Feels like the 1st time...

Dynamis Windy last night. If it seems like we do this zone a lot keep in mind that there are only 10 Dynamis zones total, and some of them you don’t wanna touch without a big turnout and a lot of prep.

In my opinion Windy is the hardest of the cities. Yagudo have an AoE stun move that they like to use, the statues like to sleep and dispel a lot and the trap pulls are just very inconvenient. Not to mention that all the houses have to be sacrifice pulls. I suppose I should discuss those.

Dynamis isn’t like normal zones. All that’s there to begin with are statues. Getting hate from a statue causes enemies to spawn; if the spawned enemies are close enough to the next statue it will link and you can end up with a nasty little chain reaction going on. Now in Dynamis you do need to kill specific enemies, whether it be for time extension, to weaken the final boss or simply to satisfy a condition to spawn the boss. Unfortunately, the specific mob you need is usually buried in enough other monsters to wipe out your group several times over. The sacrifice (aka “sac”) pull is a strategy designed to get past that. First of all, in a sac nobody except the puller and claimer can do anything to prevent getting hate from that giant group of mobs. A thief/ninja will get hate from the entire group, and then run away with all the bad-guys chasing him to a safe place to die and reraise. The claimer will use a non-damaging way to get hate (usually “Provoke”) to get hate from the specific bad-guy we need and have it chase them back to the main group. After the thief has died, the rest of the group can engage and kill the bad guy. If the pull was clean, all of the other bad guys will return to their original spawn points and everyone is safe. If the pull was dirty, all of the other bad guys will come kill the main group and dance on our corpses; usually this results in a called wipe so we can move on.

Enough about that. Last night we were fortunate enough to have some infrequent players join us, as well as a new guy to our group, and we like new guys. As always, there were some hairy moments, but if there weren’t what would be the point of playing? This was our 1st run with Oakami as our run leader (with Vexes giving a great deal of assistance), Oak and Vex being a real-life husband and wife team so they can talk shop without having to resort to Skype. They did quite well actually. No real change from our usual strategy for this zone, followed the same path and such. For whatever reason, the pace was much better than usual, maybe it was just that we didn’t wipe at all. Well, we got the win (which noone needed except from a morale standpoint) and even had 40ish minutes left to farm! Felt like old times, we used to do this every run when I 1st joined.

Suffice it to say that if we can keep up this kind of performance we may be able to reclaim our winning ways. Now NewDawn has been around a lot longer than I’ve been a member, but even in my time I have won every zone except Tavnazia. We want to get all of our members back to that point. Tavnazia is sort of a trophy point for people who do Dynamis, and we all want to be able to sport the “I Killed Diablos and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt!”. We’ll see…