Community Spotlight: Rin Karigani

Absolutely, and thank you! I’m Rin Karigani. In Final Fantasy I’m a tank main, streamer, and leader of Last Impression. I enjoy world progression raiding, high end optimization, speedrunning, PFing, and teaching players Savage and Ultimate raids!

I am currently on Aether and Primal.

Outside of Final Fantasy I’m a father, husband, and owner to three lovely dogs. My family and friends are my driving forces in pushing me to be a better person tomorrow than who I am today.

The Unending Coil of Bahamut is by far my favorite encounter in all of Final Fantasy XIV. Ever since the first time I cleared I have wanted to tackle this as 8 tanks. I finally found 7 other gamers crazy enough to try! I get extremely passionate and competitive in XIV, constantly pushing myself to be better than I was before.

This drives me to constantly look to reduce mistakes and grow, and to share this love and energy through streaming so others can learn and grow alongside me. While I instill knowledge on people to the best of my ability, I am also constantly looking for opportunities to learn from others as well. This never ending process keeps content from growing stale and keeps from burning out.

I would say my raid fatigue typically starts to waver around 12+ hours, so going for the short bursts that I do is like drops in the bucket for energy levels!

When setting goals in life I always shoot for the stars. That way, if I fall short, I’ll still have achieved something above average. If I shoot for the sky and fall short I’ll have just achieved something mediocre. Going into TankCoB I never once doubted it was possible. The DPS check mathematically worked out on paper with time to spare each phase.

A LOT of the community doubted this at first, fully expecting it to be impossible to meet the Twintania check. After we got to Nael they doubted the DPS check in Nael due to Paladin clemencies in conjunction with a failure to survive the transition into Bahamut.

Every check was challenged along the way but the only real hurdle we considered was adds phase. The reason we doubted our ability to coast through that check was because we prioritized safety over uptime for ease of execution.

Every single optimization, every first time phase change, all of the times we passed mechanics cleanly were so satisfying and gave such rushes of adrenaline.

It’s easily the hardest fight I have ever progged through and completed.

Warriors: Warriors make excellent main tanks with their natural self healing and good damage at level 70. No tank really lacked in the DPS department so we made the most of our kits given our circumstances. Having perfectly rolled relic weapons went a long way, too. In addition to this we were provided double shake it off which grants us shields with Veil for every set of heavy hitting damage.

Dark Knight: Initially we started with double DRK, but swapped one out for GNB after we realized a lot of TBNs were unecessary and were being overwritten. TBN single handedly accounted for near 500k total in mitigation. When you only have tanks that turns out to be quite a lot! TBN saved our lives in many situations ranging from mid Twin to Nael to Adds and Golden as well. Many key points!

Gunbreakers: You’re absolutely right! Gunbreaker is ridiculously overpowered in Lv. 70 content. In addition to its DPS it also has access to aurora, heart of stone, and heart of light. Aurora may seem weak at first, but when you consider three of them on one target at the same time it definitely adds up. Having Heart of Light for every series of raidwide magic damage and back to back Heart of Stones definitely eased the burden of damage.

Paladins: Double Paladin provided double Passage of Arms, Divine Veils, and Hallowed Ground, in addition to obvious healing capability.

A few of us spent many hours before and after coming up with logs and pull data to figure out where we were missing usages of mitigation, where we can push more damage, and how to plan ahead for phases yet to come. Over all it took replacing 3 members due to scheduling conflicts and about 50 hours of live combat.

I spend a lot of time thinktanking things so I didn’t keep track of the time spent outside of raid though it likely wasn’t a great much more comparatively. There were a lot of kinks we figured out by just figuring things out live in the pull.

Optimizing things like using a clemency to heal the active tank while using the 50% return to proc a divine veil and heal themselves as paladins, or figuring out key points for aurora usages or where extra or fewer tankswaps were required. Those types of things we were able to figure out fairly quickly while just in the fight!

Making diagrams for mechanics and laying groundwork for strats was able to be done outside of raid time. I primarily came up with the unique solves for mechanics while Momo converted this to toolbox diagrams and worked the baseline for our Golden mitigation.

Oh absolutely! I’ll break it down by phase for ease of digestion. Beginning by saying we reworked the opener of Twin after going through the Bahamut transition with LB2.

Twintania:

Traditionally players would spread and meet rear of the boss for the fireball stack. Due to the nature of 8 melee players we decided to spread in clock positions around Twintania and meet in the center of her hitbox for twisters into fireball.

Additionally, both of the Warriors decided to gear swap and start with low HP to spike our limit break generation at the start. A gunbreaker also used superbolide so the veil proc heal would spike our LB off of them as well. Leaving the first Neurolink we typically had between 1.2 to 1.6 bars of Limit Break already. This guaranteed we would do the transition to Bahamut with LB3 every time!

With 8 melee ranged players we decided to take the Liquid Hells around the hitbox of Twin together, so instead of an RNG bait it became a merry-go-round style bait. The exception to this is the 2nd set of liquid hells, right after first neurolink target. That player would disengage and take the loss for a little bit. Our movements between liquid hells had us moving the boss in a different pattern due to the nature of the space liquid hells take up.

Nael:

Nael was very straightforward. Each mechanic picks a player once regardless of role so we just had to work our way through it and survive. Lots of tankswaps!

Bahamut:

Quickmarch Trio quickly became the single hardest part of the entire fight. Without set roles being selected for mechanics, all 8 players needed to be able to get to any position for proper execution. We overcame this obstacle by ensuring every player had sprint ready and used static markers for each piece of the mechanic. The 2(south) marker designated Megaflare stack location while the 3-1-4(east/north/west) markers were designated Earth Shakers locations. Unmarked players could also go to 1 to avoid tempest wings at 3 and 4. The reaction time of this made a lot of us feel this became even more difficult than Wormhole in timing and learning curve.

Blackfire Trio was solved by doing wall strat and creating a diamond out of the towers instead of a square, having the megaflare stack take a tower and having 3 of the unmarked tanks callnig “Left, Right, Far” as opposed to “back left, back right, close left, close right.” Fewer concise words make for a smoother experience.

The rest of Bahamut was business as usual.

Adds:

Liquid Hell baits were handled by sending Nael far away with the tank holding aggro + 2 other players and baiting the puddles towards the far Neuro, that way if they were picked they were already near a neurolink with a boss in range.

Lots of tankswaps ensued and I used a holmgang to take both Death Sentence and Ravensbeak followed by a Living Dead at the end to give us extra time with no heals before meeting enrage.

Golden Bahamut:

The job here was simple. No heals. To meet the DPS check we did center dodges and our mitigation reduced the damage to negligible amounts. Invulning every Akh Morn simplified the job even further and at the end of the fight we shirked off the Paladins to ensure they died first as they were doing lowest dps.

Hard work, dedication, and great knowledge of the encounter as well as in depth knowledge of the game itself. When you tackle content with no battle res you have to ensure people remain consistent and accountable. Handling that kind of pressure can be stressful but with the drive and passion you overcome those hurdles and start to look at fights in different ways.

It’s exhilarating and it will absolutely help with not only new tank-only goals but any high end raiding in general! Consistency will always facilitate completion much faster than luck. Desire and enjoyment play a heavy role in that as well.

All 8 gamers were in it for the enjoyment of the difficulty. The fun was in the kill. The journey was an added bonus!

Many great memes were had and being able to enjoy the experience makes it all the better.

Unfortunately at this time the other two ultimates can not be challenged with 8 tanks due to the nature of the mechanics. Maybe one day though!

We want this TankCoB accomplishment to be a pillar of inspiration that with enough hard work and perseverance you can achieve very difficult goals! I have seen many players discouraged by the achievement thinking it dwindles their own standard composition kill, or thinking that this means UCoB is “too easy if tanks can do it.” Don’t think that at all!

This was very very difficult in its own, and if you defeat The Unending Coil of Bahamut you should absolutely 100% be proud of yourself!! You’ve done a great job beating the most difficult fight in the game!

On that note:

Both in Final Fantasy and in real life you will come across many different types of people, cliques, and environments. Some will be positive, some toxic, and others in between.

With enough hard work and effort anyone can overcome Ultimates, or raiding in general! You will never know until you try, and you can make some really great friendships along the way! I have seen so many players grow from being afraid of doing expert dungeons to farming ultimates and teaching others. At the end of the day we are still just playing a game together punching internet dragons and space robots. If one group doesn’t work for you, find another or maybe try starting your own!

A lot of raiders don’t expect perfection - they expect effort. You don’t have to BE the best, just TRY your best. Own mistakes and actively work to improve, and be humble and a team player and you will find much success!

Remember: with enough hard work we can all become proficient, clear, and help others. We can all wear the crown!

Be humble. Try playing other jobs! It’s okay to test out a new job and still love your main.

Learn from everyone you can, there’s always a better way to do things.

Reach out and get to know more players.

And get a dang vpn sooner than later!

A lot of my time is dedicated to helping players in any way I can. This ranges from teaching parties in my community on stream with fights such as UCoB or savage content on Aether and Primal to helping players across various social media like Discord, Twitter, and YouTube.

Many know me as the Gunbreaker mentor over on The Balance, and know that I do my best to help players grow from many different levels of skill. With that being said I am pleased to announce that I will begin work in the near future on tank resources in AkhMorning! I’ll be doing my best!

It’s been absolutely wonderful getting to share my feedback on a very enjoyable piece of content.

Thank you again for having me on!