After barely playing Final Fantasy for a week (especially if you exclude the time I spent making alternate characters), I returned to it last night for a few weekly tasks and my weekly Ultimate Raid event. Our group had advanced through the first portion of The Epic of Alexander well enough that we started hitting the second portion, known as Limit Cut, that requires a huge amount of coordination and practice to execute well and doing it poorly will quickly get everyone killed. Last week, when we couldn’t do much practice due to weird lag and connectivity issues between literally everyone and the game’s servers, we turned instead to a simulator that lets you run mechanics with a group of other players in order to get the coordination down without having to fight your way through the whole thing every single time. That way, if you messed it up, it wouldn’t hurt as much to have to re-do it. We spent a bunch of time practicing it last week (as of writing this) and were still struggling to get through the mechanic since it requires a decent amount of situational aware, perfect execution, and consideration of where your allies are placed in relation to yourself. Now, the simulator isn’t a perfect recreation since some parts of the mechanic didn’t function properly and not accounting for the extra steps you needed to take could get you killed in the simulator while it wouldn’t hurt you at all in the real thing, so there was a little bit lost in translation when we finally made the jump from the simulator to the real thing yesterday (as of writing this), but we managed to get through the real thing much more easily than we did in the simulator.

In the simulator, we all had things we struggled with. I was able to get the direction and grouping I needed down pretty quickly since I figured out a way it made sense to break it down in my head, but I struggled a lot with how the mechanics handled what’s referred to as “snapshotting.” When you’re doing a mechanic in any kind of battle in Final Fantasy 14, there’s usually some kind of tell that will signal to the players what is going to happen called a “telegraph.” A lot of these telegraphs take the form of orange (or other similar colors) outlines that are placed to show you the danger zone for an enemy ability. As long as you’re out of that space by the time the telegraph disappears, you don’t take damage. The moment this check gets made, when the game determines what position you count as being in, is called the “snapshot.” Since all the players are running their own clients that communicate with the game’s servers, snapshotting doesn’t always play out the way it looks on your screen, even though this method for doing this is supposed to help avoid that problem (or maybe the newer stuff I’m doing is less forgiving that the older content was, which is equally possible). What this means is that I will be moving out of a field of danger, look like I’m safe and clear when the telegraph finally disappears, and then still get hit by it. At this point, as I’m doing the Ultimate raid, I’m running about a quarter to a half of a second ahead of every mechanic we’re doing in order to make sure I’m in the place I need to be far enough ahead that I’m not in danger of getting hurt but also not so far ahead that I’m knocking other people off balance or getting caught up in their mechanics.

It was extremely frustrating, in last night’s raid, to have been clearly out of the danger zone before it even appeared only to still get hit by it. I’m really not sure why I’m having such a difficult time since my ping and frames per second are both in a good place. I absolutely should not be having this much trouble but half my deaths last night were because I thought I was safe only to find out a moment later that I was not, in fact, safe. I could overstep, correct my position out of the danger zone, see the telegraph appear, see it disappear, and then still get hit by it despite being well out of the way. This technically means I didn’t perform the mechanic correctly, but it’s so frustrating to feel like I’m nailing it only to get wrecked by it despite being visually clear of it. It happens the most with new mechanics since I don’t know how much I need to adjust my timing, but it also tends to happen more towards the end of our session since I’m usually worn out from a full day of work followed by a couple hours of this high-performance video gaming and my play gets less precise as a result. No amount of running the simulator was able to prepare me for this, which sucks because I practiced it for a couple hours between Ultimate Raid sessions, past the point where it felt like I was getting anything useful out of it, and none of that was able to prepare for how far off the snapshotting in Final Fantasy 14 feels when I’m doing more recent content. This killed me more than a few times in dungeons and trials during the lastest expansion and killed me three or four times as often in this ultimate.

Other than that, though, I feel like my performance was adequate. Most of my deaths in the simulator where the result of other people being out of position or getting killed early on, though I had my own small share of oversteps and mispositions, but I feel like I was fairly consistent in my performance thanks to all that practice and the movement of the mechanic clicking for me during our first simulator evening. I messed up my DPS rotation a few times during the actual raid itself, but most of that is just clumsy-handed stuff which won’t be a consistent issue. Last night was just really bad since the work I was doing yesterday was really rough on my hands and the changing weather in my location has made all my joints at least a little swollen and very painful. I’m surprised I didn’t mess up more often than I did, given how bad my jitter (my hands shake a little bit due to relatively benign genetics) and dexterity were last night, but I’ll need to figure something out for the future. Maybe some kind of gloves to help with my joint aches or maybe some ice to reduce inflamation. My hands and joints still ache enough today that I should be able to experiment a little bit tonight to figure something out that will work should this happen again in the future. I just don’t want to be the thing holding us back ever. I don’t think I’m at risk of that right now, but I had a few really frustrating moments last night that make me want to figure something out. Feeling like the problem is the easiest way for me to stop enjoying TEA time, after all, so I’d best avoid that.