Friday, March 30, 2007

The Izman Prize: Two Omega Eyes.

Posted by Ringthree at 12:49 AM

I was tired last night, so even though we were camping for an Othinus' Bow for me (thanks to everyone for helping me with this) we all just went to bed relatively early. I really want to test this out for XP because the delay is lower than my Selene's Bow and I have the gear for pretty decent Holy Bolt procs, so I would think my Slugshots would be lower but they would happen more often. Anyway, onto the day.

First, we farmed Despot for a while but we didn't stay in Sky long enough for it to pop, as we had out first Versus Omega run planned already. So we just popped a Seiryu, two NIN/DRK were nice, but it definitely takes longer to set hate than a nice initial voke. I suppose using JA's earlier on could set hate better but I like saving those for just in case. Anyway, this is just still for testing and I think going back to NIN/WAR will be better, but when balanced NIN/DRK's are very good tanks. Probably much more efficient for longer fights, but still decent here. I like just being able to have more things to keep constant hate with, and I am having fun because it keeps you much more busy during fights, rather than sitting waiting for voke to come back up. Also it is much easier to assist and grab hate back when it is needed, which is much more beneficial than just hoping your voke works and then being stuck for another 30 seconds. Well, Seiryu dropped basically only W. Hands, which was one of the things that I have actually lotted on in a long time, but Elfie won the lot and made their Blood Finger Gauntlets! Sweet! After Seiryu, Versus was off to Omega. :)

The Omega fight started very well, but Gordor went down at about 60%, and we started kiting instead of subbing in Izman, which in perfect 20/20 hindsight we probably should have just done. We lost a lot of time not really doing a lot of damage waiting for Gordor to get back up, and things got a little hectic, and we needed to rush it a bit at the end. But it died pretty easily when we were able to hold it for a few seconds to take care of the last 20% or so. It was definitely our first time, and we have a lot to learn about positioning, damage, and a bunch of other things, but literally this was the very first Omega fight for about 10 of our members and things will easily get better once we have done the fight a couple of times. Anyway, during the fight we got some crafting materials from the Gunpods and a Magenta Chip which is definitely nice for our future runs. And our drops! Izman and Malasia called it! LOL Izman only lotted on the head because no one else was going to do it. Awesome! Well, we headed to Mhaura to see the first Homam pieces that Versus has gained from Limbus. Congrats to Jess and Izman on their Homam Zucchettos, and yes the second head was basically free lot. LOL Anyway, on the way to Limbus last night, I get this wonderful commentary, and NO, there was NO UFO aggroing last night, thank you very much.

After Limbus but before we went to farm the O Bow, Imrahil needed his DRK AF Helm so we headed up to help him with it. Of course it was very easy to do, but Imrahil is on his first job and I think was quite pleased with the assistance that he received. And it was nice to do something besides XPing for once. LOL I think a couple of us are going to farm for NM's and pop items for the next couple of days. Bomb Queen items, O Bow, Diorites and Despots are just something we are going to farm for either while xping or getting xp while farming. Its time to put some effort into some of the things that we are missing. For a while when doing Limbus and Salvage we weren't really getting a lot accomplished in gaining gear, so now that people are gaining things they want we are actually able to improve what we need, for example, Izman would greatly benefit from Crimson Legs which improves our tanking for the entire LS. I would really like to see him get them and quickly. And here is Ice getting his Neptunal Hands, which is also nice for him but the LS as a whole. I greatly enjoy seeing people get gear that helps to make Versus that much better.

Also your daily Aable reminder!

I am going to start with the best way to help Aable as he is going through his physical troubles, as per his request.
After Dealing with ulcerative colitis since around 2003, finally things have gotten bad enough I have been in the hospital since St. Patrics day. I decided I will be going in for surgerie. March 29 sometime in the afternoon. I will be having Laparoscopic abdominal colectomy and ileostomy for any of you medicaly intersted people. Basically my large intestine will be totally removed. and i will have a poo pouch for a while. Then basically a section of my small instestine is formed into a new mini Colin while this is all going on called a j pouch. and my digestive tract is reconnected though that. my estimated recovery time in the hospital is somewhere around a couple weeks followed by other outpatient recovery.

In all I should end up with a better quality of life then i have been dealing with for the past few years so wish me luck. If you see someone around as me the next few weeks its (Exodus(Wargod))rob)

--On another note, since this sucks so bad anyone who wants to do something cool for me, please corrdinate with Ringthree; I am trying to see If i can get the foodnetwork to give me a free Trip to see Emeril Live maybe even convince him to do a special show basied on my condition or UC in general.----

Kelly Beattie
-aable


Ok, so here is what you can do. Send a e-mail to Emeril Live via the Food Network. If you don't know what exactly to say, or if you don't know Aable but just want to help him out, then please just use the following message. Cut and paste, easy as the proverbial pie.
Hello, my name is (put your name here) and I writting on behalf of a close friend Kelly Beattie. Kelly is currently suffering from Ulcerative colitis (Ulcerative colitis is a form of colitis, a disease of the intestine, specifically the large intestine or colon, that includes characteristic ulcers, or open sores, in the colon) which has currently confined him to a hospital and has severely limited his ability to eat as he wishes. I was hoping that you could help him in his time of need. Kelly has a great love of life, and his greatest love in life is food. Even though suffering from UC, he manages to entertain himself and friends with cooking and the stories of how much he loves to cook. His current hospitalization has prevented him from being able to engage in cooking for obvious reasons. So I am writing on behalf of Kelly to ask if you could do something for him, in the form of having Kelly on Emeril Live! and focusing an episode on how to person suffering from UC can learn to cook for themselves in a healthy and enjoyable way. UC takes so much of what Kelly loves, and I was hoping that you could take the time to help Kelly, and embrace Kelly's wish that people with UC learn that they can enjoy eating and learn to cook in a healthy manner for themselves!

Thank you so much for listening, Kelly will appreciate it!
(Your name here)


Just spam them! Send as many or as few e-mails as you like! Aable will appreciate it and hopefully he will be back soon with a new and improved colon! LOL

1 comments

Thursday, March 29, 2007

As per Aable's request.

Posted by Ringthree at 1:47 AM

I am going to start with the best way to help Aable as he is going through his physical troubles, as per his request.

After Dealing with ulcerative colitis since around 2003, finally things have gotten bad enough I have been in the hospital since St. Patrics day. I decided I will be going in for surgerie. March 29 sometime in the afternoon. I will be having Laparoscopic abdominal colectomy and ileostomy for any of you medicaly intersted people. Basically my large intestine will be totally removed. and i will have a poo pouch for a while. Then basically a section of my small instestine is formed into a new mini Colin while this is all going on called a j pouch. and my digestive tract is reconnected though that. my estimated recovery time in the hospital is somewhere around a couple weeks followed by other outpatient recovery.

In all I should end up with a better quality of life then i have been dealing with for the past few years so wish me luck. If you see someone around as me the next few weeks its (Exodus(Wargod))rob)

--On another note, since this sucks so bad anyone who wants to do something cool for me, please corrdinate with Ringthree; I am trying to see If i can get the foodnetwork to give me a free Trip to see Emeril Live maybe even convince him to do a special show basied on my condition or UC in general.----

Kelly Beattie
-aable


Ok, so here is what you can do. Send a e-mail to Emeril Live via the Food Network. If you don't know what exactly to say, or if you don't know Aable but just want to help him out, then please just use the following message. Cut and paste, easy as the proverbial pie.
Hello, my name is (put your name here) and I writting on behalf of a close friend Kelly Beattie. Kelly is currently suffering from Ulcerative colitis (Ulcerative colitis is a form of colitis, a disease of the intestine, specifically the large intestine or colon, that includes characteristic ulcers, or open sores, in the colon) which has currently confined him to a hospital and has severely limited his ability to eat as he wishes. I was hoping that you could help him in his time of need. Kelly has a great love of life, and his greatest love in life is food. Even though suffering from UC, he manages to entertain himself and friends with cooking and the stories of how much he loves to cook. His current hospitalization has prevented him from being able to engage in cooking for obvious reasons. So I am writing on behalf of Kelly to ask if you could do something for him, in the form of having Kelly on Emeril Live! and focusing an episode on how to person suffering from UC can learn to cook for themselves in a healthy and enjoyable way. UC takes so much of what Kelly loves, and I was hoping that you could take the time to help Kelly, and embrace Kelly's wish that people with UC learn that they can enjoy eating and learn to cook in a healthy manner for themselves!

Thank you so much for listening, Kelly will appreciate it!
(Your name here)


Just spam them! Send as many or as few e-mails as you like! Aable will appreciate it and hopefully he will be back soon with a new and improved colon! LOL

I will be posting this everywhere, and I hope that people take the time to help :)

Now, onto the game :) That is what they call the clumsy transition right there! LOL

Dynamis can be great when there are good drops and people end up getting things they have been waiting for and deserve. And Dynamis can be BST x2, BRD, and WHM x2 and make you want to claw your eyeballs out for 4 straight hours. Can you guess what happened yesterday? Yeah... when you see this in the loot pool its probably time to just through in the towel and go xp or something: This makes for a rather annoying, be very long run. I just don't get the drop system here, at least spread them out a bit. Obsidian gets so many freaking BST and BRD drops it is just ridiculous. I am not saying that those people that get them are any less deserving or those pieces are inherently worse than any other pieces, but I would just like to see a RDM hat drop, just once. Gawayne freaking deserves it, even with his Excalibur. Ahh well, 5 drops in general is neither bad nor good I suppose, what I didn't understand was the fact that there were only 51 people to an unopposed Xarcabard run, the update was small so I doubt that was to blame. Well, since we had cleared most of the zone already and were already at the Great Ax NM, we decided to give it a go for someone that needed the fragment. No real prep, just "Hay guyz, LOL Animated Great Axe Gogogo!" I had already two-houred, but it wouldn't have made a difference really, because apparently a 774 Tach: Gekko is pretty decent damage on the Animated Great Axe, and it took umbridge. That umbridge was in the form of a Metatron Torment. ;_; I guess my Gekko must have been a crit or something, because I was subbing WAR at the time, and I don't think it was a double attack proc. Oh well, it was a win anyway, and seeing as it wasn't a full run and we were able to kill it pretty handily, I can see us doing this more often because several people are already moving onto the 3rd and 4th stages now. Coins are getting to become pretty easy to come by, for example Omoi is already on stage 2 Polearm and has some coins for Stage 3. Pretty ambitious, I say, but the way Omoi does things she will get it eventually, and she will love it dearly. LOL

After the long slog that was Dynamis-Xarcabard, I got some people together and I finally got to XP on my NIN, which I hadn't been able to do in a long while, because of my RNG. It was a pretty simple party, no extremely long chains or anything just some decent XP while most everyone was in Besieged, meaning we had our choice of mobs in Bhaflau Thickets. Everyone got a merit or two, and I got to recap XP on NIN after losing a bit to Byakko, and get another merit after that. I ended up putting it into Katana, even though I said I was going to do Archery first. I don't know, its not like STR where I have to make a major commitment just to save up for one upgrade. One merit here, two merits there, and so it goes, until I have 8 Katana and 4 Archery, which will be the inevitable result. Plus I see getting a bunch of these merits on NIN, in general so, the faster I do Katana merits, the faster I will get getting merits, etc. Self-reinforcing cycle.

Now for your picture of the day, its Pbdomenator, the belly-dancer.

1 comments

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

A funny thing happened on the way to the Shrine.

Posted by Ringthree at 2:24 AM

The funny things that happen in FFXI are sometimes even better than the good things that happen in FFXI. Yesterday was a good day, but even better it was funny day. So, for no other reason than to engage in chronological consistency, lets start with Sky. Sky is great now, I mean really great, the RMT are still there and they are worse than they used to be because they are getting to be really freaking desperate, but they are obviously fighting a losing battle. For example, as I am getting to Sky, everyone is already moving to claim Faust as we had been just a little late to get Zip moments before, so we head on up to Faust trying to beat the RMT there. No real problem with the pull, but I get to tank Faust as NIN/DRK which was fun to say the least. We had a couple of new people in Sky that didn't really understand that they had to have blockaid on, and the RMT took advantage. Their PLD cured one person, then did the normal steal effects, Invincible, etc. and take it up to our mages to MPK them. It was moderately successful but we managed to get some of the hate back, and while this was happening a GM sent me a tell about a previous RMT problem. So the PLD dies and as we are managing to get things under control, and then I zone... I mean I zoned as if I was going between different zones but it was back to the very place to where I was standing, thus causing a quick loss of claim, but we got it back because the RMT PLD had already homepointed. Shortly after that our BLM's drop a couple of ES Burst's and Faust was dead, just to get the fight done quickly. While I was quickly trying to talk to the GM while tanking (not that easy, especially for a controller user) the GM, right after I "zoned," said something like "There now you should be safe from an MPK and we can talk," but afterward claimed they had nothing to do with it, and that sometimes you "resynch" into the game. I call BS, I think he thought I was being trained on, instead of like an actual steal MPK, and thus thought he was saving me. Well, anyway, it didn't matter because we won and I found out this little bit of information: Very interesting if true, but Luminious is kind of known for being hot and cold and making things up as he goes along, so I don't know if it is true or not. Anyway, that was just the first fiasco of the night. LOL

Let me say this, with NIN/DRK trying to tank with a NIN/WAR is more difficult than I thought but for a different reason than I expected, it is too easy to build far too much hate. It can be difficult to balance hate when you have so many hate tools available. I think balancing with a PLD/NIN would be much easier, because they have more tools than those available to a NIN/WAR. Truthfully, while fighting Genbu and Byakko I didn't think much about balancing hate, and I should have been. Genbu didn't matter, but three triple attacks in a row from Byakko and you are going to be eating cerment, as I did. I was trying to get as much hate as I could, which was problematic for Akanea and myself. LOL I think that until we have another NIN/DRK or Iz comes PLD/NIN to balance the hate load, I will be going NIN/WAR. I will trying NIN/DRK a couple of more times to fix my hate mongering issues, but if its too hard to balance I will just go back to NIN/WAR on gods and stick with SATA for hate. I do like NIN/DRK better because it feels more like I am in control of hate rather than subject to SATA, because even with a ton of enmity on, I am just not going to keep hate against big spells and WS's.

Speaking of Byakko eating my face, which the big tiger did quite handily, we managed to get a great drop set on our first kitty in a while. Congrats to Iceblazek and Gordor on Neptunal Hands and Dryadic Legs respectively. Izman also got a Byakko's Axe, and we got assorted other drops, including some bank items for a little bit of money for everyone. In a moment reserved for funny, as well as good, Omoi managed to D/C right before trading the stones for Byakko. This was the opportune moment for poking, and fun was had by all. :) Overall, Versus is turning back into the largish Sky shell that it was before the RMT take over, we are just able to do a lot of things we weren't able to do before because everyone now has Sea, so Limbus and Sea are options, also Salvage of which I wish we were doing more, but I understand the need to focus on other things for people that need gear. It has been a good week for us definitely and it is only Wednesday. :) Oh, speaking of which, we got our first Yin Yang Robe in the LS yesterday. Sholo got the ToD on Shikagami Weapon and it finally dropped, even though we have gotten claim many times before. >.< So congrats to Sholo on his new Robe (and we still owe Biblo one).
Right after Sky, I was able to again level my RNG, which was great. The party was Gordor, Iceblazek, Izman, Crois (a nice JP RDM that has partied with us in the past), another JP WHM and I. This was the best party we have had so far, getting pretty high chains at the Mamool Ja camp near the entrance to the Jade Sepulcher. Chain 11 was our best of the night, I believe but when pulled correctly we were easily able to get to Chain 7 or 8 with regularity, the one Mamool Ja Infiltrator being our consistant downfall. But the XP was great, managing to easily get the last 26k I needed for 75 on RNG. Well, I finally got it! Wootz! I now have to get a buffer, because I am only about 1k above my level, then I really need to start filling in the gaps, Archer's Knife and Drone Earrings being the first things that need to go. I feel so gimp with those on, but now that I am 75 I can round out the rest of my gear and not be so... average. LOL So the camping of O Bow begins in earnest tonight, and I will also be doing much more meriting on my NIN, and then farming for yummy items like the "Oh my god the sky is falling price" E Bow, a Triumph Earring and ultimately a Woodville's Axe or even a Kriegsbiel. My NIN has been a bit neglected in parties as of late and I would like to get it out to stretch my legs a bit. Time to get those Katana and Archery merits.

Well, tonight is Dynamis-Xarcabard, nothing much that I want or need from there right now, so it will be a fun run for me. I was wondering though, which job I should take to the next Dynamis Lord run on Sunday, SAM or RNG. If anyone has any input on that decision I would like to hear it! :)

Also, tomorrow, and everyday after that I will have an e-mail for people to send to Emeril on the Food Network about Aable, with the ultimate goal of getting him to go on one of Emeril's shows! So more about that tomorrow.

8 comments

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Placeholder Day.

Posted by Ringthree at 1:02 AM

A quick run down on my day, then my consternation over RNG. First was Limbus. LOL Although this picture is of a wipe we didn't really have much of a problem with SE Apollyon, just a bad pull on the Inhumer level. A couple of bad Blood Weapons and we are all dead. :) Just got up and finished up the zone, but I thought this picture was pretty cute, so I grabbed it. We did get some good Apollyon AF +1 drops, like NIN, BLM and RDM. I think that Eternalpain got a full set for BLM, so that is good. :) Got another Smalt Chip for Omega, which gives Elfaria another half set toward Omega. Right before Limbus, I was able to pick up my Loquacious Earring. I hope this helps with my NIN/DRK which I should be able to test out in Sky today. ^.^/ I think I should have well more than enough MP with my Turban, MP Merits, Loquacious and /DRK. I still need to practice the tanking style, as its not like /WAR where you get Provoke every 30 seconds and a few enfeebles in between. I don't know how good it will be on Gods considering the fact that we have a lot of SATA for those fights, but I figure this is a good place to test it out. And I have witnessed it working very well against Omega because SATA is not as reliable with its physical defense forms and hate resets. I figure Gods are a great place for testing because there is back up and we have done them many times in the past. After Limbus, we gathered most of the LS to go and do CoP 8-3 for Illius, Pb and Hellzfury, which went pretty well and we ended up getting something like 5 M Ghrah chips because we just farmed the zone while we were running about the zone. Glacian decided to blood tank the Ghrah NM at the end, which was pretty funny. LOL He did something like 3000 damage in 30 seconds but the NM ended up Sickle Slashed while it was in spider form. >.< Oh well, he was the only one that died and the whole thing went very smoothly.

Speaking of Gods, we have Sky again today, hopefully we will get to do Byakko *crosses fingers* not specifically planning on it, but it would be nice to get a try at the big Kitty.

I have been spending quite a bit of time in the last couple of weeks leveling my RNG to 75, and I wish I could say I was parsing better, and apparently the parses that people are using don't grab all of the information from a RNG because of being out of range to pick up the attacks. Maybe I should try running a parser but it sucks to have to turn off all of my filters and I don't really care that much to do it. LOL Ok, maybe I do because I wouldn't mention it, if I didn't. Well lets say that I am disappointed in my total damage output. I am thinking two things could be the issue here. 1) I am not 75, that is the obvious one because I am still missing some really good gear and 2) I need to melee. I dont know how good my damage output would be if I was meleeing but my TP build might be a little bit quicker. Allowing for more Sidewinders. I could also switch to Crossbow, which will be an option after I get 75 and camp O bow (which I really want to do now, but I need to focus on 75 *FOCUS* LOL). Ok, this is getting a bit repetitive, but once I do get to 75 I am definitely going to swap in more and more STR gear, because even at 73 level Archery skill I was parsing better than 90% Ranged Accuracy on Trolls. So at 75 with merits and Seiryu's Kote or Crimson Finger Gauntlets I will be able to easily use much more STR gear and I think I should look at some more Ranged Attack too.

I have noticed that people are progressing further in Salvage and the strategies are definitely becoming more refined, several people have been completing pieces, but Versus only had a few people show up on Sunday for our run (thus the switch to Sea instead) although I was one of them because I was out of town. I would also like to focus a small group on doing Nyzul Isle, but I don't really know anyone that has that kind of focus, even having an Assault group would be really nice, instead of just doing pick-ups all the time. It just seems that I have been spinning my wheels and not using all of my tags when I could be using them and I would really like to do that. I would really like to focus on Salvage, I just wish that they had a different way to access Salvage that using your freaking AP to get into it, it just kind of stupid, and they should have made it a separate system from the AP. I just want to use my tags when I have them instead of having them rot, and for once it would be nice to have someone ask me instead of asking other people to do things. :)

Like the title says it was a Placeholder Day yesterday, not much to mention that peaked my interest besides seeing more and more people getting Salvage pieces and thinking we could do that too, if people showed up. :)

0 comments

Monday, March 26, 2007

WARNING, WARNING, WARNING! AILEE UNFRIENDLY POST TITLE: Meat... for the love of god MEAT!

Posted by Ringthree at 2:58 AM

I was away this weekend, just traveling and drinking as much as I could between dealing with the reoccurring RL physical troubles I have been having. Anyway, traveling led me to not being on much at all this weekend, but the time I was on was very productive. When I did get home Versus was finishing up some missions for people that didn't have access to the Grand Palace yet. We completed that rather quickly, then headed to farm for some HQ organs for Ix'MNK. We only had to farm for two rooms to get the HQ Aern organ to drop and in that time we killed Ghrah's and managed to get two chips. It was really nice to be able to get them, but kind of orz on my already full gobbie bag. We headed to check the ??? on the left side because that is where it is usually up, because most people don't bother going to the left side if the right side isn't up. LOL Luckily it was there but we had to leave Hellzfury at the gate because he didn't have access yet, something I am apparently rectifying after Limbus tonight, for Pb and Illius as well. Shouldn't take too long if everyone pays attention. :) Well, we popped Ix'MNK and took him over to the kiting room in the West Tower (Mithra, I believe), and after building some hate and sorting out the mages, the kite was on. Didn't take very long, and since this was the first time kiting it (only one tank and no WHM at the time) I know it can get shorter. I did notice some things to make this fight easier, like it is not worth getting shadows up with a full defense/dmg- gear on, because in the time it takes for me to cast shadows Ix'MNK has already caught up to me and has taken my shadows. If I just voke every 30 seconds I can keep hate from decent nukes and generally avoid being hit if I voke right after a corner. When we have fought Ix'MNK before it was just straight up with no kiting, so this was kind of new and fun to test.
Anyway, we got a Deed from Ix'MNK, but Elf got so excited when the drop happened that they thought it was the Cape. LOL Poor Elfie. :)

After Sea, I grabbed Gordor, Ice and Izman for more meriting and leveling, but this time I was going to approach things a little differently. I was planning on trying meat, so I picked up a stack of really cheap Coeurl Subs:

* MP +10
* Strength +5
* Agility +1
* Intelligence -2
* HP Regeneration While Healing +1
* Resist Stun
* Resist Sleep
* Attack +20% (Cap: 75@375 Base Attack)
* Ranged Attack +20% (Cap: 75@375 Base Ranged Attack)
I thought that a 95% Ranged Accuracy would be enough to support meat, but I was still going to have some problems with accuracy like any melee would, when using meat over sushi. I was completely wrong. I was totally able to keep 95% Ranged Accuracy and eat the subs, and boy did my damage go way up. Also, it had been appearing that I was parsing a little low for the area I was in against the other people in the party, but it turns out the parsers that Ice is using is not that great at picking up ranged attacks, so I will blame my low parses on that. :) Anyway, I can't believe how effective using meat can be on RNG, my damage went up massively, including Crits for over 200 dmg, and I didn't take a hit at all in my accuracy. I think it may be time to start subbing in more STR gear for regular TP build. Why didn't anyone tell me that RNG's were this accurate? LOL I am going to take a peak at Red Curry, but it is horribly expensive to be using for an XP party. Well, I need to test out other kinds of meat dishes so that I can use them whenever is most appropriate, but at this point it will be meat-only on RNG from now on, there is no condition under which I believe that I will ever need more accuracy again, especially considering the amount of accuracy gear to which I already have access. Anyway, this party was really good, considering the party set up was "only" NIN, WAR, THF, RNG, RDM, WHM. Oh noes! No BRD! Well, even without a BRD we got this with competition in the Mire: And Kylara was our WHM at level 68 and was keeping up just fine with everyone else. In fact, she got to level 69 just one mob before I got to level 74. With level 74, I got to put on my sexy new Scout's Socks, which will definitely be a bump up in damage with almost nothing lost as I was using Hunter's Socks before that. I must say that my RNG is definitely moving in the right direction and it even looks like the price of E Bow's are coming down with it being placed in the new BCNM. I would LOVE to pick one of those up, but my goal is to get to 75 first then focus on filling the gaps, as some of those still exist, quite clearly with the use of an Archer's Knife being the most glaring issue. I have some thoughts for that slot, all of which are pretty expensive, but doable. Here is my current TP build for RNG since leveling last night:
My final thoughts for today are about the meaning of TH3, and what SE meant by the fact that they were going to increase the drop rate on items soon. Well, in the aforementioned Beaucidine run we not only had a lot of AF drops but quite a few coin drops, I mean on par with city runs. That is a lot of coins to be getting out of an outlands run, and not only that but it was not uncommon to see 3 or 4 coins dropping from a single mob. We did fight more Hydra's and they did have a good drop rate but it felt like something was different and the moon was not in cycle for a good drop run. I had two thoughts on this. One, that the amount of TH3 in the game has massively increased with the new way to easily get a Thief Knife, and being that they are now relatively inexpensive. Two, that SE just increased the drop rate on items since the last update. I don't know which yet, but I will be closely observing how the next couple of Outlands run do on the coin and AF front.

On a sidenote: Chocobo Racing on Wednesday, and I am off to read more on Salvage and Nyzul Isle.

I would also like to mention something about Aable. I didn't know if it was my place to talk about it here, but he has made it obvious that it would be ok. ^.^ So, I wish and I hope that everyone wishes Aable a speedy recovery from his maladies, as he was admitted to the hospital last week for complications from colitis. Get better man, we miss you, and just post anything here that you want me to post for people and you will get it posted first thing. Aable mentioned that he likes food, and loves making food, and that his greatest wish would be for the Food Network to have a show dedicated to cooking for people with CUC (can't remember what that stands for now). So, send out e-mails and letter and whatever is necessary to the Food Network to help Aable out. :) I tried navigating the Food Network website, orz, but Aable if you have a show you want us to contact just tell me which one and it will be done. :) Hoping you get better, fast.

2 comments

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Wait... are you telling me that things actually drop in the Glacier?

Posted by Ringthree at 2:49 AM

I can tell you this, I have recently moved, and even though its only about 5-10 more minutes away from work this changes things a lot on Dynamis days. I already have to stay late at work to be able to bid on AF on the Obsidian website, then rush home to be ready in time. And if I plan on eating before the run its even closer, making it a close shave to make it home when I am bidding on a competitive piece. The leaders have mentioned moving the start time back to 7:30 which would help a little more I guess, if they move the close of the bids back a little also. Just a completely random commentary there.

Another comment on Obsidian is that this month's schedule is so much better than it has been in the past. Several unopposed outlands runs where we can get a full compliment of people rather than splitting a group of the best members to do a CoP area. It just hurts outlands runs where, to farm the most efficiently, we should have the largest group of the best people available. Last night we did Dynamis-Beaucidine, and it was the best outlands run I have ever been on with Obsidian. We pulled all four Dynamis Statues, and could have farmed even more Hydras than we did, I think. The run had a lot of good drops, especially from the Hydra mobs, in fact we got these two on the very first pull. You may have also noticed that I had lot on the Scout's Socks, and yep they were mine. :) Well, that resolves my foot gear question for my RNG rather quickly, no silly looking War Boots for me! ^.^/ Also, Ladyrikku got her NIN body, which for other circumstances, like runs she missed where it did drop (and I got lucky and got one!), she wasn't able to get it before now. So a big congratulations to her. Even more importantly to Glacian, congratulations on Melee Cyclas. He was supposed to have to lot with Olandu on this item, and when he lot something like a 118, he thought for sure that he lost it, but Olandu had apparently fallen asleep and Glacian ended up getting it unopposed! Now he just needs his Melee Crown and he will have two full sets of AF2. :)

Back to the run itself, because it is worthy of further mention. Again we did very well, and took down all of four of the Mega-bosses, that were "supposed" to weaken the dragons that come with the final Eye. This will be important later in the story, orz. Anyway, we don't often fight this NM and it just struck me as a little off. A goblin NM that is a Chicago White Sox fan? Anyway... LOL After this great run, we head down to get the win, everything goes normally, but apparently I got to be the lucky random target of Death... weee! X-( That isn't the worst of it, either. In what could be said to be the "worst idea ever" it is declared that we should fight the Pukis'... yeah... Oh well, I was already weakened so I get out of the way, then get eaten by of the Pukis completely at random. LOL We did kill the Fire and Wind Pukis before the kiter for the other two died and they came back and killed everyone else. I don't even know if this was the intention at the beginning of the run, but in the annals of bad ideas, this will be noted with infamy. LOL Oh, well, it was fun to try.

Immediately after Dynamis a couple of us geared up to help Lucella finish Promyvion-Vahzl, luckily she already had access to the bottom floor and we already had 3 sets of animas. We headed on down to the BC and the fight was simple and easy and best of all quick. This is how CoP missions should be done. :) Only took about 20 minutes from gearing up to warping out. I did have to borrow some gear though, because I don't really have a lot of 50 gear left over. So I was asking to bum some food, and this... this is what I got from Omoi: Thanks for the ice cream... LOL and she was indignant that I didn't want her ice cream. ^.^/ (Thats the evil version of that smilie, by the way). While we were still gearing up for the run, I came across this: A really sweet Kyudogi, something that I wish I had. :) It is an awesome piece and better yet, it is just awesome looking, I just love the badging across the front of the chest. It requires a Cerebrus hide and a Yoichi's Sash, both hard to come by pieces and a very high level synth.

After Vahzl, we headed out to XP again, as Ice, Iz and I have been doing a lot lately. Ice barely won the parse, but has a damage bonus on flies in the Mire where we have been xping so that I can do decent damage to mobs while being underleveled for the xp party. I have also been talking to Crotchy (Kitty's RL brother) about what gear I should be using for my RNG, and it has been very enlightening for me. I am still a little confused on what I should be using for certain situations and what food I should be using but I am slowly getting it. :) I think at the new XP party I will be using Couerl Subs, so that I can keep up with the damage that is being done by te other two. I think a party on trolls will show a different result that the past few Mire parties, and favor Izman.

As a final note, Feiwong is back. I got a random tell from Roflga, who also sent tells to Pb and Ice. He is claiming that he has already purchased another character on another server and is planning on moving it over once SE enables server transfers. Another reason why server transfers are a BAD idea. This is just a small clip of the middle of the "conversation" we had, it quickly spiraled out of control because I had no wish to engage in Feiwong's wishful thinking of people accepting him this time. There was no reason to even engage him in his claims of a return to civility. So, be warned he is back and doesn't appear to have changed at all. He even claimed that he is going to join a good LS, build a "good reputation" and then become a normal player, just like everyone else. Yeah, I have heard that one before. I hope he dies in a fire.

Oh, I am away this weekend again, so this is the last entry until Monday.

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Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Welcome back.

Posted by Ringthree at 3:09 AM

Well, Versus headed back to Sky for the first time in month's, and it was a very good day. We started out with a nice Genbu just to get warmed back up. It was a fun fight and over pretty quickly, nothing much of importance dropped. And as quickly as that we were off to farm water and diorite. This was the first time we were camping it and there was a little bit of competition in Ullikummi's room apparently, but it wasn't too bad, so one group stuck around, while the other farmed water. No water but two diorites within an hour of being there and they dropped just two mobs apart. I know people that have farmed them for days without a drop and we got two within an hour. I can see this making farming water much better, in fact I think the drop rate is probably even better than water, because instead of just farming water we can farm both. Right now the competition is really stiff for a lot of things but I can see with how easy Byakko is to spawn now and how Kirin's will now be much easier it wont be long before Sky thins out a little bit. Anyway, we all went back down to Ulli's room after a while and popped ourselves our own personal little Ullikummi. God, it is so much nicer to be able to do this rather than watching RMT steal and hack themselves Ullikummi after Ullikummi. After Ullikummi we headed over to Suzaku and after a little bit of confusion about the location of some of the gems :) we popped it. Another fight to get back in the swing of things, and pretty crappy drops. LOL Shockingly, I did not die at all! It was a miracle... as Iz pointed out, rather pointedly. Well, I mean... they could wander up there you know! It's not my fault the Yovras like to hang out above the Aw'euvhi!

After Sky, I grabbed my "assault partners" (also called constantly nagged people) Omoi and Iz to finish the last two Mamool Ja assaults to get my puffy pants finally! It's also decent xp while you are doing something else to get assault points, so two birds with one stone and the such. After two smooth runs we were quickly finished and I went down to the Mamool Ja assault counter and finally picked up my Pahluwan Seraweels. Probably best non-Salvage piece for RNG except for in very high accuracy situations, where you could wear AF2 legs (which I don't have). After our little foray into Mamook we headed out of the staging point to get some xp. It was Iceblazek, Izman, Pbdominator, a really good JP NIN, and a really bad NA RDM. Shocking right? LOL As I have said when you look at the number of excellent players there are just as many NA's as JP's, but when you look at the average player the JP's are going to be generally better than the average NA, not because they are Asian, but because they for the most part pay attention and are considerate, instead of being lazy, self-absorbed or stoned. And sure at the bottom, there are JP's and NA's equally, but in general in parties its easier to get along with a JP player than an NA if you are just pulling people out of a hat. Ice actually parsed the fight with divisortheory's new parser, and apparently it is really nice. I was sadly not keeping up with Izman, Ice or the NIN. Ice had bad numbers because he used meat and ended up missing a lot on the Mamool's because our RDM was too busy standing in AoE range to be bothered with dispelling Warm-up. The parse had Izman in first place, the JP NIN in second (because they died once at the end, they probably would have won by a little without that) then Ice third, I think. I know I was fourth, a good ways back. >.< We kept the party going until I got to 73 then we disbanded because people were getting really tired including myself. But we did have some fun with the mobs there, RAWR!
In other news, Avesta soloed Seiryu... yeah. Thats just crazy. If you don't know who Avesta is, you just aren't paying attention. This is Avesta's website with a list of all the mobs that he has soloed, ATSEVA And here is the video (very long video) of him soloing Seiryu. Amazingly impressive, this guy is the best. That's it, everyone else is trying to be him.

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Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Long days, long nights.

Posted by Ringthree at 1:52 AM

Yesterday started out nicely, get home and a Besieged is about to begin. I generally thought that when all five generals were present that Zazarg was the dedault cutscene but not this time, maybe they rotate. The invasion was from the Lamia and Undead Swarm and I had not seen any of the new mobs for the Undead Swarm since the last update. I got on my RNG to get some xp there, but I didn't know if I would have enough time before Limbus to finish it out. I did get to see some of the new Arcolith mobs they are pretty neat looking and I don't know if they are in any of the new missions yet, because I have only moved up to the new Mamool Ja BCNM. Anyway, when you fight them they slowly fall to pieces, losing arms and even their whole torso. When they do stay together for the most part until you kill them they then fall completely apart when they die. Very interesting new mobs to say the least, and they also play into the Lamia's storyline very well. Sadly, I didn't have enough time to finish the Besieged before our Limbus run was supposed to start.

Limbus went great, much better than our last Kings run, mostly because we had a little practice under our belt, and knew how to deal with Kaiser Behemoth much more appropriately. It was also our largest run so far, which was nice and we should have more coming in soon. The win also got us our last chip in our first Omega set ^.^/ I don't know when we are going to do the first Omega, but I think we will probably be over prepared for it, as we have been taking things much more slowly and cautiously in the past three runs than we have in the first few runs. It was a little interesting last night because we had more than enough power to take out all of the mobs, so things were dying faster than they usually do. For example, we took down the ram very quickly too quickly in fact. Now, can you see what happened to me in this cute little screen shot here? Yes, that is me, using Barrage on the ram, which then died very quickly after, then me not realizing that my last shot did not go off before the ram died, then pulling the last buffalo on the level with Barrage. I got a flash and a voke and a stun in there somewhere and still had hate on the thing, and everyone on vent was like why did you pull with Barrage and I was all like NO WAI! I did not! Sadly, I did. (As for the Lucimon comment in my pulling macro? It was from an xp party that he was in with me the other day, and the only thing that needs to be taken from the whole experience is that I do, in fact, have a penis.) LOL Oh well, on to the next floor, killed the turtle very quickly, definitely not even as resistant as Genbu. We only skipped the Fafnir clone, but we did have a rather close shave with it, when we were fighting the last wyvern and he decided to come trundling by to take a peek, luckily we avoided aggro and we moved on to the next level. Next time we are likely to leave the BLM's and a RDM to take care of it while the rest of us "useless" melee head down to the last level to start clearing out the Kronprinz's to save some time. Everything on the Apollyon side is so much more weak to magic than than on the Temenos side in general. Like the melee's just flail about while Kaiser is just kited by the BLM's, who do all of the damage. Outside of my EES for like 198 on Kaiser, I did 1, count it 1 point of damage on my RNG to it while it was being kited, and that was from an arrow. LOL Sure I am still 72 but I was expecting a bit more than that. Oh well, Elfaria, Eternalpain and Gordor did a fine job doing most of the damage. :)

After Limbus I did two more Mamool Ja assaults and but realized I was going to need to have at least two more runs for my Pahluwan legs, but only had one more tag for the day, so instead of rushing it we just stopped for the evening and headed out to Cape Terrigan to help Ice try to get a Kukri... yeah, that led to me long night. No pop, but I did get something like 6k xp on my RNG and some decent skill ups, like this nice shot right here:
We have Sky again today, first in a while, and we have some gems already saved up so we should be popping some Gods if we have the healing to cover a fight. I would guess something like a Seiryu, Suzaku or Genbu just to get warmed back up after so much time away from Sky. After Byakko's Haidate, I have a limited amount of gear that I really need to get my NIN to pretty close to perfection. Some Dusk Gloves would be nice, but Koga Tekko and O's Kote are arguably better for my situation definitely at night. After that its just Nyzul Isle gear and Salvage gear.

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