Act 2: A12s, Once MoreOne day, I was looking around on the fellowship finder and noticed a fellowship called "Syncademy". This fellowship thingy didn't exist in the day when I was subbing the game. So I joined couple of the fellowship and see what will happen.
This fellowship was supposed to be doing the old raid content. I joined their discord and found out their raid schedule. The first fight that was coming next was A12s sync-ed with no echo. They told me, for the last raid in the expansion, sync-ed and MIL only off by mayb 5 ilv, so the difficulty is about the same.
I did try to sign up, but I didn't do it correctly. There was a clock iron I need to click to sign up, but I clicked the wrong one, so I wasn't included in the team.
About a week later, A12s came up again, and this time I signed up correctly.
It has been at least 4 years ago since I last saw this fight. It took a few runs to re-familiarize myself with the gravitational anomaly. I think I was dodging it more or less by luck until couple hours into the raid. I need to relearn the position temporal statis. Fortunately I was doing the timegate, so I only have to heal myself instead of placing crystal. We did made it to the second void of repentance once. I got a chance to heal the part with the holy sconge, holy bleed and what not, which was something I never did when back in 3.x.
Sadly, we didn't manage to clear the fight. Then a few days later, A12s came up again, and I signed up again.
Our raid leader told me that there were strange noise coming from my speaker. I wondered what it was, because someone mentioned the same thing last time but I didn't pay attention. Then I realized that my hands were shaking very violently. They were shaking so hard that the collar of my jacket was rubbing against the mic on my headset.
I can't quite articulate what happened, but maybe the thought caught up with me. I levelled AST on my free trial before because I haven't played this job much in the past. At that moment, it was the only lv60 job I had. It is the only job I can join this event with.
I wonder, should A12s be the first savage raid I started with after not raiding for so long? Was it the right decision to do it as a noob AST?
It was okay when I didn't think about it at all. When suddenly things started to click, it felt something was off. Like, very off.
For a moment, I was contemplating my Eorzean life decision.
During that time, C'lianta was more or less solo healing when I was trying exit my freak out state. It took me 3-4 pulls to calm down. It also happened that we were in different group in last raid and we were both playing Noct AST doing the time gate last time. So this time he went Diurnal and I will stay out to do the crystal. Then, we both have some adjustment to do. It took me couple run to sort out place the crystal correctly, and remember to top people off. By now, I felt confident with the mechanics. I started working out when to use my CD. We made it all the way to 8%, but still, we didn't clear the fight.
I had a reflection afterward.
Before the raid, I thought it would be done in one or two lockout. I cleared it back in patch 3.4 with my static, The Improvisors. After the static disbanded, I re-rolled as a tank and cleared this fight on other jobs. I even wrote about this journey on my series "The Stories from A12s Prog". How long ago was that? Four years? Five years? I came back to this fight only found my hands were shaking uncontrollably.
It was probably Charles Saatchi, said something along this line.
Our definition of sucess changes with our ages.
When you were 2 years old, sucess may mean being able to walk on your own two feet without falling over or needing help.
When you were 5, sucess may mean not wetting your bed anymore.
When you were 10, sucess may mean having someone you can call "a friend".
Then, when you were 70, sucess may mean you still have a friend, instead of seeing all of them off in funerals.
When you were 75, sucess may mean not wetting your bed, or maybe you manage to let go of your pride and wear a diper.
When you were 80, sucess may mean being able to walk on your own two feet without falling over, not with walking sticks nor wheelchair.
It comes back in a full circle.
I feared that I might have just unsubbed for too long that I am on the other side of the player's life cycle.
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Table of content of this series is
here
