{See you soon!}

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.

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?

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!

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A week of irritation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trials Galore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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