So, are you excited about Drop 5, and ready to try out the new Adventure, Bay of Betrayal?

You’ve come to the right place! I spent a bunch of time on the PTR focusing on just the Bay of Betrayal with some amazing guild members, and wanted to share my findings/strategies to make it easier for those trying the Adventure for the first time.

Before an information dump, however, it is very useful to note that you will need to be in a group you are comfortable communicating with. This is a very quick Adventure, and you can fail in as little as fifteen to twenty minutes if people aren’t communicating.

Also, don’t get discouraged if things don’t go right the first few times. Even in full raid-gear on the PTR playing classes/specs/roles we main on Live, it took us at least ten hours to get to the point we were in the video below. It is for sure a challenging place, but it feels highly rewarding to get through each challenge.

A disclaimer: We were so involved in things that we didn’t pay attention to spell names. It is that hectic-feeling of an Adventure, especially when you don’t have it on “farm”. I try my best to describe abilities and items. I will gladly edit this with correct spell names if people happen to have them.

First “Hallway”
Kill the mob attacking Herald Anku’mar (hur hur Carbine!) to start up the event, and talk to him to begin after his little spiel.

Keep your DPS (and if you’re feeling confident, your tank and healer) fully charged using the battery rods the entire time (your charge will diminish over time if you do not use it). You want to avoid as many mobs as you can to beat the two other “groups” to the next room. If you do happen to run into mobs, you want charged people (in turns) to activate the various items in the area. Jump spells are also useful to keep moving quickly after killing mobs.

Bombs – These look like a relic node. They will one-shot anybody, including a tank (unless they have a defensive cooldown running). They’re the most effective way to kill mobs.
Tether – There are rods that emit a tether. Most of the time the tether will aggro mobs once it is activated so you should be able to run away from them and leave them there.
Sentry – A folded-up robot that will activate and patrol, aggroing mobs to the best of its ability and smashing them. The second most effective way to kill mobs, as it will help you smash mobs if you have aggro.
Opportunity – There are other rods that emit a circle that provides an elongated Moment of Opportunity (MOO). If you are not fully charged, and you stand in the circle, you will not be able to attack. The best option is to have the tank drag the mobs into the circle, and then stand on the edge. Melee DPS will have to also stand on the edge unless charged.

First “Room” – The Augmented
This is an AoE heavy room. While you can use the Charge to mind-control the adds in the room, we found that just straight burning them down yielded better, and faster, results. This might change depending upon group makeup, gear level, communication, etc.

Mini Boss: Team Alpha
At this point, you have the opportunity to attack one of the two teams if you were fast enough in the first room. Avoid mobs getting to the team, and burn down the healer. We found that one of the teams had an Aurin Esper named Shan Barkheart, and encountered that team as the first group to kill both times we had this opportunity. We don’t know if this is the case every time or not. These are AI mobs, so try to focus down what is doing the most damage/healing like you would in War of the Wilds, or even PvP. The burn order depends on your group makeup, but we found that burning the healer down first made things ultimately easier.

Second “Hallway”
After burning down the team, you encounter more mobs while heading to your next objective. The birds put a debuff on that slows you, so make the most of all the bombs in the vicinity and destroy stuff and run.

Second “Room” – Varmintron and Gopherzoid
There is a battery in the center of the room. Designate two people to be the battery drainer/mind controller–one per boss. We obviously found that marking them and designating symbols was easier for communication purposes.

The object of this boss is to burn down both of them simultaneously, and then mind-control them simultaneously to have them dig a hole to the next area. It sounds simple, but the coordination took a while to establish, especially since the battery regenerates so slowly. This is why we designated two folks as the drainers. The bosses themselves are fairly tank-and-spank.

The battery will fill up three quadrants of the room, and you need to get into the fourth quadrant to stay safe. Once the battery has been drained, this will stop, but it is suggested to wait to drain the battery until the bosses are very low on health so the Charge isn’t wasted (remember, it goes down if it’s not being used).

Varminton casts The Canimid Express every so often where he burrows underground, comes back up, and then shoots a line of dirt and rocks out in front of him. Fairly easy to dodge. He will also cast Eldan Excavationand the group will get a warning that says, “Varmintron is tearing apart the terrain!”. These are huge circles that appear, and are a little more difficult to get out of, but didn’t seem to do too much damage so long as you got out in a reasonable amount of time.

Gopherzoid casts Whirlwind and you will get a warning that says “Gopherzoid is creating a whirlwind!”. He will focus on one member and slowly walk towards them. Easy to run out of the group so long as the person being chased keeps to the edges of the open quadrant. Gopherzoid also seemed to send out lines every-so-often, but it didn’t feel as frequent as Varmintron.

DPS them down until you get the group warning that they’re able to be controlled, and control them simultaneously to dig a hole to the next “hallway”.

Mini Boss: Team Beta
As before, you will have another opportunity to run upstairs and kill the second team if you completed the boss fast enough. Killing teams gets you more time to complete the Adventure, however, it makes the final boss stronger. This is an AI team, like before, so focus down as you see fit. We had a difficult time discerning who the healer was, so we ended up choosing to burn down Lia Zalkadec. From there, things seemed much easier to burn, so we assume she is the healer.

Third “Hallway”
This hallway is completely different than the first two. It requires a lot of communication with your team. Everyone should Charge up and have a jump spell just in case. One person will need to control the first thumper. A second person will need to control the second thumper, and a third person will need to re-control the first thumper just before the first person’s Charge dies. Having a fourth person control the second thumper before the second person’s Charge dies is also useful.

Congratulations, you’ve passed the first part of the hallway. Rinse and repeat all the way through the thumpers! As you can see in the video, we had a more difficult time on the second set of thumpers, but a few tank cooldowns and jump got us past them instead of having to do both sets again.

After the thumpers, rinse and repeat as you had before in the first two hallways–use the bombs and rods to your advantage. Especially since the Shamans do some wicked crazy telegraphs. You can take the third hallway slower than the others assuming you have beaten the other two teams, as it is no longer a race against time.

Third “Room” – The Elder Vault
This is more communication-heavy. We had a difficult time with this because of how short the timer is for selecting items. There are tether balls at the top of the room that you will use to jump to get the first panel. However, you will need to have someone control the middle pillar so one person can use the tether and turn off the Security Control Panel. From here, we had a bit of difficulty figuring out how to get through the red, and resorted to using a jump spell, cooldowns, heals, and a Scientist summon. Of course, we figured out it was much the same as the thumper hallway once we had gotten across. Go up the hallway and turn off the last panels.

Fourth “Room” – The Trial of Endurance
This is essentially a gauntlet. You want to burn down the mobs ASAP, because more come out constantly, and they can get a bit overwhelming with all the red on the floor. We didn’t try mind-controlling the robots, but think it is possible because of the batteries in the middle of the floor. However, you also need to drain the batteries to destroy the panel with the Charge.

Fifth “Room” – Security Hub Sigma
This is the final boss, Calidor Antevian. He’s a tad difficult at first, but we soon realized a pattern in his spells. There are four batteries around the outside of the room, and you will want to assign four people to them to drain for a specific phase of Calidor when he drains them to heal himself. You’ll also need six interrupts for this fight for a specific spell.

Variance Protocol – This centers upon one person. They will need to run out of it and other people will need to avoid the tendrils. Don’t waste your interrupts on this.
Point of Division – This needs to be interrupted with those six IA spells. This gives you a nice MOO to burn him down. If it’s not interrupted it will send very large lines out from him constantly until the spell has finished its channel.
Fractured Symmetry – We called this “Medic!” whenever he cast it. Because it looks like a medic spell. This was the most difficult part of the pattern to figure out. If you watch the video, you see it goes in a “waltz” pattern, almost. Run towards the side ramps for three beats, then back in for three beats. It’s a little difficult to describe, but once you see it (and practice it) it makes a bit more sense. If you get hit by this, it disarms you and does a fair bit of damage.
Siphoning Power – This is when Calidor drains the batteries. Send your designated folks out to drain them and then continue whacking on him. I suggest having the tank and healer as some of the drainers, and keep a DPS on him to help burn through the shield he gets while he casts this to make things easier afterwards.

August 2019 Note: This post is (15/31) of the Blaugust 2019 event! You can find out more about Blaugust over at Belghast’s blog. I (Chestnut) created a Twitter list of all participants. UltrViolet created an OPML file of all the bloggers to import into your feed reader.

When One Doesn’t Raid

On Tuesday, our raid group stepped into Datascape as a whole for the first time.

I sadly wasn’t around due to the project at work that’s currently going on, but based on our logs, we made some pretty good progress on System Daemons. Plus, it’s always fun to see guildie reactions on Twitter during raid.

We stepped in again last night, and I had a lot of fun wiping constantly to the bosses. It’s fun getting back into progression, and based on how we’ve been doing, I don’t think it’ll be long before we’re done with System Daemons and onto some more Challenge Rooms and more bosses.

I know our raid group is “behind the curve” of raiders, but for a group that is more “take it at your own pace” about the whole raiding thing, I think we’ve done a pretty amazing job as a whole to get where we are, and I couldn’t be prouder of the raiding circle. I’m looking forward to smashing more high fiving robots next week!

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD!

But I had some fun in WildStar! One of our guildies is working on attument and is at the Adventures stage, so we decided to hit up Malgrave to help him out.

It was nice to run some stuff with guildies, and it was even nicer to get Gold for the first time while in there! I’ve run Veteran Malgrave Trail quite a bit in my time playing WildStar, and I was glad to finally be able to get gold out of it! I also managed to pick up two new achievements I didn’t have, plus a title. We also got the Speedster run, which I already had, but we got it for the guildie who needed the run.

Birds of Prey

There was also a mini-pet that dropped, and I ended up winning the roll for him! It is the Vulcarrion Scavenger mini-pet, and apparently only drops off of gold runs. It’s a really pretty pet, actually. I’m hoping that the more we run it, we can get it for more guildies that need it, since only one person in the group out of the guildies there had it.

Raiding Fun

Raids seem to be like everyone is hitting burnout for various reasons, though the big one seems to be that we don’t yet have a full and complete group (second seems folks are dying for F2P!). I completely understand that real life happens–I myself am the prime example of real life happening and not raiding. But some folks have just stopped altogether.

But that’s okay, because we’ve some members that just hit 50 and are looking forward to raiding for the first time! We’re not a progression guild, so we’ll get there when we get there. We’re not going to force people to get to 50 and raid if they don’t want to, because it’s not what we’re about. But I am glad that folks have been having fun and are excited to try raiding out! It makes me a happy guild leader to see folks trying new things, and excited for new challenges and endeavors.

And it was great to see some folks who needed upgrades get some really great ones out of raid last night, even if we only got a few bosses/mini-bosses down.

Algoroc Done

I also spent some time putzing about in Algoroc. One of my goals for the month is to finish out either Algoroc or Celestion, and I was much closer to finishing out Algoroc’s achievements than I thought. All I needed was the I Like It Rare achievement. So I killed the last five Primes I needed, and I’ve finished it out!

Well, as much as one can finish it out before F2P. They’ve added in acheivements for Public Events on Live already, but the public events won’t come out until the 29th with F2P. (EDIT: I’m a scrub and didn’t realize that the events are already out there, at least in Celestion, so I’ll be checking out Algoroc again to finish those two out…) But don’t worry, I’ll be going back to do them because I’m a completionist. Now, onto Celestion! Let’s see how much I can finish before the month is over!

I downed two new mini-bosses for the first time, too! Phagetech Guardian C-148 and Phagetech Guardian C-432.

They’re fairly simple fights, actually, compared to a lot of the other mini-bosses we’ve encountered. Honestly, I think the hardest fight in the whole raid that I’ve seen so far has to be Kuralak. Especially since we’re still using the Engineer trick to get her, rather than being able to do the pillars ourselves fully, yet. I’m hoping we can get there soon, though!

I also got to see Phagemaw for the first time ever! I mean, yeah, I’ve watched videos, but it’s different to see a boss and learn the dance. I was in the non-bomb group, so it was fairly easy. Though honestly, from what I saw of the bomb group, it doesn’t look too much difficult either, as a DPS. I can’t imagine the hell the healers go through during this fight, though. I’d be interested in one day trying these out as a healer, though I don’t know when it’d ever happen because we have a lot of our healers DPSing already.

We got Phagemaw down to 13%, and while I’m sad that I didn’t get him down this week, I know that the guild will have him down in the next week or so, and I’ll get him down for my first kill soon after.

The Secret World

Both Monday and Tuesday I got in about an hour of TSW. I’m really enjoying the game, especially since I’m starting to get into some quests I haven’t done yet! The three of us playing finished up Red’s quests and have started talking to Sarge in the camp directly into the Mountains, and we did one of the Sasquatch quests, as well. They’re so sweet and make sweet noises! I think they’re some of my favorite creatures out in the world, so far.

I’m also hoping to finally get the first Let’s Play video for our romp through TSW up sometime this week(end). We started recording these back in May, so I have a hefty backlog (with some of our play sessions clocking in at over four hours), so there’s no lack of video to be had!

Chaide and I started playing with the purpose of recording Let’s Play videos, but it’s awesome that one of our guildies from Daggers (who’s not currently playing WildStar) decided to join in. I feel like three is the perfect number for our play style.

We won’t be playing TSW tonight, but we’re hoping to get some time in on Thursday, and maybe late Friday night after Chaide and I go to a nerd bar (based on Twin Peaks!!!!!) in the area.

WildStar

I hadn’t planned to log into WildStar last night, but I had hopped up to say goodnight to the folks in channel and remind our raid leader that I’d actually be there for raid tonight. They were running a dungeon, but one of our guildies wanted to try to get Metal-Maw (the one in Deradune) because it was the only world boss he hadn’t tried yet that didn’t constantly glitch on him.

So, I signed on and we smashed Metal-Maw in the face. There was a high-level medic that tried to flag a bunch of us so he could try to kill us, but he underestimated our secret weapon (aka our raid leader who’s an epic player regardless of what his gear-level) and promptly got his ass handed to him between Paws and Dahk.

So, folks got Dahk attuned! Hurrah!! I’m hoping he’ll be able to attend raid tonight after he gets out of work. It’s farm night, so it shouldn’t be too much of an issue if he’s a bit late. Which reminds me, I should really re-watch the video on Phagemaw as he’s our current progression boss…

Then we went on to X-89. We got him down after a few attempts!! It was my first X-89 kill, and the guild’s second kill. I do feel really bad, though, because I had terrible bomb placement as I wasn’t focused on my feet at one point, and I dropped a bomb in the middle dropping one of our healers. I feel really, really, bad about it. But she was avenged, because I got stuck in another bomb that someone dropped correctly.

I wasn’t really playing to my full potential on Tuesday. Part of it was I was distracted by the cats being dicks. The other bigger part is that I was tired and stressed, and my mind just wasn’t in it. Normally I can push those feelings aside and settle into raid mindset easily–and I just couldn’t on Tuesday. I’ve sort of been in a funk since, which has made it difficult to even write this post. But I have, and it came pretty easily once I got over the malaise of writing it.

I think that’s the hardest part for me as a blogger. I suffer from anxiety and depression, and I don’t like taking meds because I don’t like what they do to me. Most of the time, I do a pretty damn good job of staying positive, getting myself out of a funk, calming my axiety (it also helps I have a fabulous therapist who’s taught me a lot of tricks to help with all of these), etc. But every so often, I get in a funk. And it’s usually when life just smacks me in the face and I feel overwhelmed. And that’s when I really could care less about doing anything…

I’m going to get through this challenge, though! I’m going to get 31 posts in 31 days, even if some days end up with duplicates (because I need to catch up). And I can’t beat myself up for not keeping up with it, because then I won’t finish. I got this, hold my beer.

We have two different raid nights in WildStar–Tuesday nights we go smash the mini-bosses as more of a gear-farm for folks, and Saturday nights we focus more on progression. Last night, however, was a bit of both.

We hit up the first two mini bosses as we have in the past. I think we wiped more on trash than we did on the mini-bosses for a change! We downed the Genetic Monstrosity in two tries (the first try being a butt pull and getting him to 2%), and we downed the Hideously Malformed Mutant in one go.

We also went in to try the Gravitron Operator for the first time, thinking that we would spend most of the night on her. (We’ve deemed it’s a her, apparently, though you can’t tell either way.) In about four or five tries, we had her down for the first time. We were all kind of surprised with ourselves. And after loot handed out, we were still kind of in shock, so… we never got a kill shot because we Bailed Out to the zone-in. Oops. We’ll just get a shot of her next week!

We decided since we still had some time left for the night to give Experiment X-89 some tries, since we got him down to 22% last weekend. We didn’t have a full group, but it meant some practice for folks still figuring out how to do mechanics, so it would be worth it no matter what. It came as a shocker to us all that we were consistently getting him down past 33%, and got down to 9% at our lowest (and sadly final) try for the night. We figure we’ll get him on Saturday first thing, and be able to get some first attempts in on Kuralak the Defiler.

I love the Experiment X-89 fight. It’s not a very difficult fight mechanics-wise. In fact, I feel that he’s pretty straight-forward. But that means he’s a great fight for those less-experienced folks to learn mechanics, and get better at them. During the fight, X-89 will put a Big Bomb (no idea what it’s actually called, but so what?) on someone. You’re supposed to jump off of the platform so you don’t kill all the tiles (and thus the raid), and then you get blown back up into the air on top of the raid and fall back onto the platform (not taking any fall damage).

One of the times I got the bomb I decided to take some shots, and got a pretty good one. Who kew that Aurin (Aurins?) could fly?

It has been an interesting week with all our packing. It’s made gaming a little more difficult. Tuesday we would have logged into WildStar, but I had a crap day that was super long, and by the time I was actually relaxing after cooking dinner, it was after Genetic Archives mini-boss night had started. So no WildStar.

Wednesday I helped out some folks that needed Vet Adventures for attunement and ran a Vet Malgrave Trail. We got Silver for them, and it was lots of fun. I do hope to get Gold in there, one day. But for now, I just love helping guildies out that need it so that more can get to raiding!

Thursday our internet went kaput. Freaking Crapcast. It’s like they know we’re moving next week and are acting up. It took me a while to get it back up and running steadily, but I did. By that point, it was almost bedtime, so we crawled into bed and I watched an episode of Gilmore Girls (I never watched it when it was on TV), and Chaide watched some Arrested Development (which I can’t watch because it sends me into anxiety-central watching not-so-great people do things that send their life cascading).

Friday was Normal Dungeon night, and Bauxyte got up to level 28. So close! Hoping to hit 30 today as I quest some in between packing. We also got some folks’ alts through KV/STL that had not yet run them in any capacity, which was pretty cool.

Last night was Genetic Archives! Two mini-bosses were already killed on Tuesday, so we had a clear path to X-89. We got him down to 21% at his lowest for the night, and we’re pretty sure that we’ll get him next week! I was going to tank, but let another stalker from Blazing Saddles do so instead. So I’m hoping our internet works on Saturday after we move so that I can possibly tank next week. Y’hear that, Crapcast?

It was a lot of fun, actually. Though I did spend most of yesterday runing both my sets and trying to get as many AMP/AP as I could. I only have a few more of each to get, which is awesome. And now I’m fully runed on both sets (until I get an upgrade). It was a lot of plat, so I’m going to try to focus on getting in some dailies this coming week so that I’m not so poor anymore (I spent about 15 plat altogether–yikes!).

FFXIV

Tuesday we gamed a bit over on Lamia (we haven’t gamed since Tuesday–silly packing for moving), mainly because it was a very long day so we missed raid in WildStar, and we knew we just needed a short spurt of something. Chaide rolled up a new character and is trying to catch up to me in levels. So I just kind of meandered around and puttered in FC-chat. I did work on a bit of questing, though, to try to hit 10, which I’m just short of.

First, I started with some main story. I had to pull a sword out of a tree stump. Though I can’t exactly remember why. It reminded me of Sword in the Stone and all that and I got a good chuckle out of remembering some Arthur lore and how it’s presented in various media.

At that point, I ran into Papalymo and Yda and their Moogle.

And then bad things happened with a ground tremor or some such. So we had to fight them!

And fight them we did! But, that’s when I saw a shard on the ground…

And then I passed out as I had this… vision? I guess you could call it a vision.

Afterwards, we found a dead Ixal, but not a normal kind–I think it was a leader or some such. Regardless, folks think something is afoot because of the Ixal. Which I’m sure there is something up, no?

After this quest, I just sort of went around killing things for other quests until it was time to log. I’m hoping to get in some various aspects of gaming today before World Boss night in WildStar. Maybe I can hit level 12 on the Archer, too!