first run of the night baby!!!
criterion savage was actually a lot of fun! criterion's already really nicely designed but having to fight dungeon mobs that hit hard enough to kill without your full mit/heal toolkit makes every other dungeon in the game feel lacking, and the no-death boss rush was nice for really thoroughly learning every fight. thankful we went into it already close though because the thought of trying to get a deathless run with people one doesn't already know is kind of overwhelming
We’d been working on this for the last 2 months and it’s been extremely fun! It was my first bit of content in ffxiv involving a static/harder than EX trials, so it was really nice to get to run this with a group of 4 close friends as an intro to that sort of thing. And that’s also quite nice how grueling savage criterion is, since any death during the entire 23 minute run means having to reset and start it all over from the beginning. Overall we logged nearly 200 pulls of savage (and plenty of pulls of normal criterion before it) to get our clear. Team morale and cohesion over the length of that really is one of the biggest challenges, so it was great running this with folks I was looking forward to hanging out with every session, rather than recruitment board randos.
But this was a blast and I’m really looking forward to getting back for more savage criterions (wondering if we can clear all 3 before Dawntrail drops). The light party format is neat as a healer because you’re the only healer so all that responsibility falls to you, but also the healing plan is entirely in your own hands. It was really rewarding having the raidwides on the trash before the second boss feel absolutely brutal, so going in and charting out which healing tool I wanted to have access to for each mob of it, then redoing my healing plan for the first boss to ensure that I’d have CDs available going into each pull, then also coordinating with Rose, our tank, to co-ordinate when she’d pop Living Dead so I could drop tank healing and focus on party healing, and then going from semi-often wiping to that trash to just never having another issue on it ever again.
