Zerayla - Paladin of Valor

{See you soon!}

2011-10-27T09:31:00.000-07:00

After a lot of thought, i've decided to take a month break from FFXI. This will be the first time that i'm deactivating my accounts, in the ~7 years i've played this game.

The biggest reason for me taking a break is just that i've reached a point in the game where there is nothing to do. So many people have quit or taken "breaks" and haven't returned yet, so the number of friends to play with has decreased severely. For the last month, it's been mostly just Anderoc, Falk, Vepion and Janko that have been around. And while there is a decent amount of things we can do when we're all free, its very difficult to find a time when we're all available.

So for the past couple of months, we've worked on the remaining +2's we've needed from the Empyrian gear, as well as the trials for our Empyrian weapons. Myself and Anderoc have finished everything our characters needed. After many a lot of effort, we finally convinced Falk to pursue an Empyrian weapon so that we could have something more to do when it was just the three of us online - so he decided on the Great Axe.

We started making a little progress on this, and managed to find a few other Abyssea related things to do whenever other LS members would login... but still, there seemed to be a lot of time spent just "sitting around" doing nothing because we didn't have enough help available for what we needed to do. And on a number of occasions, i'd find myself alone in the LS so the only thing that I could really do for myself without any help, was farming. This of course got old real fast because when there's no one to keep you company, you get burnt out real quick.

It's really a let down that the recent update had nothing to help the "low-man" groups. I believe the update was mostly focused on Void Watch, which does seem worth getting into (at least once the Japanese players figure out how it all works... because you know, SE doesn't bother to really give the details about the quests/content they add) but unfortunately it doesn't seem at all possible for low-man groups right now. I have heard that a few of the Tier 1 VW NMs are not bad, but if you want to get anything worthwhile you need to progress and that requires a lot more bodies.

And I have no desire to get involved in an endgame shell again. The last one I tried out, quickly died when the main leader had to stop playing for a month. The other leader in charge wasn't really organized and i'm super anal about organization for endgame events.

So at this point, friends need to come back and play more regularily or SE just needs to give out some more Abyssea content. Or make VW possible with 2-3 people. I think i'll be waiting for a long time for any of these things to happen.

And in addition to not having much to do in game, i've lost the ability to "enjoy" logging in. I think this is mostly due to the fact that everytime I login, I get upset because i'm reminded just by checking my friendlist at how certain "friendships" have changed. I've never been one to invest myself into building a relationship with another player only to think of them as "an online identity". But I guess that's how a majority of people that play MMO's are.

If I make a friend in this game, that friendship is the same as it would be in real life. I try to stay in touch with people who have left this game, and I try to keep up with what's going on with them in their life. Unfortunately though, in the years that i've played this game... i've met people that don't feel the same, and have no problem just walking away as if a friendship never existed. And I keep finding myself in situations where people I did consider to be good friends, turned out to not to be that at all. But I guess that's part of life, you encounter that no matter where you go. You just have to find a way to deal with it and move on.

So rather than login and constantly be reminded that people I once thought were friends can go on as if a friendship never existed at all.. I'm going to take a break and distract myself with other things so that hopefully I stop thinking about it altogether. I really don't like the idea that I can get upset to such a degree about things that happen in a video game. A video game is supposed to be fun, and sadly I haven't really been having that at all this past month. So its time to remove myself from what's getting the better of me.

But that being said, it is worth mentioning that I did get to enjoy a "final LS event" just last night. Falk had suggested that we do something fun seeing as this was going to be my last week before I take my break. He suggested that we do a "Dungeon Crawl" (kill everything in a dungeon) and so I managed to grab the majority of the LS members we had left and we set this event up just last night.

So Anderoc, Vepion, Sjoi (Falk), Soulstar, Drimergirl, Janko and myself went to Castle Oztroja [S] and made our way through the entire zone, all the way to the top where we eventually did a BCNM. We all went as the jobs we wanted (go go DRG! lol) and just killed everything in sight. The best part of the event was when we were on the second level and Janko decided to see if he could cast on the campaign mobs below. It worked.

All the yagudo linked including an NM, and as we were all discussing on skype whether or not they would actually de-aggro on the way up to us... we were suddenly bombarded by a massive group of samurai looking crows.

Janko managed to MPK all of us, except for Soulstar and Anderoc who had managed to find some pretty good hiding spots.

So for anyone wondering, yes if you cast on the mobs below they WILL come after you.

We ended up going all the way to the top of the castle and entered a BCNM which we thought would be a piece of cake, considering we had 4 Empryian weapons and we were all lvl 95. And I supposed it could have been easy if we had maybe looked at making a plan before "leeroy jenkin's-ing it". As soon as we got in range of the NM, him and his elementals killed us in what seemed like seconds. So sadly, that BCNM didn't quite happen the way we wanted it to, lol.

And just before those events, we were able to complete Janko's Great Sword lvl 95 Empyrian, as well as Vepion's Hand-to-Hand. We managed to get Standpoint a few +2 items and a win for Abyssea Altep too. So the day felt rather productive, and I would say rather enjoyable.

I think there's some talk about doing some Salvage, or even doing ZNMs again as a "one time a week" event, when I get back from my break. I'm looking forward to having an event every week where I can look forward to playing with friends. And hopefully by that time, SE will have added some better content for us to do that doesn't require having an endgame shell. Seriously why did they take the guy that gave all the good Abyssea stuff???????? UGH!

But until then, its break time for me.

Updates... and uh, updates.

2011-08-13T19:23:00.000-07:00

Finally found some down time to make a post.

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 ;)

Ninja? Wut?

2011-03-11T11:50:00.001-08:00

Ever since I started doing Abyssea stuff with friends, i've been collecting ninja gear/items for Xean's NIN. I figured that if I had everything ready in terms of gear, then it might be interesting to play the job down the road.

Well, I kinda jumped ahead of that plan, and took Xean's NIN out of retirement. The reason being is that I plan to work on the Verethragna (empyrial hand-to-hand) for Xean's MNK.

The current trial i'm on, involves killing the NM Chloris many... many... many times. I've already done this trial for Zerayla's Rhongomiant, and because of the work involved in completing that weapon, I wanted to avoid adding "more work" for those that are already helping me. So my plan is to duo the Chloris trial with my hubby on the side.

But after looking into what is involved, I had to rethink my strategy which had originally been to go WHM + THF. Because we need the key items from the lesser NMs in order to pop Chloris, we need to proc "Red". And unfortunately, THF is very limited with the available weaponskills to proc red. So, I decided to take Xean's NIN to 90 and get it ready.

At first I thought that i'd have the majority of the gear ready... however I quickly found out that most of my gear is 80+, and well... Xean's NIN was still at 75. So I went off to the AH and had to rebuy a lot of the old gear I had sold months ago, which I have to admit wasn't too bad. I just hope that by the time i'm able to sell the gear again, the prices haven't dropped too much.

So now that I have NIN decently geared... it's just a matter of getting those awesome abyssea party invites. I've already gotten to 85, and hoping to get to 90 before the end of today.

As for how i'm liking the job? Well, it just seems like a weak THF dressed in black. And even then, i've been able to do better eviscerations than blade: jin's in Abyssea. I probably need to beef up my WS build a bit more, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot available on the AH. I don't really intend to invest too much into the job just yet, but I may change my mind down the road if I find myself playing the job more often. Right now I want to concentrate mostly on Xean's MNK which is nearly complete! Then I wouldn't mind getting his THF up to par.

And other than that, I have finished up a lot of my +1 AF3 pieces on both characters. All I have left now are body seals. Then I can focus on the more challenging fights to get the +2 items!

I'm almost finished with a +2 body too. I managed to get into a pickup group that was fighting Empousa, in Abyssea Uleguerand. They needed a WHM, and were letting the Cards of Ardor go to whomever could fill that spot. So I immediately jumped in and managed to get a total of 8/9 cards. My dilemma now though is figuring out which job to put those towards. I can either go with the WHM +2 body, or the DRG +2 body. The issue with WHM is that I am still 5/10 body seals, so I can't actually upgrade yet. And with the DRG, well it's my hobby job that hasn't been needed. I may just upgrade my DRG body if I can get that last card. After all, I may be doing a Dynamis Xarcabard sometime in the future (depending on how the updates with Dynamis go) with TBH and was told that i'd be able to bring out my DRG provided we finish our empyrial weapons.

Aside from that, things have been more or less slow because people have been taking breaks or just busy. But that's given me a chance to try and help friends that have come back to the game. I really want to get more done for our little abyssea group, but also want to start making use of all the great stuff i've gained and be helpful to those that are just getting into Abyssea. Plus I have this strange like for the "grind" of seal farming.

Well, back to seeking on NIN and waiting for shouts. /sigh

7 years... The Black Belt at last!

2011-03-07T09:32:00.000-08:00

For anyone that doesn't know, the original "Xean" started playing 7 years ago. He had gotten his MNK to lvl 50, but decided to call it quits with FFXI. The game at that time, was very new (just released on PC) and just didn't hold enough interest for him.

A little more than a year later, he met me and told me about the game. I had always wanted to play the game being an FF fan, but didn't know anything about MMO's at that time and so I never bothered to try it out. But having a friend (we weren't married quite yet, lol) who already knew the ropes and could help me out, was enough to convince me to buy the game and start my character Zerayla. And so I convinced him to return to the game and play with me.

To make things easy, he had offered to take up WHM and let me pick a DD class. I picked MNK!

We got to around lvl 40, but as we had progressed I started to get very irritated with the horrible tanks we had encountered in our parties. None seemed to understand the concept of "provoke" and keeping the healer alive. And there wasn't a whole lot that I could do back in that day, unless I wanted to drain Xean's WHM of all his MP.

So I decided to take up PLD and gave up MNK. But not before I had already started the Brown Belt quest... see, I had intended to take my MNK up all the way and so me and Xean had begun the Purple Belt quest, and Brown Belt quest on Zerayla. I even remember the night when Xean had actually stayed up until 4am or so the morning we were camping Morbolger to get the quest item for me. I was actually sick that night, and had passed out. But thanks to Xean, I had gotten that item as well as the other two and obtained the Brown Belt on Zerayla.

But when PLD became my "new love", we both forgot all about the quests, and Zerayla's MNK. I ended up lvling PLD to 75, followed by RDM, WHM, SAM, DRG, BLM, WAR, SMN, COR and then eventually MNK again.

Xean did actually take up his MNK and get it to 75 with my RDM, but because we had already quested the Brown Belt on Zerayla, I just gave the item to him to use. There had always been plans to get him a Black Belt, but back then it was near to impossible unless you belonged to a very good endgame shell or if you wanted to pay an arm and a leg for the quest items. So getting the elusive Black Belt kinda just became a goal that was... well, just "there". As time went by, I was eventually able to get one of the 3 items needed. An acquaintance had invited me to his endgame linkshell's KS99 run where they were selling off the Wyrm Beards and I was able to purchase the item for 700k. And from then on, I devoted maybe 2 attempts to get the Adamantoise Egg from the HNM but always gave up in the end because the competition especially with botters, was too frustrating. I even went as far as making a deal with an endgame shell to buy the item once, only to be told after staying up late at night and camping it with the LS for hours, that they had decided last minute to give the drop to one of their members.

By this time, Xean had become my alt character. I stayed at 1/3 for the Black Belt items for probably a good year, until recently...

Thanks to some awesome LS friends (Athoz, Anderoc, Carste, Janko, Hesper, Onedarkflame, Vepion and Buckeyespud) we recently had a very successful KS99 turtle run and came out with a total of 4 Adamantoise Eggs! Athoz, Onedarkflame, Carste, Hesper and myself had put in a lot of work the weeks before, to "beef up" our BLMs and we killed the turtle "mana style". Was quite fun :)

And just before this, a few months ago... I had managed to get the Behemoth Tongue from the other KS99 thanks to Timwakefield, Vepion, Carste and Onedarkflame. (There may have been someone else i'm missing..)

So I was now 3/3 on the black belt items! I was estatic to finally have been able to complete a goal that originally had been Xean's, and had now become something I was determined to complete.

But this is where the funny part comes in. That night, after getting the last item... Xean (he plays on and off sometimes with me, and had actually played during the KS99 turtle run) went to go "claim his prize" and trade in the items. Only to discover.... he had never quested the Brown Belt on his character! And you can't quest the Black Belt, until you have quested the Brown Belt!

So after finally accepting this.. (we both checked the quest logs multiple times, checking each zone in case wiki had written the info down wrong) I decided that I would go after Deadly Dodo, Nue and Morbolger the next day. I started with the most annoying one - Morbolger. He has a 21-24 hr repop and I wanted to get that done and over with. The problem was, that I had to go out for the day and so I decided just to park Xean in the zone and hopefully get a ToD.

When I got home, there was a RDM in zone and my chat log didn't show that the NM had been killed. So I waited around, keeping myself busy with a few things and about an hour or two later, he popped! And lucky for me, that RDM had gone AFK so the drop was mine!

Xean then decided he would camp the next NM Nue, while I did some stuff on Zerayla. It took him the rest of the night to get the drop, because he went about 1/3. And thankfully he kept spawning 1-2hrs after every death.

The next morning, I went out to kill Deadly Dodo. I had to AFK for 30 minutes, and when I came back there was a NIN in the zone asking to team up for the kill for his Magian Trial. I had been told by my friend Anderoc that when he had camped this guy, no one would team up with him because they also wanted the drop. So I was really happy to find out that the NIN wasn't interested in it. And about 5 minutes after coming back, he spawned and dropped!

So off I went, to go get the Brown Belt quest finished on Xean...

But... things can't be that easy when it comes to my husband's character. His luck, and everything else associated to that, is just terrible in this game.

Xean hadn't quested the purple belt either! (He had just bought it originally when he took MNK to 50)

So again, I had to go out and kill some more NMs! I couldn't believe this. It was like a slap in the face from SE! The one thing that Xean had wanted for so long in this game, and we were being kept from getting it!

So off to La Theine I went, to go kill the rams. And I believe that my luck here also made a visit because apparently Lumbering Lambert is another Magian Trial NM and often camped. But I had no competition, and while Lumbering Lambert did not spawn for me, I did get Bloodtear Baldurf within 30 minutes. I actually almost died to him too, because I had gone out on THF/RNG and never bothered to grab any real gear, and the NM's 2hr (Mighty Strikes) was taking 150-200 dmg a hit. I ended up killing him with about 109HP left, so it was a close call.

Next I went to Konshtat and lo and behold, Rampaging Ram was already up! So I got the other item needed without any hassle, and was finally able to claim the long awaited Black Belt!

It feels sooo nice to have Xean's MNK feel almost "complete". I really only have to upgrade his MNK AF3 Hands and feet to the +2 versions, and then work on his Empyrial hand-to-hand weapon. And i'm not at all in a rush to do these things, now that I feel i've been able to get the most difficult MNK gear out of the way.

What was once Xean's goal when he first started playing MNK, became my goal as well and to see it finally finished is really nice feeling. I kinda feel like I beat FFXI in a way, lol.

And while Zerayla is my main character, she still has quite a few things that will take a lot of time to get done. I'm also always at odds as to which job I feel is her "main". My first job that I really loved, was PLD. But playing that job the way it used to be played, was short lived. In the years that i've played this game, PLD has really changed and I don't feel that i've ever really been able to play it that well with how its evolved. And especially now, there just doesn't seem to be any place for the job at all unless you're doing old content.

Then there's my RDM which I really really enjoy playing. This is probably the one job that I had invested the most time into playing efficiently, gearing it very well and being very detailed about my macros. But like PLD, there's just no place for this job anymore in Abyssea. Perhaps if SE gives RDM the cure V spell down the road it'll be useful again, in which case i'm most definitely going to full time this job. But for now, i'm just collecting gear as it sits in the closet.

And finally there's my DRG. I remember being very into my SAM, but as soon as I had gotten my DRG to "merit level" I quickly changed my favorite DD. I still enjoy SAM, but I enjoy my almost 1-hit-kill-Drakesbane a little more. And this right now seems to be the job that i'm putting the most focus into gearing. It's my hobby job, so I don't get to play it much (again, DRG isn't really desired as a DD for Abyssea) but I like the idea of getting it to be geared "better than average". Which is why i'm working on my Rhongomiant, even though I keep hearing that it's a waste. But the way I see it, if i'm the only one working on DRG, I have no competition! And in those very very rare instances when DRG is needed, I won't have to bring a mage job because your typical DD doesn't have a mage job leveled, and therefore I always get asked to swap because I do!

So yea, there is the epic story of Xean getting his Black Belt. And the added bonus is that this has given some renewed interest in playing FFXI, for the real Xean. Having him play occasionally is a nice change. Not having to duo-box so often, and just being able to duo things with him again makes the experience of playing this game better. And maybe with the updates coming up, there will be some better additions to make this game more enticing. Makes me just wonder why SE couldn't have made the good updates earlier!

Oh well. Now to find something else to do as I wait for this 11 hr maintenance to be over. Hopefully we can finish up Odf's 2nd to last Masamune trial tonight if they actually open the servers on time.

Getting there!

2011-02-26T17:32:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-02-23T11:28:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-02-21T12:12:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-02-16T14:03:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-02-10T15:53:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-02-07T08:33:00.001-08:00

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.

2011-02-04T09:07:00.000-08:00

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.

I love making lists.

2011-01-31T12:57:00.000-08:00

As the title says, I really do enjoy making lists.

But before I go into my list of awesomeness... I need to take a minute (or a few) to give a huge thanks to my LS friends Carste, Onedarkflame, Athoz and Vepion for all the help they've given over the last month.

A few months ago, Carste and Onedarkflame came back to TBH full time and included me in their low-man stuff in Abyssea. This has since turned into a daily thing, where we all hang out in the evening and work on getting whatever we're pursueing, from Empyrean Weapons to zone wins in Abyssea.

The best part is that there is no point system, there is no penalty for catering to RL, and there is no waiting around on end for people to show up to actually do something. We're just a bunch of friends that hang out almost every day when it allows, and help each other progress in the game. And with only a few mistakes here and there (people need to stop sending me /tells when i'm healing!!!!!) we accomplish everything we set out to do, pretty smoothly.

So thanks to some good friends and players, this game has really become worthwhile to play. I'm pretty impressed with the amount of success we've had in obtaining gear and items, all in such a short time.

While we have progressed a lot, and by a lot I mean we've gotten all the zone wins for Abyssea including the 6 Caturae kills, and successfully killed Shinryu... there still remains a lot more to be done. Which is good, because I really don't want to go back to not having anything to do in the game @_@

I created a list recently for all the NMs, quests and other things our little Abyssea group wants to go after. I had organized it by "zone" to make it easier to get the most done at once... but lately we've kinda been moving from zone to zone anyways. So instead, I added everyone's "individual" list of NMs/items they're after so that we can just alternate on who we focus on.

My list is kinda huge... which makes me feel a little uneasy. I'm working on gearing Zerayla's WHM, BLM, RDM, SAM, DRG and PLD. These are the jobs that I enjoy the most, and also end up being used for events. But it makes for a lot of work, considering SE finally made the new AF3 worth going after.

And then there's Xean. I've really enjoyed being able to play his MNK and so i've been working on making it better than average for the events we do. This meant re-gearing him for tanking situations which now means I need to drag everyone back to Limbus so that I can get the AF+1 items that I had dropped thinking them useless many months ago. I'm also working on his THF for situations when we don't have one, or when i'm just on my own. Invested a good 700k just on his EVA set alone. And now all I need is to get lucky and get him a Twilight Dagger because I really have no desire to do any Magian trial quests for a dagger. And then there's his BRD and WHM. BRD has been useful for some of our Abyssea stuff, and well WHM is only used when we need everyone else on other jobs and need that extra healer. I'm not actively trying to make gear WHM to the same extent as Zerayla's, but making whatever upgrades I can as I go.

And not that I ever see it happening... but, I am collecting gear for his NIN on the side. I kinda have this thought that if I can get all the gear for his NIN by the time the 99 update comes out, I will lvl it to 99. But for now, i'll just keep the job at 75 and collect what would normally drop to the floor.

And so for recent accomplishments... Xean is now 2/3 for his BB items! Carste, Onedarkflame, Athoz, Hesper and Vepion came out to do a few KSNM99's in hopes of getting the Behemoth Tongue. To our surprise, we actually got 2 of these to drop and so now Athoz is also 2/3 on his BB items. A big thanks to Vepion for donating his orb to me. Now I just need to find the determination to camp the turtle, or farm up more KS to do the other KS99 and try my luck there. I'm really eager to get the BB item finished now that i'm so close, and even more excited to drag my husband back into the game to play his character again, even just for a little while! I miss playing with him, but RL doesn't really give him the kind of free time needed for him to prioritize playing a game that is only "decent" to him in comparison to the other games out there. So i'll be good with whatever time I can get playing with him, even if its just for a little while.

RoR also got our win in Dynanis-Xarcabard this month. Another LS had sniped Beaucedine the night we intended to run there, so we went to Xarcabard instead. Then we had the crazy notion that perhaps we could try the Shadow Lord and get the win, with only about 16 members. I don't think we even had more than 1 person who had successfully done the fight, so we didn't really go in with high expectations. But we did manage to get the win, and quite easily. I guess the lvl cap being raised really changed how easy things can be in this game. And Ketsurui our PLD tank since day 1, was rewarded with the Shadow Mantle. We did a second run the following week, and again walked out with the win. Looks like our future Xarcabard runs will now include the Shadow Lord kill, which is good because a number of members are quite eager to get the gear he drops.

Also low-manned Omega a couple of weeks ago. That fight was a piece of cake, and fun too. We got 2/3 homam pieces that the mule Buckeyespud needed. Carste and Onedarkflame pretty much share the account and are working on gearing his THF as well as a few other jobs, so that he can be duo-boxed for our low-man events. I think that's a big reason why we've been able to do so well, having access to multiple characters.

And that actually reminds me... i've finally fixed a problem i've had for who knows how long. I haven't been able to "alt+tab" between my characters because at some point over the last year or two, I had changed my "alt" key on the keyboard. It never occured to me to fix this, until one day Carste mentioned "alt-tabbing" to change screens when he duoboxed. All this time, i've been using the mouse to click between the windows which actually added a minor delay whenever I had to swap characters to do something. It isn't much, but in terms of efficiency... I was lacking. And I just recently fixed the problem now, which has made duoboxing a lot simpler. I just need to re-train myself now, because I keep reverting back to the "mouse + click" to swap between screens/

Oh, and getting back to my list.... with the exception of gear drops that I have yet to look into, here's my list of awesomeness of things i'm working towards:

Zerayla

====Seals====

Feet: PLD [x8], RDM [7/8], SAM [x8]

Body: PLD [x10], RDM [x10], WHM [x10], BLM [2/10], SAM [x10], DRG [1/10]

Hands: PLD [x8], RDM [2/8], SAM [x8], DRG [x8]

Head: SAM [6/8], PLD [2/8]

====+2 Upgrade Items====

Stone of Vision: WHM Head +2 [x6]

Jewel of Vision: SAM Head +2 [x6], RDM Head +2 [x6]

Coin of Vision: BLM Head +2 [x6]

Card of Vision: DRG Head +2 [5/6], PLD Head +2 [x6]

Stone of Ardor: PLD Body +2 [x9]

Jewel of Ardor: BLM Body +2 [9], RDM Body +2 [x9], SAM Body +2[x9]

Card of Ardor: DRG Body +2 [x9], WHM Body +2 [x9]

Stone of Wieldance: RDM Hands +2 [5/6]

Jewel of Wieldance: BLM Hands +2 [x6], SAM Hands +2 [x6]

Coin of Wieldance: WHM Hands +2 [x6]

Card of Wieldance: DRG Hands +2 [x6], PLD Hands +2 [x6]

Jewel of Balance: SAM Legs +2 [x6]

Coin of Balance: PLD Legs +2 [x6], RDM Legs +2 [x6]

Stone of Voyage: PLD Feet +2 [4/6], RDM Feet +2 [x6]

Jewel of Voyage: SAM Feet +2 [x6], WHM Feet +2 [x6]

Card of Voyage: BLM Feet +2 [x2], DRG Feet +2 [x6]

Xean

====Seals====

Legs: THF [4/8], WHM [5/8]

Body: THF [x10], BRD [x10], MNK [1/10]

Hands: BRD [3/8]

Head: BRD [x8]

====+2 Upgrade Items====

Stone of Vision: THF Head +2 [x6], BRD Head +2 [x6], WHM Head +2 [x6]

Jewel of Vision: MNK Head +2 [x6]

Stone of Ardor: BRD Body +2 [x9]

Coin of Ardor: THF Body +2 [x9]

Card of Ardor: MNK Body +2 [x9]

Stone of Wieldance: THF Hands +2 [x6]

Jewel of Wieldance: MNK Hands +2 [x6], BRD Hands +2 [x6]

Jewel of Balance: MNK Legs +2 [x6]

Coin of Balance: BRD Legs +2 [x6], THF Legs +2 [x6]

Jewel of Voyage: BRD Feet +2 [x6], THF Feet +2 [x6]

Coin of Voyage: MNK Feet +2 [x6]

(Scary list I know...., but it looks so pretty and organized!)

And last but not least... this guy:

Rhongomiant

DMG: 111 Delay: 492

Lv. 80 DRG

This'll be a very long work in progress I think, but it's possible with TBH!

And gotta love how in-game distractions can so easily wipe your mind blank when you were in the process of writing up a blog post. Multi-tasking FTL!!!! Well guess i'll finish this post now.

The End.

List of things to do.

2011-01-07T11:19:00.000-08:00

So now that i've gotten back into the game and gained a descent understanding of all the new content, I know have a huge list of things to do. I'm in no rush of course, as I prefer having a list of choices for what I want to do when I log into the game.

So here's the list:

AF3 +1

Zerayla

SAM Head Seals (4/8)
SAM Feet Seals (0/8)
SAM Hand Seals (0/8)
SAM Body Seals (0/8)
RDM Feet Seals (0/8)
RDM Hand Seals (2/8)
RDM Body Seals (0/8)
WHM Hand Seals (2/8)
BLM Feet Seals (2/8)
BLM Hand Seals (3/8)

Xean

MNK Head Seals (0/8)
MNK Leg Seals (5/8)

Abyssea Bosses & Caturae

Zerayla

5/9 Zone Bosses (Need Uleguerand Range, Tahrongi, Altepa, Grauberg)
4/6 Caturae (Need Iratham [Tahrongi], Rani [Altepa])

Xean

4/9 Zone Bosses (Need Uleguerand Range, Tahrongi, Altepa, Grauberg, Misereaux Coast)
4/6 Caturae (Need Iratham [Tahrongi], Rani [Altepa])

Then there's the +2 AF3 gear that I'll eventually be going after, but I still have to look into which pieces are most desired. I've already managed to get my Goetia Chausses +2 and Orison Pantaloons +2 thanks to Carste and Onedarkflame (and Timwakefield, Vepion, Anderoc and Athoz).

And aside from that I think i'm still doing Dynamis with RidersOfRohan. But i'm starting to have a hard time staying up later because our runs haven't started "on time" since I stepped down as leader. I enjoy doing the runs, but not getting enough sleep is taking its toll. Hopefully though we'll actually manage to try Dynamis Lord soon, as we've gotten a number of new recruits recently. The only thing we need to watch for, are the shells/groups that snipe zones. Which is pretty much everyone else now, I don't think anyone bothers to use QCDN/Eosun anymore for dynamis scheduling.

I think I may try to do a little seal farming during the earlier daytime when no one else is on. I have never felt confident in my ability to solo, nor in my ability to duo-box but... i've gotten a little more practice this month and I think its time to give it a try!

Oh, and I need to finish my Ice Staff trials. Then I need to go after the Thunder staff. I keep putting those trials off just because they're not the most enjoyable thing to do.

Can't wait to finally get access to the Twilight gear. I'm expecting the fights to be fun and challenging... hopefully, lol.

A revival perhaps?

2010-12-17T10:13:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-04-09T13:31:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-03-15T23:44:00.000-07:00

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 :)

I'm not dead!

2009-11-13T13:12:00.001-08:00

(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 @_@

2009-09-26T10:56:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-08-22T15:17:00.000-07:00

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??

2009-08-10T22:00:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-08-10T21:08:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-07-27T17:17:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-07-24T20:51:00.000-07:00

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.

Salvage Static #5?

2009-07-07T13:32:00.000-07:00

I don't want to jinx things, but I think I might finally have a salvage static that will actually make it past a month!

There are only two types of statics i've experienced that always seem to break whenever you get them started: CoP Missions & Salvage. I did manage to complete CoP over a year ago, but have yet to make any real progress in Salvage, which is due to every static I have ever been involved in, breaking. Either people disappear without a word, or RL schedules change and people can no longer attend.

But, i've finally found a static with 5 other people and so far it seems like everyone is planning on sticking around. The only downside to the static is that 2/3 runs, are at the break of dawn on Saturday and Sunday. Goodbye sleeping in! Just going to to keep my fingers crossed that this static works out.

I'm managed to free up more of my time now, which might not have been the greatest idea because I now find myself sitting in my moghouse more than I ever have.

I made a really hard decision to finally leave my Limbus shell. I'd been in the LS since day one, and we'd been running for over a year. In that time, we'd had a lot of members come and go, and aside from maybe a handful of people, most members couldn't be depended on to show up consistently which made our progress slow down quite a bit. Runs were being cancelled, and eventually the need to recruit became a priority.

It was then when things started to go sour. I had proposed a couple of ideas and requests to amend the lotting rules, because the system we had, didn't really fit things as well as it had originally when the LS first started. Very few of the original members were still in the LS, and while the idea behind the lotting system had been to fairly distribute gear to every member over time, you can't exactly do that when the majority of the starting members have left. New members had joined, and were being placed in the same tier as veteran members that had a year worth of attendance.

Eventually trying to point out the flaws in the lotting system, soon had a select few members making all kinds of accusations as to the type of player that I was.

The only point I ever tried to have understood was that the LS was a point system, which therefore meant that the effort and time put into the LS was being tracked. As with all endgame shells, a point system is designed to prioritize the people that are putting in more to the shell. I mean it doesn't make sense for someone to work 20hrs at a job and get paid $100, and for another person to work 2 hrs and also get paid $100, right?

In the end, not much was done to make the rules change because the majority of the members were not in favor of having any changes. And it was this majority, that while understandable, just couldn't commit as much time. There's nothing wrong with being unable to participate as much as "Joe", but it shouldn't be expected that because of your situation, you get the same opportunity to progress as quickly.

For a few reasons though, I couldn't just quit. The original leader has specifically asked me on a few occasions to help lead, and I had been promoted to an officer before he left the game. So I wanted to do my part and help the LS become better, to see it progress. I had also received a lot from the LS, and so I wanted to return that help to the members and see them also progress and receive the gear they were after.

But as the runs went by, it was obvious a few people disliked me and had fixated on their conclusions as to "who" I was as a person. Drama started finding its way into the LS, to the point where I eventually didn't feel comfortable expressing my opinion about anything because I felt like the moment I did, I would be accused of things that were untrue.

Finally, I just came to a point where I questioned "who" I was in fact helping. With the exception of a few, I felt treated unfairly, I felt judged unfairly, and I just didn't feel that I should be giving my time to people that wanted to take every opportunity to take things I would say out of context, to try and prove their conclusions that I was such a bad person - obviously out to take advantage of everyone in the LS.

So, I told leadership that I would be leaving and made a goodbye post to the LS. If the majority of the LS disliked me, then it would be better that I left after all, right?

It was difficult to do, because felt like I owed the members and the LS more... but overall, I believe it was probably the best decision to make.

At this point I think i'll be taking a break from Limbus unless something comes up. I've been considering helping my social LS get a "casual limbus" group going down the road, seeing as quite a few members have just gotten access or will shortly. But we'll see.

And speaking of casual events... SoTW had a good run a couple of weekends ago. We did a Tinnin x3 night, which resulted in 2 Enkidu Caps, 1 Enkidu Subligar, 1 pair of Hachiryu Sune-Ate (which sold for 3.2mil and was split to all members) and a lotta death!

Well, actually not really. We only had one run that I recall having more than one death, which was due to a short 30 seconds where Tinnin decided to say hello to our nukers. Overall though, the fights went well and only lasted about 30-40 minutes each. I'm really hoping that we have more interest among our members to participate, because for the Tier 3 and 4's we usually have to bring in outside help. Maybe i'll have to figure out a more convenient time to try and accomodate people's schedules ><

And now for some quick updates~

I finally got SMN to 75! And no, I am not getting a Maat's cap! I refuse to touch NIN or BST. NIN just seems like the type of job that would stress me out to do really well, because I know you have to be attentive. BST, just has too many negatives for me. You don't get party invites, and unless you're lucky enough to find someone else that wants to duo with you, the xp/hr is painful. At least for someone like me who has spent the majority of their "xping" sessions getting 20k/hr.

And speaking of that, i'm just about finished meritting SMN already, lol. I managed to get 5/5 Physical Avatar Attack, and am currently 4/5 with Magical Avatar Attack. I figure for the kind of events i'll be asked to do on SMN, the ACC won't be too big of an issue. And if I do resist, or miss... oh well, wait another minute and try again! >_>

I helped out again with some more CoP missions. Helped our the other static in our LS get to the top of Promyvion-Vazhl. I actually had some fun with this because I got to bring out my lvl 50 gear for SAM - yay soboro! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Also helped Vepion, Lyea and Fieryblizzard kill Diabolos. On our way out to the fight, Biast had popped and this turned out to be an interesting fight.

My plan had originally been to kite Biast on SMN, but Lyea ended up provoking and holding hate. somehow things got a little messy, and because not everyone had been in zone at the start, I ended up taking a death. This led to another group in the zone taking claim, but after a couple of minutes they also died to lolBiast.

Thankfully though, reinforcements came and we got claim and the kill. Oh, and the drop! Soulstar found himself the new owner of a shiny new helmet.

And now that Vepion and Fieryblizzard had killed Diabolos, they were able to participate in our dynamis shell RoR's first Dynamis-Buburimu. We got the win, which seemed pretty easy and managed to pickup about 5-7 items that you don't usually see in dynamis zones. There was one dragon though that ended up giving us a real hard time. He spammed through all the 2hrs of all the available jobs in the game (minus the new ones) and kept spamming a lot of AoEs that wiped our alliance a couple of times. But, our reliable PLD Ketsurui was able to keep up with the kiting and we did manage to kill it in the end. Now we're looking at trying to do more Dreamland zones, but because we only run once a week, its difficult to decide how often because it takes away from our usual zones.

Did a little NM camping too. Xean was out camping Novv the Whitehearted which was quite a surprise to me, because he's not a fan of NM camping. I went out to give him a hand, and within an hour, Novv popped for us. Xean went 1/1 for the Minstrel's Coat, which was really nice seeing as I had remembered another player going 1/7 on this. Guess it's just my luck that sucks with NM drops now, lol.

And lastly, had another go at the ACP fight. Athoz setup another run, and our setups seemed perfect. We had PLD/RDM, RDM/DRK, SMNx2, WHM and our 6th changed between MNK and BLM. The dmg from me and Soulstar on SMN seemed to be doing fine, because we got the crystal down to 50% in less than half the time allowed.

But, our first run had a mix of bad luck and some inexperience. Our PLD Darce, had gotten charmed a couple of times, which eventually made our RDM/DRK get drawn in, eventually killing him. With no sleeps or stuns available, it didn't take long for the rest of us to wipe.

The second run had less charms, and we did get the crystal down to about 4-5% if I remember correctly... but, once we lost our PLD and RDM, it was a sure loss.

I felt really bad for Athoz and Zaross, among the people needing the fight, they are the ones that have attempted it the most and never seen a win. And thanks to the greatness that is SE, they have to climb the tower EVERY time they want to try again. I can only imagine they're about fetup and ready to just forget about the body piece you can get at the end... but, I think we'l have another run planned hopefully in the week ahead. This time i'm gonna go all out and grab some extra meds.

Which thanks to a very lucky run of KSNM30 - Royal Ramble, won't be a problem at all! I finally got a chance to try this KSNM, and now I can't wait to organize a couple of runs with my LS. It is an easy enough fight (though you do need your kiters to be focused) and has a better profit than Copycat. Why hello thar mr. 100%-drop-O.Ingot! I managed to get myself a d.Ingot as well, which was nice because I plan to keep my O.Ingot to do the next gobbie bag quest... provided I can find myself a leathercrafter 81+!

Return to Chains of Promathia.

2009-06-22T09:24:00.000-07:00

Lately i've been finding myself unmotivated to do much in FFXI, which is probably due to a combination of some in-game drama and also due to some other stuff i've been dealing with in my RL recently. It might also be that i'm coming to that point where there isn't a lot that I can pursue in the game, unless I wanted to leave my social LS and devote my life to HNM.

Yea, no thanks!

So I guess its a good thing that two groups have recently started doing CoP missions in my social LS, because now I have something to enjoy and login to do.

The first group that started up, is being led by Athoz. He organized an Ouryu run just last week.

I was asked to come on BLM, and we ended up going with the "Nuke + Sleep" method. It is less of a challenge, but I have no complaints considering the time investment can sometimes be frustrating if you have failure in the end.

So the group consisted of myself (BLM), Sabene (BLM), Athoz (WAR), RMTFalk (WHM), Sethidus (PLD) and Xean (BRD). We went in, started off with a timed nuke and then alternated the sleeps. Ouryu took to the skies about 3 times, but Athoz and Sethidus (and I think Falk) were pretty quick to toss some mistmelts at him, making him come back down. The fight went pretty smoothly, with very minimal damage from AoEs that got through in between the sleeping, and we got ourselves a quick win.

A few other people have decided to join the static and it looks like this group will probably get their CoP rings in 2-3 months. I just hope they don't suffer the all too common "I need to go on an indefinite break" from someone and then have the static halt or break in the end. I swear that seems to be the curse for anyone who tries to do a static for CoP missions... it happens 99% of the time.

The other group is being led by Vepion, who is now racing to get up to the Diabolos fight, so that he can participate in our Dynamis Buburimu run planned at the end of this month.

And while I do enjoy the missions and the fights... I'm always reminded why I stopped organizing CoP runs, especially the prommies.

People. Do. Not. Plan. Ahead.

Usually there will be one or two people that will read up on the missions, find out what items and meds are needed, but the rest... just go planning to "wing it". And as to be expected, when you don't read up on things or bring what's needed, you're more likely to fail.

Which is what happened during our first promyvion-mea attempt.

Our setup had 3 SMN, 1 WHM, 1 PLD and I think 1 BLU. Not everyone had brought a full set of animas (hystero, pyscho, lolterror) and while I have known these fights to be possible without, "first timers" are not likely to be among those that can pull that off.

A few things went wrong with our first run, the first being that no pyscho or hystero were used (at least I don't recall seeing any), the second being that no ES + Paralyze was used at the start even though I had suggested this, the WHM pulled hate with Cure III's right at the start which led the mob to come towards the mages, and from there everything was a mess. I believe someone also used a Terroranima too, which really wasn't a good idea with the SMNs needing the mob to be still so we could pull off our Astral Flow. Needless to say, I was a little grumpy after that failed run.

So the plan was to try again the next day. I hadn't been able to sleep much that night and had woken up extremely early so I decided to go ahead and farm the recollections and turn them into anima for the group. I was pretty sure that most of them would rely on the AH, and didn't want to risk not having any anima on sale before the run.

About 4 hrs later, I had 6 pyschoanima and 6 hysteroanima all sent to the static members via delivery box!

Only 2 of the people that had been with us the day before, didn't show up.

Ha. Ha. ha... ha..... oye.

Anyways, Vepion managed to get some replacements, including someone else in our LS that also needed the promies so we just changed things around and went with a new setup: SMNx3, WAR/NINx2, WHM.

This time, we had everyone use both a hystero and pyscho anima at the start of the fight and after the Astral Flows went off, the mob was dead. We decided to wait 2hrs and go after Promyvion-Holla next, so that we could try and get at least 2/3 done for that day. And with everyone doing what they did the run previously, we had ourselves another win.

Unfortunately though we had run out of time and had to schedule the last promyvion the next day, which again went just as well.

So now that we have the promies out of the way, we just need to do a couple more missions. The only thing that I forsee being an issue is that this group isn't "full". 2/4 ppl are helping, and we have to always look for 2 other helpers. I just hope that we can keep LS members only for this static because getting random help usually results in finding people that have no clue what they're supposed to do, and don't show any indication that they're willing to actually be useful. They just join, hoping they'll get in on a free ride through the missions ~_~

And now for a little breakdown of the other stuff i've been up to:

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Yep, i'm gearing up my Samurai again. Quite a few ppl in my LS have been lvling the job, and i've been having that feeling of nostalgia everytime I see them play it. And one day, I happened to come across a Hagun that was about 200k cheaper than the current price. I mentioned it aloud, not thinking much other than the fact that it was a good deal, when Xean asked me if I wanted to buy it. I told him the truth, that I did, which was then followed by him trading me the gil I needed to get it.

(We play this game as a team, so we always work together to get gear we need and follow the saying "What's yours is mine, and what's mine is yours". So far, this has made progress in the game for both of us much easier and quicker, go go teamwork! Besides, that's how it should be done.)

So a few days later, I decided to also pick myself up some Hachiman Kote +1. I had done a LS merit pty just the day before, and had a blast with my WS spamming, which sealed my decision to regear my SAM and use it again.

My plan now is not to retire DRG, but rather to use DRG for birds and my SAM for almost everything else. I still want to pick myself up a hauby +1, but i'll wait a bit and farm up the majority of that if I can rather than spend what I have saved.

WoG Progress at last!

Though short lived, I did finally make some progress on my WoG missions. I convinced Xean to do the missions with me, so we spent some time getting him caught up.

When we were finally able to continue together, we made a group with Lyea and Janko and did the dragon fight in La Vaule.

But first... we had to go through a number of cutscenes.

For the most part these were ok, but sometimes the scenes were a little "lol". I"m still confused as to whether the character Caitsith is supposed to be evil or good. o.O

The bird of doom...

Seems like there's a lot of "going back to the good old days". And what fun would there be, if we didn't pay a visit to our old friend Kreutzet?

Well Athoz finally asked for some help with this guy (about time, that guy is always helping out people but never makes any requests to get help himself) and while I wasn't able to make one of the windows, I did manage to help out on the following window. We had another group there camping at the time, but Kawanomu was able to outclaim them on his BLU.

Though the fight went well, we didn't manage to get the dagger. I think this makes Athoz 0/2 on him now. And because of work, he wasn't able to keep up with the window so looks like we'll be taking a break from this bird for a while. Hopefully we can go 1/3 on the next attempt. And hopefully I won't shudder everytime I see the wind icon pop up in my window now whenever i'm playing. ~_~

Stupid bird never pops in the 3hr window.

Inventory space = decorate your moghouse?

Sure does! Though strange, I do enjoy decorating my mog house and after commissioning Carste to make me some furniture pieces, I decided to "spice it up" a little.

Mog Bonanza!!!

When I heard that this event was coming out, I told myself I wouldn't buy any marbles. Last year, I had spent about 80k, buying 10 marbles on my main character and 7 mules and all I won were xp scrolls.

But, I gave in. My reasoning is that i'm playing this game for fun, so I might as well take a shot at "some fun" and see if I win something. Its not like this is real life, so i'm not spending "money" when it can be used for something better.

And i'm happy that I went with that choice, because I ended up getting myself 2 Rank 4 prizes. I went with the most valuable item at the time, Behemoth's Hide. I then happened to see someone shouting to buy these in WG shortly after, so I sold them right away. Seems like it was a good decision too because later in the day, that same guy was offering to buy them 40k cheaper than what he paid for mine.

Plus, I got myself my Fafnir Statue. I would of liked to have won all 3 statues on my main character, but oh well. One is good enough.

I hate NMs.

2009-06-04T13:14:00.000-07:00

So lets see. The last time I actually pursued an NM, was back when I tried to get a pair of these:

Unfortunately, after spending an entire day in Castle Oztroja running around in circles for hours, getting a couple of claims (I think I lost one or two) and never getting the drop, I decided I would never go after an NM for myself because I couldn't stand wasting hours for a chance at getting something.

However, a time finally came when I would have to suck it up and go back on this decision. ~_~

Summoner 70!!!!!!

I mentioned in my last post that I actually had managed to get Shikigami Weapon right before maintenance, in an epic 8 minute fight with some LS members that were able to run out to Ro'Maeve at the last minute and help me and Xean kill this. We didn't get the drop that time. We logged in after maintenance hoping that we'd see the NM again, but wikipedia turned out to be right. It doesn't spawn until 21hrs AFTER maintenance (and even also has a chance to spawn 30 minutes earlier than when its window should be up)

So the next morning, Xean, Athoz, Sabene, Falk, Darce and Standpoint came to help me (Vepion and Lyea had also made their way out on the previous day). As I should have expected, there were a number of groups in zone also trying to get this, and unfortunately we didn't end up getting claim.

Knowing that if I kept up with the ToDs, i'd eventually get another shot, I made myself wake up at 5am the next morning for the next window. It was really difficult too because I had gone to sleep after 1am that same morning due to Dynamis ><

So I woke up, logged in, and invited my crew that had generously given their time to help me out (poor Xean and Darce also had so little sleep due to also being in my Dynamis shell) and we waited. Lucky for me, there was only one other group in zone so the chances were a little better this time around.

And finally, my efforts were paid off! Our little RMTFalk who had gone WHM/RNG managed to get claim on Shikigami, and near died waiting for Darce to voke it off him. I think he went down to 51HP before I saw his HP go up as I raced to where he was to help with the fight. And from there, it was a piece of cake. We had two THFs (this time Xean had brought his THF), a WHM, a BRD, a WAR and myself on RDM. And as soon as the mob's health went to 0 and I saw that little treasure chest icon above the party information I held my breath as I checked the treasure pool hoping that the NM couldn't drop any crystals or other crap and that I would see the Ying Yang Robe.

I guess I could of paid attention to the party chat in those seconds to see all the congratulations being shouted to know that I had gotten the drop, but I was too focused on trying not to get my hopes up as I opened the treasure pool, that I didn't read the chat log at all. And there it was... my YYR!

I was pretty estatic because this meant that I was 1/2, and that I wouldn't have to invest any extra time on this NM (at least for myself - i'll probably end up helping 2 other LS members that are currently lvling SMN get this in the future) or ask for extra help! Of course though, later in the day I realized that it was going to be more than a week before i'd be able to see the item on my character because:

1)I was only lvl 70 and the YYR is a lvl 71 piece
2)I was going to be out all day this coming Sunday, which is when my static would be meeting up next

Oh well! I guess I can always try and motivate myself to do some campaign this week and get it to 71. But then again, I don't really like campaign all that much and last time I tried playing SMN for a little experience points in campaign, it really killed my brain @_@ I like the concept of the SMN class, especially because its always been one of my favorite jobs in other FF games... but, playing the job in FFXI hasn't really been something I enjoy. Lately i've had some really smooth parties where I haven't felt like i'm gimping my static too much because i'm not a super DD, nor am I a BRD... and lets not even get started on how slow I am with being a healer... my gawd is it frustrating going from RDM with fastcast or WHM with merits and haste gear, to a reaaaaaaaaaaaaally slow SMN!

Needless to say I can't wait to get this job to 75 and be able to bring it to events where it'll make much better use. SMN just is not a great job for merits or experience point parties! But, if I can do some SMN burns with avatar fights, or even CoP fights to help LS members... it'll be worth the 75 levels of pain I have endured getting it there! XD

And so now I go to camp Charybdis #1000897654.

Well, thats an exaggeration obviously. But I spent all yesterday helping camp him for Darce's PLD after we killed Shikigami. Apparently we had missed one of his ToDs because we were there all day. Eventually I had to leave for Salvage, and when that was done, Darce's group was still in SSG. I was so tired from the lack of sleep that I just took a nap and by the time it was late into the night, they had already gotten the kill. And now I'm staring at two Devil Manta's... Just waiting for the window to open for what will likely be another grueling wait for Charybdis to actually spawn. I just hope there isn't too much CC, thats the one thing that kills me when I camp an NM.

Its one thing to go after an NM and not get the drop, but to spend all that time in one place, doing nothing but waiting for the NM to spawn, and then to lose the chance at the drop to another group! GAH! Guess the one bonus with Charbydis is that Joyeuse is 100% drop. I can't imagine how painful this would be if it wasn't. I can't wait to be done with NMs for a little bit after all this... i'm gonna spend some time meriting and doing some KSNMs or something. Need to get this whole NM camping thing out of my system ><

A slow couple of weeks.

2009-06-02T15:08:00.000-07:00

The last couple of weeks have been a little bit on the slow side, but no complaint here. Having a bit of a break from scheduled events has been nice and allowed me to kinda "play around" doing nothing in particular. I think sometimes its a good thing to forget about all the goals you have in this game, otherwise you can easily get burnt out or find yourself filled with irritation and frustration because so often in this game, not everything works out as easily (or as quickly) as you'd like.

Sounds like i'm speaking from experience? Well, not exactly... but, might as well mention that the goal of helping Xean get his Black Belt has officially come to an end. I don't really want to say that we'll never pursue the BB items in the future, but Xean has decided to pass on going out of his way to get the BB items. I think the main reason is just because he doesn't really get all that much use out of his MNK, and because of a lot of the experiences we've had recently, this item has just become too much of a headache.

I won't go into too many details, but to sum it up: our server only has 2 HNM shells that are camping the HNMs that drop the BB items. Both have so far, proven to be unreliable, and un-cooperative. Me and Xean had decided that we'd put forth the effort to farm up the gil for the ridiculous prices the shells were asking for, because joining them and keeping up with the members that were able to play 24/7 and be at every single HNM window seemed impossible (especially with the time put into our social LS) So after making arrangements with one of the shells (the other still had members wanting to lot the BB items so they wouldn't sell) Xean waited close to 3hrs for Aspid to spawn one night. After the shell got claim, and killed it, he waited a few minutes to be invited so that he could trade the gil and lot the item.

Only a few minutes go by, and nothing. So, he sends a /tell to the leaders and asks when he'll be invited. The leader he spoke with, then informs him that they have a LS member that will be lotting the item, and so they won't be selling the drop.

Hours of wasted time, for nothing. -_-

So after that, I tried to rally together a LS camping session for adamantoise (drops one BB item, but its not 100%). The turn out seemed pretty good, but in the end, the desire to continue putting in the energy and effort to getting the BB items without an HNM shell, just wasn't there so we cancelled at the last minute. Maybe one day we'll have a go at the HNM (or even the KSNM99s) for fun, but for now this goal has been put in the closet.

So what is on the agenda now? Well... I'm hoping to setup some BCNM and KSNM runs soon, as i've accumulated quite a bunch. Other than that, I actually don't have too much else that I personally feel compelled to pursue in this game. I do plan to finish meriting my COR (only need 5 more limit points!) and hope to get my BLU and RNG up to 37 so that they can be used as subjobs. I also plan to get a few pieces of gear, here and there for my PLD and DRG through Salvage, Assault and Limbus. Most of this stuff will happen "eventually" and i'm not feeling too rushed.

I guess its worth mentioning that I am now trying Salvage again, and might get to see an Ares piece or two for my DRG & PLD. This time I think it'll be a lot smoother, mainly because the static consists of LS members only. Carste is the one leading this, and we have Xean on his MNK, Sethidus on BRD, Janko on BLU, Zeo on WAR, Carste on THF and myself on RDM. There are a few others interested that might end up joining us too down the road once they get access, so i'm keeping my fingers crossed that this static might actually see a few upgraded salvage pieces. I'm just not looking forward to revisiting the frogs. Omg..... I... hate...... frogs.

As for what i've been up to lately, well... I've been slowly working on getting some xp on my RNG. I'm bringing that up to 37 with Xean's SAM, and so far the duoing hasn't been as slow as I thought it would. That's probably thanks to the Fields of Valor that I never really got into.

Once we get to 37, Xean plans to take SAM all the way to 75. I can't really see myself leveling something else to 75 right now, so i'll probably just sync myself to him and bring whatever job his party ends up needing. He's not overly eager about getting to 75, but i'm hoping to change that because I remember having a blast when I lvled SAM. I just hope that I don't find myself getting nostalgic about playing SAM because I pretty much retired mine. Turns out my DRG was a better DD on birds, and if I end up getting some Askar/Aurum/Ares pieces, i'm sure I might even outparse what my SAM used to be capable of against non-bird mobs. (loldrg)

(A random ToAU mission that Carste asked me and Xean to help with so that he could get his mule access to Salvage to fill in as a 6th)

Our resident RMT tarutaru Sjoidjgo (aka Falk) also presented us with a nice little challenge: Hakutaku versus SoTW with 6.5 members!

He and Sethidus were needing an Ohat, and so he rounded up some LS members (Xean, Carste, Sethidus, Athoz, a duo-boxed Ketsuchi and myself) for the fight. During the first fight, we had one death but that was only because our healer (Falk) was duo-boxing and I had taken the risk to cast an enfeeble not knowing he had switched characters for a few seconds. But the rest of the fights went great. I guess we don't really need to organize and plan Hakutaku fights anymore, seeing as they can easily be done with a party of 6.

And speaking of Falk, I just happen to have a fun screenshot from a couple of weeks ago, highlighting the results of a tarutaru NIN tanking fire breathing crawlers!

Actually, Falk does really well on NIN. The static I have with him on my SMN, has been going surprisingly well every week. I usually have had aweful experiences with having SMNs in pty, and had concluded that they're pretty much a waste of space... but, thanks to Sabene's refresh, Xean's ballads, sanction refresh AND my auto-refresh trait... I'm enjoying being able to keep up 3 "buff" BPs on the party and being able to cast at least one offensive BP every fight. I know my place in the static could easily be replaced by something else to make things better, but with the setup we've had, I haven't felt as much of a gimp to the party as I used to a while back.

And now that i've gotten lvl 70 on SMN, its now time to go after a certain item that brings a laugh to me everytime I hear someone mention it.

Yep, the good old YYR (Ying Yang Robe).

I was actually unsure how i'd get the ToD for Shikigami because i'm not the kind of person that can just "sit in game and do nothing" for hours. But the day after I hit lvl 70, there was maintenance!

I logged in 2hrs before maintenance started, and decided to go park my character in Ro'Maeve. I went RDM/RNG, and decided to scan just for the heck of it until SE kicked us from the server. About 10 minutes before that was supposed to happen, I suddenly see Shikigami Weapon appear on my widescan. So I started freaking in LS and was able to round up some friends (Athoz, Sabene, Lyea and Xean) to come help. It was a pretty crazy fight, we were all nuking and meleeing it to death trying to kill it before maintenance started and finished with maybe 2-4 minutes to spare. Sadly though, we didn't get the drop.

So after maintenance, I logged in to see if the NM would spawn. As wikipedia mentioned it would, it never did. So I had to wait until today to try it again when the window opened. Only this time there were about 3 groups also camping it, and someone else got claim. ~_~

Now to try again tomorrow. I know that I can duo this guy easy with Xean's NIN, but if there's more people counter camping... i'll need all the claiming help possible.

And then when I finally get my YYR, i'll most likely still be camping this guy because 2 other LS members are looking to get SMN to 75. Fun fun fun.... at least its only a 15 minute window! Unlike a stupid, annoying, irritating, despised chicken called Kreutzet! *shudders*

Lastly, I had an opportunity to tank Omega the other week.

I was asked to come PLD/NIN, and though I had some doubts at my ability, I was told that I did pretty well. I know that I was a little bit rusty at first, but I eventually got the hang of things after a few minutes of kiting I was able to get a somewhat fluid method where i'd alternate curing with Xean who as on his WHM. Worked out really nice being able to communicate with him so that I could take care of my curing when needed for hate. And at the end of that run, we had ourselves another Homam Body to give to one of our members.

Plunderer of the Seas.

2009-05-23T18:21:00.000-07:00

This update is a little overdo (and extremely long!), but...

I've finally achieved COR75! This makes #9 among the jobs I have at 75.

It didn't really take long for me to go from 70-75 with Xean's BRD. With our setup, all our parties were pretty much done merit style. I think we even managed to hit about 27k/hr in those last levels in one party.

And while my COR isn't the kind of DD that my DRG is, (or my "on-vacation SAM") it definitely doesn't lack in the dmg department. I owe a lot of thanks to that, to my friends and LS mates. In the last month they've helped me obtain a few pieces of gear which have really made a difference.

For starters, I had a successful "Experimental Lamia" run during one of our Saturday Night ZNM runs. I had tried to pop this ZNM for 2 weeks in a row, but there were never enough people available to attempt it. But finally, after going the extra mile to plan for it, my LS pulled through for me and after a fairly easy fight, I was rewarded with my Enkidu's Leggings. (Yay for Carste's TH4!)

Next up, I got myself a Light Gorget. Soulstar had just recently gotten sea access and had setup a "UFO Farming" run for people that were needing some sea gorgets. So Drimergirl, Zeo, Carste, Xean and Janko came to help, and after two nights worth of farming, we had managed to get all the UFO organs we needed to complete 1-2 gorgets each.

Then for the last bit of farming I needed to do, Xean came out on his THF and duo'ed with my RDM. I had to farm what seemed like a gazillian Aerns, which kept reraising making us double our efforts. But finally we did manage to get all the organs needed from the Aerns and the goldfish. I had lucked out from the previous UFO farming sessions and gotten my shark organs there, so that was one less thing to do.

And even though I probably won't see many events where i'll be able to bring my COR (just isn't as useful as the other jobs I can bring), I managed to unlock the two weapon skills: Leaden Salute & Detonator!

(NM that me and Xean duo'ed to unlock Detonator)

Getting the weapon skill points was quite a pain for Detonator, because the highest weapon skill I had was Slug Shot which couldn't even do a level 3 skill chain. But thanks to Xean and Carste I was able to complete the points I needed and finally unlock it. Then it didn't take long for me to unlock Leaden Salute because I was now able to close light with Xean's Shark Bite!

Then, just as I lucked out with getting my PLD relic in Xarcabard and Beaucedine Glacier through Dynamis on our very first runs... I also found myself swimming in the same luck. This month RoR did both Beaucedine and Xarcabard, and having just gotten my COR to 75 meant that I was now able to lot the gear there. During the runs, the Commodore Tricorn and Frac dropped. And because no one had set the gear as their main lot, and the only other COR75 in our LS already had the pieces, I was automatically able to lot them! Getting these pieces so quickly and easily was a very nice experience though I have a sneaking suspicion this means i'm probably not going to be so lucky for a long time to come @_@

As for playing COR @75, i've really been enjoying it. Its really expensive if I want to try and keep up with the other DDs, but the point of playing this game is to have fun so I find a way to pretend I don't know the expenses i'm paying into just to play it for a couple of hours in a merit party. Plus, thanks to Xean's TH3 we've had some really good success in the last week farming together.

Aside from the big dent in my wallet this job can make, its quite a change from the two jobs i'm used to playing: healer or melee DD. I like that the job incorporates a little of both (though the healing isn't really so much healing, just buffing really)

So aside from getting in a lot of meriting this week, I've managed to get a few more pieces for my PLD. I quested the Mermaid's Ring for my PLD which gives me a little extra emnity. I have no idea why I never bothered to get one of these pieces during my PLD career, but I guess it's not important anymore! The quest was actually a little more excruciating than I had thought, especially with just TH1. I had to kill 4 different types of Sahagins for some rare/ex mermaid pieces. I managed to get one of an NM (100% drop rate) and the other took me a good 2-3 hrs. I then was able to duo-box Xean and use his THF for TH3 which allowed me to get the last 2 pieces I needed in about the same time. All that was left was to go around the jungle and find the chest, and voilà!

Edit: As of tonight, I now have my first piece of Denali gear! I had been invited out with some friends, and had arranged for Xean to play my character for me during my usual Friday Nyzul static. When I got back home, they were just finishing their 3rd run and fighting the boss for floor 40. A few minutes later, I was told that the Denali Legs had dropped, and even though I was technically main lotting Askar for that floor, the members in my static decided to pass the gear and let me have it for my COR. I really had a hard time knowing how to express my excitement and gratitude to my friends without seeming like a complete psycho.

It's actually funny when I think about my Nyzul static... I remember once upon a time ago, I despised the event and was pretty pessimistic about it (then again, i've become pessimistic about a lot of things in this game after playing for so long @_@) But after we had changed up the jobs people brought, and got a few merits, the runs became so smooth and I finally found myself enjoying them.

But anyways back to the more important point, I have some really really great friends in this game and thanks to their kindness, I now have yet another good piece of gear to spice up my COR just a bit!

I also spent a couple of days doing some campaign whenever there wasn't much time to do anything else.

I had to get about 25k allied notes to get my Iron Ram Dastanas to also add to my emnity set. It was really hard to actually make myself do campaign at first, but when I was within 10k suddenly it didn't seem like such a challenge. It just so happened that it gave me something to do while I stayed up late into the morning to keep Xean company because at the time he was waiting on Aspid (I think that's the name) to spawn.

Speaking of that... Xean finally changed his mind and is going to go after the Black Belt items by purchasing them from an HNM shell. The one LS that we had both joined (though my status was really more of a tag-along if I have nothing else to do) had apparently merged with another and had quite a few people wanting to lot the BB items. The people that wanted these items, were also the kind that were in-game 24/7 and therefore able to accumulate points twice as fast as Xean (or myself). We both decided that at least for right now, the HNM thing wasn't really going to be for us. And so now our plan is to farm up a storm and buy the BB items.

Then hopefully if things work out, we'll be starting a new Salvage group through our LS (lead by the famous drunk-bearded-mage-who-thinks-he-is-chuck-norris aka Carste) and Xean will finally get to have some fun on MNK and i'll have another challenging event to play on my RDM. I might even get to bring my COR to the boss runs! O_O

I'm not looking forward to the runs we'll have to do with a few green amphibians that will remain unnamed, but i'm definitely willing to give this a go and hope for the best. It'd be really nice to see some people from our LS get an opportunity to obtain some of the best gear available in this game. And being able to say that our little social was able to succeed at yet another endgame event... well, that's just another thing to smile about.

And now to catch up on the other stuff i've been up to!

The CoP static in my LS finally reached chapter 8. I headed out to help them with the 3 fights up in Sea, which went a lot faster than I predicted. The fights were relatively easy with 2 RDMs (myself and Chisei) alternating the ES + Sleepga. We did get a little aggro here and there, but then again who doesn't when you're in Sea?

I wasn't able to help with the next mission because of my static for my SMN, but from what I heard Drimergirl, Soulstar, Standpoint and Timwakefield made some more progress. The plan now is to wrap up with the last two fights in the CoP missions in about 2 weeks and finally we'll have another bunch of LS members that have finally completed the CoP expansion! Then... its time to pester a few others to get their static setup. Eveeeeeeeeentually our entire LS will be done with CoP, and SEA WILL BE OURS! <_<

And on the topic of sea, Jailer of Faith can go dig himself a grave! Xean had tried to setup a JoF run a few weeks ago, but unfortunately he had some RL plans come up and we had to cancel at the last minute. So we scheduled for the following week, and struggled to find people that would be available and willing to help with the fight. During that week me and Xean farmed up a total of 7 pop items, just to make sure that we'd see at least one Faith Torque. I would end up getting the second if one dropped, and then we'd allow anyone else who participated to lot any after.

Sadly though, the fight didn't go well. Xean seemed to be tanking pretty well and the dmg looked good, we managed to get JoF down to about 60%. The problem though was that he spammed some move that kept giving the slow effect to Xean, as well as a petrify AoE move AND Stonega III. I was having a really hard time keeping up with casting Cure V > Erase > Haste > Stona > Repeat. I couldn't even find time to rest and had both Ballad and Refresh @_@

Eventually what made the fight turn for the worse was when Xean went really low on HP and I was in the process of casting erase on him, and unfortunately no other cures got cast after he took some massive dmg and then before I had a chance to get my own cure off, I watched his HP go to O. Then from there, JoF picked us all off one by one. Carste managed to kite him for a little bit, but we just didn't have enough time to try and recover. The most disappointing part of the evening was that immediately after that loss, the only other two healers had to leave which pretty much forced us to cancel the rest of the run. It was really frustrating and discouraging after having put so much work into setting up the run.

I'm really hoping that in the next month or two I can try and help Xean setup another run now that we'll have more ppl with access to this fight, but that also has been a challenge. I'm never sure if the people I ask really don't want to come, and I hate putting them in a position where they feel like they have to say yes out of obligation. Hopefully taking a break from this goal will be a nice breather and give me some time to get a better feel to know who really doesn't mind helping with the fight. Then the only other challenge is setting up a time that works conveniently for everyone. Stupid time zones ~_~

I also was able to help out the most recent addition to my little SAM army, Standpoint, with his Tashi: Kasha NM. I'm telling you, one day i'll have the entire LS with SAM75... and then, I will unretire it and lead them to many many fun parties filled with WHEEEEEEE's.

We did a few WS points out in Vunker Inlet [S] and then geared up for the fight which was in Kuftal Tunnel. Xean came along to help, and I pretty much just tossed a few enfeebles and watched the two elvaan men annihilate the beetle. Fight wasn't even much of a challenge for a BLU75

and MNK75!

And last thing worth mentioning, I had another opportunity to bring out my PLD for a LS event! Drimergirl had asked for some help getting her Carbuncle Mitts for her up and coming SMN, so myself, Xean, Athoz and Vepion went to the temple of Uggalepih to give her a hand. I had farmed up the key she needed to get to the NM area, as well as the pop item so that really let us speed things up. As for the fight, I wish I could say I remembered it but to be honest the only thing I remember is hitting my provoke macro! Its surprising what once might have been a really difficult fight, can be so easy and quick! I remember having close to 2 parties when I had gone after my Carbuncle Mitts years ago.... and here we were, with less than a party and the whole thing probably lasted no longer than 5 minutes! Oh well, the important thing is that Drimergirl was estatic at the end.

So guess i'll end this post by expressing my current thoughts...

I need to do some testing on my DRG! I have been getting an urge to play my SAM again thanks to a few people in the LS that have been expressing how much fun they've had recently lvling the jobs. But I really don't think its a good idea to keep multiple heavy DDs geared and available when I have so many mage jobs. Even with the satchel, I am still struggling to maintain a "20 empty inventory" space. So my goal for the next little while, will be to see how I can better gear my DRG to bring it up to par on non-bird mobs so that the temptation of getting my SAM out of retirement won't be so strong. First on the list: Get my Pahluwan Legs!

Getting caught up in the moments.

2009-05-07T18:49:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, that's exactly what we need to do when we play this game. "Get caught up in the moment".

Lately i've been noticing that a lot of people I know, have been feeling stressed out with the many goals they seek to accomplish in this game. I'm sure i've been feeling it myself at times. And the downside to this, is that we get so consumed with "having" to get something done that we easily forget to enjoy ourselves and the moments that we have which make this game worth playing in the first place.

So I think for this blog entry, i'm going to savor the moments i've had recently which have either made me laugh, or made me smile.

Lets start off with what I like to call, "getting cudly with the tarus".

That there is Xean and Falk (now called Sjoidjgo thanks to the RMT that hacked his account and the wonderful SE support who refused to let him change his name back). We were waiting to pop Iriz Ima, which our LS has done countless times...

The fight went very well, as always. All we had to do was bring out a few nukers, and voilà! GAME OVER for the poor elephant. Err, Marid.

Next up, a little bit of UFO farming.

Soulstar had just recently gotten his sea access, and wanted to farm up some UFO organs that he needed to quest his WS gorget. So a bunch of us headed up to Sea to give him a hand, and also to farm a few extras.

We had Xean and Zeo tanking, while Soulstar would jump in here and there for his treasure hunter. Drimergirl and myself were on healing/enfeebling duty, and of course we had our reliable Chuck Norris (aka Carste) nuking away on BLM. Carste took a couple of deaths (he has quite a nuking set) throughout the night, but other than that things went pretty smoothly and everyone who needed a UFO organ was able to get one.

Also, one thing which most people might find incredibly mind numbing - weapon unlocking.

My COR just hit 73 as of today, but yesterday I was able to get it to 72 which meant time to unlock my Coffinmaker i've had waiting in storage for months. I was really excited to finally be able to work on this and it available for future parties... until I found out that I couldn't make a level 3 skillchain. -_-

But... things worked out because I was able to drag Xean out on his MNK to help me out!

We worked on getting the 500 points I needed for what seemed like forever. And though things took a lot longer than I thought they would, I content just to spend time with him doing something together. Eventually he had to take a break which was fine, because I was able to solo the crabs in Vunker Inlet [S] just fine on COR (go go Ninja's Roll!) while he was away. Later in the night he came back and helped me finish up my last 40 points and I was ready to lvl again on COR!

Only we had to wait until the next day. Cuz you know, people need sleep. <_<

So this morning, we decided to try and setup a merit pty to get some fast xp. At first, things weren't looking too good for us because there was NO healer in sight and the only people in LS that had healing jobs were already busy.

Eventually though a RDM popped up and so I invited him right away. Then I grabbed a DRG, SAM and WAR (thanks Zeo!) to fill the rest of the party and we headed out to the Colibri camp which was empty.

I don't know exactly how much xp we managed to get, but the party we had was one of the best i'd had in a long time. Kills were easily under 5-10 seconds, and the majority of my slugshots were hitting. Xean seemed to be enjoying himself a lot because at the rate we were killing, we were definitely keeping him busy with pulls. We got up to about chain #126 and the only reason the chain ended is because we eventually had to replace Zeo and I had made the mistake of inviting the replacement before he was actually ready to engage the mobs and fight.

All I know is that I really can't wait to finally be able to do some LS merit parties with Xean's BRD. Called me biased, but he's damn good and i'm just keeping my fingers crossed he still has this new "ability" to endure long grinds in FFXI because I want LOTSA xp!

My only other challenge when we hit 75 will be to find someone willing to act as the healer. I love being on RDM, and I probably will end up going if I don't know the healer personally (most RDMs tend to be really lazy) but I really have been enjoying my COR and hope that i'll be able to bring that to some merit ptys. Or my lolDRG!

Last saturday was also a success for ZNMs. I hadn't been able to pop my Experimental Lamia for the last two weeks which really had me discouraged and pretty much ready to give up on even doing ZNMs for myself anymore, but my LS "saved the day" as the saying goes. I had a full alliance show up for my ZNM and even got the Enkidu's Leggings i'd been hoping for which I can now use on my COR. Now I just need to get the Aurum Cuisses and I think i'll be done with ZNM gear.

Then the plan is to start popping extra ZNMs that I know others need but don't have the time to really farm up the zeni. I just really have to remind myself to actually farm the zeni because like with campaign, that's one thing I always put off.

We also managed to kill Nuhn, Cheese Hoarder Gigiroon, Iriz Ima, Chigre and Dea that night which was no surprise. I was really glad that Drimergirl finally got her Blood Ring that night... she had popped Chigre the last two weeks but never managed to get her ring.

And to make this week an even bigger success, we got Xean, Vepion and Darce up to floor 81 in Nyzul. A goliard body dropped and Xean won that, which is a nice macro piece for his WHM. Hopefully we'll be able to get floor 100 in the next two weeks and then after that, we'll be spamming some assault to help Vepion get a Yigit Body for his BRD.

And though it was a sweet gesture to serenade to me and Xean, I think we might just have to persuade Vepion to get some singing lessons. Elvaan men don't exactly have that melodic voice.

Last things to note - I got myself a Hades Earring +1! OMG YES TWO WHOLE EMNITY!!!!! I still need to quest my Mermaid's Ring though to add to my emnity set.

My goal is to have so much emnity that the next time I get asked to tank something, NO ONE will take it away! ~_~

So that's all I can think to post about now.

Oh, but one last thing!

My DIRT.

*Stares nervously*

*Holds big jar of dirt close to her chest*

My PLD needs a little work it seems.

2009-04-28T14:11:00.000-07:00

I've been doing some thinking lately, and realized that two things about my PLD.

The first, is that I miss playing the job. PLD was my first 75, and immediately after I got it there, I rushed my RDM to 75 so that I could play a job that would have a better invite rate for merits. And from there, I ended up leveling various other jobs so that I could be more useful to my friends and the linkshells I was apart of. Unfortunately though, the end result is that I would rarely have the opportunity to play my PLD because the other jobs I would get to 75 would have more use.

As much as i'd like to be "selfish" at times and bring what I want to whatever event i'm attending, I much prefer seeing "success". So ultimately that means that when i've participated in an event, and if I had another job that would benefit the group more, I would end up bringing that job. And to be honest, this was never really a problem for me. The only time I would find myself irritated with bringing a job I would rather not play, is when I saw other people who could also do the same, yet never offered up to bring a more useful job. Instead, i'd see them bringing "what they want to play" even if the job they chose, wouldn't benefit the group as much.

But anyways, I just haven't really been able to play my PLD much in the last 3-4yrs i've played this game and seeing some friends who now have the job at 75, friends who are just about to get it to 75, and even seeing friends take up an interest and start lvling the job has made me a little bit envious in a way. I'm getting that nostalgic feeling.

And the second thing i've realized, is that my PLD is rusty. My macros are out of date, I haven't really updated any of my gear in a while and well... everytime I have been asked to bring PLD i've always felt very insecure about my tanking ability. I've been able to get some practice as PLD/NIN in the last year, but even still I find it quite a challenge to keep hate without provoke and feel that I could really use a lot more practice tanking with this subjob. I don't like feeling incapable of doing something, especially when I know that FFXI isn't really all that challenging of a game in comparison to others.

So what does this all add up to? A rusty and hardly used paladin.

What do I plan to do about it? Well, first things first... I have a little bit of gear updating to do. Its gonna take a bit of work, especially because I would rather farm up some more gil rather than spend the savings i've been eating away at due to my COR. I'm planning on doing some BCNMs as well as KSNMs as much as I can with Xean and other LS members... so plans to farm seals is already on the way. The other thing i'm hoping to do to help with this, is meriting. Lotsa meriting. If I can get one of those awesome 20k/hr parties, i'm able to accumulate at least 2k worth of Imperial Standing which I can then trade in for 99 Imperial Bronze Pieces which I then put up on the AH for gil! This is probably my most preferred farming method, because I usually enjoy meriting (especially on birds! go go DRG!)

With a little farming, and some questing (and waiting around to for some miracle opportunity to get a rare/ex piece from either my HNM shell that i'm in "part time" or find an endgame shell willing to make a deal for the B.Mask) my long term plan is to obtain the following:

Ritter Gorget (Einhejar)
Mermaid Ring (Quest)
Hades Earring or Hades Earring +1 (both AH)
Cerberus Mantle (AH)
Bahamut Mask (purchase from an endgame LS that isn't going to rip me off for a ridiculous price)
Aegishjalmr (HNM LS - Fafnir)
Homam Gambieras
Iron Ram Dastanas
Iron Ram Hose

So, i've got a bit of work ahead of me. The hardest pieces to obtain from that list will be the B.Mask or the Aegishjalmr. I think I will have a better chance at getting the Aegishjalmr with the HNM shell i'm in part-time now, but seeing as I won't be able to participate much, I probably won't really ever have lotting rights unless I luck out and no one else needs the item the day it drops. Of course the other thing I have to keep my fingers crossed for, is that my HNM shell actually gets the claim on Fafnir when I DO attend. So far our shell has been having some bad luck with this other HNM shell called Absolution which from the word of mouth, seems to have a lot of botters. And while I guess any HNM shell could have that, their shell has gotten a majority of claims which makes it quite suspicious. So yea...

I'm also considering investing in a magic defense setup. I would really like to try tanking the ACP final mission fight, where a PLD/RDM is used. I have no experience though tanking with /rdm, nor with the idea of gear swapping at the right time before a magic move is used against me to swap in my MDB gear. Still, its something i'm probably going to look into though not as diligently as getting my other PLD gear.

Ideally, if I do pursue an MDB set i'll need to get myself the following:

Merman's Ring x2 (AH)
Corral Earring or Merman's Earring x2 (AH)
Lamia Mantle + 1 (AH)
Resolute Belt (AH)
Iron Ram Lance (AH)
Lamia Kaman (AH)

The lists look like a lot of work, but I think that like with my Burtgang progress... as long as I take it slow and don't stress myself out about getting it all asap, it won't be so bad. One thing i've learned about this game is that you don't always get to have the "uber" gear immediately, and sometimes you won't ever be able to see it at all depending on what it is. Its not exactly meant for every player to have, otherwise the rarity and value would be meaningless. But, sometimes the window of opportunity opens when you're patient and you sometimes find yourself getting lucky. Keyword though: sometimes.

Hopefully once I start getting a few of these pieces, i'll run into some more opportunities where I can play my PLD again. And if not, well... guess its time for me to put together some events where I can play it, and finally make everyone else that has multiple jobs come as something else so that I can have a little more fun XD (Well, maaaaaaaaybe. Its really hard for me to ask people to play jobs I know they don't enjoy)

HNMs wut?

2009-04-27T19:58:00.000-07:00

Well, the day that I thought would never happen finally did. I have an HNM linkpearl. o.O

After having tried to find an endgame shell that would be willing to sell the black belt items for 1mil each, and having no success... Xean decided to take up the offer that our Salvage LS leader had made, to join their HNM shell. The salvage LS we had joined was actually an "all endgame" LS, but was putting more focus into HNMs which meant that our salvage had pretty much come to an end. But the leader of the shell seemed to want us both to participate in the HNM part of the LS and offered both of us to join.

I didn't really want to commit, for a number of reasons. The first being that I didn't feel i'd be able to be dependable as a member, because my priorities have always been my social LS. I have some endgame events I attend, but I try to keep these at a minimum. I know that with an HNM shell, you're pretty much expected to drop whatever you're doing if a window opens for an HNM that the shell wants to go after, and I know I wouldn't be able to do that. The other reason has a little to do with my slowly growing hatred for camping NMs. I can't stand it! @_@

The last time I went after an NM was when I tried to get my Sarutobi Kyahan. I think i'm close to 0/10 on this, and even though I know other friends have had far worse drop rates with other NMs (hello there Leaping Lizard) I've reached my limit. I want to get these so bad, but everytime I go, there's always competition and then its back to running around that stupid platform and getting dizzy for 2-3 hrs. Yea... I refuse to camp him alone, and I also refuse to drag anyone out to endure that unbearable camping session, so.. go go fuma sun-ate!

Anyways, back on topic... as much as I want the experience (especially tanking experience) for HNMs, I just can't see myself getting into an HNM LS full time. But I guess things were conveniently put in place so that I wouldn't really have to, but still have a shot at seeing some HNMs! And provided the shell I run with doesn't get outclaimed by botters, I should eventually have a chance at fighting some of these.

So for right now, Xean has joined this HNM shell somewhat full time and attends quite a few windows, where as I only come out and help if I don't have anything pre-planned. So it all works out quite nicely. I don't have any plans for gear, i've played long enough without a dalmatica, an a few of the other e.abjurations so i'm sure not having them won't kill me. But i'm really hoping that at least this way, Xean will be able to get the items he wants for his BB seeing as my attempt to get these for him failed. I still don't understand why endgame shells will post a section on their forum where people that want to buy drops from them can ask, and then they don't even bother replying to a post that is made.

Aside from that, Limbus seems to be looking up. There was a little bit of drama recently because apparently being committed to a LS and showing up on time, every run for over a year somehow makes you "a gear whore" when wanting that time put into the shell to be counted towards something. I think the biggest problem was just that when the shell was originally made, the lotting system wasn't really setup in a way that would allow members to be rewarded based on the points they were earning which showed the time they were putting into the shell. For example, i'm currently sitting on more than 100 pts (currently have the most in the shell out of everyone) and those don't count for anything at this point because i've already obtained the pieces of gear i've wanted most (we get to set an order of preference for the gear we want, from 1-5). But now, leadership is currently looking at allowing members that have contributed more to the shell a way to "be ahead" of new members that join the shell.

Right now I don't mind waiting for the people that are "ahead" of me for the gear I want, to get theirs first. The members that are in line, have been with us a long while and come most runs. But because of our low attendance lately, we've had to look at the possibility of bringing in new members, and the way that the rules are currently... allows them to easily "jump ahead" of a veteran member which doesn't sit well with me if our system is based on points in the first place.

Enough ranting though! The good part of this story is that one of the other leads is stepping up to amend the rules and make them a little more fair for veterans. Not only that, but we've also changed our run time on Saturdays to 9am PST which is MUCH nicer for me and Xean. Not too early, and the event is done in the morning leaving us the rest of the day to do other things! Our last run this saturday also turned out well, and we managed to get the last chip needed for another Omega which hopefully we'll be able to do this tuesday. So yes... Limbus is starting to be fun again, no more stress! Now I just need to hope we get lucky with the farming runs we do, because i'm helping Xean get the 75 coins he needs for his Musical Earring. If only I hadn't sold the ~60 or some odd coins we had saved up for his Loquacious last year before he quit! ><

The only other things i've been up to recently have been lvling my COR with Xean's BRD. We're now at 66, and still shooting to get 75. Our progress might be put on hold though soon as i'm planning to get some farming done with Xean's leetTEF. I've spent so much gil on COR in the last month... I've only managed to do one KSNM in the last month which didn't really net a lot of profit, and aside from that the whole "gil making" hasn't quite been a focus for me lately.

Though I did luck out in Dynamis last week! Got myself a L.Jadeshell which I was able to sell for 1,280,000 gil. This of course means no "Month End Bonus" for me this month, but that's alright because... It means a bigger payout to the rest of the LS because my share of what I would have earned (if I hadn't won the 100c) gets added into the LS share. Now to put this gil into a secret fund which I am saving to pick up something special, mwahahaha.

Ooo, and to add to this, the entire LS of RoR now has BEAUCEDINE GLACIER ACCESS!!!!!!!! Its been such a pain for the last few months... every time we have the win for everyone that has joined, we get a few new recruits that need city wins! And not that city wins are bad to go after, its just that sometimes they don't allow for as much farming time... and I think the majority of our LS is really wanting to do more Northland runs. We only have a few pieces of AF in the cities that members need.... so much goes to free lot o.O

Oh, and I guess I should add that I got my SMN up to 65. I'm really not liking the job much, at least in xp party, I find that i'm way too slow with the curing in comparison to a WHM or RDM. I'm glad that i'm finally getting the job up there so that I can have something else sometimes needed for special KSNMs, BCNMs etc, but i'm pretty sure this will be one job that will be sitting on the back burner. I wish there was more to enjoy about it, but really... I find my other jobs much better.

A Crystalline Prophecy!

2009-04-23T11:51:00.000-07:00

So, SE finally released some new content through the expansion "A Crystalline Prophecy". As usual, I've gone through the missions and barely paid any attention to the actual story... only this time I really DID try to read through all the cutscenes! I just wasn't able to retain any of the story this time around.

But on a good note, I was able to finish the mini-expansion and get the end reward in just a matter of days!

When the expansion was finally available, many LS members were jumping into the missions, eager to complete them for the customizable gear. I had no intention though to start them. I've never liked the idea of racing to do something the day it becomes available, nor following everyone just because of a new "hype".

But, eventually I got the push I needed to jump into the missions because Xean wanted to start the quests with me. We kinda have this unwritten rule that when it comes to missions or quests, we won't do them without each other. I like this, makes the game more enjoyable to play together and makes everything we do feel like a team effort ^^

So, we started off by farming some crystal items from Beastmen in different parts of Vana'diel. The drop rate was really good, and while we weren't able to get all 3 items (x2) in one session due to other game events we had planned, we still got them done pretty quickly. We then moved onto the next mission, which involved killing goblins in various areas for a key item which would then allow us to pop a goblin NM.

The NMs were laughauble. Well, at least for a lvl 75. We then had to head back to Qufim to fight a few waves of mandragoras which also were a piece of cake. All it took was one -aga spell to obliverate each wave.

Around this time, some acquaintances from my Dynamis shell were also doing the same mission and asked to climb up to the top of Delfkutt's tower with us, to take on the last and final mission.

The climb was pretty easy, and thanks to our friend Anderoc who came along to escort us we got to the top pretty quick. Anderoc also offered to help us out with the fight. Our setup seemed really good (We had WHM (Xean), RDM/DRK (me), PLD/RDM (Anderoc), BLM (Verdandi), RNG (Vague), RNG (Standpoint)), but... for one reason or another, we had some really bad luck with the "charms". During this fight, there's a possibility of party members being charmed, and we had this happen 3 times. The last time was ultimately what caused us to lose, because we had 2 pty members that got charmed.

In the end, Xean was the last "elvaan" standing (our entire group was Elvaan) which I thought was pretty funny.

So after a couple of days, me and Xean were able to arrange another run with all LS members (If you want something done right, you gotta do it with SoTW members!). We picked up Soulstar on SMN and Sabene on BLM.

This run went much better. Slowly but surely we got ourselves the win! I really enjoyed the RDM/DRK aspect.

After we got the win, we swapped out Sabene's BLM for Athoz's MNK. We actually did quite well, though this setup was just a little trickier. The role that Sabene/Athoz had, was to kill the adds that popped throughout the fight, which were actually clones of various party members. We were doing pretty well and managed to get the NM down to about 40% (I think) before things went wrong. I can't remember how it happened, but Anderoc ended up taking a really nasty hit and died and from there... well, lets just say that RNG's don't do well at tanking mobs that have a really powerful magic attack =P

Since we weren't able to get the win for Athoz and had a few other LS members that were needing this fight, we decided to put things on hold and schedule another run later on. To date we've had one other attempt, and we tried the "zerg melee method". This didn't go quite well, but i'm pretty sure that if everyone was prepped we could have gotten it. Here's to hoping that the next time we'll finally get the win @_@

And onto the end result of all this expansion stuff...

I got myself a new PLD body! Neuvo Corselette!

I chose the augments: Emnity +5 & Fast Cast +5.

I did have a little bit of difficult deciding which body I was going to go for, because I was strongly considering a body that would benefit my up and coming COR. But in the end, I decided to go with PLD just because it has always been my favorite job in the game, despite not having many opportunities to play it.

And speaking of my COR... I finally obtained Slug Shot! Can I get a Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!

In the last few parties i've had, my weaponskills have been doing some really nice dmg. The only other job i've lvled that parsed as high during ws on birds was my DRG. My WAR, SAM and MNK are all weak in comparison! @_@

I owe the fun to Xean though, because he goes out of his way to give me Hunter's Prelude >=)

Our bird parties have been really fun. Pulls come in really fast to keep up the chain, and overall progress is really fast. We've managed to get ours friends Drimergirl and Standpoint a couple of lvls here and there, so the company is also nice. Sometimes the whole "starting" process takes longer than desired, but once we get going, its smooth sailing.

Speaking of sailing...

I got my COR AF3 done! Timwakefield, Drimergirl, Xean and myself went to Arragapo Reef for the BCNM. I was a little worried that our setup might not be enough because I seem to have had a memory of the fight being difficult the last time I did it, but as usual... I get proven wrong. The fight was ridiculously easy. All I had to do was bind + gravity the BLU, while everyone else killed the other bad guy. Then when the hume was killed, everyone came after the BLU which was killed a minute later.

Now all I need to do is finish questing my COR hands (why does SE make some pieces of AF so crappy?????) so that I can store the set. And the reason why? Because I have about 1-3 pieces of open inventory on my character now.

Which brings me to another thought...

Rather than waste precious space in this blog entry though, I will just sum up my thoughts about SE and their POL Customer Service:

Insert Vulgar Language: Here.

Yep. Long story short, I ordered my security token the day it became available, which is suppose to come with a Mog Satchel >>>> + 70 Inventory Spaces for me!

However... after 2 weeks of waiting, I called up SE and after waiting for more than 30 min, I was finally able to get through to a representative who was only able to confirm that my token was "still being processed" (aka - has NOT been shipped!) and advised me to call back in a couple of days to check on the status again because he would not be able to provide any information on when it would be expected that my token would be shipped.

*Smiles*

(No sarcasm, I swear!)

So what else have I been up to recently? A little bit of meriting here and there... saving up my merits to apply to my COR (now lvl 62) which I hope to have at 75 before the end of the month.

Xean joined an HNM shell too, and while I haven't committed myself as a member because I don't feel that I would be dependable enough due to my other game events/priorities, I have been tagging along to help out when I can. So far i've been present for an Adamantoise fight which was killed way too fast for me to remember ; ;

I just went to a Fafnir window, but sadly the LS Xean is with didn't get the claim so no fun there. (I was even able to play BLM!)

I really wish that I had gotten some response on QCDN about an endgame shell willing to sell the black belt items, but after posting on a few sites (with no response -_-) we've decided that this might be the only way for him to get the belt. It'll probably take a lot longer to accomplish, but its something to do while playing the game and work towards. Plus I just really want to play with Xean's MNK finally geared up (minus the Usukane which seems to be out of reach for now).

As for other random things, ZNMs are still happening with our LS, though we haven't really been able to do the Tier 3's recently. Its a little discouraging at times, because I really don't like having to tell people "we can't do this ZNM", but with low turnouts and not enough of the right jobs, there's only so much you can do. I'm hoping that with the addition of some new members (and returning members) that the interest will pick up again. We have done so well with the ZNMs in the past, and I really like the idea of our small little social shell being able to gear up members with rare/ex pieces that most people believe are only possible by joining "endgame shells".

I've also been able to help Vepion, Darce and Xean get floor 71 in Nyzul Assault. We've started a somewhat permanent static on Mondays, and we've had a good success rate with our runs. Anderoc has volunteered to help us out as well, and so we usually just need 1-2 pickup members which haven't been too much of a hassle to find.

It's interesting how when I first started doing Nyzul, I despised the event. I didn't know much about how it was done, and found it to be very stressful. But now with the static that I do on Fridays, and this one that i've been helping with, I actually find myself enjoying the runs. I think its just a matter of getting used to the different tasks so that you actually know what you need to do, and having everyone else on the same page. And thanks to Skype, doing this event is SOOO much easier now because both static groups I run with, we use it and makes communication so much quicker. So much time is wasted when you have to type out instructions >< style="text-align: center;">(Me and Xean enjoying the view on our way to farm the coffer key for Castle Zvahl Bailey's)

(La Theine Plateau)

(Getting TP during our CSN ZNM run - Chigre!)

CorLEET.

2009-04-09T10:09:00.000-07:00

So i've finally reached lvl 51 on my up and coming Corsair.

I've been leveling the job with Xean's BRD, and so far we've had some pretty good parties. The only real complaint I have is the lack of finding tanks and healers during the times we try to get a party started. It can get a little frustrating too, especially when we don't have more than 3hrs to party and we spend half of that seeking because you can't find a tank. But somehow, we've still managed to get some xp here and there.

I'm hoping that we'll be able to hit 75 before the end of April, but that will really depend on the other in-game activities we're involved with. Right now we do Einhejar, Dynamis and Salvage (though the Salvage runs have been cancelled recently) and then I have a few statics throughout the week. Then there's usually some LS events that we help out with (including our Saturday ZNMs) so at times it can seem a little busy.

I'm finding myself a little more excited now though because I finally have more goals to reach, in terms of obtaining gear. For a long time, i've had most of the gear i've needed for all my jobs and haven't really been pursueing anything too special (aside from Homam in Limbus) But after having looked into the gear I can obtain for my COR at 75, I now have quite a list! I'm going to be trying to get some Denali pieces through Nyzul, and hope to eventually get some Enkidu's gear through ZNMs. Getting the pieces I want will take time, and there's a good chance I might not get everything because luck will always play a factor in this game, but at least there's more drive for me to play.

The one thing i'm not looking forward to with my "COR" progress is the AF. The gear isn't all that bad, but the quests... remind me of my SAM days. Long. Annoying. Repetitive.

Most of my first quests require me to go to this ??? in Arragopo Reef, which also requires me to use a Lamia Fang Key to get to. I can either get the key by killing Lamia (hello time sink!) or by clicking on another ??? in Caedarva Mire. The catch with clicking on the ???, is that I can only do this once a week. So i'm going to be relying on getting friends to help pick up some extra keys so that I can get my AF done this week.

So far me and Xean have managed to get our AF weapons. We're a little bit behind, but then again we've been doing mostly lvl sync parties so its not like we would have been able to use our weapons anyways.

Oh! and I finally got my Mercurial Kris! I sold my Hagun and Haubergeon +1, and used the gil to pick myself up this wonderful little dagger. From what i've heard, this will end up being a good investment because it will save me from buying the expensive bullets I need from 50-75. Now I just need to get a non-level sync party to try it out!!!

Aside from that, i've been working on removing my merits from my Great Katana, so that I could merit Polearm (for DRG) and get 8/8. I'll admit I am a bit sentimental about retiring my SAM, because for a long time it was my favorite job... but, there's something about the famous loldrg that just seems more enjoyable. ESPECIALLY during drg burns!

I finally had a chance to do a DRG burn recently, and it was craaaaaazy! Well, I guess it wasn't exactly a "full" DRG burn because our setup was WHM, THF, RDM, DRG, DRG, DRG... but, close enough! We actually managed to get a really high chain too which was impressive to me considering we didn't have a BRD. I'm pretty sure I remember Xean even doing some pulling to help speed things up. (Lol Dia pull ftw!)

In addition to regular merit parties, me and Xean have also managed to get some more merits by helping out our friends Vepion and Janko. They're lvling PUP and it hasn't always been easy for them to find the "tank and healer" combo. In fact, they've had some pretty bad experiences with players after mentioning the setup.

But thankfully we've been able to save them the hassle of finding the tank and healer on a couple of occasions and had some fun. Well, that is if "fun" can be defined as being scorched by a red crawler and watching your HP go from 1000+ down to 0, all in one animated motion. x_x

Oh, and I won't mention the time that Janko got aggro and ran into the tunnel with the dead end... wait, I just did! Its ok though, me and Xean had our revenge on that slime. Go go lolsword + club dmg!

Speaking of Vepion... he also managed to get the ToD for Charybdis, and recruited me and Xean to help with the fight. Initially I wasn't too excited about camping this NM, because I have really really... reaaaaally grown to dislike NM camping. BUT! In the end I was glad that I had come along because we managed to get claim (took about 4hrs for him to pop) and the fight itself was smooth. The funny part is that Xean had to leave to do some errands and just as he had predicted, Charybdis popped soon after. I think it was about 10 minutes?

Hopefully i'll get a chance to fight this again in the future when other people I know go after him. Its a pretty fun fight and if you don't have a NIN tank, it becomes a bit of a challenge for me to manage my hate because of my emnity merits. >=)

And last, looks like i'm finally going to have a chance to do some Sea gods. Janko and Xean are wanting to pop Jailer of Faith to get the Faith Torques for their Hand-to-Hand skill. The pop item for this NM isn't too hard to get either, and just requires killing some NM flowers up in Sea. The drop rate was pretty decent too, and I think between the two of them we'll have about 5 pops.

The only difficult part now will be finding enough ppl to do the actual Jailer of Faith fight. It can be low-manned, but knowing enough people willing to come help that have access to Sea is a challenge on its own. We actually do know enough ppl right now, but it might be hard to find a time that will work for everyone because we're all on different time zones. I'm sure we'll figure something out though, and if luck is with us during these fights... we'll get both Janko and Xean their torques, which will save them the trouble of buying a PCC or going after the dreaded Argus. I deeeeeeeeeeeeeeefinitely don't have the patience to camp Argus like a certain little Tarutaru, Mithra and bearded mage I know. >_>
Well that about covers most of what i've been up to recently.

For laughs, i'll finish this post with a pic I took during our Vulpangue ZNM fight last saturday. The elvaan men in our LS, like to goof off and bare it all for each other. So much love in the air!

Hanging up my Kabuto.

2009-03-30T17:19:00.000-07:00

After some thinking, i've decided to retire one of my favorite melee jobs. Samurai.

As much as i've loved this job, there are just too many benefits to gain if I retire it. The first is that I can sell quite a few expensive pieces of gear and make some gil, which I can then put into my COR.

After playing this game for 4 yrs, I figure its about time I play a job and go all out without being stingy on the gear/food that I buy for it, while getting it to 75. People have fun in this game, in their own ways. Mine is doing the best that I can in a party, and being the most efficient. So, one of the first things I plan to do in order to enjoy my COR is to use the funds i'll make to get myself a few nice pieces, such as the Mercurial Kris. Zeo actually offered to lend me his, which was really generous, but if i'm not mistaken, I could keep the dagger up to 75, and even use it in merit parties. So, makes more sense for to have my own and that way I don't have to constantly hassle Zeo to send me his to borrow when I play on COR.

I'm also planning to put some funds towards helping Xean get his Black Belt. I haven't told him though he'll find out sooner or later (probably when he decides to read this blog entry) I know that since getting back to the game, he's really been enjoying his MNK and one piece he's always wanted to get was the black belt. I recently put up a "WTB" on QCDN in hopes to find a shell that is willing to make a deal and sell the quest items from KSNM99's, and even offered up my own that i've been saving since last year. I really hope an endgame shell contacts me soon, this is one of those things i've always wanted to do for Xean ever since before he quit the game.

The other bonus to retiring SAM is... INVENTORY SPACE! Having 8 jobs at lvl 75, with another 2 on the way is definitely a very time consuming burden. I have every single quest/extension possible to have the most inventory space, and I still have to send myself random items like food, tools through the delivery box just so that I can have space on hand. Not having at least 10 open spots, drives me nuts! I need that room for when I take pictures for zeni, and for farming or crafting. And when I don't have the room (which has been the case recently) I have to spend so much time sending myself gear and other items, just so that I can have more room. Oh, and did I mention I still have a mule with at least 80 pieces of low lvl gear? >_>

Yes yes... I know...

So by retiring SAM, i'll now be able to bring my DRG which I strangely feel bad saying... I enjoy more than my SAM. Its pretty well geared (still working on getting a few pieces, but that's another story) and though it didn't parse up to my SAM, I just found myself enjoying it more. I plan to use it mostly for colibri merit ptys, and if ever I need to do other mobs where DRG doesnt' fair so well, I do have my WAR. My WAR has never seemed to do so well, but most of my gear is rare/ex so its not really hard to gear it decently. I'll just need to get a pair of Askar hands through Nyzul and should be ready to go!

Oh, and i'll be able to get rid of my merits for Great Katana, and put new ones into Polearm! See... I have something like 713 merits so far? I've meritted EVERY "outside job" category, and the only place I can now put merits into... is my MNK. Which, I don't think i'll touch because I sold my K.Osode and gave my Brown Belt to Xean. So it'd be one pretty gimp MNK. <_<

Onto other things!

Thanks to my dynamis shell RidersOfRohan, I am now 5/5 on WAR relic! I believe i've managed to get all these pieces through free lot too.

I'm almost 5/5 on WHM and BLM too now. I wonder how much gear I would have gotten if I had been in a shell that ran twice a week @_@

All I can say is that having TH4 has worked wonders with our shell. We have 3 THFs that have this now, and we're finally able to get people more AF. We even got lucky and finally got another Valor Surcoat (about damn time Ketsurui!)

Aside from some occasional partying with Vepion to help him get his PUP to 75, me and Xean have been mostly xping on our BRD and COR. We're just about at the stage where he'll be doing the pulling. We just hit 37 today, and I can't wait to go to East Ronfaure [S] to have our first "merit type" party. I'll definitely have to invite LS members to this pty, it'll be a blast.

In order to keep up though with dmg, i've had to do some skilling up with my markmanship. The one downside to lvl syncing. Its not too bad though, i'm just glad that Xean can also benefit from skilling up his BRD skills so that he can keep me company. I just have to get used to the fact that he can endure grinds now, and actually finds some enjoyment in this game. Its been hard adjusting, because once upon a time there was very little he could stand about FFXI @_@

We've also spent some time helping out one of the new additions to our LS - Lyea. We helped her out with the rank mission 2.3 - aka "Pulverize the Dragon".

I swear i've done this fight at least 40 times now, and it never gets old! Usually I end up going MNK and 2hring, but this time I got to bring out my DRG (yay!)

Now just to wait until Lyea makes her way to lvl 50, so that we can do all the Genkai quests! Those are loads of fun =)

And the last thing to note, is another successful night of "Casual Saturday Night ZNMs". Actually, I completely forgot to mention but our LS took on Tinnin the weekend before last. Unfortunately we weren't able to do a "LS only" setup because... well, we just didn't have enough people available that night, but we did have some friends come out to help fill up the alliance.

Myself and Anderoc were the two PLD/NINs. I was pretty pumped and eager to finally tank something as /nin that would really test my ability to keep hate without provoke. I suppose because of the attack rate for Tinnin, i'd also be testing my ability to keep up shadows but... the challenge was cut short when we encountered a glitch.

After we got Tinnin down to about 80% (I think?) suddenly he seemed "frozen" and stopped attacking. We just wailed on him and took him down, with absolutely zero retaliation. The fun was cut short, and I guess because we had such an easy time with a Tier IV ZNM that was suppose to be a challenge, we got unlucky with the drops.

Not one piece of gear dropped. I felt pretty bad, considering this was Janko's pop and he had been working on it for the last couple of months. He's been wanting the Enkidu Subligar for his PUP which is now on its way to hitting lvl 75.

One good thing out of the fight though, is that I got the Tinnin Fang. This makes me 2/3 of the ZNM items needed in one of the quests for my mythic sword! And on that note, the only other areas i've progressed in my mythic weapon upgrade is accumulating more Alexandrite (thanks to Xean who always grabs any when he sees them cheap) and accumulating more ampoules from Einhejar. Still a long ways to go with this goal... lol... >_>;

But yea, as I was saying! Another good night with ZNMs. We started off with fighting Vulpangue, which umm... ended with about 80% of our alliance dead after the first minute. Thankfully though, we did manage to kill the steroid puk. We even managed to get the drop that Soulstar had been wanting, the SMN head piece. But, sadly he zoned before waiting for it to drop and it ended up falling to his wife, Drimergirl ><

The night did get better though, we went after Chigre next. We had to wait for another group to do a few pops, and the funny part is that they had quite a few more people than our alliance... and we managed to kill our one pop waaaaaaaaaay faster. Go go SoTW!!

I was able to pick myself up a Blood Ring from that fight, and Vepion got himself the Insect Ring, so full drops all around thanks to Carste's TH4! He must be enjoying the break from his BLM, I hear he's lost something like 20k in the last week due to other in-game events, lol.

Then we went after Verdelet.

And yes, for those in my LS that read this...

I KNOW YOU CAN MELEE VERD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

...

......

Leave me alone!

We fought him twice, and while he did drop the cape item, we didn't get the shield. Guess we'll have to pop him again next week XD

(Vepion and Comedie making an appearance, lol)

Corsair!

2009-03-20T20:08:00.001-07:00

Feeling a little bit lazy with this entry, so going to attempt to summarize the last two weeks as much as I can... (gawd I'm really slacking eh?)

Well first and foremost, i've once again gone back on something I said I would never do.

I'm leveling corsair! I always found the job interesting, and wanted to take it to 75 when the job first became available... but when I read into it and found out the costs to be efficient, I said i'd never touch the job. Its one thing to invest in gear, shihei and food... but having to spend even MORE gil, just to see your job perform well, really discouraged me.

But, as with a few other things in this game... i've changed my mind! When Xean returned to the game, he expressed his interest in wanting to take BRD to 75. I had wanted to lvl BRD as well, but only because out of all my close friends I only have one with the job at 75 that I won't feel guilty for asking to bring it to a merit party. And because Vepion had started on his PUP which he is currently taking to 75, I wouldn't feel very good asking him to bring BRD, as I know his preference is to merit on PUP.

So, it worked out great that Xean was going to lvl BRD because that then allowed me to look at something else to play. Thinking about the best combination for jobs, as well as what would be great to have in future merit parties, I decided to take COR. I know its going to be expensive to lvl, but its been a while since i've actually just ignored the costs in this game and done something I enjoy and I figured this would do the trick.

On the plus side, we've concluded that Xean's -TH effect is gone because with the farming sessions we've done, we've managed to make a lot of profit. We've gotten 4 Ecphoria Rings in the last week (3 during one session) and can easily get about 10 stacks of ladybug wings in just over 2hrs. Its nice to have your significant other playing with you so that you can work as a team to accomplish things in this game... you get them done faster, and usually have a good time doing it.

So for the last week... here's a look at what i've done:

Helped Xean get his SCH up to 37. He's enjoying the new subjob. I think its harder to believe that he is actually enjoying WHM period though, considering he couldn't stand it once upon a time... But i'm glad he likes the job, moreso because he's always been very effecient and whenever I played on PLD, we always seemed in sync with healing. He'd be fast to cast whatever I needed, but always knew when to give me "healing room" so that I could manage my hate. Good to have him back as WHM.

Got 3 members of my ls their Swift Belts. A few months ago we had done a few runs (weekend after weekend... after weekend @_@) but we never managed to get a belt for Falk. Finally he setup a run last Saturday and we had 2 other LS members come out in hopes to get one too.

Falk, Xean and myself started out by killing a few Tauro's to help Falk learn a BLU spell he needed, as we waited for more LS members to be free.

Finally we had Darce, Soulstar, Drimergirl and Korjon come out to help and we ended up going 3/3. We even managed to take on an NM with a link that we happened to get on our first fight.

I finished my merits in category 2 for DRG. I'm now down to meriting 5/5 on the recast timer for Super Jump. After this, I can merit my MNK, but I won't be playing that any time soon as i've pretty much retired it.

My Nyzul static went 4/4 again on our boss floors. We only managed to get one drop gear-wise, but the fact that we did great on getting to the boss with the win was enough I think. Looking forward to seeing some more big wins, and hopefully some new gear pieces for our static tonight.

Helped a new LS member of ours, Lyea get her fame to rank 4 for Norg so that she could quest Utsusemi: Ichi. Also helped her get the quest done to unlock NIN. Looks like we'll have another THF75 on the way. (*fears for the time when she'll be mentioning Kreutzet*)

On Monday, I was able to help out Vepion, Standpoint and Xean get from floor 1-15 in Nyzul. Our first run we had really bad luck, and I thought for sure we weren't going to end up getting the win but we did. Our next 2 runs went pretty smoothly.

I'm hoping that we'll be able to do this as a regular thing on Monday nights, so that way more ls members will have access to the Nyzul weaponskills and won't have to worry too much about having an insane amount of ws points needed to unlock them @_@

Dynamis this week turned out to be more than I expected. We did Beaucedine Glacier, and I was up for the BLM Body. I actually ended up getting this, as well as SCH, PUP, and DRG. So i'll have another 2 jobs to try and get to 75 in the future... <_<

I also spent a lot of time showing Xean all the new things added since he last played almost a year ago. He had seen a few of the new things such as Campaign, but he never really got a chance to explore the new areas. So I had some fun taking him to a few of my favorite places.

And I think that mostly covers the important stuff. I'm going to start focusing on farming Kindred Seals with Xean for the next couple of weeks so that we can do as many KSNMs possible. I've been spending a lot on gear as well as Alexandrites (now up to 10 stacks!) and need to put a bit more work into actually making gil, rather than spending it.

Oh, and here's just a pic I took the other day. I got Xean to call a GM and request his Benedight set. Back when we had our in-game wedding, they didn't have this available for male characters but sometime late last year, they added this. Any previously married male characters are now able to request a set if they never received one, though it does cost 50k.

Blessed

2009-03-12T13:12:00.000-07:00

I've always tried to keep my blog entries to be strictly about my in-game adventures, but this entry will be an exception.

I started up this game almost 4 years ago, thanks to a very good friend who had sparked my interest in the MMO. I had never played an MMO before in my life, and I was very thankful that he ended up coming back to the game (as he had previously quit months before) when I joined. He helped me with so much in this game, and I know that without him I might of been one of the many players that get too frustrated and quit in the first month.

He taught me the ropes of the game, and always pushed me to play to the best of my ability. I remember my very first dunes party, while I was filled with confusion to the many different concepts of the game he helped me learn what a skillchain was and I felt really accomplished for being a brand new player and having learned the timing just right. I remember when I started playing MNK in Qufim, I eventually got annoyed with the "tanks" who weren't holding hate which resulted in my WHM getting hit, how I eventually decided to change my main job to PLD and become his tank, so that he would never have to worry about taking a hit. So many good memories...

It wasn't long before our friendship became something more, and just like we were in-game, we were inseperable in real life.

But life isn't always smooth sailing. Eventually a time would come when things wouldn't be as we both wanted.

The truth though, is that everything in life happens for a reason. And that reason, I believe is God.

Almost a year has gone by since that real life change. I never really gave up hoping though.

As it turns out, he never did either.

And now, for reasons I don't ever think i'll ever be able to justify, I am blessed to be given a second chance. I am blessed to have someone I cared for deeply, return to me. I am thankful, and I am happy beyond words.

The Dancing Zeo.

2009-03-06T16:23:00.001-08:00

Yep. That there would be Zeo, giving an amazing performance for our newly made friend Mr. Bomb.

I had no clue what to name this blog entry, so I randomly chose one of the pictures I uploaded this week and figured Zeo deserved a little bit of fame!

Janko, Soulstar, Zeo, Carste and myself decided to do another MMM run, and we happened to get a round with bombs. The interesting thing about these bombs, is that with every action taken against them, they increased in size. So we had a little fun trying to see how big they could get... though eventually we were a little worried they might explode and KO everyone.

As for the rest of the weekend, our LS CoP group finally got back on track again. We woke up early Saturday morning to get the CoP airship fight done.

Our setup was Drimergirl (WHM), Soulstar (PLD), Carste (SAM), Standpoint (COR), Janko (BLU) and me (RDM). We decided to do a dry run, because only half of us had previously done the fight. As it turned out, our dry run probably could have given us the 1/1 win but... I failed to remember that when fighting Omega and Ultima, you want to pull them to the side of the airship where you first zone in so that if and when you do wipe (which usually happens during the fight) you can get up and recover.

So we managed to get Ultima down to about 30% without using any items or 2hrs, before wiping. But as I said, we didn't exactly fight in the right spot, and so when all the melees died... there was no way to raise them without having Ultima aggro right away, seeing as you can't tractor during the BCNM.

We decided to give it another go, and this time we got the win. The fight was a lot messier though, and we ended up wiping during Omega. But at least we were able to do the fight pretty quickly after our first attempt, unlike the time I did my first airship fight which was before the update that made it a lot easier.

Gawd that was a long 12hr day. We had to wait on our 2hrs and with people taking breaks and what not...

Anyways, i'm really liking my new Einhejar shell Glowsticks. Its a fairly new group, but the leadership seems really strong and organized. I would prefer that the members were a little bit more organized and able to manage their time better because we have yet to be able to enter on time, but I guess that's a problem in every endgame shell and probably always will be. (Though i'm glad to say my Dynamis shell is rarely more than 5 minutes late entering unless we're pushed over our entry time by another shell)

I've managed to collect about 3k Ampoules so far, and have a very long way to go but like i've said before, time doesn't seem to be an issue for me. I'm really trying to let myself enjoy everything in this game, and not feel rushed to do anything. Plus its a bonus that i've been asked to play jobs I generally don't get asked to use in other endgame events, like RDM/DRK! >=)

My wednesday ls static didn't end up happening this week, due to all the merit camps being taken. Drimergirl and Soulstar are now 73, so we should be finishing up our static hopefully before the end of the month. After that, we might end up doing some casual meriting on that night, or just leave it open to do other ls events.

But yea, in place of meriting we decided to give a hand to Standpoint and get him a few of the BLU spells he's been needing. We started off with the Wamoura princes in Mt. Zhayolm, which weren't too bad. Took us about 8-10 tries to get the spell. After that, we tried the massive Wamoura moths.

Those are a real pain in the butt, and require a lot of MP to be tossed around. But we did manage to get the spell within maybe half a dozen tries I think.

Finally, Carste joined up with us and suggested we go fight some Dahaks for Body Slam. I thought he was kidding at first, but turned out he was serious so we all headed out to the area where the Dahaks were.

I thought they'd be as bad as they were in Nyzul, but they seemed pretty tame. And I think all the bad luck that Standpoint has had in the game finally paid off, because he ended up learning the spell after our second mob.

Limbus is also going really well again, we're finally doing boss fights now that we've farmed up both Omega and Ultima pop sets. We did Omega this week, and went in with just over 12 people. We managed to do really well. I'm reminded of the first time we did Omega, and how it seemed soo much more difficult and challenging. And now when we do the fights, things seem, so easy. Its still fun though.

And the most important update for me this week...

I GOT MY BRAVEHEART SWORD!

I got this pretty quick when I first started doing Nyzul, unlocked it right away, and then decided to toss the weapon because I never really thought i'd pursue upgrading a mythic weapon. But a week later, I changed my mind... and felt extremely stupid for having tossed my sword.

I didn't think it would be too hard to get another one, but for the last couple of weeks i've had no luck. Anytime I did pickup Nyzul runs early in the week, the groups rarely went after the NMs, which is understandable when the goal is to get to the boss floor asap. So I eventually asked my ls static if they'd mind letting me go PLD/NIN on a floor 100 run, which would guarantee me the sword as long as we got the win.

Our first try, we just had HORRENDOUS luck. We did manage to get to the boss floor, but we timed out if I remember correctly. Our second try, we got to the boss floor with just a tad less than 10 minutes remaining, and got the win! I was estatic! It felt like getting my Valor Surcoat all over again! The downside though, is that we once again got 0 gear drops. For some reason our static has had aweful luck with seeing any gear. Ever.

I really hope that changes soon.... Oh, though I should mention that we did get a pair of Trotter boots on the weekend when we decided to do a random run outside of our usual static time. Carste is one lucky {Bastord Sword} this month thats for sure. Glad to see good people get rewarded :)

Well what was suppose to be a blog that was going to be posted 4 days ago, has become a really drawn out post... so i'm going to end it here. There's another good entry i'm hoping to type up this week, but had to get this one posted first. I really have to put away some extra time to write these, because I get way too distracted when i'm also playing FFXI and then the next thing I know, I have this blog entry just sitting here half finished for 4 days. >_>

(It has now become a tradition for everyone in my nyzul static group to poke me over and over... because somehow they think it'll give us a better chance at getting drops. <_<)>

Oh and before I forget, here's a couple of screenshots for the ZNMs we did. We're planning on doing a Tinnin fight sometime this month (though it might be delayed until we can get most of the LS to be available) and i'm really excited. Who needs an endgame LS?! HA!

lolDragoon 75!

2009-02-27T16:42:00.000-08:00

Yep, finally dinged 75 on yet another job: Dragoon!

That now makes me 8/15 on the jobs @75 needed to get Maat's Cap. And though people in my social ls keep swearing i'll get it one day, I know that I probably won't have more than 10 jobs at 75. While I really enjoy getting jobs up to 75 (with the exception of Ninja and Beastmaster) the fact is, I really don't have the space to continue having so many "active" jobs. I suppose I could go ahead and gimp a few gear-wise, but i'd really prefer not to.

I'd really like to take up BRD to 75 next, but I don't think I want to invest in it gil-wise and doubt that i'd be able to re-work my inventory. I guess if SE ends up giving us some new extensions to our inventory options, I might consider it but for now it'll be on the "to do" list. Besides, i'm working on my SMN still (lvl 62).

My main focus in the last week has been making what little progress i'm capable of, on my Burtang. I would really like to have a fully upgraded Mythic Weapon one day, and while I bet its more likely I won't be able to complete the upgrade entirely, I like the motivation of having something to work for in the game.

I've already been invited into an Einhejar shell which I start today, and i'm really looking forward to that. Its a new shell called Glowsticks, and while the leader told me that they haven't been able to access Odin yet, i'm still eager to try it out. I usually end up getting involved with fairly new shells and i've always enjoyed the experience of seeing the shell progress as a team. So far the members seem to have really great attitudes from what I can tell, and leadership seems really organized, so I'm pretty sure i'll have fun doing this event.

Then there's Salvage. I've been trying to find a shell to take part in on a regular basis, but so far no luck. But its not too bad, my friend Janko was able to ask his Salvage group to take me in for the boss wins so that I can get the titles needed for the mythic weapon quests. The first time I went with his group, I just went afk until the end of the run until they got to the boss. I then decided to target the boss chariot, to see what it's HP was sitting at. Big mistake.

My screen froze up, and POL crashed on me. I logged in as quickly as I could, but by the time I came back, the alliance had already killed the chariot boss and so I didn't get the title. But luckily they were going to do the same one a couple of days later, and so I pretty much did the same thing. Sat in zone, waited until they got tot he boss, and this time I DIDN'T give into my curiosity to target the boss, which resulted in me obtaining the title "Sun Charioteer". Now I only have 3 more titles to go!

And on that topic, i've been subject to a LOT of generosity in the last week. A few of my friends have helped pick up some cheap Alexandrites for me (Carste, Vepion) and a few others have actaully gone as far as giving me donations (Onedarkflame, Janko, Kawanomu). I'm really greateful to have such good friends wanting to help me out with the insane task of obtaining 30,000 Alexandrite. Thanks to them, i'm now sitting at about 450/30,000!

Now if I could just get another Braveheart sword to drop! I can't believe I tossed the one I had... but when I had finally unlocked Atonement, there was absolutely no thought that I might decide to try and upgrade it one day. Then of course a week later, the crazy idea cemented into my brain and while I wasn't crying about the situation... I was reminded of that same feeling the day I tossed my bibiki shell. -_-

And so I made the trip back to Sea this week.

It's really been months since i've been up there (aside from doing Limbus) but after getting DRG to 75, I really wanted to take advantage of gearing up the job as best I could. I originally got some help from Janko's BLU one day. We started killing sharks for their organs, which had its moments...

Eventually things were made easier for us, because there was a group farming the HQ shark organs in the area and they offered to team up with us, allowing us to lot the NQ organs. Things worked out in my favor, and I ended up getting 8/10 organs, in addition to the 5/5 squid organs that I needed.

A couple of days later, I decided to finish up the farming and headed out again on my BLM. I soloed probably about 5-8 sharks before I got the last 2 organs. All that was left, was the one organ from a UFO. And so Sabene and Anderoc came to help me out. We first tried a "manaburn" style, (2 BLMs, 1 RDM) but we weren't really able to nuke the mob down fast enough due to the regen effect it had. So at that point, we decided we'd call it and try another time. Sabene ended up logging out, and about 3 minutes later Carste and Zeo offered to come help out on their NINs.

The first fight we had, was a little unexpected and I didn't get a chance to get off my usual spells which I think might have helped us a little more. Near the end of the mob's life, it started to spam TP moves which really drained my MP, and because of my emnity merits I did end up taking hate at one point which resulted in me losing my stoneskin really quick, and was then followed by me getting KO'd. I had to HP at this point because I didn't have RR up. By the time I was able to get back to the group, everyone but Anderoc was dead and I wasn't able to get within range fast enough before he too ended up eating the dirt... er, water.

So we gave it another go, and this time it was a success however there was a death here and there I think. The fights always started out pretty easy, but near the end the mob would usually start getting off some really nasty moves and I just couldn't keep up with the MP, so the fights got pretty messy. But we did manage to go 1/3 on the organs (or maybe it was 1/4?) so I can't complain. We tried one last UFO to try and get an organ for Anderoc, but sadly no drop.

All the work though was worth it, I got to bring out my DRG to a merit pty that Vepion formed one night and was able to enjoy seeing my Drakesbane hit 800-1150 on birds. :)

Something else good happened this week too. That ENM i've been doing with Carste and Janko turned out to be a success. Carste finally got his X's Knife!

That makes us 1/3 for this fight, and from what I hear... that's really damn good. I've heard of many career THFs going more than 0/50. The best part, is that right before we entered... I told them I had "a good feeling" and turns out I was right. Every so often, i'll get this feeling and more often than not, I seem to be right. Well, at least when it is anything BUT the kraken club BCNM. ¬_¬

To add to our "adventures with Carste the Beardmage", a few of us in the LS got to help him with one of the Windurst missions. The mission was to take down some orcs in Davoi, and while the fight was relatively easy, getting the cutscene he needed at the end proved to be a difficult task. Well not really, but at least an entertaining one.

Carste ended up falling down off a bridge he wasn't supposed to, and so instead of taking the long way to come back to the rest of us, he decided to go and aggro the pugils nearby. We all thought it'd be a good idea, and save us time... until we saw how long it was taking for his HP to drop. Even after removing all his gear, the fish kept missing him like crazy. Eventually though, I think he did take the long way to meet up with us and get his last cutscene.

My social ls also is doing exceptionally well with ZNMs. Last week we did Cheese Hoarder, Iriz Ima and Ob. Ob was pretty interesting and new to many of us, probably more so for Janko because he was able to bring his PUP to the fight. I guess the trick with this fight, is to have a PUP bring out a specific puppet to control what type of frame Ob will have. After that, its a piece of cake like with most Tier 1's.

And this week we're hoping to try a couple of Tier 3's provided we have enough ls members available. I'm really hoping that we do, because I'll get to bring out my PLD/NIN and try the blink tanking again.

That's about all I can think to post about. I'll leave off this one with an interesting pic I took in Bastok (and who said Bastok was ugly?)

Blue Chocobo {Mine!}

2009-02-18T22:18:00.000-08:00

So finally after having tried raising 2 chocobos, I finally found myself with a colored one on my third try! It jus so happened that last month during an ISNM run that Elden asked me to go on, I happened to get a chocobo egg. I had previously raised 2 other chocobos, hoping to get myself a colored one but as my luck would have it, both ended up being yellow. So off to retirement land they went. >_>

When I got the chocobo egg as one of the drops from my ISNM, I figured I might as well try and hatch it and see what would happen.

A week later, I found myself with a little blue female chocobo! And so I gave her the name LunaRay :)

I also got quite a bit accomplished this week to say the least. I managed to pick myself up my Captain's Rank in assault. I owe a big chunk of gratitude to the people in my original static that I had soooo long ago. It would have been nice to see the static end with everyone obtaining captain's rank, but with some members quitting, others moving to different servers... well, I guess it was never meant to be. But thanks Carste and Janko for helping me with the last win!

Ose also decided to be a little nicer to me, than he was to a friend of mine, Standpoint. More than a year ago, I helped him out with a few camping sessions for the shy little kitty to get his Assault Jerkin. I think he ended up being something like 1/13 or so on this drop, and so when I finally announced to my social that I was going to attempt to get this piece for my up and coming DRG, I have to admit that I was expecting to have the same kind of luck.

The first time I camped Ose, he popped within an hour. Not bad, but no drop.

I then tried to go after him a couple of nights later, which is when the kitty decided to drop the assault jerkin. Thanks to my social ls, we had a very quick and easy fight. I think the best part (or rather, the most humorous) was that as soon as the item dropped into my inventory, Standpoint had JUST crept up on us. Even though i'm sure he destested this NM because of his own experiences, he still came out to help... only he was about 3 minutes too late, lol. Which might explain why the AJ dropped.

There was a little detour that I made on my way to the Ose camping session that night. My friend Onedarkflame and I were the first to arrive, and we ran into a rather repulsive looking NM called Hellion. Without really paying attention to the fact that I had absolutely no buffs up at the moment, I casted Dia 3. Luckily though Onedarkflame engaged seconds later and took hate which gave me a few seconds to get us both some buffs. The fight wasn't too hard, but I was having to spam a few cures because Onedarkflame had come out on his SAM/WAR and didn't really have much in the way to help him evade the hits. When the fight was over, we were left with a scythe of sorts, which we ended up offering to a WAR who was in the area, seeing that neither of us ever planned to take DRK past 37.

And again I found myself getting another chance to nuke down some dirty mithra. Carste asked me and Janko to give him a hand for another attempt at the ENM "Requiem of Sin" in an attempt to get him his X's Knife. This time we had a better idea of how the fight was going to work, and our plan went pretty well. My job was to chainspell nuke "X", while Carste would be sleeping the rest of the group and then teaming up with Janko to nuke down X's pet rabbit. Then we would take a wipe and pretty much repeat, taking on new targets to nuke down. Everything went according to plan, with the small.. and minor exception. I now officially have 3 times in my RDM career where I have pulled the "Convert! >>>> Zerayla's HP drops to ~20 >>>> Before Zerayla can get off a cure, the mob KO's her". As I was nuking down something (I think the rabbit?), I ended up making a bad call on the distance I had between me and the mob and hit my convert macro. During that time, Carste had said he would stun the mob for me but before he could say "give me a second", I had already hit the macro which was followed with getting my arse kicked. Thankfully though, we finished the fight with no other problems, unless you consider getting 0 drops in the treasure chest one. -_-;

Oh well, we're hoping to try it again this week. I don't mind the fight at all, it is pretty fun and gives me a chance to have fun with my chainspell >=)

By the way... I've recently rediscovered the fun that you can have doing CoP missions! Earlier last year, I was finally able to help out a friend with his CoP missions. This involved getting some other LS members caught up so that they too could also complete the CoP expansion. While I do like the idea of seeing friends progress, there have been a couple of times when I've felt the frustration these missions can cause overwhelm me. It's all good though, we've been taking a break and i'm sure that it'll help because I tend to over-stress about these things due to the time sink involved.

Anyways, I was asked to help out 2 of my friends with an earlier CoP mission - Ancient Vows. I was very hesitant to wanting to do this because of my last experience. I had helped a couple of ex-ls members get this mission done, with I think 2 or 3 failures? I had spent quite a lot on meds and items which wasn't that big of an issue as much as never having gotten much of a "thank you" after it was all done. So needless to say, I wasn't very eager for the fight.

But Onedarkflame came through and did a little prep work and got us a really nice strat. We went in with 3 NIN, and 3 healers. We were split into pairs, and each set would tank an NM. We all managed to do very well, and had no deaths which really surprised me considering all my previous experiences had always involved them. I have to say that doing that mission was probably one of the funnest CoP fights i've done in ages, and now look forward to any other LS members that'll be asking for help on it.

I also got to bring out my MNK again for a little fun. Ascendotuum and Standpoint needed some help on a couple of WSNMs, so as usual... what started out with one or two people being available to help ended up with pretty much the entire LS coming out. Both of the fights were over pretty quick, and resulted in the much needed fun I had been missing on my MNK.

Speaking of fun... I wanted to help out Onedarkflame get a little xp on his BLM (which just recently hit 60) and offered to tank for him in a lvl sync party. We grabbed a lvl 56 THF and headed to the Lesser Colibri in Wajaom. The xp was a little slow at first, but it picked up in the end and he got himself a lvl and a bit.

I was just happy to be able to use my PLD. As much as I have expressed not really wanting to sync down my lvl 75 jobs, i've always found myself giving in.. and in the end, I usually ended up enjoying it. I'm pretty sure that i'll start offering my PLD for more lvl sync parties in the future, at least to LS members. Its fun being able to watch them attempt to steal my hate, hehe.

And another thing which i've found myself getting interested in, is the Moblin Maze Monger event. I've been looking into this, and it seems there's a few nice pieces of gear that you can get by doing "1 boss" style fights. Of course though, you need to have a specific setup in order to initiate the fight. So, whenever i've had a chance i've been trying to do some quick and easy MMMs to collect marbles and purchase the rune pieces needed so that eventually I can do these fights. As easy as these are, they're still a blast especially when you have a crazy mithra named Fieryblizzard who runs ahead and aggroes everything to bring to the party in an attempt to MPK us.

I haven't really been updating much on my other endgame activities, but figured i'd do that now. My dynamis shell is still going strong, we've managed to recruit a couple of new members again. This has made our farming runs veeeeeery profitable. I've especially been enjoying the fact that our shell hasn't been having any of the drama kind of issues i've been hearing happening with other shells. While not all are the same, many seem to have some pretty messed up leadership problems. I'm really glad that RoR not only makes everything "transparent" to our members, but also puts the "good of the ls as a whole" first and foremost. Whenever we need to make a change in the shell, we always try and look at things from as many angles as possible to ensure that whatever changes are made, are as fair as possible. So far we haven't had any complaints, so I think that's a good sign. And now that another one of our THFs has obtained his TH4, we've been seeing AF rain every run. Craaazy @_@

Limbus is also doing pretty good. We're finally starting to do Ultima and Omega again. We just finished farming up 2 pop sets for each recently, and i'm keeping my fingers crossed for the drops to come. I'm really anxious to see my homam body so that I can have that on DRG before I hit 75. I probably won't get that lucky, (i'm 2nd in line) but as long as we're getting wins and getting members gear, i'm happy. I can't wait for the Ultima fight planned next week... I get to bring out my BLM *evil grin*

Well that about covers everything. Only other minor updates are that i've completed meritting my WAR, gotten Bonecraft to 34, almost capped my merits out again (which I intend to put right into DRG when I hit 75) and...

I've decided to pursue a Burtang for my PLD. Yep, the mythic weapon. And yes, I'm aware of the time/cost that'll be poured into it. While I DO want to have it fully upgraded before I quit this game, I know that might not (well more like probably not) happen. I'm still going to put as much effort into pursueing this in game goal though, because all the requirements involved I know i'll enjoy doing and so even if I quit this game and the sword isn't fully upgraded, i'll still be happy because I will have gotten at least SOME progress on it.

But obviously i'm going to hope that opportunity + luck favor me with this insane goal ^^

Your base are belong to us!

2009-02-05T18:41:00.000-08:00

So today I was asked to help out a fairly new ls member Valker, with the 2.3 mission dragon fight. As it turns out, I had actually done the dragon fight about 2 hours earlier too, with Vepion (Elden's alternate character). I don't mind doing the fight at all, its kinda fun to be able to bring out my MNK and 2hr the thing. I swear though, I have to have done this fight at least 30 times or more throughout my FFXI playtime.

Anyways... Valker's fight was going to be up in Horlais Peak. So I dragged Janko and Elden along to help me out because we had just finished doing some zeni picture taking together. I brought my DRG, Janko had previously been on his RDM and decided to bring that along, Elden was on BLM (he wanted an excuse to wave around his scythe) and Valker came on MNK.

When we zoned into Yughott Grotto, Elden had the bright idea to train every mob in sight so that he could spam -agas at the end. I figured it was also a good idea because Valker was only lvl 28 and would eventually get aggro from the higher lvl mobs, and this would save us the time from sneaking/invising him.

I have to say, watching Elden run for his feline life was quite enjoyable.

He must of had at least 20 orcs on him, and as he trained them to zone (while screaming for Janko to give him a cure because his HP got into the yellow) I just sat there laughing. Eventually though I decided to give him a hand and started provoking a few orcs and bats.

By the time we had finally reached Horlais Peak, i'd say we had trained every orc in the zone. So, basically, we claimed that territory as ours! And of course... we claimed the win on the dragon fight (but then again, that fight is so easy provided you're not with a noob of a certain beardmage, hehe)

But yeah, prior to helping out Elden and Valkar with the dragon fight, I was on a mission to collect as much zeni as possible. I've been working throughout the week to accumulate about 5k pts so that I can pop a few this coming Saturday.

So far the Casual Saturday Night ZNM group I have going with my social is turning out to be amazing. Everyone seems to be having fun during the fights, and a lot more members seem to be interested now that they've had a glimpse at the gear that can drop. I'm trying to encourage more members to take an interest because now they can have access to better pieces of gear without the stress of having to join an endgame shell, earn points, etc.

I'm extremely happy with the progress we made last saturday, which is probably due to the fact that I was lucky enough to get two of the drops I never thought i'd see.

Our night started off with Armed Gears. We had a lot of members, and figured that it would be best to do the hardest of our ZNMs while we had enough people. I had my friend Anderoc come along to help tank alongside Darce, and both did very well. The rest of our team consisted of BLMs (Carste, Sabene, and myself), WHMs (Falk, Drimergirl), SCHs (Janko, Kefkha), THFs (Soulstar, Ketsuchi), BRDs (Elden, Mailinx), a RNG (Standpoint), a COR (Zeo), a BLU (Kawanomu), a MNK (Athoz) and a DRK (Demionknight).

We had two pops that night, mine and Janko's. My pop yielded my highly desired Aurum Sabatons, a couple of grips and I believe something else. I was very psyched and am now determined to finish meriting my WAR so that I can see how much better I can do on the job. I probably won't be able to outparse my SAM, but... my DRG is able to equip them, so I can look forward to that. Janko's also yielded some nice drops, but unfortunately we didn't get to see a second pair of sabatons.

The fight was actually pretty fun. Our first time we took things pretty slowly, just about everyone was new to the experience. But by the time the armed gears were weakened down, we all went just a tad "leeroy jenkins".

To be more exact, I kinda went a little nuke happy.

Ok I lied... I went a little nuke happy, a little often....

Which, as i'm sure anyone could guess, meant that the NM suddenly had a new love for me. A love which surpassed that of the PLDs tanking and had me running for my dear life... which uh, didn't take long to lose. <_<

I like BLM! >=)

So after we finished up with Armed Gears, we went after Cheese Hoarder again. I think we did 3 pops, and all the fights were pretty quick. There was a lot less "blowing up" because most of us had a good idea of the distance we needed to keep this time around.

Then it was off to fight Verdelet! (Well actually I think we ended up doing these next two first... but, I don't think the order matters too much) When I originally read up on this guy, I thought curagas would be spammed on end and stuns would be flying through the roof.

The reality though was that I actually barely recall much else other than getting off one of my Burst II's before the mob was dead. We zerged it just a little too fast.

Aaaaaaaaand, something that I had really wanted but assumed i'd never see, dropped! Muse Tariqah! I was extremely happy to see my winning lot and probably missed a few thank yous in my chaotic excitment.

Next on the list was Lil Apkallu. This fight was probably the most fun, probably because many of us wiped to hundred fists, lol. But luckily the bird only got that off at the very end and we were able to finish him off. I think only the MNK feet dropped from him.

Then it was Iriz Ima again! I LOOOOOOOOOVE this fight! Its only too bad that we only had one pop though. Most of us got a little too anxious to nuke the big elephant down that we pretty much had him at less than half HP by the time we got him close to the camp we were "supposed" to kite him at. Actually, I think we pretty much killed him seconds after we got him there. Yeah... our ls rocks :)

So now i'm reaching a point where i've really got to put some effort into gearing up my DRG which as of today, has just reached 64. I have to say, ever since I got to lvl 40+ i've really started to like it. Especially on bird mobs. OMG!

I remember back in the day, "loldrg" was very common. In fact, I know that I even made jokes here and there too. But ever since the update with 2 handed weapons (even if it did get nerfed a little) I honestly don't see anything "lol" about the job. It might be that I have access to merits, and a few pieces of gear that aren't easy to come by (unless you have no life like me, lol) that have made me excel as a DD in party... or it might be that I have been getting invites very easy, always to camps where we fight bird type mobs... but regardless, I'm keeping up with the other melees!

Actually, most of my party experiences have reminded me of what I went through on my MNK. And of course, my MNK parties remind me of what I went through on my PLD. Which in lamens terms = I tank!

I can't wait to finally get lvl 75 and try merit parties on colibri. I'm just hoping that by that time, i'll have gotten either an assault jerkin (why hello thar Mr. Ose - REVENGE IS MINE!) or an Askar Body (doubtful considering I have 4 other people in my Nyzul that will also be lotting for this) or a Homam Body (which i'm currently in 2nd for). Likely i'll have to go with the AJ, so now I just need to work up the resolve to go camp Ose. (I just pray I don't have the same luck Standpoint had with that kitty)

The good thing about my DRG's lvl now is that I can do campaign. Last night after a run of Moblin Maze, Janko and Elden/Vepion joined me for some campaign.

The first while we enjoyed quite a bit, though there were a few deaths when we decided to go after the big NM turtle. Apparently his AoEs were a little too much for us to handle. ><

Aside from a lotta DRGing, Zeni picture taking and the usual Dynamis/Limbus stuff I do every week, I also managed to get in some small LS help time. Drimergirl finally hit lvl 50 on her DNC and needed some help farming a rare/ex item off some yagudo in the past. Elden, Janko and myself went to West Sarabaruta [S] to pulverize some yagudoes with Drimergirl. We probably spent a good hour there killing, before we finally go the drop @_@

Anderoc also invited me to help him unlock his polearm of trials so that he could get his lolimpulsedrive for his DRG. We did a few light skillchains in Pashlow Marshlands [S] and then headed out to SSG to fight a fish NM to finish the quest. Janko also came along for the fun, and I just did my RDM thing.

As for plans this weekend, I might be helping out a friend with his self funded Dynamis runs that he might be organizing on Saturday mornings. Then I have my Limbus, and then some ZNMs again. I'm hoping we'll be able to try Dea (tier 3) but that'll all depend on our turnout. Being that I emphasized our ZNM thing to be "casual" it won't be expected for everyone to show every weekend... but, hopefully we'll luck out so that we can pop multiple ZNMs and gear up our members ^^

Oh, and it looks like i'll be able to try out a new ENM this weekend. Carste dragged me and Janko along to get the pre-requisite fight done, which was a fight with "X" and "Y" mithras from the CoP storyline. (I think those were the names)

Of course you can always rely on SE to find a way to make you sink your time... because the actual fight that Carste plans to do this weekend, has a 1 week "cool down" which is why we're planning it for the weekend. Hopefully he'll get his "X's Knife" which is apparently an uber item for THF. I might have to convince Carste and Janko to boot me from party though, otherwise my "bad luck" might just play a factor. /em looks away.

Casual Saturday Night ZNMs, has begun!

2009-01-30T09:42:00.000-08:00

As mentioned in my previous post, i've decided to start up a little casual event on Saturday nights to give ls members something fun to do together. We're not a really big social/event ls, but we can manage to do quite a lot as a team with the numbers that we have.

So the event that was chosen, was ZNMs. I remember last year when SE first introduced ZNMs in one of their updates, I wasn't really interested. The gear looked great, but the work that was involved seemed too much of a hassle and for the most part, it seemed that you would need to join an endgame shell to get far.

Eventually though, a friend started telling me about how the fights could be low-manned and explained all the details about ZNMs. Though there was some extra work involved (like collecting Zeni points) I didn't really feel initimidated anymore. And after our last ohat run and realizing that our ls was pretty much capable of alliance type fights, I decided to get things started up!

Saturday night was our very first run. Originally it was going to be Janko and myself popping the tier 1 ZNM - Cheese Hoarder Gigiroon. But, with the interest of other LS members increasing, we soon had a few more pops on our agenda.

Our first fight seemed a little rough, probably because we didn't really know what to expect. Carste, Janko and his friend Kefkha were the only ones that were familiar with the fight, so it was a learning experience for the majority of us.

I went as PLD and had Darce acted as backup tank. I pulled the NM to the "safe room" where the rest of the group waited, ready to nuke down the NM. When we got the NM to the room, it seemed a little chaotic at first because there were mines every where and we weren't exactly positioned correctly in order to avoid the explosive damage. Luckily though, I don't think we had more than one death. Though, I did learn something interesting about this rat.... apparently he has this move where he removes certain pieces of your gear, and you can't equip it back for a period of time. Damn SE perverts. -_-

After our second attempt, we decided that I should go and change to BLM and let Darce do the tanking, seeing as he managed pretty well co-tanking with me. I didn't object to the request, after all... I don't usually get a chance to bring out my BLM for events.

So we went 4/4 wins, had a few drops and then decided we'd do the next ZNM in line - Iriz Ima.

This ZNM was a lot easier, and by far a lot more fun. We got to kite a huge Marid while nuking it. At one point, I managed to get off a Burst II for about 1600+ dmg only to have the elephant come after me and one shot me with one of his TP moves.

But that didn't stop me... as soon as I got raised, I got up and chased the thing as it was being kited around a tower and got off a Freeze II. This was of course followed by a little scolding from my friends on skype who pretty much just shook their heads at the weakened BLM who had a little bit too much fun nuking...

We got full drops on 2/3 of the pops that we did.

Next Saturday we plan to do Lil Apkallu and probably a few more Cheese Hoarder Gigiroon. If we manage to have people available long enough, we might even go after Armed Gears which i'm pretty excited about. I really really want to get those Aurum Sabatons! I might reconsider unretiring my WAR if I do.

So what else... oh, I decided to try a pickup KSNM run for Copycat the other day. That didn't go too well... the setup was WHM, WAR/NIN, SAM/WAR, DRK/SAM, PLD/NIN, RDM (me). I was hesitant with the setup, but figured i'd still give it a try. Turns out that my gut feeling was right, because we wiped on the first orb. We had to wait for one of the members to bring their mule and raise us, seeing as our WHM didn't have RR up. Unfortunately though, the second attempt was just as bad. While silencing the mob is a good idea, I was having to focus on the sleeps, hastes, refreshes, enfeebles and cures and couldn't sit there spamming silence (because the mob is resistent) otherwise I wouldn't be able to do the rest of my duties. And with only one stun, we just couldn't handle the -agas. After the second failed attempt, we decided just to call it quits. Guess my only luck in this is that I didn't end up using my orb yet. Glad that I have my KSNM static group on Sunday nights though, I don't think i'll be trying the pickup thing again ><

And continueing with the progress on my DRG, I finally decided to go after all the AF. I started with the first AF quest, which involved me heading out to Western Altepa to fight an antican.

Easy win.

Then I had to go get a couple of coffers and redo the Dark Spark fight (for the gazillionth time I swear) Janko offered to come out and help, and so I offered him the chance to bring his PUP that he had been trying to skillups on earlier... as great as the level sync addition has been, it really messes up jobs that need to get skillups and have difficulty in doing so.

The next day, my friend Anderoc offered to help me take out the AF3 fight. So we headed to the temple of Uggalepih and cleared the room where the fight was to take place. I then popped two fomor NMs, which he pulled one at a time. After we killed the first fomor, we waited for the other one to despawn... but, I guess we killed the first too fast, because I wasn't able to get the cutscene. -_-

So we rested up, and tried again. This time though, the fight seemed to be a little rough (that or my attempt to help was really just feeding the mob more tp) and ended up killing Anderoc. Thankfully he had come /whm and so he also had reraise up. He raised me, we waited until I was unweakened and as the saying goes... third time is a charm!

Finally, DRG AF done!

Having been the one that needed quite a bit of help this week, I was finally able to return the help. Janko was still trying to get caught up skill wise with his puppet (due to lvl syncing all the time) and so we decided to head to Vunker Inlet again to fix that. I brought my PLD along so that I could also get a few weaponskill points for my Brave Sword and unlock Atonement (now sitting at about 900/1600 pts).

(Zerayla may not like beating on the bambi mice in La Theine Plateau, but she sure loves nuking lizard like creatures to oblivion when she's waiting for the Manaclipper. <_<)

Throughout the week we've had a number of random skillup sessions. I've also been able to help him out with trying to unlock his BLU mythic weaponskill. We managed to get pretty far, but I think the new plan is to help him get a few more floors through Nyzul so that he won't need so many weaponskill points. Its just a matter of rounding up 4 other people to come along.

And on that note, I was able to unlock Tashi: Rana a while ago, though I forgot to mention it. It didn't take very long because i'd done quite a lot of skillchaining during my Wednesday ls merit/xp session. The animation for the weaponskill is really nice, its just too bad the damage isn't as great on its own. But that's ok, I can make Dark skillchain now! Woot!

Oh and speaking of Nyzul, my friday static finally made it to floor 60. I'm really glad that our group decided to help Drimergirl and Soulstar get lvl 75 on the other jobs they were lvling because now our setup is a lot more reliable. We have BRD, DRK, THF, WARx2, RDM. As long as we don't get any Soulflayer floors, I think we'll continue to keep climbing. The plan after we hit floor 100, is then to go back and farm the boss floors to get the gear we all want. I'd reaaaaaaaally like to get a few Askar pieces for my up and coming DRG. Otherwise, i'm gonna have to think really, really, really hard of a way to convince a few ls members to come and camp a certain kitty that is not to be mentioned. <_<

Well that's about all I can think to write about at the moment. Err, actually one more thing! Elden dragged me and Janko out to help him get G2 done for his new character Vepion that he's rushing to get to lvl 75 so that he can retire his Elden character. I met up with them both in Xarcabard, but when Elden zoned in, he realized he hadn't flagged the quest so he had to warp back to town and do that. While me and Janko waited, we ran into an old friend of mine, Gimli who eagerly offered to help us out. It was fun watching our dmg do insane amounts on the undead :)

Oh, but because i've already started this... here's the .dat swap of the week!