Wishes granted?

Oh god, this is going to be difficult. I had a very busy weekend, have a ton of pics to go over and its update day. So quickly, the first thing to go over is the banning of the RMT. Another 6960 accounts banned and 2.6 billion gil out of the economy. They said they are now focusing on crafting bots as well as their normal round up of hackers and cheaters. Very nice to hear, especially for my crafting friends! That is just a minor detail today though, because RMT has become less and less of an issue for the game with all the measures that they are taking, and because today is update day! Yay! No word on the update notes yet, but I will cover them when they pop up. Luckily this lets me go over my busy weekend.

Alright, first thing is my final Assault Rank up to Second Lieutenant, which was achieved at the end of our Assault run on Friday night. We had a very successful run on Friday night, getting a bunch of new rank ups for people and new missions completed. We were going to have to do Apkallu Seizure for Sholo, which is just a hard mission, but he fell asleep so we got to do some other missions like Azure Experiments which was pretty fun, and we even got a ??? ring, but it wasn't a Divisor Ring. :(

The rank up mission was not very difficult but it was really long and funny. First, we had to go to officer training, which actually took place in the area that will be used for the Pit when it is released. The school was run by what appeared to be a relative of Naja Salaheem, LOL. She was barking orders with what appeared to be Hellzfury's twin in sunglasses too... (That's him in the background, LOL). Anyway, we were introduced to the new Drill Sergeant Rongelouts. In classic drill sergeant fashion Rongelouts yells a lot, calls people maggots, and you eventually earn his stubborn respect. I thought there was a bit of interesting detail in this mission as they mention a character from the southern continent, likely an assassin, which is interesting because in the last expansion they offered up some slight details about the expansion in previous updates, like how the Limbus gear came from the Near East, etc. I wonder if this has any importance for the future at all. Anyway, a lot of the missions focused on you meeting the drill sergeants grueling tasks with the laughable back drop of Falzum's incompetence. The first mission had to do with a simple memory game with baby Chocobos. It was very simple, and I completed it very quickly even without taking screenshots. More silliness followed with the corralling of the dangerous enemy forces afterward. There was even a sick little baby Chocobo that was identified by one of the other recruits, a San d'Orian noble. And they were all taken care of by the Galka that carried you off to your training everyday. And that was just the first day of training. LOL The next day was much less complex. I just had to bring in a beastman item from a ToAU area, and that was quickly dispatched. Finally, we moved onto the last day of training where I was instructed to remember details about previous missions. Now, of course I had the answers already, but I would have to say that I would have remembered at least a couple of the answers even if I hadn't peaked on the Wiki for the answers. LOL With that done, I completed my rank up mission, and headed straight over to the gate guard to get my Perdu Blade. Man, the Perdu Blade is awesome, I swing ridiculously fast now. I just love this thing. With haste and marches, I can almost break the animation just with normal non-double attacked swings, and even without marches I can break the animation with just on double attack. The delay is incredibly low on the Perdu Blade which makes me wonder if I should consider changing my TP build set up and it will be something that I be considering in a future blog post. Also, the look of the Perdu Blade is just great, and I like the main-hand/off-hand design difference, main-hand focused on damage and the off-hand focused on speed. I would have to parse the difference between a couple of different set-ups to see which is best, but again that will be the subject of a different post. I also need to pick up a parser.

Anyway, on with the rest of the weekend. I did some major meriting this weekend, and little leveling of my MNK. I figured it was time to catch up a little, and my MNK has gotten a lot of focus as of late, also I wanted to test out my spiffy new Perdu Blade. :) It was fun and I got something on the order of ten more merit points I believe. I finished up Overwhelm for my SAM, and I added two more levels of Double Attack for my WAR. I really should focus on one or the other but I don't feel massively compelled to either way. I think once I finish up Double Attack I am going to do one level of Shikikoyo so that I at least have that, then I will focus on Meditate recast down. It was a good weekend for merits, and I am glad I got to invest some time into it. While meriting I got this Blade: Jin which I believe to be my highest yet, but I am not positive. It was a 14 TP return, so probably two double attacks during the WS. There is some debate on whether you can double attack twice on a WS, but I am pretty sure that you can. Also, while meriting I was provided with evidence that HP merits are really worth it, as opposed to what some people say:
For events, we had a quick Hakutaku run to get two people Optical Hats, which went extremely well and very rapidly. We had a very pleased Galka thief on our hands. LOL After that we went and did CoP 8-2 for Ashhhhh and Crlmsonking while trying to pop Jailer of Temperance along the way. Sadly, it didn't pop and we have been having a bit of difficulty trying to get some of the pop NM's in Sea to spawn which is a bit disappointing, but we will keep trying. We also completed Hellz's Retribution NM so that he can finally start working on his NM again, because he needed to complete Retribution to open Asuran Fists and he has already gotten a bunch of WS points for that already apparently. Finally, Omoi and I did a little bit of farming for pop items for the Gigas in Upper Delkfutt's Tower with little luck, but we weren't there for long and there was a bunch of competition. Ah well, its hard to find time to squeeze it in. That is it for the weekend, but this post is only half done, just waiting on the update news now. :)

Oh, on a belated side note, Versus did 2 Kirin's on Sunday which I had to miss. We got a total of 3 N. Bodies and an Osode of note. So Congrats to everyone on a good day, one without any D. Bodies! (Still would have been nice to get a set of W. Legs for Izman >.<)

Update addendum: Very Interesting. Slightly concerning. First off, there is one thing I just did not like about the update.

The party that defeats the monster required to cause “Despot” to appear will now automatically claim the NM.

This can easily be abused by RMT just claiming the entire wall of dolls and then sleep nuking them. This would really be an injustice, especially considering camping Despot before wasn't all that bad. I mean sometimes you would get an RMT or a sniper soloer, or someone that was trying to take a Despot when you were the one killing all the statues. That all was much better than the risk involved with the RMT just stealing all of the spawns. That just freaking sucks. We will have to see what this looks like but I hope its not like their first Ullikummi "fix" which just allowed the RMT to take over Sky.

Ok, now for the blah, blah stuff. New missions, blah, blah; new assaults blah, blah; new Chocobo stuff, blah, blah; new Besieged stuff, blah, blah.

A quick preface on the new items: All the information was stolen from Taj's data mining which was original posted on BG forums.

Now onto the good stuff. Can't find anything about grips except for a little bit of information put up on BG for a couple of minutes. Looks like they were either low level, or just that the data miners haven't gotten to them all.

Platinum Grip
Acc+2
Add. Effect Stun

and

Pole Strap
Double attack+2%

Now I have no idea what level this stuff is, whether you can buy it or its crafted, or whatever. It's a nice little bonus over having nothing, but they aren't providing much in the way of groundbreaking bonuses.

In regards to Assault, there appears to be some decent rewards for not only getting First Lieutenant but also for completing every single Assault that is available. This means that I will need to go back and do Lebros Supplies, but the rest appear to be doable. I would like to have that extra tag for getting more Assault Points and for building up Assault Points to be able to do Salvage more often. They also minor tweaked Einherjar and Nyzul too.

Now, onto the two-handed weapon changes. They didn't say anything new about the weapons themselves, just what they already reported in the teaser notes. But they did have this to say about the WS's.

The following weapon skills have been adjusted:
Howling Fist/Dragon Kick/Raging Rush/Cross Reaper/Penta Thrust/Skewer/ Yukikaze/Gekko/Kasha/Empyreal Arrow/Detonator

Now, as I will get to in a minute, they didn't make any specific mention of this change, they just said they have been adjusted. Likely they will be adjustments to the WS stat modifiers and base damage during the WS, the reason I say that is because they mention this right afterward:

Several weapon skills have had the effects of TP adjusted in the following manner:

- Raging Rush
Damage varies with TP >> Chance of critical hit varies with TP

- Penta Thrust
Damage varies with TP >> Accuracy varies with TP

- Skewer
Accuracy varies with TP >> Chance of critical hit varies with TP

Penta Thrust, ok, thats neat, but not really that relevant because it will actually probably decrease the total damage of a higher TP Penta Thrusts as it exists now, but for 100TP Penta Thrusts it may be better depending on how SE has changed the base damage calculation for that WS. Some people will complain that they didn't give Crit Hit to Penta Thrust, but honestly that would be like Rampage with a 93 damage weapon. Skewer was the right WS to give that too, it is like a Blade: Jin with a 93 damage weapon now. :) Very, very nice. The same applies for Raging Rush. These sound give good incentive for people to use two-handed weapons I believe.

Job changes: More good news for our less desired jobs. Shield and Weapon Bash got a boost, now increased chance to stun. Dragoon gets a nice Accuracy bonus trait which was a bit unexpected. Corsairs have had Phantom Roll improved and tweaked, and Fold did exactly what I said it would do which is remove a Bust first instead of removing the Roll with the most time left on it. Beastmasters got the boost that SE had already mentioned to pets and along with making the availability of jug pets a little higher apparently. Finally, Puppetmaster got their new heads.

Finally, the added a new function called /translate which appears to let you add any item to your auto-translate buffer just by typing it in, also you will be able to see the foreign language version of the word you are typing. Interesting indeed.

Thats it, enjoy your update.