iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 19/10/2026

Related to last posts, kind of a cool milestone today too

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 19/10/2026

I am very slowly getting better at this.

A screengrab from Discord.

"Actually, looks like that run was my new best parse on 2/4 of the main bosses. Still all green but I only have 4 Valor rays so I'll take it. No surprise that TS is still my worst lmao."

There is an embedded screengrab from FF Logs, showing best parses of ~38 on Trinity Seeker, ~49 on The Queen's Guard, 70 on Trinity Avowed, and 45 on The Queen. The former two are showing "not locked in," meaning they were just earned and subject to change.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 17/10/2026

Who would win, one roegadyn-turned-primal, or 24 absolute nerds and their fairies?

A bunch of Scholars standing on the steps at the end of Delubrum Reginae, the classic clear photo. Lots of Eos, Selene, and Carbuncle are all around the picture.

A party Finder listing for "Oops, all Scholar!" It's a 24-player run of Delubrum Reginae with all 24 players playing Scholar.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 28/09/2026

My Aetherwells. They have every disease.

My AetherWell Array for the DawnTrail relic. One of them is maxed and the other three are nowhere close.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 28/09/2026

Ranked CC is completely dead. I've had people tell me "You can't wait until too late in the season to queue, everyone's already done." Well, apparently "just over two weeks into a four-month season" is already too late.

Me showing a "More than 30m" average queue time for ranked Crystalline Conflict.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 26/09/2026

Woke up at 7am this morning for an omnifarm in Bozjan Southern Front. Got to make a cute purple glam for a job I never play (terrible shot, I know), and got a decent amount of loot

A way-too-zoomed-out shot of Oryn as a Dancer, wearing an outfit colored complimenting shades of deep purple and lavender.

A few thousand Bozja fragments, a few hundred members, 100 bronze coins, two mounts, two parasols, three emotes, and half a dozen orchestrion rolls.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 19/09/2026

yoo, p sure that's a new record for me! 6 kills as solo-SCH is a lot. SCH is an assist machine but doesn't kill-confirm well. Most total damage of anyone on the team too,

Me finishing a Frontline game with 6 kills, 6 deaths, and 26 assists, with 1,075,322 total damage dealt.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 13/09/2026

It's definitely not just me having issues, but it sure seems like SE either won't or can't get it under control quickly. Hopefully they will eventually.

Eight "recovery from technical difficulties" messages for specific servers, all in less than three days.

DownDetector showing that there was a big spike in reports of outage earlier today.

A screengrab from is xiv up dot com, showing massively elevated pageviews as of around 3pm Alaska time today.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 13/09/2026

Unlikely any of them will see it, but just in case: Congrats to the five first-timers in that Puppet’s Bunker a few minutes ago! Ignore the haters. That is a *tough* raid, and tbch we did perfectly fine for having >20% of the raid being fresh. Even I misplayed several times and I “knew” the raid!

[20:20]Sushi Cat * Excalibur earns the achievement "Uncanny Valley"!
[20:20]Vesper Pentaghast * Hyperion earns the achievement "Uncanny Valley"!
[20:20]Andralora Darkfyre * Hyperion earns the achievement"s Uncanny Valley"!
[20:20]Mairi Vidya * Lamia earns the achievement "DUncanny Valley"!
[20:20]Lumi Arseyl* Lamia earns the achievement "d Uncanny Valley"!

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 05/09/2026

For the "Krile's Attire" on MogStation, the hair is part of the outfit - and shares a dye channel with the skirt?!

An official picture of Krile's Attire, "showing the default color and metallic blue." The only real noticeable difference is that the character's hair in the latter is bright blue.

An official picture of Krile's Attire, showing three different dye pattern on three different characters. While it's less obvious in this shot compared to the last one (because of the color choices, which I'm sure are deliberate), the skirt and the character's hair are all the same color.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 04/09/2026

Haaaaahaha, someone else in another server (probably inadvertently) rubber-ducked me on why this bothers me so much. (Also, yeah, typos. We hates them. I swear I do actually know the difference between their and there.)

It's not any one thing. It's the general negative attitude toward newer players (using "newb" as a term of disparagement), while also thinking of themselves super highly.

The lack of understanding that not everyone can choose to run subs, and the suggestion that anyone who doesn't is just bad at the game and deserves to not be able to afford stuff. Likewise, the idea of playing "10-12 hours per day" as an expectation, not as an anomaly, and only even acknowledging that some people can't do that once explicitly challenged. (IDK if you read so far as the imgur album I linked downthread in that BlueSky post; frankly, I wouldn't expect you to.)

The attitude that they should be allowed to join raids at prog points they haven't reached, because they're just that good at the game. The whole idea that "prog lying" is something that they should be allowed to do, to the point that that the term itself is disparaging of them. (Note that many of these people will enforce prog points for others joining their raids, for good reason - so it's a very "rules for thee but not for me" attitude.)

I mean, there's more. But the whole thing feels very "gamergate subculture, broadly construed" to me - right down to the word choices, but more relevantly in the sense that these people think very highly of themselves. They think of themselves as the "strongmen" (term used gender-neutrally) who need to lead the weak plebs to greatness. Anyone who doesn't (or can't) do things there way is playing wrong. Anything that prevents them from doing what they want to do is bad. ToS and rules are just their to stop them from being as great as they can be.

...that whole screed is going to sound absolutely hyperbolic if you're not familiar with the subculture. To be clear, I'm really not being hyperbolic in any major sense. Reddit mods see this stuff all the time, for example. If we did out job right, nobody else ever saw it. Which leads to many people thinking I'm exaggerating. But yeah, I have learn…

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 04/09/2026

I will add these bit, just to make it clear where I stand on the matter.

(Like, for the record, I also dislike the over-reliance on Tomestone in the western game, even if I understand why it exists. But also, holy entitlement.)

Honestly, thats the one and only thing I really hate about Eureka, Bozja, and OC: It’s the one place in the entire game where elitism like this is truly widespread. Even lots of people who’re otherwise really helpful in this sort of content are sometimes guilty of it—and they seem completely oblivious to the fact they’re even doing it.

Well, that and also BLU. BLU has the same problem. But tbh the BLU community and the field op community actually overlap a lot.

It’s like when you spend so long in a certain community that you start to think the common beliefs and mannerisms of that community are in fact universally applicable to everyone?

Yeah.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 04/09/2026

Might be taking a break from FF14 again. Got back into field op stuff, first with FTB and then going back to DRS - and then remembered why I got out of it in the first place. I know most of the game isn't like this, but this one aspect is and it's kind of offputting. Turns me off the game, broadly.

But yeah, the fact that people, including at least two server admins:
- seriously argued that “gil can never be a real barrier when one sub gets you like 100k a day. it's not a real currency” (direct quote)
- made dubious boasts about how easily they make gil, so seemingly ludicrous that even others in the conversation called them out on it
- seemed to admit they buy or sell RMT gil, or at least know enough about the RMT gil market to immediately put a dollar value on 6 billion gil
- bragged about their own ability to “prog skip,” and spoke disparagingly of tools like Tomestone used to prevent prog lying
- also spoke disparagingly of the term “prog lying” itself
- unironically used words like “cuck” (to mean “nerf” or “weaken”), etc.
- spoke disparagingly of “newbs,” suggesting they shouldn’t even try to contribute to the raids and instead should just stay out of the way and let the strong players handle it (this bit was from a different conversation, but same broad community and many of the same people)
…all aligns perfectly with one particular subculture.
It’s not a subculture with which I particularly identify, nor one I feel particularly comfortable in. But I do enjoy the content - and unfortunately, if one desires to do field op raids (or BLU) stuff in FF14, that’s just the prevalent subculture in that community. It often stays a bit “stealth” (at least outside of ABBA?) so not everyone sees it immediately upon joining the community. But it’s always there, and occasionally has a mask-off moment.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 30/08/2026

I was reviewing the logs to see what I could have done better, and one thing I do is check the "slow deaths" (because if someone died to damage over a period of time, that's a place I could probably have helped). In this fight it's mostly one-shots - but this one was funny to me.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 30/08/2026

Also, holy wow that Rapid Sequence Particle Beam hurts. I'm still learning how to read logs so idk how this compares to eg. the raidwides in M9S (since I haven't done M9S since learning to access this bit of the logs), but man. That's a lot of damage coming out in a matter of seconds!

Me parsing a 93 in heals, with 5.23 million combined healing and mitigation.

1.18 million of the healing and mitigation in the previous image was just Rapid-sequence Particle Beam.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 30/08/2026

Did my first Chaotic Cloud prog today. Honestly, I didn't play super well but I'm satisfied for being completely fresh.

Just reached the start of Phase 2. I feel like I have Phase 1 down pretty well. The lasers are the only thing I still can't easily read myself, and those are doritoable. I did P1 at least once deathless and doomless.

Unfortunately, I also died a lot to a combination of lag and my own stupidity

I think I only killed others once, though, and it was a particular situation: I had a hand going off immediately after the "pull + out/in doom" mechanic, which meant the whole raid was clustered together 2 seconds before my hand went off.

At that point, I should have made a beeline for a wall, but I got distracted because several party members had picked up Dooms during that mech and I was trying to cleanse them. I didn't realize my timer was so short and ended up inflicting more dooms than I cleansed.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 29/08/2026

I guess I am, since you've made it so none of my glam plates work without taking a 5-minute diversion and also half my jobs are unusable.

Ruvoll Ja: Are you wearing that to the party?

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 29/08/2026

Okay, genuinely, fuck this SE. You encourage me to change my look but you make it impossible to do. It's objectively not a big deal, but who designed this shit? It seems like the systems designers were deliberately going out of their way to sabotage what the story writers were trying to do.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 29/08/2026

I'm sorry, are you implying something?

A screenshot from the DawnTrail Allied Society Capstone quest. The character Ruvoll Ja is saying "But before that, why don't you change into something less dusty from travel? This is a party, after all, and we'd like you to relax."

Notably, my character is still wearing the bikini glam I used for MoonFire Faire.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 29/08/2026

Was not planning on running DRS today, but someone in NN mentioned that they needed 2 more people for an anyprog. DRS anyprogs are "up to four hours."

Savage Queen of Swords II

Clear Delubrum Reginae (Savage) 5 times.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 23/08/2026

I haven’t been responding to these for a few reasons both ic (Oryn isn’t *entirely* ace but she’s a good ways in that direction) and ooc, but here. No bingo but a fair bit!

The bingo card from the top post, with 14 of the 24 boxes marked off. One of them, “Academically Inclined,” is marked more heavily than the others.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 16/08/2026

Honestly the logs might be bugged tho

Me parsing a zero yet not being the worst in the raid, because someone else also parsed zero with less than half my DPS.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 16/08/2026

What lag does to a person. I didn't even realize this was possible lmao.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 12/08/2026

Amazing reference in the Moonfire event

A line from the Moonfire Faire event, with Fourchenault reprising Alisaie's famous line about Alphinaud: "The boy just isn't very buoyant."

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 28/07/2026

After just under two weeks of near-daily prog, I've done it! And deathless and ruinless on the final boss too!

A screenshot of a lot of Final Fantasy 14 characters in a diapidated library. A large disc engraved with cryptic symbols stands prominently in the background, glowing ominously.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 25/07/2026

Really shitty day irl (for reasons discussed on my main, not gonna talk about it on this account). But really shitty day of FTB prog too. Magitaur prog wiped twice to Dead Stars, and if that weren't bad enough it was also just a rotten group. First bad experience I've ever had in this server.

A portion of Letters there didn't get the loot from the 50/50 room because some of the players stealthed past the Manticore but others got stuck behind the silence orb blocking the door, and by the time those latter people got there the others had already looted and left eta: and the manticore had turned around in a way that made it impossible to stealth past it.
Really kinda selfish tbh.
Like, I could run through the silence orb if you don't want heals, but I figure you do.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 21/07/2026

Been a very bad day irl (covered in several long, ranty threads on my main) - and I thought I'd blow off some steam with tonight's FTB prog, but I've come to the realization that I may have to stop doing that too. The tl;dr is that there are rather few progs that suit my needs:

Things I don’t like in anyprogs of FTB:
People coming in blind. As in, not just fresh (which is good and expected), but rather with absolutely zero studying. Like “not even knowing meteors exist in Tablet, much less having any idea how to resolve it, and expecting hosts to explain it in incredible depth while everyone waits.,
Hosts not bothering to explain much in Dead Stars. Like, yeah, I acknowledge the odds of a fresh prog clearing Dead Stars on the first pull are exceptionally low—but I’ve literally had hosts say to the raid “We’re going to die here so I’m not actually going to bother explaining much. Here’s a sentence or two about snowballs and half a sentence about fire towers. Let’s pull.”
Anyway, I just had my first deathless clear of Tablet. I think it’s time for me to start signing up for exclusively DS prog, because fresh prog just doesn’t ever provide any serious practice on DS.

Also just had a pull where (a) a pranged who wasn't paying attention early-pulled Tablet; and (b) one of the stacks was on the wrong side and killed half the raid.
Former is basics of the basics, imo, and should be something that never happens after, like HW. Latter is totally fair for a fresh prog, but not helpful to my own learning.
It's like dying to plumes when you're on gaols prog. Nobody would blame a total rookie for dying to plumes, but someone who's on gaols prog is not going to learn much from being in that group.

Second one ended fast as a very anticlimactic enrage on tablet (which I'd never seen before), which the raid lead said was primarily on account of the early-pull. I trust the lead's judgment on that.
Anyway. I'm glad I finally got a deathless clear of Tablet (which I knew I could do but am happy to have finally executed), but overally a rather disappointing day of prog. I don't feel I actually learned anything.
Next time.

Aaaand I'm running into the issue of: Almost all progs are either anyprogs or MD+ progs. I see a few DS progs (I'm signed up for on on Thursday), but they're few and far between.

Can't join an MD+ prog until I've seen MD, and most anyprogs don't reach MD. (I know it happens but I've now done over half a dozen entries of anyprog and only one got past snowballs; I have seen as many anyprogs wipe on Tablet as I've seen reach Fire Towers.) So, actually getting any practice on DS is going to be a challenge, it looks like.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 16/07/2026

Well, that was inefficient. Finally got the last one in a relevel CE after my first FTB prog. (I didn't play super well.)

Lots of demiatma, way more of some colors than was needed.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 15/07/2026

What the fuck is that? (Possible #7.5spoiler? I seriously don't know.)

Me flying over Yak T'el at night. There are some low clouds but the sky above is clear and there is a large, pink object glowing in the clear sky. It seems much larger and brighter than a star.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 13/07/2026

On today's episode of "things we do for glam": I just augmented an i50 piece of armor.

Me in Mor Dhona, augmenting the Scholar's Culottes into Augmented Scholar's Culottes.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 09/07/2026

This is almost my FSH glam lmao. I’m honestly flattered to have had a similar thought as a great artist.

My character in Final Fantasy 14, wearing an outfit very similar to the one Spindle’s Original Character is wearing in the quoted post. My character is, sadly, not a Viera.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 06/07/2026

I usually genuinely enjoy roulette in which there are a few wipes, as I've mentioned recently. This is the exception to that. Nobody was learning or improving here.

Jesus everkeeping Christ. Level 69 DRK in Shisui of the Violet Tides, wearing gear between i245 and i270 but not all of it was tank gear. NB: Min-IL for Shisui is i245, so this guy was very slightly above min-il but of course that's offset by his jewelry not being tank jewelry.

Kept trying to do the gigapull (you know which one I'm talking about), kept dying, kept running back and re-pulling before the DPS even got back there. I was burning all my cooldowns and then resorting to spamming Physick, and he could hot stay upright. (I didn't see him use any mits either; every time I looked he was mit-less, though I wasnt staring at the party list as much as I usually do, for obvious reasons, so it's possible he popped something when I was occupied with other things.) He kept insisting "the last scholar I ran this with had no problem!" Both DPS and I were begging him to slow down, and he kept adamantly refusing until we'd wiped several times.

I got the comms from both the DPS. I don't think the tank commed anyone.

And the thing is, sure, I could blacklist him. But the problem is *that won't stop me from matching with him.* So, what's the point?

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 03/07/2026

I genuinely love stuff like this. I may not be the world's greatest player myself, but I still love seeing others improve!

A wall of text on Discord:

Unironically yes! Alexandria with two genuine first-timers, and yes, we wiped several times. It was a 40-minute run - and I genuinely *do* find that fun, because that is a *tough* dungeon on your first try and I got to watch people learning. (I also got to use two reci+prot spreadlos in one boss fight, lmao.)

ETA: Some frustratation was voiced, yes, but nobody gave up. Nobody tried to vote abandon or anything. Yes, two of them needed the clear for MSQs, so really couldn't - but nobody was upset that they weren't being carried or whatever.

I did end up doritoing the bosses - which is not ideal, since I'm not yet good enough at that dungeon to do all the bosses flawlessly. If *I'm* the best choice for dorito, and that's still better than no dorito at all, that's usually a bad omen lmao. But we got through it!

There is also a screengrab of a timer, which reads:

Duty information
Alexandria
51:21.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 01/07/2026

Huh, I apparently got a blue parse on EX2. Huh, I got a blue parse on EX2. That's way better than I expected. Granted, there aren't many EX2 parses in 7.5, so competition is low. Still, I'll take it. #7.0spoiler, I guess.

A 64.9% parse for rDPS on Scholar, on EX2 (Zoraal Ja, Everkeep Extreme).

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 26/06/2026

For a vanilla shot taken in the middle of a cutscene, this is okay.

My character in Final Fantasy 14. Unlike previous shots on this account, she's now got pale skin and blue eyes. Her current design is now a mix of her original design and her "reworked" design, both of which have previously been posted here.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 14/04/2026

Apparently my fourth species of big fish. Other three are Navigator's Brand (which is required to even start Feast of Famine), Endoceras (the La Noscean Feast of Famine Fish), and Worm of Nym (which is required if you want to make an ARR relic without hitting the MB).

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 14/04/2026

Oh, and apparently that was my 200th unique fish. Which is, uh, not a lot. But everyone starts somewhere, right?

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 14/04/2026

Yooooo! Still no Giant Takitaro, but now I have the other two!

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 14/04/2026

Moving to this account and spoiler tagging, but ho. lee. shit. The "Voyagers" of Oizys were ancient beings, who had vastly more control of aether than modern peoples? And judging by the physical size of the ruins, were probably also much taller? Hmmm. That sounds pretty familiar... #7.3spoiler

$A screenshot from Cosmic Exploration. T'laqa Tia comments that the Voyagers were "better attuned" to aether than current peoples, and thus current peoples can only "elicit a fraction of the response" the Voyagers seem to have elicited from the stone devices on Oizys.$

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 12/04/2026

Should add that while I'm homed on Dynamis, I have tried going to Primal, Crystal, and Aether for queues - and it's not better. Which actually got me and a friend theorycrafting. (First bit here, above the username "northwind," is my friend, not me.)

Friend: The fact Heavyweight Normal is taking so long seems VERY odd on healer. My guess is the matchmaking algorithm is de-prioritizing or trying to put you in a less popular duty
Heavyweight Normal should be near instant on healer this time of day
Like people start posting "dead game" memes if they queue longer than 5min on a support for current raids

Me: Yeah, like I said, I first started noticing "bad queues" around the time I was doing Crown of the Immaculate. So, mid- to late-ShB? At the time, I was whining about 30-40 minute queues. It's only gotten worse since; now, 80-120+ minutes is the norm. Doesn't seem to matter whether it's MSQ content, "optional" content (that still must be done for things you really need like gear or Aether Currents), or truly-optional content either.

I have a couple hypotheses, but that word is only accurate in the sense that *someone* could maybe test these; I personally don't see how I could, myself:
1. It seems that there's a sort of "thermocline," starting at the mid-70s in level and worsening from there, inre how long things take to pop. But even if I could prove this is actually a thing (and I doubt I could ever get sufficient data myself), it would still only prompt the question "why?"
2. My other hypothesis is that maybe Travelers have decreased queue prio? Like, I know that as a Traveler, if a server kick happens while I'm on Primal or Aether, I'm at the end of the line to log back in. (And I do not get extra prio if I happen to be mid-duty at the time, much to the frustration of my teammates.) Might I also be getting hit with end-of-the-line prio for duty queues?

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 12/04/2026

I’m a healer main and it’s not better, sadly. And Ive had several people try to tell me I’m being unreasonable to expect these to pop in reasonable timeframes.

40+ minute queue for Normal Raid roulette
90+ minutes for Alliance Raid roulette (so far) >30 minutes for Expert Roulette

Like, it's not reset day and this isn't "old content" the way e.g. the Four Lords is ETA: and it's not super late anywhere in NA. so why.

Yeah, I'm being told "Recollection, San d'Oria, and M10N are old by the standards of live-service games," with the implication that I'm in the wrong for expecting them to be doable

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 12/04/2026

Sadly this does not meet the dimensions to be a profile banner

Me saying "why am I tanking adds" in Alliance chat.

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Oryn Eyltanath @maidenofletters.etheirys.social · 09/04/2026

Thanks. I am somewhat notorious for my bad roll luck. (First pic is also yesterday, second is from a few months ago.)

I have cleared M12N seven times in the last 12 hours. There is one token I need. It's the hand token. In the seven clears, I have rolled 60 once, 43 once, in the 20s three times, in the teens once, and <10 once.

A screenshot of the final loot in Orebonne Monestary, in which I rolled eight times: only three of the eight were over 50, and none was 75 or above. Three were 10 or below.

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