Zilart Mission 8 complete, Minotaur Re-redux

I haven't focussed on EXP'ing much this past week, and have even taken the past two nights "off", but the week contained enough events to constitute a good time.

Last Friday, Feon and posse (Cozmos, Ishy) kindly offered assistance with ZM8, which was completed pretty quickly although I managed to pull hate off of Feon at a rather inopportune time and died to Kam'lanaut's Light Blade move. Fortunately Kam was near death, so Feon was able to Mijin Gakure away the rest of his HP.

The Pallas pop item dropped while we'd had been killing our way to the BC, so we killed that NM on the way out of Delkfutt. No bracelets, though. -_-

I set up a CoP 2-3 run for the Roughnecks on Monday, which would be my third time completing this mission, and it still retained the fun factor!

Out of curiosity, I decided to be the person who runs solo to the Minotaur & draws the rest of the party in. Although the path is straightforward, the run certainly was an exciting exercise in dodging True Sight agro from the Steg/Taurus mobs.

A dry run (sans Roughnecks) had taught me a valuable lesson that I hadn't learned in my prior completions of this mission: Steg/Taurus line of sight extends upward, meaning they will agro you from he bottom of a ladder if you stand too close to the edge. Unfortunately, this makes it really difficult to gauge the direction of the mob's sight when it stands directly under the ladder unless a tail is sticking out to provide some indication.

My "real" attempt went more smoothly although I still agro'd a Taurus around G-7 on the second map (sometimes they just turn at the worst times). Refusing to start the whole thing over, I decided to just... run my ass off to see what would happen. My shadows were eventually stripped and I took 2-3 hits, but I managed to get up the next ladder without interruption and ran a bit more. Apparently the ladder slowed the mob's pursuit, resulting in enough distance for a despawn. This was definitely a heart-thumping moment, so I had to compose myself at K-5, and the final stretch eventually cleared.

The Minotaur fight itself went smoothly, although Ahmber faced Mortal Ray and was Doomed... apparently without Holy Water since he died at the conclusion of the fight. A few more people died to Mortal Ray that night, due to the same reason, which leads me to believe that, despite reading walkthroughs and warnings, people will just never really look for the move nor bring the curative item until it actually happens to them at least once (and no, I can't say I'm an exception to this... see my recounting of my own CoP 2-3 run ^_^;).

The rest of the mission was completed without a hitch. Rather than farm the Bronze Key, Ahmber had brought his THF and a Skeleton Key (or several, I'm not sure) and managed to pick the lock on the first attempt, which saved us a ton of time.

All in all it was a fun mission, even though there were moments where I just had to telegraph or bark instructions to prevent mishaps or to just enable me to focus on where I was going but simultaneously direct/inform the group. I might have inherited this style from a friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, but I'll try to make more of an attempt to be a bit more respectful with my orders. Hard to do in the heat of the moment sometimes, though.