A revival perhaps?

Well, i'm finally getting back into playing FFXI, and I have to admit i'm enjoying it.

I spent the last few months getting settled into my new home, and my new life with my hubby <3

I've had a lot more time to play, but up until recently, I didn't really have any desire to. In the last couple of months, TheBrotherhood (we went back to our old shell) had become pretty empty. A lot of members had either quit, moved onto other shells or just didn't have the time to play. I found myself often being the only person in LS for hours, and this made it all but impossible to do anything. I'm not the type to send /tells to people outside of LS and ask for help, or invite myself to events. And knowing that i'm more likely to fail at "soloing", I didn't bother to try very much on my own. Eventually it got to a point where I started asking myself what the point of logging in was, if I had no one to play with. I was actually going to quit one day, until I remembered that there was an update that was coming up the following week and so I decided to stay and just give it one last shot.

This ended up being a good decision, because Carste and Onedarkflame decided to return to the LS, and Timwakefield also came back from his 100000000th break from the game. Immediately we started spending our afternoons going into Abyssea and low-manning NMs to get atma, seals, etc. This has been a lot of fun... so much that i've found myself neglecting my Netflix movies just to do some Abyssea with old friends. I've been bringing BLM, and trying to absorb as much information about how everything works in Abyssea.

I hardly touched the expansion content up until now, so there's been a lot to learn. And getting the practice in on BLM has been good, but I still laugh at myself most of the time because I just seem to make really retarded mistakes. In fact, i've started to think of myself as that one character that always gets into trouble. Only in my case, I end up dying a lot! But the deaths are nothing now with the kind of xp that you can get. After all, I already hit lvl 90 in less than a week from our low-man Abyssea stuff.

Speaking of progress, i've been able to do quite a bit of catching up this week. It's been a little bit of a hassle getting all the new gear though, because i've had to do a lot of rethinking for my macros. Despite that we now have an additional 80 slots for inventory, this doesn't increase our "main inventory" which is where our gear swaps take the gear from. And currently my WHM, RDM and BLM have over 70 pieces of gear which leaves me very little room for anything extra. Oh well...

So thanks to Timwakefield, Carste, Onedarkflame, Vepion and Anderoc I now have these:






There's a few other items i've gotten too, but I can't recall them off hand.

I've also reactivated Xean's account and have been bringing his BRD to help with the Abyssea stuff. I don't really plan to be aggressive about getting progress on him, but i've decided that little by little I will work on his MNK. Hopefully by lvl 99, i'll have that elusive Black Belt. Though I bet it'll be useless at that point, as there may be something better.

And for Zerayla, well I think i'll just keep working on her RDM, WHM, BLM, SAM, DRG and probably PLD. I haven't really cared to play on PLD since the lvl 85 update, but having gotten some new gear for the job, i'll probably get around to lvling it up soon.

Oh, and I finally finished the WoTG missions with my static group: Carste, Hesper, Anderoc and Onedarkflame. Carste actually ended up duo-boxing Odf's character because he had RL plans the night we decided to finish the missions. We also ended up fighting the final fight with a very typical setup: BLM, RDM, WHM, SAM, DRK. According to wiki, the fight is best done with SMNs or BSTs... which I wouldn't doubt is true because we had some difficulty with the fight. However, as with all the previous missions we had success :)



It's too bad that the reward isn't all that great though. I ended up getting the "Refresh" and "Magic ATK +4".

And so that about sums things up. Looks like at least for now, i'll be playing a little more often and hopefully SE will continue to update the game the way they have been recently, rather than focusing on their failure of an MMO FF14! Sooooo glad I never bought that game. I mean it's likely it may get better down the road, but just recently they fired their development team, apologized for how crappy the game has been and made the game indefinitely "free" to play until they fix things. So for now i'll stick to my FF11 ^^

Things are a little slow.

I can't really say a lot has happened recently. I've been playing a lot less, which is partly due to my RL getting busy with marriage/moving and stuff... and also because I no longer really enjoy playing solo the majority of the time. Not many friends play much anymore, or frequently for that matter and so I typically just have my character on for the day while I go and watch TV or do something else.

There have been a few fun events lately in LS that have come up, such as a Jailer of Faith run we had just last weekend. Despite only getting only one torque, we had a successful 4 runs. We had a great turnout too which I was really surprised at and the overall fight went really well with only a few deaths. The best part about the JoF run for me was that I now feel capable of navigating the area without a map. I just wish that the respawn time wasn't 15 minutes, because we had about a 30 minute "down time" in between each pop due to having to find the ??? and then getting everyone there.

Unfortunately we didn't come out with the number of torques we had hoped for, but I still had another 4 pop items leftover. I was able to go farming for some more pop items with Onedarkflame and Vepion later in the week, and we added another 3 to our collection. I believe we have 7 or 8 pop items now, so we'll hopefully be able to setup another run down the road and finish getting ls members their torques.

Salvage hasn't really changed much over the last couple of months. Our group hasn't killed too many bosses lately, and while we have seen a few good drops recently (completed morrigan's robe and usukane hands) it still can be really discouraging when you wipe to a chariot at 1 %. But at least it's something to do, and lately i've been needing that when it comes to FFXI.

I'm really hoping I get out of this phase where the game just seems boring. I used to enjoy it so much, but I have a hard time being motivated to do anything. The majority of goals require endgame shells and because of the other statics I have going on, I can't really juggle them all.

And now that there has been all this new stuff released, I feel really opposed to having to spend my free time reading about how it all works and I honestly don't want to pursue anything until I know for sure its worth my time. I've heard a lot of things about these new "Magian Weapons" but it seems like the final upgrades are more than a challenge for your typical player that isn't involved in endgame and I have yet to really spend the time figuring out what augments are really going to be "best".

I'm hoping the new WoG static i've joined with some LS members will spark up my interest in the game again, we'll see.

Otherwise seems that my future for FFXI is just meriting and farming with Xean's TH4. x_x

Jimminy Cricket!

So its been eons since i've made a post. I guess I had just felt that it was too much of a time sink to update this blog consistently, and with very few (or no) readers, I didn't really see the point.

But thanks to my friend Onedarkflame who recently started up his own FFXI Blog (http://www.odfsblog.blogspot.com/), I regained that little bit of enjoyment and eagerness I used to have when i'd write up a post and decided that I should give this thing a go again.

So now for the updates!

Zerayla

• Completed A Shantotto Ascension mini expansion with some LS friends (Vepion, Carste, Hesper, Timwakefield and Onedarkflame)
• Leveled Bonecraft to 60 and Goldsmithing to 28
• Completed merits on all jobs @75 including non-job specific merits
• Capped XP on all jobs
• Obtained MNK, BLM Relic 5/5 (still missing SMN, SAM and DRG)
• Obtained Ares's Flanchard
• Leveled SCH to 51, NIN to 42 (EW EW EW EW!), BLU to 37
• Obtained Hecatomb Mittens & Shura Togi (thanks to a great SoTW Byakko and Kirin run!)

Tahla

• Leveled BRD to 75
• Obtained 5/5 Minuet, 5/5 Lullaby Recast, 8/8 Wind Skill, 8/8 Singing Skill, unlocked Troubadour & Nightingale, 4/4 Spell Interuption Down, 3/4 Evasion
• Obtained Sky Access

So that's the short version. I'm sure there's a lot of other things I could add, but that works for now.

Figured i'd also share a few good stories. One in particular which has made me a little bit of a celebrity of sorts on my server.

See, it was about 3 months ago that I finally managed to convince my fiance Xean to quit FFXI. He had been loosing interest in the game for a long time and due to getting a full time job, he wasn't really finding any enjoyment playing FFXI with the little "free time" he had. So he gave me his account, and I soon found myself with access to TH4.

This then led to a "farming obsession" that pretty much consumed all my free time. And because Xean had already stopped spending gil months before he quit, he had also accumulated quite a bit of gil. And thanks to about half a dozen Royal Rambles and other gil making methods (hello toreador ring enm x2!) I was able to save up a good amount of gil. So much in fact, that after the mog bonanza, I figured I might as well purchase the 12 Imperial Wootz Ingots I would eventually need to complete my Ares's Cuirass from salvage as I finally obtained 2/3 pieces needed for it.

So off to the AH I went. I made my first bid on an Imperial Wootz Ingot quit a bit less than the last selling price, hoping the sellers had undercut. Sadly, this wasn't the case and my bid of 1,140,000 gil didn't go through. So as I went to try my second bid of 1,160,000 which was the last selling price. Unfortunately though, I didn't realize that my cursor had moved to another item and because I had been distracted by a conversation on skype at the time, I really didn't read every word of my chat log to notice that I had just bid 1,160,000 gil on a stack of IRON INGOTS.

What's worse, is that I proceeded to make this mistake 8 more times without seeing that little bit of text that told me I had purchased a stack of Iron Ingots at that price. By the time I had noticed the mistake, I was torn between wanting to bash my head against my desk to express my disbelief that I had somehow managed to make that mistake nine times, and finding a way to express verbally the many things that might help relieve the anger and other crazy emotions I was feeling at the time.

So did I get any of the gil back? I did actually. Two out of three people that I was able to reach were understanding and kind enough to make arrangements with me to trade back the gil for the ingots I had purchased. The others either wouldn't reply to my /tells, or I just could never find online. After a week of searching, I just accepted the loss and moved on. And the truth is that I didn't feel as upset as I thought I would. I ended up seeing the ~10mil loss as something that would only give me more reason to log into FFXI and have something to do which as sick as it sounds... I actually kinda enjoy. Farming. (And if you think thats sick, you should see my sphere grid in FF10!)

So these days I pretty much just login and wait around for people to ask for help. I haven't really had a lot of motivation to do much, but then again I think its because I haven't really had a lot of success with being able to get people to be available/interested in any of the things I would want to pursue. I've pretty much just decided to wait for the things I'd like to go after to be organized or brought up by others as they usually seem to have better luck than I do when recruiting the numbers to accomplish the goal.

With so many people quitting and playing less, the "fun" that once was there seems to have all but disappeared. I still like playing the game, but the game on its own can only be "so fun". I think the company of friends is what really made this game the most enjoyable to me and when you find that the only company you have is your own... well, you get my point.

I'm hoping that the new updates that have been announced will generate some interest from players that haven't been playing much, and also look forward to the many level grinding sessions i'll have to do thanks to the level cap increase. I definitely don't look forward to getting my NIN up to 49 to use as a subjob, but thankfully my sunday static has agreed to let me gimp the party and level the job during that time ^^

As for future goals, the biggest one at this point is getting my last piece in salvage to complete my Ares's Cuirass. So far my static hasn't been able to beat the boss chariot that drops the item, so its been pretty discouraging. I don't think i'd be as frustrated if we at least managed to kill the boss to have a chance at the item dropping... but so far we've wiped twice at 1%. I've just repeated to myself "Its just a game" after the failure, and it helps a little bit, lol.

So there you have it. Probably won't keep up with this blog as often as I used to, and probably won't have too many pics to post (those are quite time consuming to edit and crop) but whenever I get the urge and feel bored out of my mind, i'll probably make a post here :)