Omoi and I.

Omoi is my best friend and most favorite person in the game. She is pretty much amazing and we do so much together that when people ask one of us to do something they know that they are asking both of us, and we generally don't do something else we both can do it. Omoi is awesome in general, and specifically, is a great leader of Versus, has huge amounts of patience to do with the myriad of issues involved with that responsibility and is continually looking to support the LS in any way possible. She is also incredibly giving to the point that we have as of late force her to lot on stuff that she needs for her DRG. Her DRG is now, by the way, the subject of my pride for her and my consternation, as she has consistently been able to outparse my MNK. I think it may be time to break out the big guns the next time that we merit and bring my SAM, but she also likes to cheat, and keep Hasso up fun time. >.< I am going to have to do the same or just come MNK/WAR and tell the healer to just suck it up. LOL Anyway, my jealousy causes digression. Omoi is awesome, and makes me happy to just play this game and be able to talk to her and hang out with her every day. :)

Speaking of the big guns, I finally got around to doing Divine Might again. The fight was a little bit more messy that we have had in the past, took us 20 minutes to beat it instead of the normal ~10 minutes. I had dropped my Suppanomimi a couple of weeks ago so that I could get a new Bushinomimi. Now my SAM has one of the last key items that it needs, leaving only pretty much a Justice Torque. Well, I still need an Ace's Helm or Askar head, but those will come eventually. Also, I am considering if I should go with full Usukane whenever I get it. It is obviously not as good in haste but it is at least worth testing out.

I suppose I should mention the new update notes that came out today.

Several adjustments to the battle system are scheduled for the upcoming version update.

Merit Points Group 2: Maximum Raised for Ability Increases

Adjustments to the Group 2 section of the merit point job categories will be implemented in the upcoming version update.
The current total maximum ability increase of 6 and the individual maximum ability increase of 3 will be raised to match the Group 1 values of 10 and 5, respectively.

New Job Abilities and Spells

In conjunction with the scheduled job adjustments, the monk, paladin, and bard jobs will be receiving new abilities and spells.

For monks, we will be adding a new job ability that allows them to restrict their attacks to kicks only. In exchange for a penalty to attack delay, the monk receives an increase to damage and attack power, as well as a bonus to the amount of TP gained per kick.

Paladins will be receiving a new spell that increases the rate of shield blocks, as well as reflecting blocked damage back to an attacker. As with "Blaze Spikes" and "Dread Spikes," this spell will only affect the caster.

Lastly, bards will gain a job ability that allows them to limit the area effect of a song to a single target.
For example, if a bard casts "Mage's Ballad" after activating this new ability, only the selected target will receive the effect of the song.

MNK: We will see. I am definitely hoping that this is just some kind of situational boost and not something that is going to be used full time as it seems to kind of defeat the entire purpose of the MNK haste gear. If its situationally good that is fine, but if I am going to use it full time, then MEH. It also depends on the recast of the ability and such.

PLD: I think this is actually much better than most people I have seen say, and the reason is that it might actually let PLD sub something besides NIN, like WAR, DRK or RDM. I have no doubts that it will not be useful with shadows up. If it stays up when shadows are up, sure it will make tanking easier with /NIN too, but in many cases /NIN is not the optimal subjob but is still needed to reduce damage. Honestly, for HNM if this spell is strong enough then /RDM may become the best subjob available.

BRD: This will be pretty cool for leveling BRD with a PLD obviously, but also for DRK and BLU also. Of course it will depend on recast and usage, but it definitely seems like something that will help a whole lot.

Merits in general: This is a huge fuck yeah! I will definitely be boosting Overwhelm first, then Penance and Invigorate, then I am going to go back and put the rest of my merits into Blade Bash which should reduce its recast time to 5 minutes.

I wanted to mention one last thing, Rukenshin updated his live journal and if you are a SAM you should check it out. He suggests that SAM/DRG may actually be more beneficial than SAM/WAR. Now while this may be true for him, there are several reasons to believe that it might not be as beneficial to everyone else. The first is that even with SAM/DRG he believes that he is at or near the attack cap which is impressive, but it may not be true for everyone if they do not have equal gear. Also his math assumes exception gear for haste too. Since the benefits of haste increase with more haste the effect for his haste set up will be higher than those that do not have more haste. Also, he does not have a Bushinomimi so his /WAR gear is slightly less than optimal compared to his /DRG gear where he can use Brutal and Wyvern Earring. I am definitely not saying that /DRG would be better or worse just that using Rukenshin's example to base your gear selection may not be best for you.

Thats it for today, see you tomorrow.