I see dead Garudas...

I have a ton to talk about today. This weekend was busy and really productive, but also included some failures from which we learned quite a bit. First, lets go over the dings. Now, I should be leveling my WHM, and Omoi will be the first to tell you that I have been slacking in this department, but I leveled some of my other jobs because I was a bit run down on leveling everything under the sun to 37. I will pick up on leveling WHM again today and this week, and I will hopefully have WHM, PLD and BLM to 37 relatively quickly. So I leveled my RNG again, and got it to level 66 ^.^ The parties weren't too spectacular but they were decent and one of them was with Biblo, Ice and Aable, which went very well even though Biblo ate a one-shot fire breath from the Eruca a couple of times, but he is a trooper like always so he got right back up and kept fighting. There are no real new accomplishments on RNG until at least level 70, so it is kind of a bog right now, I can't wait to get to do Mire parties because mobs will die really fast at that point, weak Imp's and Flies weak to piercing, sweet! My gear on RNG has been pretty stagnant, I did upgrade my rings and I am thinking about moving up to something better in the ear slot. Genin and Vision earrings would be great, but I am being stingy about gil right now. Once I get to level 70, I will completely reevaluate my gear. One last thing I will say about RNG is that even though I do not have an Eurytos' Bow, I think I am going to stick with Archery for three reasons, 1) I already have a bunch of good STR and AGI gear, 2) I like the TP build and base damage on Archery better than Marksmanship, 3) I can use Archery for both RNG and SAM/RNG. With that being said I will be going over what I want to merit and a definite path I will be taking in a future post.

The second job I was able to level was my WAR, which I finally got to level 55, and then to level 56. At 55, I got the marque WS of WAR, and yes, I am sorry to say but the reason that I am leveling WAR is because I already have the gear and it is basically an "XP get" job. I am the kind of WAR that main job WAR's hate, its not my first job and I am not taking it as seriously as some other jobs. Sometimes even people like me need to embrace my own inner e-peen, and thus learning Rampage was the pinnacle of this e-peenery. Getting my WAR to 56 has saved me a ton of space because I was able to mule about a million different really crappy pieces over to Ringone. I now have all of my WAR gear to around 75 basically. I do still need a Maneater and a Woodville's Axe but I already have a Byakko's Axe, and I am quite satisfied with that. Since I am not going to merit Axe or Sword, I will be sticking with Axe/Axe set up at 75. I am quite comfortable with the damage I am doing with Rampage as this is what I got on one of my first Rampages after getting the WS: In an attempt to come full circle on my own e-peenry, I would like to say that if SE changed the TP modifier on Penta-Thrust from damage to change of critical hit then DRG would be much more viable end-game for, at very least, merit parties. It's a very obvious change, but I doubt SE will notice it.

Now, about 1k of experience before I got to 56 on my WAR, Kirameki hit the cap for level 55, because she has not gotten G2 done yet, so the next day, we were off to kill some Boreal beasts in Xarcabard. When we arrived I realized that I only had 15 shehei left and no blind tools, and with the only support being a level 55 BRD, this was going to be a little bit more difficult than I was originally thinking, but we marched out to the Hound first. Now e-peen shots of damage on the hound are like e-peen masterbation, because it has like zero defense and vitality, so the numbers were irrelevent, and truthfully this was one of the harder Boreal mobs we fought because of Methane Breath, that combined with not much more healing than Paeons to heal it was a bit dicey, but we pulled through. Another short run across Xarcabard and we were at the Coeurl. This was the easiest monster for G2. It liked to cast Burst which wasted much of its time and only took one shadow. Not much else to say there, so we were quickly off to the Tiger. The Tiger was a bit tough too, because I ran out of shihei about half way through the fight. So I was blood tanking with out much support for a while, but we managed even with any two hours. :) It was fun duoing all of the G2 mobs for Kirameki, and then we were off back to Jeuno to set Kirameki's new level cap to 60. ^.^/ Congratulations!

Now, that the dings and leveling accomplishments are covered on to the events of the weekend. First was a horribly failed Dynamis-Valkurm, which isn't as bad as it sounds because they were testing if you could beat the boss without having to beat the NM's to disable the Boss's special abilities. Oh, by the way, you can't. Exhibit A: No drops, kind of a waste of borrowed gil, but whatever, it was a test, and at least we wont try it again.

Salvage, on the other hand was much better even though we were unable to get the win either. The run was rather smooth even though we did die more often than normal. We went for the win, but even with that we managed to get two different drops. I got these because I am the only person that could lot that had the Usukane set as their first priority in hands, because Gordor has his set for Morrigan hands. We also got the Enyo's leggings Now, we still have only got the level 15 drops so far which is a bit annoying as we have not been able to get any of the NM's to pop in either of the areas we have been to, it is a little annoying but gear this good I can expect it to be pretty difficult to get. Now, we were going for the win this time and started off by trying to straight tank it, but for a couple of reasons this wasn't going so well at all. Mostly because the tanks didn't really have much time to get started and we don't have many THF or /THF to set hate with. I think we would be ok with straight tanking if we gave the tanks at least a minute or two to straight up build hate, but with our current situation we are going with something that I believe will work even better. We are going to bounce hate back and forth between two NIN's. Kind of like kiting but a little more efficient. Basically,we will have two NIN's on the opposite sides of the room making small circles around the polls on the non-working teleporters in the room. Then we will treat it like Kirin, skillchains and magic bursts, and RNG's. I think we can pretty easily get the win doing this, as we basically switched to this very shortly after the fight started because hate was all over the place. After we did this in about 5 minutes we had it down pretty far with just a few people putting damage on the boss. Once we start going for the win with this as the original goal we will be much better off, because there will be less work for one WHM to do at once. We should also consider taking two WHM next time I think, because we are definitely a little low on healing. I think that we should be able to get the win on the next run with this new strategy.

Speaking of Salvage, I saw this on Arrow yesterday. If you don't know who Arrow is then you probably live in a box or something. Lets just say that he has 2-3 relic weapons and a ton of upgraded AF2 +1, etc, etc, etc. I find it interesting that the Ares body is one of the easiest Salvage items when it is also one of the best.

The last major thing that we did yesterday was finally get Hellzfury and Illius through the Airship fight. This fight just gets easier and easier the more that I do it. Our set up was NIN, DRG/SAM, RNG, WHM, RDM, BLM, and basically this is the best kind of set up I can come up with if you are going to go with a regular party. Two NIN's is much too little damage, and risks running out of time. I was a little concerned about the Mammets which was actually the hardest par of the fight because Gordor (who came as NIN) had to basically hold three Mammets while one was Shadowbound and while Hellz (DRG) and I (RNG) tried to quickly kill another. It got really close a couple of times, with just having to pull hate off of the mages and different people having Mammets on them at different times, but ultimately we prevailed even though I thought I was going to die on two different occasions. Onto Omega, it was a normal Omega fight, got it to 34% before the first wipe. Then cleaned it up pretty quickly after the restart. Ultima was actually pretty easy, and we got it down to 3% before the semi-inevitable wipe, because Eternalpain was able to get off a Flare right before he died. At one point something kind of neat happened, where Omoi and Illius were basically kiting Ultima back and forth with Gordor and it helped to actually slow down its damage, just because they had to heal Gordor a bunch. In the end we got back up after it was at like 3% and I used an Icarus Wing, Sidewinder >> EES >> done. And now Illius and Hellzfury basically have Sea, they were running around doing some CS's and were going to try to get the NM's done before Tenzen, then we are going to do Tenzen tonight so they can go to Limbus with Versus.

Speaking of Versus, if you hadn't guessed by now, it has reformed. We have basically reformed to a group of 18 people to do Salvage, Limbus, Sea, Sky and a bunch of other things, basically everything we want to do. We are starting our full schedule this week. This is what I was alluding to in previous posts in that I believe that almost everything in the game can be done with 18 competent people. Salvage, Limbus, Sea, Sky, everything. Kirin might be tough, and so might the higher level Sea gods, but it is our goal to do everything with 18 people. To test SE's assertion that everything in the game has been defeated with 18 people. Maybe we can do it, maybe we can't but it is our goal to try. We haven't created a full roster yet, as we have a few slots left to fill, but we are finally requiring that people have Sea and Sky and ToAU missions complete, so that we don't have to do that anymore. LOL Hellz and Illius should be the last time doing a lot of CoP missions unless I am asked to help for others. :)