I'm not dead!

(Magisterial & Tahla)

Well lately it's been feeling like the the "FFXI Journey" is starting to come to an end. More and more people seem to be quitting, or people just don't have the interest or time to play it as often as before. I actually find myself fitting into the "not wanting to play as often" category, only because with fewer people playing, the game is less fun to play. I've always been one to say that if I wanted to play by myself in a video game, i'd much rather play a console game. Despite the game seeming to be winding down, I still plan to play though - after all, I now have a new character to merit!

Tahla has finally reached lvl 71.

(Went 1/2 on Maat - BRD)

(Skilling up dagger)

(Xean killing the BRD AF1 quest for Tahla ^^)

I've had quite a few interesting parties along the way - many have included Xean's tarutaru "Magisterial". He's been working on getting Magisterial RDM75, which aside from the rare East Ronfaure [S] party, hasn't been the easiest thing. There's all the little quests you need to do in between the lvling in order to get access to the right camps, and of course when you finally are able to go and seek or put a party together... there never seems to be the right jobs available to get something going.


But there's really no rush. Me and Xean are just playing more casually and not really setting any big goals to stress about. That always seems to be one of the things that can easily burn a person out while playing this game - setting too many goals.

I've really limited my goals in this game lately, but then again I pretty much feel "done" with Zerayla. There's some things that i'd like to accomplish on her but many of them include the kind of commitment I can't give.

I even decided to call it quits on getting the mythic weapons "Burtgang" for my PLD. This goal seemed like it would be fun to continue working on throughout the rest of my "FFXI Life" but after some really bad luck and experiences with the prerequisites, I decided it wasn't worth the frustration.

The one prerequisite which stands out the most is probably Einhejar. You need to get the Odin win. And for quite a few months, I ran with one LS hoping that in time they would grow and be able to fight Odin. But in the weeks before I quit that LS, the numbers were dwindling down and runs were being cancelled. The leader and the members that showed every run seemed like good people, but I just felt that I wasn't going to see the progress I needed in that shell.

So, I joined another LS that I had heard had a lot of success and would even give me the opportunity to obtain the Valkyrie Fork for my DRG. I had put off joining this shell for a long time because the majority of the members are apart of an HNM shell which is very much disliked on our server because of their shady way of playing and bad attitudes towards other players. My first two runs with them went really well, but from that point onward, things were terrible. First of all, there was only about 3 members that weren't apart of their HNM group so we would be waiting an hour after the supposed "start time" only to find out that they would cancel the run. And on the days when we actually DID manage to run, we were always late because the rest of the shell prioritized the HNMs who's windows were open. Eventually I couldn't stand seeing 1-2hrs of my time wasted for nothing and decided it wasn't worth the headache anymore.

In addition to the bad luck with Einhejar, there were a few other things that just seemed out of reach. So in the end I went and sold all ~2000 Alexandrite I had saved up. I sent gil to all the people that had either given me donations, or offered me a discount for Alexandrite in the past so that their generosity wasn't wasted.

And... now that I had an extra chunk of gil to sit on, I went ahead and got Tahla a Sha'ir Manteel!

A waste of gil you say? Not really, because I do intend to get a Yigit body down the road (my static for assaults is going a little bit on the slow side, but getting there) and the price for the Sha'ir Manteel hasn't changed much at all in the last couple of years so i'll be able to get that gil back!

So these days I spend the majority of my time just playing on Tahla. But in the last month and a bit I have done a few interesting things:

I was able to help Athoz get Sabene a Joyeuse. She had no clue either which was the best part. Athoz had managed to get the ToD, I just happened to be online when Charbydis spawned so off I went along with Janko to help Athoz kill the NM.


SoTW also had a sky run a while ago. We had about 4 Byakko's and 2 Seiryu's. Our turnout was really good and while we didn't really get the drops that we wanted, we still had one member (Athoz) walk away with some new kitty pants.


Also gave Standpoint a hand with his WHM AF3 quest which seems to always get easier every time I fight it. AF quests seem to be a walk in the park for our ls. I wonder if Standpoint will actually take WHM to 75 though... he never struck me as the type of player that would enjoy WHM. But then again, /sch has really changed the way WHM is played and even I actually enjoy it now.

Vepion also invited me to lend a hand with the SAM quest. Out of the many many jobs he plans to lvl, he's been considering SAM and wanted to unlock the job. So I went out on WHM to have some fun with my club!


Another event worth mentioning was our SoTW Shen run. Vepion had organized it, and we managed to walk away with about 7 wins under our belts! Yet again, another event I was able to bring my PLD to, so naturally I had a blast =)


And about the only other thing I can think of mentioning is the ENM static I do with both Xean and Carste. We do the ENM for Promyvion-Vazhl and Antlion in Sheep's clothing once a week. We now have seen both the Toreador's Ring and Hagun drop. A little extra gil is nice and overall I really enjoy these ENMs. They're not stressful, they're not too long and now that Carste is trying to get his RDM to 75, I get to bring my SAM with polearm to the Promy-Vazhl! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee Samurai!

I think i've about exhausted my brain by this point so i'll wrap up the post.

FFXI is dying.... but! I'm still around, mwahaha!

(Uggalepih Pendant run - Athoz and Onedarkflame having fun on Xean's corpse)

(Some random farming with Xean and Vepion in Beaucedine Glacier [S])

Late Update @_@

I've been needing to update for a long time, so rather than write a novel about what i've been up to recently, i'll do my best to sum up things.

Tahla - Merit Bard in the Making!
Originally when I decided to level BRD on my alternate tarutaru character, Tahla, I had every intent on making her a BRD/WHM and using her for events. I would of liked to lvl BRD on Zerayla, but with 10 jobs at 75... its impossible to add another job because of inventory reasons. But recently i've been having the chance to play on Xean's character who also has BRD/NIN, to help LS members with merits (as well as get a few for Xean too) and i've reaaaaaally enjoyed the "merit bard". So much, that I went out and farmed 200 yagudo necklaces for Norg fame to quest Utsusemi: Ichi and unlocked NIN, on Tahla. Well, I didn't do the farming and questing alone... Xean brought his lolTH3 and helped me out while I stood in zone and lotted the yagudo necklaces for the first half ^^;

So far Tahla is only BRD36, and Magisterial (Xean's alternate taru character) is RDM41. We don't lvl too frequently, but enough that we make a little progress every week. And thanks to a LS party just a few days ago, we were able to get a couple of lvls. LS parties > pickup parties!

Team T R I O!
Carste asked me about doing a static for ENMs just over a month ago, with Xean. We chose to do "Antlion in Sheep's Clothing" which drops the Hagun, as well as "Pulling the Plug" which drops the Toreador's Ring. While we can only do these once a week, we have the potential to make ~6-6.5mil (split 3 ways). And it just so happened that on our first run doing Pulling the Plug (well, technically our 2nd because we did try to do a static earlier in the year but we wiped on our first run and took a break) we ended up getting the Toreador's Ring. That was definitely a nice little boost in gil for all of us, and with that extra I went out and got myself a Zahak's Mail for my DRG (so far seems to give me more consistent numbers, but nothing too flashy).

And now here's the interesting part. Every week, when we head out to Boneyard Gully, Carste always jokes about looking for Xolotl, the corse NM in the area. I had always thought he was kidding about killing it, if it happened to be up because i've only known this thing as being kill-able by 12ppl or more.

Well, as to be expected... i'm always proven wrong! Because just as we were headed to Boneyard Gully, Carste happens to spot Xolotl. Unfortunately though, he was just a tad too far to get claim before the game time turned to 4:00, which made Xolotl despawn.

So we went ahead and did our ENM (no drop ~_~) and waited until night time to attempt Xolotl. Carste grabbed the 2 skeleton adds that follow Xolotl and began kiting them and then it was up to me and Xean to take out Xolotl. Things were actually going pretty well (which is probably due to all the merits and gear Xean has setup for solo-ing) and even though Xean had gotten charmed twice during the fight, I was able to kite long enough to wait it out (yay gravity!). There was one time where Carste ended up dying and I had to run over and chainspell raise him (I was being chased by Xean who was charmed and Xolotl) but Carste got right back in and took the skeletons again so that Xean could finish off Xolotl.

While we did manage to trio Xolotl successfully, nothing dropped. But I think we were pretty happy with having killed him with only 3, considering there was another LS that had been watching us and probably hoping we'd wipe so that they could kill him afterwards. We even had a special guest who just seemed to be "wow-ed" by our performance!

Bees and Frogs - My Best Buddies. Not.
Salvage hasn't exactly been the most enjoyable event i've been doing. I do like doing the boss chariots because I really have to be focused because the other healer is usually weakened throughout the fight due to a few deaths... but there are just some parts of salvage that I can't bear.

For example, in Bhaflau Remnants, you have to fight ~100 bees. You have to pray that one of these bees that spawn, ends up being the NM. Then you have to pray, that his NM, actually drops the piece of gear you're after (usukane). Well, unfortunately our luck with this... hasn't been too great. I honestly haven't kept track of how many times we've actually gotten the NM, and what our drop rate is. What I do know is that being healer during this part, is sooooooooooooooo brain numbing! I try to change things up every once in a while, sometimes i'll be lolmeleeRDM, other times i'll nuke... and then there are times where i'll just play Restaurant City on facebook >_>;;

Then there's the one zone which I can't remember that has frogs. The frogs, that charm the rest of your party, and then run after you and try to kill you. FUN!

Not!

Actually, our static so far hasn't really had trouble with this zone and we've always managed to kill the main frog NM so I really don't have much to say. But my initial memories with this zone were horrible because of how many failed attempts we had.... Needless to say, I hate bees and frogs now though. I just hope that Xean and Carste will get some usukane gear out of this. So much work and yet so little progress. And did I mention the horrible luck with lotting? The times where Xean has been able to lot some usukane that he needed, he always gets outlotted. Story of his life, in FFXI anyways....

At least I got the Marduk Shalwar legs! Go go SMN? lol.

8 manning Omega!
Well I haven't been able to 8-man Omega in Limbus recently, but my first run with Weheartcaulk (lol@LS Name) we did Omega with only 8 ppl. It was pretty impressive because in all my limbus experience, i'd never seen it done with any less than 14, and even when we had a full alliance, there had been failure. I really like the low-man approach to Limbus - especially when I get to trio the King Behemoth zone (BLMx2, RDM). Mind you I'm a little slow on BLM in comparison to my other jobs, which usually means that I slow the run down a little because I try to be overcautious with my distance when nuking KB. I must say though, its a lot more exciting and fun doing this zone with only 3 ppl when I used to have to run with at least 2 full parties previously. And it seems there's a few more Omegas down the road, so maybe I might just get my homam feet!

It seems that I might also be tanking our future Ultima's on PLD/NIN. I've been collecting some magic def- gear in preparation and interested to find out if i'll be able to survive a Citadel Buster. So more to look forward to.

Beaucedine rains RELIC!
As with any endgame LS, you always encounter people that don't quite have the "team player" attitude. You also encounter people that don't quite grasp that "efficiency" is very important when it comes to spending 3.5hrs once a week, with 20+ other people to obtain some hard to get gear. I really wish sometimes that everyone could be on the same page and just bring the jobs that are going to help the most, and gear themselves accordingly without complaint... but things are never that easy.

I can say though that things pretty much resolved themselves, because there seems to be no tension anymore within RoR. For the last couple of months, things have seemed really stressful because of a few members that just wanted to play their way regardless of how that would affect the overall "efficiency" of the run. But things have changed, these members have left, and I no longer feel like I have to argue with people to bring the right weapons to a run, or the right job. In fact, things seem to have really changed for the better despite our roster decreasing a bit, because we came out of Beaucedine just the other week with 16 relic and 1 - 100c. The best part, is that 2 of the relic were PLD! We haven't seen PLD in Beaucedine in over a year, and it was nice to see our veterans who have been sticking it out for so long finally get some really good pieces. I'm especially looking forward to October as we have 2 Xarcabard runs which is the one zone that seems to have the most desired pieces.

SotW takes on Sky!
A while back, RMTFalk proposed to do a Byakko run on our "Saturday Casual ZNM Night". That run went very well, so well in fact that the highly sought after Haidate dropped. Well apparently that was a hit with our members because just last week we had another "Sky God Night" which included Byakko x2 and Suzaku x2.

And so our little social LS, was able to kill all 4 gods successfully. The suzaku's were a little more difficult which I think was because there was a lot of people that had never fought the bird, and so the concept of disengaging immediately after chainspell so that our RNG could shadowbind was new to them. But despite this, our healers were still able to keep everyone alive and our melee were able to keep the bird busy long enough for us to recover.

While we didn't manage to get any of the drops that people wanted, we did see a few gil items which went free lot. And I think mostly everyone enjoyed the night off from ZNMs... spamming Cheese Hoarder and Iriz Ima is starting to get to a few of us I think, lol.

We now have another 4-6 Byakko's scheduled for next weekend so hopefully we'll see some haidate drop there.

I believe that about covers the bigger things that have happened in the last couple of weeks. No big goals for me anytime soon, aside from getting Tahla to 75 on BRD. Just gonna take things a little slow and probably spend more time farming. My DRG is not only an MP sponge, but a gil sponge! @_@

More Moogles...

Thanks to Sabene, Athoz, Vepion and Zeo, myself and Xean were able to complete the latest mini-expansion "A Moogle Kupo d'Etat".


Myself, Vepion and Xean had made a static to get the expansion done and get ourselves the new augmented head piece. Along the way, we had to recruit some LS help in order to do a fight in Quicksand Caves. Thanks to Zeo, Sabene and Athoz, we were able to complete this very easily. After having done the fight, we started to make plans to do the final missions which included another challenging fight in Castle Zhvahl Bailey's.


Sabene and Athoz had asked if they could join in the static and get caught up, so that we could all do the last fight together. We had no problem, and so they worked on getting their missions done that following week. That weekend, Anderoc, RMTFalk, Darce and myself helped Athoz and Sabene get the quicksand caves fight done, so that they would finally be ready for the last fight with the rest of us.

This time around the fight didn't go quite as smoothly, but we still got the win. I was only disappointed that I never got to use my SAM 2hr because I ended up dying about halfway through the fight. ><

The next day, we headed to Castle Zhvahl Bailey's for the last fight against Riko and his evil matrix minion moogles.


Our first attempt started off pretty good, but due to some bad luck with getting off the sleepga/horde lullaby when it was needed, we ended up wiping.

Determined to get our head pieces, we ran back to Beaucedine Glacier to redo the mini moogle games needed to get the key item to redo the fight.


As for our 2nd try, we made sure to have everyone ready for the sleepga/horde and that seemed to do the trick. When we got to the last part of the fight and had Athoz and Xean zerg Riko, I knew we were going to have a sure win because of how fast Riko's HP was going down.

After the win, we all made our way to Jeuno and immediately picked up our new gear.


I'm still a little unsure if I made the right augments, but so far i'm quite please with the choices I made:

• STR+4 & Weaponskill Accuracy +15
• DEX+4 & Critical Damage +2%

I went with these choices with my DRG in mind. I knew that the STR+4 and WS Acc+15 was a definite, but the second option is where I was a little unsure. I had done a little reading, and also asked for some advice and was told that the augment that added +2 WS DMG, would be roughly around 20 more dmg on my WSs. Then the other option was getting ACC+10 & ATK+5, which while looked very good, I felt wouldn't add as much.

So far i've been able to have a couple of merit parties, and I do notice that my "average" has increased and is more consistent now. I haven't seen much of a difference in what I call my "high" WSs, but then again I have yet to have both a BRD and a COR in my pty. I suppose I'll just keep what I have now, and wait until some poor and bored "Joe" goes and spends hours testing the various combinations to find out which augments would of been best for a DRG WS piece, and until then i'll stay content with what I have.

Other than that, I gave Fields of Valor "Elite Training" a try. I managed to pickup an extra Warwolf Belt through a KSNM30 Royal Ramble that had been setup through QCDN (really good group too) and thought i'd see what kind of augment I could get.


One would assume that with all the people bragging about getting really good augments, you too would get something decent.

+15 Light Resist.

. . .


Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice.

Seeing as the fight was pretty easy, and a few LS members were interested in trying out the sky FoV, I decided to try again with an extra Hierarch belt I had.

-1 STR, DEX+1, VIT-1.

Ugh....

So with that kind of luck, I think i'll put the augmenting thing on the back burner for now. I do enjoy going up to sky and killing pots with Vep's PUP, Xean's MNK and Darce's PLD though... so we'll see.

I think the next few things i'll work on are getting my crafts up again, and finally getting my cooking the +3 skill I never finished. I'm also hoping to get Tahla to lvl again with Xean's alternate character Magisterial. We both need to get rank 5 for our characters, so maybe we'll get that done this week.

I'm kinda looking forward to getting Tahla's BRD to 75. The last couple of days, Xean has let me play his BRD (I wanted the BRDing experience and he didn't mind getting the extra merits) and while I know I'll need a lot more practice... I feel pretty capable at merit pulling now. And, I actually really like it. o.O

Maybe thats just because I haven't had to take the job to 75? Well, guess i'll find out how I like it if I can get Tahla to 75. Only question now is... do I want to invest the time/gil into getting /nin to 37? I had only planned to play the job for LS events, and usually /whm is needed for those. But... I might just want to play her BRD in future merit ptys. Gah, decisions ><

(Nice little screenshot of Valkurm I took while getting RNG to 37 through many, many... many level sync ptys!)

(Yay for the annoying music played during the summer festival! Just glad I got myself the new yukata!)

Matrix Moogles??

Finally getting caught up with the newest expansion, A Moogle Kupo d'Etat.


A few people in my ls got this done just a couple days after the release, and as usual, I was dead against jumping into the missions at first. Whenever an expansion comes out, I always try to pretend like I have no clue it even exists. This is because the hype, is almost always overrated. I guess even on some level I see it as "following the crowd" which I really hate doing... so in the end, I usually wait to experience new content for FFXI when all the hype has died down a little.


And that time was also last week. I had mentioned to Vepion that I would join him in doing the missions, and that if he could get Xean to come onboard with us, I wouldn't mind starting. So of course that same day, he convinced Xean to commit to the static.

The next day we started off with the missions (with the exception of the first one you obtain when you zone into your moghouse) which led us to all the beastmen strongholds to farm some items. This didn't seem to take too long, and with a little bit of teleporting we were done pretty quick.

Then it was off to Jeuno for a cutscene, where we were introduced to SE's version of what I like to call, "The Matrix Moogle".


Seriously. Lol.

Story didn't really grab my attention too much, but it started to pickup a little later when suddenly the main moogle character was trapped in some kind of magical box. The cutscene was pretty interesting and creepy at the same time, with weird eyeballs and ghost looking things flying all around the room.

We were then sent off to Windurst where we had to ask Shantotto to help.


She sent us off to fight some cardians in Horutoto Ruins, which meant farming a couple of key items to make the "already easy" fight, even easier. Vepion came on DNC, I was on SAM and Xean came on WHM.


After we were able to free the little moogle, we then had to find some key items in Quicksand Caves. We picked up this mission a couple of nights later, because Vepion didn't have the map at the time which was a requirement to do the mission. So I helped him get the map one morning by farming up a coffer key for the zone.

When we were ready to continue with the mission, we then found out that Xean also needed the map for the area. So me and Xean zoned into one area and started farming, while Vepion farmed in another. Xean came out on his THF to add some TH3, and yet in the end, it was a mob that Vepion killed on his BRD that dropped the coffer key. Go figure, lol.


After we had collected all the key items, were were finally ready for the next fight. I was able to enlist the help of Athoz, Sabene and Zeo a few days later. The fight involved us killing Nanaa Mi'hgo (sp?) from Windurst, and a bunch of goblins. Fight was also relatively easy, more than I thought it would be. But i'm not going to complain, i'd much rather have an easy win than a failed attempt = loss of time.

Having finished the 2nd last fight in the missions, we set out to Beaucedine Glacier for some mini-games. These were a bit confusing at first, and took a little time to finally understand even with the wikipedia guide. Thankfully though both Xean and Vepion were able to understand what to do and explain it to me.

We wrapped up the last final mini-games in Castle Zvahl-Baileys, which were FAR easier and even a little fun, in comparision to the pre-requisite for the final ACP fight. Now all that's needed is the final fight, which i've already been able to try out as a Soulstar, Drimergirl, Chisei, Fizzywig and Janko needed an extra BLM for their fight. Hopefully we'll be able to do this last fight next week, and soon be sporting some new gear! I'm pretty sure i'll be going with the augments for the DD WS.

And for other updates... lets see...

Tahla is still lvl 22BRD. Need to get her up to 30 so that I can finally play with Xean's taru, Magisterial. Trying to work on some missions so that she can finally get her airship pass.

Did a bit of meriting, and just about done with the merits for my SMN. Gotta look into other things I can "unmerit" and "remerit" now...

Salvage is finally picking up. We've only managed to get one pair of Usukane feet in the ~15 runs we've done, but my static has decided to try out a few other zones to give a little bit of change now and then which I think was a good idea. Otherwise I think we'd all be going insane fighting so many friggin bees. I just dread the runs that we do when I have to revisit a certain green amphibian that gives me nightmares. ; ;

Limbus is really really great. We did an Omega with only 8 ppl last week, which really surprised me. In all my experience, i've never tried Omega with any less than 14 ppl, and on those runs we always relied on our 2hrs. This time around though, we didn't rely on 2hrs and got the win with a very small group. I'm really glad that i'm running this Limbus group now, i've finally found a group of people in the game that bring a lot of challenges that I haven't encountered very often. And thanks to that beardmage Carste, i've also had the opportunity to "trio" the Behemoth zone. I definitely sucked the first time around, but I feel that I got a good understanding of how to do that last floor and look forward to trying it again.

Oh, and lastly I was able to get my RNG to 29 thanks to some LS members that did a level sync with me over the weekend. The first party I had was with an all Japanese group and PL, and we just swept through the Qufim lvls. Then when we disbanded, I headed over to Kazham with some friends and was able to get 2k to lvl 30. Can't wait to get the last 8 lvls so that I can finally mule back all my gear. Zerayla has so much crap in her delivery box right now ><

Been a while since i've posted some "scenic screenshots" and seeing as I promised to do a wallpaper for a retired player on QCDN (he requested one after having seen some wallpapers I made a few months ago) I took a few screenies recently to work with, and figured i'd share them. Enjoy~

Helping out some friends.

Last week I did about a 10hr session of nothing but Zilart Missions. Some friends in my LS had setup a static to go from ZM4-Sky, and needed some help. I decided to take that opportunity to help one of my friends, Onedarkflame also get access to sky seeing as he has never been able to commit to any previous statics that were setup in the LS due to his playing schedule. Having access to his account, I just had to login and play as his character through all the missions which wasn't too bad.

The static consisted of myself playing as Onedarkflame (WHM), Vepion (BRD), Hyprixon (BLM), Athoz (MNK), Lailie (DRG) and the usual dependable Zeo (WAR) who came along to help.

Originally our plan was to do the missions in 2 days, but thanks to both Zeo and Hyprixon putting in a little extra(who were both on very very off time zones - UK and Asia), we were able to push through all the missions in one go. I don't know how they did it really, but I think everyone was happy at the end.

Going through all the missions again wasn't as bad as I thought i'd be, but then again everyone in the static was well prepared and followed instructions well. I think the only time I found myself a little frustrated was when we were doing the ZM8 fight in the Stellar Fulcrum, and I found out that Onedarkflame didn't have the key to Delfkutt's Tower which meant that I had to run him all the way up to the top.

All the fights were a breeze. In fact, they were a lot easier than I last remembered them being... which is probably due to the changes FFXI has had over the years. New gear + merits have pretty much made players more powerful I suppose.

I won't go into too much more detail, but rather i'll just post the screenshots I took throughout the missions.

(ZM5 Fight @ Sanctuary of Zhi'Tah)

(ZM8 Cutscene)

(ZM8 Cutscene - EVIL TARU!!!!!)

(Stellar Fulcrum)


(ZM8 Fight)

(Kam'lanautwhatever is DEFEATED!)



(ZM12 Fight)


(Dawn Maiden)


(Final Cutscene - Access to Sky!)

It was definitely a looooooooooooooooooong day, and I remember being pretty brain dead in the night. But it was worth seeing some friends finally have their sky access.

The reaction I got out of Onedarkflame was pretty hilarious. He had no idea that I had planned to get him Sky access, and so when I had completed the last mission for him, I logged him out, in Sky. That night when he logged in, he was pretty surprised not knowing where he was. Now he won't have to deal with the "Sorry, you don't have access" when asking to help out people in Sky.

Better yet, looks like we'll be trying out a few sky gods in the near future as a few ls members have expressed an interest. Zeo even has a pop set for I think Suzaku which I look forward to taking down with SpiritOfTheWolf.

I don't really see any "serious" sky farming happening, but the odd occasion when a member wants to farm pop items, or just pop a God, I think we'll be able to do this. We've had success with Byakko already (lucky RMTFalk got his haidate 1/1) and i'm pretty sure we'll be successful with anything else we try. Best part is that there's no need for ls members to join a sky shell and put hours upon hours into earning a piece of gear. The chances are much less doing sky gods as a "casual" thing, but once chance is better than none! And a chance to do a challenging fight with close friends, is enough to hold my interest! Well, to be more exact... a chance to bring out my PLD is enough to get me excited. <_<

Pessimism Pays Off!

Many people that know me, have seen that throughout the years of playing FFXI, i've become quite the pessimist. I would blame this on the fact that SE specializes in the term "Time Sink".

What this means is that the idea of spending hours of working towards a goal, that might result in failure, and thus result in wasted time, is very unappealing to me. I enjoy the game and many of the events in it, but there is so much work that is sometimes needed to accomplish something, and if you fail, you get to do it all over again. That right there, is what has over time, made me the biggest pessimist in this game.

Usually when something "big" is planned, I don't like taking chances and would prefer to "overkill" to make sure that time isn't going to be wasted. And whenever things look like there might not be "enough" to have decent rate of success, I can't help but express my thoughts which is why many know me to be a pessimist.

Despite this annoying trait though, I don't back out on anything I offer to help with, or say i'm going to do when it means having other people take time out of their day to also help.

And so.. more to the point, last Saturday we had a few ZNMs lined up. The most difficult one being Experimental Lamia which myself and Vepion had wanted to pop. When I checked the LS at our usual start time, there was less than a handlful of ppl available. So I didn't hesitate when asked in LS what the plan was, to express that I didn't see it being possible to kill a Tier III ZNM with what he had.

But the best part is that it seems to be everyone's personal agenda to prove me wrong! (well not really, but it'd be funny if it was)

And that's exactly what happened. Well, sorta. Soulstar asked a few of his friends to give a hand, and before I knew it, we had almost 2 full parties. We made our way to the pop location, which unfortunately took longer than expected which was more mine and Vepion's fault. On all our previous runs when we had made our way to Experimental Lamia, there would always be time spent waiting for people to gather and Carste would always end up farming the Lamia Fang key in the meantime which was needed to get to the pop location. So this time, I told Vepion that we both didn't have to worry and we would be able to farm one on the way.

Fast forward to everyone being at the gate, and no one having a key because the Lamia weren't dropping any ~_~

(I had Xean's character on auto-follow when I was duo-boxing him, and couldn't resist taking this screenshot. Kinda like it, looks like the lamia is playing music for us and Carste is singing!)

So some extra time was added on, but luckily ppl didn't seem too bothered. Finally we made it to the pop location, and instead of doing our usual pull to the bottom zone, we had Vepion sac the NM up to the wall, where I then grabbed her and pulled her to the North zone where the alliance waited. Me and Carste then did the repeated zoning with some help from other members whenever we went down, and the rest of the alliance killed the adds.

Even though we had a couple of deaths, we still managed to take Experimental Lamia down and Vepion got the drop he had wanted - Enkidu Leggings.

Then for my pop, we did the fight we normally did by pulling the NM down to the south zone. This pop seemed as tricky as the last, but that might of been because at the time I was duo-boxing Xean's BRD and wasn't able to stay on top of everything as well as I could have if I had just been playing on Zerayla. A couple of deaths, but again we had another win.

And the best part? AURUM CUISSES DROPPED!

I believe we've fought this about 5 times in total, and we've never seen these drop. But finally they did! Now I just need to figure out how I can persuade a couple of LS members to let me come DRG to the next merit pty @_@

Other than that, the only other thing I figure is worth mentioning is that i'm having fun getting Tahla ready. I finally hit lvl 30 today, and started the BRD quest which i'll probably finish tonight. I've managed to get her a couple of gobbie bag quests done, and plan to work a bit more on her fame so that I can open up more quests.


I guess it's a little odd that i'm finding some fun in repeating quests when I explained at the beginning of this post that the reason that i'm such a pessimist is because I dislike repeating things... but I guess playing a tarutaru makes a difference? I dunno, lol.

There once was a tarutaru named Tahla...

There once was a tarutaru named Tahla, who for the longest time, remained a lvl 5 monk mule in San d'Oria. That is, until a tarutaru named Magisterial from Jeuno sent her Kupo mail and invited her to embark on a journey through the lands of Vana'diel!


Well actually, after seeing a screenshot of my character and Xean's as tarutarus, thanks to some nifty program that Falk used on his pc to swap the .dat files, me and Xean both decided to bring out our tarutaru characters and have a little fun. The plan at the moment is for Xean to lvl RDM on his taru Magisterial, and i'll lvl BRD on Tahla. We probably won't try to do too many missions or quests, but mainly use these characters for LS events.

I'm not sure yet if i'll unlock ninja to use as a subjob, or stick to "ls only" parties so that I can just go with /whm until 75. I figure if I plan to use the character for LS events, chances are I won't need /nin too often and so investing time/gil into getting that to 37, might not be worth it. We'll see.

So, i've managed to get Tahla's WHM to 25, and BLM to 17 (yay for warp!). Most of my levels went by really quickly, thanks to an anniversary ring I had from last year.

I even lucked out getting to be the level sync target for a SMN Astral Flow burn, which brought me up to WHM 23. After that, I had a late night level sync party with Vepion's MNK and Zeo's PLD which went really well. I honestly didn't expect for a lvl 10 Valkurm Dunes party to go so smoothly, but that's just the pessimist in me speaking... which seems to always be present when playing this game, lol.

However, that fast and smooth ride soon came to a halt as soon as I accepted an invite to a Qufim party. I had a feeling when I saw the party setup that we probably wouldn't be getting the best of xp. We had WHM, SMN, SCH, DNC, WAR and MNK. Normally this setup wouldn't seem too bad, but for some reason the other mages thought that they were the main healers, and spammed cures rather than attempting to deal some dmg and speed up the kills. It also didn't help that our WAR wanted to kill worms out in the open where the Gigas spawned, and never waited to make sure all the mages were present before engaging. That of course lead to his death a couple of times, before he eventually just disbanded the party without saying a thing. I think in the end, I only netted about 3000 xp in that party ~_~

I took a bit of a break from trying to get Tahla to 30, (eventually I will though and then i'll unlock BRD) and decided to do a couple of rank missions. When I got to mission 1.2 for San d'Oria, I had to head over to King Ranperre's Tomb in the evening. I ran into an old friend...


Unfortunately though, he didn't drop anything.

I stayed in the area, killing bats for the rare/ex Orcish Scale Mails needed for the quest but wasn't having any luck. That's when Xean came and joined me, and after a couple of kills I got my item. He also went after the 2nd spawn for Spook to try his luck, but again no drop. I miss the good old days when me and Xean used to camp that thing as our gil maker, one of us always outclaimed all the other campers.

As for Zerayla, i've managed to do a little bit with her in the last couple of weeks.

First of all, I realized that I really enjoy my RDM. This has made me determined to become better at playing the most versatile job in the game, and so i've been trying to re-work all my gear sets. For the last year, i've only had my MP gear out of storage because all I ever did was merits. But now I have all my upgraded item, my rare/ex gear and i'm currently looking into other pieces to pursue such as a cape in Sea.

And because of the frequency that i've been asked to bring RDM to events (Limbus, Salvage, Dynamis) I decided to unmerit my Bio/Dia 3, and get 5/5 on Phalanx II. Only took about a week to finally finish, but that was because I went several days without a merit pty! (ZOMG!)

I've also been trying to get some more allied notes, because thanks to the update, I only need lets see.... 65k + 75k worth? I need to get both the new Iron Ram Mail and cobra Unit Harness, which so far seems like it's going to take an eternity to obtain. Everytime I put 2hrs aside to do campaign, I spend more than half the time waiting in town because there aren't any happening except for in beastmen owned areas. And those give you nothing if all you do is hit fortifications. Good job SE! Way to offer no incentive to go to those zones! /sigh


I will say though, last night me and Xean tried out the new "Union" thing and we're both happy with this update. If I understand it correctly, you just need to get a certain amount of AN, and your union will then get a chest full of random items. Anyone that joined the same union as you, will also be able to lot, but at least there's a chance you can get something at the end.

Then there is my ever continueing quest to get a decent leg weaponskill piece for my DRG. I have 3 options at the moment: Aurum Cuisses, Pahluwhan Seraweels and Askar Dirs.

Tonight I'll have a shot at the Aurum Cuisses if my social LS is able to do the 2 Experimental Lamia planned. But seeing as that ZNM is far out of the way, and requires a decent number of people... i'm not going to keep my hopes up.

Then there's assault, which is going well so far. I'm currently spamming "Pre-Emptive Strike" with Athoz, Sabene, Standpoint and Xean. I was a little sad when after our last run this week, I checked my points and saw that I was only about 90 away from being able to get my P. Legs.

And lastly, the Askar Dirs! While I believe i'm the only one left in my Nyzul static out of the "main lotters" that doesn't have this piece (which means i'm next up for them), no one has been wanting to do the floor that drops these so I have to wait until its my turn to call the floors. I think that might be next week though, so hopefully i'll have something for my DRG in the next 7 days.


Oh and I did get a couple of lvls on my RNG recently. I don't really enjoy the job at all, but i've been wanting to get it to at least 37 to use as a subjob for my RNG. I haven't really been in any situations where having COR/RNG has been needed, but I like being prepared and the fact that i've put off getting the job to 37 has been annoying me. I just wish I had the patience to get all the lvling done at once, right now I have about 16+ inventory slots in my delivery box filled with RNG gear that I want to give back to my mule already. Maybe i'll try to finish that this week.


And for LS events, SoTW finally has something new to add to our list of accomplishments! We took down our first Byakko!

Falk has been lvling his NIN with the static I do on Sundays, and he finally was nearing the "B.Haidate" level. So he spent a couple of days up in sky farming the pop items. And when I say "days", I don't exaggerate. I actually went up one time to help him and we spent quite a few hours killing Aura Stones but nothing dropped. It was still kinda fun though, I brought my RDM and my nuking set and didn't do so bad.


We decided to pop Byakko during our normal ZNM night because this is when most people were available to help, and no one had made any ZNM requests that week. But we did run into some trouble, because more than half the people that came out to help had either logged into LS too late, or been too busy on the skype call that was going on to have seen when Falk said we had to pop Ulli first before going to Byakko. What this meant is that we only had a handful of people at Ulli, with only one or two DDs. Everyone else had gone straight to Byakko ><

In the end though, we did kill Ulli and then joined up with the rest of the group. We were also pretty lucky too because there was a JP shell that was popping multiple Byakko's at the time, but they let us get our pop in.

So after buffing up the alliance, Falk invited the white purple striped kitty to come out and play!


Me and Darce were tanking him as PLD/NIN which was something new for me, because in my previous sky LS I had always gone PLD/WAR. I actually enjoyed it too, though did run into a few moments when I didn't have any shadows up and the recast timers were down. But our WHMs did one hell of a job keeping us alive, and I think the only death we had was our TH4, Soulstar. I think he died twice at the very end, though I can't really remember how that happened. Maybe the SATA hadn't gone off correctly?

All that matters though is that we had some really awesome drops. Falk got his haidate, and a few other goodies dropped that went to LS members.

The nice thing about doing sky gods is that it gives a chance to LS members that don't have the time, or desire to join an endgame LS, an opportunity to get endgame gear. And it even looks like we're going to have a Suzaku planned down the road too, which I look forward to seeing as I owe that bird for one shotting me ages ago with chainspell Firaga III. ~_~

I've also started doing Limbus again with a shell that Carste and some of his friends reformed from a broken shell. The run times are way more convenient, and so far the runs have gone a lot better. It looks like we'll be doing Omega a lot more frequently too, because this shell is used to doing low-manned events and we've done really well farming 2 zones in one run with very few people.


We even got to do an Omega, which I was able to bring RDM to! We had less than 2 full parties, which made the fight a little more challenging. The members are really good players though, and we managed to get the win which resulted in Carste finally getting his homam legs he's been after for months. I'm really looking forward to future runs with these guys, looks like we'll easily be able to do an Omega at least twice a month, and thanks to a fair lotting system, I might finally be able to finish my own homam, rather than sit on a bunch of points that mean nothing. (Fun fact: after I left my last limbus LS, seems they finally decided to change their lotting system and go with some of the suggestions I had made to make it more fair, go figure?)

Lastly... looks like Garrison might be something SoTW will start doing again. Kawanomu had setup a run last weekend for Cape Terrigan, and this was pretty straight forward in comparison to the other areas we've done in the past. It was pretty easy for me, all I did was bring COR/WHM and help cure and do some rolls. Oh... and spammed my sleep. I love that I can sleep mobs while running, quick draw FTW! Hopefully we'll get to do this again. The drops aren't all that great, but this is by far one of the more enjoyable quick events our LS has done in a while.