Making some changes to my merits.

After doing a little bit of reading on RDM, i've reconsidered some of the merits i've applied. I guess when I first starting meriting as RDM, I didn't quite know the roles I would have in endgame and what spells I would find myself using more when soloing and partying, so that resulted in making a few bad choices. Currently my merits for my spells are:

Bio III: 2 merits
Dia III: 2 merits
Paralyze II: 1 merit
Phalanx II: 1 merit
Slow II: 0 merits
Blind II: 0 merits

I've decided that as great as Paralyze II is, its not a guaranteed effect all the time when it does land. I understand that the more MND you have, the more often you'll find the mob is paralyzed but even still, it is not a predictable effect. And here you have Slow II, which is somewhat the same as Paralyze in the sense that its preventing the mob from attacking as often. The difference is that Slow has a guaranteed effect (as long as it lands). So I decided that I would remove my merit point from Paralyze II, and put it into Slow II. However, i've heard that only one merit point doesn't really get noticed and most people will put a minimum of 2 merit points into the spell. So, I had to remove another merit point from another spell.

Seeing as I definitely use Bio III and Dia III, I decided against removing a point from either of those two spells, leaving me with Phalanx II. The majority of the time I am on RDM, i'm almost always with a NIN tank and seeing as they should be having shadows up throughout the majority of the fight, there's very little reason to need to cast Phalanx II. And, for sky events i'm always asked to come as WHM so again I wouldn't really need to have the spell available, so I guess i'll be removing my merit from Phalanx II as well, to add to Slow II.

I really wish SE would allow us to remove limit points and apply them elsewhere. It doesn't make sense to earn a merit point, apply it and then should you decide you want to move it somewhere else, you're forced to re-earn the limit point altogether. Considering each limit point is 10k experience points, and most "merit points" are a total of 3-5 limit points that can be pretty harsh if you make a hasty decision on where to apply your points. But then again SE knows exactly how to keep their players around -_-

So now that I have my merit points figured out, its just a matter of getting into good parties and getting them. Unfortunately though, the parties i've had recently lacked a BRD and we always had a DD pull which didn't really let us get beyond chain#7. So meriting has been slower than I wanted, but what can you do? On a good note though, I did max my MP merits and now have a total of 80MP added on. I even break 1k on my WHM MP without food now, which is pretty neat. I don't feel so "elvaan" anymore when I look at my MP.

I also decided to put some merits into my Ice Magic Accuracy (2) and Wind Magic Accuracy (1). Last night a LS member of ours, Elden had asked me and Xean to party with him to help him hit lvl 75 so we went to mamool and picked us up some xp. It was kind of funny though, because Elden was PUP so there were a few jokes here and there about PUP dmg. I didn't have the parser on, but Xean said that PUP dmg was a lot less than he had expected. Guess the job is really only good for soloing? ^^; Thats ok though, it was a decent party and its always nice to be able to xp with LS members and see them hit 75 which Elden did last night.

Other than that I helped Pasquale with his BLM AF. We had to go to Castle Zvahl Bailey's and kill some demons for a wine cellar key. We spent maybe 40 minutes farming this before it dropped, and then spent another half hour trying to figure out where the Wine Cellar door was. It was kinda funny, we were running around and eventually discovered that we were in the wrong area. Gotta love when you're looking for something, but you're in the wrong area! Either way, we managed to find the right spot and Pasquale got his BLM AF.

I also decided to spend a little gil and craft a bit more. Most of the time I don't craft unless I can farm the ingredients, but I was too lazy to go farm Sheep Skin to turn into Sheep Leather, which I needed to craft Parchment... so instead, I bought it from the AH! I felt like such a spender ; ;

But I managed to take Leathercraft from 27-29. I think i'm only a few points off from lvl 30, so i'll probably just move onto the next recipe because i'm too lazy to go farm more ingredients. Only problem is that the next recipe requires Ram Skin, which means farming 2 Rams that pop every 15 minutes... which in short, means i'm going to be spending a LOT of time in La Theine.

Oh and good news is Timwakefield is finally back from his break, and we're planning on doing some assault tonight. He wants to try out the assault where you fight a wall, but apparently you need more than 3 people (at least we think) so we'll probably get a few more LS members to come out and get themselves some points too. Looking forward to some more assault fun! ^^