Late Update @_@

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! @_@