Take what you can get.

So after two angry blog posts, I get more comments. Honestly, I don't know what is up with you people. I spend over a year writing a happy-go-lucky blog, with interesting tid-bits on the game, my adventures, advice on proper gearing, I even spent a week explaining out the damage system works. Then I make one angry blog post and I am the hero of the world. I see what you people like. You are like the spectators at the Colosseum, waiting on the lions to eat the Christians. You want your blood and you want it now. Well, eat, eat, you fucking jackals! (And if you know where that line is from then you get your own feature on the blog next week, and Googling it doesn't count!) I will take what I can get. :)

Anyway, I really need to do a gear review and I need to do it soon, I have a bunch of changes that have been made to my gear recently after being stable for quite some time. Usukane will do that to a man. But I will have to hold off on that for some screenshots because I don't like posting gear comments without the screenshots because it just seems so unfulfilling. I also wanted to mention that I going to add a new segment to the blog every once in a whole. It's going to be "Ring's person that he thinks is so cool that he may potentially want to have gay relations with at some point, well, maybe not, but you get the picture, not that there is anything wrong with that!" segment. I am going to do Izman first, and when I say "do" I mean I am going to cover him first, not like bang him, and when I say "cover him" I mean talk about him not like bang him again as another euphemism. God, you guys are totally sick fucks! NOT THAT THERE IS ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT!

Anyway...

"My gay love for Izman" - by Ring<3three.

Look he even dressed in all pink for me! Ok, whatever maybe I am gay. But at least he is the one in pink. OK, THATS IT NO MORE GAY JOKES! And I am not making jokes about gay people! I am making jokes about me being gay, so my string of non-offensive posts continues, well, except for that rant yesterday about JP gil-buyers being worse than NA gil-buyers. And well, my implicit hope that every Chinese RMT die by porcupine ass-raping. Maybe I hate Asian people? :( Nah, that can't be it because I love XPing with good JP players. :) I think I just hate people that suck. That is better. Wait, I know you are twisting the meaning of suck in your minds right now, you sick twisted bastards. Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, my love for Izman... let me count the ways. Nah, but seriously Izman is the damn coolest person I know in the universe. Shit that drives me crazy doesn't even bug Iz, and when Iz is around, that shit that normally makes me crazy, well it just gets toned down so much that I don't even notice it. He is a totally calming influence on every one and just having him around instills a ton of confidence not only in me but in the whole LS. He tanks like a champ, and he is one of those people (like Bgalvin was) where gear only improved his play, it never defined what he could do. This is something that is forgotten on new PLDs who think gear really matters all that much. Iz could tank literally everything we do naked (<3! What? Too gay? LOL, alright, I was just kidding) except for sword and shield and some shadows. He just hardly ever dies on PLD outside of crazy situations and then its mostly just funny. And the funny thing is that he knows this but never flaunts it, he only uses it for humor. I have two perfect examples of this, both in Campaign. The first, his favorite, was when he some how managed to link all of the Orc's at Jugner and proceded to run the entire group from one end of the area to the other with the entire zone of players chasing after him trying to catch up to the mobs. The other was my favorite time, essentially he did the same thing and linked all of the Orc's onto himself, but this time he ran around the Campaign tower and managed to MPK something like 80% of the people there. Hilarious! Iz is the kind of person that will do anything for anyone and will never complain about it one bit. He hardly ever gets upset, and just takes things as they come without trying to force solutions that won't work. Calm, cool, collected is a perfect description. Iz is takes all of the hardships in game and in real life in stride. I couldn't have a better friend in the world.

Ok, now I just feel dirty. Anyway, that screenshot you see of Iz being all pink is actually him using Retaliation which as it turns out is pretty neat, but has a pretty low proc rate. I don't understand why they would give them this ability such a low proc rate if it doesn't reduce damage. I mean I know the swings you get from it count as full swings and you get full TP from them, but still it just seems a little weird. I would really like to try this out in Salvage on the first floor of all the runs. You are going to take damage anyway, so may as well give some back in the process. The only problem will be the decreased movement speed, but if you have multiple tank-like jobs (MNK, SAM, well, just about any DD in Salvage) they can support in the few second it will take someone to get there, or you can just click it off when you have to move any real distance. With a 3 minute duration and a 3 minute recast you can have it up when you need it and click it off when you don't without having to wait very long for it to be up again.

Omoi and I did a little exploring of the newly opened Beastmen Strongholds, and again I am left wondering; what the fuck are we supposed to do with this? Man, it feels so much like CoP all over again. "Here are some huge wide open areas, we don't really have a use for them, we don't really have a motivation for you to go explore, we don't really have an incentive for you do anything here, but we are are scary smart and cool that we know you will love it!" W... T... F? The only suggestion I have heard for using those areas is for XP there at 75, but it still has the same problem that every other XP area that isn't under Sanction. Let me be clear here for a moment, let me get out my singing voice... MI, MI, MI, MI... *cough* Ok, here we go. PEOPLE ARE NOT GOING TO XP IN A PLACE THAT DOES NOT HAVE A 15% XP BONUS! No, Ninjafox, that dirge was not pointed at you at all. At least you are trying to come up with something to do in those areas, which is about a thousand times better than what the developers are doing right now. I want to emphasize a point here (like I haven't already) but even Campaign doesn't make a load of sense in and of itself. There are no direct instructions, there are no guidelines, there are no explanations. Like why the fuck can't I one of the Campaign Ops but not another? Why is the dialogue so incredibly vague on what you are supposed to do? What fucking incentive do I have to do anything outside of Campaign Battle? Why give 7 tags for Campaign Ops for shit you are never going to do? Why make the Campaign Ops completely unrewarding? It's just crazy. I don't get it. Here is my ultimate question, do they actually believe that people are going to put together an alliance to go into the Beastmen Strongholds and take them over? People are barely motivated enough to go get the Astral Candescence back, why the fuck would they go into the Beastmen Strongholds and try to take them over, and I want to be clear here again, WHEN THERE IS NO FUCKING REWARD TO DO SO! Is this group of SE's developers really so fucking full of themselves that they believe we will play their content for the sake of it? It's a mountain, it must be conquered kind of crap. Yeah, that works when you are bored, but not when you already have the choice to do 10,000 other, BETTER things to do in the game. Kings, Sky, Sea, Assault, Salvage, Nyzul Isle, Limbus, Dynamis. No matter what you think about those things, guess what they all have in common. That's right, YOU GET SOMETHING OUT OF THEM. Why fucking invade Beadeaux when you can just stay in Jugner and get more XP and AN. It just doesn't make sense.

Now that rant may seem similar to other people's complaints about Wings, but it is not. I don't think there is a problem with the amount of content. There is huge amount of content in this expansion, and its all interesting in some form or another. There are two major problems with it and the first is that it is undirected, and by that I don't mean that it needs to be quest-line after quest-line, I mean that it doesn't make any fucking sense. No matter how complicated something is, if you give us time and direction we can figure it out. But this shit is complicated to the point of complete insanity, and it has no directions at all. It's like trying to put together a flux capacitor with instructions that are written in fucking Gaelic. How does the recruitment function work? How much effect do our decisions really have on the NPC's? Why can the NPC's die, retreat and just disappear all of a sudden? Where the fuck are the gigantic machines they promised? I want to get crushed under the wheels of the huge-like-X-box warmachines! The second issues is that there are no fucking rewards. Ok, so the Rare/Ex gear at Emblem rank doesn't completely suck, but man, give me a week and I can have it from all three nations! Rewards should always be Time x Risk x Effort. Now instead of looking at the gear and going, "wow, that is situationally good gear how much time do I need to put in to get it", we say "wow, I have all the new gear from the update, that didn't feel very rewarding." And come on guys, give us gear that is relevant to the game we are playing NOW not the game we were playing 2 years ago. Evasion + STR = why would I use that at 75? Sure its good, maybe great gear from 68 to 75, but how long are you at those levels anymore? Maybe a week, maybe two? My mother always said think before you speak, SE needs to learn to think before you implement.

That was another tangential rant, and I wasn't even expecting it. LOL Anyway, so Omoi and I went to Castle Oztroja and its pretty cool inside. You have to sneak around for sure, which I really like. The idea of running through the Beastman Stronghold in the present without getting mauled by like 8 million mobs was kind of weird, but its like it should be in the past. The Yagudo are pretty bad ass too. This Samurai for example was getting Zanshin procs all the time and was pretty damn accurate even with my evasion/haste set up. Zanshin is a bitch. He also hit decently hard, but was relatively easy to enfeeble and that toned him down a lot, but it was literally double attacking 2 out of every 3 swings. It was fun getting up to the top of the castle, but again, outside of three new NM's in that area, I really have no idea why I would go back.

Yesterday we did some Barbarian Mittens fights for the LS, and man, WTF, that dude is hard. Now, the description for this mob is basically all wrong. It doesn't reset hate with every hit, because it would stick on people for a while then change. It is more like it just doesn't have any hate rules at all. And it hits for a ton, so you are usually dead if it hits you straight up. It also has what I would think is its two-hour which is a really high damage 4 hit Frypan. My shadows were down when it used it the first time and it hit me for like 1900 damage on NIN. We didn't get a drop either time we spawned it, and we ended up just zerging it after we got the second one to 30%. It was annoying and as there is better gear on the Auction House for less than it costs to synth the pop item, we will likely never be doing this one again.

Finally, back to Salvage. Had a run with Rakuen last night, pretty straight forward Zhayolm run. Celestria offered to kill the frog that drops my Usukane Feet 15's but I told her not to change for me because I wanted to do it with Versus. So we did the normal routine of 1, 2, 2, 3, 6 and the boss. The 6th floor Madame dropped Morrigan's Feet 35 which went to Blaize for his BLM. Surprisingly only the first floor Madame got off a Frog Chorus, the rest were stunned by Butcher or I and honestly the Madames didn't even try to use them that much. We went onto the boss, Battleclad Chariot and because I was in the main party this time, I actually got to tank, yay! With MNKs that have full Penance tanking, this guy is really easy. Limited TP moves prevent any real harm from Discoid. The last time we did BCC we got an Usukane Head 25 and Usukane Body 25, this time it was another Usukane Head 25 which I won the lot on! ^.^ Omoi won the lot Ares's Legs 25, so it was very rewarding for both of us! :)

Anyway, thats it, I have Dynamis tonight so tomorrow I will get to rant without having a whole bunch of pictures to interrupt it.