Thanks Slashey for taking the time to double/treble/quadruple/quintuple post. The Wind Tower view you provided was extremely useful to me. Not that I did a good job this time, but it may have been worse without.

The journey up to 15th floor was pretty uneventful. I should have put some more effort into assigning my himes, though - I had I think Culyune with Ithaqua and someone else who basically all bounced off giving the exact same buff to the team. 15th floor I took off-element first - reason being, if I failed within a small margin of the top, I could then claim complete with an all-R fire team using Solomon. Unfortunately, without thinking, I selected my Thunder team (my usual strongest element) and then suddenly realised that's the absolute worst choice for wind. And then, cleared it flawlessly in about 12 turns. The gap between my team's power levels may have grown some in the last few months.

Which should make clear exactly how bad my Fire team is, that it took another 3 runs to get a fire run completed. First team got halfway through 3rd stage, 2nd run I thought I could just walk it, and it turned out I couldn't (probably could have if I'd played it smarter - just regular attacks until rage, then use all abilities and full burst before ougi, instead of throw everything at it on start, then realise it was going to take several rounds of attack, only now she's raging). Weirdly I now have a good collection of fire SSR himes (I had none at the start of the year, I'm up to 6 now and my draw-luck-drought is over), but after having no reason to build the team up for years, the lack of slv30 weaponry or a decent main eidolon is telling.

16 and 17 both took two teams. In retrospect, I may have been better off launching each floor from 15 onwards off-element here; I might have climbed higher or at least completed in fewer turns. Still, 17th floor completed puts me in the top 300, for significant improvement in rewards I'd really have needed to be top 150 or even 50, and that was never going to happen for Fire.

Next tower is in August, according to the Event Encyclopedia, which is Thunder. Unless I pick up some significantly better Wind himes by then, it'll be just as bad as the wind tower for me so maybe I'll take my own advice then. At least Thunder will be a viable alt team for that one! I may post my mostly-SR assault strategy for that if Slashey does. Worth it to give him something to laugh about at the very least.

Congrats to everybody who got past floor 15. I remember when that was an impossible mission for me. I'd probably have made a full clear if it had been only 15 floors / 16 keys this time (if I had used my fire "A" team instead of saving good fire himes for floor 16+) dropping only some tens of points for not clearing fast enough, which is a nice indication of progress. Pity there's so little to actually think about now though beyond these events. It's a long, grinding path onwards and I still don't have my S-level soul. Back to the raids, I suppose.