidating at first, but once we figured out exactly what was going on everything fell into place really intuitively; the hard part was just execution of the memory game. The mechanic essentially being 2 completely unrelated (until the end) phases playing out simultaneously is so cool as an idea. The hardest part of the solve was actually just which tethers everyone needed to grab, and how to make that easy in the moment, which is what we ended up using our waymarks for; copies assigned you into color quadrants, where you would always take one of the two tethers in that quadrant. If your copy is in line with a Circle/Letter waymark you take Mana Burst/one dot (defamation), if it was in line with a Square/Number waymark you take Heavy Slam/four dots (stack); this gave 2 stacks nearby the position of both platforms for easy solve in Reenactment later. Once we got that, the only thing left to really solve was Meteor elements, and the only part of that that tripped us up was the Fire one only punishing movement (so Healers could still cast Esuna, mostly), not a full Pyretic that punished all actions, and also that the Fire and Earth timers were only half the length of the Lightning ones. (I did work out a solution to Portents that assumed both that Fire couldn't move at all and the location of Earth stayed unsafe, but it was... messy. Glad that ended up not being the case.) First time we got a clear view of what Wind did was also fun - our WHM just being yeeted off into the void. We did come up with a variant of Portent positions that could easily accommodate all 4 being Near or all 4 being Far, but that ended up not being needed anyway, so meh. For Reenactment we ended up going with Platform groups for the first set (LPs, except the people swapped by the Wind meteor stay with their new group), and "melee far" for the second set (so they could grab some uptime while they ran through the boss, also no cast times). It was also just a nice flavor touch that even Metem gets confused at the end when he starts mixing up Blue and Green mechanics (platform clones in Blue only being solvable via movement during Green, and the portal clone in Blue coming back out in Green, just to mix things up a bit).
\* Don't do this, by the way. If someone tells you they're working on a fight blind, that's your cue to shut the fuck up about it. You aren't as subtle/clever in your comments as you think you are, and meta spoilers are still spoilers.
- Closing
Awesome tier, nearly every fight/mechanic was great to solve blind.
I always encourage people to give blind prog a try, rather than always relying on outside guides. Start with EXs if you don't want to commit to a Savage tier, just going in on day 1 either before guides are out or looking for/making Blind parties and figuring things out as a group. I promise it's fun, and it'll make you better at the game too.
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