Odin down

Well, we finally managed it. Odin has fallen.

I've had a Shadow Coat for something like 9 months now, don't misunderstand. It's certainly not the first time I've been party to an Odin kill.

While you're helping to run the show, though, it is an entirely different experience. When Remedy killed Odin, and bragged about it on their frontpage, I saw little more than the relatively menial tasks assigned to my role in my party: sing songs on bard, provide DD-party healing as SCH, beyond that, more or less stay silent.

Now I see the amount of work put into trying to keep a linkshell of 50+ people all moving in the same direction, trying to get the same group of people, more or less, into three different tiers of Einherjar wins, and executing a workable strategy in a sometimes unpredictable environment.

Helping to run a clean linkshell has helped me to understand just how dirty Remedy was, and just how lazy, uncreative, and plainly stupid most of its leadership was. Our first two Odin tries failed largely because we'd been saddled with the mode of thinking that Remedy's leadership provided, of rigid, inflexible rules compiled most off of half-heard, half-understood BG posts from posters that may or may not have had the first clue what they were talking about to begin with. They still succeeded, because they had a pair of Aegis PLDs and a host of top-tier DD to lean on. Running a linkshell, and making the improvements that I've made, I've come to see the degree to which Remedy succeeded despite, and not because of, its leadership.

This particular Odin was a bitch. The fight went smoothly for the first 15 minutes or so, and we quickly had him down to 30%, but as we gathered at around 25% for his final 10k needles move, he proceeded to crap all over us with a consecutive sleepga2, breakga, sleepga2 just after we'd all woken up, and then breakga again. it was fucking ridiculous. Cost us something along the order of 5 minutes, by my estimation, and because he was still beating on tanks and doing other nasty shit in that timeframe, we had a significant percentage of our ally in low health that was then sent critical by 10k needles.

Somehow we pulled out of it, and got back to DD even as the 5 minute warning came and went while he was frighteningly hovering in the 20-25% mark. We got him to 11%, successfully pulled everyone off of him, had 2 sacrificial rangers launch their 2hrs to bring him to 8% or so. We got the 1 minute warning as we were zerging, and the 30 second warning as a final Atonement brought him to 0, much of our DD decimated by the 9 Valkyries (as our kiting party was in rough shape, the final valk spawn coming late and being a pain, and thus we were unable to pull them off of people and keep them off for long without dying.

Drops were pretty poor, though we got Rulob his M.Body and Andraana his Shadow Coat, both well deserved. Other drops were (lol) H.Hands and A.Feet.

And we're back on our way, with T3 and T2 wins bringing in a full 36. Now if only we can start seeing some e.bodies...