So about a week ago, FluffyFoxxie, his Bishop gf, I, and a few low level MMs and Snipers from the IronArrows guild in Bera went on a Scarlion run. Some of you may be protesting already: "What the hell? You have no rushers!" But pretty much every single time I've fought Scarlion it's been stuffed completely full of ranged classes, partially due to my BL being composed almost entirely of archers and bishops. What we usually did was to have the Bishop lure the boss to the right when it is Weapon Cancelled, saving the rest of us from being run over. We'd done it before. Between Foxxie and I, I figured we could easily down it in ~30 minutes even without the others. I was expecting it to be a smooth run.
But the run was anything but smooth. Right as the third body was summoned, one of the Snipers died. He got a res. Then our Bishop died. This killed our original plan. This time a Sniper and a MM died as Scarlion made his way over to the left side of the map, leaving only the three of us. I climbed over and Recoiled to the right side, hoping to fight it in a way that I've fought Bigfoot in a party before - attack from both sides, luring it back and forth and keeping it from reaching either edge. For the next 25 minutes, Scarlion angrily stomped back and forth across the map, trying to hit those assholes that kept shooting it in the back. We couldn't simply stand there and tank damage, because we had to be able to climb up to the top platform quickly in case he walked too close. So it was a matter of knowing when to retreat up and when to climb back down and contribute to the fight. More than once I had to Recoil back to the left side of the map to avoid it and also to MW the party. But it worked. Slowly but surely, the fat animatronic cat's health whittled down to about 15% with about 14 minutes left on the clock.
Then I dropped the ball. I had only brought about 500 pots, not expecting the run to take anywhere near as long as it had. I had a backup of 200 Power Elixirs in my inventory but I wasn't paying close enough attention to my supply and didn't react fast enough when my Ales hit 0. Then the other Sniper just flat ran out of pots, leaving only FluffyFoxxie to solo Scarlion as a MM. Let me tell you, this is terrifying as pomegranate. He is impossible to pin without a Rush-like ability when he uses Weapon Cancel so you have to jump over him as he approaches. You have to climb up to the top of the map and jump over him. He's fat and huge, and he jumps up and down repeatedly like the motherpineappleer thinks he's playing basketball. So anyway, there was nothing for the rest of us to do but watch as he shot and puppeted and made that leap of faith. Over and over again. Eventually I got booted by to the 10 minute respawn timer. It wasn't until there was about 1 minute left on the clock when I finally saw in party chat: "Victory!"
I think a lot of people would probably find an experience like that extremely frustrating. Taking twice as long as planned to kill a boss, having to improvise a really inefficient method of killing it, and dying so close to the end. But I had a blast. It was orders of magnitude more exciting than routine Zakum / CWK / Pap runs for money, even if it was a disaster. I really enjoyed the challenge, and the uncertainty that we were going to succeed. It would have been impossible to simply stand in place and blast away as usual. But I know many people enjoy doing scheduled boss runs with a group, though I wouldn't bother at all if there wasn't a fair amount of profit to it. So I'm wondering, do you think it's more fun when you can quickly beat the hell out of a boss and reap the rewards, or when everything goes haywire and you really have to give it your 100% to eke out a victory? Discuss.
