Taking a break.

It's the easter holidays, and I've gone home. I'm going to be pretty busy with family/friends etc. so I've decided to take a break from FFXI since my schedule will be all over the place and I won't be able to attend events regularily and without being interrupted. Well, that and I have a shitty connection here (shared between 4 people) and am forced to use my laptop for logistical reasons which makes the game look and play like ass.

All things considered, I still managed to attend a dynamis run (Sandy) since it's late enough and everyone else has gone to bed by then.



I was lucky to have a framerate of 10fps at most times, and even D/C'd just as the boss went down. I couldn't log back in which worried me that I might miss the clear, but ended up working after I reset my loltop.



We ended up doing a Bastok and clearing the entire zone again, which was nice. But more importantly, this put me at 4/4 on city clears giving me access to Beaucedine Glacier, and hopefully Xarcabard soon.

Hopefully I'll find time to get on and level lowbie jobs (DRG!) and build a surplus of assault points so Salvage won't have me crippled when I start back again.

Dynamis.

I've only just started doing dynamis, despite it being around since before I was playing. My main reason for avoiding it in the first place is because all I hear is people complaining about exp loss, crappy drop rates on this and that, etc, etc. Also, I was intimidated by the whole idea of applying to shells in the first place, I guess.

After recieving some encouragement, I decided to finally give it a go. I joined Aristocrats, a shell that I've got a large bunch of friends in so it wasn't too discomforting and unfamiliar although the runs are rather late for me, I can put up with it for now.

My first run was in Bastok, which from what I gathered was one of the easier runs. It seemed very hectic with 40 or 50 people in the zone, running around, mobs all over the place but at least everyone else seemed to know what they were doing. At first I was in a party with a single WAR, so I didn't have a great deal to do apart from keep him buffed and alive and sleep the occasional mob that the blms missed.


Loot whoreing already?

I got put in a BLM party later to commence the soul-destroying process of a 6-man refresh cycle, but it wasn't all bad with MP refills and Aspir on the statues allowing me to nuke on occasion.

Only thing that troubles me in Dynamis is targeting stuff quickly through the mass of players/mobs, probably best to employ stnpc in my important macros (Sleep/Silence).

So we end up killing the main boss for the clear, and then proceeding to empty out the rest of the zone with 30 minutes to spare (hardly a surprise considering how many people were there).



Next run was Windurst, which got a little frustrating being regularily hit with paralyze and silence, along with sleepga at times. It was all going quite well, up to a certain point where we had to pass something called 'death house'. We were told not to aggro the mobs there, as we wanted to get pass and kill an NM for the boss to spawn before we fought the mobs here. So, I behaved myself and snuck past undetected.



Unfortunately, not everyone did the same resulting in an asston of mobs pouncing most of the alliance while we were split up and unprepared. Most of us managed to make it to a safe spot to die and reraise and made a feeble last stand there.

We lost a huge chunk of time thanks to this balls-up, but fearless leader Xarpei spings into action, sac-pulling (basically sacrificing himself so we can pick off one mob and avoid the adds) the NM we needed to kill, and then sac-pulling all the death house mobs away so we could get past to the bridge and avoid fighting them. He missed a few of the house mobs, so we had to take those with us and kill them at the bridge. In the end, most of the house mobs linked to those we were fighting at the bridge and we ended up killing 90% of the mobs we were trying to avoid in the first place.


Everyone was reassured to see how focused I am during pulls.

In the end, we still managed the clear and had plenty more time left over to kill a bunch more mobs.



Most recently, Dynamis-Jeuno.

Once again, I demonstrate my unending vigilance.

Killed some gobs, got paralyzed by pets, fire alarm went off just before we stormed the palace place so I had to afk for most of that. Half expected to be sitting beneath a sea of popped mobs when I came back, but I was ok and caught up easily enough. Was the first time I saw some RDM af drop, and I actually had the highest points out of the people who wanted it, hurrah.



'Spikes' enhancement is nice, since I do alot of bloodtanking in campaign and skillup soloing, also I still encounter alot of nuke resists on mobs that are very tough and over, so the +skill is very welcome. MP is cake, DEX is....uh, DEX. LolDEX.

The run went a little messy towards the end, but we got the clear easily enough again, putting me at 3/4 for Beaucedine Glacier access. I think the next run is Buburimu, which I do have access to having completed CoP 3-5 so I'm looking forward to trying that one out. Hopefully a Sandy run comes soon. :0

That's all.

10/03/08 update: the aftermath.

Scholar AF! Yay!

He's smiling because his job just got pimped out.

Did some early questing to net me a quick profit from lazy people who just buy new stuff from the AH before thinking. Got me three new teleport scrolls, getting me 250k for the three, and another 100k from the new warp scroll.

Bumped into a taru when getting the quest, who asked if I wanted to team up, and I just couldn't say no to that cute, but freakishly disproportionate face...



Naturally, Taru F WHM slowed me down significantly, and didn't have access to the handy area warps that WoTG offers, but I stuck by her and I guess the company made it a little more interesting than blitzing it alone as usual. Alas, she hadn't done the prerequisites for the quest properly, so was unable to get the key item from the waterfall :(
We had to split at this point 'cause I had a class to attend.

Logged on later, continued getting Telepoints and finished off my scroll quests;


3/3, woo


I'm often cheap enough to prefer risking death over using Prism Powders.


Xarp asked me to give him a hand on some Bastok quest as I was in the area, so we rushed off to the battlefield entrance.



This time I was the one without the necessary prerequisites and was unable to enter. The mobs ended up being really weak though, and he had no trouble soloing it.

Later set about doing more Lamia 13 runs, putting me at just over 15k points. That turban will be mine soon enough (or do I want P.Body now?)!


Oh, and yay dance emotes:

Version Update...

10/03/08

http://www.playonline.com/pcd/update/ff11eu/20080311rYKc61/detail.html#top

New quests (surely you mean missions, right? Right? ;;), Wings of the Goddess areas, AF I don't care about, Campaign additions I don't care about, poke-ration stuff that NOBODY cares about, some RMT countermeasures with mining, curelock fix, blah blah blah.
Also, DRK nerf, SAM buff, various job adjustments to BST, COR, SMN, THF, DNC, SCH and DRG, all with varying degrees of win and fail (mostly fail though). Nothing for RDM, boo.

What do I get from this update then? Some EXP ring that is slightly more suited to my meriting habits than the others, looks like SCH may become an even more viable sub for RDM, if not surpassing /whm and /blm depending on the additional spells that Addendum: White/Black will provide. Status cures are a possibility (wish) and Sleepga from /SCH will be awesome(unlikely).

Saving macros will be nice, although it's not too often when I play on another machine. Not to mention that my macro sets would just be awkward on a console.

As I expected previously (but was praying to be groundless pessimism), dance emotes and Adventuring fellow additions (which are not as good as I hoped) are the best thing to happen this update for me.

Salvage, Sky and skillups!

Did Zhayolm Remenants today, no drops. Our first time fighting Poroggos, it's great fun when you get charmed for the first time, sure, everyone has a good laugh "Hey look, I'mma frog! Ribbit!" but it started to get old fast, especially by the time we were on the 5th floor Madame with 3 minutes to go...



Actually, looking back at the wiki none of this makes sense. We had no drops, when it was supposed to be 100%. Either we screwed up and didn't do the right path/were too slow or I wasn't paying much attention.

Oh well, Salvage is depressing anyway. We keep chasing after small NMs and collecting those pieces when we're yet to even attempt a boss properly, which I don't think is the best idea in the world. Sure it gets around having to wait for nasty 35s to drop when you're 2/3 forever, but in the event that something will drop, what's to say we'll even be able to beat the boss when we come to it? Our only shots at a boss so far have been incidental and half-arsed, with one being on our first run with a minute left, and another going horribly wrong due to mass tp feed.


Bleh.

More Sky farming, yaaaaaaay...I always take the opportunity to skillup, got 0.5 total on club (sigh) and a few WS points on my dissector (didn't help that my SC parter would constantly d/c).


Gogogo club skill teim!



Our usual time for gods will be interrupted by the version update tomorrow (as usual), and we have a ton of pop items (as usual). I'm also expecting more maintenance follow-ups throughout the week on EU primetime, so I'd be surprised if we get anything done in sky next week. Otherwise, I'm hoping for a gods marathon, they make for nice pictures.

Netted myself an Iron Emblem of something or other in Campaign, which is the 3rd highest available at the moment, so I shouldn't be too far behind if they add more medals in the update. I'm hoping that they give something useful to spend Allied Notes on as well, I've got a large surplus of those.



I prefer /pld for campaign soloing, since it's fairly easy to reduce most hits to 0 when you pile on some def. gear and make use of Phalanx. Flash makes for easy re-applying of stoneskin mid-battle, and Sentinel, Defense boosts, Shield Bash and Auto Refresh are great to have too. Although it's probably easier to accumulate exp as /drk despite it being less survivable over long fights, since any campaign mob can be Aspir'd and Drain usually fixes most damage done to you, plus it gives fun job abilities, attack boosts and stun to play with over /blm.

RDM is a pretty effective and self-sufficient tank in Campaign battles, it's a great moment when you are standing up to an NM and taking hits to the face when everyone around you is falling to AoE. I'm still bitter about one time where nobody cured me when I was stuggling to stay alive on Yaa Haqa, when I went down at about 20%, he just rampaged and killed everyone else present, which could have been avoided had they cured me! D: Shows them.

Something needs to be done about my resolution, it just seems a bit crappy at the moment, I've been fiddling with the resolution stuff on the windower GUI but just can't get it to go right. I'll just have to fiddle more or lern 2 computer better, because I know my PC is capable of more than this, surely. It feels worse after I ditched SE windower (which hasn't really fixed my problem of insane and unbearable amounts of bloom that turn daytime snowstorms in Uleguerand Range into an epliepsy hazard).

Speaking of Uleguerand Range, I should try that ENM again...but I think I'd rather skillup somewhere than make that climb twice again.

Eternal Mercenary.

Farmed sky, got some pop items. We munched our way through Despot, Faust, Zipacna, Steam Cleaner, Mother Globe, unsucessfully farmed Diorites for an hour, and I think we got some water to drop and did the Ollas (maybe..)



Despot decided to pop after a particularily nasty meltdown, so I thought I'd bind him on top of the BLMs for giggles.
Ended up having to queue for a warp at the end, and naturally my presence at the front of the line was disregarded. >:(



Did Salvage later, no drops. No screenshots either because they were rubbish and got deleted.

More interestingly, had a proper shot at the final ToAU mission with the ls.



PLD/WAR was far, far more useful for this fight. PLD, WHM, RDM, BLM, BLM, WAR. Didn't encounter many troubles at all although everyone was out of MP at the last 1% where things got a bit panicy. While I was om nom noming on hi-ethers to get enough MP for a final nuke, Flam jumped in and finished the boss with his massive big axe. Exciting stuff. And new toys:




Will be nice for Salvages where I get the luxury of a ring slot, and assaults of course. Also, will consider macroing the ring for Silence, Sleeps, Bind/Gravity, Dark magic as long as I have space for it (I think only my Drain/Aspir macros have the room on them for more additions).

I'm happy to have another set of missions complete, now I can just focus on getting CoP done. But they may take a back seat to WoTG missions, since I don't want to miss the initial rush of people attempting them (as I did with Aht Ughan).

Yet more ToAU action!

So after zooming though my cutscenes up to ToAU 42, I happened upon a couple of people from the 35 run, who asked me if I was interested in doing the next fight. I said yes.



Had to draw upon the ls for help, but it turned out Xarp needed it too, when I always had assumed he had it all completed. The strategy was simple enough, but it didn't exactly execute smoothly... NIN, WAR, SAM, MNK and 2 RDM's, we intended to have each DD's solo one gear/set of gears each while the RDM's kept them healed/buffed and the main boss slept. Easy enough, just gears have some rediculous AoE attacks so we ended up spamming cures and taking alot of hate throughout. Somehow, the NIN was tanking worse and taking more damage than the other DDs combined (sigh) and managed to run in and die in the second room before we (the RDMs) even entered. No big loss, we just bound the extra gear and let the other DDs carry on as usual. Raised the NIN, and buffed up for the final boss.

Soulflayers are not supposed to be in the game, they are just a bad joke made by SE that was taken too far. This one in particular seemed to be immune to any debuffs I tried (not that I had much time to try sticking any before having to spam cures again). I gave up on status cures since they just got hit with them again over and over, so I just kept people alive and pray they'd kill it.

They did. I ended up pulling way too much hate and tanking towards the end (gogo blink cycling), so was unable to convert :/



We later attepmted 44 as well, which was a hell of a cool fight, although we lost in the end. :(
The first part went pretty badly, we relied on magic too heavily in the first few phases so in the final phase he was immune to stun so we just had to eat his nasty spells. Couple of deaths later, we killed him and rested back to full before engaging the mega boss. But by this point we had already wasted far too much time.




Ultimately, we simply took too long to damage him which was basically down to a bad set up more than anything else though (PLD/NIN could not keep hate, and the DDs had to hold back/die so we didn't get anywhere fast).
The music for this fight is pretty epic though, I don't mind repeating this a few times. Besides, it doesn't look too hard if you have the right setup.


Assaults!
I muscled my way into Arc/Soli/Flam's usual trio static to leech a clear on Escort Professor Chanoix, which was great fun.



We just stormed through the zone, sleeping (<3 Repose) anything the senile old bat ran into, which included many dead ends. Being forced to backtrack into the mobs we just slept was rather discomforting.

From what I noticed during that assault (I could be wrong) was that anything slept with Repose (the skellies) that we didn't bind as well would lose aggro eventually, and the ghosts which we were using Sleep II on would continue to chase, ruling out the possibility of the mobs in this assault being particularily lazy and losing aggro faster than normal mobs. So Repose generates less enmity than sleep? Possibly alot less cumulative enmity, as I think that's what keeps mobs chasing. Obviously I'm too lazy to test it.
If this is true, and I wasn't imagining things, it would be much more of a useful spell for escaping any unwanted aggro you get (of which there is plenty in assault missions).

I also did 'Stop the Bloodshed' with a pickup party, which involved bullying some chigoes (seemed to have 100% crits on them) until the rune pops, whilst avoiding some mean lamia. We did bully the chigoes, but the lamia were not avoided as efficiently.

A few melee died before I could get to them after we split up (oops!), I managed to aggro a lamia trying to raise someone, but they slept easily enough (but they do start to build resistance, unless I just got an unlucky sleep II resist), I ran back to the rune when it poped, got hit by a tier IV from the lamia on the bottom floor (!) and just about survived thanks to stoneskin. Crap loot, 1k assault points, 5 points to next rank (10/25), disbanded and went to sky. All smiles.

I forgot to take screenshots, the tier IV was a good moment too. :(

Naja Salaheem.

Naja and I are on good terms at the moment, along with completing ToAU 35 I managed to get myself a promotion to Sergeant after yet more Lamia No.13 runs. I know it would be a better idea to do other assaults for rank ups and first time point bonuses etc., but I really want the Ilrusi Atoll points for mah Yigit Turban.



Nothing jaw-dropping, but the 4MND is what I'm interested in for putting together a Max-mind potency build for Paralyze and Slow spells, also the +hMP isn't going to do any harm. Currently I'm sitting on +61 without food, so with this hat, plus a couple of earrings (1.2 million gil of earrings...) I'll be sitting happy at +69. I'm looking forward to breaking +70 after completing CoP and getting a HQ MND ring.
However, Salvage is currently doing it's best to keep my points down. >:(

Anyway, the rank-up Quest for Sergeant was no let down (i.e. not 'go find another warhorse footprint').


Had to do some running around, but it was a nice little story.


Next! ToAU 35.

The fight was supposed to be the hardest one (so far) in the Aht Urhgan storyline, but we just employed the cheap tactic of all-out melee raep. It worked pretty well.



Excuse the vandalism, but I really hate spoilers. I hate it how I always forget to take screenshots of a fight until it's over already.
We went with a DRK, MNK, MNK, PLD, BRD and myself as RDM/DRK. The monks boosted up to full and opened with a Chi Blast each, and then everyone used 2-hour abilities on the boss with some tasty Soul Voice marches from the bard, while I chainspell-stunned him. The paladin stood around looking pretty until the boss' babies spawned, at which point he cast diaga on them and kited away.

All in all, the boss was down in just over 30 seconds from engaging, which is a little dissapointing, but the cutscenes make up for that.
After the usual grim, "blah blah end of the world is coming, etc, protagonists are in yet another predicament and we're all doooomed, oh no! Who could possibly save us now?!" volley of cutscenes, it was back to Naja for more giggles.



Now, only two more fights between me and a sort-of-ok, sort-of situational ring and a shiny but otherwise useless crown. Strangely enough, the story and cutscenes are probably better than the rewards themselves.

Ohi

I tried this initially on LiveJournal, but we fell out and we're not speaking anymore. I decided to go out for a walk to clear my mind a little, and then bumped into Blogger who seemed like a much nicer guy, and had less angry buttons that wanted me to do things. I feel happier now, and I trust LJ is getting by much better without me in the way. It's all for the best.

Gogo copypasta:

Since finding mild entertainment in reading others' journals, I figured I'd go for making myself one for FFXI and see if that same small state of interest carries over into actually producing one. Well, that and every time I browse my old screenshots I feel the need to document each with a commentary in my head...

I've been playing FFXI for over three years now, since EU release or thereabouts (late 2004?...I forget), which doesn't really mean much, but it feels like I've been going for a while to me. But hey, who cares? I've had my main job, Red Mage at 75 for a good while now, so I'll spare you the story of the long climb to 75 since most see the game *really* starting at the higher levels. As a substitute, here's some oldpics:




Classic Guivre moment :]




I spent months farming/capping skills/questing RSE/etc at 40 and 50 during that period of hyperinflation way back when... but prices were all relative, I doubt it would be any less work getting started these days. Besides, it made me feel good that I could do it without bothering other people to help.




I wore some stupid stuff in my early levels (complete overhaul at 40 though :o) , but damn I didn't half look good. RDM/THF was the biggest thing to hit kazham, especially when I learned about enspells at level 25!




Earliest screenie to hand. I actually started as a Thief, intending to be a Dragoon when 'I grew up' (my actual words ._.), but soon my dreams were shattered by Crawler poison as I swapped jobs to something that could heal itself and ended up liking it.

Sigh...I honestly do intend to get DRG to 75 as my 'next' job (largely because it shares w.legs with RDM), but sans Homam, Ares and Odin's pointy stick I don't think I'll make it my main over RDM (not that my RDM is dripping with rare/ex shinies either ;-;).




I've migrated PC twice whilst playing, so the vast majority of my old screenshots are on other hard drives that I'm not too keen on seeking out at the moment. I have other stuff to do as well, really I do.

Moar will come. I have time now, but putting multiple entries on one day is not a good idea since I'll burn myself out fast and lose intrest, so I'll take it slowly. Not to mention I don't really know what I'm doing at the moment. :3