One thing that I don’t think many know is that if you don’t have to eat many shrooms (closer to the middle usually) it’s actually helpful to eat your shrooms a bit slower (wait like ~1 second before eating it).
The thing is that if you eat the last shroom long before the next subling spawns your room actually becomes smaller at one point and you will have to move the boss quicker.
Of course if your group has no problems and moves fast you can eat quick and deal more DPS because of that.
I feel like there’s an art form to this, where u have to actually undergo a couple wipes (with most fingers invariably pointed towards you) before u can begin to perfect thr craft. It’s similar to something like learning to melee t4 chaos end boss with pugs while balancing dps with survival I.e. not downing thru entire fight. It’s messy and chaotic but through the thick and thin there is some measure of transcendence to be gleaned in the conquest of that trivial feat by itself.
Most ppl I come across usually seem to give the advice to ‘not eat more than 3-4 shrooms’. In retrospect this is actually pretty good advice, as this shorthand is actually the most concise explanation u can give to pugs. To explain the logistics of it to the typical unsuspecting casual would probably be more trouble than it’s worth, at least with the in-game chat. Almost as worse as having pugs explain the order for cannons in Sab in shorthand (cue unnecessary headache if not tasked with cannoneers). This shorthand actually takes into account the limited time as slubling to further allow it to set the pace for you. Which I suppose is also why why pugs have a predilection to eat through mid.. it generally doesn’t matter at what pace u eat the shrooms or if u start or end early, since fulfilling that arbitrary upper ceiling limit on how many to eat is by itself usually good enough. So you really don’t have to count how many x seconds to wait betwixt consuming shrooms, or count how much ticks u have left on the counter for slub form or what have u.
The way I do it is a little more cost-efficient (I think) but also a little more reliant on constant observation to successfully pull it off. So basically I only eat those max amount of shrooms as mentioned, but have my own way of ascertaining at what pace to move so as to preclude the possibilities of either going at too slow a pace and risk stalling them indefinitely, or panic eating too fast and thus hampering ur grp by further constricting the free space they have allotted as their safe zone. Either tactics can be problematic enough to warrant a group wipe. So rather than count the seconds in between, I find it’s more practical to espy ur group and intermittently take note of their positioning relative to u, but more importantly to keep a track of how quickly the poison on their footsteps is sluggishly creeping towards them. So suppose u freeze frame and witness at a particular instant in time that their playing field has receded by some extent, then u even that playing field by eating the next shroom in line at that point in time. I actually find it’s less of a hassle to tackle it with this method but of course the obvious downside is that u are reduced more or less to playing watchdog, an approach that might not suit everyone’s playstyle admittedly. But then again, to each their own.
