So much more than just Refresh...

My new home

2006-09-01T15:29:00.000-04:00

My new url for Nivaud will be http://nivaud.blogspot.com if any of you want to link me. I am carrying over all my old links to my new site cause everyone I have linked here has me linked and I think that's cool of you all.

Read about my deaths on a new site! Yay for deleveling! Thanks for reading everyone, I hope we can still continue my (mis)adventures.

Leap of faith

2006-08-30T13:49:00.000-04:00

So I made the jump. I found someone who was looking for the same things I was (a new server, a new craft, and a new set fo jobs). I found that person on Bismarck and I made the leap and traded up characters straight up. To my right you can see what I gave up in Gorokai, here is what I recieved:

name - Nivaud
race - Male/Elvaan (Face 3A)
allegiance - Rank 10 Bastok, rank 8 Windy
jobs - 75SMN, 75RDM, 75BLM, 57BST, 56DRK, 55WHM, 37NIN
access - all areas including sea, sky, ToAU
crafts - 95 cooking (Raw Fish Handling), 84 fishing (Lu Shang's Rod), 60 Woodworking (Lumberjack), 27 smithing/alchemy

The character has a weskit and a yinyang robe for SMN! Along with LuShang's, I have an Evoker's Ring, Ugg Pendant, Loq. earring, and about 60-70 merits dispersed throughout SMN, BLM, and RDM. The RDM has 3 AF2's, the BST has 2 AF2's :D and the character has 1/2 the items needed to make a RDM, BST, BLM, and SMN AF+1. Unfortunetly I only have 14 coins... but that shouldn't be a problem. I have found a new joy in fishing and cooking. Last night I fished up 2 stacks of Black Sole in Port Jeuno (sinking minnow = free bait!) and then I synthed up some Sole Sushi and stuck it up on the AH. Easy gil... I also spent a few trips pulling in some Gugru Tuna and slapping them up on the AH block 4k.

It's not huge gil like clothcraft... hell I could buy a 500k Galaetia and make a 700k pair of trousers in 2 minutes and make 200k right there. Instead this is a slow and steady craft that has return customers. Once one of my clients bought my blessed trousers I'd never realy see him again, but melee are always gonna look for sole sushi when the fight. So I'm hoping that this turns out a little less stresfull than camping the AH for Galaetia and Siren's Hair.

Sadly I have to call POL and get the pasword for my new email account. The previous owner never used it and forgot it, and the only way to get my screenshots to my PC to host them on this blog is to email them from my POL account to my real life email account. So, unfortunetly, no new pics of my dhalmel SMN.

On a side note, I wanted to thank Resurrection very much for being the only HNM LS to take a chance with me. I never asked to join, but I was glad I did. They welcomed me and forgot the past and decided to invite Gorokai and if I was truly an ass... just kick me. They treated me iwth respect and were so SO helpful. You helped me kill my 1st king, my 1st Cerb, and my 1st Limbus Ultima. You helped me get BRD AF+1 legs and about 8M from my KS99 last week. I thank you guys for all you did. A while back I did my CoP static with Aenarion and Gimmeone, two Res members. UP told me to listen to him and forget they were Res, just push through the missions. I'm really glad I did. Thank you all.

bore ring

2006-08-28T23:51:00.000-04:00

- Solo'd BLM from 138/23,000 to 12,100/23,000 over a few hours while watching TV.

- Synthed up 2 pairs of blessed trousars, having to deal with mid-week undercutting morons so they aren't selling, patience is a virtue.

Still need a buffer on RDM, seeing as I'm 1,400/44,000 right now.

I truly love tarus...

2006-08-27T02:01:00.000-04:00

So for the past few days I have managed to do a whole lot of nothing really. A bunch of random stuff but no "big thing" has happened since Aspi last Sunday. Monday I leveled SMN which was sorta just to pass the time. Tuesday we did some Limbus, Apollyon SE which I've done a million times with Victory before. We managed to pull out the win. Wednesday was Dynamis and we got the win but 23 of our 45 people left right after the boss, so farming was not happening.
Thursday I picked up some xp on BLM, since none of my duo partners were online. It was the first normal party I have been in, in about 6 weeks. I was shocked to how much fun it was to getback to normal parties. There wasn't a whole lot of chatter, 4 of the 6 were japanese. We had PLD, DRK, RNG, RDM, COR, BLM. The RNG and DRK did a Fragmentation WS to perfection and I was able to MB Thundaga II or Aero III almost every time. The COR was dropping me Wizard's Roll which was like crack. I ended up getting 16k xp in two hours and really loved the experience. Taru's in COR AF take the cake.

We have planned to finish our KS99 runs that went unfinished from 2 weeks ago, but it kept getting delayed. Friday night we finally got the people together and did about 4 runs (mine included). The first run was great drops, the 2nd run was crap (poor Eowen). The third run was my orb and I ended up with a Shinsoku (3.7M) and a Behemoth Hide (5.1M). Not a bad bounty for 99 seals, seeing as last time I walked with a 5M gil Kriegsbiel. A big thanks to Resurrection for their death and suicide each time the KB got to 1%... since we all knew it was gonna blow.

Finally Saturday (today) I logged on to see no one really doing much of anything. I checked my Choco in windy which still hasn't hatched, went to Sandy to trade in Cursed Soup with Oblation Abjuration to get some Ambrosia, and decided to get some skillup. I got on BRD and went out to the local Lesser Colibri's outside of Aht Urghan. I had sanction + auto regen bonus on to start with. Then I would cast Regen and 2x Paeon. I was getting like 15hp/tick and I was able to stay at 90% HP while meleeing these damn birds. Energy Steal was a great WS to fill up my MP bar (since Cyclone is wind based and did about 5 damage to the Colibris). I started at 171 skill and ended at 197. It took about 2 hours but I got myself ready for the 200-225 mobs. I don't know why I really skilled up other than the fact I want to use Heart Snatcher (since my damn RDM can't use it) and I also want to eventually use Evisceration.

I bailed on solo skillup for Limbus, and without going into too much detail... let's just say we got to the last floor and had to kill 3 elementals and for some reason our melee thought that 4 melee could kill them without pulling em back to a safe spot. I tried saying "NO MAGIC CASTING" but some people just had to cast. We wiped, we lost, oh well. Not smart, hopefully they think it through better next time. The night ended with a crappy xp party that netted me 276xp in 2 hours, so I went back to my solo spot and was able to solo to 63. I decided to leave on a high note and logged off at that point.

newb

2006-08-22T10:58:00.000-04:00

Not much going on last night, didn't feel like leveling BLM since I've done it so much recently. Wanted to get my newb feeligns back. I hit up my armor mule and saw that I still had all my level 15 mage gear so I muled it all over, switched to 13SMN, and headed out to Tahrongi Canyon. Soloing as SMN is easier than soloing as BST, and very little attention is needed, granted it's only 40-70xp per kill but seeing as it's only 3600xp per level... thats 65 mobs killed. If you kill a mob every 2-3 minutes than you can get your level in about 2 hours. So that's what I did, I spent the night watching the DVR on split screen and soloing on SMN, going form 13 to 15. I probably need to start going into parties now but even then, I won't need to pay super duper attention since all I'll be doing is using Blood Pacts and backup healing. (I will not be a main healer, if I wanted to be a main healer I'd have switched to WHM).

Tonight may be more of the same unless we actually DO our scheduled KS99 run which has been pushed back now almost 2 weeks since our last one. Maybe even do a few jailers. If both of those fall through I'll just party on SMN, solo on BLM, or skillup on leather (finally).

Aspi sunk (this time I WAS on-board)

2006-08-20T22:18:00.000-04:00

Tonight we decided to head out to Aspi. We knew he was due and we had the people online so we all gathered at the Valley of Sorrows for his window. We had ToD from the previous night and when we got there only LB was there. BBQ started to trickle in and the Unsent popped up after the 2nd window. We weren't seeing much astion and I was watching the Colts game on splitscreen. I do this sometimes when I am in a slow situation like Dynamis or Kirin or camping windows (see below in this old pic)

So after the 4th or 5th window started to perk up because there's only seven. Well, he popped and we got claim. He isn't all that hard, it's the fact he is in an area that has so many adds that he can be tiresome. We evetually did most of our damage on MB's, and after about 30 minutes of fighting we killed him. Aspi drops Wyrmal Body, Aquarian Body, and Koenig Feet. 2/3 of the drops are RDM friendly... well he dropped the feet (Congratulations to Kimith!). Seems fitting since the PLDs claimed and they did a great job on adds. Drops were:

In other news I got my BLM to 62 while duoing and hit my alltime high for XP. We had to burn a Manafont in the process but it was well worth it. Fun times all around today. Too bad I was too damn lazy to level leathercraft this weekend...

Temenos Liberator

2006-08-19T21:19:00.000-04:00

FINALLY!

FInally beat one of the 2 NMs in Limbus. Granted it took 59 minutes and change, it was our very 1st time and our very 1st win. We learned alot, mostly who has hate when Citadel Buster begins and who doesn't. We went in with 17 or 18 and came out with about 12 (still alive). Everyone gave their all, no one complained about R1's and after throwing everything we had at it including the kitchen sink we walked out with 2 claws (Nashira Gages x2). A big congratulations to Nanci and Gimmeone for their new uber SMN hands!

All in all a good fun night and it's a step in the right direction. I think we are going for Omega now which is infinitly easier to get to and to kill. Hopefully we can get melee some Homam (finally!) and start heading back to Ultima for some more Nashira (yes, please). Good times!

After that everyone kinda crashed. We were pretty exhausted. I know I was. I started the day duoing BLM with Santiago, finding out that spamming tier 3 and tier 2 agas do just as much damage in alot less time. I ended up 2k tnl before we headed out for Ultima.

After that I decided to take a shot at Aht Urghan mission 13 "Lost Kingdom". It's a Fomor NM named Jazaraat way out in the western part of Caederva Mire graveyards. I almost solo'd it with grav, nukes, and DoT's but he ended up double-attacking me (both were crits) and then he used a TP move on me that is BIND! That was the end of me... one hit after being bound and I was toast. I called out for some BLM support and Sartre came running. I offered him gil which he refused after the kill. LS mates helping LS mates... that's what I like to see. I have to make a note to myself that I owe him a favor. I just know he's going to cash it in on a CoP mission...

Finally, it seems some veterans to ffxi are leaving. Both leaders of BBQPlatinum are hanging up their controllers/mice and calling it quits. I wish we could have left on better terms but I still wish Hulkk and Donnie the best. They put together quite an impressive endgame LS and were always respecting to surronding LS's. Also a good friend Tuufless is quitting. I have gotten to know {Tough}less for a while, he was always out to help people and even though he dabbled ever so gently in endgame he steered clear of any drama and made sure he had fun playing a game, which is really what it's all about. He has made the difinitive resource for camps Campsitarus as well as an intriguing Goldsmith's blog called Shiny Things. Tuuf has always been a example of the kind of player we all strive to be. You will be missed Tuuf, good luck in real life. I hear it's a jungle out there.

Back to the Subterrane

2006-08-17T10:51:00.000-04:00

So I decided to give this BLM solo thing a shot. It took some trial and errors but after finding that tier 2 agas and tier 3 nukes weeren't really worth it and Burst was somewhat being resisted I settled on Flares. I found a spot in the area that has 3 Qiqirn that pop very close and repop is 16 mins so by the time I kill the 3rd, I can go back to the 1st and he's up. Let me outline a little better. The main mob is Qiqirn Enterpriser:

They are a RNG type mob that checks VT to me as a 61BLM. The great thing about these things is no matter how much damage I throw at it, it never rushes in to attack me... It just stands there and shoots arrows at me. Well each Flare hits for 1050 and 4 usually take them down. That equates to about 4200 damage that you have to do. My strategy is to cast stoneskin, blink, flare, blind, and then sleep 2. I eat a Wizard Cookie and rest to full MP. Repeat. Without empress band on they give 312xp per kil and with the empress band on they give 468xp per kill. Really this is easy xp that requires very little, (if any) attention. Last night I did this for two hours while watching Talledga Nights on my PC... Easy stuff, and no stupid XP party is pulling my mob. The other benefits (like I said yesterday) is the auto-refresh from sanction and the closeness to Aht Urghan as opposed to way out in BFE Bibiki Bay.

BOOM!

Multi Muzzle

2006-08-16T10:53:00.000-04:00

So I login yesterday to go level BLM since Monday was a bit of a fiasco. I decide to try Aydeewa Subterrane which I'm told has Qiqirn Enterpriser which I'm told is a soloable mob for BLMs. Well, being a RNG mob it is because you can nuke the hell out of it and all it does is try to shoot at you. I was able to kill one for 300xp with no Empress Band on (450xp with?!) but it was slow going and used alot of MP. I would say I have to cast 2 Flares and 2 Quakes to kill it, while it only takes 1 Flare and 1 Thunder II to kill a Hobgoblin Rarab. Either way, I kinda like this area better because

I can get Imperial Standing.
I can get Qiqirn Sandbags which desynth into Silica which actually has some demand right now.
When we don't lose the Astral Candy... I can get auto-refresh with sanction on!

Unfortunetly, I got 1 mob in before I heard "LB is dying to Cerb!". Ugh, so I warped, job changed to RDM/DRK, realized that Odin lost in Besieged so I couldn't use Runic Portal. I had to sub DRK so I couldn't escape once inside Halvung... so I had a long ass run to get into Mt. Z. At least I found Archaic Mirrors along the way and marked them on my map for future reference.

By the time I arrived most of LB had home-pointed or tractored and was weakened. Our LS pulled with 4 and held for almost 10 minutes... I guess they felt they weren't going to lose out again by being overly cautious. Well they held him till the cavelry came and we never had a problem. Two Gates of Hades got through... 1 was on mine but I KNOW I stunned it. There must have been massive lag and I got the chatlog line late. Either way we recovered and had only 2 deaths from the whole fight. This time Cerb was nice to us. Two claws, one hide, one meat, and one Algol. That sword is so sexy, and it's kinda the only way people can know you killed Cerberus without checking your title. Since Mantle and Bow can be bought, this is the only rare/ex item that he drops.

Afterwards I was convinced to return to Airship BCNM. I once said after I died so much to that stupid ass fight... "I'll never do Snoll or Airship EVER again". Well, I was somehow convinced to go as BRD (well, a nice free reraise hairpin was thrown in) and we got Madberserk and Ncloud both Sea access. Congrats on that! Now we need to get these new sea-goers into some Limbus/Jailer action.

Aspi sunk (I wasn't on board)

2006-08-15T13:59:00.000-04:00

Got home last night and tried to solo on BLM, a party was there. They said they weren't going to stop pulling the Animalier even though there were TONS of other mobs to chain off of. Got sick of it, came back RDM. Brought along my NPC and starting killing Gobs . Got my NPC 57 but got bored trying to pull their mobs... it was true, there were tons of mobs to chain off of. Camped Intulo, popped him, got a curaga earring.

I wanted Magic Slacks...

Went back to Aht Urghan, synthed up a pair of NQ Cursed Slacks and NQ Blessed Trousers. No skillup... We were buying time for a NM pop, so I headed back out to Bibiki Bay as BLM. Sure enough, same damn party was there. This was, like, 4+ hours later... They still refused to let me have the gob so I moved. Found a gob who has a pullable pet but it's a distance. If the rarab gets 2 shot in on my stoneskin it's gone. Killed 3 rabbits, then died... Reraise 2 was on. I got up and warped. We were to gather for Aspi.

Changed to BRD, finally used my newly aquired Volbow Outpost (Windy hasn't hardly ever controlled it since I changed allegiances). Camped Aspi alongside BBQ and LB and it popped. LB claimed, killed no problem (duh) but only W Body dropped. LB has been looking for members to hand out Dalmaticas to since almost every single one of their mages in shell has one. That thought stayed with me for most of the night where I sat in my mog house waiting for the slacks/trousers to sell (1.7M and 600k respectivly).

While in my mog house a buddy sent me a tell that he stunned Kirin. MANY people will say he's unstunnable, but with enough Dark Magic and ES on you can stun him. I bet him he couldn't and he produced an undoctored pic of a stunned Kirin. I made a little sig for him while I sat in my mog house and eventually logged off after sending it to him. Here's the sig:

just a random thought for LB

2006-08-14T17:48:00.000-04:00

Revisiting the Cerberus situation with LB...

Multiple members of LB told me that Res needed to be faster with our claim, and thats why they rushed in and took it from us with 8 people in their party...

Yet this weekend Auronku claims Fafnir and dies because his alliance couldn't cure/invite him in time. Clan claims and HANDS IT BACK to LB. Now this is called respect, something we didn't recieve at Cerb. The only reason I mention this is because Auron told me in tell:

a) We gotta be faster if you want the big kills
b) We will have the same thing happen us again, especially with the JPN shells.

Well, seems not Auron. If that were so, then Clan wouldn't have handed you guys back Fafnir even though you lost it when you died. I'm just trying to make a point here, even in the endgame arena, LS's can show respect to other LS's that actually do the work, i.e. camping a HNM (us) as well as claiming a HNM(you).

source: http://my.opera.com/ashira/blog/ (since LB is saying it's a lie, I'll pass along where I got the info)

Sunday remix

2006-08-14T15:01:00.000-04:00

Sunday was a pretty lazy day. I started off trying to get some skillups, which as of late have been a real pain in the ass. I got +0.1 from a pair of Blessed Trousers which got me to 94. Then I did something stupid (again) and bought 2 stacks of Rainbow Cloths and Silk Threads to make some Rainbow Capes. Well... they cap at 94 and I realized this as I was getting my advanced support at the guild. Needles to say I didn't get a Prism Cape, so I desynthed them all and got back 4 stacks of Raibow threads. I turned 3 stacks of thread into 1 stack of cloth, and sold the stack of cloths and threads. I ended up getting no skill and no +1. It cost me 1.2M for the materials and I got back about 800k... Like I said, I'm stupid. Later on I bought 8 War Berets @ 75k each, and 8 Phoneix Feathers @ 2k each. Synthed all eight, didn't get a single skillup. Dammit all to hell.

I picked up a Kirin's Pole for 750k, I got BLM to 61, and then headed out to Dynamis - Xarcabard. Once again, no chapeau dropped, but we got WAR body and MNK head which finished out the sets for Tohmane and Rihai respectivly. CONGRATS YOU TWO!

Finally we headed up to Horlais Peak for some KS99. I got 3 runs in and the LS did a total of 5 runs. We won all but 1, because 3 people DC'd and 1 person went AFK while dead... We still had 4 more orbs to do but ran out of time so we're going to finish them up Friday. Hopefully, we stay on schedule and head up the promies tonight so I can get my darn Magnetic Earring!

Limbus, Jailers, and Cerberus. OH MY!

2006-08-12T22:26:00.000-04:00

This afternoon we did some Limbus action, we decided to go after HQ Beastmen. Another new floor to me but fairly straightforward. 2 mobs in all 4 corners of a room, 3 more in the NW and SE corners, and finally the 3 HQ Mega Bosses in the middle. Not to hard, We had lots of time, 47 coins for 18 people. Was nice to see new stuff in Limbus. We should be doing Ultima this week sometime, possibly this weekend.

After that we gather in the Garden of Ruh'Met for some jailer action. We planned to farm the Ix'Aern and pop Jailer of Temperance and Jailer of Fortitude. We got our parties together and we get the call that Cerberus just popped. We were outta sea and into Halvung in about 5-7 minutes. No one else knew, but lots of people saw a sea of orange dots heading for the Runic Portals so it was only a matter of time before people who didn't camp it found out it was up.

Now I want to stray away from being a drama magnet, but as we were setting up our parties LimitBreak charged in with 8 people. I kinda asked Costello before his party even got there if they planned at making a go for it. His answer was "maybe", which was obviously BS cause he had a sea of people en route. Telling us yes would force his hand, so instead of lying he just didn't tell the truth. To me, it's pretty lowly and disrespectful to charge in like that. Its not like this is Fafnir or KB, we camped it, we were organizing for it, and LB pretty much just said, "Too bad, too slow". I look at this as if our LS gathered for Jorm or Tiamat and as we're finishing up our parties another one run in with 8 people to claim and hold. It's not illegal, it's just disrespectful.

It's also embarrassingly disrespectful the way alot of my LS was talking in say. I don't condone it, I don't agree with it, but I am in no position to stop it. Especially when our leaders are the ones doing it. To categorize myself with people that are rude in /say is pointless. That's like saying that I look at LB members as gil buyers since one of their members has spent hundreds of dollars on his character purchasing gil... but I don't look at LB as gil buyers. Even if one was really bad at buying gil. I'd expect them to feel the same about myself and who/what was said in /say during the fight.

Anyways, congrats on the win LB, you definetly didn't earn it but you sure as hell got it (along with an Algol). Let's hope in the future you can show a little more respect to a LS that camps a NM instead of riding in on our coat-tails and claiming a mob with 1/3rd your alliance, hoping to hold it for your slow as molassus teammates.

Guess I don't avoid the drama magnet too well do I?

stupid.

2006-08-12T11:11:00.000-04:00

So yeah, the Ix'grah cannot be duo'd nor killed by DoT and just "run around". To begin with after 2 grav/binds it resists. To effectivly beat that NM you'd have to land 20-30 grav/binds.

aint happening.

Also I was able to land poison II. bio II, choke, shock, and burn. They were on 5x for 1:00 each time, did 0% damage to it. To effectivly kill this you'd have to land those spells for hours.

aint happening.

Instead, I nuked it with Thunder III, did 2% damage. Then regen'd it all back in 2 minutes. I eventually gave up and died. We waited for hours and hours for our other pt to meet up. Literally, 2 hours for them to catch up to us @ the NM. I fell asleep twice. They finally showed up at 3:30 am and we killed it without a problem. The ironic thing is, I joined up with this person to farm my organs, then to farm LS Grah chips, and I somehow convinved myself to help with this mission.

/slap

Nice or just stupid?

2006-08-11T23:44:00.000-04:00

So I logged in and offered to help farm organs for a LS mate who just got Sea. Well that turned into farming Grah chips inside. That somehoe turned into doing Mission 8-2, (duo'd). When I decided to try and help him I was thinking this was 8-3 (which can actually be solo'd by a BLM or RDM as long as you sleep/log any aggro you get.

Well, it wasn't 8-3, it was 8-2.

The mission where you escort 5 NPC (Quasiluminums) around the Palace and try to not die in the process... yeah that one. It ends with an Ix'Grah. I really don't want to try and duo this thing but he asked someone in another HNMLS and they convinced him it can be duo'd by putting max DoT on it and running around. I don't think I can kill a NM thats somewhere around level 85 by just DoT... but for some stupid ass reason I'm offering my help.

We'll see how this turns out.

Dynamis - Tavnazia loss... no pics

2006-08-10T10:27:00.000-04:00

So yeah, I was both excited and annoyed last night in Dynamis - Tavnazia and never got around to getting any pics. We go again on the 20th so I'm hoping to get pics then. We got to the last boss but lost because we weren't stealthy enough to sneak by the NPC Diabolos mobs and the main boss just destroyed us. I'm kinda pissed that Mazurka works in every Dynamis zone, and it works in the Tavnazian Safehold, but does it work in Dynamis - Tavnazia??? NO! Stupid SE. Talk about glitches... when we got to the Diabolos NPCs Christmas music started!!! I kid you not. Even our time was screwy. We were to be kicked at 8:19pm but our designation didn't wear off on the hourglass until 8:21pm. -.-

Anyways the main 2 bosses spam Sleepga and Bio-ga and when they attack you they don't wake you up. That's fun. We need to refine our strategy a bit but we did kill the 2 time extension mobs, we killed the subjob mob, and we had 38:00 left to get to and kill the final Diabolos mobs. We just fudged up getting there.

Sorcerer's Tonbon-1 dropped for AF2+1 BLM legs. No Chapeau, I was high bidder. I hope we get that win next time...

BLM AF done

2006-08-09T14:07:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I realized I needed to get my Wizard's Pestasos so I wrangled a few LS mates up and headed out to Toramai Canal (sp?). We used a lil cheat in killing the NM. Santiago sneaked up and pop his elemental. Then he walked back to the party and waited for it to despawn. Once it did I waited 5 minutes and popped my elemental. The party killed it and we both clicked the ??? for a CS. Usually for 2 BLMs you would have to kill 2 NMs. Congrats to Santiago and myself for Pestasos. Also a big thank you to Hex and Fatally and all that came out to help.

After a successful Limbus run where we got BRD, RDM, MNK, DRG, and PLD items (+48 coins and a metal chip!) I took up duo'ing with my BLM partner (yes the one who sold me out after I sold myself out) and we both got to 60BLM. We are actually only about 1400 xp apart when it comes to levels. I don't see us stopping this until 62(ish) since we can still get Chain #1 300xp without Empress Bands on. Eventually we will be able to solo these for probably 250-225xp per kill and keep getting more insane xp from not being in a normal boring party. Tonight I have Dynamis Tavnazia, and I am REALLY excited about it. Expect many many pictures tomorrow from this new zone.

Also, props to Frozenx for adjusting the BBQ blog. It originally said that we pulled Cerb @ 13% after BBQ's 2nd wipe. Unfortunetly that wasn't the case and Fx was already warped and/or logged off. We pulled at 45% (it's went from 13% to 23% to 34% to 45%) not the 13% that was originally stated. With so much drama in endgame I'm really glad this was cleared up without a bickering session.

Muzzler

2006-08-08T22:38:00.000-04:00

So, we killed Cerberus, what fun it was, and somewhat of a hassle. I'll illustrate what the facts were and try to sway from making it dramatical.

- I was duoing in Bibiki Bay with a BLM that I have duo'd with many times. We were being "covered" by a member of BBQ (seems they were bf/gf). Things were goin fine
- A LS member says, /l I'm bored, I'm gonna check Cerb
- Three mins later /l CERB IS UP! No one is here!
- I tell my duoing partner I have to go because a NM is up, and it's Cerb
- I warp to Cerb, get there, and BBQ is gathering
- I find out that our BBQ back @ Bibiki Bay found out about Cerb from his gf... yay.

We gathered and had about 13 people, BBQ started to gather and we see them with 6. For some reason, they claimed it, did 1% damage and wiped. That semmed somewhat pointless. So they had someone tractor them and start to raise. We were still at about 15 people and we weren't rushing in. They got about 12 I think and pulled. BBQ was hacking away at it but Cerberus is not that hard until 25%. BBQ got to about 45% and missed a Gates of Hades. Wipe. We waited for it to regen to 100% and we finally had a full alliance with a few outside paralyna people. We went in.

I had never fought him and didnt know what to expect. Cerb has paralyzga, a fire spit conical attack, and a huge AoE attack called Gates of Hades. Luckily, Gates of Hades is stunnable and quite slow. Still, if you don't stun it your done for. You won't wipe with 1 but you'll go from 100% to about 30% in 1 shot. We got him to about 27% and then we had to start looking for GoH. We stunned the first but didn't have the cycle down. On the 2nd one we missed it and it got through. We couldn't recover and wiped at about 24%.

We reraised and started tractoring, and got everyone up. BBQ went for round 2 when it regenned. At this point we just we spectators, watching how they attacked it. Also, this time they had more members than before but some of their tanks and other jobs had left. They still did really well, they took it to about 10%, maybe less. Then a GoH got through. They looked like they were recovering and actually did. A few minutes later, another, and then another. They were done.

Hex said in LS no one pulls till it hit 40%. I asked why and he said something about hate and stun... I don't know. We watched it tick its HP... 23%, 34%, 45%. We claimed at 45% because 1) it was late and 2) It was obvious both LS's could take it to 20% without difficulty. This time we had a stun order laid down in concrete. We took him to 20, 15, 10%. Stunning every GoH. I wasn't really concerned with doing anything to Cerberus when it was my other 2 RDM/DRK's turns to stun. I was refreshing my people in my party and my outside paralyna's were getting me VERY fast. When I was up to stun I watched that screen like a hawk for "Cerberus readies Gates of Hades". That was my cue to execute my Stun macro. Sure enough we got him down and finally killed him. 1st kill for the LS and drops were Claw x2, Hide, Meat. No Algol :( but we did kill it.

Afterwards we went to the Hostel and wasted gil on fireworks and costumes. So in 3 days of being in Res I've killed Nid and Cerb. Good introduction.

cerb

2006-08-08T03:28:00.000-04:00

3:28am right now but tonight we found cerb and tookhim down, details + drama to follow tomorrow.

a new day

2006-08-07T15:01:00.000-04:00

So after learning that one of the HNM LS's I was looking to join had no interest in accepting me (28 no's vs. 3 yes's) I was ready to give up on ffxi. Reputations take you pretty far in this game and mine's pretty crappy. I've asked around for a new end-game LS and most said no thanks. Finally, Friday I got a tell from someone I never thought I would. Hex from Resurrection.

Hex and I were in the same LS before he created Res. Since that time he has been on the opposite side of every LS I have camped with for almost 2 years. I had come to hate him for the simple fact that he wasn't on my side. This escalated from incidents that came about from other Res members, most notably Azeral trying to MPK me at our 1st Nid claim.

Well, after some deliberation I decided that, hell he was giving me a chance, I'd be selfish not to give him and his LS a chance. I showed showed up at Dragon's Aery Saturday morning since they were camping Faf/Nid. I was invited to a party but given no pearl. I camped for 2 hours with them and Nid popped. Hex claimed and we got him in our alliance. Nid, so we meet again.

This time I was in a party with people who knew what to do, what WS's to do, how to announce their intention to do said WS, and finally BLMs that knew how/when to MB those SC's. Then a veteran RDM of the LS showed up and was invited to my party. I was in a party now with WHM, RDM, RDM, BLM, BLM, BLM. We were doing fine then a BRD needed to come in. Well of course I was kicked (not asked to disband >:-\ dammit) and I outside healed while they grabbed the BRD. At that point I was told I had my pearl after the kill. It took 48 minutes and M Body/N Legs dropped. Unfortunetly I didn't get my title, but there's always next pop.

Next we did Temenos Central (floor 2) and won with under 1:00 left. One step closer to Nashira. Ended up with 4 coins bringing me to 20 and I got to finally see a new area of Limbus! Sunday was a mix of success and distress. Sunday morning I did Dynamis - Buburimu (victory) and we ended up with RNG belt, DRK hands, MNK hands-1, BLM hands-1, and two pairs of RDM hands -1. Our most successful run (drop-wise). Later we attempted Jorm in Ule Range. We had anough people but 3-4 people were in the wrong jobs (me included but I was told to come BRD!), and after starting over @ 90% we took him to 74% and kinda threw in the towel. A good chunk of players was EU or JPN and it was like 3am GMT and 8am JST. We're going to attempt him again next Saturday.

I'm exhausted, but excited at the same time. Res isn't as bad as I, or some others, make them out to be... there are some idiots in the shell but the problem is they are very "loud" idiots to others, whereas in other LS's I was in the idiots were idiotic toward their own LS members, not other LS's. I'm happy so far, there just needs to be a little less bickering. Pointing the finger at people for their mistakes doesn't change what happened in the past. You just need to learn from it and move on.

BRD AF2 done

2006-08-03T10:47:00.000-04:00

So last night I finally got around to doing a city run and it was Jeuno. I haven't been to the cities in months, and the last 2 times I went to Jeuno the slippers didn't drop. Luckily for me they did this time. So now that I closed out BRD I can continue to sandbag my points so that I can keep my place in the pooverbial "Cheapeau Line". Right now I think I am #5 in line which means if I'm lucky I might see a hat come my way before the end of the year. In a week we're going to try Dynamis - Tavnazia for the 1st time, so that's something else which will be new and probably take a lot of xp from me.

In other news my blog's page loads has jumped due to Ohemgee's sad attempt to be cynical by putting my url in his sig. Funny thing about Ohemgee is he sold his account earlier this year (which technically makes him RMT) and now he wants it back and can't get it back (haha). He spends as much time as ever trying to be funny in forums since he can't get in-game any longer, so he must have been jealous of my RDM because he's recently put his crosshairs on me. Oh well, at least I don't RMT and I have my character still. If anyone asks him about it he, of course, denies it saying that his account was "stolen" (how clandestine) yet if you looked hard enough you would find a post on KI's Odin forum where he was asking if anyone wanted to buy his character for $500 before he put it up on eBay. Haha, pathetic.

i love tarus

2006-08-02T10:10:00.000-04:00

So last night I logged on so that I could possibly get some BLM xp in. I found a 59BLM who was a taru and had pretty good INT gear. He was fairly new, and didn't have the gil to buy a reraise earring and/or ginger cookies. He only had 30k and when I told him we would duo in Bibiki Bay he told me he had never ever been there. I asked if he had CoP and he said of course, so a friend tele'd us out there and we headed out on Choco to Bibiki Bay.

We arrived to an empty camp (yay!) and the Hobgoblin Animalier wasn't being pulled. All the conditions were right. I explained to him that I would pull the rarab with Blind, he would sleep 2 and if that failed he'd Sleepga 2. "I don't have Sleepga 2". /sigh ok well I'll sleep it if you fail, but you are a 59BLM taru with INT gear you won't fail. I put on reraise, stoneskin, invis, and headed out. "Ready?" I ask. "RDY!" he types.

I pulled the rarab and came back to camp, and there he is resting. Two hits later I lose stoneskin and on the third hit I take 160 dmg. Only then does he finally stand up and start Sleep 2. I take another 180 dmg and his Sleep 2 is resisted, so I stun and start Sleep 2. I get to 60% and the rarab finishes me off. Then it moves to the taru. 1 shot takes 80% of his HP. I reraise up and sleep 2 it. "I forgot to put up stoneskin" he tells me. He's now @ 22HP, I'm at about 30HP. He starts casting Burst and I realize I have 224MP cause I'm weakend and used Sleep 2. He cast Burst and took 50% of it's HP, but the rarab finished him off right after. I cast Stonega 2 and got it to 5% and it killed me.

Two dead BLMs, no reraises. "Thanks, it was fun, I'm going out to dinner now with my parents". He HP's and disbands. Great. I got a raise from a passerby and threw inthe BLM towel for the night.

Seeked on RDM for 30 mins and never got an invite so I grabbed my NPC pearls and headed out to Castle Oztroja. I was soloing Prelates and High Priests and not getting any of the money scrolls, and then a pary of 5 tarus rolls up behind me. They weren't RMTs but instead they were Japanaese. There was a SMN, WAR, NIN, WHM, WHM so I asked if they wanted Refresh. They thanked me and told me they needed a Judgement Key. Easy drop off the Flagellants, I get 1 from every 4 or 5 I kill.

We killed stuff for 2 hours with no drops. It was fun though. XP dropped considerably because of the amount of people but it was nice to help some people. Sucked that we never got the key but we did get both WHMs their testimonies and I was able to snag 2 Kindred's Seal and 1 Beastmen Seal. We disbanded around 12:30am and I was lookig to head to sleep. I hit the AH to sell the scrolls and they were all around 1-2k. Reraise 3 was 4k I think. I NPC'd them all for 2500 and went to sleep.

Not a bad night, I felt good about finally being able to offer some "pseudo-help". Dynamis Jeuno tonight, if Bard's Slippers drop I will be 5/5 on AF and finally finish BRD AF2. I hate Jeuno though. We'll see I guess.

whatever

2006-07-31T21:36:00.000-04:00

So yeah I guess I've been a real asshole to others over the past 2 years and 5 months I've owned this game, or maybe I just became an ass once I got RDM to 75 (which was around jan '05). Either way, I have pretty much alienated myself from the Odin community, thanks to my mouth which flies off the hook whenever a simple thought seems to enter my emtpy head.

I realized this after I read a bunch of Odin blogs and saw all these people doing shit with their in-game friends whether it was helping get AF items together or meriting in a static for 3 hours so that everyone can get a new meritable thing. Or even simple things like one person joining a new LS, feeling like they contributed, and getting positive feedback from the vets in said LS.

I have none of that.

I am probably on more blacklists than friend lists. I don't have a static for anything. If I need help with anything in game I have to beg strangers or pay the people I know. For example, I need to get to rank 8 for Windhurst. Getting rank is a joke, as long as you have 75's as support you can get to Rank 9 in almost a week. After that you need people from your own city. I have been Rank 6 for 3 months and only yesterday did I get Rank 7. I can't find anyone to waste about 15 minutes to kill 3 easy-ass slimes to help me finish Rank 7-1. Why? Because people don't like me. Boo-f'ing-hoo don't gimme the "he is always feeling sorry for himself" routine. It's reality, and I know why people don't like me; because I was an asshole for about 12 months.

Problem is, I have tried to seriously change my outlook and attitude towards this game, but almost everyone I know either thinks I'm the same asshole or they've heard about what kind of an asshole I am and want nothing to do with me. Kinda like a convict who's paroled and has changed but all anyone sees when they look at him is the same old criminal. I have no Limbus LS (the one I was in went from 20+ members to 4), I have no assault static, no ISNM static, no experience points party statci, and I have no HNM LS because every single one of them denied me. I'm well aware of the bitterness that is felt whenever someone brings up the name Gorokai. People that I know inside these LS's that have denied me have told me about how people want absolutely nothing to do with me.

There is no point to this post other than saying out loud how shitty I feel when I read other people's blogs and they're having a blast together with other people when I have the exact opposite experience whenever I am logged into FFXI. And honestly, it's all my fault.

no double ballad for j00!

2006-07-27T17:17:00.000-04:00

Yeah, so those asswipes at SE have been screwing up all kinds of BRD stuff since this patch. They give you something, then take it away, then they offer you something, but don't honor what they say they will. Let me explain:

1) Troubadour - First day update went live the description was "Increases the casting times for songs by 1.5 and doubles the effect" which was awesome sounding! Then, after putting 3 merits (30,000xp) into Troubadour I find out it only increases duration. (WTF it said nothing about duration!) The next day I log in and scan through my merits and guess what Troubadour now says... "Increases the casting times for songs by 1.5 and doubles the duration effect".

um, excuse me that's something totally different...

2) Harlequins Horn - So with the implementation of Raptor Mazurka (lv37 mazurka) it seems that Chocobo Mazurka got a bit of a speed boost. Suddenly, everyone with a Harlequin's Horn found that when they sang Chocobo Mazurka you got flee speed. Wow, awesome, now we can have almost constant flee! Sure, SE annoyed me by giving speed ncreases to not only low lvl BRDs, but people actually subbing BRD now... but giving us flee with HHorn is totally worth it. Horns starting selling again, raising from 400k to 3M. Then SE releases this crap:

Jul. 25, 2006 05:00 [PDT] From: FINAL FANTASY XI
Details on Current Known Issue (Jul. 25)

Since the implementation of the latest version update on Jul. 24, 2006, the following issues have been discovered. Solutions to these issues are now being tested. Players will be informed as soon as solutions are finalized.
The following issues have been discovered:

- An issue where singing Raptor Mazurka or Chocobo Mazurka with Harlequin's Horn, Gjallarhorn or Millennium Horn equipped would result in improper effect.
* This will be addressed on Jul. 26, 2006.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

You gotta be kidding me... So they lied to me about an effect which cost me 30,000 xp or about 3-4 hours of meriting... and now they are taking away the flee effect they added? Doing a bang-up job on us BRDs SE! A 20 minute ability to speed up songs which can be aquired by having the proper armor and having it on you 100% of the time, a /ja that extends songs, not their potency, and enmity control.

You fail this patch for us BRDs.

Troubadour, a let-down (so far)

2006-07-26T10:01:00.000-04:00

So I got my 3rd merit, unlocked Troubadour, and to my dismay I found out that the term "doubles the effect" does not mean it doubles the output that ballad gives... it means the time which it stays on party members is doubled. Maybe this will change as it gets merited more. It's really the only thing I'm meriting in BRD.

Nightingale (faster songs) - I can get that through armor, why waste xp singing faster?
Adventurer's Dirge/Foe Sirvente - Like I'm gonna get tens of thousands of xp so a PLD can hold better hate or a BLM won't nuke himself to death? HA! Seriously though, mages/tanks should at this point have the proper gear to manage their enmity, and if they can't manage it then they should work on their tactics.

So pretty much the only thing of value (to me) is Troub. So we'll see how powerful/useful Troub can be when it's maxed.

Paralyze II is still incredibly tempting, but it can wait for now.

Holy crap am I excited...

2006-07-24T14:27:00.000-04:00

So the version update went live today, and I'm at work right now but I was able to read what is in store for me when I come home. So many things to be excited about, here's my list:

New RDM spells (obtained through merits only)
-Paralyze II
-Slow II
-Blind II
-Phalanx II
-Dia III
-Bio III

New New BRD job abilities/spells (obtained through merits only)
-Nightingale
-Troubadour
-Foe Sirvente
-Adventurer's Dirge
-Raptor Mazurka <- (37BRD gets this... not too happy about that)

New BLM spells (obtained through merits only)
-Freeze II
-Tornado II
-Quake II
-Flood II
-Burst II
-Flare II <- (i have seen this and it's friggin amazing)

Other jobs' new notable stuff
-NINs can now earn job trait "Ninja Tool Expertise" through meriting (sucks for all those Koga Tekko folks)
-WHMs can now earn Proctectra /Shellra V through meriting!!! <- (also gorgeous... though no Curaga V)

Raise/Reraise was changed from 25% xp returned to 50% (wonder how it works with Hymnus)

Finally, new BCNMs in Aht Urghan won't be obtained through seals but instead through Imperial Standing. This is great and crappy at the same time. Great because I never wasted my IPS on the Walahara Turban (what job doesn't use a turban now...) so that means I can go ALOT. It costs 2k IPS for level 60 cap, and 3k IPS for 75 cap. The Bad, you trade your IPS for a key item to enter the battlefield, but you can only get said key item 1x every 24 hours. This means you can't go ahead and just warp back to the NPC to get a new orb like you could for KS30.

Still, I have over 35,000 IPS and having both RDM and BRD at 75 means that I'm going to be meriting... ALOT. My main goals are to get Paralyze II and Phalanx II, then maybe one of the new BRD job abilities. It's too soon to know what they do yet. Hell maybe, (just maybe), I'll level NIN to 37 so I can go RDM/NIN with Paralyze II and Phalanx II. I still hate melee though, but getting DRK to 37 meant getting WAR to 18 and my NIN is already 14 so I'm about 1/3rd there. I've got to find some time to get BLM xp in so I can unlock the AM2 spells (Flare II is insanely cool looking). Just when I thought I was gettig ready to get out, SE pulls me back in.

Oh yeah, I got +0.7 on Clothcraft synthing 24 Dance Shoes... too bad it cost me almost 2M gil to get 70% of a level. Still, I have 2 pairs of NQ Cursed Slacks on the AH so that right there is 3.2M coming to me. Shouldn't be too bad. Man, why did they do the friggin update on a Monday!!!!

Yeah I still kinda hate smthing but w/e

2006-07-22T10:17:00.000-04:00

So I got bored last night, I had farmed 3 Marid Hairs worth about 375k so after selling them I spent 800k on 2 stacks of Darksteel Sheets. I picked up some wind crystals and faced east on windsday with wind weather in Whitegate and made 16 Dark Scales and 1 Iyo Scale. The Iyo Scale is used to make some really great SAM AF+1 hands and the Dark Scales are used in the SAM JSE body armor (which almost every SAM has).

I got +0.6 in 12 synths. Got smithing to 56.2, was it worth it? I don't know... I really should be putting money into leathercraft since I currently need to make Dance Shoes for skillup but I'm incapable of making the Moccasins because they are a level 59 leathercraft synth and my lazy ass is only 28. Seeing how bored I am today I may continue to pump out the Kaginawa or move my ass to Sandy to level leather.

Oh yeah, last night I was whored out for my chainspell stun and we took Diabolos down in about 16 seconds. I know because I was watching the clock on my chainspell... and the 4 BLMs blew it up in mere seconds. Too bad we wasted about 1:30 buffing, positioning, and making things clear to everyone. Oh well, my SMN needed the avatar anyways, now I have all but Fenrir.

Ristin kinda inspired me!

2006-07-21T00:50:00.000-04:00

So after sharing his Chi-town pics I thought I'd take my camera to work today and snap a few shots from my office window. Some days I find it hard to stare at the computer screen when I have this behind me:

(click the links for the full size versions)

http://img142.imageshack.us/img142/3951/city1mq8.jpg

This is looking out and down (northwest sorta) onto Park Ave and Madison Ave which runs from the bottom left corner towards the right. 42nd Street runs in front of that church like building in the bottom right hand corner.

http://img158.imageshack.us/img158/4720/city2iz8.jpg

This should be pretty obvious... since my buiding is between 33rd and 34th Streets I got a view of the Empire State Building if I look out my west window. If you look hard enough you can see the Hudson River and Jersey in the distance.

http://img158.imageshack.us/img158/4456/city3sa4.jpg

This final picture is my awesome "I'm not full of crap" picture. On the right you can see my desk. At the bottom you can see the lame air conditioner/heater we have. I prop up those cardbopard flaps so that I can direct the cool air my way cause when the sun sets it beams through my west window and makes my office about 10 degrees warmer. Hope you enjoyed a peek into my city!

lawl @ quitting again

2006-07-18T20:34:00.000-04:00

So tenbears quit this game a 2nd, (or maybe 3rd time). I get a tell on Sunday night that he gave his stuff away and deleted his character. Oh well, I guess if he wants to return again he can always buy some gil and get power leveled... This backlash though was that the LS died, with 75% of the people following an unexperienced "veteran" of the LS and the other 25% went with Eraphie. Either way we aren't doing kings now, (and for a while it seems). Instead we are doing SKY! yay! Ugh, I have done sky forever it seems, with Envy, with fx, and now with Era's new LS.

I haven't been fdoing much else. We lost to Proto-Omega in Limbus this week for a 3rd time. That's getting annoying. Not just the death and the xp loss but thats 2-3 pieces of Homam we aren't getting each run, and it's another set of wasted chips down the drain. We are moving to Temenos now, which is fine with me. Time to start getting chips for Ultima and Nashira gear. Luckily I'm told Omega is easier than Ultima... so being 0/2 on Ultima I['m sure Omega is gonna be a pushover.

In my free time I've been trying to farm Demon's Axes, Dark Spirit Pacts, and Absorb -DEX... so far only an axe that won't sell...

BLM fun times

2006-07-15T13:01:00.000-04:00

So for the past few days I have taken up soloing and moved on from Gustav Tunnel and into Bibiki Bay. My first try soloing as 55BLM was funny... Used 1 ES'd Quake and seeing it only take 50% of the rarab's HP I realized I needed a partner. I did a /sea all BLM 55-57 and found a little taru 56BLM who was looking for party. This player was Japanese but in their comments they had {Please use the Auto-translate function}. I was able to convince them to come out with me to Bibiki Bay and duo, and boy am I glad we did. At first we were trying to one-shot it but doing that requires the same spell and calling out times which is kind of hard to do when 2 people don't speak the same language. We had some deaths but this lil taru was very eager and optimistic.

We came to the realization I would pull and stun at camp, then she would Sleep 2 the rarab and we would nuke. We finally got into a groove and the xp flowed like water. Our highest was Chain #4 for 520xp. Completely insane xp. We found a third person to join in and things went faster, even if the xp did drop to [gasp!] 250-300xp per kill. Finally we got our levels and moved on to higher ancient magic using tornado and even burst. It's really amazing how you can get into a groove partying with a 2nd person. You get a feel for what needs to be done fast and efficiently. If she got a resist I would stun, she would sleep, I'd toss her a Cure 2 and she'd thunder 2 for the kill. We really did well for our 1st party. When we finally broke we had partied for 3 hours and gotten about 13,000xp total. As we were saying our goodbyes she befriended me and just like that I made my 1st JPN friend. We warped out and before we broke party we agreed {Team up?} {Tomorrow} {Yes, please}.

Sure enough last night we got back together and she hit 58, I hit 56 and we got another 10k xp in a few hours. I'm hoping we can duo for a long time, cause not only is her little taru butt powerful, but she has so much optimism and loves to /emote everything. Makes partying with her alot of fun. So far my record for Quake is 1105 without ES on Earthsday. Weird thing was it was in the morning, but for the rest of the day I was capped at 940, and ES never broke 942. Didn't understand that one. Right now I'm camping for my Wizard's Tonbon. Kinda crappy pants but I'll macro them in with my Dusky Staff for my aspirs and drains.

Resurrection strikes again

2006-07-14T00:24:00.000-04:00

Well after their MPKing at Ying yang Robe using Dia on slept links, many hoped that Res would stop killing people when they don't get claims but this is Hex we're talking about. Case in point tonight FX claims Nidhogg, our very first time claiming him. Right off the bat Res members spam cures on our PLDs and turn Nid, trying to MPK us. I was able to speak with Eowen for quite some time after we lost and Eowen (being the trooper he is) didn't deny that Res tried to MPK us right off the bat. He did say though that since a spike flail never happened... no harm no foul. That's Res for you. We eventually got all of our members to get /blockaid on and we took Nid to 24% with maybe 2 deaths. Suddenly there was a flail...

Now we've done Fafnir successfully two times in a row with no flails. People know not to move. People at Nid tonight who were in the alliance were not moving. Faf doesn't just flail if you are on his feet and motionless. Our people stayed on his feet the whole time... except when we had to chase it down because Res tried to MPK us (unsuccessfully so it's ok) 10 seconds into the fight. Anyways we eventually wiped and LB got the claim at about 25% and had to do 1/4 the work for the eventual kill. Congrats to them, A. Abj: Body dropped (which was originally headed my way had we gotten the kill) and also some leg or foot abj. The funniest part of the night came when a GM contacted me because putting Hex's name in my search comment was "harrasing to him". What a glorious hypocrite... and what is turning a mob you lost claim to? Is that not harrassment? Trying to MPK us at the start. That's not harrassment?

Resurrection is a LS run by a total asshole with a handful of the most underhanded, dirty people in all of endgame. It's really a shame for the good people in that LS because when Res tries to MPK you right after they lost claim, it reflects on the LS as a whole not just the one person who is tryig to wipe your alliance.

I'm playing solo right now.

2006-07-12T13:55:00.000-04:00

Wow, BLM solo is crazy xp. I've found a nice camp at O Bow NM camp and been milking the Goblin Sheperd's for their leeches. You have to one-shot them or the Sheperd's come after ya but if you are successful you can get better xp than you can in a normal 6 man party. If you rest as soon as you one-shot it and nuke as soon as it spawn you can keep the chains going (as evidenced above in my ghetto college). So far I got to 54 and can now equip my Wizard's Gloves.
After using Quake and Tornado (AM is fun to watch) I headed out to Bibiki Bay because at 54BLM I only get 82-125 xp per kill, which is a steep drop off. I went out there and found the Hobgoblin Animaliers and their Rarabs. First Freeze hit for 421, I died. Reraised, thought maybe it was just a resist, so I waited, used Elemental Seal and went again. Freeze hit for 871, took the Rarab to 20%, I died. After reraising I was 15 tnl... so I headed back to Gustav Tunnel and got my level back. That's what I'm doing right now. Writing this entry in between spawns of the Goblin's Leech. Wyvernpoacher Dracalox just popped too. No one in the LS needs it and I shouoted his and still no replies so I guess he'll go unkilled for now. He drops Othinius' Bow. Pretty much the best RNG crossbow in the game.

Rod Stewart's right, "Some Guys Have All the Luck"

2006-07-10T12:45:00.000-04:00

I think God decided to LOL @ me yesterday. Octa, a LS mate, got A. Abj: Legs in sky and wanted to get his Zenith Slacks. I've never synthed them before and they are a 97 cap synth. I've been on a bit of a crafting break since hitting 93, so I wasn't really all that close to the cap. With my GP items and advanced Guild Support I could meet the cap being 93.0+2+3, but that was the best I could do. I told him about this and he said no problem. I synthed his Siren's Macrame (91) and faced south on Firesday Waning Moon 79% and synted. I warned him it could break, he seemed positive. Well sure enough I synthed the Cursed Slacks -1. Unreal. Some people on Killing Ifrit talk about going 0/100 + on that item. I'm 1/1... and they weren't even for me. Honestly I've only ever seen 2 on people. Terican has a pair and Yumikogirl has a pair in her bazaar usually for 25M. I think maybe 6-10 have sold on the AH before. Either way it's a super rare synth and I'm glad for Octa. In no way does this mean I'm gonna start pumping out Cursed Slacks trying to get another +1. Hell, I didn't even get a skillup on it.

In other news I found a nice spot I can solo BLM which I got to 52 last night. If I can 1 shot the Goblin Sheperd's leech in Kuftal Tunnel I can get anywhere from 180-200xp without my xp ring on. Last night with some help from Omegaslayer clearing adds, I hit 2 Chain #5 's for 300xp each. I wish I had my xp ring on at the time, but I still got 5k in 1 hour of soloing. I'm on my way back there today until Limbus. Not sure if I'll make HNMs tonight, though we claimed our 2nd Fafnir again last night. Congrats to Gooftaru on his Adaman Mufflers. So far Eraphie has done a bangup job organizing and motivating the LS to make a serious push into the HNM market. Hopefully Nidhogg and Aspi aren't too far around the corner from dropping a A. Abj: Body for me since Dalmatica is the dream armor I've had since I learned about endgame. As Earl says, "Karma... it's a strange thing". Hopefully I increased my karma skill +0.1 last night with that cursed slacks-1!

Fafnir Slayer

2006-07-09T21:25:00.000-04:00

Well, lots of good stuff happening. We claimed and killed our 1st Fafnir. That was fun, drops were ok but the fact that we killed it our first try was reward enough. Sure, we had our detractors. hex spent almost 15 minutes talking badly about our LS in /say and even one of the Res members stood at Faf's tail and spam cured our PLD trying to get it to turn and spike flail us. No matter, we won and that's all that matters. Some people just feel the need to put other people down whenever they can. Hex is that type of person, and it's a shame too because there are many good people in Res but there are a handful of horrible ones and they ruin the reputation of the entire LS by doing this sort of stuff.

I've been spending some time up in Castle Zvahl Keep camping the 4 NM's that pop there. They are level 68 but not hard for a RDM to solo and I've gotten quite good at it. So far I've killed the DRK 3x (no drop) the SMN 2x (no drop) and the WAR 1x (got a 450k Demon's Axe). The only one I have yet to pop is the BLM, for some reason he just doesn't want to spawn. I'm determined to get at least my BLM spells from the BLM and possibly the Absord-DEX spell from the DRK. Patience I guess, it's not like they're going anywhere!

Another 48 Hours

2006-07-08T12:08:00.000-04:00

So after rushing so fast to get BLM to 51 what do I do the next two days? Nothing... and I play on my RDM doing end-game stuff. Yesterday, we had a new person named Eraphie come into the LS. She has been so helpful to everyone in the LS, and she needed to get some whispers for Fenrir and I have had only 3 avatars for the longest time.... so the Prime Avatars were about to go down! Well she was so cool that she tele'd me all around Vanadiel to the various avatar taru NPCs and even helped me get enough fame for Bastok (which I have crap level 5 fame) and finally get Titan's fork. Only for Titan did I "tank" which took us 18 mins to win, but for Ifrit and Ramuh she tanked like a beast, and the fights took 8 mins. Before the night was over I had doubled my avatars and I am only missing Diabolos and Fenrir. I don't have Light and Dark Spirits but they aren't all that necessary for a SMN anyways.

We've also started camping kings and that can take anywhere from 3 hours to 9 hours of camping which kind of worries me because there is still so much I want to do. I want to merit RDM so I can have them for BLM, I want to actually XP on my BLM. I want to farm my spells for my BLM (already have 15/24 of the spells to 75), and of course I want to do Dynamis and Limbus. Now that I've started gearing up for SMN, I might want to level SMN eventually as well. Oh yea and then there's always that crafting thing... So much to do.

Finally last night we had a new addition to the LS named Jokerr and as soon as he joined he started organizing a ZM17 run. This is the only thing that's holding me back from Apocalypse Nigh. I've beaten CoP, I've beaten Bahamut v1, I just needed to complete RoZ and then climb my promies. Well sure enough we got a pretty good party together (WHM, BLM, RDM, RNG, WAR, NIN) and headed to the Celestial Nexus. Three deaths later from dumbass aggro (I'm as much to blame as anyone) we buffed and entered the Nexus.

Now we had the gameplan down, but I had never seen what this fight looked like. I was to sleep the Orbitals and run back. Well we enter, Jokerr runs in to get hate and starts fighting. These Exoplates form around the kid and Jokerr is tanking them and I see no Orbitals so my dumbass casts Sleep II on the Exoplates. Wouldn't you know less than 2 seconds later the Orbitals spawn. Luckily I get a Sleep I to stick and run back. We start doing fine and get him to 5% with some Mighty Strikes and nukes, but then a Tornado gets through someones shadows and me and the WHM Cure IV and Cure V. Well we both got hate and soon dropped from a few hits and a Burst spell... So we're dead and they take him to 1% and I'm wondering why the WHM isn't Reraising. He finally does and we take him out but 5/6 of the party is weakend for his 2nd form. Supposedly his 2nd form is a joke, he only had 2500 HP so our WHM Bene's, our BLM Manafonts, and we start nuking the hell out of him. Here's the problem, this kid has an AoE attack that seems to have unlimited range. Don't forget all mages are weakened and 1 AoE drops Stoneskin. Well we get him to 15% and all three mages drop. We get right back up and run to the starting point of the arena... pretty damn far from the fight. We start using our Reraise Hairpins and I got to about 55% before an AoE wiped the mages... So we're out for the count. All that was left was the RNG and the NIN and there was no barrage up. Luckily Jokerr knows how to tank pretty friggin well and was able to tank this kid with only 339 HP the whole time. Barrage finally comes back up and the RNG destroys him. Game over. RoZ finished. Thank God. I have been on this Mission since I got DM done with Envy almost a year ago.

After a long CS involving a storyline I had completely forgotten about, I was ported out to Hall of the Gods and HP'd. I can now climb the 3 promies and get my pretty Magnetic Earring, Conserve MP+5, MP+20 hells yea. Then I can sell my Insomnia Earring and make a little cash. All in all a very eventful 48 hours.

13 hours seems fair

2006-07-05T11:17:00.000-04:00

So after hitting 50BLM I looked at my spell list and realized that I wanted/needed Tornado @ 52. I checked the auction house and of course it was 300k. I checked online and saw Yagudo Prelates in Castle Oztroja dropped them so I headed out around 11am. I got there and no one was there, so I started killing prelate after prelate. Eventually some people came for G3, some for coffer keys. They all came and left. yet I was still there. I farmed them upstairs by the torches and I farmed them down below past the Brass Door where you do G3. I killed and killed, and got not a single tornado scroll to drop.

13 hours.

Yep, I farmed for 13 hours to get this scroll, from 11am till midnight. I got about 12 BLM testimonies, 3-5 MNK/BRD/NIN testimonies, I got Aero IV, Aeroga II, Aeroga III... but no Tornado. Finally a kind THF allowed me to whore his treasure hunter and so I helped him kill the Yagudo High Priests for Raise II. Thirteen hours later it dropped and all thanks to a nice THF named Eleene. I figured it out I was getting about 33xp per kill and went from 7490 limit points to 10,200 limit points (I even got a merit). At 33xp per kill thats just over 82 Prelates killed. 1/82 isn't the best drop rate seeing as some people who came and went while I was there reported as going 1/5 on Tornado. Oh well, I got all spells I needed from them, now Ineed to farm Dread Demons for Firaga II, Flare, and Fire IV. There are 27 spells for BLM from levels 50-75, and so far I have 14 of them.

Today I tried to solo Goblin pets in Gustav Tunnel as a 50BLM, and died 4x so I'm not trying that again for 2 levels. My Freeze spell was hitting them for 792-795 and leaving them with 3% HP which meant the Goblin Shepherds were incoming to kill me. First death was because I got aggro while casting freeze and it seems that it takes a good 5 seconds for freeze to get interrupted, but it only takes 3 seconds for a Goblin Mercenary to slaughter you. Death #2 and #3 came from the linking sheperds after I left their pets and 3%, and death #4 was BS because the Goblin hit me as it was despawning! I've never died from a mob that was disappearing off my screen, but now I know you have to wait until you can no longer see the name of the mob. So 3k xp later I'm only 500 into 50BLM and warped home with my tail between my legs and put up my party flag in shame.

-insert catchy/witty title here-

2006-07-04T02:48:00.000-04:00

Well I finally got to 50BLM.. and boy was it a trek. I was lucky from 40-48 but these last two levels I have been in some pretty sad parties. People DC'ing never to return, people saying that they refuse to SATA the tank, just plain stupidity. I was able to trudge my way to 50 tonight in a party that was averaging about 115xp per kill. At 2am I finally hit 50BLM and was able to learn my 1st ancient magic (Freeze). I also was able to wear my Tacticians Magicians Coat and my Gold Hairpin, so I got a handful of goodies.

At 51 I'm told I can solo the pets of Goblin BSTs in Kuftal Tunnel. I also need to farm up Tornado for level 51 and also start up on BLM AF quests, since this level 29 Seer's gear is getting dusty. Not a whole let else going on. Took a break from crafting for a weekend. Got my Choral Cuffs +1 but never got around to getting my Yigit Turban because 1/3rd of my static wasn't online all weekend. I did get my NPC to level 52 (whoopie) but other than that I've done a whole lot of nothing. Farmed Dynamis - Xarc on Sun (no chapeau dropped) farmed Apollyon SE tonight (got 3 coins which I'm selling from now on). Kinda a boring update. Sorry :/

Down the backstretch they come!

2006-06-30T13:11:00.000-04:00

93 down... 7 to go. Well, to be realistic I'll probably stop at 98 or 99 but close enough. Have been making and breaking Errant Slops for about a week now and it seems to be the cheapest way to skillup besides plumes (which are hardly ever in stock). Now that I am 93 it will take quite a few synths to get to 94 which is Errant Slops skill cap. So I must move onto something a bit higher, somewhere in the 95-96 range. What I'm being told by other crafters is to do the Tarutaru Sash to 95, then Blessed Mitts to 96, and Blessed Trouses to 97. Then Dance Shoes to 98 and finally Rasetsu Samue to 99. Things are beginning to look expensive again... I'm down to about 50% of my starting capital, so I should be ok, but I still need to start synthing cloths fromscratch to make up some of the lost gil. It's not necessary but I want to be able to finish Leather to 60 when I get to 95 Cloth.

In other news my Kriegsbiel sold which was nice. I haven't been doing much of anything in sky, I've been keeping up with my Limbus LS but only am going for coins now so I can sell them. Tomorrow I get my 4th piece of AF+1 (2 RDM and 2 BRD) and with every piece of AF+1 I obtain thats one more piece of AF I need to re-obtain so I can store it all. Tomorrow is Choral Cuffs +1. Stats are:

Also today sometime I need to do 2 runs at Lamia No.13 and I will be able to afford my Yigit Turban:

I'll end up using that happily to nuke (tho I don't think my macros are big enough anymore) and then use it for BLM when I get high enough too. I should start XP'ing my BLM again... I haven't done much in game except craft, dynmais, and limbus over the past week or two.

No cheap option

2006-06-29T08:08:00.000-04:00

I surpassed 91 Clothcrft last night and looked at my options to get to 95. None of them really seems that great. To make 12 synths here are my costs:

Errant Slops (94)
Velvet Cloth x24 - 200k
Silk Cloth x24 - 320k
Rainbow Thread x12 - 300k
Ram Leather x12 - 50k
total - 870k

Rainbow Cape (94)
Silk Thread x12 - 40k
Rainbow Cloth x24 - 1.8M
total - 1.840M

Tarutaru Sash (95)
Wool Thread x12 - 60k
Rainbow Thread x12 - 300k
Silver Thread x12 - 36k
Gold Thread x12 - 480k
Manticore Hair x24 - 324k
total - 1.2M

Elite Beret (95)
War Beret x12 - 1.2M
Phoenix Feather x12 - 36k
total - 1.236M

The slops can resell for 25k-30k a piece so that should be about 300k-360k return which would make the slops 570k-630k loss per 12. Looking at the value of the other 3 items this may be my best bet. Elite Berets are worth only 120k per stack, and I'm not too sure about the other two but I'm guessing the net loss per stack is smallest with the slops. My Kriegsbiel got undercut from 5.5M to 5M (why do people do that crap...) so I had to relist thanks to impatient sellers. I think I'm going to have to take a few weeks worth of profit crafting to recover the massive amounts of gil I have spent the last 3 days.

Oh well, shouldn't be too hard if I HQ Kaginawa or some lower level synths. We'll see I guess.

I am teh sexah now (misspellings on purpose)

2006-06-27T20:25:00.000-04:00

So I woke up today knowing that I would get my apron, and I checked online and sure enough I needed to turn in 2 Errant Hats. The things cost a fortune to make, luckily there were 6 on the AH and when I looked in the price history I saw that the last 8 were purchased by 4 people... people doing the same thing I was doing. Buying today's Guild Points item. I got them for 16k each and rushed off to Windy. I got there, turned them in, and got my arpon! Then I got some synths in and raised myself from 89.9 to 90.2 in about 14 synths. Cost me an arm and a leg for those 2 stacks of stupid Plumes but I didn't care. I had 5M worth of stuff on the auction house waiting to get sold.
Five Million on the AH waiting to be sold? Say what? Over the weekend I decided to burn one of these Themis Orbs. Seeing how the last one turned out... I was looking for a more successful outcome. I heard from my good friend Tuufless that Evilstar was doing Horns of War in Horlais Peak. I was in a party at the time but 90 mins later when it broke he was still there. I asked if he had space for me and he said "sure". Here's my thing... manaburning a Kindred Seal BCNM has always annoyed me. You work for months to get these seals and the BLMs get everything but 1 item (depending on which BCNM you are doing). Fortunetly, and luckily, this wasn't anything like that. I arrived in Horlais Peak and there were 18 brave BLMs all waiting for me. I traded my Themis Orb and entered Horns of War.

It was a King Behemoth type mob, which means nuke, grav, run the hell away. It's quite a sight to see 17 Blizzaga III's go off at the same time. I was extremely lucky, I used my Terra's Staff and also kept Stoneskin, Phalanx, and Protect IV on me at all times. That kept me alive, unfortunetly the BLMs didn't have such spells. As they ran around they had a big old behemoth to tend with... and he wasn't happy.

Unfortunetly as you can see some of the BLMs fell... well, most of them did. Towards the end he was at 2% and I was slamming my Chainspell macro but remembered that I used it to warp my party from Altepa... and wasn't able to steal the kill. He used Meteor one last time and even killed me, though I had Reraise II on just in case such a thing were to happen.

Even Tuufless ate it, though a taru BLM doesn't have much chance against a giant flaming rock hurling at them. In the end I got really great drops, which I didn't know at the time. I was expecting Guispiere, Bayard's, or Princley Swords. Little did I know that the Kriegsbiel was an even more valuable weapon. I chose my one item (the Kriegsbiel) and the rest went to the BLMs. See, here is where I used to think I was going to get ripped off. Instead I found that the 2nd most valuable item was a Behemoth Horn, and the rest wasn't worth 100k combined. All those BLMs died so they could split 700k 17 ways. Granted, they were going to do it probably 5-6x that night from different people. Still, much respect to the BLMs that died to get me a 5.4M gil axe. Hopefully it sells soon, not only do I need that money to help finish Clothcraft, but I really don't want to have to relist it.

So thats what went on this weekend, (mostly). As always thanks for reading, leave a comment if you have something to say. Even if it is "You suxorz you noob". Take care.

So I didn't quit so what

2006-06-27T00:05:00.000-04:00

I don't know my status, I am feeling kinda like I wanna play but at the same time I wanna do my own stuff, on my own time. At least for the time being. So far I have spent a lot of time (and money) on Clothcraft. I got to the G.Bird Fletchlings/Errant Slops stage (87-93) and damn if those ingredients are expensive. To make 12 synths of Fletchlings its 600k, to make 12 Slops it's 870k so my wallet is feeling a bit lighter these days.

I have still yet to HQ a pair of Slops but I have gotten all the way to 89.5 and I am due to recieve my Weaver's Apron tomorrow so I'm pretty psyched about that. I also took Leathercraft to 28 because I had to have a base of 26 Leather to make these Slops. I still have to get that leather up to 60 if I want to be a good crafter, but for now I'm shooting for 92 Clothcraft. Then I will bounce back and forth from my subs to my main.

In non-crafting news I got my BLM to 44. Its fun, some nights I get great steady parties where we don't slow down for 3 mins and go for 4.5 hours. Tonight isn't one of those nights. I have been in this party for 2.5 hours, and my XP ring just wore. Which means we've gotten 3k xp in those 2 hours. This is due to 2 seperate occasions of a member DC'ing for the night, and a 3rd incident where a party wiped and the last member CFH'd as he was dying... So our 45WHM spent 10 minutes raising 6 people (they had no WHM). So here I am writing this entry while 5 of us kill VT crawlers for 74xp. Can't complain really, better than nothing I guess.

I've found a nice little 3 man (well 2 man/1 woman) Assault static for Lamia No.13 finally. Its 2 RDMs and a SAM and this leech is a great leech. He can mediate and slugshot quite nicely. So far we are 9/10 and I'm 6k from my Yigit Turban. Hopefully we can find 2 more people to start a static for the other ones, cause these people seem really cool and I know them from my Dynamis LS (which makes them cool by default).

Dynamis and Limbus... well last week I skipped both of these because I felt I needed a break, but now I think I may start going to these again because these people aren't morons and it is fun to do things with people who know what they are doing most of the time. Having said that we tried Omega again and he wooped us at 24%. We lost our tank and our BRD at the exact same time and the other tanks were weakened. A gun pod popped and wiped everyone, and while the last 2 people in the alliance were dropping the BRD and NIN logged in only to die seconds later. Disappointment was there but not as bad as Sunday's Dynamis. We got the mega boss to 1% with time running out. Lots of people were dead. I reraised with 1 minute left, used reraise gorget, cast stoneskin on myself cure 3'd myself, saw i had low MP so I used a Hi Ether, and with about 15 seconds left ran out to the boss to use Thunder III and the game wouldn't allow me to cast on him until about 3 seconds left. The reason... after you use an item on yourself there is (for some UNKNOWN reason) a 10 second timer you have to wait before you can cast any spell. Whether it's food, medicine, or reraise item. Since I used a Hi Ether on myself with about 15 seconds left I had only 5 seconds to run out into the area and cast a 4 second spell. I got Thunder III to 39% before I was kicked from the area.

Back to hating the game.

Goodbye my friend

2006-06-24T02:30:00.000-04:00

So today I was informed that one of our members, a galka SAM, decided to take his own life last night. This is probably the most shocking news I've ever heard while playing this game. I wish there was something I could have said to the guy while he was in-game. He was quiet but not a recluse. He knew how to have fun...

Whenever we gathered for Haku we'd always joke about how long the newbs were taking and we'd place bets on how many would die to aggro before reaching the ??? that spawns Haku. I used to put my character inside his and tell him I was cleaning the inside of his armor and demand gils when I stepped out. We'd screw around sometimes in Jeuno. He'd start emoting his chest hurt (with me inside him) and then I would /point motion and my arm would come out of his chest. He'd play off the whole alien thing and we'd get an immature laugh in and then do it again 5 mins later. Other times he would find another random galka and flat out skull hump me for minutes until I came back from AFK, making sure he documented it by screenshots. He is the galka on the right with the kote on.
I don't know what he was thinking, he was one of the most loved members of Furiousx and he will be missed incredibly. I hope wherever he is he doesn't have the pain he must have felt when he was still alive. Take care my friend, you will be missed.

Taking a break

2006-06-20T01:10:00.000-04:00

I talked about doing this a few months back and never did. I have gotten myself too wrapped up in this game, online for hours upon hours upon hours. I don't know if I had a moment of clarity or if the shit finally hit the fan and I needed to make a decision. I'm taking of the next 5.5 weeks until August. Then I can reassess if I want to keep going in this game.

I have great jobs, good crafting, a ton of gil, and am in one of the best Dynamis LS's on this server... but I have no real friends. No one to talk to when I'm online. Sure I converse about meaningless dribble in /linkshell chat but that is just ambient chat. People have stuff I want but don't have. People are in linkshells that I want to be in but am not. People are doing things and killing things that I am not because I am not in that "circle of people" that are doing the things I want to do. I feel like I'm at a party with people who are no fun playing music I don't like talking about shit I don't care about. I'm sitting on a couch in the corner staring at the host's CD collection wondering why the hell I am still sitting here.

Well, I've been unhappy long enough. I'm getting my ass up and leaving this party. I may be back, I may not. I'm not sure. But I bet I'll be happier not stressing over the things I don't have and the stuff I'm not doing if I'm not confronted with it on a daily basis. Until then...

Arhat's Gi

2006-06-19T13:44:00.000-04:00

yeah.. um, no. 12 Gi's? Hell I' wouldn't do more than 2-3.

24 Steel Sheets - 140k
12 Velvet Cloths - 110k
12 Silk Cloths - 135k
12 Rainbow Threads - 300k
12 Rainbow Cloths - 1M
Total - 1.685M
Value of 12 Arhat's Gi - 240k
Value of 1 Arhat's Gi+1 - 3.4M

So yeah, back to plumes.

Face it... Dynamis - Valkurm is lame

2006-06-19T00:55:00.000-04:00

We're like 0/5 on this stupid zone. This time we didn't even fight the Mega boss. I won't go too far into a tangent but it was a dumb mistake compounded by a dumber mistake. The butterly effect, a better example would be an snowball effect. Either way we didn't win thought we did get 3 drops. Koga Head-1, WHM Head-1, and a THF cape. Sadly it could have been a better farming run had we thrown in the towel after we got subs back, but that's in the past and nothing can be changed about it so there's no need dwelling on it. Of course Jeuno got 8 AF2 to drop (though the too botched the win and wiped on the boss). Crappy day for Dynamis.

On to fun stuff. Crafting. Sadly neither of my Arhat's+1 have sold yet, though no one has undercut them either. It's not been 3 days since the last sale. Come one Odin NINs... Enmity+3!! Screw Haidate. I managed to squeeze a full level out of Wamoura Cocoons > Silk > Cloth. Now I just have to unload this cloth to make some money back. Tonight I'm going to make a stack of Arhat's Gi's just for kicks to see if I can HQ one. If I can thats 3.4M right there which more than pays for the materials for all 12 and I can get some skillup possibly. If not, oh well. i'm sure I'll get some skillup on it. So It's a win/win situation either way.

Also got BST to 19. Man I was duoing and even though it is much safer it is slow as hell when you can't release your pet at the last moment. I got the same XP in 1 hr solo'ing than I did in 3 hours duoing. I think I'm going back to BLM for a week. I'll post results on the Gi's tomorrow. Let's hope!

I pwn Tier 0

2006-06-17T18:01:00.000-04:00

I'm currently dead as 16BST in Carpenter's Landing waiting for a raise, so I might as well type this up while I wait. So I realized that it was not gonna be cheap to get through the 80's. Peronally I <3 style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7627/1431/320/hakama.jpg" border="0">Now granted it's only about 600k but that's still 600k back in my pocket. That paid for 1.5 stacks of materiels. I basked in my glory for a while before I started back in. About 2 hours later I got another one synthed! Now this is kinda rare because tier 0 HQ's are about 7-15% chance. I was 3-4 levels below the cap and got these two HQ's. That's pretty rare. I listed them both for 598,001g and finished crafting last night and this afternoon I finally hit 86. Hakama cap at 88 but I'm done with them. I'll maybe do 1 level of Wamoura Silk > Cloth and then start in on Giant Bird Plumes. They are't much better, a stack of materiels costs 480k... so I'm seeing the funds from the Manteel, Nobles, and H Kote slowly disappearing. I should have enough though, and when I hit 95ish I'll get my Leather sub to 60 to be up to date.

Yay! A raise for my BST... god XP is slow.

Wyrm: 3 | LS: 0

2006-06-16T23:19:00.000-04:00

Well Ten's army of BLMs finally showed up, and KS99 "Early Bird Catches the Wyrm" was 1st attempt. I, of course, used my orb first and after the PLD voked the Wyrm used Breath and wiped the entire alliance in 1 second. Glad I was planning to choose Unsho > Princly > Guispere, etc and we never even engaged it.

Second try was better, but being the only RDM/DRK in the whole alliance it was my job to CS stun in the air. We did fine till 75% when it went airborne, then like and idiot I hit stun macro before Chainspell macro and I had to wait almost 30 seconds before I could cast stun again, and I had a whopping 40 seconds of Chainspelling in. I learned that the Wyrm stays in the air almost 2 mins, much longer than my CS Stun can hold him off for. Once he landed he wiped the BLMs and 2 Benedictions later it was only a matter of time before the WHMs ran out of MP and the PLDs would fall. We took it to 24% and wiped.

Third attempt was just stupid. We went in with 12 BLMs, 1 WHM, 2 BRDs, 2 SMNs, and 1 RDM/DRK. Almost none of us had our 2 hours. We failed sleepingit at least 10x on darksday, though I was told thats the main strat, to sleep it. We wiped at about 48% and I gave up. The people were there but the execution wasn't. We had no ctun lock on the Wyrm and we had no real SC's of any sort.

Pics... well when I scrape through the file manager of the PS2 I'll post em... but it sucked. I have good news about my crafting but I'll post that tonight or tomorrow so it's not infested with this feeling of failure.

First commissioned piece, and I didn't even blow it up!

2006-06-15T23:26:00.000-04:00

Eviljoker had me make her a Vermy and boy was I nervous. Not only was it my first synth that someone asked me to do for them, but it was worth 9M gil! After getting support and a Terra Crystal I faced south and made the cloak. I wasn't all that surprised since I was 12 levels over the cap but as evidenced the next day... people can have critical failures on stuf way below their level. It happens, the trick is to have it happen to inexpensive crap instead of crap worth 9M gil, even if it isn't your gil, it's still someone's.
So I'm leveling up BLM right now because I have the job at 37 and I want to be rich by leeching off KS30's. So far it's alot of fun, and I already know SC's and MB's. Farming spells hasn't been so bad either. I have OCD I think, which is shown by the "map" of spells I have made. I listed the level and spell all in a table with the price on the AH and what mob drops them and where... I have problems. Not just because of that but because I did that same thing for my Clothcrafting. Luckily right now I am writing this while in an amazing party 40-41 in Western Altepa Desert making Chain #4 280xp without an Empress Ring.

I recently hit Clothcraft 83.7 today and I made a list of the next 8 synths from 78-94. I put the recipes down and what each will cost per synth. While this is a very efficient way to plan your attack, it is kind of scary seeing as I am doing this for a video game. Either way, I'm moving along quite fast with Clothcraft and I should have to do these stupid Arhat's Hakama for a few more days until I can mobe onto some Wamoura and maybe some Giant Bird Fletchlings.

Adept! Finally.

2006-06-12T13:06:00.000-04:00

Not a whole lot to update, since my modem has been on it's last leg I haven't been doing alot of hardcore stuff. Tried Dynamis - Qufim but we couldn't do enough damage in the 3 mins that we had Chainspell Stun going and we ended up losing. Did gods on Saturday and I was high bidder on Genbu's Shield again and all that stupid turtle dropped was a Kabuto. Genbu really has a thing against me. I've come to accept that. They did a Sunday Kirin run but I knew my connection couldn't handle it. They got Raise III and an Oricalchum Ingot... so total crap drops.

I did on the other hand finally reach Adept in Clothcraft. Seemed I had to get past 73 to finally get some solid back to back to back skillups on Rainbow Threads, then when I did Puk Fletchlings the skillups were crazy. I did 4.5 levels of skillup in about a 2 hours time and finally finished at 78. (This morning I synthed 3 stacks of Rainbow Cloth and got another 0.7 through all 36 synths) Only problem is there is a huge dry spell 79-82 and the synths in the 80's suck.

I will just craft Puk Fletchlings till I cap them at 82, then Arhat's Hakama (which is a huge loss) caps at 88, Wamoura Cloth caps at 89, and Wamoura Silk (for some reason) caps at 90. I'll start doing W. Silk >> W.Cloth around 84, but I have to do stupid A.Hakama from 82 until 84 which is gonna eat some gils up. I have started synthing Kaginawa, mostly because its a Clothcraft synth with a Smithing subcraft and I am covered in both areas. So far I HQ about 5/12 synths and as long as I am not paying more than 13k per Manticore Hair I should make a decent profit off the toolbags. I'm pretty happy overall with the cost of getting to 80. So far I am about 4M out of pocket to get it to 80 which leaves me plenty to hopefully break it past 90. Some synths are getting a bit pricy now, such as Rainbow Threads >> Rainbow Cloths. Each stack of threads is 350k, and a stack of cloths is 1.1M so when I fail and lose 3 threads it's a little painful to see 90k go up in smoke... but, as my grandpa used to say, "Can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs". Just keep my eye on the prize and I should beover this Arhat's hump in by the weekend. Seems Mikesjustice is defying all logic and crafting like mad... Dude sold 7 of the last 10 Scorpion Harness+1's. Ugh.

Gearing up for Jorm tonight

2006-06-09T15:37:00.000-04:00

Capped RDM XP
2 fully charged Reraise II gorgets
Capped Enfeebling Magic
99x Ginger Cookies
MP regen+23 gear
948MP to use

Let's see if this does me any better against that bastard Jorm tonight...

***Edit*** LS pussed out, not enough BLM and SMNs showed up. That was worth it.

Artisan baby... hells yeah.

2006-06-09T02:50:00.000-04:00

So I broke past the 68 level and started up on the road ahead to Adept. I leveled out today at about 72 and change, and the only reason why I'm not getting up faster is because I'm buying all the damn Spider Webs I can get my hands on. I'm trying not to pay more than 13k a piece since they are going for 10k. I'm tackling Puk Fletchings around 76 which should take me to 82. That will also allow me to get my Weaver's Apron which actually makes me look like an actual crafter. Right now I find myself crafting daily in my Jaridah Peti just so I can look original. The only thing I'm not looking forward to is synthing anything including Wamoura. Right now the only way to get that stuff is to farm the mobs in Mt. Zhaylom or to camp the Al Zhabi Clothcraft Guild... which looks like this every 55 minutes, and the pic below doesn't every show the 8 tarus who literally stand inside the NPC! It seems that the closer you get to the NPC, the better chance you have at pulling up the Buy/Sell menu at exactly 6:00. I would say about 75% of the time at 6:00 when I click the NPC I get no menu and when I reselect the NPC at 6:01 or 6:02... anything of value is long gone. There has to be a better way to do this. Even people who aren't logged in suddenly appear at 5:50 to try and buying Wamoura Cocoons, Karakul Threads, and Gold Threads only to logout 3 seconds later. Hurray for RMTs!

On a more positive, note we beat Dynamis Lord again on Wednesday with no real problems but for the 2nd straight time we got nothing but a L.Jadeshell. We DID in fact finally get a Duelist's Chapeau which is the 1st in a long time and only the 5th one we've had drop in the lifetime of the shell. So yippie only 6 more people ahead of me to get the Chapeau before it's my turn! That's only 1 more than we've seen total in a year... fack. I must say that the Culverin is a damn impressive weapon. It's pretty much a damn hand cannon and it puts out massive damage. I had to get a shot of this thing when I saw it, and I was definitly intimidated by that thing. Reminds me of what Arnold wielded in Terminator 2.

Finally, I finished up enough Lamia No.13 to get the Grandiose Chain. It's quite a nice piece, especially for burns (which is what it seems RDM do for xp once they hit lv75) although I am a bit upset that my HP/MP ratio is adjusted now. The Star Necklace is 15HP > 15MP which gets me about 10mp from 1:1 ratio, but the Grandiose Chain is HP/MP+10; hp/mp regen +2. This means I have about 972HP:948MP. So I need to finish my MP merits which will give me 20 more MP and then I should be closer to my 1:1 ratio.

Save the Drama fo yo Mama

2006-06-05T13:53:00.000-04:00

Well I had a good weekend... for the most part. I caught up on my Clothcraft and we did a successful god run. Only blemish came on Sunday afternoon when another Dynamis LS jumped into our zone 30 minutes before we had scheduled to go in and shenanigans ensued. Luckily I had stuff on the TiVo to watch split screen while the drama unfurled in /linkshell chat. When we went in we had another Dyna - Beau win and got a Montinont, THF, WAR, and RDM AF. So Tabards for everyone!

Later on we did a Kirin which (as always) turned ugly on the 3rd and 4th mini god and avoiding a wipe was another task we had to complete before taking Kirin down in 90 mins. Unsent showed up the same time we did while MisfitGods was fighting their Kirin and I told a few of their members, we have done Kirin at 6pm on Sunday for the past 2+ months. After some talking it seems Firiel and Tenbears came to an agreement and Unsent respectivly waitied for us to finish. Say what you want about Firiel (I know I hate her and she hates me) but she runs a tight ship. I may dislike her, but I do respect her.

Moving on to happier things... I decided that saving up Assault Points for the Intensifying Cape was not the smartest thing. You see it's 10,000 points for MP+30 cape I want... but recently the Lamia Mantle was introduced. It's not 10,000 points, it's 28,000g which is cheap as hell and the trade off is a measly 6mp! Stats are great (MP+24; Magic Def. Bonus+3). That's right up my alley, plus, with the points I had saved up I bought a Insomnia Earring. It was 3,000 Assault Points and is HP/MP+15 and enhances Resist Sleep. Kinda killed 2 birds with 1 stone. Now I'm really starting to get impressed with my HP/MP ratio as well as the overall size of my MP pool.

(man I wish PS2 could screenshot menus...)

Also you'll see that my XP is capped. As of last night after Kirin I deleveled 2x but finished the fight with 292xp into 75RDM. I knew it was time to finally cap this xp (again) so I found myself a nice burn party for 6 hours and not only capped my xp but got 2 merits in the process! I now have 953mp and with 2 more merits to go in MP I can get to 973 base MP without food and break 1000MP with food. Yay me!

Made it over the hump

2006-06-04T03:09:00.000-04:00

So this morning I told myself I had been slacking long enough in Clothcraft. I hit 60, got my Spectacles and got complacent for a week. I dug my heels in and cleared 62 and started up in Black Choco Fletchlings which cap at 73. The first 1.5 levels was a bit grueling and I knew it would be but I said screw it, I'll skillup eventually and once I made it over 62 things picked up nicely. Only reason I stopped is because we had sky tonight. By the time I left for sky I had hit 64.0 and still had 9 levels to go on fletchlings.

Once in sky we made our rounds with Byakko, Seiryu, Suzaku and Genbu. I must say my enfeebling merits are finally starting to show themselves. I was able to silince Suzaku without Elemental Seal on 2x and the second time was literally 5 seconds before he 2 hour'd which meant his chainspell firaga 3 was completely nulled. It was pretty impressive if I say so myself. When we got to Genbu I knew I didn't have much competition, but sure enough the only person who was bidding against me had 4 more points than me. It didn't drop and Genbu was the only cheapass all night. Byakko dropped haidate, Seiryu dropped kote, Suzaku dropped sune-ate, but Genbu... he continues to seek unadultrated revenge on me. He dropped A. Abj: Hands again for the 2nd straight time and Canabis was able to get his Zenith Mitts.

Afterwards I was crazy bored and decided to be a ghetto BLM and help the LS do some KS30 orbs. We did 7 or 8 but got no V Claw nor any Damascne Ingots/Cloths. We got Forty his Destroyers though, and I ended up getting some stupid bow called the Expunger which increases its damage after you get 500 WS points (no thanks) so it was kinda crappy. I think the 4 BLMs gonna cut me in on their split since I was with them all night long. Tomorrow is more skillups, Dynamis - Beaucidine, and probably an evening Kirin with the seals we got today.

Jorm is a punk

2006-06-01T16:32:00.000-04:00

Well last night I did Dynamis - Sandy and we walked out with 15 AF... 2 RDM's even. Crazy drops, and that brings us to 31 AF in 2 runs there. Yikes. I came out of Dynamis to find the LS had done 5 Shen runs http://gorokai.blogspot.com/2005/08/shen.html#links and gotten 5 Reverand Mail and found out that Jorm was up so they got almost the whole shell to head out there to meet him for the first time.

It was a fun fight, people made the mistake of running behind him alot, and it eventually spike flailed. I told them it would but we got it to 20% and it hadn't so I think the shell got complacent and comfortable with it. Only thing that was important is we pulled our 1st wyrm, we did pretty well rotating, we need to get better with using the right avatars and always facing the wyrm the same way. It was fun for us, but Hex had to come out and be a total jerk. I don't usually vent my problems about people on here, but to come all the way out to the ends of Ul Range to watch us fight a wyrm for 5 hours shows that you both have no life and that you think sending tells to our members that we suck makes you look any less of a loser. Get a life dude, go play with your LS for 5 hours instead of watching ours.

Anyways, we lost, but the win was the learning of what we did wrong and how to get better. I'm sure this LS can move on to beating Jorm and then hopefully take Tiamat and Vrtra. Until then, it's a learning process, no one wins the first time they attempt something.

3 Day Weekends = fun times

2006-05-30T13:20:00.000-04:00

So... there's a lot to catch up on. On Friday night the LS did a Rostrum Pumps run. Pretty much the last piece I need on my BRD to make it feel complete. It's egotistical to think this, (especially since good armor does not mean good player) but my BRD is pretty uber now. I mean... really.

Weapon: Terra's Staff
Head: Opo Opo Crown/Bard's Roundlet
Neck: String Torque/Star Necklace
L.ear: Loq. Earring/Melody+1
R.ear: String Earring/Minstrel's Earring
Body: Chl. Justacorps+1/Bard's Justacorps
Hands: Sha'ir Gages/Bard's Mitts
L.ring: Tamas Ring
R.ring: Jelly Ring/Minstrel's Ring
Back: Jester's Cape+1/Prism Cape [soon to be Intensifying Cape]
Waist: Gleeman's Belt/Ocean Rope
Legs: Bard's Cannions/Zenith Slacks
Feet: Rostrum Pumps

Makes for a pretty respectable collection of stuff. My RDM is starting to get almost complete as well, and with a new addition on Saturday at the God's run... I'm one step closer to completing RDM gear. This is a piece I have been waiting for since I was in Envy, and a piece I have been in line for since November. These are the hands to have for any RDM or BLM who is nuking. Magic Attack Bonus+5 and 50HP>>50MP is godly. My RDM now (with a rolo pie) is now 981HP and 963MP which is damn near the 1:1 ratio all RDMs strive for. With the Intensifying Cape from Assault I will be hovering dmn close to 1000MP with food. With the good came some bad. First my main competition is a girl who only attends our runs to spend points, she has stopped accruing them because she joined another LS. This meant I had to earn more points to win the bid (or wait for her to get them). Well I finally passed her by 1 point before the gods and she forced me to pay 100% of my points. Doesn't matter though, I have my mitts and thats 1/2 of the items I want in sky, the other being Genbu's Shield. The other bad news was Cursed Mitts jumped from 750k>950k the day I got my abjuration. Even worse I had to get mine for 995k... which annoyed me somewhat until I checked the Cursed Mitts recipe and found that one of the ingredients costs 1.1M so I guess I can't complain. Either way I got my mitts and that's all I was concerned about.

Sunday started with me finally breaking 70,000 Guild Points and earning my Magnifying Spectacles. Sadly they are impossible to see on my character when I wear them unlike bonecraft or goldsmithing but all that matters is I got 1/2 of my "crafting gear" taken care of. Now to earn 100,000 more for the apron... ugh.

Later on Sunday we did a Dynamis run. Finally I was going to be able to put those weeks and months of levling a job I absolutely despised to good use. I have to say one thing about DRK... stun is fun, and when used properly you get compliments from your party and that makes you feel good. But playing DRK as main? BORING. You can engage a mob and go afk for 1 minute and come back, and as long as the mob hasn't moved no one in your party knows any different. No thanks... Anyways we went into Dynamis - Xarcabard with the intent of clearing all time extensions and then taking a run at good old Dynamis Lord. The last time we went after him we won, but after many deaths, ALOT of XP loss, and a zombie attack that took nearly 20 mins. Needless to say, it was a clusterf**k so we vowed to do it again and do it right. We had 8 RDM/DRKs, about 9 BLMs, maybe 5 PLDs, and about 6 WHMs. We also used a BRD/BLM to Elemental Seal Ltng. Threnody which worked wonders. We took that badass down in about 3 mins flat. We had perfection going till 5%. Thats when Ying and Yang appeared and stunned our Chainspell stunners (me and Rhyis) and that jerk got off an Oblivion Smash but the last group of stunners came in and the melee finished him off. Only a Jadeshell dropped but it was seriously impressive. We ended up having over an hour left to farm. I'm really proud of Obsidian for really executing this time. We are a premiere Dynamis LS on Odin and I'm extremely proud to be a part of it. I really hate PS2 pics, when someone posts a PC version of the group pic this crappy one gets replaced, until then... the Interlopers:

Finally on Monday was sort of a day of resting. I woke up and found that some friends wanted to kill a NM in Riverne #A01 so I grabbed some DRK gear and headed out. We were going after a NM called Heliodromos which is actualy 3 NMs. Once you engage one the other two attack and once the first dies the other two will despawn in about 10 mins. We went out with about 12 people and killed all three no problem but only got 1 pair of Mountain Gaiters so we let the person who really wanted them all along have them and Gooftaru now has his new boots. We decided to check another NM called Aiatar which is a Wyvern type NM that drops JSE legs for DRG and DRK. We had a DRK there named Lyric who really wanted the Sable Cuisses. He was actually a tough fight. He used Dispelga and Paralyzga which were incredibly annoying and he also used normal wyvern moves which aren't so bad if you didn't get your food dispelled and you can't cast your shadows because you're paralyzed. After about 6 minutes we finally got him down and wouldn't you know it... we got the worst drops you could get.

We called it a day after that and headed off. I did yet another Apollyon SE limbus run... (this is our 6th in a row I think) and we got 5 coins. We could do this in our sleep now. I think when we pulled the boss weapon on the 4th floor we had almost 25 minutes left... I wish we could farm or repop the mobs to use that time we get with time extensions. Oh well, I have 8 coins and 1/2 items for both BRD and RDM. We need to start going to Temenos again so I can get my 2nd items for AF and we can finally get some Nashira gear.

Finally (yes really this is finally) we did some BCNM60 runs. Six to be exact. We did Dismemberment Brigade in Horlais Peak and it was a joke how easy it was. We had PLD, NIN, DRG, RDM, BLM, BRD and we won everytime. We were really after Spectacles and crate after crate we weren't getting any. Hell even my crate was a flute and 5 goldsmithing items... Red Rock, Mythril Ingot, and 3 gems... so lame. Finally at 3:00am on our final crate I had lost my patience...

So there you have it... threaten SE in shout and you get your drops. Our total haul was 1x Spectacles, 2x Dragvandil, 3x Hamelin Flute, 2x Assault Earring, 4x DS Ingot, 4x Mythril Ingot, and a bunch of gems that can be NPC'd for 2400g (and are that much at the auction house). I think we walked with about 1M each when all was said and done. Well, that about completes my Memorial Day wrapup entry. Hell if you read this whole thing and got this far... send me a tell in game. I'll send you 1000g cause you're either entirely too bored, or enjoy reading my blog. And I bet you'd enjoy it more if I paid you to keep coming back :P so take care guys, my fingers are tired.

catching up

2006-05-30T04:32:00.000-04:00

I have alot to catch up on but have neither the time nor energy right now at 4:30am to do it. I'll get an entry up tomorrow, unitl then...

I <3 the 80's.

Who needs those stinking THFs?

2006-05-26T14:44:00.000-04:00

Treasure Hunter pfft! I was soloing Marids to close out a merit and I was getting crazy drops. Hides, Hairs, and tons of seals. I think I got a total of 7 hides, 3 hairs, and 9 Kindred Seals over about a 3 hour period. I was crazy bored and wanting some stuff. I got the hides turned into leathers (thanks EJ!) and then had a friend synth a Jaridah Peti (thanks EJ!). We did a little Limbus (Apollyon SE again someone shoot me now) and we lost because I hit my convert macro instead of my silence macro when pulling skeletons. It backed us up timewise and I shoulder the blame for that loss, though we ended up with the same amount of coins per person as we did last time so...meh. On a side note I finally got enough Assault Points to unlock tier 2 assaults so I am now a PFC Wildcat and can accrue 5 id tags now instead of the previous three. Hopefully I can find a static and finally start getting my assault rewards.

A lil good, a lil bad, and alot of Lost

2006-05-23T22:02:00.000-04:00

(this entry is a culmination of the past 2-3 days)

Kind of a weak couple days since the Valkurm fiasco. I beat Apollyon SE again for the 10th time it seems, finally getting enough coins to recieve my earring. Spent some time in a Imperial Standing party. I have no desire for that stupid turban so I'm just accumulating points right now, hoping that there is more to the rewards than just 1 item. Oh yeah I beat Shadow Lord with a 75MNK. It was a joke actually, but fun nonetheless. The cutscene was longer than the fight. I did 3 Assaults as well, wining one in the never before attempted area of Periqua and then went 1/2 in Lebros Cavern. The Qiqirn were bastards when it came to dropping their mines, and both times someone messed up the blowing up of the wall by running away too soon. Oh well... I've got some things I need to do, leveling can wait. In no particular order:

Level Clothcraft to 85
Get my Magnifying Specs and eventually my Weaver's Apron
Get to Windy Rank 8 for Master Caster Bracelets (INT/MND+1, ele/enf magic +7)
Get Grandiose Chain (HP/MP+10, hpp/mpp+2) Mamool Ja Assault [2,265/8,000]
Get Intensifying Cape(HP/MP+30) Lebros Cavern Assault [3,762/10,000]
Get Bard Slippers to go 5/5 on BRD AF2

Decided to see how much CHR I could get on my BRD... came up with 2 pics, one with my Opo Opo Crown activated and one with both CHR+ songs on. I could get it higher actually if my ring wasn't gimp and I had different earrings. Without songs I had CHR: 68+66 which isn't all that

bad, but with songs I had CHR: 68+89 which is absolutely insane... So the moral of this story is... um, I can have alot of CHR if I wanted to. Also I didn't notice I was BRD/BLM until I was standing in front of the Trail Markings in Beaucidine...

Kinda a crappy night tonight, started off the day camping Cactrot Rapido with the LS for who knows why, we claimed with 14 people and somehow wiped. RMTs claim it while we're reraising and kill it. Wonderful. Then I figure while we have these people here we could get my Savage Blade out of the way. Well I have no idea the process of opening the gates so we bailed on that idea. We wandered around and killed the Dainslaif NM (no drop) and the Save the Queen NM (no drop). We made our way to the Dune Boots NM and finally got a drop. We wanted to move onto an ENM but I noticed the day/time and realized I had to attend my regulary scheduled Dynamis (Beaucidine). We farmed for over 3 hours and all that dropped was 1 single Montinont... Such crap. At least my night picked up, when I logged out I was able to watch the season finale of Lost, but I won't go into that seeing as this is my FFXI blog.

...

2006-05-21T14:28:00.000-04:00

That's pretty much all I have to say about Dynamis - Valkurm. A fight with a NM that does not seem to have any way to 100% negate charm or its other TP moves. Today we took the Mega Boss to 5% and lost. There were (in my eyes) 2 reasons this happened.

Within 3 seconds of engaging 1 of our first 2 Chainspell stunners got massacred by NM's babies.
We were short handed even though we were signed up with 36/36 for weeks.

We got no AF, we got a loss, and I'm pretty pissed about it. Everyone did their jobs right, we just didn't have enough people in that "everyone" category. So my mood about the whole thing is simply "...".

My melee days are OVER!

2006-05-21T02:37:00.000-04:00

Thank god... This is one of the reasons I am happy to have completed my short-lived chapter playing melee. Berserk + Nightmare Scythe got me a whopping 1 damage... Anyways I went from 35DRK to 38DRK and finally got Stun activated so I can chainspell stun. It's such a relief to finally have finished this. It's sad when I think about it, I spent weeks upon weeks leveling this job so that I can have 60 seconds (edited) of continuous stuns. Either way it rounds out my RDM, so now being able to choose to go /BLM, /WHM, or /DRK makes me a more complete RDM.

A little disappointing news came earlier in the day. I finally got all my synthesis materials to make the 650k Jaridah Salvars. I paid the stupid Aht Urghan NPC 1 Imp.Brz.Piece to get synthesis support, and I tried to synth. Tried. I was 4 levels from cap on Clothcraft, 20 levels over cap on Smithing, but the listing for Leathercraft was (?). Here's my beef... Steel Ingot is a lv36 Smithing synth, which I had. Karakul Leather is a lv10 Leatherworking synthm which I had. I can only guess that there is some other craft that is needed but either way, I could synth it. So what to do? Ask a friend to do it for you. I did that, I asked a 98+3 Clothcraft friend to synth. I handed all materials over to her and she started to synth. Failure. I ended up losing a 250k Marid Hair and a 220k Karakul Cloth. Needless to say I was disappointed, but I'll just try and farm the ingredients up again and have her make it. Ity was just bad dumb luck that it failed. In a few hours I have Dynamis - Valkurm and I'll be goign as RDM/DRK to help of the final boss. It seems like I am the only person bidding on BRD Slippers so if they drop I could (once again) be welcomed into the 5/5 AF2 club in Obsidian. Here's to hoping.

Absolutely confused...

2006-05-19T18:01:00.000-04:00

So I was skilling up because I was determined to get past 58 today and become a Craftsman. I turned in my 2 Wool Bracers for 6400 Guild Points (woohoo!) and started synthing Hunter's Cotton. I wish I had known about this synth sooner, it costs about 2000g less per synth if I buy all the ingredients off the auction house, probably 1/3rd that price if I synthed the ingredients myself. Either way, it took me past 58 and I ended up finishing at 59.4, which I'm quite happy about. I have 34,998/70,000 guild points (half-way to magnifying spectacles) and also started collecting items for my 1st pair of Jaridah Salvars. It consists of 2x Karakul Cloth, 1x Marid Hair, 1x Karakul Leather, 1x Steel Sheet. They sell for 650k but the ingredients cost more than the value of the item so I decided to farm everything. So far I have 1 cloth and almost have enough skins to make a 2nd cloth. I farmed the Marid Hair last night after an hour of soloing (250k on auction house NO THANKS!) and I made the steel sheet myself.

Anyways, as to why I was confused. I was told that synthing is helped if you are facing a certain direction, on a certain day, with a certain elemental staff equipped. I usually almost always do this. This time however I forgot to and was just in a rush. I synthed on darksday (supposed to be bad) facing south (was using earth crystal which means I "should" face SouthEast) and had my Thunder Staff equipped (theory says best luck comes with Earth/Terra's Staff equipped when using earth crystals). To top it off I had no guild support and was in my mog house which has "a faint glow of water eneregy". The item's cap is 63, I was 58.7 and here is what happened: I got +0.7 skillups in 5 consecutive synths. After the first 2 I said, "screw this don't change what's working for you" and continued synthing facing the wrong way on the wrong day with the wrong equips. It was Darksday 3:14 and was First Quarter Moon (45%). Now I'm totally confused... Either way I hit 59.4 and hopefully can get to 63 by spamming this synth over the next few days.

Update -
Spent 5 hours in a party organizing KS99. Took the RDM/DRK almost 3 hours to get online, then while waiting in Balgas Dais for 2 hours the second I trade orb 1 PLD starts to DC. Our other PLD said he was way late for something and logged... We were gonna try it with 1 PLD and a crapload of healers, and as I approach the circle... he DC's again. We called it eventually, a little over 5 hours after the party was started. I'm 2 levels from 37DRK too, glad I left my party for that.

...I'm gonna go buy a lottery ticket.

Damn melees sidetracking me!

2006-05-18T03:59:00.000-04:00

Look at this crap! Its 3:57 am and I'm finishing up an Imperial Standing Party... I get invites when I'm not looking for party or when I'm trying to get into an Assault party. Only time I never get invites... when I'm looking for an xp party. I tell ya what though, being RDM in a burn party is alot easier than being BRD. I have to do more but it's much easier cause I just plop my ass in a spot and heal, haste, silena and blindna! So easy. I got 2 merits tonight and finally closed out Convert Recast timer. I'm down to 8:20 in between converts. Not bad if I say so myself. This will be nice when I'm soloing VT mobs and needing that MP faster.
I'm not sure what I'm going to work on next, maybe Max MP. I had a spare merit and threw it into that category which got my max MP up to 823 without food. Still kinda sucky but I'm Hume and RDM, cut me some slack here... When I get my Assault cape which is HP/MP+30 and my Locq. Earring which also has MP+30 I should be sitting pretty around 880 MP or so. Then my Zenith Mitts will get me over 900 MP.

Speaking of Zenith Mitts... screw Genbu, fat ass friggin turtle has not dropped mitts for me dating back to November, and the only mitts he has dropped was 2 weeks ago when I was unable to attend our sky run... Isn't that some sick irony. Anyways the sun will rise in 90 minutes so I am off to sleep. I have another job interview I need to rest up for. Here's my day in a nutshell.

Solo'd some Marids with xp ring on, great xp and Kindred Seals
Got Clothcraft to 57 (so close to 58 and Craftsman!)
Turned in 6 Cotton Hachimakis for guild points (HQ'd 2 of them!)
Won Dynamis - Beaucidine (3 AFs... wtf, where were our THFs tonight?)
Did a burn party, got 2 merits, capped convert and raised Max MP

Diving In

2006-05-17T02:32:00.000-04:00

Well I finally bit the bullet today and started in with the Green Ribbons. Damn they suck. Out of 12 Silk Cloths I only successfully synth about 8-9 Green Ribbons and out of those 8-9 ribbons I only get skillup on maybe 4 total. So far I've gone from 53.0 to 56.1 in about 7 stacks of Silk Cloths and I've had to sell any synthed ribbons back to an NPC for 2,070 gil. Luckily I'm halfway through this ordeal and will quit in about 3 levels. Once I hit 59 I'm moving onto White Capes so I can actually sell the capes on the Auction House.

I've found that I can also make Field Hose which caps at 60. The materials (when synthed from scratch) cost the same amount as the Ribbons but instead they actually sell on the Auction House. If this is the case (as it has been tonight at least) I'm going to make Field Hose until I cap it at 60 and then move on. Blowing up Silk Cloths make me cry. When I fail on 4 synths and lose 4 cloths thats a total loss of 56,000 gil. I'm sure when I am at 86 Clothcraft I'll wish I was only losing 56k a stack but right now that still kinda stings a little bit to be losing 56k to failed synths. I'll pick up where I left off tomorrow and do a Dynamis - Beaucidine. I am not lotting anything because I have both BRD and RDM AF2 from that zone so I'm strictly going for the coins and the points.

My quarterly rant

2006-05-12T12:53:00.000-04:00

I am pissed about a few things today, and I'm gonna vent them right now because I feel like it. If this refers to you or has anything to do I'm sorry, but I'm just fed up with some things and need to vent.

1) Stupid newbs - Last night I was trying to farm silk on my ex girlfriend's character (which is technically mine since it's on my Content ID but that's besides the point). This character is 30THF is located in Jeuno. I grabbed an instant warp scroll and signet and did a simple everyday shout. /shout Teleport Mea Can I have it? 2000g You can have this. Simple enough right? I got four separate people (not all in the same party) asking me to teleport them to Mea... Are you retarded? Can't you SEE that I am a 30THF and looking for a tele, not offering one? All 4 of these bozos were not even rank 3 yet... and since all tele-taxis seem to have moved to Aht Urghan, the morons are left begging for rides in Jeuno... begging a THF for a tele.

2) Undercutters - People in this game have ZERO concept of any form of economics. Macroeconomics, microeconomics.... even basic principles. These people are idiots. I say this because I'm trying to sell stacks of Velvet Cloth, Silk Cloth and Linen Cloth and all 3 items were undercut. These idiots would rather sell a 170k item for 160k today than wait 5 hours and get 10k more. Friggin idiots... Then someone sees its last sale at 160k and undercuts to 155k. Now we're 15,000g below the normal selling price. Problem is that buyers don't want to pay high prices so they gobble these prices up, making the seller think, "Oh crap I can sell this item in 12 minutes! I'm gonna farm it more and sell for 150k!" and now we're 20k below normal selling price and it's now 1/8th cheaper than it was yesterday. I wanna climb through my TV and punch these idiots in the face till they can't see their screen anymore to ruin the economy. Having said that I have almost 700k sitting on the AH because people wanted to undercut prices by about 5-10k; thus lowering its "going rate" which is lower than my current listed price. Which means I have 3 choices; a) wait for people to stop undercutting and the price go back up, b) wait for the item to get sent back to me from the AH cause some dingbat dropped the price, c) Stop Sale of the item and relist at the lower price which in turn reinforces the lower value of the item. All choices SUCK.

3) Vagus - (as of late) Now this can be a touchy subject. I have known this guy for almost 2 years and respected him when he led me in Envy, but as of late he has been kinda pissing me off. Everyday... every single day he camps Lord of Onzozo for Kraken Clubs. His gaming experience has come down to sitting around for hours trying to get an item to sell for 200,000,000 gil. That's right two-hundred million gil. Now some of you might say, "Linkshells everday camp Fafnir or Behemoth, etc" and sure, you're right. Linkshells do camp those NMs daily, but not for profit. Not to get a 200M gil item to sell. They camp it to better their LS members. Instead Vagus camps LoO daily to make money. I thought about this for a while last night and came to the conclusion that an argument could be made that he is attempting to monopolize a NM. Now he doesn't get cliams daily I know this. He has RMT's there everyday to compete with. I do know that he has claimed it multiple times and gotten a Kraken Club a few times as well. I see him purchasing a Shura Togi for 9M or some super-duper dagger/knife for 10M and that's cool, I made my money off of my Manteel. But when is enough ENOUGH? That has bothered me recently, but also the fact that in my Dynamis LS I only see this guy at Dynamis Xarcabard runs. He no longer attends any other runs except for Xarcabard and the same goes for Strawberrie and Senrez and a few others. It sickens me that we helped them get their AF yet they don't come on runs to help us get our AF. Sure you have to quit sometime, but if you are only going to come on 1 run for your last piece of AF don't even bother coming. It just shows a lack of respect and says to me that all you are concerned with is you getting yours. Once he gets that last piece of AF I'll bet my wallet we'll never see or hear from him again in Obsidian.

I'm pissed today and I don't care that I'm typing this down. Fack.

Found it! Money pit!

2006-05-11T15:40:00.000-04:00

So, after getting Clothcraft from 1-51 in one week I had spent a whopping 1.1M gil in total. Not bad, seeing as I didn't spend any time hovering on the money synths. Today I hit 52.6 and looked at what lay ahead for me. No synth is free, but so far they have been extremely cheap. Getting from 53-62 is going to be a bit more expensive than I am used to. I have to make Green Ribbons. The ingredients to the ribbons are the cheapest of the synths in this crafting range. The ingredients are simply 1 Silk Cloth and 1 Wind Crystal. Easy enough. Problem is a stack of Silk Cloths are 170k... that equates to just over 14k a cloth. I can ease that pain a little by making the cloths myself from Silk Thread. Silk Thread is 45k a stack and since 3 x Silk Thread = 1 Silk Cloth that means I can make a stack of cloths for 135,000 gil. That at least saves me 35k in ingredients. If I synth each cloth that makes each Ribbon synthed cost me about 11,250g, and since the NPC buys the ribbons back for 2000g I'll be losing approx 9,100g per synth. Not all that bad, but seeing I'll probably have to make 6-8 stacks of Green Ribbons to get up to 62(ish) that means I'll be losing about 655k-837k after all is said and done... crap. Hopefully this will get me to 62 and I can get past this small hurdle, and I shouldn't hit another speed bump until around 78.

Until then I'm going to try and make some gil on the side by synthing cloths day and night. I've found some moneymakers which I'll share with you (don't go screwing up the economy with these now...)

Flax Flower x 2 = 1 Linen Thread
Linen Thread x3 = 1 Linen Cloth

That means 72 Flax Flowers are needed to make a stack of Linen Cloths. Flax Flowers are around 200g at the guild or at the airship shops. 72 x 200g = 14,400g in Flax Flowers. Guess how much 1 stack of Linen Cloths is? 60,000 gil. Thats a 45,600 gil profit. There's more

Crawler Cocoon x 2 = 1 Silk Thread
Silk Thread x 3 = 1 Silk Cloth

That means 72 Crawler Cocoons are needed to make a stack of Silk Cloths. Crawler Cocoons are around 810g each and are only available at the Clothcraft Guild Salesroom or the Auction House. 72 x 810g = 58,320g in Crawler Cocoons. And how much is a stack of Silk Cloth? 170,000 gil which is a 111,680 gil profit.

For the next week or so, these two synths are almost the only thing I'll be doing. Hopefully I can make about half of that upcoming gil loss beforehand so instead of losing 655k-837k... I may only lose about 200k-400k.

Server down for maintenance... /shocked!

2006-05-09T13:10:00.000-04:00

While they're fixing the servers once again I find myself blogging away before I grab a late lunch. I haven't been doing a lot of anything in game except crafting. I got Clothcraft from 39.4 to 45.7 last night and planned to get it to 50 until I was told the server was going down for more maintenance. SquareEnix said "gtfo or else", so I logged.

I've started to use alot of lightning crystals, and that crap is getting to be more expensive than the damn ingredients! Lightning has hovered around 6k but now they are creeping to 7k and above. I threw in the towel and headed out to Qufim and Behemoth's Dominion. I farmed for about 45minutes before I finally did something stupid. I pulled an elemental with Dia and started nuking, then realized I had convert up and ready to use (you can see where I'm going with this). I slept it and immedietly used my convert macro and converted to 23hp. Well Mr. Elemental wasn't slept (seeing as I had Dia'd him) and he got in a shot for 31. Unfortunetly 31>23 so I had to ask Mohib (MNK/WHM) to come all the way from Jeuno to raise my stupid ass. I deserved the xp loss. I didn't even have Protect on much less Stoneskin. It reminded me of my favorite title ever granted in this game:
I left with about 12 stacks of lightning clusters and went back to making silk and velvet. I remembered I needed to do my guild points so I checked and it was a Wool Cap (lvl 45 synth). I was at 44 at the time I think so I grabbed some Chocobo Feathers and guild support. Faced southeast with my Terra's Staff on and I get this! My first ever +1 synth. I had gotten the animation while making Wool Thread and Linen Thread but since they don't HQ I never reaped the benefits until tonight. I wanted to keep it just for sentimental reasons but it was worth 4960 guild points and when I saw that I said "screw that" and synthed another cap, a NQ Wool Cap. With my points I bought the key item "Spinning" which allows me to use multiple threads for one crystal. It doesn't help me skillup any faster, but when I want to make gil by turning items into threads this will save me a bunch of crytsals (which aren't cheap) . For example, 2 Flax Flowers + 1 lightning crystal makes 1 Linen Thread. Well, when you have learned spinning you can use 6 Flax Flowers + spindle (75g) + 1 lightning crystal and you'll get 3 threads. You end up saving 2 lightning crystals per synth. That's 24 crystals per stack and that equates to a 12-14k savings per stack on crystals alone. Anyways at the end of the day I was 45.7 and had the key item Spinning. From this point on I'll start saving for my Magnifying Spectacles. That's 70,000 GP's and the apron is 100k GP's (ugh).

Linens-N-Things (my new way of FFXI life)

2006-05-08T11:29:00.000-04:00

So for the past 5 days all I have done is craft. I didn't do much of anything Thurs-Sat because the Moms was in town, but other than that I have been in Windurst crafting my little behind off. Only time I have left Windy is for Dynamis (another Valkurm loss on Sunday...) and Limbus which is tonight. Last night I got Clothcraft to 39.4 and even got Goldsmithing to 10.7 which means I can make Silver Thread (whoopie) I think it's a loss though, not completely sure. Either way I think I have spent less than 1M to get my Clothcraft to around 40 which isn't that bad in my opinion. Soon alot of stuff will be made with Velvet (which is expensive), so I think I'm going to spend time making the ingredients instead of buying them since the crystal cost is far less a sunk cost than the price of the already synthed ingredients.

On a positive note I have 2 interviews this week, both with different divisions of Morgan Stanley. I'm hoping one of them pans out. It means less time on FFXI but more time living my life with more money. Money > FFXI

And the boots makes seven

2006-05-04T10:11:00.000-04:00

Entered Dynamis last night and was high bidder on Duelist's Boots, and I didn't expect them to drop to be honest. Then we started getting drops left and right. We got NIN. WAR, DRG, then BST and the AF just kept flowing. We ended up with 15 AF when it was all said and done and I think my boots were the 13th or 14th AF to drop. I was really getting worried because the boots are really good boots. Good MP and Magic Attack Bonus + and it means I'll be selling my Wise Pigaches. They cost me an arm and a leg in terms of points but they are a rare drop and it's my 7th AF piece (3 RDM and 4 BRD) and the only pieces I need left are BRD feet and RDM hands. Neither of those two are considered rare drops and I should be able to get them with the points I have left. I don't ever expect to have a Duelist's Chapeau, at least not for a long ass time. There are about 3 people with 100 points that want it and we've seen 2 drop in 8 months so I'm not worried. When we were ported out of Dynamis - San d'Oria our total haul was:
BRD
RDM
MNK
BST
NINx2
RNGx2
WARx2
DRGx2
PLDx3
(and a Montinont)

On a crafting note I got Clothcraft to 14 in a day. Crafted about 4 hours total all day yesterday. Pretty easy stuff. I did Grass Cloth to 4, Capes to 8, Cotton Cloth to 12, and I'm doing Cotton Capes to 18. I'm kinda liking the fact I can synth 10 of these capes and then desynth the capes back into threads. For almost an hour last night I was synthing Cotton Capes and desynthing them back into Cotton Threads only to use those threads to make cloths for more capes! I even got some skill ups on the desynths. Looking ahead it shouldn't be too bad until I break 50, then alot of the synths seem to use velvet. I will probably hover there for a week or more trying to make some gil off simple profitable synths like silver thread, silk thread, and velvet cloth before I make the dive into the 50+ waters. Right now that's still a ways off tho as I am a 13.8 Cothcrafter.

On a personal note Mother's Day and my Mom's birthday are both this weekend and she's in NYC to visit, so my online time will be limited. I might miss my Limbus LS's 1st run at Omega but there's not much I can really do about it I guess. Oh well, I want Ultima's body parts anyways...

I chose to be a Weaver

2006-05-03T14:19:00.000-04:00

So I thought alot about the small fortune I have earned over the past 2 weeks and realized... there's nothing really to buy. My RDM is almost completely covered (I need Master Casters for the hands and I should be done) and my BRD is the same. All my good gear is rare/ex and the stuff that isn't is NQ. I guess if I wanted to I could buy Mahatma Slops and Wise Pigaches+1 but is it worth the millions of gil for +1 INT? I don't think so, not when those millions can return millions more when put into a craft.

So a decision had to be made. Which craft? Since my Smithing was at 55+1 I had pretty much 3 main options; Bonecraft, Clothcraft, or Leathercraft. I looked over bone and just wasn't really feeling it. Besides Scorpion Harness most profitable synths in bone have to be HQ'd. The real choice was between leather and cloth. I thought alot about this, and I know a few people who are leather vets and a few people who are cloth vets. Both are pretty wealthy from thier crafts, so then I just looked over the recipes. It seemed like getting cloth raised the first 50 levels was going to be a walk in the park. I can get to 31 by only crafting with Grass, Cotten and Linen! At 43 I need to get my Goldsmithing up to level 12 for Silver Thread, but that's a ways off.

From level 1-51 I found that I only have 6 synths out of 13 that require more than 1 ingedient. After that the smithing subcraft may benefit with synths like Arhat's and Shinobi. I feel confident about this and might dabble in some money making synths when I hit that level to just provide some income. I've been told leather takes about 15M to get to 100, and looking over the synths it looks as if cloth may be less. That's my first impression, I may do an about face in one week but for now I'm pumping my gils into Clothcraft!

Waiting for the other shoe to drop

2006-05-02T20:30:00.000-04:00

So I've had a lucky week... A very lucky week. Last Wednesday I got my Bard Cannions for 7 points when the person who got me up to a 60 point bid backed out. Thursday I finally got BRD to 75, Friday night I somehow found a Shining Cloth for 1.21M. Sunday afternoon I got my Bard Justacorps for 17 points (not too bad seeing as the average value is 16) and then Monday night I sold a Nobles Tunic that I made from the Shining Cloth. On Sunday night people finally found out how to acquire that stupid Haste turban, (whoopie) for 20 Gold Pieces and the value of Gold Pieces went from 400k to 850k. I managed to get into a couple of psycho parties; one MNK party for Chain #148 and another RNG party with Kmstr, Fatkat and Jahga which hit Chain #152. The only reason we stopped is because they ran outta ammo, but at least I capped RDM xp and made a whopping 5,000 Imperial Standing points. This allowed me to buy 5 Gold Pieces and sell em for 800k each. Thats 4M gil for 3 hours of xp. This has been an insane 7 days... I'm waiting for someone to hack into my account and steal all my stuff. It's happened before, I'm praying that something like that doesn't happen again.
I managed to make my way out to Arrapago Reef and get my staging points. It's really quite an amazing area. very wide open, great music, and it snows! I'm tempted to explore some more but it seems that Imps don't like people treadingon thier territory. A few times I had to sleep an Imp (or two) and log out to to survive. The looks on the Imp's faces are priceless. They look down on you with this smirk on thier face as they beat the snot out of you. We'll see where this new expansion will take me, so far I'm quite pleased with it.

Some days you just get lucky

2006-04-28T01:10:00.000-04:00

I'll keep it short, I'm tired. Did Limbus today and while I'm waiting for everyone to gather someone starts shouting that he's selling a V.Claw for 6M. I head on over to the Auction House and see there isn't any in stock and the last sale was for 7M. I send him a tell that I will pay 5M right now. After a little negotiating I convinced him that he wasn't losing 1M, but gaining 5M since he obviously got it from a Kindred Seal BCNM. He bit and I threw it up on the AH for 6.75M and went about Limbus. We beat Apollyon NE, got 5 coins each, and when I got to my Mog House I found that someone had paid 6.8M for it! I made 1.8M gil just in the matter of about 2 hours, doing absolutely nothing!

If that wasn't enough... I warped to Aht Urghan and did a successful Assault run. We got 1200 Assault points and a ??? Ring. As I took it to the appraiser I saw a taru run by with a bazaar. As I always do, I check his bazaar and to my pure astonishment I saw a Shining Cloth for 1.1M! I actually did a double-take (which is evident in the picture) and as soon as I realized it was in fact a 9M gil Shinig Cloth I bought that bad boy right up!It cost me 1.21M including taxes. What a night! I'll have it synthed into a Nobles Tunic and hopefully sell that for 20M (if it's still worth that). With my Manteel sale and little investments like these... I may actually end up with enough gil to make a serious run at getting my crafting where it should be so I can make a hefty/steady income from synthesis. We'll see. I hope this is a sign of things to come.

*edit - well poo I just found out that Nobles have taken a nose dive in the past 2-3 month and is down to around 10-12M opposed to the 20-25M they were after Christmas. Oh well, I spent 246k on the rest of the synthesis materials for the Nobles which brings my total to 1,456,000g for all materials. Thats still a 10.5M gil profit.

The new crack has arrived

2006-04-26T04:06:00.000-04:00

So Treasures of Aht Ughan arrived. Of course I had to get it asap, actually waiting 20 mins for my GameStop to get their UPS shipment. When UPS finally arrived I got on line and was the first peron to request their copy. The manager kinda gave me a look and then turn around to crack open the box and find a PS2 copy for me. I was tired of waiting.

I have alot to go into but its 4:06am and I am awake on the computer... Everyone rushed for jobs, I got BLU and COR unlocked. Don't have much interest in PUP, although the frames are super cute. After day 3 there was 4x the amount of people in Aht Urghan Whitegate than all of Jeuno... The SquareEnix gestapo started shouting "gtfo!" from the heavens.
I had never laughed harder while playing this game. Nearly 600 people in 1 zone and only about 170 people total in 4 Jeuno zones. Anyways enough about other people back to ME. I have been playing BLU and been LOVING IT. It's very powerful and there is so much it can do. I've sorta found myself in a BLU burn with 5 BLUs and a BRD. We kills things so fast that we are about 2 levels ahead of the normal xp party, so we went to Qufim at 17, moved to Pugils at 20, and onto Yuhtunga Jungle at 22. Fun times, and now with Ballad on our 25BRD... it's only going to get faster. We have a player on our server that played 3 days straight, almost 24 hours a day. He finally crashed after the 4th day but by that time he was 38. On day 2 when he was level 28 I sent him a tell asking why he was rushing through the job, and asking if he had his spells. Here is a snippit... I don't want to throw his name out there though everyone on Odin knows who he is pretty much. I asked him right after if he had Healing Breeze, a level 16 spell. He said no and I told him that it was found that Healing Breeze and Sheep Song combine for Auto-Regen. His reply was classic. "I don't have Sheep Song either so it doesn't matter much to me". Anyways to each his own. There is no AF armor or weapon in the game so as he rushes to level 60 he'll get there and have no reward for AF. I, on the other hand, am farming all my spells so that I can be a well rounded BLU, and be able to use combos for traits. There's more to leveling a character than just being the highest the fastest, whether you are NA or JP.

Finally I picked up my Choral Justacorps+1 before Dynamis. Such nice armor. I'm waiting for the screenshot that Elvima took so I can post it, but here's a little text that made me incredibly happy one Sunday afternoon.

Return of the GigaFlare

2006-04-17T01:23:00.000-04:00

So I was leveling my DRK on Goro (30DRK as of now) and my RNG on Tyrhanny (49RNG) and I got a tell saying that a group was heading out to try Bahamut v1. Say no more, I was down for this fight. I had fun last month and zoned into his BCNM while wandering around doing the Spice Gals XP Scroll quest. I entered and tried to Elemental Seal Sleep II Bahamut.

I failed.

But either way I knew I was all setup for the fight (cutscene-wise) so we gathered up a group of 5 BLMs, and 11 other melees. The group was with some very nice people, people I've known off and on for a while. Aable, Yumikogirl, Darcain... too many to list. A nice group of people from Lineage, Furiousx, as well as a few stragglers. When we entered I started to remember how big this guy was.

We setup a good stun order and set off. Everything started off well. Bahamut does alot of talking, and especially tends to jabber on right before a major move. He used Flare II and some other moves that did about 200-300 damage. My job, as always, was to have my refresh cycle going on the BLMs at all times and in between Refreshes I would haste some melee and also Dispel Bahamut. We didn't have any problems at all really, we decided to 2 hour at 20%. At about 25% he started spamming TP so we mostly let it go from there. I made sure I had full MP and had all buffs up before I Chainspelled. After I made sure Stoneskin, Phalanx, Blink, Refresh, and Haste were up I popped a Ginger Cookie and rested. Thank goodness for my healing mp equipment (+19 mp while resting!). After about 90 seconds it was time to see if I could pull the hate off the melee! I hit him with Grav just in case (which didn't stick of course) and used Elemental Seal. Then I used Chainspell and just smashed the Thunder III macro. I used all my MP and ran back to convert. With Chainspell still on I was able to Convert and use back to back Cure IV's. I ran back and started mashing again. After 2 spells all of a sudden he used GigaFlare. I saw about 6 people go from 75% to 0% in a second. His HP was at 3% and 6/12 melee were dead but the mages were still holding on. Someone shouted "finish him!" and I honestly thought for a second I might be able to finish him off with my 550mp left. I spammed till I was out of MP and then Kumo used eagle Eye Shot to finish him off. Great fight, lots of fun. I'm sure if you had 2-3 Chainspell stunners then he'd never even get GigaFlare off, but we had none.

When it was all over and we were raising outside the BCNM I looked back on the chat log to see how much damage I was doing. Every single Thunder III hit him for 75-78... There was no way in hell I was going to solo finish off Bahamut. Meh, either way I got the win. Now I have to finish Zilart Mission 17, "The Celestial Nexus" so I can do Bahamut v2. On a side note one of our NINs was shown to be the hacker he truly is! How else could a 50NIN be wearing a Kirin's Osode?! It was fun times, I hope to do Bahamut v2 with these same people.

Man I love uncamped NMs!

2006-04-12T12:34:00.000-04:00

Well it's been a few days so I'll update ya. I was 500xp from 38WHM so I decided to solo to 38 with my NPC. Simple enough. When I hit 38 I realized that I could now teleport to Yhoat and Altep (of course I hadn't quested the scrolls yet). I saw shouts in Jeuno of people offering 3-5k for Teleport-Altep, so I hit up the Auction House and bought Yhoat for 300k and Altep for 350k. The next day I decided to quest Altep.

I went to Rabao to start the quest then into Quicksand Caves to check for the ???. Luckily I found the ??? and right after I found my map coffer. After 2 years I finally got that stupid Quicksands Cave map. I realized that no one was camping Centurio X-I. I knew that this was a NM that I could solo and I also knew how good the Shaman's Cloak was. I sat around for 2.5 hours killing the Antican Signifier PH's (BLM) every 16 minutes. Then a SAM friend of man wandered in for his coffer for AF and after finding it decided to camp Centurio with me. Finally it popped and I got claim. Here's the problem... he links with surrounding antica. I got 2 links and pulled into hallway. I used sleepga and focused on the NM. Problem is he used "Frequency Jammer" which is a TP move that silences. Well silence stuck a real long time and the 2 links woke up and pounded me and my 53SAM friend into the ground. Upset but not defeated I HP'd and bought echos as fast as possible. I grabbed a teleport and rushed as fast as possible to the caves again. I got there and he was still unclaimed! I quickly used reraise and pulled.

Another 2 mob link...

Great, but I was able to sleepga them and focus on the NM. Then I see I'm examined by a friend in my Dynamis LS. I ask for help and get the reply, "My SMN friend here wants the cloak". Of course I did as well so any help was outta the question. I made sure I had max buffs. I used protect and shell before pull but I also made sure I used aquaveil, phalanx, blink, stoneskin, refresh, regen, ice spikes and baraero. He likes to spam Aeroga III. I also made sure that I dispelled his blaze spikes and kept him blinded, slowed, and paralyzed. Silence won't stick on him no matter how hard you try. Then I just whacked away at him. I kept the sleepga macro ready so that when I saw the links woke I quickly used sleepga to take them out of the picture. One of the most important things I realized was not to waste TP. Centurio likes to use ancient magic like quake, burst, and tornado. With haste and joyeuse I was able to build 100% TP quite fast and stun any AM he tried to use on me. Anwyays I was able to slowly chop him down and he never once used silence on me... I got the kill and the drops were Iron Ore, Adaman Ore, Stonega III, and Antican Robe. Well that sucked. I warped out. I turned in my item for Altep scroll and found out I can't get scroll till next JPN nidnight, (11am EST). I sold the Adaman Ore and Stonega III scroll. I didn't even use an echo drop so I sold them right back (for a 2k profit I might add!).

This morning I wake up and decide "what the heck", so I head out sandy and get my scroll, warp back and find out it's selling for 50k over what I paid for it and I throw it up on the AH. I port out to Altep and head out to the caves. No one is camping him again and I kill my 1st two PH's. I make sure I have buffs ready after 14 mins and realize as the next pop is coming up, "crap, I don't have echos..." and as I realize this I see Centurio X-I pop. It was literally about 4 seconds after that thought popped into my head that he popped. I waited for a clean pull this time and when I saw him alone I grabbed him. Kept up the same strat. Use as many spells as you can on him and yourself. Stoneskin, blink and haste combined with paralyze, slow, and blind go a long way. I love enfeebling magic. This time I didn't have links to worry about and I don't think I ever got yellow HP and my MP never dropped below 50%. Drops came up and sure enough! This is a great BLM cloak for leveling up BLM and its also the best cloak you can use if u want to go into a 60 cap BCNM. I'm really happy with this drop, and since it's rare/ex it means it can't be purchased, it has to be earned! Here's the stats on it.

What makes me laugh is all this came about because I was bored and wanted to get 500 measly xp on my WHM.

Gotta be quick in this game

2006-04-08T02:40:00.000-04:00

At least four times today I lucked out and scored an item by having the fast finger. The first came when I decided to camp a NM for my recently leveled 36NIN Tyrhanny. I ran to Davoi as RDM/WAR but went /anon of course. There is a 60WAR/25THF (gimp) Chinese RMT farmer. I know he is Chinese because after I got claim he kept trying to speak to me and I replied {I don't understand Japanese} and he replied "Chinese". Anyways, this WAR named Shopurs is in Davoi 24/7/365 and never ever EVER leaves. He camps the Jujitsu Gi NM all day long. His RMT buddy is Asuranfists, I watched him come and unload his stuff off him (3 Gi's and 9 Sitabaki's) and then bazaar it as he warped out. Here is what stupid RMT's do... they undercut themselves. This moron was selling multiple gi's daily for 1.5M and he undercut it nearly in half in about a week. Well anyways I waited till he used flee and got the old voke macro ready and sure enough right in front of me pops a long named Orc. Poisonhand Gnadgad is his name, he is a level 40 MNK Orc that pops once every 1.5 - 4 hours in Davoi. He drops the Jujitsu Gi. It seems like it's mostly used for MNK and SAM, but I love the look of it and right now I am using Federation Gi, great NIN stats but it's a lv25 armor and comes with much less DEF on it .

Anyays it didn't drop so it really doesn't matter. What is funny is 1) I beat him to claim, 2) He was extremely interested to know if I got drop asking me in broken english, auto-translator, and finally in Chinese and 3) Later on I saw he sold 3 Gi's and 7 Sitabaki's. He had undercut the Gi from 1.5M down to 850k, even selling one for 800k. RMT farmers are such morons... If you look close in the pic below you can actually see the RMT to the right of the NM. He's got the bazaar next to his name and he had 2 Gi's and 5 Sitabaki's for show.

Later I decided to finish my Mithra RSE gear. The final two pieces were Savage Gauntlets (MP+16, VIT+4, MND+2) and Savage Loincloth (MP+32, VIT/MND+1). I really didn't have any interest in either of these because they are kinda mage specific and seeing as Tyrhanny is a RNG/NIN/THF/WAR I doubt I'll ever use em so I checked AH and to my surprise the pair were worth about 700k combined! Nice chunk of change for running into a dungeon for 30 seconds, finding a chest, and trading Thief's Tools to it!

Finally... after I was all tired and worn out I decided to head to Sacrarium for my weekly XP scroll quest. It's real easy, just talk to NPC, head to Sacrium, in one of the 6 rooms is a ??? that when clicked gives yoi key item Tavnazian Cookbook. Take it back to NPC to get XP Scroll reward. As I started hitting the rooms I noticed someone checked me. Strange, very rarely are others in Sacrarium when I am. Anyways I went to room #2 and checked the bookcase and sure enough ??? was right there. I clicked it, got key item, and warped out to claim my scroll. Had I been about 4 seconds slower I'd have had to wait about 15 mins for it to respawn in another room.

Moral of tonight's stories. "Be sharp", or others will screw you over and beat you to the mob, item, etc. (People such as myself it seems...)

quickie

2006-04-05T23:21:00.000-04:00

Just got done with Dynamis, got insane drops... of course RDM boots drop like the 1st time in months and I decided earlier in the week to save for Bard's Cannions... oh well, grats to Johyo. I went ahead and harvested my plants. Last week I planted 10 grain seeds and ended with a bunch of Tarutaru Rice. This stuff sells well and is 18k-20k a box because it is used in all the melee sushi. Anyways this time I bought 2 stacks of Grain Seeds and planted 10 seeds on 2 different characters, or 20 plants in total. My results were:

10 Grain Seeds
Brass Flowerpot >>> 51 Boxes of Tarutaru Rice
7% New Moon

10 Grain Seeds
Porcelin Flowerpot >>> 37 Boxes of Tarutaru Rice
7% New Moon

When I broke down the numbers I was very happy with the results. I spent about 66k on 20 seeds. From those 20 seeds I got 88 Boxes of Tarutaru Rice. That rice is valued at (low end) 132k-147k (high end). I more than doubled my money in 4 days... I'm thinking of becoming a rice distributor.

somebody got the hooooooook uuupppppp

2006-04-04T17:51:00.000-04:00

Well I finally got a pic of my character and his hat, and boy do I look better when viewed on PC! Thanks to Victory LS for such great teamwork and dedication. So later on last night we did Apollyon Northeast and sure enough with 17 we not only beat it but I walked away with my 2nd piece of BRD AF+1 item! That means as soon as I get my coins I'm making my Justacorps +1 and selling that damn Sha'ir Manteel. Hopefully it will hold its value of 30M over the next 2 weeks or so. I'm really just so proud of that LS growing so well so fast. I was very tempted to quit it the 1st two runs because we had like 5 people and I was not going to pay 50k to die and not get items... but I stuck it out and now we are going for Ultima/Omega by the end of next week.

I've started playing Tyrhanny more and more which is strangely interesting for me because I don't usually like melee jobs. Well I got her up to 32NIN and I even got a friend in my LS to help me camp Empress Hairpin this morning! It was so great we were camping against a LS of 4 people, 2 of which were THFs. Somehow someway he pulled of a miracle and voked Valkurn Emperor. I got there with it at 10% and he finished it off and we got the drop. I was so excite and happy I forgot to take a screenshot. No matter, I'm happy with it. I solo'd for about an hour today and the difference is night and day. Without hairpin a mob might miss me1 out of 4 times it now hits me 1 out of 4 times. After a failed claim last night I was cntemplating trading my H.Kote for a Emperor Hairpin + 2M gil but no one would bite. Then I went to sleep with it in my bazaar for 5M gil, (1.7M gil less than the AH price) and it still wouldn't sell! Luckily I still had it this morning because thats when I got the drop. Now I'm 2 levels from H. Kote and 6 levels from Gaiters. Never in a million years did I think I'd enjoy looking forward to leveling up melee...

Today was rarely exclusive

2006-04-02T22:20:00.000-04:00

Lots of rare/ex stuff today. The day started with me hitting up the NPC and picking up my Warlock's Chapeau +1. I was very happy to get it and then headed to Lower Jeuno to the Magic Shop to "erase my memories". In essence I can now do the Warlock's relic attire quests again. This is mandatory if I wanna store my RDM AF anymore (which I do) and my pocket is feeling the strain of lugging around extra armor I'm not using.

After basking in my glow (for all of 5 minutes) I realized last night was daylight savings time and that I was in fact 1 hour from Dynamis - Qufim. I quickly switched over to BRD and headed out to the Heiroglyphics. We did 70 minutes of bidding before we entered... and we ended up with 3 whole drops. We ended up with DRG hands, DRG belt, and BST belt. We also ended up with a win. This was our 1st win in about 5 attempts and it puts us one step closer to Dynamis - Tavnazia. Eighteen people, 15 minutes, 1 pissed off gaming community. Either way I am a Dynamis - Qufim Interloper. It was alot of fun.

After Dynamis I jumped into a NIN and WAR spam pt and ended up grabbing 21k of the 30k I need to ding 75BRD. I'm about 9100 tnl and hoping to get that tomorrow. Then I switched over to my 2nd character. I really started to enjoy playing melee though long ago I vowed not to melee ever. My real life girlfriend took one of my fishing mules and made it her character. She played while I was at work and when we broke up the PS2 and account went with me (since it was mine to begin with). The charcater's name is Tyrhanny and is currently a 30THF, 30NIN, and 49RNG. I xp'd on her last night as NIN and went from 27 > 30 in one sitting. Strangely, tanking was fun. When I got back to Jeuno I realized that I needed to upgrade some things. I picked up some Dodge Earrings and then saw that RSE feet were nice. Savage Gaiters are Mithra RSE feet and are HP+16 STR+3 CHR+2 but they were 330k. I decided to quest these buggers cause they're free if you go out and earn em.

I looked on http://www.mithrapride.org/vana_time/index.html and found when it was time for the Mithra and where. I didn't have a key but I did have a stack of Thief's Tools and a 30THF. I hurried out there on choco and realized that I had no oils/powders when I got there. I got aggro from a Goblin which I disposed of easily but then I realized there's some tough stuff in here. As I was about to drop down a hole I got aggro from a jelly. I was doing fine but it did some type of fluid spread move and dropped my shadows. I was taking damage and then saw 2 mithra run into the room. I typed /help and they ran at me, examined me, then typed {That's too bad.} and dropped down the hole! That annoyed me so I dropped down too. Luckily the jelly doesn't follow. when I got down there I saw them fighting stropers, and as I checked the chest spawn locations sure enough there was a chest! I careful went over to it and traded one Thief's Tool to it and viola! "Tyrhanny recieves key item magical pattern!" Then I get a tell from one saying "WTF that was our chest can't you see we're trying to get the key??!" I just typed {That's too bad.} and then /wave before I used my scroll of instant warp. Some people are just unreal. Anyways I ran straight to the gobbie and got my free Savage Gaiters! Tomorrow is a new Limbus, Apollyon Northeast so we'll see how that goes. In theory I could get my 2nd BRD AF item and finally be able to make Choral Justacorps +1. I've decided once I get my Justa+1 I'm selling manteel. Also when I get Bard's Cannion's I'm selling my Sha'ir Seraweels because I'll swap between Cannions and Znith Slacks (+50MP). Soon I'll be selling my Sha'ir Gages because I got my Bard's Cuffs, and finally I'll be letting go of my Sha'ir Turban because I have Bard's Roundlet, Opop Opo Crown, and Demon Helm. Pretty much all my Sha'ir will be sold hopefully by this time next month. That's about 35M gil right there and I'm going to invest that into a craft that will net steady returns. I'm thinking Clothcraft, but I haven't decided yet. I have Smithing at 56 and that's really only good with Goldsmithng (no thanks!) so I've got a decision to make. Thats a long ways off though. Treasures of Aht Urghan is bought and paid for and so now I'm just preapring to move into that expansion pack. Until next time, mahalo.

Slow day today

2006-04-01T12:14:00.000-05:00

Well, yesterday was a slow day. Started off with... you guessed it Boroka. THF got killshot, all 4 items dropped, eight kotes in a row. They don't sell so yay... Still fun nonetheless. I was able to steal two of our campers and head to Waughroon Shrine for Rank 2-3 Dragon fight. Easy stuff. I ES Sleep the dragon, they pull out an avatar and Astral Flow the Eye. I Manafont and finish off the eye while the wait for BP and use Yag Drinks. Dragon wakes up and I re-sleep, they get their MP back and summon Ifrit. Game over. Fun fight, I decided to nuke it out at the end and won with 20hp. Got Rank 3 and logged.

Came back later and tried to get a Yorva party started to no avail, and decided to do Rank 4. Easy stuff, and since I had the Delkfutt Key from Sandy rank missions all I did was enter in, go to the left and head to the Delkfutt basement with 3 doors. I found the ambassador, warped back to Ru'Lude and hit up the embassy. Rank 4. Disgustingly easy and saved me the time I would have spent climbing 10 floors and using the key with the elevator. Afterwards I did some cooking, took the old NPC out to Oztroja and got him to 51 before getting a massive train and dying (I chuckled). Then I hit up my cooking mule and harvested 7 stacks of Taru Rice from 10 grain seeds (my best harvest yet). To put that into perspective a stack of 12 Grain Seeds is 40k, a stack of 12 Boxes of Taru Rice are 18k. Once you get 3 stacks of rice you've paid for your seeds. I ended up with 7 boxes and didn't even use the entire stack of seeds. For all the number crunchers that's 33k planted and 126k harvested. Can't complain about those numbers!

I should get Chapeau+1 tomorrow, maybe start the quest for another NQ Chapeau if I could only figure out what NPC I have to talk to so that I can re-quest it. Not a whole lot accomplished but at the same time not a whole lot attempted.

*edit - finished Boroka again and wouldn't you know it, the NIN who really wanted the kote didn't get the drop today. First no kote in 8 days. That sucks, but there's always tomorrow. We got torque, earring and (duh) cape. I caved in and took the torque. I'll never solo on BRD really but if I do ever decide to, at least I can have STR/VIT+4...

dropulicious!

2006-03-31T00:44:00.000-05:00

Pretty good day today. We camped Boroka and got another friggin Kote. This has sadly become a bit of a joke. Seven kotes have dropped in a row, and we have gotten six of those seven. Hell even I ended up with a pair for my 28NIN. The earring is now the rare item it seems. We've gotten five earrings out of thirteen kills, and about nine kotes out of thirteen kills. Too bad these damn things don't sell on the auction house. Oh well... I was never camping it for the money.

Later I headed back into Palborough Mines to finish up the boring part of Rank 2-3. I brought 3 pickaxes this time and after finally spending 20 minutes running to the "Mythril Seam" I started to mine. I did this twice before, once for Sandy 2-3 and also as Tyrhanny's rank 2-3. Both times I used 1 axe and got my "mythril". Well... of course this time had to be more difficult.

"Your pickaxe breaks!"
"Your pickaxe breaks!"
"Your pickaxe breaks!"
"You find nothing."
"Your pickaxe breaks!"

You've got to be friggin kidding me. I mined in Oldton for years. If anyone were to have any hidden "mining skill" it should be me. Well I just got frustrated and warped out. I've done this mission twice before as a much lower level RNG and RDM and never had this much trouble. Hopefully I can finish this thing asap, and get my Master Caster Bracelets.

Finally at the end of the night I got to do what I was looking forward to do all day long. Limbus! We hit up Temenos West with 15 people and I decided not to lock out all our tanks this time (good thinking). We mopped the floor with those mobs. We really didn't have any missteps, and we got some nice yet weird drops. We ended up with 2 SAMs, 2 BRDs, 1 DRK, and 2 RDMs! I got my Ruby Silk Thread and we finished with 65 coins collected. We got 4 each and as soon as I got my coins I warped back and traded my items to the NPC. Word to the wise, you need the 2 rare/ex items and an item from the Auction House. I, of course, rushed in and thought the stupid NPC stole my coins when in fact it was the stupid player who didn't read the text all the way through. After I traded my Warlock's Chapeau, Ruby Silk Thread, Cardinal Cloth, and Rainbow Cloth I was told that I would be able to pick the Warlock's Chapeau+1 up Sunday when the next Conquest Tally is done. Yay! Pretty good day when it all comes down to it.

daily recap (no witty title tonight)

2006-03-30T02:13:00.000-05:00

midday - got Boroka again, he dropped his 7th pair of Kote in a row. RMT's undercut it from 10M to 7M in a week and after 4 sat on AH for a week, RMT's undercut to 2M. What a bunch of idiots. We claimed 6 times in last 7 days, and have gotten 6 kotes, but our poor WHM Arcia hasn't seen earring drop since last Thursday. Hopefully we can get it for her (an throw in the towel on this NM). Today's Kote went to our DRK who never casts lots over 200, and sure enough he won today's with a 116 (mostly out of pity from the rest of us). Then when I left Riverne I went into Sacrarium and did the Cookbook xp scroll quest. It was easy stuff, I just had to sleep and log for 2 Taurus mobs and check 4 rooms. When I got back to Tavnazian Safehold I got my scroll, and I was all psyched up to get around 1200 xp, but I got 864. What a gyp. I read it varies between 700 and 1600. I'm hoping for a better result on Sunday when the new Conquest week starts.

afternoon/night - Speaking of conquest, I did that Sandy portion of Rank 2-3 and was almost done with Bastok part when I realized I needed a pickaxe and didn't have one, so I warped out and decided I'd do it again later. Next is that stupid lv25 capped fight against the Dread Dragon. Later on I did Dynamis - Beaucidine, and I was even the high bidder for AF2 (Bard's Justacorps) but of course they didn't drop. We did get a record number of drops though. Melee Cyclas, Sorcerer's Coat, Summoner's Doublet, Saotome Domaru, a Montiont Silverpiece and 3 (three!) Lungo-Nango Jadeshells! That makes 11 AF's in Beauc and Xarc the past 2 runs and our 27th set of full AF! Pretty impressive.

nighttime - after watching one of the best episodes of Lost all season (anyone catch the hatch map?!?) I decided to get my cooking GP's and do some leveling up. Well 1st I got my GP's and was able to buy key item Patissier. Now I have key items Raw Fish Handling and Patissier for my cooking which is pretty much all I need for sweets and sushi. Then I decided to take a shot at snagging some Taru Rice. I always lose out to the campers for this stupid item but sure enough, I got all 12 boxes! First time that's ever happened. Good stuff. Finally I muled over all the ingredients for my San d'Orian Tea and made 2 stacks. I went from 63.9 to 64.8 in about 15 synths. It was the best skillups I've gotten in months, and it was facing NW on lightningsday waning moon... go figure. I'm finally in the clear to make Melon Pies on a consistant basis but I'm more ineterested in skilling than selling right now. Soon as I hit 66 I'll move onto Pear Au'Lait, another non-stackable synth for skillups (yay) but hopefully that brings me into the 70's so I can start skilluping up on Navarin and finally make some good money on skillups.

tomorrow - thursdays are Limbus days and boy am I looking forward to tomorrow. Not only are we hitting Temenos West again but I think we should have the same people which will mean an easy win but quite possibly I could get my 2nd RDM item. If I do get Ruby Silk Thread as soon as we're done I'm warping to have my Warlock's Chapeau+1 made.

meh, nuff said...

2006-03-28T23:50:00.000-05:00

Word to the wise, if you enter Limbus and pull anything before everyone is in the BCNM, they get locked out. Also, the only way to know they are in the BCNM is if you can visually identify them since on the party list you show as being in the same area whether you are in, or out.

Having said that... I have learned a new lesson. Amazingly we still got to the last floor and killed 2/6 birds. We also did this with no NIN tanks and 3 people missing (2 NINs and a MNK). We ended up with 36 total coins (3 each) and I even walked away (somewhat embarassed) with my 1st BRD AF+1 item. Now I need Temenos RDM and Apollyon BRD and I can make my AF+1's.

btw, that was a surprisingly good movie... not oscar-worthy, but funny nonetheless.

I still, still, STILL hate stupid NM's...

2006-03-25T01:33:00.000-05:00

So today was a kinda crappy NM day. We gathered at Boroka about 5 minutes too late and a bunch of RMTs claimed, almost wiped, and from some dimensional portal of hell 4 more RMTs show up and they alliance and get the kill. Not only the kill but the kote as well. Oh well, I got my earring and we have our H.Kote on the AH.

We did a Rostrum run and got 5 people some Pumps. Took about 3 hours and I died 4x but it was fun none the less. I even got another kill-shot in:

After a overcrowded MNK pt which ended in a wipe, I decided to head back to Valkurm Dunes as Tyrhanny. That is my other character who is a 48RNG, 30THF, adn 28NIN. I am really starting to need a hairpin so I decided I'd spend a few hours camping Valkurm Emperor today. I lost claim at 2pm and 5:30pm before I headed to Attowha Chasm for Rostrums. When I switched back to Tyrhanny I killed 2 PH's and sure enough... the Emperor popped right in my face. I've read up about how it pops and it's place holders recently and it seems to be legit. I took him down easily, tho all I have to show for it is this stupid Insect Wing...

Relaxing Earring is done, organs are lame...

2006-03-23T17:21:00.000-05:00

Finally got my fifth and final Euvhi Organ. I spent far too much time in the Grand Palace trying to kill Eo'Euvhi for 130xp when I should have been in the Garden killing the Aw'Euvhi's for 280xp (I solo'd them and didn't use an xp ring).

Traded in my Silver Earring, Black Chip, 5x Luminum Tissue and 5x Euvhi Organs and got my Relaxing Earring. Great resting earring to have, and I tested it out after I got it. I now gain 41mp per resting "tick". After I got my earring we headed back out to Borroka. Good thing too. We hadn't claimed or tried for Boroka in a week because RMT's had gotten ToD and were just more prepared than we were. Well for some reason they passed on it today. Their mistake. We had 7 people which was overkill but it was a breeze. WHM's mp never got below 75% with RDM and BRD there. Our THF got the killshot and drops were the best we've ever had.

Finally tonight is Limbus, our 2nd attempt at Temenos West. I think we can do well if the same number of people show up again. I've kinda been appointed puller which suits me fine. Last time we had a miscommunication and we MPK'd ourselves because we pulled 3 mobs when we had 2 sleeping at camp. Hopefully I get my Ruby Silk Thread and I'll be able to make my Warlock's Chapeau+1. Crappy thing is I've been told that I'll need to acquire another one through quests if I want to store it in storage...

Taking a break, short time...

2006-03-19T21:04:00.000-05:00

I've become kind of blah with this game the last week or so. The people in this video game have taken it way too seriously, and I have been treated like someone who doesn't have any feelings nor would react to being treated poorly or rudely. When it all comes down to it I pay to play and enjoy my time in this game, and when a person (or a group) of people try to make me feel like shit because of things they've heard about me but do not have any first-hand experience about me... that's my cue to back away. I don't need to pay to be verbally abused, ignored, or mistreated. I can get that for free in the streets of NYC.

I'll play maybe 2x a week for short periods of time. In all likelihood it will be for Dynamis and for Limbus but other than that I don't have the desire (not right now at least) to feel like shit because of a video game. It's just not worth it. If I do come back on over the next 2-3 weeks it may be to level a low-level job and have zero interaction with most people... Maybe things will change, maybe people will get this giant sized chip off their inflated ego shoulders, or maybe a world emmigration will open up. We'll see. Until then...

Wark! Wark! ("Chocobo Talk" for crafting stinks!)

2006-03-16T13:05:00.000-05:00

I came to the realization long ago that crafting is a pain in the butt. At one time many many moons ago I thought I would be a blacksmith. I crafted, and crafted, and crafted piles of useless crap. Arrowheads, subligar, greaves. Low level stuff that no one ever wanted, and half the time I'd just attempt to desynth the materials back to try and get something of value back. Every now and then I'd hit an item I could profit off of. Turning Iron Ingots into Iron Sheets could net a 10k profit per stack, 5k if I had to buy the crystals. Then, of course, SE added a tax that is paid to Jeuno shortly after I reached this level. So I pressed on, and finally made it to the Darksteel stage of blacksmithing.

Eventually RMT's started to realize you could make 100k+ by turning a stack of Darksteel Ingots into Darksteel Sheets. Soon after I saw the same people in Palborough Mines and Oldton Movapolos... synthing DS Ingots right there on the spot. Prices started to climb, and profit started to dwindle. Ingots are more useful than sheets, and eventually the price of ingots matched the price of sheets. So long profits... Then finally the straw that broke the camel's back. IGE's Christmas blowout. Stacks of DS Ingots jumped from 400k to 800k in mere days. People tried buying up everything they could get their grubby little paws on because they thought with all this newly bought gil, hell they'll level up smithing! Seeing as I capped my smithing at 55 synthing DS Ingots from DS Ore, I threw in the towel. Sheets were now less than ingots (wtf) and getting from 55-80 just went from 5M to 10M+so I just gave up and/or gave in. I still garden on my mule which yields me elemental ore, but it takes 3-4 weeks to grow and usually yields about 1M-2M each harvest. It's a nice payoff, but takes quite some time (and some luck) to make gil from gardening.

So a few months went by, SE countered with their gil capping delivery box idea, and they deleted 30 billion in RMT mules. Prices dropped some, but not to what they were at or should be at. So a week or so ago I started thinking... "What am I gonna do to make income? I know I can cook on my mule but my main really has only 1 craft". I started up fishing my first 3 months in the game, got it to 13 and then I hit some kind of wall. Its at 13.3 currently... I leveled Leather up to 13 as well so that I could make some Smithing things that required a leather base. Then there was "The Aquarium Disaster of '05". They released fresh and saltwater aquariums during an event. I had someone craft my saltwater aquarium which was awesome (until I got hacked into last August and it was stolen).

To make the simple Goldfish bowl you needed Woodworking 10/Smithing 4/Achemy 7. Well after spending nearly 10 hours farming, synthing, and getting ready for my synthesis, I got this:

Critical failure! All right!

It would seem that crafting and Goro are a dish best served seperatly. So last week I decided that I would take up Chocobo Digging! I did a lot of reading about it and it seems like it can be profitable, you just have to put mind-numbing hours into "leveling it up" and be kind of lucky since there are many "high level" diggers that can clean a zone out in minutes. I got Eviljoker to synth me some Chocobo gear (+1 gloves!) and I've pumped about 75 atcks Gyshal Greens into it so far. From the reading I've don it can take up to 10,000 stacks to max out digging and around 4,000 stacks to start to get your profit rolling in. I'm at 75 stacks... The profit isn't really there yet. My average run is:

Chocobo: ~350g

Gyshal Greens: 5,628 (67gx12 = 804g per stack x 7 stacks)

5,978g

Average return:

12 Pebbles: 3,000g

10 Bone Chips: ~4,000g

4 Tin Ore: 200g

1 Wind Crystal: 300g

7,500g

Now these are average estimates which are modest at best. You can clearly see I don't get much of any type of return on investment really but that is to be expected in the first 1/3rd of any type of craft. So if you see me running around Vana'diel on choco for hours, know that I am not lost, I'm just out wasting time and breaking even with my money. Wark! Wark!

I leave you with one of the funniest (and possibly insulting) pictures I may have ever taken. A taru on chocobo got bored while we waited at the Yuhtunga zone for our 6th person and decided to show me how they make taru-sized chocobos... Enjoy.

Funny commercial

2006-03-14T02:32:00.000-05:00

It's late, I'm tired. I'm not gonna post about LB and AV. Everyone knows about that now and the Benediction heard round the world.

Anyways, LimitBreak gave it there best shot, thought outside the box, and did everything humanly possible to beat that NM. Problem is that NM is broken or isn't programmed to be beaten yet. It wouldn't be SE's 1st time putting something in the game that can't be completed. Back when CoP Mission 8-3 was released you could climb any tower, get your amultet, run through the stupid gauntlet of pots to get to the elevator, navigate through the teleports to get your "Dawn" and "Twilgiht" but when you got to the BCNM door that had the 4 pots it was either not ready or glitched but you couldn't enter. The leg work for 8-3 leading up to that point is about 3 hours and SE awarded people with a "locked door" message. I truly think this is what is going on with AV. More info and/or tactics will be introduced in ToAU and until then you have to try and fight a mob with almost 100,000 hp that can 100% regen at any moment's notice without being stopped. lame...

Anyways I found this commercial on the net and laughed my ass off so here is the new Japanese drink named "FinalFantasy 12 Potion". Enjoy:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=qv99JmJdto8&search=potion

Breaking news! The Apocalypse has been averted!

2006-03-13T15:02:00.000-05:00

Well we finally did it. It took us about 3 weeks but we were able to go from 5-3 to 8-4 in under a month. What an incredible group of determined people, hell we even set the record on Airship. Getting to Promathia was a bit of a pain. Not skill wise, just long and drawn out. We had to run up and down towers in the Garden of Ru'Hmet and all around to get our "Twilight" and "Dawn" so we could go to a stupid BCNM with 4 pots.

We initially tried SAM, WAR, NIN, BLM, RDM, WHM but soon found out you need 2 ES Sleepgas to make this fight not such a pain. We swapped the WHM for BLM and I became main healer (yay!). We ran to the far side of the room, gathered the pots and ES Sleepga II. I Chainspelled onto the 1st pot and I pretty much solo'd it after using Convert. We moved to the second pot and I got 2 spells off before I totally used all my MP. The 2nd BLM ES Sleepga II and we finished off the 2nd pot with the BLMs at about 20% MP. We took the 3rd pot to 50% before we wiped (which we knew we would) and reraised after they returned to their platforms.

We were 11 minutes in and rested for our 7 minutes of weakened state. At about the 18 minute mark we were fully rested and pulled the pots. I used ES Sleep II on the pot @ 100% and everyone focused on the one at 50%. The melee made short work of it and we went all out on the final pot, killing it at the 20 minute mark. Next was Promathia.

I have never had a more fun fight than Promathia. The battlefield is gorgeous, the NPCs talk and they are even VERY useful. Prishe is a MNK/WHM that uses both 2 hours (all right!) and even has Ambrosia which she uses and will toss a Cure V out to your tank if need be. Our 1st run failed because you have to speed through the CS or else Prishe will start attacking. Our tank died and even though we got to Promathia v2 we still were playing a badly dealt hand. We died but had all our 2 hours. We went back in and mopped the floor with Promathia. We kited him, allowed time to stop and let Prishe beat the hell out of him for a while, our SAM ran around Meditating till he had nice TP and would Gekko, trying to SC with the WAR at times. It was a smooth fight. I ran around refreshing myself, the SMN, and the WHM and followed the kiters around making sure they were hasted and cured. With so much hate towards Prishe and the kiters, you have some time to rest and look at the scenery.

Such a fun fight, and a lot of CS's afterwards. I will gladly return to fight Promathia for people that need him, it was that much fun! Don't ask me to go back to airship though... having my name as the record holder causes me to get 5-10 tells a day about random things, most of all asking if I will go do the fight with total strangers.

I'm so proud of my static, they did a great job putting XP and LS events aside to make sure that we got to the finish line. Not just sea access, not just Promathia death, but all the way through getting our rings and the great CoP ending CS.

NIN - Xerxes "For starting with a 75NIN and finishing this with a 73NIN you are the man. You never complained about XP loss or the fact that we were doing something stupid."

WAR - Aenarion "For joining us up at Airship (which you had beaten) and dying so many times until we got to Tenzen... and also realizing that your old static were a bunch of lazy mofos."

SAM - Ultimateplaya "For being my right hand man in this organizational mess and farming with me 19 straight hours after we opened Al'Taieu access, you rock."

WHM - Lilliana "For putting up with 5 guys always complaining that the WHM isn't keeping us alive. Your patience and understanding helped us get through all this. Airship record is ours thanks to that unbelievably timed Benediction."

SMN - Gimmeone "For never complaining, always being there right after work, and allowing us to use you for your BLM even though I know you are a true SMN at heart."

Thank you guys, 4.5 weeks until Treasures of Aht Urghan... lets see what the future holds for us.

Still some fun fights out there

2006-03-11T17:18:00.000-05:00

Well I'm feeling a little dumpy because I was told by a BRD in a LS I spoke to about joining, that I am a greedy player for owning a Manteel and a stupid player for having only a March+1, not March+2 instrument. So yeah, some people are taking this game way too seriously. I screenshotted the whole conversation because I just found it so ironic yet pathetic, so maybe I'll pull those out some day.

In the meantime, Boroka. Today we headed out to our favorite hungry hungry hippo and we decided to take him on with 5 this time. We thought that 3 healers would be enough... we learned that 3 melee aren't. Anyways all started well till about 70% when old Boroka wanted to start Hoof Volleying. We used our patented, disengage, ES, Sleep II on him to buy us 45 seconds of resting. Well he just got pissed at that. We took him to 40% until our tank went down and I was ready to call it off and port to the safe island, but people wanted to fight it out.

Our WHM dropped and RR'd and I thought we were done for. I told her to wait until the NIN's weakness wore off and then to use Benediction. We were able to kill 7 minutes and when NIN was unweakened the WHM (like a champ) ran in and pretty much suicided. Everyone was at full and withing 8.35 seconds the WHM was dead. SMN Astral flowed, RNG Eagle Eye Shot, hell even I used Chainspell getting a measly 2 Fire 2's off before running out of MP. We finally brough it down with 2 dead. Drops today were better than ever before. Cape, H. Kote, and Boroka Earring! Our SAM got his Kote, I lotted a 512 which was enough for the earring, and we gave the cape to the SMN (mostly cause every mage that as gone has gotten a cape already).

So happy day, I can finally replace my (although impressive) somewhat useless Diabolos Earring with this very useful Boroka Earring.

Minor gear upgrade

2006-03-09T11:41:00.000-05:00

Ever since I have finished my Sha'ir set the rest of my BRD gear has begun to look a little gimp. I haven't updated any accessories in almost a month when I was in the 60's. After last nights BCNM40 runs (8 runs, 2 Erase's, 0 charms) I am now 0/16 getting a charm using my orb and 1/27 overall seeing a Peacock Charm in an Armory Crate. Sometimes my bad luck even baffles me when I take a step back and examine my statistics. Anways, we split the 1.4M from the two Erase scrolls 3 ways and walked with 460k each. Blech. I also finally decided to give up trying to get my 2 Fire Beads true value of 800-900k and just sell them for market value of 700k each. That was another 1.4M last nigth which just brought me to 3M in gil. The most I've had since paying off my Sha'ir.

Moving on... I checked the AH again for my one "gotta have it" item that's never in-stock and sure enough it was! I grabbed it for 100k, the price it's been for over 4 months.

This will be a nice addition to the Jelly Ring (-5% Physical Damage) and the Earth Staff (-20% Physical damage) when I go into MNK parties. Since my HP will stay in yellow alot, that gives me -55% damage reduction with yellow HP. Not bad. Since I now had 2 Melody Earrings I sold them both and bought one single Melody Earring+1. Finally I realized that since I use a Harp for Lullaby and sleeping Spartoi Warriors/Sorcerors is pretty important, I bought a Wind Torque that is String Instrument skill+7. With the Manteel and Minstrel's Ring I also now have -37% songcasting time when I am in yellow HP. The whole point of this gear is to help sleep things fast and effectivly. Overall, the BRD gear is finally starting to be finished. The only missing thing is a better ring for normal XP. I have a Loyalty Ring which is CHR+3 but it's a level 36 ring and there's other rings out there that are better... but their values begin at 1.4M and only go up from there. Fortunetly, most of my XP parties are spam parties where I pull so I use the Minstrel's/Jelly combo and never worry about the 3rd ring.

Boroka's window opens in 2.5 hours, cheap ass better drop something better than that damn Skulker's Cape.

update: Well, he dropped more than the Skulker's Cape, but no earring. I got my cape, (since Lill and Arc had already gotten the last two, and Xerxes got his Kote. Nice little item, it's the Horomusha Kote. It's the same level as Ochiudo's Kote with 5 less attack so I don't know why anyone with O Kote would want H Kote... but oh well. We try again tomorrow.

update's update: Well we killed again and I'm too lazy to make a new post. Dropped cape and torque this time. LS MNK got the torque because STR+4 in MNK parties with a BRD will be quite nice. I also realized why H Kote > O Kote... I never knew O Kote had -5 evasion, so it seem H Kote is the preferred kote for NINs since they offer 5 more evasion and 5 less attack.

meh, accomplishments starting to mean nothing to me

2006-03-09T03:35:00.000-05:00

So yay, I helped kill Boroka 2 days in a row. In two kills we got 2 Skulker's Capes and a Auditory Torque. No Boroka Earring, no H. Kote and so even though we are 2/2 in two days I feel kinda, meh. I got a cool title that shows we killed it, and I even got the killshot today, but I'm still kinda down.

Today I found out that Senrez is in TeamKANICAN which blows my mind because after Sen broke Envy he said he wanted to have nothing to do with HNM LS's and camping. Also, Sen rubbed quit a few people the wrong way, yet there he is, in tK. Recently I've had some concerns about Furiousx. It's a LS that reall wants to grow, but the maturity level can be lacking at times and communication is lax (to say th least) sometimes which is painful because decisions are made without informing the LS and then when the new rule is put into effect the leaders don't understand why the LS is surprised, caught off guard, and sometimes upset. Anyways I asked tK's leaders if they thought I could get in, and after a few questions the leaders and members took a vote. Supposedly 1 person's no is all it takes...

I was told I got 3 no's.

Now I know about 4 people in tK, all of whom I know from Obsidian, my Dynamis LS. The rest are Japanese or people I just don't interact with. It's just bothersome to know that people may not like or approve of you. It's like them looking at me and saying, "We don't want to be friends with you, please go play over there". I know it's not that simple, but it's just an analogy. It's weird about this game, you make many friends on your way to becoming a higher level player. When you get great gear, cap out your job, clear all your missions, things can get pretty lonely and unsatisfying.

So much to catch up on...

2006-03-07T17:10:00.000-05:00

OK, this might end up a huge post, so much has happened in the past week. Man this is going to be long, I'll try not ot overindulge...

SEA

On Thursday night we tackled airship again. This was our 4th try where we really tried to win. Before the fight I said to one of my static guys, "I feel good about this one tonight". Sure enough, after not letting anoyone die...

We actually broke the record... We were dumbfounded, and incredibly happy. We went ahead and got our map and started farming organs. By the end of the night I had enough organs to make my 1st Obi, and I ended up deciding on a Hyorin Obi. My decision was made because I live and die by paralyze, and this Obi will help boost that spell, as well as Blizzard nukes in snow weather or on Iceday. I am farming Euvhi Organs now for my Relaxing earring, (the drop rate sucks) so until then I wear my Obi proudly.
After we got Sea access and Grand Palace access we decided to do Limbus. Unfortunetly the startup LS we joined had only a handful of people go. We cleared the 1st floor with 2 minutes to go and go 12 coins and one crate had a Square of Cardinal Cloth. It is 1/2 the rare/ex items needed to upgrade AF1. All I am looking for now is Ruby Silk Thread and some coins. Twenty coins upgrades hat and 30 coins upgrades Tabard. I'm still undecided which to do. Hat gains INT+3 and Tabard gains mp regen+5 (same as Errant Hppl.). We'll see.

BRD

So I finally got my BRD to 72+ and full Sha'ir is so gorgeous. I get a lot of /checks and on my first day I even got three people to call me a gilbuyer! Then after toiling away at BRD for weeks I did a full day of xp and went from 72 > 73 in two parties. One was a tK spam party in Ule Range and the other was a MNK party in KRT. Something like 48k in xp in 4-5 hours. Since then I have obtained Sea access and been incredibly lax about leveling BRD. So far BRD hasn't been super useful in Al'Teau but we'll see later. Until then I run around Jeuno in this:

Owning the Manteel has gone straight to my Turban, er, head and dammit I earned it and made it all, why shouldn't it! Anyways half my Dynamis LS calls me camel jockey and half my social LS calls me a gay Barney impersonator. No love for the belly shirt... I'm sad you can't see my elf shoes in that pic, everytime I see that pic I think of the Lollipop Guild Munchkins from Wizard of Oz.

NMs

I also killed Boroka today for the first time, earning me the title Boroka Beleaguerer. I've wanted to camp this HNM for so long because of his earring. It was a fun fight, although they made this BRD NM have horrible accuracy, and even on 100% Full Moon Lightsday his drops were Skulker's Cape and Auditory Torque. He also drops the Boroka Earring (MP regen+1/INT+1) and the Horomusha Kote (Attack+15). Our BLM/WHM got the cape and our SAM got the torque. We spent 2 hours trying to get the people out there and wehn we had all but one person on the NM's island another HNM LS member popped through the Spatial Displacment and our BRD freaked, so he tried to sleep Boroka, and failed. We gathered ourselves though and took him down without any deaths. We might take a shot at him tomorrow, though the other LS saw us pull him so I do not doubt that they will be there as well when the window opens to try and claim him.

Random pics

This was a fun fight, got Ultimateplaya his organ too!

My 1st killshot in a long time, been gettin lazy.

On the Cusp

2006-02-28T02:29:00.000-05:00

So last night I did something really stupid. I had a party go through the night and into morning. I don't mean until 1am, I mean the morning. Crazy ass BLMs partied from 1am till 6:30am. I pulled in about 24k xp and broke into 71. It was a great party, and after a few miscommunications and deaths we really hit our stride. I would pull a Spartoi with Fire Threndoy and then sleep it. Then 5 BLMs would cast Firaga III and Firaga II or Fire III to finisih it off. XP was very good, 180-250 at chain #5.

This afternoon we tried 6-4 again... this time I went as RDM/BLM and we did much much better. Getting through the Mammets befoe the 10:00 mark. Unfortunetly our NIN went down when Ultima hit 39% so we wiped quickly and waited our 7 minutes. After weakened wore we finished off Omega but ended up using 3 CCB's for him. We only had 5 and as we pulled Ultima with 16 minutes left it became obvious we weren't going to be able to control him as much as we wanted to. We wiped with 90 seconds remaining, used all polymers and 2 hours, and all of our reraises. We got it to 20%. We know what went wrong, we just have to keep our tanks up the whole run.

So I'm in the secret room in King Ranperrre's Tomb waiting for my MNK party to get here. It's 2:46am and I haven't even started yet. I want 15k xp so I can hit 72BRD for the night. I need serious personal help...

Sleep is for the weak... and camping is for the crazy

2006-02-24T16:53:00.000-05:00

For a very long time now I have gone without something that every RDM or BLM should always have. A Moldavite Earring. I've never been good at camping, and before the patch the only way for me to claim was to cast Dia. Then came the claiming patch where you had to wait nearly 3 seconds to cast magic on a target to claim it. So basically I had to change my strategy if I ever was to claim anything. Recently I was in a capped BCNM with a old friend of mine and he looked at my earrings and said, "What's with the gimp ass earrings Goro." I laughed it off but knew it was really time to get this item. Now the hard part begin... claiming.

Starting with Masen (Pigeon Blood Ruby) I began subbing WAR for Provoke. Now it's way under-subbed so whenever I do it I do /anon. So Thursday afternoon there was maintenance (which I found out when I tried logging in at 12:30pm) so I decided to try and grab this guy ASAP. Unfortunately I logged off in Upper Jeuno with my bazaar, so at 1:05pm I rushed out to the Labyrinth of Onzozo. I arrived at 1:12pm, and found a flurry of people there. I waited, and waited and waited. Talking to Vagus I came to the realization that when the servers came up, Mysticmaker Profblix was up. He was probably taken down in 30 seconds and the person didn't stick around. Most of us campers did not know this, but when he spawned at 3:20pm it was obvious that this was most likely his 2nd spawn already.

There were at least 14 people there, and I did not get the claim. A DRG did... and after he quickly disposed of it he did his /cry emote to let us know that there was no drop. I know this feeling. I was 0/1 and it's quite annoying to get the claim and not the drop. At least I had his ToD which was 3:29pm, meaning he'd pop between 5:30pm-6:00pm. I had sky to do that night, so I left... vowing to come back later. Little did I know how determined I would be after sky.

In sky all we camped was Ulli, and we did it from 5:00pm until 11:00pm. At 11:12pm Ulli pops and up there was LimitBreak, Envy, RoyalKnights, and my current LS Furiousx. Somehow our PLD got the pull in a sea of people, and we took Ulli down easily. We called it a night because Gods are Saturday and we are doing all four of them 2-3x. I spent an hour or so looking for a Curtana and farming Fire Clusters for easy XP. I eventually warped myself out of sky around 1:15am.

I headed out to LoO determined not to leave without an earring. I didn't think I would actually do what I did. I showed up at 1:30am to find the place empty. I was quite excited at the notion of camping against no one, but after 90 minutes of being on edge I realized that it was because I missed Profblix by 5 minutes... He spawns at 3:30am, and I lose claim. Same DRG as before, same quick kill, same /cry emote. Sucks for him he's been here for at least 14 hours. The next spawn was at 5:30-6:00am, so I decided (like an idiot) to stay up watching TV until then.

At 5:39am there's 6 people there, it pops, I claim! I had 300% TP and Vorpal Bladed him 3x and Blink'd his Freeze (Fast Cast) but all I got was Burst. Lame... I decided to grab a nap and set my alarm for 7:40am. At 7:40am I awoke and logged in only to find myself and that same DRG, (whom I am sure was AFK at this point) and a MNK. I changed my macro to /ja "Provoke" {st} because it was much faster to simply select a target and press a button rather than target something and press the macro menu button and then X Button. The 75MNK in full AF2 beat me with Chi Blast and Hundred Fists it... more lame. He gives a /cheer emote and puts the earring on. At this point the DRG player is either asleep or has shot himself, but my only competition was 1 person. I again set my alarm for 10:10am, and took a nap.

I awoke at 10:00am and quickly logged in. No one was here! I cleared all the Gobs and knew that I was 2 minutes from the window and the only pop in the next 16 mins would be the NM! I waited about 3 minutes and then a THF/NIN shows up. He was /anon but had on a piece of THF AF on and was also dual-wielding. Right away that told me that I was the only one with voke, and I knew the ToD, this THF wasn't here at 8:00am with myself and the MNK. It pops, I claim it (not my best claim for Profblix but I got it done) and I used the same tactic. Eureka! I saw the last item saying I gained a moldavite earring.

I was stupid excited, and incredibly tired. I had slept about 3 and a half hours last night and spent way too much time focusing on pressing a button the second Mysticmaker Profblix spawned on my screen. Now I have my Moldavite's and my Diabolo's Earring (only really good in dark weather), so I will be needing my Locquacious Earring soon. I refuse to buy the coins though, I am 2 fights from Sea and Limbus can be farmed. Until then, I can use my Moldy, and not until now did I realize the hardship that can come with getting this stupid earring.

I still despise NMs as well as camping, especially when I see Vagus and company camp Kraken Club only to lose it to RMTs...

Mixed Emotions

2006-02-22T03:00:00.000-05:00

Alot has happened since last update. Got past Snoll (THANK GOD) and caught up to Airship. Went 0/7 (mostly tests) 2 nights ago and then ended up kicking the BLM cause was a pain in the ass. We picked up a WAR and went is NIN, WAR, RNG, WHM, SMN, BRD. 1st time we kinda screwed up on Mammets, but 2nd time we passed Mammets and then wiped on Omega at 12%. We reraised and Astral Flowed him because time was running out. When we finally cleared Omega we had used 3/6 CCB Polymers and 3/6 Two Hours, (Benediction included). We started the 3rd fight weakend and weren't able to engage Ultima until we were down to 7 minutes. Well 7 mins later and 2 CCB's later we got it to 19%.

With everyone's 2 hr's gone and starting to think how much those CCB's costs us (300k a pop) we called it a night and decided to retry Friday. We totally had it. We can kill Ultima and Omega... we just can't waste 7-8 minutes weakened. So that sort of bummed me out.

Then I start desynthing because I'm thinking to myself... "I spent 70k GPs on these stupid Smithy's Mitts, might as well use them" so I head off to an area and find an item from an NPC that sells for 517g. That's 6,204g for 12 of them. The NQ desynthed result is valued at 40k a stack and the HQ result is valued at 100k a stack. With 1 HQ synth I've just paid for the entire stack of items I bought from the NPC. That made me quite happy. It's always nice to find these little gems in the game that you can "exploit" to make some gil without having to stand in one place for 3 hours and spam a command just so you have a chance to claim. Anyways I need to make some gil (who doesn't). I'm not poor but if I'm going to have to spend another 500k on meds and CCB for this Friday's fight, I'd rather earn it than have to spend it.

69BRD - 21k/32k

Well after 3 in-game days of desynthing I raised the price of the item from 517g each to 2500g each and eventually emptied the NPC of the item.... Still got 3+ stacks of NQ items and 2 stacks of HQ items which is about 300k. I also learned I can make Steel Ingots cheap. They are 10k a piece. 4xBomb Ash (2300g) + 4xIron Sand (1868g) = 1xSteel Ingot (10k). Thats a 6k profit on every synth which is a 72k profit on every stack.

I really despise NM's...

2006-02-14T01:07:00.000-05:00

(omg I published the blog and this is a huge entry... bonus points if you finish it all)

So I got BRD to 68 and finally got around to synthing my Manteel. So far I'm 3/5 with only the hands feet and the head left. One of the ingredients of the Sha'ir Turban is a gem called Pigeon Blood Ruby. It drops off 2 NMs, one 72 hr spawn thats a level 70 (no thanks) and one level 39 leech in Sea Serpent Grotto that spawns every 2-4 hours. Thank you I'll take door #2 please.

I get there around 7:00pm and there's a Japanese 60RDM/30NIN there... wonderful. Within 10 minutes a MNK/WAR from her LS shows up. Great, 2 vs. 1 I love having the odds stacked against me. So I get the ToD and find out it's a 12 minute spawn for the place holders and there's only two of em. So lots of boring downtime. I get 4 spawns in and spend about an hour down there and I get a /tell from a BRD friend that a MNK party is starting up. I got on her last night because she got inot a MNK party and forgot to ask me. This time she remembered so I figured what the hell. I swapped to /WHM and did a little monkey business in King Ranperre's Tomb. Got about 10k in Limit points but the BRD DC'd and we warped out after 20 minutes of waiting. I got to Sandy and activatedmy 4th modifier for Enfeebling Magic, (yay) and Outpost Warped back to Elshimo Lowlands and into the Sea Serpent Grotto.

Those two were still there which lead me to believe that they hadn't gotten the drop. That would really suck because it was now 10:30pm and they had been there since before I got there (7:00pm) and the spawn time is 2-4.5 hours. I had switched to /WAR because voke is much better to claim and within 15 minutes and no pop the did a T T and started to leave. The RDM/NIN was named Onpuu and was saying {No Money!} and they left. I was all alone and felt very confident of claiming. Well a few hours went by and at midnight I logged off real quick to check the Jeuno AH.

I logged in as Tyrhanny (my real life ex-girlfriends character) and suddenly there was a Pigeon Blood Ruby in stock! How strange. I tried bidding on it thinking I'd buy this one and sell the one I camp when I switched but I couldn't buy it. I had 258k on Tyrhanny and even though all 10 sales in the Price History were 250k, it wouldn't sell. How ironic too that Onpuu and Zecross were both in the price history... no money my ass. I did a /search and both were in Castle Oztroja (farming of course). So I came to the deduction that they claimed the NM Masan and were waiting for a 2nd one, but figured why compete, and they left to farm something else.

So here I sit... I have created a spreadsheet and taken down the ToD of each PH I clear, after they're both dead I do whatever for 11 minutes and then look to voke the useless PH every 13 mins. It's 1:54am right now and I'm pretty determined to get it at this point. Even if the suspect farmers got it between 8-10pm that means even at it's latest spawn it should pop before 2am which is fast approaching. I find it funny also that I just got a Carbuncle's Ruby of a Royal Leech place holder. It took me almost a week to get that ruby in Bibiki Bay, yet in a few hours I get it and I had to toss it. Irony.

Moving on from my leech displeasure... yesterday I hit 68 and realized it was time to ditch this Monster Signa. It looks cool, carries a bit of a status symbol (I camped mine didn't buy it) and has alot of CHR (+8) but the VIT (-5) is just annoying and there's better things available to me at 68. So me and my 75SAM friend head out to Labyrinth of Onzozo to try and pop the NM named Soulstealer Skullnix. A goblin THF that drops a Tonberry-like knife called a Kard. A Kard has CHR+5 and is quite fast and strong. It's no Blau Dolch but it's DMG: 22 Delay: 190. When I combine the Elegant Shield (CHR+1) I can get 6CHR with no lost VIT. Fair enough trade off. With my Opo-Opo Crown I'm a 68BRD with 110 CHR so I may be overdoing it a tad. Anyways without getting off on a tangent I camped him 2 days, 1st day no drop. He was a bit tricky with a SAM tank and he has a nasty Triple Attack every 2-4 swings. I pulled in a WHM and BLM and we all took him down and the Kard dropped. I was very happy. Ose was up before we started the fight but someone killed him during. I felt bad, the taru WHM wanted his Ass Jerkin.

I moved over to Mysticmaker Profblix and there was a BST camping him... Eventually 2 others showed up (both in the same LS) and the 4 of us sat there for about an hour. I started spamming Dia and sure enough it popped. I had Dia interrupted 2x (the patch that made it impossible to claim with magic now) and they still hadn't claimed him. By the 3rd attempt I claimed! It sounds so stupid but my heart was actually racing. I took him down easy and all he dropped was a Thunder IV. I warped back happy and upset. I got my Kard and that's what I went to LoO for in the first place. Upon checking the AH I saw that Thunder IV was 100k! All right! At least I made some gil out of it.

But I still despise NM's nonetheless...

*edit - killed Masen at 2:26am which would have been 4.5 hrs from the time the 2 suspicious farmers up and left... (what coincidence??)

65BRD and only 7 more levels to go

2006-02-04T02:12:00.000-05:00

Last night I started off in a party in The Boyahda Tree... which is always a bit of a pain. Damselflies have a nasty ass AOE and Crawlers slow party members and put up shell. Top top it off we had a taru PLD and a RNG. I have nothing against either of these jobs, but it meant I'd have to land Ballad on the PLD and give the RNG his Hunter's Prelude. Each fight I was singing 9 songs which got tedious real fast. To top it off, we spent 2 hours there and got about 4k xp. When they said they were tired I jumped on it and left. I went to sleep as 64BRD with 4k/24k into the leve.

Today I attempted the new Valentine's Day event, you get a reraise wand that cannot be cast on you (um... yay.) and a few other sundries. I read up on it and it's quite confusing and as of right now (well the NA's don't know for sure yet) people don't know the 100% way to the HQ Charm Wand +1. It's just as bad but has a different amount of charges and delay. So I found this chick, we followed the instructions, and we got our wand. I feel bad if this girl runs around with her wand equipped not know how many people may or may not dislike me. But we tried the next game day and got a whopping Chocopass. We decided to try another city and headed to Bastok. There we did it a 3rd time and were offered signature crystals and more chcopasses. Well this was 2 hrs in the making so I threw in the towel and said I'd try it again after the weekend when people had figured the 100% way to get HQ wand. Here's a screenshot of the very manly weapon.

So I have some early dinner and get a blind invite into an xp party. I only accept because a few people were Rank 10 and the names sounded familar. That was at 4:30pm. Well the party broke at 12:30am and byt that time I was 7k inside of 65BRD. I am now only 7 levels from Sha'ir and I need 10M more to be able to craft each individual piece. So I ended up all in all getting about 30k or so in 8 hours. Average xp but I didn't die and got 6 Beastman Seals and 1 Kindred Seal. At the end of the fight Viviflare sent me a tell and let me know that he was doing KS30 and I figured what the hell. I had my Themis Orb (KS99) so I went the BLM route and there was only four of them so if I got a D. Ingot then at least I'd get more than I would if we had a full party. Well, total crap dropped.

HQ Scorpion Shell (3k)

Anubis Knife (1k... the last one sold for 1g)

Heart Snatcher (already had one so /toss)

Malboro Fiber (59k)

Trainer's Gloves (2k)

Wyvern Scales (15k)

Really crap drops. Nothing says FFXI than a month's worth of seals netting 80k in gil.

ding 50NPC

2006-02-02T16:11:00.000-05:00

Ever since SE introduced the Adventuring Fellow quest I have really enjoyed leveling up my NPC. Maybe they made it for the kids who don't have a lot of friends but for whatever reason they made it, I have thoroughly enjoyed it.

Early on I learned how to get armor that you wanted by leveling in certain areas. As seen below I was able to get Zoldof into a Scorpion Harness. Well I thought I locked it in and when I changed to Bastoker areas for the Shinobi pants... I lost it. So my goal has been trying to get him into Shiobi pants, then lock it in and get the SH back. Over the past 3 weeks I have leveled Zoldof up enough to get him up to 50, not incredibly high, but seeing as I was afk for 2 months after I had just created him... still admirable (to me at least) that I've taken him this far.

I've done every single quest there is availale (short of 1 which requires the NPC be at level 56) and I have gotten him to weapon # 5 out of 7. I also have him on his 6th piece of headgear and 2 lockable pieces of armor (max is 3 as of yet). He's coming along, and last night I burned through 4 charges of my tactic pearl in Xarcabard. That region is under Bastoker control and fighting the easy Gigas is what got him the SH when I was fighting with him to get his SH. Well here is my quandry:

He's lost his mind.

Over the past two weeks I have leveled nowhere except Bastok areas. He keeps cycling through his Chainmail, Raptor gear, and Sollerets. Right now he is wearing his locked in Sallet (I have yet to find a piece of headgear I actually like, the Sallet is the highest level right now) a Shade Harness, Tekko gloves (not Shinobi Tekko), Raptor Trousers, and Sollerets. He looks absolutely horrid and all I want to do is get him Shinobi Hakama and lock that in. In theory, that is the next body piece after Raptor Trousers. I pray to god he doesn't do anything stupid (again) and show up next in Chain Hose...

Return to the Nightmare

2006-01-29T11:21:00.000-05:00

To start off, we did Sky tonight. A successful, yet incredibly long, night. After killing Genbu 2x more he dropped no shield, which means the past 3 Genbu's I have been high bidder, he has failed to drop Genbu's Shield.

After we all left sky I saw Forty speaking about wanting Diabolos. I too needed him, and only got the quest by accidently talking to a Windy Waters NPC. Good thing I did, because I needed both the avatar and the awesome earring that it gave.

We head out and it's BLM, BLM, BLM, RDM, MNK, PLD. Maybe it was overkill but when you hear the horror stories about Nightmare, you just want to get these kind of battles over. We head in and the plan is the PLD and MNK drop down, both 2 hr. Three seconds later from above the BLMs and I 2 hr as well. Unfortunetly, I realized after entering that Chainspell wasn't available for 9 minutes. So we waitied and went over the plan, and when the time came I hasted everyone, refreshed, and we went in.

Viddion dropped down and 2 hr's like a champ, Forty 2 hr'd before he dropped, but rushed in none the less. After I saw Manafont and the first series of spells hit, I activated Chainspell and mashed my Thunder III macro. They were hitting for 515 which was pretty nice in my opinion. Within seconds Diabolos was at 25% and he let go with his Nightmare. All mages were still up top, but when Viddion dropped we were all drawn in. All it took was 1 more round of spells to take him down. I would venture to say that all in all it took 40 seconds tops.

We exited out and warped outta Pso'Xja and headed to Windurst to claimour prize. Since I was doing Dynamis - Xarcabard and really wanted a victory, I chose Diabolos' Earring. It has great dark weather stats and in Dyna - X it's always dark weather.

We plan on going back for our second item on Monday night. I am hoping this doesn't interfere with Snoll Tzar... we'll have to wait and see. For now I am sitting at +9 Magic Accuracy which sounds good I guess. I'll have the opportunity to test it at the next Kirin.

NPC gear, hell yeah

2006-01-12T11:24:00.000-05:00

I love this lil pic of my taru mule cook and his pals

I have been slacking recently... I've really gotten into leveling my NPC (48 Fierce Attcker right now) and this week I got thrown a curveball.

Luto gave me a quest called Blessed Radiance: http://www.teamavengers.org/ffxiclopedia/index.php/Blessed_Radiance and I had to call my NPC in 3 seperate areas using my Tactics Pearl. This kida sucks seeing as 1) You need touse 75% of your charges for one week to complete this quest and 2) The areas which they were in (Giddeus, Maze of Shakh, and Jugner) are total crap areas for getting any leveling done for my NPC out of the call I need to make to simply harvest/mine/log a key item. Anyways, I finished it and since the areas are under 2 different kingdoms I kinda gave up on getting 6 calls in a Bastok region done this week... I am going to have my NPC in a SH with the rest of his gear being the Shinobi set, though I see that 10 calls in a Windy area give Nobles tunic and I would laughmy ass off if I could get a Galka Fierce Attacker who is pretty much a glorified SAM to do Tachi: Enpi in a Nobles...

Last night I did another successful Dynamis run, this time it was Bastok. Next Sunday is Beaucidine and I should have enough points to be #1 on the drop list for Tabard. Everyone with more points has the Tabard and I think the next person below me who doesn't has 18 fewer points (so I'm going to try and work something out so I won't have to blow their all points +1 to be high bidder...)