Getting there!

Finally completed a couple of AF3+1 bodies, thanks to TBH again.

This week I had joined a couple of pickup groups to work on body seals for PLD and DRG. I managed to get 6 seals total for my PLD and 9 seals for DRG, which I thought was pretty good. It's not to often though that I'm in Jeuno to see the shouts, or that I can even get in on a shout that won't have more than one lotter on the seals that I want. So the pickup groups I got into were pretty decent.

And last night, we decided to do an Emperador de Altepa run so that we could get the MNK body seals for Xean, Athoz and Janko. Because i've had Xean sitting on his 9 cards of Ardor to upgrade his MNK AF3 body to the +2 version, i've been pretty vocal about how annoying it is, seeing all these MNKs walking around with their +1 version. Nothing sucks more than being able to get the final upgrade, but needing the items for the first upgrade....

So I was really happy after our successful run last night. And special thanks to Athoz who actually passed on the MNK seals until myself and Janko had gotten our 10. Unfortunately we weren't able to finish getting Athoz his 10 seals, but we're actually about to finish that as I write this... Currently farming Gamayun and being counter camped by a JP group. But thankfully we're now 9/10 on his seals, so i'm sure we'll get the last seal tonight.

The farming itself was long, but the company was entertaining so there wasn't really a boring moment. I was on BLM for the run, and occasionally overnuked as usual... but that is why they evented the atma of apocalypse. For BLMs like me!

At the end of the run, I had finished my RDM body as well. Only I ended up being disappointed when I discovered that until I get it upgraded to the +2 version, its only useful as an idle piece :(

And then there's the whole "RDM isn't useful anymore". At least for Abyssea....

I think the next big goal on Zerayla aside from my polearm trial, will be to upgrade her DRG body +2. But that might be awhile, as I think its better to upgrade the jobs that people are more likely to use during events. And DRG is just my hobby job. I haven't run into a situation where my DRG has been needed yet, as far as abyssea events.

And now that i've been able to complete Xean's MNK AF3 +2 body, i'm psyched. I'll be even more psyched if we walk away with a few Adamantoise Eggs from tonight's KS99 run... because then i'll have his Black Belt! Here's to hoping!

A week of irritation.

I guess eventually when you find yourself really enjoying something, is when it starts to go downhill. Just when i'm finding myself full of energy, patience and determination for the many goals I am looking forward to completing with friends... things just start to happen to ruin that momentum.

Monday morning I logged into the game, to wait for Hesper and Athoz. We had made plans to work on our Ice Staff trials and get caught up to Carste, who would join us later that night.

However, I had mistakenly misunderstood some previous plans I had made with Vepion, to go kill Yaguarogui, the same morning. I thought my plans with Vepion, were in the afternoon.

Anyways, before I was made aware of this mistake, Hesper had logged in and had some bad news. He had some stuff in RL come up, and wouldn't be able to play. However, he did agree to give me his account information so that I could log him in, and bring him along for the trials so that he would get credit and not fall behind. But about 5 minutes after I had signed into POL on Hesper's account and he had left, the game crashed on me. Because the account had the security token and I had no way of communicating with Hesper, I wasn't able to get back into his account.

So Athoz and myself decided to wait for him to come back, because we didn't want to continue the trials without him. The wait ended up being close to 2-3hrs I think. So that morning we pretty much did nothing.

And in the meantime, I re-arranged my plans with Vepion to do them on Tuesday morning. We decided to go after Blanga instead of Yaguarogui because the seals were more useful.

Then SE ruined our evening plans for monday night, because they decided to do maintenance from 5pm - 3am. And unfortunately Hesper had to go out again so we were only able to complete 1 trial, rather than the two we had planned to finish to get caught up to Carste.

So Tuesday morning rolls around, and I login and wait for Vepion to get online. I see a few shouts go by for stuff I could join, but decide to continue waiting for Vepion.

Finally, about 45 minutes before I have to AFK, Vep logs in and had decided to do some other stuff after his RL plans. I was a little annoyed that there had been no communication prior, because again I felt like another morning had gone to waste.

Luckily though the evening went a little better. Onedarkflame, Hesper, Athoz and Carste logged in and we all finished our Ice staffs. Then we did a low-man Omega and got Buckeyespud the last of his Homam gear he needed.

Then finally there was Dynamis-Xarcabard, and this went well as usual. We beat Dynamis Lord with about 14 ppl, and managed to do a few of our usual "wipe" pulls, without any wipes. We had the cape drop, but no ring :(

And then for the cherry on the cake! This morning my hubby offered to help me in-game, so I decided we'd try to duo Gamayun for some MNK seals. We went out to Abyssea Grauberg on THF + WHM, and found the VNM pop spot easily. We fought him down to about 25%, which is when Janko came out to join. Sadly, we didn't get any MNK seals though Xean did get a THF body seal.

So after that, we fought a few crabs as we waited to find Gamayun again. Only this time another group got him before us. So we waited again.... but the other group got to him first. We decided to try and camp him closer to the bottom of the waterfall where he had spawned the last times, only to see that right as he became available to pop, the other group "msyteriously" was already at the spawn point and had him.

Pretty sure they were using some kind of 3rd party program. =/

I felt really irritated and we decided to just stop at that point. Doesn't make sense to be competing against people that cheat, and have a much better chance at getting claim.

Guess this means that Xean's MNK body is going to have to wait now. We can probably do Emperor de Altepa, however there are a total of 3 MNKs within our LS that are interested in these and with my terrible luck, I just don't feel too optimistic about finishing the body anytime soon. It annoys me even more because i'm sitting on the 9/9 items needed to upgrade to the +2 version....

I really hope things pick up tonight and the rest of the week. I feel like i've lost my momentum because of the last couple of days... random stuff happening that just interferes and messes up what you look forward to doing.

I guess on a good note, i'm finally onto the VNM part of the trials for Xean's empyrial weapons. Glad to finally be done with the lottery NMs... I despise being in-game, doing "nothing".

Trials Galore.

Lately weapon trials have been the focus for me in game. And I think this will be the trend for a while, because I recently decided to pursue the Empyrial weapon [Hand-to-hand] on Xean.

At first I had no real intention of going after this, and was going to settle for one of the other trials that would give me a slightly better pair of weapons than my destroyers, but my hubby offered to help me with the harder Abyssea trials on and off. So now i'm trying to fly threw the ever tedious trials that involve camping lottery NMs. I'm nearly done after a matter of days, with only one more Ramponneau and 4x Keeper of Halidom before I can move onto the VNM trials. I will probably be taking a bit of a break once I reach the Abyssea trials (Chloris is the first trial) but eventually the plan will be to get the Verethragna on Xean too. I really want to play his MNK and feel "completed" with his character gear-wise before this game dies. Which i'm hoping, won't be for a long time.

Also spent a little time working on my own trial for my Rhongomiant. Carste, Athoz and myself went out to Attohwa and did a little bit of key item farming so that we could pop Uladashi. As with all of these NMs that drop the items needed for weapon trials, there's always one NM that is a pain to do because it's a spawn-timed NM which means having competition. And I thought for sure, our progress would be slow when we zoned in and headed to the Amun camp to find another group there as well as a solo NIN. But, after getting the first claim... we had the NM to ourselves. Guess we intimidated the other group, and by the second pop, the NIN also left.

After doing about 5 Uladashi, I had completed my BLM AF3 Head +2, and Xean's MNK Head +2. We started working towards the completion of Athoz' MNK head and Carste's BLM Head, but didn't manage to finish. And I got another 9 Uladashi fangs to add to my trial, leaving me with 31 more to get.

And just a few days prior, we worked on Onedarkflame's trial in Misareaux. I think he got more than halfway done with the lantern items he needed for his trial, and we also managed to complete a few AF3+2 legs including my SAM.

I'm starting to feel less overwhelmed by all the stuff I would like to get, because at the speed we've been going... we're getting a lot done in a short amount of time. SE has finally been making some good changes to the game, giving us more to go after, but making the challenges easier to take on in smaller groups. And the whole cutting down on NM spawn time? Excellent idea... No more 21-24 hr crap. -_-

Also thought i'd include this pic. They did a minor update last week, which affected the blinkmenot script. Basically anytime you did a gear swap, your gear and/or character would change entirely to the most random of things. The pic below, is supposed to be my PLD...

I was helping out Vepion get some skillups on his staff, tanking bugards in Abyssea Misareaux Coast. The funny part is that I hadn't played on PLD in so long, that I had completely forgotten that being /nin meant that I could cast shadows to have some "interrupt-free" cures. I think i've just been on MNK/WAR too much and forgot about blink tanking.

And yesterday I was able to finish up my RDM AF3 +1 hands on Zerayla. My hubby offered to login and play a little bit with me, and wanting to give him something a little more fun to do, I figured i'd find an NM to do. At the time, Hesper was in LS and so I asked if he wanted to come out and kill an NM in Uleguerand that dropped BLM, RDM, WHM and SCH. We managed to finish my RDM pretty quickly, as well as Hesper's WHM, BLM and SCH hands. Carste logged in a little later and came out to work a bit on his BLM and RDM hands seeing as we were done with those. We didn't get to finish the ones Carste needed, but got pretty close. Was fun to see the "real Xean" in-game. Definitely made things easier on me because I only had to focus on one character. Duoboxing has become a permanent thing with me, so the little break was nice.

I also was able to get my Orison Cape for Zer's WHM finally. I've killed that rabbit at least 5 times (when the first expansion came out) and never got the drop. My husband briefly logged in a couple nights ago and as I was showing him the new things in Abyssea (how to proc) I figured we'd try an easy NM. After waiting around for a bit, Mangy-something-Marvin decided to pop, and off Xean went killing it, just like old times.

I remember back when I first started this game, and was about lvl 8 or so, me and Xean went out to La Theine and he introduced me to the higher level rabbits that we began to club to death. At which point, I accused him of animal abuse for killing what I came to call "Bambi Mice". (They look like a cross between the disney deer Bambi, and a mouse) Fun days those were...

Aside from that, i've been trying to plow through the trials for my Ice (dmg) Staff. Because TBH has plans to take on the turtle KS99 this coming Saturday (and hopefully i'll finish Xean's black belt) Athoz, Hesper and Onedarkflame also wanted to get their staves completed. So we've been working on the trials over the last couple of days, and are now 3 trials away from finishing. Tomorrow we'll hopefully complete the next 2 that require real work [Crabs + Wyverns] and then the last trial is just a matter of trading in 15 Snow Geodes.

And maybe eventually i'll get my Thunder Staff done too. I started working on it last week, thinking it would give me something to do while I camped the stupid lottery NMs on Xean. And for the most part, it wasn't too bad.. but the trial i'm on, now requires that I kill "Slimes". And it can't be any animorph, it HAS to be a slime. Which limits me to non-abyssea areas, which means = excruciating slow kills with no easy way to regain MP. At least if i'm doing it on my own. I gave up after about 10 kills in Bostinaux Oubliette, when I realized how painfully long it was going to take me to do on my own. And i'm pretty sure I won't be working on this staff again until others are caught up and interested in doing the trial i'm on. I would much rather go with other people.... unless I get extremely bored one day. But i'm sure if that ever happens... I'll always have netflix or something.

Rhongomiant: The non-bandwagon weapon.

Last Friday, I finally finished the trial that gave me my Rhongomiant. When the Magian trials had just been introduced, I was playing my dragoon quite often because the best merit camps at the time were the colibri camps in Aht Urghan. So I decided to start on the polearm trials that would boost the damage, resulting in the Empyrial Weapon: Rhongomiant.

Back then, they had only released a few trials and it didn't seem all that hard to get them done. But eventually when the update came when Abyssea was introduced, I soon found myself putting my polearm trials on the backburner. The newest trial that I had to do, was obtain 50 x 2-leaf Chloris buds which drop from the NM Chloris.

This Chloris, could only be spawned if you had 4 key items. And 3/4 key items, required that you obtain 2-3 items to spawn an NM. And at least of of those items used to spawn the lesser NMs that dropped the key items (getting complicated yet?) were dropped from an even lesser NM that you had to farm regular mobs to get a drop item that would spawn it. There, I think I said that right...

Long story short, a lot of freaking work...

But thanks to some help from Anderoc, Carste, Onedarkflame, Vepion, Athoz, Hesper and Midgetking, I was able to farm up all 50 items needed to finish my trial.

It's funny that I really thought i'd never see this trial done, because of all the work that would be involved. But a few months back when Carste and Onedarkflame came back to TBH, we decided that all 3 of us would pursue an Empyrial weapon. And now, all 3 of us have finally accomplished that. We just have another 1-2 trials each to wrap up...

Bustin' out Dragoon.

Vepion asked me to help him out with a Magian trial for his dagger, which involved killing some 600 dragons. I couldn't turn down the offer to bust out my DRG, especially after having upgraded a number of pieces over the last month or two.

So Janko, Xyclo, Hesper, Vepion and myself headed out to Wajaom Woodlands to kill some puks. Though the mobs weren't anywhere near the difficulty level of an IT, it was still fun seeing them be almost one shotted. I think we killed around 150 puks, maybe even more.

Conclusion? I miss my DRG.

And going back to my previous post... I gave up camping Adamantoise. The next window was likely going to pop the HQ Aspid, and unfortunately the window would be way too early to recruit any help.

I did however cement my decision to try the turtle KS99. I've been able to recruit a number of people, and even had an offer of 3 orbs to be donated. I'm hoping that at least one egg drops, and hopefully we'll see a second with the orbs Athoz has available so that he can also get his BB item. But more importantly, I just hope that we can succeed and get a win. If we don't get the drop, we can always farm more kindred seals as long as we know that we have a good setup for the fight. So hopefully in another week when we do our run, Xean will finally have his BB.

And speaking of Xean... I managed to get all 9 Cards of Ardor to upgrade his MNK AF3 Body to the +2 version. Sadly though, I still need another 8 Body Seals to get his +1 version, lol. But I think i'll invest some time trying that one quest out in Abyssea-Uleguerand that randomly gives body seals when you complete it, occasionally. So far i've gotten 2 MNK body seals, but the quest is a pain because it takes about 10-12 minutes to do.

Other than that, I had a successful Chloris farming run the other day. Carste, Onedarkflame, Vepion, and Athoz came out to help for an excruciating day filled with Tahrongi NM farming, in order to pop a total of 9 Chloris which resulted in an extra 19 two-leaf Chloris buds for my Polearm trial. I'm now 29/50, and should be able to wrap up the trial in another 2 or 3 runs. The NM isn't hard at all, but he does have an annoying move that puts doom on everyone. Its always fun trying to see if we can cursna everyone before they die.

Also helped out Janko with Turul. We took a very long time trying to find him, and took just about as long to kill him. Onedarkflame came out to help on his WHM, and brought out Buckeyespud on THF. I had Zerayla on WHM, and Xean on THF as well. We ended up getting the body piece Janko was after for his MNK. I also got to walk away with the Searing Cape which is a nice nuking piece for BLM. One thing to note about this Turul though... Shock Spikes.

Adamantoise, how I hate you.

I finally kicked myself in the butt and decided to put some real effort into finishing Xean's Black Belt. I've really enjoyed playing MNK in Abyssea, and even though I don't usually get to put 100% focus on playing it as i'm often duoboxing, its still fun. I think playing the job reminds me of playing my PLD, because MNK is now a tanking class in Abyssea. It plays differently obviously, and I have no where near as many options for holding hate, but being the main one to hold the opponent has a strange appeal for me.

So anyways, Xean is now 2/3 on the BB items. All I have left to get, is the Adamantoise Egg which gives me two options:

1. KS99

2. HNM

I didn't have 99 Kindred Seals on either of my characters, so I started by farming some on Xean who was ~70 seals. One minor 2hr session resulted in maybe 4 seals. I had gone out to help Vepion with one of his Magian trials, and we killed Peistes for a while. This wasn't too bad, and being able to help a friend was a nice bonus.

The next day, I went out to Vunkerl and decided to kill some crabs. I thought that this would be my best option, because they're pretty easy to kill, and quite plentiful.

But I think my ability to endure insane grinds (ex: Farming Quadav Chestplates for 8hrs daily) has kinda disappeared because I kept finding myself getting bored and distracted. After spending the entire morning with probably no more than 3 or 4 seals, I decided I needed to change things up. That's when I realized that I could go out and get the TOD for Adamantoise which I had been putting off, AND farm seals in the meantime!

So by the late evening, I was out in Cape Terrigan with no clue when the turtle might pop and began my farming. Shortly after zoning in, an old LS member (Kawanomu) sent me a /t and asked if I was camping the turtle. I told him that I was, and then he explained that he was after the title for killing Adamantoise in order to get access to an atma for Abyssea. So we teamed up and he helped me out with his THF and eventually by the end of the night, I got the seals needed to get a Themis orb on Xean. But by that point, we had determined that the turtle had already popped sometime in the morning, and we both logged off for the night.

The next morning, I logged in to see a number of people online. Mostly Kaizen people. I was feeling a little annoyed because I only had a short time to be online due to some errands/appointments I had to do in RL, but luckily Adamantoise spawned 20 minutes before I had to leave. So I finally had the ToD.

So the next morning, I logged in and again was going to be pressured for time because I had some stuff to do in RL. I had some friends come out to help (Athoz, Onedarkflame, and Kawanomu) but we didn't manage to get the claim. Kaizen did, and with their 6-8 ppl they took the turtle down. I couldn't help but feel very irritated because these guys as far as I knew, did KS99s all the time and easily had the man-power. Why did they have to camp the NM?!

And because we didn't get claim that round, it meant I was going to have to wake up in the am the next day. And I mean the bright and early AM. But whatever, I finally had the ToD and I didn't want to lose it and have to camp the turtle all over again. (Thank you SE for making so many of the old content a big waste of player's time!)

Later that night, I logged in and me and Onedarkflame decided to go to Abyssea-Misareaux and work a little on his Masamune as well as Xean's MNK AF3+2 legs. Anderoc joined up with us to proc red, and we started off by getting the key items from Cep-Kamuy because Heqet was being camped heavily (as usual). Anderoc actually had a pop set for Cirein ready, and offered it to us if we'd help him farm another set afterwards. So we managed to complete 2 pop sets and got Onedarkflame 4 lanterns for his Masamune and 3 balance jewels for Xean's MNK legs. When we thought we were done, Onedarkflame decided to check on Heqet as that was the only KI needed to complete a few more pop sets. Apparently he was up, and no one was camping him anymore so we jumped on the opportunity to kill him.

We managed to get another KI to complete a pop set on both Onedarkflame and Buckeyespud, as well as get Anderoc another so that he could replace the one he had used for us. Quite a successful night i'd say.

And so getting back to Adamantoise... this morning I woke up, and I knew because of how early it was, I was unlikely to have any help. Fighting Adamantoise wasn't really a concern for me, but claiming him was. There was about 3 other people out there camping him, including the one mithra from Kaizen that had claimed him yesterday... so I felt pretty pessimistic about it all.

But to my surprise, Hesper had logged in and offered to help on his BLM, and about 2hrs into the window, Anderoc also logged in to give a hand. Anderoc actually logged in about 10 minutes before the next window was about to open and had to gear up. This left just me and Hesper to get claim, which had me worried because I don't ever seem to be quick enough to cycle through targets to claim.

But again... I surprised myself and CHI BLAST GO! Xean got claim and immediately I sent a /t to Anderoc to let him know. So as Xean was punching away, Hesper took care of an add or two and Anderoc started to make his way over. But his game froze when he tried to talk to the outpost NPC, and he had to reboot. Because I didn't want to risk killing the turtle without any treasure hunter, I held Adamantoise until Anderoc arrived. He managed to get TH8 on it, but no egg dropped.

And now the next window is even earlier! I can live with this, but the problem now is that i'm pretty sure Aspid is going to spawn next pop. And though I know HNMs are easier now because of the level cap, I don't think i'll be able to duobox him. I know can easily count on my small group of friends to help, but because its a weekday, they'll all be prepping for work, or at work. So... that doesn't leave me with much as far as options go.

I'm undecided now if I want to bother waking up so early in the morning, just to get the ToD. I'll probably decide later after i've had a chance to catch up on the sleep I missed this morning, lol.

In the meantime, I need to do a little more reading into the turtle KS99. Athoz had been wanting to do it, but I was pretty reluctant because the only time I ever attempted this, we failed miserably. And even though the level cap has been raised, I don't like risking time/items on an event that hasn't previously had success. I want to make sure that before I use the only orb I have (which could also yield no adamantoise egg) a good setup and a decent chance at winning. It took way too long to farm 30 KS.

I really dislike how difficult getting this dumb turtle egg is being. I'm tempted to start asking friends if I can buy orbs. Heck, if there was an HNM shell still camping Aspid i'd even buy the item from them. I just want to get this belt already! Why does it have to be such a pain!!! GAH!

Maybe some Abyssea tonight will take a little bit of the frustration away.

I think I hate Adamantoise as much as I hate Kreutzet.

Abyssea = Awesomeness.

I can't seem to get enough of Abyssea @_@

I actually forgot to mention a few posts back, that I was involved in a low-man Jailer of Love fight. I finally got to bring out my PLD, which has been locked away collecting dust for who knows how long. I remember when I was initially asked to tank this fight, how hesitant and nervous I felt because it had been so long since I had played the job other than getting some xp through an Abyssea party.

(After we killed Jailer of Love, Absolute Virtue popped and immediately began to rip us all apart. After raising, Onedarkflame then thought it would be funny to MPK us again by pulling him over to where we resting.)

The fight went pretty well though we did wipe at one point which was probably my fault. Jailer of Love has a charmga move, and in order to avoid this I had to remain a certain distance. Throughout the fight, I hadn't noticed that the NM had moved a little closer to me, and I ended up being in his charm range. I think mostly everyone got charmed because of this slip-up, but we managed to recover with a little bit of sac'ing from Xean's WHM. And at the end, we managed to get the Novio Earring and the Love Torque... so well worth the deaths. And I got to enjoy playing my PLD again. But back to the closet it goes for now, seeing as PLD isn't all that useful in the new content being released.

And I was able to find a couple of pictures from the cutscenes following the Shinryu fight.

The fight itself is a joke when you have someone "brewing", which increases their stats to insane numbers. Hello Mr. 10,000 HP with 50tp/tick regain! So far i've done this fight I believe 4 or 5 times, and haven't managed to get the more desired pieces (Twilight Mail, Twilight Helm). But I have managed to get the Twilight Belt for both Xean and Zerayla, as well as the Twilight Cape and Twilight Torque. I'm sure there will be more of these fights to come, however I need to do some more cruor farming so that the fight can be brewed. And even though the brew makes it easy, the first part of the fight can be tricky. I usually end up duo-boxing as Zer's WHM and Xean's MNK. Which means that i'm usually tanking or proc'ing on Xean, and healing on Zerayla. And because of the constant spell spamming and having to proc "in between" the melee hits, this makes it really difficult for me. I know that eventually i'll get more used to it, but I get so nervous not wanting to mess things up that I can't relax at all when I do this fight. At least now I have my alt-tab thing fixed, so swapping screens should be easier from now on. Oh, but I do still get some annoying lag for some reason and I have a feeling its because my graphic settings are too high. If this could get fixed, it'd make my life so much easier.

And so yesterday I got invited by a friend Yatlin/Mindgrasp to help farm some AF3 Feet seals in Abyssea-Vunkerl. Having a BLM available is definitely giving me that advantage now, because people will actually look me up and invite me along to help them. I managed to finish off my SAM and RDM AF3 feet. Now all I have left on Zerayla are her PLD feet.

As far as the AF3 seals go, I'm starting to feel that i'm near "done". I've been trying to get much of this done in the day time so that I don't have to keep dragging everyone in TBH to do this. They've all pretty much completed their pieces and are now working on the bodies, meanwhile I've had a huge list of head/hands/legs/feet to do. Thanks to SE making the new AF3 gear good, and because I have 8 jobs that i'm gearing between 2 characters... I have my work cut out for me. But I can't complain too much, always having something to do right now is a nice change.

One thing i'm baffled about though, is WHY SE made the Empyrean Polearm such a pain in the butt to get. We've just started working on the next trial for my Rhongomiant, which involves collecting 50 non-stacking Two-Leaf Chloris buds. And the work involved in popping the NM Chloris, is a real headache. I need to collect 4 key items to pop him, and each of those 4 KI's involve at least 2 NM kills to get. We did our first "Tahrongi KI farming" session just the other day, and I was really trying to convince myself that maybe I should give up the idea of getting the Rhongomiant because it seemed like too much of a hassle. But Carste insists that the next session we do, we'll be able to manage our time more efficiently because we'll buy some of the pop items for the lesser NMs, and we won't have as many "leeches". Our last session, a number of us brought our low lvl characters in to get some xp and while that was helpful (Xean's WAR is now 49!) it did hinder us a bit, because Carste was more or less doing all the work in terms of killing. So we'll see how our next session goes, and hopefully stupid Chloris won't be stingy like he was last time. On 2 of our kills, he only dropped 1 Two-Leaf Chloris Bud. I'm now 10/50, and so there's still a long way to go with this.

And thanks to TBH, i've now gotten a really awesome Great Katana for my SAM (who also has yet to see the light of day) which allowed me to sell my outdated Hagun. I picked myself up this little guy:

We were fighting some NMs in Altepa for body seals as well as +2 upgrade items, and it dropped from one of the Cerberus type NMs. I don't recall the name off hand, but the fight didn't seem to be too difficult. As long as i'm not being distracted with /tells and people aren't asking me questions about random things on Skype, I can stay focused on curing! And with Carste usually being our tank on his NIN, fights are made even easier.

So now I think we're going to be working a bit more on body seals as well as the +2 items. And hopefully we can get in a little bit of Limbus, because I recently found out that the MNK AF+1 legs are a nice counter piece. I just wish I hadn't tossed BOTH upgrade items months ago when I was doing some cleaning on his account. I never thought they'd get used, and now I want to slap myself for not thinking. I have terrible luck with tossing things that I end up needing later on, which is why my Mog House storage is now swamped with rare/ex gear that I refuse to toss, even though i'm not using it. I have made the mistake too much of tossing what once was useless, and later on needed.

Next up on my list of things to work towards, will be getting the last item needed for Xean's Black Belt. He's now 2/3, with the Wyrm Beard and Behemoth Tongue. I just need the Egg from the Adamantoise NM, but so far i'm having a little difficulty in pushing myself to get the ToD. I had this master plan of camping it this Thursday after I heard there would be maintenance, but they cancelled it at the last minute. And the thought of wasting an entire day to find the ToD.... really turns me off. There's been talk about doing a KS99 because Athoz is also 2/3 now, and we "may" have the nuke power to pull it off... but, Xean no longer has an orb available and my two attempts at Kindred Seal farming haven't been that great. I think i've only managed to collect 4 seals. I may just have to ask around and see if anyone I know would be willing to sell me an orb. I want to finish Xean's BB ; ;

So back to the game I go now. Looks like Standpoint may have returned to the game and i'm sure I can help give him a little taste of the Abyssea awesomeness.