It’s another Final Fantasy XIV post, I’m afraid, but I feel compelled to share the experience I just had, as I think it’s something that’s going to stick with me for some time.

A bit of context, first, for those who don’t play. My character is primarily a Black Mage, which is part of the group known as “DPS” (damage per second” or damage dealers. I don’t have a lot of health, but my spells do hit hard and do a considerable amount of damage. When playing as a member of a party, I rely on the “tank” character to keep the enemies’ attention off me, and occasionally the assistance of a healer to keep my health topped up if I do happen to get hit by something. For the most part, my responsibility is to avoid getting hit as much as possible, and to simultaneously ensure that I’m doing as much damage as possible.

I’m at level 50 on my Black Mage, which means I’m no longer gaining experience and have instead been gathering better and better equipment. My average item level is now 71, which is significantly stronger than where you are when you first hit 50 — though the effectiveness of all said equipment is scaled down accordingly if you happen to run a dungeon that’s lower than level 50.

Which, as it happens, is exactly what I was doing earlier. I decided to run the dungeon Cutter’s Cry, because I was well behind on my “Hunting Log” for the Immortal Flames Grand Company, and wanted to actually polish it off and make some progress. (In the game, your Hunting Log is a checklist of specific monsters to defeat, with rewards on offer for completing items on the list, and larger rewards on offer for completing a complete difficulty rank. The Grand Company is an organisation tied to one of the three main city-states in the game, and is effectively where your character pledges their allegiance to.)

Our run through Cutter’s Cry didn’t go as smoothly as it could have done. Our tank — the guy who stands at the front and gets hit, as well as the guy who generally leads jaunts through dungeons — wasn’t especially skilled, and was having trouble maintaining the attention of monsters that really wanted to chomp on our healer’s testicles. I spent a lot of the dungeon casting my Sleep spell to take a bit of the heat off the party and allow us to concentrate on a single monster at a time, and it overall seemed to work pretty well, with a few minor mishaps along the way.

We eventually reached the dungeon’s boss monster Chimera, albeit with a different healer to the one we started with, who disconnected. Our first attempt failed miserably in a matter of seconds. The second, however, is where things got interesting and exciting.

It was going reasonably well for a while. We were doing decent damage to the Chimera, and the tank was successfully maintaining the attention of the enemy, allowing the party’s Bard and I to pelt it from a distance with arrows and fireballs respectively.

Then something went horribly wrong. The tank didn’t quite move far enough to get out of the path of one of the Chimera’s special attacks, and hit the deck. The Bard followed shortly afterwards, leaving just me and the party’s healer to deal with a by now very pissed off Chimera.

I thought this would almost inevitably be the end, but on a slightly selfish whim I decided to see what I could do. We’d already whittled the beast’s health down to an amount that certainly looked doable, so I started alternating running away from it and flinging a few spells at it whenever it stopped to try and do one of its special attacks. The healer cottoned on quickly to what I was doing, and supported my efforts while the tank and Bard lay on the floor — the fight’s too hectic to make raising party members practical, particularly if the tank’s down.

The Chimera’s health bar continued to deplete, and I somehow remained standing, successfully dodging each and every one of his special attacks and only occasionally taking damage from an occasional claw swipe. Meanwhile, I’d continue to electrocute him with my Thunder spells — which causes him to continually take small amounts of damage over a short period of time — and pelt him with fireballs whenever I had enough distance between us to make casting practical and safe-ish.

Finally, his health was into the “holy shit, are we actually going to pull this off?” territory — and conveniently, the party’s Limit Break bar was fully charged at this point. (The Limit Break bar builds up gradually through combat, and any one party member can trigger it once it’s charged high enough for a powerful special ability according to what class they are — in the case of Black Mage, it summons, as you might expect, a devastatingly destructive spell.)

“Limit Break!” called the party members. I was skeptical as to whether or not it would do enough damage, but I put some distance between the Chimera and I, waited for the perfect moment and then began casting.

The screen exploded in fire and my speakers erupted with the sounds of falling meteorites… and then there was a deafening screech as the beast collapsed to the floor and dissipated into a cloud of aether. The Chimera was down!

“Holy shit,” said the fallen Bard afterwards as the healer helped him to his feet. “Good job.”

I don’t often like to toot my own horn, but in this case? Yeah, I have to agree.