Lament.

The last couple of blog entries have been pretty insightful, if I do say so myself, but I don't know about today's. Well, lets see what we can do. LOL

A quick recap on yesterday to lead into today's discussion. First, started by leveling SAM, THF, BLM and BRD with Omoi, Izman and Glacian. This lasted for like 15 minutes, because we had Limbus to go to earlier than I remembered. LOL Limbus was a simple run, Apollyon NE, lots of good drops, like two NIN AF upgrade items. Then several hours of fruitless Sea farming. No Ix'Drk, and the spawn for Faith kept moving about moving away from us whenever we got close. LOL I really wanted to give Faith a go yesterday. At least spawning something would have been nice, but no, just a couple hours of running around and crappy xp.

Now, that wasn't very exciting for a blog entry, so I think I am going to go back to an old reliable, obsessing over gear. Now, this is just some new piece of gear that I am looking for to add to my repertoire, but rather a new way that I want to look at tanking for events. I used to tank in my XP TP build gear and had my WS gear and my tanking gear on me in general. After a while I just noticed that I was taking more damage that I could have been avoiding. So, I have specifically moved to a semi-evasion gear set up. Let me just say this, this is not a new idea. LOL I was all about evasion and enmity until I moved to the burn party set ups in the new areas while XPing to 75. But I gave up on this set up because it was unnecessary, and I was going to events as DRG still. As I have switched to mostly going to events as NIN, it definitely is time to bring my evasion set up out of retirement.

The main problem with an evasion set up at events is that we have some very powerful DD's and mages which tend to tear hate away from anyone that isn't keeping up damage wise. So the question is, what is the best balance? Well, lets take a look at what I have now.

Main: Senjuinrikio
Off: Fudo
Ranged: Ungur Boomerang
Head: Optical Hat
Neck: Evasion Torque
Earring: Brutal Earring
Earring: Suppanomimi
Body: Scorpion Harness
Hands: Seiryu's Kote
Ring: Sniper's Ring
Ring: Rajas Ring
Back: Amemet Mantle +1
Waist: Swift Belt
Legs: Koga Hakama or Byakko's Haidate
Feet: Fuma Sune-ate

This is what I believe to be a rather balanced evasion and damage set-up but I definitely can tweak it some more, a Boxer's Mantle is the first thing that comes to my mind as being a great step up for my evasion set up. The funny thing is while writing this I took at look at what Rukenshin (an awesome player that has great guides for a bunch of different jobs even if it is with gear I don't have LOL, check it out at Rukenshin's LiveJournal) has done for an evasion and it turns out his "Solo" set-up is close to what I have adjusted to be my evasion tanking set up for events. So, I will pursue a Boxer's Mantle to fill the last slot, but I was actually surprised that I was already so close to what I want to balance out my evasion set. There are other slots I could shift to evasion gear, most obviously the earring slots, but I don't know how much the benefit would be after giving up my Brutal Earring or my Suppanomimi.

Now, in practice, I LOVE this set up, stacked with Kurayami, I have a pretty good evasion rate on PH mobs in Sea and Sky, while still being able to easily keep hate with WAR sub. Its a little more difficult when subbing /DRK, but at least I can hold hate initially, then whatever it is that we are fighting dies quickly. I am going to continue to upgrade my evasion set-up slowly, so that it becomes even more effective, but I don't think I need to push it much further for day to day use.

Honestly, I don't know how Rukenshin carries around so much stuff when he is on his NIN. LOL Some of his gear is just amazing. Well, that is all I have for today, not a great entry, but I will have something more for tomorrow I hope :)