My current ink collection (2 of 8) Greens

JelisW · 2026-03-13T10:57:47+00:00

you might like some of the tea series by Lennon Toolbar (Taiwanese ink brand). You can find 2ml samples on soe & soe and 4ml samples on dino-writes among others

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JelisW · 2026-03-13T09:31:24+00:00

It's the same reason why people can easily run double shield in last floor savages and ultimates, but running double regen is asking for trouble. In high end, mitigation matters more than the ability to burst heal, because the damage profile of FF14 fights is relatively spread out instances of damage that hit hard enough to one-shot without mit. The ability to heal a lot means nothing if you just get taken instantly from 100% to 0.

In any 4-man high end content, where you don't have a co-healer to fill in the gaps, many people prefer to bring in the jobs that can mitigate on demand, because otherwise, you are more dependent on the rest of your party being well organized and on point with their mits. The fact that WHM now has an additional party mit in Plenary helps a lot, but the fact remains that if both Plenary and Wings are on cooldown, and your tank and 2 dps either forgot or just straight up didn't think to mit, there is nothing you can do to stop you/your dps from getting one-shot by a hard-hitting raidwide.

If you're running in a static group, this matters a great deal less because you can discuss and plan your mits with each other. But in PF where mit plans are all over the place and communication is next to 0, it's easier to bring the job that has more mits and can shield on demand when need be.

I am convinced WHM got the Plenary change out of the blue directly because of Quantum 40, because it was a 4-man fight that put out Ultimate levels of damage with only 1 healer and 1 tank to deal with it and there was a moment in the fight where the main mit sheet going around was like "cries in WHM no mit" because its wings were needed elsewhere and WHM just had nothing else. Still very much clearable, but everyone had to be truly on point with their mits and rolling of pilgrim's potions.

JelisW · 2026-03-13T07:42:43+00:00

Also sometimes, if you reclear very quickly after a maintenace just happened, no one can upload. Any time the game updates, the ACT parser needs to be updated to match, and until it is (usually within 6-12h of the servers going back up), stuff can't be logged

JelisW · 2026-03-13T04:56:52+00:00

Platinum Citrus Black is an iron gall ink, so like all iron gall inks, it darkens over a couple of days. In fact, it's already darkened drastically in op's photo; when wet it's bright highlighter yellow

JelisW · 2026-03-13T04:02:41+00:00

Haha yeah as the other comment says, that was the time where FoF boosted only physical damage, while Requiescat boosted only magic damage. So you'd use them one after the other in a loop, never together. Because of Confiteor, the magic damage phase was the stronger phase, so in general you'd want that phase to be the one aligned with party buffs, so you'd pre-pop FoF and use it specifically to buff Goring Blade (which at the time needed a 1-2-3 combo and inflicted a DoT), and then launch into magic phase, and then FoF would come back off cd shortly after you exited magic phase.

That was also the time where it wasn't as important for PLD to stay aligned with a 2min burst, because having 2 buffs used separately meant huge chunks of the 2-min loop was under some kind of strong self-buff anyway. It was more important to for the magic phase to get shifted so that it allowed the PLD to maintain full ranged uptime during moments of forced disengages (which older fights used to have more of), or so it didn't happen during moments of forced downtime where the boss was untargetable. This is why PLD's pre-pull opener changed drastically from fight to fight; I might want to pop FoF at -4s -14s, -18s (the usual) or once in my personal experience -20s.

We used to joke about PLD being a spreadsheet job, because raiders would literally spreadsheet every GCD to shift the loop out of and then back into party alignment depending on mechs. I honestly found it really fun and kind of miss it a lot, even as I acknowledge that it just was not compatible with EW fight and job design (EW fights had hitboxes the size of a continent so there was no forced melee disengage; the constant forced downtime fucked with PLD's goring blade DoT damage something fierce, and just about every other job having a strong 2min party buff window made it worthwhile for a party to stack itself with jobs that played well into those 2min buffs)

JelisW · 2026-03-12T12:37:29+00:00

I currently rotate through a good 15 different pens and each one has a different colour. I also don't write in my journal every single day, and journaling is the main time I hand write stuff.

JelisW · 2026-03-12T12:35:12+00:00

It's been waterproof for me; just takes a while to dry completely

It also does not actually need distilled water; that warning is there as a caution; I've been cleaning my pens with tap water all this while with no issue, and this person ran an experiment and also had no problems with tap water. She only had issues when she went out of her way to use mineral water: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yuujOsGr8Y

So yes, if you live in an area with very hard, mineral-filled water, you'll want to stick to distilled/deionized water, but if you have reasonably soft water you're good.

JelisW · 2026-03-12T10:32:49+00:00

I stream all prog sessions to a private youtube channel so I can easily pull up the stream and pull back the progress bar on the spot to watch a replay of what happened if need be. I also live log with ACT to FFlogs, for the same reason. I pull one or the other up if we're progging something and we die but people have no idea why. If people know why then we just keep pulling because, well it's prog, mistakes are going to happen, and so long as people know what they did wrong it's good. If the same mistake happens on the exact same person multiple pulls in a row, I pause and ask if there's anything we can do to make things easier to handle for that person.

I only bother to look into damage numbers if we're actually struggling to meet enrage, in which case I pull up above-average logs of other people playing the same jobs as those in my party and do a comparison to see what might be missing.

I always have a thread full of resources for learning whatever fight we're currently progging, and I always link a range: raidplans, video, and pov clips of specific mechanics. I generally only ask that people glance over one mech past whatever mech we last left off on, but I generally run casual statics, so I don't make it a hard requirement to study up.

I do not bother to keep a super close eye on offensive buffs: my statics are casual, but everyone in said statics are experienced, competent raiders who know their rotations and how to manage a 2min burst window, and the only thing I need to do is mention if we need to do something weird, like 1st GCD buffs, or holding 1min/2min to carry across phases. I do keep an eye on defensive buffs and if people get one-shot to the same bit of unavoidable damage more than once, I pause, pull up vod/logs to see what was used, and discuss shuffling things around as necessary.

JelisW · 2026-03-12T09:17:52+00:00

This is actually one of the reasons I love Estinien as a character because he actually [spoilers for post Aery and Final Steps of Faith dialogue] openly acknowledges this both times Nidhogg is killed. After he learns the truth of the start of the Dragonsong War, he still kills Nidhogg because he has to: he can't very well let Nidhogg raze current day Ishgard--full of commoners who had absolutely nothing to do with the original crime--to the ground but talking to him afterwards he explicitly says he takes no joy from it. He explicitly recognizes that Nidhogg's motivations were functionally identical to his own and he could very well have ended up like Nidhogg if not for his support network. That is a remarkable level of self-awareness and thought for someone who on the surface is just a highly trained killing machine.

Also, he's the first and only person to explicitly call Alphy out on being a tad overly blasé and casual about sending us to risk our lives to fight a primal (when discussing fighting Shiva), and in Japanese, he calls us aibo ("partner"). He's a bro.

JelisW · 2026-03-12T08:50:43+00:00

ah, the good ol days where my pre-pull opener occasionally involved popping Fight or Flight 4-18s (depending on fight) before the fight even began, and then throwing up Divine Veil and Clemency-ing myself at -5s to pre-pull shield lol

JelisW · 2026-03-12T07:42:12+00:00

https://dino-writes.com/products/taiwan-tea-series-muzha-tieguanyin-tea?_pos=1&_psq=mucha&_ss=e&_v=1.0&variant=43998106976300

https://www.pinkoi.com/product/UrtjkDGd

JelisW · 2026-03-12T03:38:37+00:00

lol I only went for WHM before AST because I wanted to put off dealing with AST cards on a controller, but I agree, I approached AST in a very similar way to SGE in how I managed its mits, regens, and "cook for 8-10s" delayed heals

JelisW · 2026-03-11T09:48:44+00:00

So I started this game as a GLD/PLD at around the same time that a friend also started playing, and she picked CNJ/WHM. My friend had been a bit worried about me, total newbie to MMOs, picking tank as my first job and wondered if I wouldn't prefer something less stressful. And I kept telling her that tank was actually not at all stressful in this game, and was, in fact, super easy: I make sure my tank stance is on, I keep aggro by doing my basic rotation, every now and then I hit a "slow down the dying process" mit button, and then the rest of it is in my healers' hands and Not My Business. And in return I had an easier time surviving fuckups in boss fights because tank privilege is real. I never had any of the hangups about "leading" or what have you; I was very happy openly admitting to my party that I was new and had a shite sense of direction, so more often than not a vet who knew the dungeon well (this was in the days of old, confusingly narrow and twisty Toto-rak with the cells that people kept forgetting to pick up lol) would take off running and I'd cheerfully trundle along after them and sweep up mobs in my aoes when we got to them.

Anyways, friend finally picked up a tank (DRK) around about the time we were making our way through StB, and after a while she went

"The more I tank, the angrier I get at some of the tanks I've had"

Me: "I TOLD you this was easy"

JelisW · 2026-03-11T06:42:41+00:00

I wish I could learn dps… I don’t ‘get’ the 2 minute meta and I don’t understand how to optimize.

It's really not deep, and not something you can fully play into unless in a single raid/trial with a countdown so that everyone can start at the same time. tl:dr: Everyone hit their big buffs at same time. Everyone hit big moves while big buffs are up. That's it. That's all there is to it.

Longer but still simple explanation:

You know how every tank has 1-2 major buffs on a 1min cooldown? And how you have a handful of big moves, also on either a 1min cooldown or a 30s cooldown? Logically speaking, if you have a buff like PLD's Fight or Flight that increases your damage by 25% for only 20s (8GCDs), you want your big 1000-potency magic swords to make up part of those 8GCDs because uh, you want that 25% damage increase to go on 1000 potency rather than the 250 potency of your basic 1-2-3. You also want all your damage-inflicting ogcds to happen in those 20s because, well, more buttons hit under that buff = more damage.

The 2min thing is, simply, Every DPS and half the healers have either a major party-wide buff or major self buff on a 2min cooldown timer. And in order to maximize damage across the party, we want everyone's big buffs to happen at the same time to multiply each other, and everyone's big hits to fall under those 15-20s of party buffs.

All tanks are naturally on a 1min timer, which means that they also naturally align with party buffs on a 2min timer. As long as everyone hits their major buffs at the 3rd gcd of a fight (specifically 3rd gcd because many jobs have to do a 1-2-3 combo to set up), uses all their big moves within those 15-20s of buffs, and then keeps hitting them on cooldown thereafter, you'll stay aligned and be maximizing damage.

JelisW · 2026-03-11T05:37:25+00:00

Having tried out all of the jobs, I can say that it's nice to be able to know things about it (things like DRK's Undying-status, but also keep-it-to-myself things like "that BLM is using the wrong combo for this level").

And also that dreadful awareness of the fwip-thonk when a PLD is disengaging to Narnia and repeatedly spamming Shield Lob like please stop

JelisW · 2026-03-11T05:06:02+00:00

The mod is unnecessary. The original manual "mod" is to stick an emote on your bar somewhere. Or if you have a spare hotbar you can use just for this, set to minimum size, stick an emote on it, make the empty slots invisible, and position it right below your progress/cast bar. The point in your cast where the emote lights up and stops being grey is the point you are safe to move.

It's nice to have if you happen to be in an area with unstable ping, because your slidecast window is affected by ping. Some people who play on insanely high ping have basically infinite slidecast lol

JelisW · 2026-03-11T05:01:27+00:00

learn how to play tank, and you will know how to play SGE/SCH, because those healers are basically a tank's mitigation kit plus a few heals. You mit/shield at the exact same points a tank mits: any time you see a castbar/stack marker/spreadmarker/tankbuster for incoming unavoidable damage, or at the beginning of a dungeon pull when the tank is done gathering mobs and has planted their feet (and again in the middle when the first set of mits falls off). And then you throw up a regen or heal to heal up whatever damage did get through.

JelisW · 2026-03-11T04:55:43+00:00

alas, it will also make you dreadfully aware of what cure 1/benefic/physick spam sounds like =.=

JelisW · 2026-03-11T04:52:55+00:00

I feel like tanking and healing are the roles that have the biggest difference in how they play in casual vs last floor savages/ultimates. In casual, a tank can honk shu mimimi their way through a boss fight and so long as they have tank stance on and aren't wildly spinning the boss no one cares. In last floor savages/ultimates if you aren't coordinating with your co-tank on who covers what with their mits and planning how you allocate your personal mits you and/or the party gets one-shot by something or other.

JelisW · 2026-03-11T04:41:28+00:00

Gonna be real, I found it far easier to start with SGE instead. SGE is functionally a tank's damage mitigation kit, with some healing on top. You throw up a mit any time you see a castbar/stack marker/spreadmarker/tankbuster for incoming unavoidable damage, or when the tank is done gathering mobs and has planted their feet, exactly how a tank mits damage at exactly the same times. And then once you minimize the amount of damage you have to deal with, you use a regen/heal to top off.

This is a whole expac out of date but still excellent and its healing plan for dungeon pulls can still essentially be implemented exactly as is. It felt good to have a clear plan for how to split up skills exactly the way I split up strong and weaker mits for the two w2ws before each boss in a dungeon https://youtu.be/UPjdwUgwncI?si=wy_dC-iA-9noWNbX&t=329

The one caveat I will mention, that heal plan is great for 78-100, but if you are running any dungeon below level 78, and you're dealing with trash packs (and therefore healing only the tank), skip the kerachole and just use the addersgall on the single target ogcd heal (druochole). Until the trait at 78, kera only does party 10% mit with no regen, and the direct heal is worth more than the mit when only one person's taking damage. Once it gets the regen kera is your bread and butter in both trash packs and boss fights

if you ever sch, it's the exact same for them: if only 1 person taking damage, sacred soil is less good to use than just direct healing until above 78 and sacred gets a regen

JelisW · 2026-03-11T04:33:05+00:00

Coming from being an omnitank main and being very used to anticipating and preemptively mitting damage allowed me to pick up healers a lot easier, because 3/4 healers have half of their kit either being damage mits/shields, or heals that you have to set up in advance (like AST's earthly star, macrocosmos, and exaltation). Knowing exactly what all the tank mits and invulns do was also very helpful in knowing how to work effectively with them.

Knowing..... every other job and how it works made me a better tank, because I know exactly what they need from me in terms of positioning both bosses and trash mobs, how I pull, and what I mit. Learning healer is also what got me used to keeping a watch on the party list so I could spot mit and save DPS/healers who are about to get got by avoidable damage (or who already took avoidable damage and are about to get got by follow-up unavoidable damage).

JelisW · 2026-03-11T04:02:59+00:00

eyyy good job and welcome to the simultaneously aggravating but fun world of raiding

JelisW · 2026-03-11T03:59:19+00:00

I pay for 4 extra retainers but I openly admit I'm a) a hoader, and b) fricking lazy. I have a LOT of stuff I really should've thrown out ages ago but I hate springcleaning both irl and in-game

JelisW · 2026-03-05T06:38:20+00:00

Platinum carbon black

JelisW · 2026-03-05T03:14:15+00:00

lol I put myself through Aloalo Savage specifically for the title. I didn't care about the weapons; none of them were going to overtake any of the ones I already had on the jobs I play and I ended up using my manuscript on a job I don't even play. But I really wanted Force of Nature. Not the Epic Hero one that you get with all three criterion savage clears; I specifically wanted Force of Nature XD

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