Greetings one and all!

Our next community spotlight features Elunia Arlana of Team Hopeless. PvP fans will of course remember this team as the victors of the Crystalline Conflict Regional Championship 2023 in Europe and Oceania that took place at London Fan Festival!

Join us as we take a dive into stories from behind the scenes in the tournament, as well as learn some tips for Crystalline Conflict along the way!

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Community team: Firstly, congratulations on your amazing and well-fought win! Can you please introduce yourself to our readers, and how long you've been playing FFXIV for?

Elunia Arlana: Hey everyone, my name is Elunia in-game and some people might also know me as Hoody. I've been playing FFXIV on and off since Heavensward mainly doing the main story quests. Around the start of Endwalker I got more invested in the game and started doing a lot of PvP and Savage/Ultimate raiding.

Community team: What is Hopeless' origin story? As in, how did you first form and name your team, and how did it come about that you'd be team leader?

Elunia Arlana: Our team was formed with the primary goal being winning the CCRC. It started out with Taivas, Deadrise, and Cliffe who already played together as a team in a previous community tournament, further adding the strongest players in Europe who were eligible to participate in the tournament, which included Tyr, Miyu, Weekender, and me.

As to where the name comes from, we had a team Discord server, but one of our members, Taivas, wasn't able to use emojis from other servers. So we made black and white versions of them, and one of these was our commonly used "Hopeful" emoji that we turned into the black and white "Hopeless" emoji, which we also referenced in our team picture.

I wouldn't really call myself the team leader; I was more so the spokesperson in the interviews and the one who would organize scrims [or practice matches] with other teams. We joked around that I was more the "manager" or "PR representative" of the team.

▲ Hopeless' team picture during the Crystalline Conflict Regional Championship 2023.

Community team: How does Hopeless strategize before a match? Did these strategies change or become refined as you progressed through the tournament?

Elunia Arlana: The way we strategized for matches was mainly through scrims with other teams, where we tested out different compositions, different ways to approach the game, and different ways to play out fights by using limit breaks in a certain way, and eventually just figuring out what works.

During the course of the tournament, the meta in Europe eventually settled on playing around the strong crowd control abilities of reaper, monk, and white mage, combining them in ways that make it easy to lock one player down and play out the rest of the fight with a one-man advantage.

A key example of this is using monk's stun into white mage's Miracle of Nature, making it so the target is unable to press Purify in time to remove the crowd control and defend against anything that might follow, like a dragoon's burst combination.

This combination of tanky frontline DPS jobs combined with two healing jobs made matches slower as it was hard to kill targets.

Our response and solution to dealing with this was mainly theorized by Taivas. In the finals, we ran a composition using warrior, dark knight, ninja, dragoon, and scholar. The main goal of this composition was to counter the European metagame by being able to survive the aforementioned crowd control combinations due to high health pools and scholar shields. While also having a lot of interesting synergies between the jobs, such as dark knight's AoE pull into warrior's AoE stun, warrior and ninja both being able to burn Purify with crowd control, scholar's healing reduction and ninja's healing reduction, dragoon being able to follow up with high damage burst, and many different limit break combinations.

This composition sped up the game in a way that most other European teams weren't used to, making it so they had to pay a lot more attention to their defensive cooldowns, while also having to keep in mind that every limit break in our composition is powerful enough to turn a fight in our favour.

Community team: How did playing Crystalline Conflict live on stage feel compared to playing from home?

Elunia Arlana: I knew that playing on stage was a whole different experience from playing at home, so I tried to hype up my teammates because I knew that having that confidence on stage can be a game changer, and I definitely think it paid off as we all played our game with full confidence.

Overall, I'd say playing on stage honestly felt amazing, especially knowing my friends were cheering me on in the crowd. It's a very unique experience that I'm glad to have been a part of.

Community team: Were there any surprises for you in the tournament? Were your opponents in the finals who you were expecting?

Elunia Arlana: I think the tournament mostly went as we expected aside from a few matches, notably the one between Bruhcats and Bouobons Ranch, which was so close it could've gone either way.

We were also unsure about team FISH, as we didn't have too much experience versus the Australian metagame and how their strategies would compare to ours.

That being said, I think we had a lot of confidence in our strategy near the end of the tournament and believed that if we executed it correctly, we could beat anyone.

Community team: Are there any particular moments in the tournament that stuck out for you?

Elunia Arlana: The evening before the tournament at Fanfest, we had a three-hour strategy meeting, reviewing VODs and discussing our strategy. Near the end of that meeting, I had a feeling that I knew that what we had planned would work.

The following day, everything we had planned the night before came to fruition; the games played out exactly like we thought they would, and knowing that the preparation paid off was very memorable for me.

Another moment that stuck out for me was at the end of the final game we played versus FISH. I had my warrior limit break ready and knew that if I managed to get a good limit break that we would win the tournament. In that final fight, Cliffe set up everything perfectly with dark knight's AoE pull, allowing me to hit three players with my limit break, winning us the fight.

Community team: Did your team face any challenges along your journey to victory? If so, how did you resolve them?

Elunia Arlana: I think the biggest challenge for us was deciding who would get to play out of us 7 on the final day of the tournament. Miyu is an incredible player overall and Weekender was one of the strongest Reaper players in the tournament.

Eventually, what decided who would play was our change in strategy to our new composition, but I believe any of us would've managed to pull off the win on stage.

Community team: Do you have any niche tips for Crystalline Conflict that you've picked up which players might not know about?

Elunia Arlana: A pretty useful tip that a lot of players might not know about is that damage over time effects are calculated at the moment they apply, so if you apply a damage over time effect on a player before they use guard to reduce damage, it will still tick on them for full damage.

Another useful tip is that during overtime it is sometimes more beneficial to be on the losing side rather than the winning side. The winning side has to force all opposing players off the crystal for a certain time period, while the losing side has to keep at least one player on the crystal to beat the opposing team's percentage pushed, and there are times where it is a lot easier to achieve the losing team's condition to victory.

A great example of this is when you have a reaper with the ability to push other players off the crystal with their limit break in order to push past the opposing team's percentage.

Community team: Finally, do you have any advice for players wanting to try Crystalline Conflict for the first time?

Elunia Arlana: While it might seem straightforward the most useful tip I can give is to always play around the crystal. Make sure that whatever you are doing has the greater purpose of moving the crystal in your favour, whether it is getting a kill or helping your ally survive.

 

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Watch the archive footage of the thrilling final matches of the tournament over on the FINAL FANTASY XIV, as part of Day Two of the Fan Festival in London 2023.

Be sure to check out the matches of the North American and Japanese tournaments as well!

Thank you for reading and stay tuned for more community spotlights in the future!

P.S. Push the crystal ✧₊⁺