Thursday, March 29, 2007

Why? why? and why?

This post is going to be more of a rant than anything, so if you're not into reading those you may want to skip this entry.

When I first played this game, the job I took to 75 was PLD. This job was fairly popular, even more so when I was a "set" lvling with Xean's WHM. We didn't get phenomenal parties, but our invites were pretty common and when I got to lvl 68, the new expansion "Treasures of Aht Urghan" was released and so the party invites I got, were always in the new areas which resulted in pretty good xp.

Of course, when I hit lvl 75, I soon realized that your typical merit party didn't include PLDs. In fact, regular xp parties didn't really like inviting them either, because if you could have a NIN tank, your damage output would be significantly more resulting in more xp/hr. So realizing this, I decided to take a well liked job for merit parties... Red Mage!

I lvled my RDM with Xean's MNK, and really enjoyed it. I'd say our party invites were about as frequent as the ones we had when we had lvled PLD and MNK. Somedays we'd get an invite within an hour of seeking, other times which were very rare we'd wait about 2 hrs... and only on a veeeeery rare occasion, would we seek and get nothing. I think that may have only happened about twice.

Well, my third job i'm taking to 75 is WHM. I decided to take this because Xean wanted to lvl his NIN, and I figured who wouldn't want to party with a WHM + NIN??!!! You have a job that can act more as a damage dealer while still tanking and requiring not so much curing as long as the job is being done well (which Xean is actually very good at) and you have a healer for emergencies... the best healer in the game! I have every cure to all status effects (well aside from that retarded amnesia move which they really need to create a cure spell for -_-) and should any party member die, I can give them a nice R2 or R3 and the xp loss won't be as big.

However, my assumption that WHM + NIN combo would get fast invites, and very good parties... has kinda been shot to the ground. I have to admit that at first, going from 40-50 our invites were pretty good. We had decent parties and never really complained. But as soon as we dinged about 55+, thats when it all went downhill.

The majority of my party invites always involved a leader who was inexperienced, or just a plain moron as I would like to put it. And now I don't generally like to insult people, but if there's one type of person that annoys me online its the type that speak using numbers for words, and generally can't put a complete sentence together. You know, i'm sure you've seen these players:

Scenario#1

Player: Hi
Me: {Hello!}


*waits for him to actually ask the question*

Player: u want 2 pt?
Me: Yes, can you please let me know what your setup is? And do you have room for Xean?
Player: just me now I can get a pld tho


Scenario#2

Player: Hi
Me: {Hmm...}?
Player: party?
Me: Yes please. What do you have in your party and can you invite Xean?
Player: we only have room for 1 person
Me: My comment lists that i'm partying as a set, so if there's no room for Xean then i'll have to decline. {Take care!}

So lets look at the problems here. First of all, WHY do people say a greeting ONLY in their first sentence???? Why not add your question WITH your greeting! It saves you time!!! Second, what happened to people trying to make complete sentences using proper grammer? I don't understand why people prefer to use numbers instead of words... I understand it can be quicker, but gawd does it ever look aweful seeing a bunch of digits in a sentence that has reference to the actual value of numbers! And third... why do people not look at the /seacom????? I admit i've forgotten once when I was in a hurry to find a replacement, but generally I always look in case there's something important, like indicating that you're partying with a friend!


So yeah, aside from the fact that I feel i've been playing with people who seem to have failed elementary school, i've also been having to deal with very bad party setups. And when I say bad, I don't mean to say its something to die over, but i've gotten better xp on my PLD than some of the parties i've gotten. I would expect, that having 2 jobs that can potentially form a "cannon" party, we should be getting these great party setups with a BRD, and great DD.

However, that hasn't been the case. I have partied with a PUPs who really lack any real damage output (which leads me to believe there's a reason why most players laugh at them like they do DRGs). I have partied with CORs who don't understand that they're inviting to "enhance" the party's performance which means giving the mages refresh and that other dice roll that helps the hmp+, but instead they feel their priority is to DD and only keep one dice roll up at any given time. I'm pretty sure that like a RDM or BRD, once you've started your "cycle" you can keep your spells up at all times.

So to sum it all up, I think I only recall one party since 55 that has offered decent xp. That party had a mostly JP player base, and we were fighting puks. Ever since, half my parties have been without a refresher/dispeller and the choice on where to fight, what to fight, and what jobs to have in the party have just been really bad choices period.

Last night, me and Xean were partying on crawlers in Aydeewa, and we had no refresher which was fine as there was a SMN to help with healing if needed... however, our BLU didn't cast the dispel BLU spell until about an hour into party. I think he just didn't realize he had it (I didn't even know they had a dispel). But he would have to sit for an entire battle to rest up his MP after a chain, and the rest of our DMG which was being done by a SAM, DRG and Xean on NIN... just wasn't enough to get anything more than 3.5kish of xp/hr.

And eventually our BLU d/ced (likely forced) and it wasn't until 20 minutes later that the leader decided we should all head back to Aht Urghan and get a replacement. After getting a replacement, everyone stood around waiting for the leader to tell us where to go and eventually because no one would talk, our replacement just left. Then I think someone else d/ced, and the choices for replacements were THF and BLM, and at that point I was already frustrated because the leader didn't really seem to be very knowledgeable in good party setups, nor on a good camp. So I ended up asking Xean to tell the party that we were going to leave (I didn't know how to say it nicely, and he just does it so bluntly but without seeming rude). and logged off to go color a picture I drew of Zerayla (thanks Myrrh, now you have me hooked on doing artwork again!!!)

So I guess the point of this post, was more or less just to ask "Why do me and Xean have such bad luck getting invited to a friggin good party when we have 2 desired jobs?!". I keep asking this everytime we're in a bad party, and the best I can come up with for an answer is that whatever GM is stalking Xean and messing with his luck in this game (he has the worst luck for drops and lotting I swear) is also trying to mess with his progression, which therefore includes the parties we seek together for ; ;

And the above is a really cool screenshot I took of one of our "bleh" parties we were having. I really like the pose that Xean has there, and you can see he's tanking well because the mob is facing towards him. I've really gotten into this addiction of taking screenshots to post in my blog, because I love editing them in photoshop and making them look pretty so expect future posts to have tons of these >_>;;

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