About to Have Dinner First

For the first time in my gaming history, I’ve joined a raiding group working on high end content in an MMO. It has been a wonderful experience gaming alongside my brothers (one of who is leading the group) as well as some fascinating new friends who joined specifically for this content. We’re working on Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers first raid tier, Eden Savage, and while we’ve not completed the tier yet, we’re having a good time working on it.

A quick rundown of what this content is for those not familiar: The (Savage) content in FFXIV are special versions of fights in which a party of eight players are expected to handle complex mechanics, deal with a boss that has much more health than normal bosses, and have a number of extra surprises thrown at them that the average player doesn’t have to deal with. It’s optional content that can lead to bragging rights, achievement accolades, special treasure rewards like mounts, minions, and music, as well as access to dyeable versions of outfits non-raiding players won’t be able to access for some time (Glamour is the true end game). They push the limits in terms of how much damage players can do as a team, what healers and tanks can survive through, all while dancing to the rhythm of the fight’s design.

It’s been a good experience dealing with my first raiding team. The eight of us are working on fight three now after spending five weeks wearing down the difficulty surrounding fight two (we cleared fight one our first week together). There’s been annoyance, snarling, and an occasional need to just step away for a few minutes with the frustration of how challenging these fights are to newbie raiders, but there’s nothing quite like the thrill of hearing all of us cheer in glee when we knock out a boss. So many of us are new to raiding overall or new to raiding in FFXIV that our expectations are all over the map in terms of what we hope to accomplish, but we’re learning the quirks of jobs, of our role within the team, and of where we stand as a blossoming community.

Oh, the name? Yeah, our raid team is named About to Have Dinner First, shorthanded to Dinner First in most content. Blame our lead, Enthnal for that. When he was organizing this party, he asked me to come up with names. I obliged by offering to come up with names after I eat, because I was quote “about to have dinner first.” And he Dad joked that into our charter. So here we are, Dinner First. Stranger names have come out from worse.

Since we’ve been keeping at this for so long, I’ve now started to make some art to help identify us better. To give us a sense of community and growing as a team. Here’s our first desktop banner just finished today:

I’m rather proud of it. The icons on the top are our jobs in the order of tanks, healers, and then DPS. There’s more I’d like to add such as a banner for the trials we’ve cleared together, the challenges we’ve beaten up, and a list of our roster. All of that will come in time, no rush. We’re off to have this boss fight for Dinner First.

-null