A good week.

Well i've had about the best week ever, in FFXI. Actually, its more of a "2-week" time frame, but still.

Where to start, well first off... two Dynamis runs back to back, I came out with some more Valor AF! Dynamis-Windurst was a little more messy than usual, and by the end of our run we had more than 10 people who had to leave due to needing sleep/work/other valid reasons. I think we were down to 2 BLMs too, and even had to melee the stones at the end @_@

But within the last 30 minutes of our run, the Valor Leggings dropped!


I was so pysched, i've waited for these for a long time and there was one other person lotting against me and knowing my luck in Dynamis, I figured i'd lose the lot. But for whatever reason, luck was with me that night and I got a 600+ lot which won me my boots! I think the greatest part, is that the entire LS was expressing how happy they were that I got them. I had a bunch of congratulations through /tell after they dropped, and it reminded me of how lucky I am to be with a group of good players and good people. I was very grateful for everyone cheering me on and just really happy to be apart of a friendly dynamis group.

And the luck didn't stop there.... the following week, we did Dynamis Beaucedine, and we were about half way through the run with 0 drops... until... VALOR BREECHES DROPPED!


Our Northlands lotting is a little different, and setup so that those with the most attendance get their gear first (rewarding veterans first) and because i'd been with our shell since day one back when it was SpiftasticAdventures, I had the most attendance and up first for lotting the PLD AF. Again I was pretty much surrounded by everyone cheering me on, and I ended up being so psyched myself that I wasn't entirely paying attention to the debuffs I was casting on our PLDs and ended up getting off the wrong spells for a few seconds. <_<;;;

Next week is Xarcabard, our first run in that zone. I'm excited to try it out, but i've heard so much about the difficulty of the zone that i'm not going to over-estimate our LS. But i'm pretty confident that with some of our main players like our puller Cherron, that we'll do very well. And even if we have some wipes or just a few mistakes, we'll learn and do better the next time.

In other endgame activities, i've FINALLY gotten my Byakko's Haidate!


I've been saving up my points from sky farming to lot on these, because they're one piece of gear that all the melees want and therefore really hard to get. I've actually had enough points to be in the lead to bid on them for the last month, but Byakko wouldn't drop them and on the Byakko before the last, leadership didn't pay close attention to the people lotting and allowed a person who had been considered "inactive" to bid. According to our LS rules, if you're considered inactive you have to attend at least one farming session before being able to bid, and so technically while this player did have more points than me, they still weren't suppose to be able to bid. I was a annoyed at the time because I had thought for sure i'd get the Byakko Haidate that night, and when I saw that I was outbid by another player who shouldn't have been able to bid right away I immediately brought it to the attention of the leads, but for whatever reason they chose not to address it until after we had killed Byakko.... despite that I brought it up to them through /tell BEFORE the fight.

In the end, apologies were made so I left it at that. I didn't mind that the other player had gotten them too much because if they had more points than me, obviously they were deserving. Its just that not everyone follows the rules, and the leadership isn't always aware of the status of its members. I guess sometimes I just like being a perfectionist, and if there are going to be rules in place for me to follow, I expect that they will be followed by everyone else.

But anyways, on our next Byakko pop a week later, the haidate did drop and I won the bid. Of course it cost me like 90% of my points, which is one of the highest bids i've ever seen for the Haidate. Its worth it because now my WAR and SAM don't feel so gimp, but its going to take a while to regain those points that I paid for the haidate so that I can finish the other gear I need to get.

As for missions.... my static had been able to make it up to ToAU44 this month, but we had decided we would wait on the last fight with Alexander to better prepare. Well last weekend, some of the members were asking if we could try it out, and gave some suggestions as to how we could change our setup. We were going to invite 3 people from our LS as well, so that they could get this last mission.... mainly because they had tried more than 10 times to do this fight with other groups and hadn't succeeded.

So we went in as PLD (me), BRD (Alianne), MNK (Timwakefield), WHM (Xean --- Haha!), DRK (Standpoint) and BLM (Carste). Our first run we got Alexander down quite a bit, but we just didn't get in enough power at the very end and he wiped us pretty bad. But on our second go, we made sure to keep me at full health when Alexander did his Omega move at 50%, and I managed to live through it and though we did have a few deaths, we did manage to finally kill him!


Our third run we replaced Timwakefield with one of our static members - Hojima (WAR) and again we had a win! We were on a roll! Finally for our 4th run we had Alianne change to WHM, brought in Elden for BRD and replaced Hojima with Spalko (SAM). This too was a win, but definitely not an easy one.

We were all definitely happy though, 3/4 wins on ToAU44 which seemed to be pretty decent considering 3 of the people we did the fights with had tried many... many.... many times, only to have failure. Of course I think the reason why though, is because it wasn't done with a full LS group, hehe. When our LS comes together, we can definitely pull of some great things.



Also, being that i'm an active member for KeitaroAeon and KeitaroOmega, their social group KeitaroPrime opened an invitation to me and Xean to complete Storms of Fate, which is the mission required just before Apocolypse Nigh. Me and Xean had to get up early on a Sunday morning in order to do this, but it wasn't a problem because like Divine Might, you usually need close to an alliance of 75's to take down the BCNM which isn't the easiest thing to do.


Our fight went really well, except that I died at the start. I was sitting in orange health for about 10 seconds and then took a bit hit sending me face into the dirt. I quickly raised and went near the mages to get unweakened, but the group was doing so good that Bahamut was dying too fast, and finally when he was down to about 15% I just jumped back in unweakened because I didn't want to miss the entire fight ><

And so our run was a success! Thanks to KeitaroPrime for letting us come ^^

What else is on the list... oh yeah, Sabene decided to change her nation to San d'Oria (yay!) and so me and Alianne were helping her get the beginning missions done. We helped her out with the BCNM fight for 2.3 in Giddeus, which was fun. I of course hopped on my MNK and 2hrd the eye and dragon, hehehehe. I'm really going to have to pick up MNK again, that was always a pretty fun job to play.


And a few days later we gathered a few LS members and did the BCNM for mission 5.1 and 5.2 for Sabene. These were a piece of cake with everyone having done them previously, and everyone being lvl 75 for the Shadow Lord fight. Sometimes I kinda wish I had played the game before the lvl cap was raised to 75, so that I could see what a challenge the 5.2 fight use to be for players.


With how busy i've been, I haven't really had much of a chance to lvl up my DNC with Xean's BRD. We did however manage to hit lvl 20, but with his school and my other in game activities we just haven't been able to steal some time for ourselves and lvl. And to make things worse, getting a decent party at the early lvls is always a pain... such a pain in fact, the we ended up duoing lvl 18-20 in the dunes. I don't mind the duoing, but I definitely prefer the xp of a good party much better.


And just a few little updates on my character:

-Put 4 merits into Great Katana
-Unlocked Shikikoyo
-Finished merriting PLD
-Lvled Woodworking to 39
-Lvled Leathercraft to 35


Thats about it for this update.

5th job to 75!

Finally got my WAR to 75 this week, making it my 5th job to 75. I had hoped to ding 75 with Xean's THF, but during our last static session he was trying to setup his new mega computer (which in the end had a defective power supply which means he has to wait another 2 weeks before he can use is new computer) so I ended up getting ahead of him. I had decided to start using my Byakko's GA (thanks KeitaroAeon, was the first drop I got with you guys) to skill up my GA skill which was sitting at 223 (and thanks again to Elden and Xean who helped me skill it up earlier that week). I managed to get it up to 245 on that party, which only lasted maybe 2hrs so hopefully i'll be able to cap it in my next party. All in all, the dmg seems to be much better but I would occasionally get some pretty crappy weaponskills ~ 100-200 dmg -_-. But I did manage to break 1k about 4 times! So I guess it can't be too bad, haha.


And on that same note, Sabene got her WHM to 75 with us. All week we've been doing pretty much "all ls" merit parties trying to get her to 75. It was a lot of fun, and though we didn't always have the best jobs available we still managed to get 7-10k/hr. Its always nice to party with friends, especially because you don't have to worry about having someone who can't perform their party duties.

So the next job i'm planning to lvl will be BLM. I don't really find it too much fun to play in xp parties, but I'm sure i'd enjoy it at 75 when I get to bust out some nukage on NMs. I always liked playing the nuking RDM, but sadly as my job class (and race to a degree) was limited, I could never really come up to par to any BLM. I know that lvling BLM will be tough because ever since ToAU, its not wanted in parties much anymore... BUT! I have a plan.... I'm bringing Xean along on his BRD! So I should be able to get xp pretty decently whether its with a regular party setup or with a mana burn. And I can't wait for Xean to have BRD@75. Knowing that he's the type of player that will do his party duties efficiently (and fast) i'm sure that by the time we're ready to merit at 75, i'll be seeing those nice chains of 200+.

But in the meantime, I gotta get his BRD caught up to my BLM40. So i've decided to lvl DNC up to 40 and use it as a subjob (for those random times when it would be useful). So far I've only managed to get it to 15, so I JUST got my curing waltz which is nice... but I have yet to actually fight something "tough" and see just how good the job really is.


Me and Xean have been duo-ing for most of our dune levels and though the xp isn't that great, we've still managed. We've had a few of those stupid deaths... you know, the kind where you see an NM and you think to yourself "Lets KILL IT!". Then 10 seconds later, you're lying face in the dirt....


Yeah.....

Aaaanyways, one of the most recent things that i've had the pleasure of doing, was an Ohat run for my ls. A few weeks ago, one of our members Elden mentioned needing one and I told him to make a topic on the LS. After that, we had several members show an interest so we did a lot of farming for the hakutaku eyes needed to make a hakutaku cluster which is the pop item for the NM. Finally after everyone got their cluster synthesized thanks to our very own alchemist Tiaybara, we scheduled a run which actually happened last night.

I was a little worried about how successful the run would go because we were very limited on the "help" end. A couple of people who had said they'd help out weren't online, and a couple of others didn't even bother to let us know they had changed their minds and prioritized something else.... but in the end, it didn't matter because we went 6/6! HA!

I was really happy after our first fight. It went soooo smooth, no deaths and barely anyone went beyond yellow HP. We only had 2 WHMs at the start, and while they did run low on MP they still did an excellent job keeping our tanks paralyna'd. And our tanks definitely were on top of things, as well as the stunners. I got to go as RDM/DRK and really enjoyed stunning whenever I could but with all the enfeebles, refreshes and assisting cures I sometimes had a full plate @_@

In the end, I was extremely happy with the members that came out to help. We pulled off something that not many "social" linkshells get together to do, and seeing the reactions of everyone at the very end was worth it.

Congratulations to Elden, Standpoint, Kawanowu, Yourdestiny, Tiaybara and Zeo for your new fugly hats!!! And thanks to Ferque, Trindel, Alianne, Soluslupis, Timwakefield, Sabene and Xean for helping on the run.


Based on how much fun everyone had and the comments at the end of the run, we'll definitely be putting another run together in the future. Hopefully we can even try a few different pop NMs.

Now for the other random things I did this week...

I recently got a /tell from a player who had joined SpiftasticAdventures Dynamis LS a long time ago, and unfortunately had to stop playing and took a long break. She came back to the game, and started a new character Annalise. We ended up talking a little bit, and in the end I offered her some help to get her new character started. She took me up on the offer the next day, and me and Xean went out to help her with the Magicite Mission to get her rank 5. I hadn't done that mission in ages, so it was nice to do again.


Then I also had Anderoc invite me to help camp the rare/ex fuma with him. On my way to Castle O., he ended up claiming the NM and managed to get the drop. So when I got there, we waited for about an hourish and got the second pop. Unfortunately we didn't get the fuma though. Haha, one of these days i'll go camp them seriously, but I'll probably wait until I can find a decent site to download free stream videos so that I have something to do while I wait for the window to open. I really can't stand waiting around for NM windows, sooooooooooo boring -_-


Other than that, KeitaroAeon finally did our Kirin TP Burn. I was asked to bring up Xean's MNK/DRK because my SAM wasn't merited yet. The actual fight itself was neat, and everyone was pretty excited... the only downside to it all, was that the fight was about 2hrs late. We had a lot of people show up late, and we actually ended up making another LS wait on us. Hopefully though our next tp burn Kirin will happen on time because the fight itself is only a few minutes long.


Its just too bad that I died on Xean within the first 30 seconds.... I didn't even get to use his entire "Hundred Fists". ; ; Oh well, lol... there's always next time. It looks like we might try to TP burn Kirin once every week, which would be good considering we've collected a ton load of Kirin pop sets and haven't quite been able to use them.

As for anything else going on in the game, I just finished up ToAU42. The first fight was a bit sloppy and we died in the second room, but when we tried the fight again we made it all the way to the Soulflayer and got the win. Was a bit of a long fight, but pretty fun. I love it when I get to play RDM and enfeeble the mob... and see them work effectively, mwahaha...

Our next fight is going to be against Alexander, but we're going to wait on a friend of ours to help on his BLM (we hope). We're also going to see if we can get Timwakefield to lvl 75 on his PLD so that I can come on RDM to help with refresh and healing because we don't have anyone else with RDM available. I've heard the fight is pretty harsh, and would rather wait for us to be 100% ready with the perfect setup, then waste an evening trying and ending up with only failures. Gawd the game can be such a time sink at times -_-


Last, here's a little pic I picked up while in The Sanctuary of Zhi'tah. My favorite zone in the game. Its a bit dark I think, because the image was made smaller but when you get to see all the details in full size its really nice. I'll have to use this for a future wallpaper or signature.

Obligatory LOL post.

L O L.

I spent about 5 minutes starting to type up what would of been a really long entry that basically would of been a repeat of Xean's two blog entries he's made here, plus other things that weren't mentioned. But I decided, to hell with the immature and obsessive people out there that only live to make others miserable. Its clear as ever in their postings be it on a flameboard, or a pathetic attempt to wound me by commenting to past blog entries what kind of people they trully are, and I really don't feel the need anymore to waste my time dealing with them.

I've had plenty of people in the past few days express their views and i'm happy to say that there are some intelligent people out there that know whats right from wrong, and can see the malice in people's hearts. So i'm done with it all.

Back to playing FFXI and helping out my friends, and having some fun memories to look back on. Now if only I could remember to take more screenshots so that I have some to post in my next entry >_>

Word of advice to the haters: People that go out of their way to make others miserable, need to get over themselves. ^^

(Oh, and because Xean posted his pic in the last entry he made in my blog.... I get to say "damn he's hot, and he's mine! Gotta love a guy that has a sweet heart, good morals, and isn't a stereotypical man)

Again?

Seems I'll have to take down the spouted crap being said a second time. But I'll wait on that. I'll allow easily swayed masses to continue being fooled. Besides, I have more important matters in my real life to attend to than a bunch of retards. No point bothering with those who don't seek for more information on their own accord, either because they're not smart enough or do so intentionally because their words can actually stand without that extra info being around so that they can maintain their online images of each other. Just like this:

Though, I have no problem taking people on individually. Takes up less of my time. Until then, let the people be stupid. - Xean

PS: As for "wiggas", I don't think this looks like one. Unlike all of yall. Full beaner blood. And no fools around talkin shit to make me lookin mad. That's when I flew up to Canada to be with Zerayla for Christmas. A girl I actually CARE ABOUT unlike most foolish old but immature dudes.

So ToAU does get interesting...

Before I make a seperate post to express some things about a few recent events, I figured i'd make a regular update (which will also hopefully put me in a better mood to write the next entry)

So lets see... I recently finished the ToAU35 fight, and got a few more cutscenes. For those not wanting to hear any spoilers, scroll down now until you see the "Spoilers Finished! "


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Spoilers

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So far in the story of ToAU, we know that the little girl with the two puppets is actually the Empress. We know that the corsair Luzaf, was interested in her puppets and eventually you end up going after the empress as she tries to rescue her puppets. In the end though, she joins up with Luzaf upon hearing his story which goes on to explain how in the past, the Empire of Aht Urghan destroyed the corsairs using the Lamia monsters they had experimented so that they could control them. Luzaf wanting revenge for his fellow corsairs, makes a pact with Odin the Dark Rider to become him in the future, and bring about the day of judgement once he has had his revenge over the Empire.


But later on Luzaf realizes that the Empress is actually a good person, and has nothing to do with what happened in the past and that if he destroys the empire now, he could be preventing the possibility of seeing a "better" world should the Empress grow up and govern her people. So he decides that he wants to back out of his deal with Odin, so that he doesn't have to destroy her and the empire... however, it doesn't seem that the deal can be broken. For right now, Luzaf is in control of himself but soon when the day of judgement comes, he will become the dark rider and destroy the Empire. At least thats what I understand of the story so far...

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Spoilers FINISHED!

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So yeah, in short i'm really starting to enjoy the storyline of ToAU and look forward to being able to finish the expansion soon. My static hopes to be able to finish up our last two fights in one go, but we're currently putting things on hold because our normal static day which is Sunday, is also a big sports day for football fans I guess (superbowl?) so we're just going to wait and have this weekend off.

I'm also hoping that we'll be able to get a few of our other LS members included on the last fights, because we have about 3 members that have been in other statics that either broke right at the end, or just never managed to beat the last battle. It would be great if we can get the last fight for them too, so that way we can all get our blue crowns back from stupid Najaa!

Other than that, I spent a lot of last week farming some hakutaku eyes for various LS members. I organized 2 farmings runs and managed to get the majority of the eyes needed to craft the item to pop the NM which drops the Ohat. Our LS hopes to do an Ohat run at the beginning of February, and rather than have everyone spend an arm and a leg to buy the pop item, we're doing it the old fashioned way and farming the ingredients because one of our members Tiaybara has offered to craft the pop items for us. I also ended up spending some time soloing some of the eyes too one night to get a few eyes for members that hadn't been able to participate on the runs, but I never got one single drop. I guess i've managed to catch whatever "unlucky bug" Xean has always had. -_-

(Hojima decided to show the greatness of WAR Hand-to-Hand after a small talk about PUP dmg)

Also managed to make one of our members a little rich too.... just the week before last, a bunch of us went out to help Shaoulin get his Selene's bow. I think he's now 1/13 on it. He was able to sell his E-Bow for a pretty penny apparently after getting this. I was glad that he got the drop, and glad that we had enough people come out to help... but can't say i'm too happy for the recognization that was given after the fact. When I make my next post i'll go to explain some events that have happened recently, which resulted in some members leaving... one of which was Shaoulin. All I can say is I guess those people in the screenshot were just there for stupid reasons, and not out of friendship. (note: tone is meant to be sarcastic)


On to more happier events! I finally had a chance to try Under Observation BCNM40 as BLM. Jackstraw and Trippyhippy invited me along, and after an hour of muling all my gear over we went and did 5 runs total. On our second run, we managed to get the Peacock Charm which goes for 1.9mil, which gave us about 600k each. I've heard lots of people doing this fight and going 0/50+ on that item, so I was really happy to see it drop considering i'd only done the fight maybe another 6 times before with the RDM, NIN, NIN setup. It was kinda fun too, mostly because we screwed up the first time around and didn't all cast our Stonega III at the same time. But even still, we managed to get 5/5 wins and get a nice drop. Trippyhippy also got himself an utsusemi: ni scroll, so I guess our luck was pretty good that day.

Last thing worth mentioning.... I finally got my SAM to 75!!! Now if only people would prefer to invite that job over my RDM for merits! >_>

Well actually, I kinda prefer being on my RDM because the battle music can sometimes get annoying and I guess having always been able to heal people on all the jobs i've played so far, I still like having a little control over keeping my party alive. And I can't say that I complain too much on the cost to actually merit, all I do is buy Wizard Cookies or Marron Glace, depending on what kind of setup I have and those are a hell of a lot cheaper than sushi. Especially when you're fighting Colibri!

The only items i'm missing on my SAM for the moment, are Hagun and Byakko's Haidate. There's a lot of other gear I could get, but most of it requires a considerable amount of time investment which I just don't seem to have with everything else I have going in the game. But like with some of the PLD gear I would like to have one day, i'll just wait for the opportunity to come up and not be too concerned as long as I have just a bit better than decent gear.

And gawd I can not stand the haubergeon for female elvaan. I ended up changing my .dat to the SAM JSE body (at least I think thats what it is) which I like, but.... because I use the haubergeon on my WAR, it kinda looks a little funny when i'm playing WAR. Oh well, I think I can stand this better than the original haubergeon.


And speaking of my WAR, I finally hit 74 last night. Our static has brought in Standpoint on his DRK, and hopefully Timwakefield will be coming back permanently seeing that he's back to playing the game again. He joined us last night, and though we didn't have astral candescence we still managed to get about 8k/hr with a PLD tank and SMN Haste! Not too bad... well, actually, the only bad thing is that my WAR ended up being outparsed by Xean's THF and Standpoint's DRK..... which only confirms to me that I most likely will never touch this job after it hits 75. SAM FTW!!!!