Imperfect just like everyone else, I do it perfectly.

A great lyric from a great band that never made it because of the assassination of an entire genre of great music by a 40 year-old rip-off artist. Anyway, perfection is sometimes defined by an ending that perfectly fits a theme for an event. In the case of Salvage, and specifically our Zhayolm Remnants runs, perfection comes in the form of this: I mean seriously, come on, we have gotten double drops of everything except Hiryo's Usukane 25 Head. We are tossing 25's at this point, because of the total lack of Usukane head, well, at least once we do finally get Hiryo's Usukane 25 Head we will not have to do Zhayolm boss for a long time, and we can kill both frogs without worrying about having time to kill the boss too. :) Last night though was much faster than normal in Zhayolm Remnants so I think everyone is getting better at learning to move fast through the zones so that we can kill everything and still have time for the boss.

I have been farming a bit here and there trying to get my leathercraft to a reasonable level and making a bit of gil in the process, and while doing so I have happened upon Stray Mary at least three times now, and I don't know if this makes me particularly lucky but I have gotten a Mary's Horn that I will use for my BRD when I finally level it. I feel semi-bad about claiming Stray Mary, but I tend to spam wide scan while I am farming and it's popped up three times that I have been able to claim, but that also means that someone is killing sheep to try to spawn Stray Mary and I have been getting the claim. I don't know, it may make up for the years and years of not claiming crap in this game, and I think that Mary's Horn may be the first ever rare drop that I have ever gotten from this game from an NM that I have claimed and killed myself. :)

Over the weekend we did some good ZNM's recently, including some tier two and tier three spawns, which actually resulted in some of the gear that a bunch of us have been looking for recently. First, our main goal has been to try to get Izman some of those sexy Aurum feet for his WAR, which required killing Armed Gears. This time it was much quicker and tanking Armed Gears with NIN/DRK is so much easier than with NIN/WAR. Iz was on PLD/NIN and we very easily duo tanked it. And this time we finally got Iz his new feet. They are, I believe the best feet available for WAR. There are pieces that have more haste and are far more expensive but in the end there are no pieces that have this much accuracy and attack WITH the haste and none of the other alternatives are anywhere as obtainable as the Aurum feet! Get these for your WAR! They might look a little retarded but it's not like Dusk feet look good on Elvaan anyway.

The next we did was a couple of Dea's for the Enkidu's legs for Kallo and Myrrial. Myrrial wasn't that lucky though, but I was as I was able to pick up a pair of Oracle's feet for my WHM resting MP set up and I will get to use it for my BRD! :) That is something I really like about ZNM's really, it's pretty easy to get people to come and help because after you have spawned a few of them then you are basically giving away some incredibly good gear to people just for helping you out to kill some pretty simple to pretty painful mobs. :) So if you are one of those people that are poo-pooing ZNM's because its too much work for the result, I think you just need to go with a few people that have already done a couple of tier 3 or 4's and pick up a couple of pieces of gear that go free lot. You don't really get to see how good this gear is until you put a lot in on it. That is when you notice something about it that stands out, and then you start getting that itch for the gear. I think part of the reason that most people don't think much of this gear is because of the nature of the stats. But I will get to that in a minute, because Kallo's Dea did go better and he got his new subligar. If this was WoW and we could name them something ridiculous they would be something like Pink Pajamas of the Utterly Undignified. :) Yes, Kallo the stats are awesome, and yes Kallo, you do look like mom didn't wash your clothes and you had to go to school in your pajama bottoms with the poop flap in the back. :D

Now, as to why you should reconsider the ZNM drops? I did the same thing that you did when I first saw the gear; I yawned and said, how is this supposed to beat what I already have? It took more than a second or third look before I started to realize how good some of the pieces are and that even if SE didn't put much thought into the design of the ZNM system or especially into the look of the new items instead of just recycling old unused gear. But since gear may be pretty or it may not but the stats are what defines it lets look at that instead. Take for example the Oracle's set all of which except for the body has +2 hMP on it which should make it of interest to mages in general but the thing about the set is that it also has high additional MP too. Why does this matter? Because a lot of time hMP gear doesn't have additional MP so that means you have to have either deal with the fact that resting in the middle of a fight or XP chain you will never be able to get to max MP. With the Oracle's gear you will be able to rest and keep your max MP at a reasonable level. And thats just the basics of the gear, each individual piece has a nice addition, like the feet have BRD skills, and the hands have Enfeebling skill. For the other gear, the Enkidu's have very nice stats but it is the first time outside of Homam gear that Blue Mages can actually call an end-game gear set their own, at least for WS's. Lots of STR to be found here even if there are other sets with more stats there is also quite a bit of accuracy to be found here to which should let BLU's use some different subs on HNM because /THF or at least some other spells besides Cannonball. The biggest surprise though is the Aurum set though. Even though the legs and hands have silly negative stats on them, the individual pieces are still very nice. Well, wait, no, the hands suck, you should be using Dusk Gloves for TP and you should be able to find something better for WS's. After the hands though, the rest is good, well, wait, no, the head is just retarded I think. It would be better with more haste, but it doesn't so it isn't. Soooo... the body is awesome... for who you ask? DRG! Even though SE has finally started giving DRG some good gear, the body is still a hard place to find something reasonable and here it is! Store TP enough to make a reasonable 6-hit set up or close to it which, as I have discussed previously, is ok for DRG, good attack, really good stats and enough DEX to actually have an impact on accuracy. That being said, it is definitely something you don't want to Jump in because of the negative VIT, and if the modifier for the Gungnir WS really is AGI then it would suck for that too. The legs are great for Steel Cyclone too and is also good for Jumps for DRG too.

The point ultimately is that the new ZNM gear is good and subtly so. You should take a fourth look at it and maybe put some time into picking some of it up or hell getting some of it free lot.

Oh crap, forgot one last thing. BLU, COR and PUP relic equipment is being added to Dynamis. Yes, I was absolutely DEAD WRONG about this. I thought for sure it would be added to a new event, and that they wouldn't wrangle with the storyline issues of adding them to Dynamis. Looking back, I think they tried but how do you make a new event that has gear equivalents to things that are already in the game and put them in a new event and have incentives for other jobs to go? I just don't know really, but I figured they had enough time to work on it as they are being paid to come up with something like that and I am paid to process books. The other things is that Dynamis was actually like the one end-game event prior to ToAU that actually made sense in the game story line. Sky, Sea, Limbus, HNM, they were all like outside of the storyline and independent, and I felt some inviability to Dynamis, but in the end if it is going to make the game play easier on the players and the designers I have no issue with it at all really.