#serpentium raid

[throwingawayhailstones]

New raid dropped and it's kinda peak???? (party 2.2 (i actually finished the story))

yea ok holy fuck kill Barkat. KILL (spoilers btw obv)

The story was honestly pretty sweet. Even though it's a raid boss you don't actually fight the conductor in 20-5. He says he's not the combat type so he was just gonna let them go, but turns out the doors won't open until he finishes a proper performance. Them's the breaks. So the gang play some music with him and take him through therapy. it's really cool. He's like "i'm just an android i do i really count as alive?" and Eve is like "well you can hold a conversation far better than the androids outside and you can also create art. Even if you aren't a Nasod that's alive enough for me :)" I love this man i SWEAR TO GOD BARKAT IF YOU KILL HIM FOR LETTING THEM THROUGH I'M GOING TO BE REAL UPSETTI

I love him so much

Little guy discovers free will omg

AYO ADD NOT THE NEANDERTHAL ALLEGATIONS

KILL HIM EVE

The 20-4 story was really funny with Haivan realizing the trick to getting past the security system right before the communicator broke and Add and Eve getting all upset because that dumbass Haivan figured something out before we could wdh wdh

Eve is great in this chapter btw. She's honestly the star of the whole raid even though it's Lu's region. I lover her heart to heart with the Conductor and I love her getting snippy.

(anyways turns out since it was a "simple" machine they just asked it what the passcode was and it was like lol sure gimme a sec)

Oh gee a chapter called "Manipulate" I sure wonder what's going on in there

Ah..

DIGG NOO

(btw for context, he was one of Lu's closest followers and went by "Digg" rather than his birth name "Tarith" to distance himself from his piece of shit dad)

GOD I HOPE

THEY KILLED CIEL NOOOO (he's fine (probably))

Also next raid is a cool dragon or something. Apparently Barkat kicked the Tortas out of their territory to excavate some fossilized dragon bones that were in there. That's why they've got that cool elevator lol.

HMMM AISHA I WONDER WHO WOULD BE EVIL ENOUGH AND POWERFUL ENOUGH TO ORGANIZE A RITUAL SACRIFICE OF THAT SCALE??? SURELY NOT SOME TWO-FACED BITCH??? Barkat's reckless mining operations poisoned the land, she reduced Lu's castle to a crater to repurpose the raw materials, and now she's (might) kill all the people too? What does Lu even have to come back to??

On a side note, I like how in the recent storylines they didn't forget how "morally questionable" (evil) some of the gang and their allies are. While exploring the land of steel, the Tortas were slaughtering anyone who questioned them. They didn't suddenly become good people now that they've adopted Raven as their boss.

Remember that all the Ikus of Magmelia are terrified of the Torta. The only reason they are even alive is because Vasili (Incoolord) convinced Ricardo to let them go in exchange for their vision. (This is why all the Ikus in Karis' army or in Magmelia either have scars on their faces or blindfolds).

In the Monaterra storyline we have Ciel openly and proudly talking about ways he'd efficiently kill his targets, and it's like "oh right he was an Assassin. He worked with the Lanox underworld."

Raven and Elesis were mercenaries, they've definitely killed people for money.

Aisha is a Landar mage and not a single one of them is normal (except my goat Yuria).

Even though Tir is an ally for the Abyss storyline, he still absolutely cannot be trusted and would bet on the gang's deaths for a laugh.

Aren openly invited Ran into his body because of his treatment in the Xin capital. He may not have forseen everything that would've happened, but he definitely knew that a lot of people in the palace (many of them innocent servants) were going to die.

Haivan plotted for Aegrip and Berthe to kill eachother during their rampage and isn't sorry about it even though he'll admit that the current outcome where the capital doesn't get turned to rubble was preferable.

Add was openly talking about taking apart the Conductor which they just made friends with.

Ain is STILL RACIST

Interestingly, this contrasts with Elboy's decision to do everything he can to spare the baby Myuriconus in 18-2 (Abyss). He feels bad after seeing how the Magmelia Dream Demons are mourning Karis and doesn't want to kill if it he doesn't have to. The gang follow him even though Ciel or Raven or even Elesis absolutely would have killed it in such a desperate situation (they were actively dying due to being in the Abyss) yet they still followed him because they trust Elsword as their leader and moral compass (even if they make fun of him in the down time)

[throwingawayhailstones]

New raid dropped and it's kinda peak??? (P1: gameplay)

no like actually it's really good. There's a dps check in 20-4 phase 1, but it's not very high and it's mostly a matter of maintaing a laser buff. (3 pillars pop up and dps can f1 them for a 10 second massive dps buff). The mechanics are pretty interesting, and the patterns are fair (for the most part). Though i've only cleared up to 20-4 D3 (we could've cleared 20-5-1 but it's very focus intensive and people were getting really tired)

Difficulty wise i'd put it around crosso with a similar dps requirement for D3, but for D1 it's doable with people who can dps in Abyss raid. The main difficulty of the raid is learning and executing the mechanics, and situational awareness. Doing this without a voice chat shot caller seems pretty hard, though not impossible.

There's this very interesting trade off in this raid where you can play risky if you and your party members are prepared for it, or you can play safe for a significantly easier experience. In 20-4, there's multiple times where there's a huge criss-cross of lasers spanning the whole screen which seems super daunting and unfair until you learn that:

you can i-frame them

the lasers appear based on a debuff that stacks when you get hit.

If your team is willing to i-frame continuously to survive the laser, you can play as risky as you'd like just be prepared to chug and chain skills because those lasers hurt. (knowing how to rotate in order to maintain full i-frames is a skill worth learning)

Alternatively you can play at a distance, being careful to dodge the worst attacks and keeping away from the boss if your stacks get too high to make the raid a lot easier. Your dps may be a lot lower but if your team consists of classes with worse i-frame options or worse mp and cd support, this may actually end up being faster.

This trend sort of continues in 20-5-1. If you get hit you stack a debuff and eventually have to place an attack somewhere. The difference is this time if it hits the boss the boss heals A LOT so you are forced to respect it. If your party is very good at predicting the patterns then you should barely heal the boss at all. You can play risky and stack the debuff a lot, but in exchange you have to spend a lot of time away from the boss placing the attack down. The boss, however, has a lot of attacks that are sorta "time wastey" so is this really so much of a trade off?

Stuff like this imo super cool. If you can make D1, then I highly suggest you try the raid out yourself. It's very scary and chaotic but once you figure things out it's actually quite fun. Funnily enough I think this is the only content where the CP requirement seems too high for what is needed to clear. We were making good time where only 2 people had 13m on their dps setup, the rest were at 10-11m even some dps.