Giving Sky Another Shot.

On Monday, I logged in to get ready to go on a Fenrir run that Myrrh, one of my LS members had organized to get his purple puppy. I had already done the battle 2 previous times, both wins so I already had my puppy as well as Fenrir's Stone (one day I might use this in Sky on my PLD) so the next item I was going to select as my reward, would be the Ancient's Key which would allow me to get my Evoker's Ring as I had already turned in whispers for the other avatars to get their rare/ex items.

When we went in, we had a RDM, BRD, NIN, WHM, BLU and BLM. We did our buffs inside, and went and pulled Fenrir but within seconds our NIN got one shotted by Eclipse Bite so the rest of us ran to the entrance to exit before he could eat the rest of us for dessert!

Our second time around, Fenrir again did a move though I don't recall which, that really took down our NIN's health but luckily Myrrh was on top of things and got him healed up right away. I continued tossing out enfeebles and refreshes, and when he got to low health I then let out a few nukes and soon victory was ours.

After this, I waited for Xean to login and we tried to find out a good place where we could farm. Lately his jobs have been a bit demanding on us gilwise, and we've pretty much spent what we had saved up from selling a few good items like a brown belt I quested and a soil ring. Seeing as I have WAR i'm taking to 75, and he has NIN, we figured we would need to put some time into farming and so we decided to give the birds in Miseraux Coast a try, as they drop Giant Bird Plumes which currently go for 60k a stack.


It was pretty relaxing the whole night, we took out our NPCs and killed the birds which had a 5 minute respawn time. Xean's treasure hunter seemed to be working pretty decently, because in about 2hrs we had one stack of Giant Bird Feathers, and about 4 Giant Bird Plumes. It wasn't as profitable as we had hoped, but at least the environment was nice to look at and there weren't many people around. We'll probably look at farming something else next time, but at least we got something done that night.

Here are a couple of shots of the scenary. I can never get over how beautiful it is especially when the sun is out. Night time can also get really nice, especially near the waterfalls which I have an obsession for screenshotting everytime I visit ^^;




So as the title of this post implies, i've finally decided to give Sky another try. There is a lot of sky gear i'm eager to obtain for both my RDM and my PLD, but in order to get any of this you need a LS to work with. All my past experiences in joining Sky Linkshells, has always been less than desired. The first one I joined was called CaelestisST and though there was some really great people in it, there was always rumors about the leader using the linkshell's money to go give to his online girlfriend (who has dated so many people in this game i'm surprised her reputation is still good) and also at the time, TheBrotherhood was still expanding and I felt I was needed more by my own LS.



The one event I did try to attend for CST, was a Kirin fight and this was probably my worst Sky experience. First I learned that playing as PLD in sky, is very costly. You have to buy a ton load of food, and you have to have Reraise Gorgets which go for about 90k usually. This wouldn't be so bad, but as PLD you die quite a few times, and when I did my Kirin fight I died about 8 times, and ended up deleveling too. At the time, we only had 1 WHM and I guess they needed to conserve MP so I had to accept Raise 1 everytime I died kiting Kirin because being new, I had no clue I was expected to bring a reraise item. When that fight was over, the leader pretty much announced that he was quitting the game and was going to pass over leadership to someone that I didn't quite know, and wasnt' interested in following at the time. And so for quite a few months, Sky just remained a place I had access to, but never ventured into.

Eventually after waiting a while, I applied for another LS called Element. They seemed to have very knowledgeable players and their schedule would allow me to attend Sky events once or twice a week which was perfect, because this would let me still give the majority of my time to TheBrotherhood. However, I was pretty unlucky when I got accepted because they broke a week later and I didn't even get the chance to do any events with them.

So at that point, I had given up on finding a LS that would allow me to participate up to twice a week, until last week when Maddambooboo made a post on QCDN about a new LS called CrimsonSky. This LS had a 3 day schedule, and I figured i'd talk with the leader and find out the possibility of me participating 2/3 nights. I explained that I was the leader of a social/event LS and that I wanted to still devote my time to them, but that I wanted to be able to participate in some endgame events on the side.

In the end, I was told that I was accepted and that they understood my situation which would be fine. So yesterday, the LS had decided to do a Gods run as they had farmed up quite a lot of pop items in the last two weeks. Usually they run on Mondays and Thursdays, but as an exception they asked for people to come out on Tuesday.

Eager to prove my commitment, I headed up there as soon as I got home. We waited around for about an hour until everyone had showed up, and we went over some of the basics of how our first god, Genbu would be fought. Then the leader Jumanji went over the drops that would be available, and asked to find out who wanted to lot on what. At the time, I was unsure that I should mention anything because I was new, so I waited thinking someone with more participation than myself would be entitled to lot on the drops (Genbu's Shield and Martial Abujuration: Hands) But to my surprise, no one in the LS at that time needed or could use Genbu's Sheild, so I sent a /tell to Jumanji and was given the opportunity to lot on the shield.

The first fight went pretty well, I think it only took us about 20 minutes. I was surprised that my enfeebles weren't landing and I think i've decided to try out the Wise RDM JSE set next time and see if maybe the magic accuracy will help. But other than that, I just stuck to my refreshing and hasting with an occasional elemental seal + Thunder III which did about 400 dmg (Yay! Go go Elvaan INT! lol)


When the fight was over, I was a little disappointed to see that Genbu's Shield hadn't dropped but I was still happy because the fight itself had been interesting to watch. Its definitely different from your typical xp party, at least for the PLDs and the DDs.

On our second Genbu pop, I pretty much did the same thing. Tried a few enfeebles, refreshed, healed, hasted and nuked when ES was available. Then when Genbu dropped, I saw the shield in the list of items! I was really excited, and lotted as soon as the command was given to lot. So now I can go solo stuff on my RDM, and use my Genbu's shield which should really help keep my stoneskin up longer!



As soon as we were done with our second Genbu pop, we headed over to go pop Suzaku, however due to an oversight we were missing one of the items needed to pop him. We decided at that point that those that could, would go farm for the rest of the night. But unfortunately with many people who had to log for the night, and after checking a few of the camps which we found were busy, we decided to call it quits.

So afterwards I geared up my PLD and headed to Jeuno to get ready for Dynamis. Unfortunately, we had quite a few of our main people unavailable for the run so we didn't do as well as we had planned. We had a wipe at the start which sometimes does happen with all the MNK mobs that spawn (gawd I hate tanking these). Then we had an miscalculation with one of the areas we had pulled, which was near the AH. I guess one of the mobs that was pulled, respawned all the mobs at our camp which caused another wipe which was something we couldn't get rescued from. Luckily though, we had a mule outside holding an hourglass and we all HPed and dealt with a 10 minute weakness status you get when re-entering dynamis.

When we were very close to the end, we noticed that there was these two little red dots which we had seen before on other Jeuno runs. I decided to take a pic because these are really crazy. I wonder if its a GM watching or something, or just a glitch with the graphics.



This run we were very close to getting the win, but because we had been limited with our time (7 minutes when we did the sac pull for the boss NM) and because of accidental aggro on my part which had been caused by lag, we didn't get it. But thankfully there were quite a few members that were trying to be positive about it, to keep the moral up. As long as we learn from our mistakes, and do better the next time we can only get better.