Picture recap.

I really need to get back into the swing of things when it comes to screenshots, but honestly a lack of good drops and a lack of new things to do it really killing it right now. Screenshots do such a good job at filling in blog space. It gives it life, and beauty and makes it look like I have written much more than I actually have :) Anyway, lets see, I have finished the Treasures missions up to the maximum available, and man, they are just awesome. This is the part where a nice person would warn you about spoilers, but honestly, someone has probably spoiled it already for you, and seriously, there is no reason that anyone shouldn't be at the end already. I mean, the other day three of my friends trio'd the Black Coffin fight. The only semi-difficult fight is the Gessho fight, which is actually the first semi-real challenging fight in the storyline and we did it with only 5 people. Honestly, these new missions are like missions-made-easy, you don't even have to go very far to get the next set of CS's. CoP was challenging, and the CS's took you all over the world. Here, its one zone, hop to another zone, done. Well, after Gessho, we get our first real look at Odin when he is presented as such. And Lazuf's little rebellion from the Lord of the Underworld. Ok, seriously, SE needs to let players get neat particle effects like Lazuf has on his rapier and knife, and let them do that bad-assed swing your sword over your head move. PS2 limitations my ass, there is no reason that if they can do it in a CS, they can't do it on a regular player. Ahh well, the plot further develops, and this is what I like about the new storyline the most, their is no real good and evil sides like CoP. Sure the Empire looks bad, but what about Aphmau? Gessho a bad guy, but he is just trying to stop the Empire? The Beastmen are just trying to stop the clash of Alexander and Odin, but they still kill people and stuff? Then there is the Allied Forces, that want to stop the Empire but where does that put them, with the Beastmen? Don't forget Lazuf and Odin, who are out to destroy the everyone in the Empire and clash with Alexander, but Lazuf doesn't so now he is opposed to Odin. The spiderweb of alliances and enemies is actually quite interesting. Besides, its finally nice to see that Bastok is getting involved in all of this. I don't know if they plan on doing a whole lot more with the storyline or not, but it seems to me they could. We are only just now getting to the characters at the heart of the conflict. Honestly, I don't even know if that was Odin that was making an appearance, or if it just was an avatar. Alexander still hasn't been risen, and really I would like to see some more BCNM's from this expansion. SE still has time for at least two more updates before the next expansion, so we will see what they are going to give us. If its just the Pit, then I am stabbing someone in the eye.

I heard someone come up with a good idea to help to fix the overabundance of melee burn parties. Introduce new mobs that have two aspects, first, they have high defense and HP so they are less vulnerable to traditional burn WS's, but are weak to Skillchain damage and Magic Burst damage. Second, have them give an XP bonus or uncapped XP, to equal out XP to those that can kill weaker mobs faster. This would be something like Qutrubs maybe, but would act as an alternative to the standard melee burn party, not a replacement for it. And the way to prevent abuse is by controlling the TP moves of the mobs to prevent over reliance on a certain job (Kuftal Tunnel basement comes to mind) and by having the additional bonus damage from Skillchains and Magic Bursts limited by the Tier of the SC. Tier 1 SC's would have a very weak bonus, Tier 2 slightly better, then Tier 3 would be massively better. This would mean that SC's again would be a consideration in building parties, and you could have the mobs elementally based so that a BLM would actually have to use spells that aren't necessarily Lighting or Ice based, and the mobs could be Light or Darkness susceptible so that it NIN's couldn't just be plugged in as the sole tank all the time. It would provide an opportunity for more jobs to be invited to parties.

Anyway, I thought that would be a decent way to create an alternative to the burn party mentality. XP per hour is the major determination for how people create parties, at least for intelligent people, if an alternative was created that allowed for a comparable XP per hour, people would embrace it.

As I have mentioned I got WAR to 72. And I got to XP it some more yesterday, but it still feels like my WAR is just floundering, not really going anywhere. Blargh, we will see if I can get a little xp in this weekend, and maybe on Wednesday.

Finally, here is a shot of a dropless Qiqirn Astrologer from Salvage. I can't wait to finally get one drop from this zone so that we can move on to kill the Bhaflau boss, because once we have one piece from Arrapago and have the piece from Bhaflau we can essentially finish our first piece. And we should have some other pieces from Bhaflau to then go back and focus on from Arrapago. SSR is the easiest place to get gear from so it will be the last place we will go. LOL Wishful thinking so far. :)