CHAPTER 4 - WHERE THE HELL IS MY CHAPTER 4???
Previously, on THE HISTORY OF BURNINGCOSMOSSSS...
I don't remember. Damn thing was too long ago.
Hey guys, I have to wait until freaking NEXT JANUARY until the next episode of Battlestar Galactica comes out. 3 month gap is nothing!
Anyway, last time I promised to go through the Tiamat fight. June 17th, 2005. I can say, without a doubt, that the first Tiamat fight BC underwent was the one fight in my entire FFXI career that I will never, ever forget.
Why, you ask?
Well, simply because there is no other term for it than EPIC.
Now, I'm not using that term lightly. You need to understand some things that went on before we entered the fight.
1.) During this time in Phoenix history, many other linkshells were in a race to see which linkshell would become the first English speaking linkshell to down Tiamat, or any CoP wyrm for that matter.
There have been many other attempts in the past, even before several team ups. I remember hearing about WildSeven, Genesis, 13, Assassins, and several others attempt this fight, yet they could barely make a scratch on it. So of course, this left us entering the fight with a sense of doubt. We knew that, in all likelihood, we were going to fail. This was our first time fighting a grand Wyrm, and even then our overall Wyrm experience at the time had been limited to 3 Fafnirs or so.
Of course, we were determined to not go down so easily.
2.) We were still unknown at this time. The new kids on the block. Just in the HNM business for under 6 months. Dawn and WildSeven have been around a while by then, and even the other large newer linkshells, 13, Genesis, and Assassins, have been around longer than we have. All of our accomplishments by this time, no matter how fast we've done them, have just been things others in the NA community have accomplished several times over. So we decided to attempt to do something to really stand out.
Now, why was this the one fight that we would never forget?
True, it was our first time fighting a greater Wyrm. We gathered together at the Tiamat site, staring the dragon down, knowing full well that we were most likely going to get our asses handed to us. All we knew that this was going to be an insanely glorious battle.
And so, we begin.
The fight was much tougher than we expected. At this time, we had absolutely no information about grand Wyrms. There was nothing substantial that we could find on the internet. The few linkshells on other servers that have beaten it were keeping suspiciously quiet about the strategies that they used to win the fight. So it was up to us to test anything and everything we could think of to throw into this fight.
From what I could remember about this fight, here is what we had:
Tanks: We used 2 PLD/NINs, and 1 NIN/WAR as the main tank. The PLD/NINs were there to support the NIN. PLD/NINs at this time was a mostly undeveloped job, and so mostly did not know or understand how to properly hold hate as a main tank. We therefore used them as a support tank, covering the NIN in times of need.
Damage Dealers: The bulk of the damage came from two summoners, Harmonia and Izzy. Myself, I was a Monk at the time, coming in for Chi Blast every 3 minutes as well.
Black Mages: We did NOT use Black Mages as damage dealers at this time. We tried it, but when we saw how resisted magic damage was, we decided to hold them back. It was a dumb choice now, looking back, but again, we had no references to draw from on this fight. We kept the BLMs rotated in for stuns, and they were mostly adds control for the bulk of the fight.
Tiamat stayed at above 95% HP for the first two hours. Two hours of us figuring out the best way of damaging her, with most of our ideas flopping madly. Summoners finally got into a rhythm, and we were finally starting to make progress after a while. Past the 70% mark, we were already insanely proud of ourselves, having taken Tiamat down past what anyone else save Feather was able to do by that time.
Tiamat continued being a tough bitch. We kept on running into snags, and had to sleep her again and again. The damage came around slowly, but surely.
That last picture was around where we almost lost the fight. We had taken Tiamat down to around the 20% mark, when she started to go crazy. Nobody knew by that time just how insane a low HP Tiamat would be. She began double attacking more, and attacking faster. Our tanks weren't able to keep shadows up, hate started getting out of control, and our entire alliance nearly wiped.
Tiamat regened during this time from about 20% to 40%, if I remember correctly. It was disheartening to see our work being taken away, and of course, we were afraid we were going to lose the fight. However, it's been said, that if there was one talent that BC has above anyone else in this game, it's in recovering. We've recovered from many fights in this game that most others would have considered a lost and given up, despite heavy odds. Well, this was one shining example on how good we are at recovering. People reraised, others were raised. Some of us, myself included, were sacrificed and zombied to keep Tiamat from becoming unclaimed and REALLY start ticking HP back up. It was an incredible moment, but eventually, the mages got to sleep Tiamat again long enough for everyone else to unweak and recover.
Then we took control of the situation again, and never lost control.
Later on, friends from other linkshells that watched the fight said that they were sure we had lost the fight at this point. Most of the alliance had wiped, and Tiamat was completely out of control, chomping down on tanks and mages alike. They told me that it was nothing short of a miracle we were able to pull this off, but we knew that we had the determination to do it.
And finally...
lol gimp subjob
The fight was so god damn incredible.
Earlier in this post I referred to it as EPIC. That is, I believe, an accurate description. The fight itself took just a little over 9 HOURS to end. All I remember by the end of the night was being incredibly hungry, tired, and needing to pee really badly.
We had one EU member go to sleep shortly after the fight started, and when he woke up, WE WERE STILL FIGHTING. He was shocked.
We had our tanks come dangerously close to running out of ninja tools, so we had to have members bring in supplies from Jeuno. And they didn't exactly bring in very little to begin with.
It was the most intense experience in my FFXI career, and I was so, so proud of my linkshell and my friends that day. We've done what no other NAs were able to do at the time, and we've done it on our first try. And for heaven's sake, we did it with STYLE. Nobody else on the server can claim to have the fight we did.
Later on others criticised us for taking too long. Well to those I say PISS OFF. I'm proud it took us that long. There was so much energy in the linkshell. So much determination. The will to even sit through a 9 hour fight, to try theory and experimentation on how to fight it the best. We pioneered Wyrms for the NAs on Phoenix, and we're damn proud of it. Later on we've taken down Tiamat with as few as 16 people, and when we have over 25 we can easily do it in an hour now, but nothing will beat the sheer exhiliration of our first struggle against the red bitch.
It was a good time to be in BurningCosmosss.
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Originally Posted by Bartuc
