Ok, everyone please just shut the fuck up for a second.

Man, the unending speculation, the myriad of ideas, the ceaseless chattering. My head was ready to explode yesterday just reading threads about what people though of the update and what they did to many different things. New monsters, new gear, new abilities, new items, new quests, new everything. This update was ridiculously huge, and I will give you a run down with what I believe is a reasonable description of events without the hype, chattering, crying or whining.

There was a whole lot going on so I can see it becoming overwhelming to a point, but breaking it down into little chunks may be beneficial to help wrap our brains to wrap around the huge changes that were brought about with this update.

* New missions. I have no idea about these, but from what I hear there are not many of them. I am guessing they will probably be short and not reveal much to us. I really wish that this had been more of the content as they said it was going to be when they first announced the update, but with everything else that is going on in the update, it is not that bad.

* New NM's. The obvious first observation is that Dark Ixion is now prowling the past, and is very interesting. As it stands alone, it can be engaged but once it is engaged it will run off at a high rate of speed. Apparently, Stygian Ash which is a drop from Faeries in the past (not that uncommonly) is used to aggro it and a hit will allow it to be fought without it fleeing again. At this point information is known about it but it is without an HP bar so it may be taking damage but it is unknown if it is even killable at this point. There is probably another item that has to be used to make its HP bar appear. Interestingly enough, it seems that it can respawn in different zones at different times. Lots of information still needs to be gathered about this one. The second NM that appears to have been changed is Sandworm. Although Sandworm in the past did nothing, it appears that it now at a certain point it will use a TP move called Doomvoid, which will suck all of the players currently in the party with claim on the Sandworm into one of the three instanced zones in those areas, e.g. Everbloom Hollow, and there you will be able to fight Serket, King Arthro or Guivre (Guivre is in the dat files but not confirmed yet). These mobs are highly buffed versions of the ones in the present and there are no confirmed kills as of yet.

* New NM system. As word trickled in on this one, I thought it was going to suck, but it turns out to not be that bad really. You basically talk to an NPC, and that NPC will give you a specific request which is pretty hard to come by, and a more general request which isn't that bad. You then have to take pictures of the mobs with the Pankration camera and film then trade them in for points. The points are then traded for pop items for a plethora of NM's throughout the Aht Urhgan areas. These NM's appear to have 2 possible drops and can get to be very good items, and they also drop another item that is traded in for a future NM pop item. At some point along the way, you can get a pop item for an NM on the stone tablet islands around the main Aht Urhgan areas. To get to the islands you must get a 500 point item to trade to the stone tablet, then on the island is a ??? where you will likely trade the pop item. The mobs include Cerberus, Hydra and Khimaira and those are assumed to be the higher level pop monsters. It looks like everyone that goes to assist with these higher level spawned monsters will need salts to get to the islands.

*Einherjar. Almost everyone knows about the fixes so far, including normal mobs giving you ampules, not having to complete every single chamber to get Odin access and a new item for 100,000 ampules that I will get to later. They also slightly adjusted things to make it easier to pull, because the linking will occur normally instead of all mobs linking at once. There were a couple of complaints that for the higher tiers the linking helps to draw all of the mobs together faster, but I think this can be dealt with relatively easily for those that can already do it.

*Group 2 merits. Outside of a slight nerf to Overwhelm for SAM this appears pretty much as they said that it would. The tiers are now 3,4,5,5,5 so it is not as major of a burden as it could have been had they kept rolling up the numbers. I think that I will be shifting over to 5 Overwhelm and 5 Blade Bash for SAM and then just continuing what I already have for MNK. Two MNK with maxed Penance can now keep up the TP down effect in perpetuity. Waiting on Izman to test his new Iron Will effects, and if it doesn't work, waiting for Highlife to kill him. LOL

*New Job Abilities. Footwork sucks, as I thought it would, but its also not as bad for certain situations. The problems it has is that it is not effected by haste, spells or gear. Just a flat 480 delay. This means that well geared MNK will have next to no use for it, but for those that have marginal gear or are still working to get better gear. I will likely almost never use it, except for opening on an NM in Salvage. Since it does do more damage and you get more TP from Asuran Fists, I could open or at least use it for one AF then turn it off immidiately, like DRK do with Souleater. I will probably make a macro for that and carry my Dune Boots on me again, but I don't think its going to matter that much. I worked hard for all the haste gear that I have, I don't want to give it up! LOL Reprisal looks to be pretty good, but I am not a PLD, and the guy that sells the spell was captured last night so I didn't get to see any definitive testing. It does look like it makes a huge difference in block rate and the damage that is returned is half of the damage that is taken by the PLD before other adjustments are factored into the equation like Phalanx. The new BRD ability basically works as indicated, the BRD uses the ability, then targets a player with a song and only that player will get the song. Nice for PLD in XP and low MP situations, but nothing ground breaking.

Ok, that is just part of the update, I haven't even gotten to the new equipment or the new relics. But I will get to that tomorrow.