After finally clearing the Alexander 8: Savage (aka A8S) raid, the core of our Difficult Content group decided that we’re gonna go into Ultimates now. Specifically The Epic of Alexander (TEA) as chosen by a poll. We’ve proven our abilities on A8S and now we’re ready for the big time. We recruited two other experienced players to replace the two of our A8S group that weren’t interested in doing Savages, and spent a hectic weekend preparing for our first session as what I thought was a planning session for sometime in the more distant future shoved everything else aside in order to start on the one day everyone had available. Which means, as of writing this, our group is down to one weekly “Content Rewind” session since the Monday one was displaced by Ultimate practice and we’ve had our first session. Things went pretty well, as far as Ultimates go. We’re making slow progress as we adjust to the new level of demands placed on most of us, each time getting a little bit further or messing up on something new, but it’s not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Probably because I’d doing DPS for this group rather than the healing I was doing in the other group, but it’s like any other raid at the end of the day: you study the mechanics, work on getting your part down, and slowly move forward as the group comes together. I do miss the added complexity of healing on top of all that–having a challenge to throw myself into that’s constantly fluctuating and will likely never become rote–but there were people in our group who don’t have the versatility of skillset that I do, so I knew from pretty early on that I wasn’t going to get the chance to heal.

Playing as a Bard isn’t bad, though. There’s a pretty high variability in your routine as things come off cooldowns and effects that have a chance of happening randomly happen, so I have to stay on top of a lot of stuff as I’m going in addition to the mechanics, but it’s not the same challenge that healing was. That’s not to say I’ve got my Bard rotation down perfectly or anything, but I’ve slowly ironed out most of the big issues and my hands are learning the muscle memory required to overcome the slight delay from needing to think about what to press. It certainly helps that the way I’ve been playing my Bard for the last few months maps well to one of the more-ideal rotations for the job, though I was much more lackadaisical about it previously since I wasn’t really doing anything with my Bard job that required strict adherence to a rotation. Now, after about two hours of pretty focused repetition, I’ve got the first thirty to forty-five seconds of my rotation largely worked out and my part of the mechanics we’ve witnessed figured out. The whole encounter is incredibly specific and demanding, making it super easy for the entire party to wipe or to start a cascade of deaths that quickly collapses the push, but it’s also pretty easy for me to get the feel of it down since I don’t need to worry about cast times or AOEs or any of that stuff. I just need to correctly target my foe and stay on top of my abilities as they come off cooldown while I go through the mechanics.

This feeling of, well, not exactly “ease” since this is, at most, a minute of the fight, but “competency” is a result of the preparations I did over the weekend. There weren’t a lot of good resources out there for Bards since one of the other Ranged DPS jobs, Dancer, is the one people tend to prefer, but there were enough for me to study up on how to play my Bard at this level, thanks to a friend’s research. Gear information was sorely lacking, though, but apparently “just the best stuff you’ve got” seems to be the answer that everyone gives when queried, so I’m not sure if the lack of that information is entirely because of the popularity of the Dancer job or because there’s no need for it since a Bard’s gear needs are fairly straight-forward (they have the simplest “important stats” section on all of their expert explainer pages). Plus, it’s not like Bards do a huge amount of damage. They’re there to do some damage, of course, but they’re mostly there for buffing the rest of the party. Few jobs got it like Bards got it when it comes to party-wide buffs. Outside of accepting that there wasn’t much to do for my stats and gear, I spent time stocking up on consumables since a lot of high-end play requires having them on hand to add to your damage bursts or to heal yourself up a bit if the healers are hard-pressed (or to restore your MP if that’s a thing you use). Buying some stuff was relatively easy, as was making the potions I’d need to heal myself. Much more difficult was making a metric ton of stat-boosting potions for my fellow DPS and I. I had the time, focus, and necessary in-game skills, so I gathered everything up and produced way more than we could possibly need since there’s no telling how long this is going to take us. Plus, it’s not like they won’t be useful for other Ultimates when we get to them.

All-in-all, I think it’s going alright and I’m enjoying myself. I got to feel useful and skilled, and was able to prepare away all but the “time to start” anxiety of this endeaver. I will find satisfaction in our continued progress, and that means a lot to me, as does having a group with which to do this at all. I may not be able to do it the way I most wanted to, but someone needs to fill in and, well, I’m the fill. I want to be good enough at everything that I can hot-drop into any role or fill any need, so I’m currently working on my goals even if I’m not doing my most preferred job. I am trying not to feel frustrated by this since I was there–I saw the way roles got filled and I can’t fault the decision-making–and I don’t have an argument for why I should be healing over someone else other than “because I want to.” Complicating my entire emotional response to all of this is the fact that I also dealt with a few incredibly frustrating days of work in a row while all of this planning and decision-making was happening, so my emotions from the work stuff are all mixed in with my emotions about the Ultimate planning stuff. I can’t really separate the two out, even a few days later, probably because the work-stuff is still simmering and likely to flare up again the week I’m writing this [it absolutely did], so I’m trying to just focus on being good at filling since that’s also something I want to be. Plus, it’s not like I’m mad or upset by not healing. I’m just not excited about it. Which is fine. I don’t need to be excited about things I want to do in order to do them. Just like maintaining this blog. I’m not excited to post most days, but it’s a thing I get satisfaction from so I don’t need to be excited. I just need to stay disciplined and focused. Which is what a raid group (or any group of people trying to accomplish a mutual goal, really) needs more than everyone getting to do what they want. Plus, I’m sure I’ll get my chance to heal this stuff eventually. Might not be with this group, and it might not be any time soon, but I’m sure it’ll happen eventually.