Seeing as it's been an eternity since I last made an update, i'll post the most recent stuff that's happened and go back to as far as I can remember.
The biggest thing to have happened recently was defeating Pandemonium Warden with TheBrotherhood. Onedarkflame and Carste had been wanting to do this fight for some time, and a few months ago suggested that we work on building a pop set. TheBrotherhood used to do ZNMs as a weekly event, so we actually had quite a bit of the "leg work" done already. What we had leftover was mostly duo'ed between Onedarkflame and Carste, and then for T3 ZNMs we had to kill we setup a date and got it done.
For the PW fight, a few of us put in a little extra effort to gear ourselves just a tad better. I especially needed to work on my PLD, which had hardly been touched in the last year. I was able to finish getting all my AF3+2, and worked on putting together a PDT set. Thanks to a lot of help with farming PDT rings in Abyssea Konshtat, and my Shamshir +2 (-10% PDT) I was able to to put together a decent set.
The PW fight was very well organized, and didn't take too long. My job was to hold the lamps, but I had a little trouble at first targeting PW after each death. By the end of the fight, I seemed to have it down. My only complaint was that it was a bit too laggy for my computer and because i was duoboxing with Xean's WHM, I wasn't as quick with the curing. But our old friend Falk (Sjoi) did a great job with the backup healing and took care of whatever I couldn't. I'd say everyone did well. It's only too bad that during our "zerg" on PW's final form, I didn't even get a chance to really see my DRG get any real damage in. I busted out a Camlann's Torment for just a little over 1k dmg (such an embarassment) and before I could even get another 100% TP to do a Drakesbane, PW was dead :(
But now myself and others from TBH can say that we've beaten one of the most challenging fights in the game.
And i've finally been able to get my lvl 85 Empyrian weapon for Xean. He now has the Verethragna which I owe a huge thank you to Anderoc, Sjoi, Vepion, Janko, Carste and Onedarkflame. These guys have helped with many many hours of annoying Tahrongi farming for Chloris pops (I really really hope no one else ever decides to do an empyrian with this trial because it sucks that bad) and Attowha farming for Ulhuadshi. Playing MNK is so much more fun now with these, and I can't wait to try and do a few solo Dragua's while duoboxing in order to complete the final trial.
I also re-geared my WAR on Zerayla because I wanted to open an opportunity to play a DD on her in Abyssea. Even though I enjoy playing DRG out of all my DD jobs, there's never any need for it and so WAR is the most useful thing I had available on Zerayla in terms of a non-mage job. I still need to do some skilling up in order to get access to all the blue proc's, but otherwise i'd say the job is ready.
I keep thinking I should sell off all my SAM gear and retire that job, but i've already done that once before and then ended up having to re-buy everything because the job was useful again. So I'm going to wait for the next couple of updates and see how the job changes, just in case I end up finding use for it again.
So to recap, the jobs that I play on Zerayla are WHM (perma these days lol), BLM, RDM, DRG, and PLD. The other jobs that i'm still gearing as I can "just in case" are COR and SAM.
And for Xean, I mostly play his MNK, NIN and THF. I occasionally use his BRD which is pretty much finished as far as Abyssea gear goes, and I still keep his WHM up to date for whenever I need it.
I've gotten a lot of progress done with all the new abyssea content that has been added, but there's still more that I want to do. I want to complete all the missions in all the zones and also get all the Atma and Abyssites. This goal will probably take the longest, just because I keep putting it off, especially the missions.
I was spending some time in another Abyssea/Social shell for a bit called TeamGL which I enjoyed. Members in TBH just didn't have the time to play as much anymore, so it was difficult to accomplish anything and waiting on shouts in Jeuno really wasn't how I wanted to spend my time in game. So I signed up with TeamGL, and managed to make some more progress. But last month one of the leaders had some issues with billing and hasn't been able to return since. As a result, there didn't seem to be a lot of organization for events, or even a real agenda as far as looking at the goals of the members. Often I would login and there would be nothing planned, and the only time we'd get to do something was when one of the leads would push to work on his second empyrian weapon trials.
I actually thought I'd hit another one of those "should I quit?" phases when this happened because both the linkshells I was in had so little activity, but thankfully members of TBH started to return more often and things began to pickup again.
I initially planned to spend my early evening with TBH because that's when the members were most active, and then play with members in Team GL in the late evening... but every night, I found myself busy with TBH until I was ready to log for the night. And so I guess things worked out for the best, and hopefully with the new lvl 90 update coming up, people will be even more active.
I just wish sometimes that I had more playtime during the weekends. I never seem to be at home during the weekend and so my only time to login is during the week. Being able to work from home is great, but work has also picked up and so i'm usually distracted up until the afternoon. Oh well =P
As of right now, i'm considering on finishing my smithing and goldsmithing to lvl 60. But I keep putting that on the back burner, just because it means clearing up some inventory room.
Other than that, i'm going to be helping Janko and Vepion with some Shinryu runs on Monday nights, and helping Vepion with his Verethragna for his PUP. He's about 26/50 on the Ulhuadshi fangs.
I still need to take some time to write up a list of the gear upgrades I still need to make (like usukane legs for Xean's MNK) so perhaps i'll do that for my next post. But again, its a matter of having that "down time" because otherwise I can't seem to get around to posting here ;)
