Giants in mining tunnels, exploding oozes and more in the second half of Ragar's healing tour of ARR's early dungeons

The Bowl of Embers, or “Stop Tunnel-Visioning and Hit the Nail!”

With the first three instances completed, you do a few more solo quests for your main story until you unlock your level 20 Trial, The Bowl of Embers. This instance is a single fight where you and three other party members will square off against Ifrit, a primal of fire and enemy to the three nations you work with. The first time I was preparing to try this fight, I decided “Better gear or not, I’m going to try tanking this guy on my Gladiator! Those guildhests I did were okay practice, but this is the real deal.” I threw on my Gladiator set, added the couple of Greed-roll items I picked up while healing the dungeons, and ten minutes and a cutscene later, it was time to fight the big guy.

Things were going great at first: I’m dodging most of the attacks, the healer’s keeping up with the damage I’m taking just fine, and the DPS seemed to be making good progress on the boss. After a few minutes, Ifrit jumped into the air and I got ready to pick him back up. Shortly after he landed though, a wave of fire washed over the entire battlefield and all four of us were one-shot. Surprising to say the least, but I figured we’d just dust ourselves off and go again, right? I mean, when someone died in the other dungeons and released early, they just showed up at the front of the instance, so this should be even faster. Unfortunately that was not the case – you wipe on Ifrit, it dissolves the group, you show up dead wherever you queued from and have to return to your home point.

I repaired my equipment and started to think about the battle, trying to figure out where I could have made a mistake. Was I supposed to reposition him before that jump? Did I miss an add I couldn’t see through the wall of Ifrit in front of me? Rather than waiting another ten minutes to try tanking again, I decided to go back to Conjurer for another perspective on the battlefield; if there was an add I missed while tanking, I’d be able to spot it much easier this way.

[center][/center]

When I entered the instance, the new tank went over the strategy with the group after someone else said it was their first time: avoid stuff on the ground and burn down nails. Things started off great while healing: tank was dodging attacks like I was, DPS was making good progress, and everyone was moving out of the glowy red circles on the ground. That just left whatever the nails were the tank had mentioned at the start. Soon I got my answer as a glowy red nail-looking thing dropped down from the sky. The tank was topped off and my mana was looking great, so I threw a DoT on the nail to help out the DPS and went back to healing. I watched the health of the nail tick down on the health bar above it, but only to a point – apparently my DoT was the only thing that was on nail. Soon after we had a repeat of the first attempt: large wall of fire, dead party, removed from Duty Finder.

A quick repair later and I was back in for my third attempt. Same beginning as always and everything’s looking good other than one of the casters deciding to sit in a few of the red circles. This time when the nail drops though, I helped the one DPS attacking the nail burn it down in between heals. After that Ifrit did his jump like before, but now instead of a party one-shot he barely does enough damage to warrant casting Medica to heal everyone. With the nail down, the rest of the fight’s a cakewalk; sure there are more spots to dodge on the ground now, but Ifrit’s regular damage is easily healed through and we emerge victorious! No loot from the primal unfortunately – just experience, access to the remaining locked features of ARR I mentioned earlier, and the completion of the beta’s portion of the main storyline.

Conclusion

Other than a few tweaks here and there to various features, such as being able to queue for multiple roles/classes or having it respawn the group inside the Trial instance instead of dissolving the party, I thought the Duty Finder worked great for its first test weekend. There has been some contention among some fans of FFXIV:ARR about including the Duty Finder in their game, citing that it ruins server communities and causes players to just live in cities waiting for queues. I understand their concerns, but personally I don’t share them. You could add in an option to limit grouping to same server only to appease the first group of complaints. As for the second one, I spent a good portion of my time in EverQuest and the first couple of years in World of Warcraft sitting around trying to find a dungeon group. All that time waiting did not make me grow closer with my fellow players as a community and form deeper bonds with them--it made me play a DVD on another screen while looking for purple text or listening for tells in the background.

I might be overly cynical though.

As for the actual dungeons in ARR, I generally enjoyed them. I was hoping for more variety of mechanics in those first two dungeons, but you have to have something available for new players to get their feet wet. With the third dungeon, I saw enough there that I’m excited to see what else lies in store for me in the remaining dungeons and if it can live up to some of the better group content I’ve played in other MMOs. Hopefully in the near future I’ll be able to try my hand at those instances as well, be it as a tank or as a healer. I’m also hoping that I’ll have access to the second-tier jobs or at least a few extra abilities when that happens though. All that chain casting Cure was giving me flashbacks of Paladin healing in Burning Crusade.

Michael “Ragar” Branham