Where did I go, you ask? Well, work and work. They had me pinned down with no way out. I had to succumb to their wily schemes. But lets she what I can get done with today.
Lots and lots of Salvage.
We have been mostly doing SSR and Bhaflau. After last night, we now have three or four pieces that can be upgraded from LAC, if it would drop anything besides Ares's hands and Usukane feet. Or if we could actually see an NM besides the Gate Widow, and even that is rare. Never seen a Skirmish Pephredo, 
Never seen a Zebra Zachery. 
Frustrating to say the least. We did have a run were an accidental DoT killed one of the Archaic Gears on the third floor of Bhaflau which lead us to try the boss with 6 people un-nerfed, and we got it to 27% before timing out. It was actually pretty fun. 
But in the end, the drop rates or spawn rates of NM's is so bad that it does get to be a bit overwhelming. And considering the fact that some of the people that need more gear are EU and can't make all of the late night runs it gets to be even more complicated when planning runs and trying to complete some of the pieces. Still only two completed pieces in total, but we have had so many different 25's and 35's floating around that we will inevitably be able to get some of those pieces completed. I want to next move onto Zhayolm Remnats, where we can finish up another piece if we get the right drop from the Boss. I also want to finish the BGWiki Salvage page. I only have to finish up the Zhayolm Remnants description, but with work that may take a while. Then Omoi and I can finish up the maps, and the pages will mostly be completed.
Outside of Salvage, things have been pretty regular. We did KS99 Wyrm and didn't get much besides a Juggernaut which, of course, Elfie got because he is so freaking lucky. 
But we did get three or four Wyrm Beards for our MNK's! The cut was pretty low and I think we in general got pretty yucky synth materials, but if we can get a couple of Black Belts in Versus that would be sweet.
I have also been spending some free time in Campaign building up my rank and getting some XP on WHM. 
I just don't want to have happen what happened with Assault, where I was rank 2 when they finally released the Perdu Blade and I had to rank up as fast as I could. Although our Assault group is actually very nice right now, I could have started it way before and people would already have all the gear that they need. I have enough points to get all of the Yigit gear that I need for WHM and still do Salvage, just because I have been doing Assault rather consistently for so long. I want that to be the case with Campaign.
This is just the beginning of my triumphant return, I want to talk about the game in general tomorrow. Interests people have, and my new favorite blog to read, and I highly doubt that blogger even knows why I respect their blog so much. See you, tomorrow with more fun!
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Covered in... Wasps?
Monday, January 28, 2008
Inversely proportional.
Jailer of Love is just a long, boring fight. 
It's not that difficult and if people stay aware and you have a good puller, you really don't have to do much. After the first 9 waves of summons were killed and the regen is broken, its just time taken to bring it down, there is very little that can go wrong. 
The worst possible situation happened to us, where a tank got hit with an Astral Flow right after a -ga, which caused some draw-ins, a TP move and one tank for a couple of minutes, but even with that it wasn't really an issue. A melee may pull hit and get one-shotted but that is not really a concern if they remember to not run away. All we really did was to just put some melee on it and slowly but surely take it down. 
Being that I am me, I did manage to get killed something like three times in the space of 5 minutes. I got one-shotted by a boosted melee attack, got raised, immidiately got poisonaga'd and didn't get cured in time, got raised and rather numbly ran out of range by running by the tanks and was killed by a JoL Waterga. /sigh. 
We took the fight nice and slow, and out prep time took almost as long as the hour and a half that it took to kill it. LOL I would have to say that the main alliance is pretty much irrelevant to the fight. If everyone does their job, then basically it's pretty hard to have anything go wrong. Killing the summons is the real place that things can go wrong, but we have good BLM's that generally pay attention and an amazing puller in Crlmsonking. Riddarran came to help out with tanking the first half of the fight because he had great experience with JoL and he set our tanks in the right place so that they did not get drawn-in or get hit with TP moves. He did also mention about half way through the fight that we didn't have a THF for TH, LOL. Honestly, we hardly ever do, we don't have a lot of THF's in general in Versus, and those we do have come as something else usually. We just in general just suck up the drops we get, and this may explain our pretty bad drops! In this case, we just sent Ninjafox to switch to THF, but some of his THF gear was muled, so he showed up in this: 
LOL But our placebo TH failed us again. :( We did get a Novia which went to Potpressure, who at times needs it pretty badly LOL 
and the Love Halberd went to Hellz which is awesome for him because he hardly gets any gear and I like to see him getting his fair share! 
Still no torques from anything in Sea so far, but we do have a huge amount of pop sets for the first tier Jailers and have been decently lucky on Ix mobs so far. So hopefully Sea will give us something soon! To wrap up our first Jailer of Love experience we brought in our resident french uber-mage: 
We were quite proud of our experience and win against Jailer of Love, almost all of us looking at the treasure pool when someone on vent said "It's up." LOL And I didn't even know what they meant, until I looked back from the treasure pool and saw a rather largish looking Aern. 
And the fun began, people ran, people warped, people tried to fight it. In the end, AV deaggroed and was heading back to it's start point when Lucella flashed it again and the silliness started all over again. 
It was fun while it lasted even though it didn't really last that long. :)
I was gone for the weekend, but I did get back in time to do Salvage last night, and it went even better than it did last time. We did Hammerblow, Dekka, Gyroscopic Gear and Long-Armed Chariot. 
None of the NM's dropped anything of course, and Long-Armed Chariot had the same drops as it did last time. The best part was that we were able to it all and still had over 10 minutes left, so next time I think we are going to take a different route after killing Gyroscopic Gear and try to take down Gyroscopic Gears and then Citadel Chelonian before we do the boss. It may take a run or two to get the timing down, but I think it is totally possible with our group. In the mean time we are going to do some Bhaflau farming and then we are going to try out some new Zhayolm and finally try Arrapago Remnants for the win. I think it is funny that after all this time, I come to find out that LBC is the hardest boss by far, and now that we have a new approach the other bosses should be a breeze and we should be worrying about 35 gear and not 25. The way it should be.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Fire and forget.
Leveling subjobs can suck if you don't like the subjob. As I do not like BLM, it sucks. :) SCH is currently behaving in much the same way as BLM though, which is troublesome for me. :/ It's nice to have some real cures and a regen available but honestly, now that Omoi has Curing Waltz I do very little curing and mostly just free nuking because I don't have the enfeebles that Iz has. The only benefit with doing this trio is that I get to hang out with Omoi and Iz, LOL, thats the awesome part. But I wish I could do that on a better job. What I need is the ability to go to sleep and wake up at level 37 SCH and BLM. No, I am not saying I need a leveling bot or something, I am saying that I need to be able to turn my brain off while I am leveling SCH and BLM. At least Iz and I have come up with a devastating combination move that allows us to do a large amount of damage to the mob and kill it much faster. It's called a skillchain! LOL Seriously though we have been doing Shining Strike to Burning Blade for a Fusion skillchain then we both burst with Fire, and it is at least fun and gives me a reason to pay attention for more than just Fire, Aero, Fire, Aero, repeat ad nauseam. Well, after a bit of running around and trying to make it back to Mhaura without getting killed, we all managed to get to level 20. 
Outside of leveling SCH, I did a couple of Campaign battles on WHM, which is actually pretty efficient for getting XP at that level. I get about 400 XP per battle but I can do it any time, and I am always active during it. I would still prefer to be in an XP party, but lately I haven't had a lot of time to build one and I can still search for a party while doing Campaign.
As a side note on Campaign, I have noticed that some people have been complaining about the fact that the game is thinning out because there are less people searching for parties. I really don't understand how these people can not put two and two together. Before Campaign there were people that didn't really want to party for XP but outside of XP scrolls they had no choice, now instead of waiting around for a party invite and dealing with crappy people they don't like they can now just get XP on there own. Now, I don't think this is the majority of people, but I do think that there is a significant group of people that prefer Campaign to partying. And this can in fact have an effect on the number of people available to make a party with. I do not think that it is an indication of anything.
The problem that I do have with the game right now, is not the game itself, but rather the non-existence of information about the next update. I am getting really antsy, and I am going to expect a lot out of the next update. My theory on the current update cycle is this: SE wanted to get the expansion out by the Christmas shopping window, and to do so had to limit or remove content that they wanted to have at launch but did not want to release if it did not function correctly. SE is different from Blizzard in this respect. SE does not use open betas to test game changes or content and although they do make mistakes they are more careful about implementation than Blizzard, who will put out content then fix it later. I guess what I am trying to say is that SE and Blizzard both will have issues that are caused by unexpected programming errors or conflicts, but Blizzard is more likely to release content that has problems that they know about than SE. So SE probably left a lot of content out of the expansion to allow for more testing and tweaking and will probably be adding that content that should have been released at launch in this coming update. I don't really mind this if the next update is a good one, but if it is as sparse as the expansion update then I will have an issue. If I am right about this, then it should be easy for them to have a lot in this update because they should just be wrapping up the things that they did want to include in the expansion.
Now for my last random comment for the day: I was reading a thread about how people view damage calculations and parses and I found some of the comments to be rather uninformed, and by that I mean that the questions the person was asking were the wrong questions. They wanted to know if damage calculations or parsing was a better way to determine gear selection. The simple answer is neither of them. They are both tools for helping to determine which gear is the best but neither of them will tell you in all cases what you should use for any particular situation. The question posed doubted the quality of the calculations in determining damage, and I had a problem with this argument.
Now I am not a computer programmer, but as long as the rounding is understood, the mathematic equation does not change if we have the assumptions of the equations correct. I think the questioner was confusing the variables within the equations for the equations themselves. We know (or at least theoretically know with the appropriate testing to back the theory) that the equations work, we do not know the way that SE derives the variables for the random factors in the equation. The only way we would know this is if we did have access to their random number generation algorithms. But the equations were derived from situations in which the variable part of the equation was stabilized. And the proof is in the pudding, the equations work. I have not seen an example for a place where they did not work. There might be places in which, in a certain variable range, there are certain factors that we do not know about, but as we do not know about them and for that there is no test, and that circumstance just becomes a Schrödinger's cat.
As for parsers, they can lie just like any other measure of data that is variable and open for interpretation. There are many factors that apply to parsers that make them a good tool for general analysis but should not be taken as gospel. They are like any measure of a large system with multiple variables apply, in that they provide a representation of a larger whole, but individual variables act on other variables in a myriad of ways making them always at least partially indeterminate. This isn't necessarily bad, but this indeterminate factor increases as the change in inputs decrease making it increasingly difficult to determine differences between smaller variations in input (i.e. differences in stats on gear). This is not limited to in-game variables like level of mob versus variable in the weapon damage equation, but also things like when you weaponskill, how fast you engage, the amount of time it takes the bard to get songs up, or even when your mage casts Dia. Too often people treat parsers as iron law, instead of a guide for making informed decisions. There is no error if there is a difference in parses. It is the nature of variables in a large system. There are a myriad of factors that determine damage for each swing and the damage it inflicts. This is then multiplied by a huge number of swings, applied to a large number of mobs with more variation in their statistics. Even if a player was perfect and managed to perfectly replicate their performance from one xp party to the next, they could not account for the actions of the 5 other people in their party and how their actions interrelate with the parsing player. A parse can only give you a snapshot of a very large and variable system and any differences between parses are just the results of variables within a large system.
Ultimately, neither equations or parsing will give you a complete answer. I have already stated the problem with parsers but the damage equations do not factor in same things as the problems with parsing (e.g. weaponskills, engage time, bard delay, Dia casting) and they also do not factor in accuracy, which is a major indict.
You should use all means at your disposal to come to a conclusion on decisions like these. Just using one or the other limits the amount of information input into the decision-making criteria and can lead to incorrect or flawed conclusions.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Attack of Ringmo!
Thaz used to be in a different Limbus LS that eventually fell apart so he has offered to give us some of his and his RL brothers chips sets. We did an Omega with one set last week, and we were going to do another Omega this week. There was only one problem though, it wasn't an Omega set, it was an Ultima set. Now this wouldn't really be a problem, except for the fact that Thaz couldn't be on for the Ultima run, so Omoi had to play Thaz for the fight. We were already set for tanks and DD's so there really wasn't a reason for another when we were going to be missing one of our WHM's, so that ended up with me playing as Omoi, or more appropriately dubbed Ringmo. 
Yes, that was me, the level 40 WHM doing a an end-game event as WHM! Hehehe, and Pot our other (pretty darn bad assed) LS WHM even said I did a decent job! Though he did say that when he died (drawn in after a Dissipation managed to get off) he almost had an anxiety attack. LOL But I did a decent job, I am not used to a regular Haste order yet, so I would over Haste at times and I would be a little bit slow to cure on the PLD after the first 20% because I wasn't sure if they were going to cure themselves our not. That will probably have to do more with learning what the PLD's like to do in certain situations. I never really realized how great our PLD/NIN's are until I had to heal them. Izman took two Citadel Busters, survived and went right back to tanking like normal, totally bad ass! As normal, right after the fight we headed over to Mhaura to get some screenshots of the rewards being traded in, and since Omoi had to take Thaz back to his mog house, I went as Ringmo and I bought a chocobo! Now, if you know Omoi then you would know how epic it is to see Omoikitte on a chocobo, because she runs everywhere to save money! LOL 
Anyway, the drops were Nashira Turban which went to Noze, 
and Elfaria finally got his Nashira Gages which pretty much completely rounds out his SMN set up. 
That is probably the last time you will see Ringmo, which is probably best for humanity overall. Hopefully, my WHM will be high enough to be useful in the near future! I have been working on it steadily, but the real problem that I am having is not WHM, I really like WHM. The problem is leveling subs; I hate BLM, which is probably a requisite, but I am having fun leveling SCH with Izman and Omoi. 
We have gotten to level 17 so far, and in the end I think I will like SCH better for WHM than BLM except for maybe missing Warp. With DNC, RDM and SCH we can take on a whole lot of mobs, but we are a little slow to kill and it ends up draining Iz and my MP pretty quickly, requiring a bit of time to get it back. But the best part is that it is fun! We were killing stuff around the entrances to the cities in the past but they quickly became too weak and everything else outside of a small radius around the entrances were radically higher in level. So now we are back in the Dunes, and hopefully we will be able to get back at it again tonight!
Yesterday our LS event was the Promy climbs for the Apocalypse Nigh fight, it was a fun and relaxing event. 
We had some fun running around and basically set everyone up to be able to get their AN earrings. I am definitely going to go with the Ethereal Earring, the Attack without negative Evasion is very nice and goes along well with the additional HP. This is really good for my MNK, and I will use it on SAM until I switch my Suppanomimi to a Bushinomimi. I should mention that while I was away this weekend Versus did a full sky God run, the drops in general were pretty bad until Byakko, where we got 2 D. Legs, a B. Haidate and I believe a Behemoth Hide. :) The Haidate went to Eternalpain for his recently leveled MNK, and this actually puts us pretty close to everyone having the Haidate if they want it.
I have been doing a bit of Campaign on my WHM so that I can level it at weird times without a party and so that I can build up some Allied Notes and rank up. I don't really know what is coming for the ranks in Campaign but they generally have some kind of decent reward that is released later on and I don't want to do what I did with Assault and have to do them constantly just to get where I should have been when the gear is released. Playing as a 42 WHM in Campaign is pretty interesting, LOL. On a normal wave if I can find someone good to heal and I don't die or have to raise anyone then I usually make about 400+ xp, the most I have gotten so far was a little under 800 for a pretty busy Jugner Campaign. While I try to stand out of the way, some times the mobs just want to come after you no matter what, and you get hit for this: 
:) That was just a normal hit, no crit, no special proc, just it's sword caving in my head. While I was running around with Iz, Hellz and Willriker I did notice this little glitch: 
It was weird because when it was targeted it would appear with the "e" on the end in the target window and the chat log. Just thought that was interesting enough to screen shot.
So, in an attempt to follow up on our very successful try to kill Long-Armed Chariot last week we went again today. My plan was to skip all of the NM's and just head for the boss, but we were moving so quickly there was no reason to not try at least some of the NM's. We killed the Devilet on the second floor in record time so we killed Dekka too, sadly no drops. 
Then on the third floor in the north room we cleared the gears really fast and then we had a bit of miscommunication. I had forgot to mention to Skur, our puller for the night, that the Gyroscopic Gear would pop as soon as the last gear was killed. So he pulled it thinking he had just missed one of the gears, while I was telling everyone to killed the speedy Devilet, it made for some fun times, and people thinking I was upset that they fought the wrong mob, when I wasn't at all, I more thought it was funny. It did get a couple of people killed but it wasn't that much of an issue. Again, we got no drop from Gyroscopic Gear so we headed up to the boss. The funny thing is that for the entire run we only got 5 magic cells total. 1 from the crate at the start, 1 from a mob on the first floor, then 3 from the MNK in East side big room. That was it for the entire run. LOL Luckily we only had 4 mages, but only one tank got magic so we could only use 1 tank for the majority of the fight. Luckily though we got some decent chests on the way up and I had a Revitalizer, Fighter's Drink, Fanatics Drink and Fool's Drink. This let me start with two Hundred Fists, which was nice considering that we didn't have two tanks to increase the damage. I did find out something that I did not know before this, and that is that the Fool's Drink and Fanatics Drink do not stack. LOL And sadly I used the Fool's Drink last, so it ruined the benefits of the Fanatics Drink, so I had to put up shadows during Hundred Fists. :( Ah well, I did get both sets of Hundred Fists off before the first set of Brainjacks. 
I tell you one of the silliest and funniest moments in the game is when you are intensely paying attention to a boss fight, then all of a sudden a rendition of Keystone Cops breaks out and everyone is running everywhere. LOL Over all this fight is so freaking easy and could easily be done under 10 minutes if it wasn't for the Brainjacks which waste 2-3 minutes from all the running around and trying to get hate back on the tanks, and even that isn't very hard. Usually, I just get 2 or 3 hits in and it is back on me. The pathing for LAC and for the charmed players is so bad it is laughable, and LAC even has increased movement speed (I think). No one died during LAC last night at all, and we took it down pretty fast, under 20 minutes from zone up to the last floor to 0%, and that was with some buffing and other prep. 
The funniest part of the whole thing was when Omoi was scolding Glacian for having his Great Katana on during a Brainjack because Glacian didn't know it would do multiple charms. She kept yelling at him to stop hitting her! LOL We got some decent drops, Phobos's Gauntlets and Tsukikazu Sune-ate. 
The Gauntlets went to Omoi and the Sune-ate to me! Woot! My first non-15 piece in Salvage after going for almost 6 months now. :) Plus, I have a brand new title to match the one that I got from LBC. 
After doing LAC and having be such an easy fight, I think its time to try to get some other wins. So we will try Zhayolm and Arrapago bosses soon. We really need to work on getting through Arrapago much more quickly.
Finally, during an Assault run, there was a little bit of a debate between Ninjafox and the NPC. 
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Slooooooooooow day.
Wednesday is the off day for Versus. Most people have Dynamis or they level or now do Campaign, which is what I did, on my WHM. I got maybe halfway to 41, and I think that I have figured out a decent formula to getting better XP for lower levels in Campaign, especially on my WHM. In general, I try to get the cap on the self buff and other buff categories by using bar spells, but this is limited by the adjustment for level, so the main thrust of my approach is to lock onto a tank or a good DD and just cure bomb them. The problem is that I still do not have Cure IV so I can't get that much healed, and I definitely can't keep a tank alive on my own. Only need a little more XP and I will have Cure IV, which will be really good in Campaign but generally not very good in XP parties yet. After doing about 5 Campaigns, Omoi got out of Dynamis, so Izman, Omoi and I went to go XP again on SCH, RDM and DNC again. Man it was easy, and we got to level 16 before it was too late to continue.
Honestly, that is about all I did with my day. So, until SE gives me something new to write about, or I do something of more interest, then this is all you can get in a day.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
The Price is Wrong, Bitch!
So, I am going to do it. I am going to trade in my Suppanomimi for a Bushinomimi. The reasons are all listed in my previous post, and I can't really come up with a reason not to do it. If MNK and SAM are stronger than NIN then there is no reason not to do it. If I need to go WAR to something, I will just use Great Axe instead of dual Axes. 
Speaking of MNK and SAM, I have finally capped out MNK completely, and I am quite proud of myself! :)
MNK Merits:
General:
STR: 5/5
Crit: 4/4
Hand-to-hand: 8/8
Group 1:
Counter: 5/5
Kick Attacks: 5/5
Group 2:
Invigorate: 3/3
Penance: 3/3
I think at some point I will do Critical hit rate down, but I am going to focus on finishing up SAM next. Here are what my merits look like for that right now.
SAM Merits:
General:
STR: 5/5
Crit: 4/4
Great Katana: 1/8
Group 1:
Store TP: 5/5
Meditate: 1/5
Group 2:
Overwhelm: 3/3
Blade Bash: 0/1
Shikikoyo: 0/1
Ikishoten: 0/1
For the Group 2 merits on SAM, I am not positive on what exactly I am going to do with Shikikoyo and Ikishoten. I am definitely going to get Blade Bash because the improvements to the Bash effects makes it a reliable stun now. Shikikoyo while a neat concept just doesn't really seem that it will have many practical applications. Ikishoten, again, is a nice concept but it wont really effect a 6-hit build so I don't know if it will be very useful at all. I may just forgo both of them and put 3 merits into Blade Bash. As for Meditate, it is probably the last thing that I will merit because I haven't decided Meditate over Third Eye yet, once I pick one of them I will put all 5 merits into it.
For other jobs, I have started leveling WHM. Now, I know that I said I would level RDM, but at least I am leveling a mage job. :) WHM is actually really fun, and I am definitely going to take it to 75, and I have already gotten it to level 40 and I got Haste for which I am proud. 
(That screenshot is of getting level 39, I actually got 40 in a Campaign battle so no level up screenshot for that.) The problem I am having is that I want to level Scholar to be my main subjob for WHM. Light Arts will probably conserve more MP over time than Conserve MP will and it lets me cast some debuffs with a little bit of reliability. But for now, my BLM is the closest to being a real sub job because I have only been able to get to 15 on my Scholar trioing with Izman and Omoi. 
Now, lets be clear about something here; I hate BLM. I hate it a lot. I hate it so freaking much that I seriously thought about not leveling it as a subjob. It may have been cool back in the day, but now, it just sucks. No one makes skillchains, so its just basically a race to see how many resisted nukes I can get off on one mob before I have to rest again. Sure, I cast Bio, elemental debuffs and the occasional Blind before I start nuking but that is essentially it. The thing that really gets me the most though is that people don't pull. Come on, it's 2008 now, you can figure out how to fight something while you are waiting for Xsavagexavengerx to get back from taking a dump. It really is about the time wasted in these parties, I think, that makes people hate them. Anyway, that was my experience with BLM which is now 21 so I can at least get two more levels on my WHM without being gimp again. 
I think that is it for jobs for now. I will be aiming to get SAM completed and WHM to 75, then maybe SCH.
Now, here is where I make a big complaint to you my reader. You know that I am stubborn and I will try to do things over and over until I get it right, and I wont give up until I do it, or I find another way. I ask you, my dear reader, why didn't you tell me that Long-Armed Chariot was SO MUCH FREAKING EASIER THAN LBC! >.< LOL We did a Long-Armed Chariot run just to test it out and see what it was like. 
We got to Long-Armed Chariot with something like 10 minutes left, and we only put me on it to test out our new one tank set-up for bosses. Wow, did we make a big mistake, LOL. We almost killed it in that 10 minutes with just one MNK doing damage and the occasional DD coming in with a Meditated WS. Once we had about 1 minute left, and Long-Armed Chariot was at 36% I just told everyone to go crazy and try to kill it, we got it to about 20% before we were zoned out. 
The funniest thing was that no one was killed by LAC from straight up fighting it in this 1 minute zerg. LAC was taking way more damage (80-100 per punch o,..,O/) and hitting for way less (200-300 tops) than LBC ever did. So, dear reader, why didn't you tell me this! LOL We still need to do more LBC to get Omoi and Hellz their Ares 25 bodies, and we are going to keep trying but we are going to do some other bosses to see how easy they are too. Man, I love Salvage, but this is just an amazing revelation. I thought that it was insane that people could beat bosses with just 6 people, but now I completely understand, LOL. They were just omitting LBC from the calculation. The next time we go, maybe tonight, we will go for LAC again, and get the win no problem.
Assaults have been mundane except for trying The Price is Right which was pretty tough. 
The problem is not that the King can't be tanked straight up or that the weapons are that hard to deal with, it's that these issues are difficult to deal with at the same time. So instead of tanking the King straight up next time, we are going to kite him while everyone else kills him straight up. Skur made a good suggestion of THF kiting/tanking the King while everyone else kills the weapons, then just killing the King and we will try that the next time we go. 
For Versus events things have been pretty busy. First, old business: Jess got Homam hands from the last Omega that we did that I didn't mention before. 
But the real big winner as of late has been Izman, and rightfully so. Since Sky was fixed Izman has pretty much been locked on Wyrmal Legs from Kirin, and since we focus on Sky a lot more than other LS's we have done a LOT of Kirin's to get the opportunity for him to get them, but they have only dropped one time and that was a day that Iz wasn't online. :( It took over a year for Iz to get his W. Legs and that was with a ton of Kirin's (one week we did something like 7 Kirin's) but finally they dropped, and Omoi even screamed on vent, LOL. 
Now that Iz, after over a year of getting nothing from Kirin, could finally lot on something else that he has wanted for a long time he lotted on the Osode, and guess what dropped on our second Kirin of the day? You guessed it! And Iz even won the lot. LOL Now, it might seem like Iz got a lot of loot this day, but when you compare it to the number of people that got gear from Kirin while Iz patiently waited on the W. Legs then it all evens out. So right after the second Kirin we were off to San d'Oria to check out Iz's brand new W. Legs. 
and then later on we went to XP and Iz came on BST in his brand new Osode! 
Our final event worthy of mention was our first Jailer of Prudence, which went... LOL not well. The first thing we learned: Don't straight tank Prudence. We were pretty easily able to straight tank the first version of Prudence but the second one, not so easily straight tanked. ^.^ So, we wiped and had to sac it. Meaning, I had to sac it. LOL 
After we worked out that perhaps we should just kite it, and have the BLM nuke it down, things went swimmingly, and surprisingly no Torque dropped. LOL But I did get the honor of lossing 20k in XP. 
At least we have our first Jailer of Love set, and that was the greater goal for us all.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
The waiting game.
Just as I predicted yesterday really didn't amount to much of anything. I did get to hang around with Omoi, Iz and Hellz which was nice, and we got some much needed farming done, even made a little gilz. LOL Anyway, the farming is good for our gil supply, but I can't keep up with the gil that Omoi makes. :) I am going to farm for a new set of Dusk Gloves, then save for something bigger. Anyway, while messing around and farming we killed that stupid sheep NM in the mire, after it messed with us and killed me a bunch. Then when we decided to move and farm something else, something strange happened on the way to the staging point. Iz was on BST and as he zoned the sheep that he had claimed went unclaimed and Omoi and Hellz killed it, and right after, it popped up inside the staging point charmed by Iz again. o.o; 
So we played with it for a while then I got to kill it! 
That was a pretty boring day, but I have something to talk about today to fill in the gap. Prior to the two handed update I was equally interesting in NIN, SAM and MNK, because they were relatively equal in power and capability, but now with the two-handed update I have found that I have been on NIN pretty much solely for tanking events only and one XP party. This got me to thinking, am I holding back my SAM which is a more capable DD just to maintain my NIN which will never really be able to keep up? And I am moving more and more toward the idea that I should marginalize my NIN slightly to greatly improve my SAM.
There are basically three factors involved in this decision:
*NIN while a very good DD and XP tank is not the elite DD it was before the two-handed update. Ultimately, the thing that convinces me of this the most is the fact that I need to use Sushi on my NIN while MNK and SAM doesn't. Now, of course I could use meat on my NIN, but I don't think that is a good idea. Either I will have to give up haste to get more accuracy (which I am loathe to do) or I just take a pretty large accuracy hit and give up some slots that I use for other things for more accuracy where I can.
*SAM and NIN have two very important pieces of gear that are mutually exclusive, Suppanomimi and Bushinomimi. The Suppanomimi is probably better in general than the Bushinomimi for pure DD purposes, but since I have MNK and SAM now, NIN is now my third best DD job. Since that is the case, the Bushinomimi would make a lot of difference for my SAM and losing the Suppanomimi wouldn't change my NIN's position on the list while the Bushinomimi would boost my STR for WS, increase my base Great Katana skill thusly increasing my accuracy and attack, and it would replace one of the worst slots I have on left on my SAM.
*Bumping up my GKT merits to 8 and losing 4 of my Katana merits. As I mentioned I have always used Sushi on my NIN so pulling out my Katana merits are going to mean a lot less than the increase in GKT merits where I will almost always be using meat.
Does this mean that I love my NIN any less? No, not at all. I will still be tanking on my NIN a lot but I do recognize the fact that my NIN is not as capable of being a DD as my MNK or SAM and that trying to make all three the best places limits on my SAM preventing it from being even more powerful. More thoughts on this tomorrow.
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Good luck, bad luck and Ash luck.
Some people call it karma and some people call it self-fulfilling prophecy, but sometimes when things go bad for a while you can almost anticipate that something will go wrong. Ashhhhh has been struggling a little bit recently, Omega has been greedy with his heart and Ashhhhh is next in line for it. It's like Izman and Kirin's relationship. They are both next in line for the best but the rarest drop so they actually lose out on gear to other people. It sucks, but when it does finally drop I know that both of them will be incredibly pleased. Until then, it starts to feel like the world is against you. Which leads us to yesterday. We did Alastor Antlion for some Rostrum Pumps, the first one was no real problem, neither was the last one. The second one was Ashhhhh's and as he predicted before the run, it was time for some Ash luck. 
On this one of course, it takes forever for the Feeler to spawn anything, then three quick Executioners in a row, then Alastor, then right before it's killed another Executioner. Things started to look a little bleak at this point. We pulled Alastor away from the spawn point, and kited it. People sac pulled the Executioners away from Alastor and the rest of the alliance did what they could to kill the Executioners but it ended up with a semi-wipe. Things looked really bleak, but we were not going to give up, especially because I was fearing for Ash's sanity. LOL So we kited and slowly got everyone back up and finally killed Alastor, netting Ash a new sexy pair of Rostrum Pumps! 
I was very happy to see Ash in a better mood after getting these and especially because he predicted that things were going to go wrong. LOL
Outside of that it was a calm day, nothing much of importance. Tonight will be the same, tomorrow though might be a little more interesting though.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Blah, I vant to suck your blood! Vampire jokes always slay!
Ok, comedy is definitely not my forté.
We did the first of three Omega's last night, which is all part of a big week for Versus, culminating in our first Jailer of Love this weekend. We got a head and legs last night which went to Tco, 
and Crlmsonking respectively. 
Monday was light outside of that. I mean Omega takes less than 10 minutes now, and that includes buffing time inside. Last night we spent more time waiting for Sholo to come back from DCing than we did actually fighting Omega. I know that Omoi will never actually go for this but it might be time to consider farming the gunpods. I do understand that caution is the better part of valor, but we are definitely not in the same position that we were in when we first started. We have an amazing group of very well experienced players to draw from for these fights. The real problem that we are having is that we can't kill enough Omega's to keep up with demand on the items. This really sucks because even if we increase the amount of time we spend farming we still can only do two Omega's a week. It's the nature of Limbus, but still annoying. On a happier/sadder note, I got a bit of cuddle time with Coejus before Limbus 
and Dockrpto showed up! That was nice, but sadly he was just on to say good bye and shut down his account permanently. :( He hadn't been on in a long time anyway, but it was sad to see him say he was leaving for good.
After Limbus we did some pretty successful Assaults, got people a lot of points and Glacian even got his P. Head (not sure exactly why he wants it, LOL, but he does really love his full sets of gear, full AF+1 and full AF2 for SAM for example). More importantly though we tried Bloody Rondo for the first time, and man it was fun! I accidentally came as NIN/DRK (from Limbus) which actually turned out to be pretty good for the fight. I mostly kept hate, although Jess did manage to steal it from me at time, and it let us have an extra stun. With a BRD and a RDM it wasn't that bad on my MP even in DD gear. Man, I can't emphasize enough how fun that fight was. It was tough but not overwhelming, pretty much perfectly balanced. They only real prep that we needed was to make sure that I had some Holy Waters to deal with Eternal Damnation. Even Dracula's model was cool. 
His moves were strong but no real one-shotters, and some of them were downright cool. The Cursed Doppleganger was cool, and it was weird seeing myself die at my own feet. LOL And watching Myrrial and Jess, then myself, turned into bats was hilarious. 
It took a little bit of work but handled it in stride even when three of us were in bat form and Omoi had to kite everyone! 
LOL Didn't get any good appraisals (never do) but I am now 1/5 on my way to get Captain rank. I would like to get at least two more of them out of the way on Friday, then two more again on Monday. Until then looking forward to Salvage tonight, depending on how many people we get we will either do Arrapago or Silver Seas farming or we might try Long-Armed Chariot.
#1 ~ Monk
#2 ~ Samurai
#3 ~ Ninja
#4 ~ Dragoon
Chaotic Pellucidity
Teabags and KY Jelly
The Bloggaru!
