Wednesday, January 31, 2007

BLOGGERIFIC!

1.

2. Gordor was thrown in Mordian Gaol for being retarded. Happy now? LOL

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Salvage notes

Gears can disappear while fighting on third floor Bhaflau. Confirm? Ok, well that is confirmed, and actually it is the fourth floor. Probably need more DD by this time if we want to farm them for the Rampart on this level. They seem to try to warp out at 20%, probably need a stun or a big skillchain at 20%. We weren't even able to kill one of the gears before they warped out. We did take down the Archaic Chariot on the fourth floor but it was a bit of a struggle. We didn't have anywhere as good drops as we did on my first run and many more people still needed a lot of unlocks. We also ended up skipping some of the drop mobs on the second floor because they were Wandering Wamoura and we didn't want to deal with the AoE. The goal for the run was to farm some gears, oh well, still haven't seen a card drop or any other such thing yet. Here are some maps I have put together since doing a couple of Bhaflau runs. Bhaflau West is the easiest route to take to get well equipped on the first floor. It drops weapons and equipment much earlier on, and its easier to get through. The real decision comes on floor 2. This map is for Bhaflau West on floor 2, but I would suggest taking East if you are heading up to the boss. This is because the mobs on the East side are easier for heading up to the boss. Yes, the Wamoura are very squishy but they also seem harder to crowd control and are true sound. Once you have cleared these two floors you need to decide what you are going to do with the time you have left. Either the boss or farming. 100 minutes really isn't that much time. 120 minutes would have been much more advantageous to doing many of these runs. It looks like we are heading to fight the boss the next time we go which should be cool. Really need to move on /DRK. Probably more later.

I got nothing.

Still busy, and will be so until about Thursday. >.< So nothing much for pictures today and after tomorrow night I wont even have my computer. ; ; I am just telling you, so you know what to expect. And now on with the show.

The simple things, I got a party with a friend for my DRK last night, but got pulled away for a while and Spleen let me leach xp for like an hour. LOL I told them to kick me but they didn't care. I got to just over 29, but I was running late for Limbus so I death warped and am now sitting just below 29. Limbus was pretty good even though we didn't do Ultima. >.< We did a split Apollyon and since it was a lot easier than Temenos we only needed one tank. That meant that I could go as DRG. ^.^/ It was fun as hell especially considering the fact that we did SE Apollyon, which meant that we got Piercing bonuses on two of the levels. :) I got a 1688 Penta-thrust, which made my e-peen soar. LOL 6 coins a piece, a decent set of AF drops and another Omega set. A very good night. After that I pretty much went to bed, I was so tired.

I have Salvage again tonight, hopefully I will have more to report about it tomorrow.

I posted a link about Hazhalm Testing Grounds but I wanted to go into it a bit more. This place looks like a completely classic area of Final Fantasy lore, the great dungeon crawl! Now as a disclaimer, these shots were taken by other people, and I don't encourage the hacking that was needed to get these shots, but if you are going to be stupid enough to do it and take pics then I will talk about it. Now, this is an overhead view of the testing grounds. It is a downward spiral, but its hard to see in this picture. The highest point is the area at the bottom of the map and it the lowest point is the central room. The area looks very cave-like, with the final room being close to pitch black and a "purple ambiance" probably because it has a constant double dark weather in the area. Here is another shot to give you an idea of downward progression of the rooms in the area. And now I need to explain the massive expanse of this area. It is FREAKING HUGE, and when I say huge it is the size of a full outdoor zone if not larger, I don't know if it would be able to be to fit on an in-game map. That is a shot of one of the rooms, and if you look in the lower right hand corner of that room, that is Cerberus. Yeah, its that freaking big. I can't wait to see what they have planned for that area of the game. There are pretty large cages in each room that could hold mobs that are used in this area. There also appear to be test shields and other devices in the area, what these are for is anyone's guess. This area is the most intriguing to me right now, but there are other areas that are still left in the expansion that I will present more information on in the next couple of days (mostly as filler for real information, LOL).

Enjoy.

Monday, January 29, 2007

Back but for how long?

Yep, back again, but I am still really busy this week, but hopefully by Thursday this will all be cleared up. Real life getting in the way sucks >.< LOL Anyway, onto what I actually have been able to do while I was so busy. Actually, lets do what I wasn't around for first, then what I was around for. Well, they did another planned Salvage run, which apparently went much better as a run but their weren't any drops. >.< They did get to fight Mad Bomber, but it looks like they fought it too early, and it blew up on them because they didn't have any stuns. My thought is that if it is up on the side you are doing, you should clear the side getting all the unlocks that you need then head back to kill it. But its very easy to say that from the comfort of my chair instead of being there in the trenches! LOL

Anyway, I can't wait to do Salvage again, it looks like we are focusing on doing Bhaflau left for a while, which I support but we will need to do more if we want to get all of the pieces needed to start upgrading, but we will cross that bridge when we come to it. People are still learning about Salvage and some of the zones are definitely more difficult than others and for one zone, no one has been able to even get to the boss yet.

But lets take a step back, my Limbus LS did another Temenos run, the last we needed to make another Ultima set, which we will be doing tonight. My Limbus LS is a little funny, a couple of weeks ago when we started doing split runs we didn't do any real preparation for splitting the groups, which ended up hurting us pretty badly, now we have swung fully the other direction. We did a elements/avatars run, with a full group and with a bunch of resist gear for one of the tanks, and focusing on bar spells and carols. We also changed the order so that Ifrit was the Avatar that we were going to fight at the end. With all of this preparation the run was a total joke. Inferno did 68 damage to me, and I had no fire resist gear on at all, it did 0 to Kitsume who had full fire resist gear. After that we just fought Carbuncle and it was also a very easy fight. With just Stoneskin, Light Carol and no Kirin's Osode I took zero damage from Searing Light. And we finished the run very quickly, which was also a very nice benefit of being over-prepared. I will probably go as SAM tonight because my HP build isn't finished and I still don't have DRK leveled to 37. >.<

Also, a group of us took Hellzfury and Illius to beat the Mithran Trackers, easy fight, even though the first Astral Flow didn't go off correctly because I had someone move and that moved the targets out of the way. Still even with all of that we just fell back on the kill one, wipe, kill the rest. Not very hard at all, just need to do the Snoll Tsar fight now. The rest of the three paths is very easy after that. Even though I am really busy, I still want to get this done as soon as possible, so they can get to Sea and their rings.

Finally, I want to mention that Iceblazek got his Duelist tabard! He was actually really lucky, because he was second on tabard that day but the first bidder had to leave early, but the crazy thing is that he had to leave early but AFTER the tabard dropped, so he PASSED on it, then logged out. And Ice ended up with it, I wish I could have been there for that! Well, congratulations Ice! It looks good on you.

Thats it for today, I got enough merits for MP level 2, just need to drop them into that tonight, then going to try to level my DRK before and after Limbus, but I am sure I will be distracted by something else. LOL

I wanted to point out these two threads about the Aht Urhgan expansion, apparently there is already a bunch of new events that haven't even been added to the game yet. Like I had no idea that the Hazhalm Testing Grounds were so freaking huge. It appears to be the classic dungeon crawl for final fantasy games, in fact a lot of things in this expansion appear to be drawn from the classic final fantasy games. Well, I would suggest checking these links out: http://www.killingifrit.com/forums.php?m=posts&q=146009 and

Enjoy!

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Poor Izman

Salvage again, for real this time.

Running a little late today, which sucks because I have a bunch of stuff to cover. Well, lets start with the most important part, Salvage.

A little recap for those that don't know (you should by now, LOL) when you enter Salvage your equip screen looks like this:
We did a Bhaflau Remnants west side run yesterday. West side appears to be the easiest run for a couple of reasons. First, the first mobs you kill drop the best first floor drops, weapons and equipment. Second, these mobs also appear to be a little bit weaker than the mobs on the east side. Cannonball is definitely weaker than the fire breath move of the Eruca. I don't remember the exact set up, but it was something like PLD/WAR, NIN/WAR, NIN/WAR, MNK/WAR, DRG/SAM, BLU/NIN, WHM/BLM, SMN/WHM, RDM/WHM, BLM/WHM. Actually, I am pretty sure that is exactly what it was. We got a really good drop set for the first couple of mobs, but we were taking a long time to distribute the original cell drops, just because we wanted to take it a little slow and steady on the first run. In, fact the only person that died was Gordor on some Scorpions deep into the second floor, on a badly linked pull. Anyway, our plan was something like get some gear for Glacian (MNK/WAR) so he didn't take as much damage, get a weapon unlock to Izman (PLD/WAR) so he can use sword (Joyeuse was great for this) for hate and shield for damage reduction. Then equip the NIN's, then the DD's, then mages. Now here is an exception that most people would say is a bad idea but I think is a very good idea, suggested by Omoikitte and a few others. NIN's can't really tank until magic, they take damage like a regular DD, since that is the case, it is better to give the weapon unlocks to big damage DD's like SAM's, DRG's and DRK's because they do tons more damage with a limited amount of equipment. NIN's do damage through their equipment, like Haste and Dual Wield, but when these are no available they are actually quite weak. So initially to speed up kills at the beginning when there is a limited amount of equipment to go around, its better to equip two-handed weapon users because someone is going to be taking damage, you might as well get the most bang for the buck. You can't use the same rules you use for normal fully equipped situations as you would in Salvage.

Anyway, the faster you kill the first set of mobs, the faster you can move onto better mobs, so even though at first we were going slow to start distributing the cells we quickly realized we were going to get everything that we need very quickly so Omoikitte just started calling out who lotted what and we just kept pulling and killing. The very nice thing is that we got no links on the entire first floor, so there were no concerns about wipes and the reraise items that we brought were more than enough for our needs.

Another thing I wanted to mention here is that you probably dont need as many potions as you might think if you properly use the chests that are dropped by the mobs at the start, also don't use those assume boost items on the lower floors, you should save them for the bosses or NM's if you are farming. We didn't even use most of ours because we were holding them for something more important if we faced it later on. Anyway, once we were decently equiped we were able to clear out the first floor with speed, in fact we over farmed the first floor and could have spent more time on the second and third floor, but it was our first real run so it wasn't much of a problem for us.
The second floor was pretty easy, and we plowed through the flans that were supposed to spawn the Dormant Rampart NM, but in a series of mistakes that I personally made, I read the map wrong and opened the wrong Gilded Door AND I did it before I was supposed to because I misunderstood some instructions. Oh, well, we will know better for next time. We then moved onto some more scorpions then the third floor. Now here is the point where I say bring sneaks and invisibles. They are a godsend because there are just too many mobs to farm for cells, and alot of the time you just want to skip them, to get to mobs you need or mobs that will give you better drops. We did end up getting to some of the Archiac Gears. They hit pretty hard and its kind of shocking compared to the weakness of the other lower level mobs. They do some pretty tough moves too, like shadow wiping moves that also gravity, etc. We did get to kill one of them right before the end, and it did have a drop. LOL But we did get some more drops than that. and The run felt very successful even though we didn't get to see either the Mad Bomber or the Dormant Rampart

Immidiately after the Salvage ended we collected some people to go and do Promyvion-Vahzl for Hellzfury and Illius. We had already done the the NM's so all we had to do was boss fight, so we quickly farmed up some animas for the extras then headed to the boss fight. Which was a little bit interesting, LOL Well, right when the Mea boss was about to die, it Impailed Izman and somehow killed him, even though it is a throat stab type move, it may have been because the Dem boss aggroed and killed him or something like that, but we were left tankless for a little while, and Hellz just started voking the Dem boss and kiting it while Illius gravitied it and Gordor DoT'ed it. This bought us a ton of time for Izman to get back up and ready. Once Izman was up we engaged and killed the Dem mob very easily, then took care of Holla pretty easily. Now they are onto the Three Paths, and hopefully Sea within a week or two. The plan is to do Mithran Trackers today, which just leaves us with only two real hard fights left to do before they get Sea for later this week into next. Then Limbus! Woohoo!

After we finished this up a couple of us went to merit and had a nice little time. I had gotten up to 8 merits and I finally decided to spend some of them. LOL Level 4 HP and level 1 MP (before I even have a real use for them yet), just need to get 9 more to cap out MP then I will be set on that front.

And now, for what you have all been waiting for (drum roll), here is Ailee's new Shadow Mantle. Pretty damn impressive, I say, and I also say congratulations to Ailee! The blogger paparazzi has struck again!

Just so you know I will be in and out for the next couple of days so I don't want you to expect an update every day, but I will try to do everything that I can to post something. I will be very busy in real life until the end of the month.

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

More distractions.

I still have a bunch of real life distractions limiting my game play until the end of the month so another short game update before onto rampant speculation. Yesterday, I got a decent party on my DRK, sure the prediction of getting to level 30 was a bit much, but I had hoped to get more than 25 before Limbus, but at least I am close to 26. I also leveled my RNG after limbus and am not half way to 64, but that seems to be slow going too. I have noticed that there are some areas where it is difficult to find the proper mobs to fight and that even one level, this is especially true at level 50. Where there are several good camps from 48-50 but if one person in the party hits 51 then the xp drop is huge. Now, this presents an interesting situation in how people interpret the game. The idea that parties must somehow always be within a three level spread is actually incorrect, the real problem is when one member of the party is too high for the mobs that you are camping. In the case above you could have 6 level 50 people fighting certain mobs and getting good xp but if one person hits 51, then the xp will drop. No amount of keeping levels of the party close together will prevent the fact that one member is now too high for the mobs in question. And a party of 4 or even 5 level spread wont matter very much especially at higher levels as long as the highest person in the party doesn't make the mobs too low of a level to xp on. Remember the general rule is that melee can be higher than mages in level if you want to overcamp, but it shouldn't be the other way around until the melee are capable of doing enough damage to take out the mob in a reasonable amount of time.

Anyway, enough on my dissertation on leveling, last night I also did Limbus, as usual. It was Temenos Central First Floor, matching pairs of mobs that are strengthened when their partner is defeated, so the idea is kill off the matched pair at as close to the same time if not at the same exact time. The only problem with this is that all of the mobs have a very large auto-regen, so its hard to keep them in low enough to be -ga'ed to death at the same time. Well, its not that hard and even if one of them dies before the other they are still relatively easy to beat if they are at 1% left. This floor also takes less than 20 minutes if you do it this way, but sadly the drops from Temenos is generally limited and some of the floors only have 1 chest so only 1-2 AF items at most, turned out to be SAM a piece I already have. Well, it was a quick win. It turns out that after I had to leave the computer right after the run because of needing to take care of some real life business one of the coins distributed to me, which caused some spazzing but I after I got back I didn't really understand the issue because they could have just given me one less coin for the run. I mean I had to leave for a real life concern and real life is more important than the game, right? Right? LOL

After I got back, Glacian and I leveled NIN and RNG for a while, then Glacian had to go to bed and our THF was really bad (how do you get above 60 and not know how to use Trick Attack to set hate?) so we regrouped and picked up Illius and Iceblazek and the party got a lot better, not that Glacian was doing a bad job at all, in fact quite the contrary, I don't know how Glacian was keeping hate with what seemed like the THF intentionally trying to make things harder for him. LOL Anyway, still didn't manage to get to 64 on RNG but I am getting closer.

Tonight should be a very interesting night, and I hope to get to level 64 at least on RNG and then maybe some more on DRK too, probably a bit too ambitious but I like to have plans for many things even if I don't achieve them all because at least I will know which direction I should be headed.

Monday, January 22, 2007

Congratulations are in order.

Long weekend in which I didn't get to play a whole lot. I was out and about doing real life things, as I will be next weekend also. >.< Well, at least I got to get another couple of merits, bringing my total to 7. I have decided for now to go with 4 levels of HP and 4 levels of MP, so with 7 I could do 3 levels of MP, or I could finish HP. And I don't mind sitting on the merits for a little while, just do see where I should put them. In other self-improvement news I think I am going to try finishing up leveling DRK tonight. As long as the party I get tonight is better than the party I had on Thursday everything should be fine, LOL. Anyway, its only 24 but I figure I should be able to at least get to 30 tonight, and I would also like to cap Hand-to-hand very soon. I only have Limbus to really distract me from this tonight, but that should be quick, because people are actually showing up on time, and we are actually doing skillchains and not doing dual runs so the rewards are getting much better too. We should be up to another Ultima soon, which is fun but I need to check my buffer on my SAM, I think I don't really have that much left to go before I start deleveling again, which is not good at all. Ultima is just a pain, but compared to how we have been doing in our split runs, we did Ultima pretty easily. So at least that doesn't worry me all that much.

Now for the congratulations, but first a bit of background. As I said, I was gone this weekend, so that meant that my Obsidian was going to plan a Dynamis Lord run. I have never even seen Dynamis Lord let alone fought him. It seems like they can predict my schedule then precisely place Dynamis Lord runs when I can't attend. Oh well, hopefully they will do another run soon. I still don't understand why they don't just farm Dynamis Lord. Well, to the point of the congratulations, they were successful in killing the Dynamis Lord and among the drops was a Shadow Mantle for which Ailee was the winning bid. A rather impressive item for her PLD, and I will have some pictures of it tomorrow. :)

Now, I got to try out a few new xp camps that were opened up with the Nyzul Isle staging point. One of the camps is a circular island in the Northeast of the Mire, it has only Imps and Soulflayers, now after testing out this island I have come to the conclusion that with a couple of certain support/healing job this camp is completely melee burnable.
The Soulflayers seem a little weaker than those in the Arrapago Reef, while the Imps are of a higher level than those in the lower parts of the Mire. I think this is the area for which Khimaira spawns, but there are PLENTY of mobs here, in fact a lower level regular party could easily just pull Imps full time from the zone-in area and not even worry about the Soulflayers. Now, let me say the Soulflayers are no joke, I think at very least a WHM and RDM/WHM should be required for this kind of party, because you will need Erase. The Ice Spikes that the Soulflayers use seems to be undispelable or at least they have incredibly high resistance to dispel, but the nice thing is that they don't seem to have high HP and a couple of WS's and they are done. The base XP for this camp is very high, but there is much more of a risk of death. I suggest it if you have the proper party set up.

Finally, we got around to helping Illius and Hellzfury get their Promyvion-Vahzl started, and its pretty impressive how quickly you can get to the bottom floor if you are in a rush (I needed to get to Limbus). But first we had to play around with the NM at the door to the entrance. It was pretty funny, we weren't ready for it the first time we fought it and everyone kind of forgot about it so no one had 75 gear on them, and some people didn't even come with jobs at 75. LOL Anyway, with that out of the way, we headed deeper into the zone, the only death coming from me when I cleared the hall of death on the second level. In relatively short progression we will be getting Illius and Hellz to Sea like we did with Gordor, Iceblazek, Izman and Kalgar.

I think I need to pick up leveling RNG again, I kind of feel like it is falling behind and I would like to get it to 75 pretty quick. I wish I could keep up with Elfaria's leveling speed. LOL Elf started out as a lower level RDM than my RNG, but is already 70, and probably higher. Now that is fast, oh well, maybe something else I will do today. Limbus gets out early today, so I might just do DRK, then Limbus, then RNG. We will see tonight. :)

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

This is going to be a low hit day...

I went to bed early last night, just as a warning so you don't get the impression that this is going to be the stellar post you were probably hoping for, but hey, I have mostly daily content so you can't possibly expect everyday to be exciting. All I basically did yesterday was go to Dynamis, at least I went as Dragoon. :) My Dragoon gear is actually pretty good. Still could use some Hecatomb Mitts, and sure a Hecatomb Cap would be great but I don't do HNM's so that is right out for now. Outside of that, though, I am quite pleased with my Acc and WS builds. On Quadav's Wheeling Thrust is a good 400-600 damage almost every time.

Well, I had won the bid on Dragoon Greaves again, but I wasn't really expecting them to drop as I have won bids on the Greaves for a long time, but they just haven't dropped. We won't even start on head or body. orz But quickly after going into Dynamis guess what dropped! Well, at least I am finally 3/5 on Dragoon AF2. In the normal course of killing mobs in Bastok I got this nice Wheeling Thrust. That is probably the highest damage I have personally ever seen for a Wheeling Thrust, considering that it is a one hit weaponskill with an "Ignores Defense" TP modifier it does very consistent damage but hardly ever gets over 600. It must have been a double attack and some kind of critical hit on the weaponskill. Still, I was impressed by the number, especially for not having my Dragoon out in a while. Iceblazek ended up getting an Assassin's Vest for this THF after it went open bid, of which he was very proud. Strangely enough, even though we got a bunch of AF2 drops we didn't get the win in Bastok because we had limited numbers and took our time with alot of pulls. We managed to sac pull the last NM, and then pull the boss, but killed him about 10 seconds after the 30 second warning. Oh well, it just let me go to bed earlier. :)

Anyway, that was my day, but because it was so short, I guess I would like to talk about something else. Something that annoys me a little bit, and that is the perceived secrecy that people think they need to have about end-game activities after they first come out. Originally, I saw this happen when Sea was first released and people started doing jailers, when they found out how to pop the NM's and the Jailers, they would not disclose the method for popping them. Its just so silly, because within 24 hours people are going to figure out how to do it. And then they are going to be the ones that discloses the information and get the credit for it. Basically, its a situation where if you release the information first, you get the credit for it, but if you CLAIM you have the information and don't disclose it, you just make people think you are a dick, AND they will find out the information soon enough. I think the FFXI Wiki is a really good resource because of this, because as people find out information they just add it to the Wiki and usually before someone can claim to have information before anyone else, its already on the Wiki. I can slightly understand about keeping information about open world NM spawns like in Sea, but whats the point really? It's not like you are some original explorer in a wide open new space. Everyone else is doing the same things that you are, they are testing the same things and the information will be supplied quickly for everyone else. So your choice is not between keeping things secret and disclosing the information to everyone, the choice is really between being seen as the first person to provide everyone with the information and being a dick. In the end, don't be a dick.

That is my rant for today. :) I have Limbus tonight, I don't think it will be a split run because the runs in Temenos are a lot harder than they are in Apollyon, which I approve of considering the last two weeks, I have barely gotten any coins or upgrade items, but during the wins were we did normal runs we have gotten a lot more coins and items. Now, I am looking at upgrading my Myochin Haidate to the HQ version, and I understand how that is supposed to work, BUT what I want to know is exactly how I reset the quest to do the Borghertz's Hands quest. What I mean is that the Haidate are a coffer item and I want to replace them so that I can get the Myochin Haidate again to be able to store them again. I don't want to give up 5 more slots of storage when I am already cramped to start. So if you have suggestions on how to restart the quest, I am listening :)

...And with this sword ye shall be eye-humped by all of Vana'diel!

Not too busy yesterday, I poked around for a while and finally got my cast metal plate for the Halvung Gate. That was really easy, and I don't know why I took so long to pick it up. Then after that I did a few Golden Salvage runs, very simple and quick wins. I would still like to finish a run of Mamool Ja staging point level 2 runs because I am still about 3k off of getting either Pahluwan Seraweels or Amir Boots. Still kinda torn between the two. Pahluwan better helps my NIN, while Amir better helps everything else. Oh well, I will cross that bridge when I come to it. I also got to do a Besieged against the Undead Swarm which was fun, I got in a little late but the server got Medusa down to about 60% before it warped out. I originally believed that you needed to kill all of the NM's to make Medusa more vulnerable but I am not sure anymore because the last time we did it, after all of the NM's were killed Medusa immediately warped out. I wish SE was a little more clear on the win conditions for Besieged, because I think with a little more time Odin could easily beat Medusa.

After this early messing about we decided to go XP, and while waiting for Izman to finish up his CoP cutscenes, I bugged Gawayne to come out into the woodlands to give me a couple of screen shots of his Excalibur for the blog. Now, a couple of observations to start. First, Excalibur already hits hard, usually over 100 damage a swing. Now I don't know all that much about sword damage but my guess is that is pretty strong for just a normal swing. Second, the additional light damage procs about 2-3 times per fight on a below Even Match mob. That light damage is always 25% of current HP. I had read elsewhere that it was some inversion of health or something, but I can confirm it is definitely 25% of current HP. Apparently in Besieged, with a Giant Drink, Gawayne was able to get a 800+ additional effect damage. Third, the random high damage swing is about 2.5 times damage of a normal swing. Its noticeable compared to the damage of a normal swing. Finally, Kinghts of Round is a pretty nice WS for a single hit weaponskill. It was doing around 700+ on a below Even Match mob. And now for some pictures. First, our hero! Gawayne standing about in the woodlands, ready at any moment for the onslaught of evil! Evil comes in many forms and today evil came in the form of... a bee! Yeah, what a let down. LOL Anyway, the brave, brave Sir Gawayne doth smite thine bee with Knights of Round! It is pretty damn neat to watch. :) You can also make self-Light with Kinghts of Round, and it alone. So with a little Shikikoyo help provided by Glacian, Gawayne did two consecutive Knights of Round and made himself a nice little Light Skillchain. The question we had was whether he would be able to follow that Light skillchain with another Knights of the Round to make Light again, we tried it with a Icarus Wing but it either doesn't work or Gawayne didn't get the weaponskill off in time. I am inclined to believe the former, and that the WS can only be used to make one Light skillchain, whether from closing the first skillchain or from adding an additional skillchain onto the last Light skillchain.

After all of the eye-humping and congratulations to Gawayne we headed out to the Mire to get some quick xp. It was fast and fun and only Izman died one time, because Gordor MPKed him accidentally, then Izman died again, because Gordor intentionally MPKed him without Gordor even knowing. :) That is something only a few people will get. Anyway, I got a merit or two, because it was a relatively short party and I wanted to get to bed... but of course I didn't. :) Izman and Illius needed the map to the Mire so off to fight the Plague Chigoe we went. That thing is so funny, bouncing around with drains going off all the time. Its quite cute to watch, and with that they had their maps and I was off to bed.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Revenge deferred.

And so Guivre eats my face again. In a small pick up group, Izman, Tamarisk (now affectionately known as Bullet), Kylara and I tried to take Guivre. It went ok, but I went down relatively early in the fight, to a triple attack to strip shadows and a Fang Rush for the complete face munching. I will have my sweet revenge, oh yes I will! One might ask what exactly was I doing in Kuftal Tunnel to have my face eaten by that annoying wyvern, and I would say mass confusion. Well, in reality Thaz had asked me to come skill up with him. He needed to cap enfeebling magic on his quickly rising RDM, and I was looking for some hand to hand skill ups. So we started to kill some crabs until Aable suggested to me that we head down to see if Bloodthirster Madkix was up. Kitty suggested that the placeholder goblins we a bit hard to be skilling up on, so for those we just killed them quick, then skilled up on the raptors. And low and behold Bloodthirster popped after the first PH was killed ^.^/ At this point Izman was already on his way to do a little skilling up, but Kitty and I decided to try to duo it before he showed up. Now, let me say something really quickly, I thought we were getting the Acha d'Armas for Kitty. He has a 71 WAR and this is a really good ax for WAR, but as has happened before we apparently were camping a NM for me without me even knowing. It was actually pretty easy, and Kitty was easily able to support me as a 53 RDM/BLM. Now, I have heard people waiting for hours for Bloodthirster to pop and never getting the drop, but I had the Kitty inherent TH trait with me and the Acha d'Armas dropped :) Now I have the best Ax at 68 just waiting for me in my Mog, for when I finally get around to leveling WAR. >.<

Anyway, that was last night, now for a bit of a rewind. I finally got to get a GM of my very own. Apparently, if you have seen RMT claim Ullikummi for 50 straight times you get one of your very own. This one decided to show up to me because I was "very upset" about the RMT claiming Ullikummi AGAIN. I am guessing that they show up to show that they actually exist rather than just being canned response algorithms. Didn't make me feel any better about losing Ullikummi again. In fact, it seemed a really hollow action. I would rather have just been ignored again, rather than grand-standed. Ah, well. It does appear that gradual the RMT are losing to SE though, apparently they didn't show up at Behemoth yesterday and they were nowhere to be seen when we tried to take out Guivre, when they are normally all over Amemet. I think they are putting themselves out of business, and are basically putting themselves only on the highest priced items to make their real life money. After their crazy money grab and the SE smackdown, they have essentially put the squeeze on their own income. It's rather short-sighted but to be expected, from people that readily break the law to make money.

In game, I have been spending a lot of time helping people get things done to finish up the Promathia and Aht Urhgan missions. Earlier in the weekend, I stayed up pretty damn late to help run the guys through the Garden to get to the BCNM fight with the 4 Sea "pots." I got to go as SAM for this fight (and got to kill the last pot with a nice Tachi: Gekko after my 2 hour), which was fun. Pretty easy actually, kill the BLM "pots" then try to get as far into the RDM's as we can, then wipe, get up and finish up the RDM "pots." That left them to do the Promathia fight the next day, which I showed up for but didn't get a chance to help them with because Eji and "Bullet" (Tamarisk, hehehe) stepped in to help out. Oh well, I helped with the hard fights at least :) Anyway, they quickly dispatched Promathia (much more successfully than my group did back in the day). In addition to helping the guys finish up the CoP missions, we helped Illius to finish up his Aht Urhgan missions, which included a trip to see good old Khimeria 13. This fight is a little harder when you aren't watching it from your back. Note to those that didn't know: Khimeria 13 attacks like the Shadow Dragon, it doesn't need to turn around to stomp on you. LOL Well, the fight was still pretty easy with 5 people. Eternalpain had come to help too, but he wasn't far enough into the missions to get into the fight, but he should be there by the end of the week no problem. Now, I just need to get my Halvung gate key and we will be all set.

After all of this, my Limbus LS actually had a decent run last night. We tried Temenos West again, and this time it went much more smoothly than the last. We all got 4 or 5 coins and I even got my last piece to upgrade my first piece of Myochin gear. It will be either the Kote or Haidate. Now I think most people would say go with the Kote first, but I am thinking I might go with Haidate because of my WS macro change limitations. The reasoning is that for /WAR and /THF I do not switch my leg piece which is typically just left on Myochin Haidate because its the most STR I can get in the leg slot. So, keeping that in mind it would be a full time use piece rather than a WS macro piece. Now, I do have to say that the Kote is a DAMN good WS macro piece, and I don't have to use stupidly expensive and not all that impressive Gigas bracelets. I still wish that my Limbus LS would take a little bit of finesse into consideration rather than the zerg method of mass BLM death, especially considering the generally higher resistance that Temenos mobs seem to have. A few skillchains properly bursted would go a lot further toward quickly disposing of mobs rather than just blindly nuking, this is especially bad considering it would just take one SAM in a run with two NIN's to basically constantly have Darkness skillchains going off. Oh well, my Limbus LS is like the only place that I don't actively impose my opinion into things, so I will generally defer to the leaders.