More progress on CoP; I've got myself access to the Grand Palace of Hu'Xzoi and The Garden of Ru'Hmet after completing 8-1 with a pickup party (although the initial intention was to go from 8-1 to finish, that didn't end up happening) later managed to do 8-2 with a couple of people from the previous mission.
8-1 isn't particularly interesting, just beat up a bunch of sleep-resistant Aerns and run around sea for a bit, I also got my map for the area at the same time.
8-2 however is inside the palace itself, and requires that you escort an NPC Quasilumin in order to get through various gates that block your way, ending up with an NM fight when you reach the end. Since there was only three of us, we just decided to sleep/logout any aggro that we got, while one person just followed the NPC to its destination.
This was incredibly time-consuming and shakey at first, as we tried to logout on every mob that came after us, and eventually lost track of the NPC and had to restart the escort. The second time through, I suggested we just sleep everything and keep moving until that particular escort was complete before logging out, which made it alot smoother.
Our Corsair was extremely useful for this mission, with light shot being able to store charges now, he could sleep several at once, not needing to stop and cast (since it's a job ability) and it didn't generate enough enmity for mobs to keep chasing us after we'd got some distance away (much like repose) so I left the sleeping to him, until his recasts were down, or we encountered a light-based 'ghrah.
Of course any other sleeper would do instead of a Corsair, perhaps even one RDM would be sufficient for this strategy to work, but you would have to be careful of recasts and dark-based 'ghrahs.
The NM fight at the end wasn't too difficult, although we had a decent setup RDM-COR-NIN which is a pretty effective combination of jobs for most NM fights. It was a pain in ball form, spamming Stonega III, and I couldn't land silence so I was forced to spam cures until it changed form. Despite it being earth based, Slow II landed with a full mnd build and never had to be recast for the whole fight (I suspect earth shot might've increased the duration, or the fight was just short) it changed to hume form, where we tried to damage it as much as possible so it would use the less-threatening Invincible as its 2-hour. Instead it didn't fancy that and decided to change to spider (which has a particularily nasty Sickle Slash that ignores shadows) and used Mighty Strikes almost immeadiately. Bind resisted, but Gravity stuck and we kited it for a bit so our NIN didn't get one-shotted by that move. Fun stuff.
I imagine with more people, the mission would have only gotten harder with some getting lost/going the wrong way/dying/etc. on the escort part so I can be grateful for my relatively hassle-free attempt.
Got this after 8-1 as well, which is convenient but not entirely vital as I can just outpost warp to Tavnazia anyway, I guess this just saves me the 300 or so gil.8-3 requires some sneaking, pretty much all up to the BC can be done solo (with some reraise/flee items or sleep spells/abilities). Although some jobs that can't sleep/flee and don't fancy dying once per floor probably would need help on it. In theory, it is possible to sneak to the top of each tower without aggro, but fast spinning Eo'zdeis are a pain (I only got past them 50% of the time undetected with +12% movement speed) so I just slept them and moved on.
Once reaching the top of my race tower, I got the title that I'd been after for a while - Warrior of the Crystal - which allows me to complete a small quest in order to be able to warp to Sky from the crags in Holla/Dem/Mea, which will save me the 10~15 minute trip and outpost warp fees to get there.
As I was on a roll, I decided to solo the prerequisite key items for the 8-3 pot fight, the Brand of Dawn/Twilight. Again, these are no problem to obtain for any job that can sleep and even that isn't a necessity this time because there are warps that (albiet disorienting) lose any aggro you may have picked up. This map was an invaluable resource, without it I might have spent hours lost in there.
Getting to the elevator was more of a problem, as there's a bunch of 'zdeis that you must sneak past, as the door closes if they move off of the starting points:
It's fairly simple to sneak past them undetected if you approach the elevator from the North, as they all spin quite slowly, and you can run straight through if you time it right. Of course it is always possible to just put reraise up and let them kill you on the other side of the room, but where's fun in that?
Campaign has drawn me back in, it being over a month since I got the top medal and over a month since I did any ops/battles I've had it taken off me, so I spammed some supplies ops to use up my credits, and a couple of battles one having a 30 minute wait between the normal mobs dying and the boss showing up...sigh. Since supply runs for Bastok involve a fucking stupid 4 hour walk across the zone and back, Cuddles had to look for another easy one to spam, which ended up being Steel Resolve:
This just requires you to run to a Nation-controlled outpost and talk to the guard there to start a fun little minigame where you name a type of crystal for each NPC to use as they run back and forth from the fortifications.
Dragoon has reached 33 from supply Ops, during which I noticed the Dhalmels in Saruta [S] were prime targets (T~IT range for a 32 character) for a 31-34 party as an alternative to Altepa or Sauromuge Weapons before Garlaige Citadel.
The upcoming Version Update still doesn't excite me all that much - MNK, PLD and BRD are all getting new abilities/spells (kick attacks ability, damage reflection spell, and single-target song ability respectively) Kick attacks sounds fun for Cuddles, and Group II merit cap increase sounds like more of a chore than an upgrade (I'm now considering Slow II 5/5 and Phalanx II 5/5, fuck para. I'll obviously wait until people merit/test different spells, I don't fancy wasting my own merits). But it annoys me when I see 'Battle Adjustments' on a POL announcement, because every time I get my hopes up for some sort of RDM adjustment and am crushed every single time. They also finally announced they're making Einherjar more worthwhile, which is really needed. As it stands, it's all or nothing - and even if you win, it's most likely nothing. Now at least you can get ichor from killing the normal mobs, and it's less demanding to fight Odin now as well. However no explicit mention of the crappy abjuration drop rate being changed, just mention of new items dropping - speculated already to be for the Nyzul Relics. Not that I care about those, I don't even like the look of the RDM one, and I'm yet to do even one Nyzul assault (although I remember Goliard body/feet looking pretty nice stat wise, I really can't be bothered to start that up as well).
Many words today, perhaps too many...
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