Death and Challenge

I suppose you could say I'm spoiled because I have the ability to raise III myself everytime I die but I don't mind death, and I didn't long before I had the ability to cast r2 and r3. If you ever wanna test your ability to cope with death, I suggest you level bst to 20, that's a true test right there. What I mean to say is I don't mind an honest death, a death where everyone involved knew what they were getting into well before the fight, everyone knew their role, everyone put forth their best effort, and overall an honest attempt was made yet the result was unsuccessful. An honest death is acceptable to me, as opposed to a stupid death which I'll save for another post. These honest deaths are made possible because we're presented with a true challenge.

Bermont, Kiris, and I dead in an attempt to trio a rdm AF3 NM.

Challenge is something I've begun to experience ever since I started getting more into the Chains of Promathia mission series. This is a huge huge change from when I did the Zilart mission series. In Zilart, we were able to walk through those missions in 2 days with the help of a few level 75's for the missions. And once Jean, Merc, and I were done with our 2-day sky run, we went back and brought 10 or so other LS members up to sky too with little difficulty. Zilart is a series where you can have your hand held through it, CoP presents you with a true challenge. First off, the majority of its missions are level capped, right from the start, so there's no lvl 75 hand-holding, everyone's on equal ground for nearly every mission. Nextly for the level caps imposed on you for missions, the difficulty of the missions are understandably much harder. These missions require proper setups, strategy, and coordination to get through, even the very beginning missions, the promyvion runs, require a fair amount of effort to get through.

Moogle Army's Successful Sky Completion

CoP has often been criticized as being too hard and because of this it has been viewed as a failure of an expansion pack. I agree with this to a certain extent, I agree that the level cap put on some missions doesn't neccessarily match the level of experience required to complete a mission. For example on the promyvion runs, a fresh group of players who just hit lvl 30 technically could do the promyvion runs, but they most likely wouldn't succeed just due to the level of strategy and effort required to get through it. In that sense, CoP can be viewed as almost too difficult. However looking at the number of people who do proudly wear a CoP ring or walk around Sea, obviously it's not imposs ible to get through CoP, just challenging. Also due to the level caps it required people to have gear for a lvl 30 job, and a lvl 40 job, and a lvl 50 job, and so on which also frustrated many players.

I recently had the opportunity to do a Phominua Aquaducts run (CoP 2-3) with two linkshell members Jedimasta, and Xenojin. This was the first mission in a long long time where I felt unsure about the outcome. I was alittle unprepared going into t he actual fight as I wasn't expecting to be warped to the area with the Minotaur and have him immediately start pummeling on us but it was a fun fight. We did lose both a pld and a nin during the fight because of an instant-death ability that only has a random chance of being prevented but we did successfully kill the Minotaur. Overall my experience with CoP has been enjoyable. I'm not even finished with the second chapter and the story already shows some promising things to come, also the missions not only being something completely new to me but providing a real challenge just makes the series even better. I look forward to progressing in CoP.

CoP 2-3 Minotaur Fight