I have... a stalker? o.o;

Long story short, just be glad that I didn't post yesterday's post, which I would have had the internet connection for my office had gone down yesterday right before I was going to post it. I had forgotten to send myself yesterday's pictures and who wants a blog without pictures. I have the pictures now, and they are integrated into what I got accomplished yesterday, plus today's stunning revelation... I have a stalker. Yeah... First question that came to mind, why stalk me? I am a middling player with a middling blog (even though I have a flare for self-promotion), but this goes deeper than that I think. Evilringthree has been around for a while, has sent me and friends tells in game, isn't connected to any character on my friends list, and now, apparently, has a blog. There sole purpose appears to be to stalk me and eventually replace me with themselves as they are my evil doppleganger. I am not kidding. I wish I was, but I am just not clever enough to come up with this: You are your fucking O's kote. Apparently, I forgot to mention that Evilringthree plans on torturing me too. I am going to go ahead and say that, while this may help in the promotion of my blog, the stalking, torturing and eventual replacement the evil version of myself isn't such a great development. Where this all is heading I do not know, and since I seem to be the only person in the world that is capable of maintaining a blog on any kind of regular basis it will all probably disappear before too long.

ANYWAY...

On with the show.

Ah well, lets see, yesterday when this blog was written and before the collapse of the entire interweb surrounding my workplace this information was fresh and new, well, now it's one day stale, but you can stick in some onion soup cover it with melty cheese and have it for lunch. I was going to call this post something like "Just chillin' over here in the corner..." because thats what all the screenshots appear like... for example lets take the first thing I did two days ago: I was late getting home because of a meeting and I missed sky but I did help with Bastok Rank 10 for Rygar which definitely was cool to do again after so long. And it appears that I am uncomfortably waiting in the corner, just chillin', waiting for Zeid and Volker to finish their little heart-to-heart.

After the mission, I did an Arrapago Remnants run with the other Salvage group. I really think that these runs with this other group is going to help us a lot. They move so much more quickly than we do in general. We have far too much waiting around for instructions and chest checking, and if we eliminate that I think we will move much more quickly. I am also going to draw from their play book in Arrapago. I actually think that we under farm the first floor in Arrapago now, because getting a few extra cells on the first floor is really helpful later in the run. For example, it makes the second floor QQA much easier to kill and it makes it much easier to clear a path to do the third floor QQTH. I am really excited about doing Arrapago again with Versus because I think we will be able to really zoom through it. On this run we were able to kill the mobs on the 6th floor in the requisite 7 minutes to get the two QQTH's to spawn. I don't see why we would have any problem doing this either. I do have to say that we did get rather lucky on cell drops on the first two floors, so that did help later on, but earlier planning definitely helped in making this a reality. I also like the way that they divvy up the mages responsibilities in crunch time situations. I think our mages have been trained to be successful at open world situations, because that is what we do for a majority of our events. This can lead to over-curing because in general in those situations it is more critical to keep the tank at full HP because of potential large damage moves. In Salvage, especially on bosses, it is easier to have just one mage per tank which massively saves on MP for the fight.

Anyway, nothing dropped from the NM's we did and "we" (parentheses because I was the third MNK on the run and didn't get much gear at all considering it was Arrapago) fought Armored Chariot, which went very, very well, but we timed out at about 35%. I would say that we were at about 8 minutes, maybe a little more when we zoned up. I have yet to fight Armored Chariot so I can't say how easy or hard it is supposed to be but I can say that only one person died on it with just a WHM, RDM and BRD healing and it was the person that was being healed by the BRD, so not that surprising. I can also say that we would almost definitely have beaten it given just a couple more minutes. I didn't have much gear at all but I still could have stepped in if someone else had gone down, and though the mages we getting low on MP, they were still managing. Now, I have to say that I am learning a lot from this group, but it is not like I haven't been doing Salvage for a long time, so the "learn" is not like "Hey, I need to go this way" or "Hey, we should kill this mob differently". That is stuff I already know. Hell, I even did most of the write-ups for the BG Wiki for Salvage (just need to finish the Zhayolm Remnants one), so it's not like I don't understand the concept. What I am learning about are the tweaks that will make our own runs better. For example, I think we have been really under farming the first floor as I mentioned before, and that with more time spent there the rest of the run will go more quickly. The second thing I think I have drawn from this is that I need to spread out the duties for these runs a lot more, starting with teaching Ashhhhh how to pull for all of our runs. Ashhhhh is a really good BRD and I think he is totally capable and will fill the roll well. Another thing is that I need to guide the pace for each remnant we are in and what our goal is going to be. I feel like I am always rushing, but there are places where killing a few extra mobs and opening space will help a lot more than just trying to get to the next floor. I think that I need to insist to our mages that buffs earlier on are one of the most important things that the DD can have, that means having haste on all of the DD's in at the the main party, and not worrying so much about keeping everyone healed all the time in the second party. This is how we do things outside of Salvage, the DD's know that if they are getting banged up on Omega, they have to pull back and take a knee because no one is going to heal them. It's time to adapt that to Salvage. My last thought on this is that I am torn on insisting that people have certain merits and merit abilities. I don't like dictating to people on what they should and should not merit (well, I do sometimes in my own head LOL), but there are some merits that really are crucial for Salvage. Angon and Feint are two melee merits that come to mind first. Angon is a minute worth of stackable 20% defense reduction for a minute every three minutes. Feint is even stronger with a 50% evasion reduction for 30 seconds. Having these two merit abilities is critical to a quick QQA kill especially on the second floor. For BRD, Troubadour is important for the 6th floor where you have to kill really fast. Then there are the RDM tier 2 spells which all RDM's already know about.

That's it no more Salvage for today or I will ramble endlessly about it. Well, ok, one last thing. Omoikitte has totally reworked the Versus website as I have already mentioned but specifically she made a new page for Salvage gear. I love the effects of this page, check it out.

Now, about my SAM. Well, last night I finally popped those 5 extra merits I had lying around into Meditate Recast. That leaves me with 9 merit points left to earn to completely cap my SAM merits. Honestly, I don't know what took me so long to get MNK and SAM capped, well, at least for SAM, because MNK was my last job to 75 so I can see needing them there, but I think it was just recently that I decided to start focusing more, and now I feel good about my choices. I am going to get 1 in each of the last three categories for tier 2: Ikishoten, Shikikoyo and Blade Bash. Blade Bash is now a reliable stun, Shikikoyo might be helpful when prepping for events and Ikishoten, well, I am going to get that because it's not really that great but reducing 15 minute recasts even to 10 minutes doesn't really do much for me. I will only use them in special cases I have no doubts, so no reason to have them up faster. Now, my SAM just isn't as well equipped as my MNK which is a little saddening but it also doesn't have the easy and apparent best gear for each slot that MNK has either.

For TP:
Hagun
Tiphia Sting
Walahra Turban
Chivalrous Chain
Merman's Earring
Brutal Earring
Haubergeon +1
Dusk Gloves
Rajas Ring
Ulthalam's Ring
Amemet Mantle +1 (Charger Mantle?)
Swift Belt
Byakko's Haidate
Hachiman Sune-ate

As you can see there are plenty of places that I can improve, but I have to use this set up to get to 6-hits. If the stupid bees every drop my feet, I will be able to us Usukane Sune-ate and that will change a whole lot of things. I will be able to get rid of the Chivalrous Chain as the first and most obvious improvement, and I will switch over to the Peacock Charm for TP build, maybe a Justice Torque if they existed. There are other obvious places that I can really improve like an Ace's Helm would help infinitely, or even Askar would be nice. I don't really know right now if the Amemet Mantle +1 is better than Charger Mantle, and that is a bunch of math that I can't wrap my head around. Finally, it looks like we will be able to do a Divine Might soon, so I will be switching up my Suppanomimi for a Bushinomimi and that will fix my gimp ear slot.

I wish I had a better understanding of how Attack and STR were calculated so that I was better at determining which pieces were better. And I am trying to teach myself, and if you want to know more, I will be going over that tomorrow, with neat graphs and stuff.

Anyway, to wrap up, my WHM got to 47. Still liking it, just don't have tons of time to play it right now. Once I cap my SAM merits and maybe replenish my of NIN I will spend some deliberate and extensive time working on it. Right now my goal is 51, Serket Ring and staves. Thats what I really want.