Act 8: Four Years AfterIn Syncademy, there is something called a "study group". It is basically a static with a goal to clear particular content. When I first joined Syncademy, there were two study groups working on A8S. Eventually one cleared the fight, and the other one was struggling. Some people in the latter group gave up, while the remining ones started a new study group to reattempt A8s.
I signed up for that group as soon as it was announced.
It was back in patch 3.3 when I first got into A8s with Heliodor IKEA. Time flies, and it was more than four years ago when that happened. Back then we had so much problem in replacing the healers, it was difficult to keep the static afloat. We somehow managed to get passed A7s with different people in the team every week, and everybody was excited going into A8s.
Back in Midas, initially I didn't really interested in raiding. I transferred to Cerberus so that I can hang out with Asny and Aelia for a bit before I unsub the game. I unintentionally ended up in a static, but I was more into helping people then raiding myself. It was until I got to A8s, I ended up in involving in recruiting people. It was really the first fight that I actually wanted to get into.
It was difficult to recruit team of 8 for A8s back then. Four years later, it was still difficult to recruit 8 people for A8s now. Amber setup the study group, but in the end there were only six people signed up. It was beginning of October. We talked about it in discord in Syncademy, trying to advertise it. Week after week, the two empty slot remained empty.
At around the same time when this A8s study group ad was posted, Laetitia was recruiting members for another study group aiming to clear T13 sync-ed with no echo. I of course signed up for it immediately.
The very first time I sub for FFXIV was about two months after the expansion 3.0 came out. Even back then the Coil of Bahamut was already an old content. I have heard of people try to form groups to run it synced in some servers. However, back in the day there was no cross server PF. It was almost extremely difficult to find a group like that. Not to mentioned that back in those days in Shiva, you won't even get into a half serious static to do current content if you don't speak German, let alone doing the old content.
It was then I ran into Zanza and his FC. I helped them out on the ARR relic trial so they invite me to join their sync-ed coil advanture. I never joined them on voice, because their raid lead told me that he would be doing call out in German and that I won't understand. But he gave me some instruction in English before the fight started. We only did T1 to T4. Then I got involved in Annie's static. They let me joined them on TS, but then I couldn't understand any of the call out.
Thinking back, it was just so awkward. You really need to have a good understanding of the fight before even bother trying. Not only I was new to raiding back then, I was also new to MMORPG. I had zero clue on how to play my job and only ran into trouble everywhere I went.
In the end, I transferred to Cerberus. One day, Aelia decided that three of us will do a 3 men run on the coil unsync at lv60. Typically Aelia refuses to do anything unsync. In fact, she said that until she found a group to clear second coil savage sync, she would never use those titles from savage coil.
She told us that there will be mechanics if we did 3 men unsycn coil run, and this would be the only way she was willing to do it unsync. I had no idea. I just tagged along. Honestly, I really had no idea on most of the mechanics. I did try to watch a video, but we managed to skip mechanics even as 3 men unsync. I struggled to remember which skill was a tank buster and which one was not. But as a lv60 tank, I can survive tank buster with no CD. While she and Asny were running around doing mechanics, I was cluelessly hitting the boss. For T9, we invited Aster to run with us 4 men, because some people getting more than one debuff in the final phase, but we didn't clear. I don't think we did T13, because you need a tank LB3 and we just didn't have it.
When 5.3 came out, I ran into the Syncademy. One of the coil fight I did with them was T12 and T13. It was during their community choice week when we were given a chance to vote for the fight we want to do. I joined after the first round of vote was finished, but I was able to cast vote in the second round to finalize exactly which fights we were doing. Normal people voted for the fights they like. I voted in a way to create as many ties as possible. In the end, almost every catagories have 2-3 entries with the exactly the same number of vote.
T12 and T13 was chosen for one of the raid day, and I signed up for both.
In T12 I have to learn about swaping Brand of Purgatory with my co-heal during the Flames of Unforgiveness cast. For some reasons it went wrong for several time. Cure told me that I need to heal myself after the swap, but I was so confused. It was only after we cleared the fight, I went to look up what exactly this mechanics. Basically I need to sheild both me and my coheal before swap, and both of us needed to be healed. The rest of the non-healer specific mechanics, I learnt four years ago and somewhat still remember them.
In the T13 group, we did very well initially. We hit the last phase after couple pulls. The problem is, in Syncademy your group have different people every time. In this particular group, there were too many chit-chatting going on. It really didn't help when the raid leader (technically raid leader in training) started all the chit-chatting himself and kept talking about non-raid stuff even after the pull. Although in the earlier pull, we showed that the group was strong and knew the mechanics. I think we were sufficiently distracted that people just die to random stuff. After two hours of trying, we got very close but never managed to clear it even with echo.
Fast forward to now....
Sadly, Laetitia's group did worse than Amber's group sign up wise. We got 5 people signed up here. Week after week, that number stubbornly stayed the same.
And so we waited.
Then one day, Laetitia wrote on discord, " Since there're apparently not enough dps players interested in T13 no echo around but I'm kinda loath to abandon the project completely, I wondered if we could try and go for the second coil savage instead?"
In less than a day, a flood of people showed interest. So suddenly we had more than enough people to form a group.
Our little study group on second coil savage was formed.
A few days later, it was right after the first time I joined a PoTD Group Gamma in Rebecca's War Room. Amber told us that he got enough people to start the study group in A8s.
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Table of content of this series is
here
