I’m really proud of my FFXIV guild team. We took a rather lengthy break from the game, something like eight or nine months with only a few breaks in the middle, so when we got back, there was a ton of content that a lot of people had already done (but still struggled with) that we’d never touched.

Last night, we did The Howling Eye (Extreme), also known as Garuda EX, the hardest mode for the first hard-mode Trial (single boss) in FFXIV. It’s a challenging fight, with fairly complex mechanics, and while it’s intended for gear markedly below where we were at (recommended ilvl 70, most of us are ilvl 90+), it’s also meant for a group that’s been working together for quite some time and are very familiar with the game’s mechanics, their approach to boss fights, and so on, which few to none of us are.

It was also a return to raid leading for me, one of the first times I’ve actually led a team in any significant way in an MMO in quite a while. We’ve done some previous forays into the Binding Coil of Bahamut, but I haven’t really been leading those as much as curating while someone else does the direction and leading, and mostly letting other folks run the show. It’s been a rocky start, as the needs and wants of the team aren’t always immediately clear and I have to feel them out.

Garuda EX went well, I think, and it reinforces my belief in trusting my teammates rather than micromanaging. When raid leading (or team leading in general), I like to approach things from a more hands-off direction; I tend to assume my team is competent and knows what they’re doing and only intervene when or if that assumption is proven wrong. Individually, people tend to know what they’re able to handle and where they have more maneuvering room, and being able to adapt strategies to accommodate this is much more useful (in my opinion) than simply declaring what each person will need to achieve and demanding they reach that minimum level of performance.

We took shots at Garuda for a little more than an hour last night, with some fairly significant pauses between attempts to work out what happened in the previous pull. We defeated her as the timer approached zero, with about 30 seconds total left on the clock. More importantly, we won in a single night of attempts, when most of us hadn’t seen the fight previously and hadn’t yet gotten comfortable with the way the game approaches raids.

It’s exciting to me, because I feel like it proves that our group, despite playing casually and not really pushing terribly difficult content for years now, still has our edge, or enough of it to relearn old skills quickly.

It’s a good feeling as a team to win, and it’s a good feeling for me that everything ran smoothly and effectively such that, as the team leader, I can fade into the background and let skilled people do their thing.