Savul-Kivul

My beloved adventuring fellow. Let me tell you something about him.


2005 ed.

I first met him at level 41. The quests to be able to call him, and the subsequent NM fights which I remember having trouble with as the poor little guy kept dying trying to tank them.

I also remember the queues. Oh god, the queues. Looking back on it now, I'm quite impressed that people actually waited in line with nothing more than common courtesy forcing them to do so. I wonder if people would do the same nowadays.


Alot of early leveling (30~40) was done in Rolanberry due to its proximity to the (then) busiest town, Jeuno, and the abundance of farmable mobs (bees, crawlers, Goobbue).

I first gave him a Great Katana, entirely because I thought it looked cool and progressed through the higher level GKTs (at immense cost might I add) only now I've realised that it does nothing more than change the weapon's model.
I later swapped him over to Great Axe, because of the utility of some of the weaponskills (Weapon/Shield/Armour Break) and because Sturmwind, and later Raging Rush was pretty decent damage. Iron Tempest was really the only -bad- WS he could do. As I'm unable to find any relevant screenshots of him from around this period (likely 2006/7), here's an artist's impression of what he might have looked like:




Currently he's using Axe/Shield because I was using him to tank when I levelled a few jobs to 37 (DRG, BLU, SAM) earlier this year. Most of the WS's suck though, and even Rampage does crappy damage, so I'll change him back to a 2-handed weapon when I finally get him to the cap. He should have access to Tachi: Gekko or Kasha I think, which are broken weaponskills so I might have him back on GKT.


2008 ed.
I've only really logged on this week (midterms coming up and I need to revise more) to level him in Grauberg [S] which is a really nice camp exp-wise, he's gone from 65 to 67 in 4/5 calls. I found that subbing /sam and depending on him to heal was more cost-effective than a mage sub, and made for faster kills (although the downtime for MP might even that out). His current armour has been the same since level 40, while it looks pretty cool, I don't think it accurately reflects his high level, so that's another thing to look into after changing his weapon. Hopefully I'll have enough fellow points from calling him here to be able to make his appearance more impressive.


I got a couple of merits out of it, and managed to cap Polearm. Now onto Group 2, dump a couple of spare merits into jump recasts (not sure which ones yet) and I'll be done.


And finally; an Assault I did at some point, but can't quite remember:


32/51 to captain! (I'm not in the shot because I'd just used Super Jump before taking it)


Today's entry was brought to you by team Kaya

(I could have sworn they added more than just one fellow emote, but all I could get him to do was /bow)

<3

I was actually 2nd for it, but the person ahead of me was afk (came back just in time to see it drop :x).

Thanks for all the tells guys, this really made my day/night/whatever. :)

A weekend in pictures: Assaults and Adventuring fellows.

Despite my activities (namely NPC leveling) being tragically cut short, I spent alot of time doing stuff on DRG. First up being Mamool Ja assault spam:


My highest wheeling and penta thrust so far, only food and Angon for these so there's alot more potential there with Hasso, Bard/Corsair buffs.

Three runs of PFC, and we disband with me at 15000/20000 points toward my next objective.

After that, I'll go for Captain (31/51 ...sigh) and look into Nyzul (primarily to make progress on my disk, but I seem to have missed the boat as far as statics are concerned).

Well, shortly after that assault party disbanded, I see another shout for a FL assault in the same area.


Wasn't the most complex one I've done to be honest. The objective was pretty much 'kill this hydra lol' with no adds, no wierd gimmicks to find it or make it spawn, just go in and kill (well aside from the spike flail-esque move it can do if you give it TP at the wrong moment, but we were prepared for that!). Penta still outdamaged Wheeling, I'm yet to encounter a situation where Wheeling is preferable. 1500 points + first time bonus left me only 2500 from 20k points. I'll just finish off by getting the clears in that area (unless I get no intrest from shouts, then I'll just spam PFC some more).

Adventuring Fellow Action!
Maat fight from Maat's perspective?


I crushed the poor guy. I meditated to 300% TP before entering, which was wiped upon entry (thanks wiki!) and I was dumb enough not to wait for the recast to be ready, so had to make do without it. He was some kinda crazy BST/NIN combo with a Great Sword, and a devastatingly powerful pet (read: lolcrabs). I got lucky with interrupting Jubaku and Utsusemi with Jumps and Penta Thrust, but after 1 WS and a couple of Spirit Surged jumps he gave up. Dissappointing performance, Savul! (I expected better from him...) :(

I dumped a bunch of Fellow Points into his duration - since there's not much else to spend it on, other than silly hats (that said, I might get a chef's hat or opo-opo crown for him).

I helped someone with their WHM AF3 fight too. Well...tried to. I was reluctant at first after seeing what else they had brought with them (60-something THF and horrendously gimp NIN, who ended up spectating for some reason) and having heard of unpleasant encounters with this NM.


Needless to say, it didn't end well. Dimensional Death rapes hard, and it spams -aga nukes like there's no tomorrow (which for us, there wasn't). I could have offered to come back as RDM or something, but even then I didn't see myself winning without resorting to kite/DoT crap.


I spent some time leveling with Savul, but not as long as I would have liked due to a few unfortunate deaths and disconnections. He's just short of 66 now, with Grauberg Hippogryphs being level 71-75 he should be getting some nice exp. I've gotten the art of fighting them down pretty well now, I'm usually fine if I save TP for after they use Choke Breath (Silence and Paralyze) so I can WS to trigger Remove Paralyze from the blue rat, use echo drops (if it's not nearly dead) and carry on all smiles. Until it uses the terror move on me and another one links while I'm immobile. It would be nice to set NPC AI to "Don't cure me, but remove status ailments and buff etc." which would fit DRG soloing fantastically, but kind of too well to be fair on other jobs. Pffft. Or set him to only cure when I'm in red HP! That wouldn't be too bad at all...

Hippogryphs suck, but they die fast. I've been trying to think of safer, squishier alternatives to level him on, but nothing else comes to mind. But as these are lv. 71 minium, then they're ideal for leveling him to the 70 cap (they will always be Tough~).

Technical failure or epic failure?

I fried the power unit on my PC.

It froze, so I thought I'd hit the power switch at the back. Only it wasn't the power switch, but the voltage switch.

Fortunately, I found a computer shop that does repairs (which is lucky, because this godforsaken 'city' is so small that it doesn't even have a cinema) so hopefully that will be fixed today. According to computer-fixing guy, there's a chance my motherboard was damaged, which sounds rather expensive.

On the plus side, my laptop received some love for the first time in months, and I managed to update FFXI on it. But I remember the damn thing having trouble running the game smoothly even with SNES graphics and in an empty zone. Hopefully I won't have to resort to using it.

I also did some digging on it and found a bunch of old screenshots which were interesting to go through. It turns out I was still on my laptop even after WoTG release, and up to January 2008 :O
I can't remember using it that recently now, I've gotten so used to playing on PC that it's hard to even imagine coping with that piece of junk.

As this entry is disturbingly devoid of pictures, here's one of the Ark Angels (GK is probably my favorite):



Also Serpent Generals! (I wish I could find where to watch this cutscene again)


Which leads me into the thought for the day - which of them would win in a fight? It's a hard call to make, the generals have retardedly high stats so they can endure an army of besieged mobs beating on them for an hour straight, but they don't have a full alliance of BLMs to throw at the AA's which is of course the only way to reliably beat them.

I'm weak.

As the goblin cat picture clearly incdicates, I gave in and got dusk feet until I get a decent shot at Aurum. I updated FFXIAH info to reflect gear changes, and deleted some sets (such as hMP) because they're hardly exceptional and just clogging up space.

So now I need to try out my new gear! Here's an event I didn't go to as DRG:

We managed to link the Quadav NMs we were pulling with a crapton of other mobs, plus a dragon came along to munch people mid fight, and Apocalyptic Beast made an appearance, causing everyone to run around in blind panic. I had an amusing death to a ninja turtle that got me with ore toss while I was recasting stoneskin.
Good stuff. We recovered, still managed to clear (barely), and got a decent amount of drops. The important thing here being these drops are not D. Tabard/Chapeau.

The moral of todays episode being: in spite of increased drop rates, Dynamis still sucks because icelands AF doesn't drop everywhere.

I got some new gear, so I thought I'd write about it.

We did a couple of Kirins for the first time in a while, because we finally had the numbers for it. The first one was a near-disaster, with Astral Flow killing pretty much everyone (except myself and one NIN, who got one shotted by Stonega IV a little later on) so we had to stall him with PLDs (Arc and Soli) for a while until the NINs had recovered.


Tarutaru in a can. The perfect distraction - compact, reliable, and ridiculously cute.

So that was pretty ugly, and took over an hour to kill, but we managed it... at least we got a double abjuration (D. body and W. legs) out of it.


Pillars present no obsticle for the master of the Shijin!

The second was much smoother and didn't take nearly as long, but drops were pretty poor (I think an ingot and an abjuration).


Typically, there's no cursed harnesses on the AH and probably won't be any others for a few months now I have the paper. Teaches me for watching the AH for two weeks to try and get it cheap (again...will I ever learn?).

I'll have a look in Rolanberry.

WoTG success, Sahagin keys and Sandworm!

A hard-fought victory
At lasssssssssst I beat the (apparantly) underwhelmi1ngly easy WoTG 7 on the 8th try. I gave up on trying as DRG as it's pretty much impossible to avoid dying to Chaos Blade, so I made 4 attempts on RDM/NIN.

The first fight went well, despite him completely wiping my buffs twice, wasting a ton of MP then cursing me just after convert, so I had no MP for the last 15% of his life. I got him down to 1%(!) with just melee attacks until he petrified me (I didn't notice the move being readied as I was focusing on keeping shadows up). I didn't react well to this defeat:


If I remembered the Elixir that I had in my safe, I would have won this one...

The second and third attempts of the day were defeated each time by the retardedly potent (80% at least) Paralyze additional effect he has on one of his TP moves. I managed to survive for another 5mins+ each time despite this, but it just didn't wear off even with barparalyze on. I probably could have won here if I had remedies. I didn't want to spend a ton on meds though if there was still a good chance of me losing some other way, not to mention I wouldn't be surprised if I lost them all to paralyze.

For the final attempt I just used Chainspell at the end (but I had really already won by then, I just wanted to make sure it happened this time) and the Elixir from my safe (which was actually more detrimental than anything, because it took forever to use and shadows/stoneskin had been wiped by the time I could cast again) which was a waste because he just cursed me again after using it. Fight took 10 mins.


I'm glad this is over with, now I can get the new quests done and keep my WoTG progress up to date.

This is a pretty epic fight, and it shows how gimp I am for struggling so much with it, when a blm can just stand there meleeing it...
I'm thinking I should have gone /blu or something and supertanked it, because in that video he's taking 30~50 damage from hits, wheras I was taking 100~200 (250 crits) on both RDM and DRG. DRG would have been much easier if I'd eaten a taco then, I guess :\


Only six quests total to get through, three of which are just cutscenes (yay) and the others involve fights (for which you need to keep NPCs alive, so not soloable).


Impulse Drive progress!
I discovered that I needed a Sahagin Key to get the the WSNM, which is obtained through this quest. I needed beastcoins, and lots of them.


There was only one mythril coin on the Jeuno AH, so I had the mad idea that it would be easy enough to farm the others. I learn that the gobs outside the Altepa outpost can drop them, so I stab at those for the next hour or so. No coins at all, I get about 4k in gil drops (I changed to /thf at one point and they began dropping 100gil+ thanks to gilfinder) and give up. Only now it occurs to me that I could check each town's AH, and find 8 for sale in Sandy.

So off I go to Sea Serpent Grotto, and look who I bump into:


My old friend Charybdis! I'm not really being sarcastic there, we're actually on good terms. I don't have any horror stories about camping him, nor any epic struggle to defeat him before getting my Joyeuse. Chary is a pretty cool guy (or is it a girl?).

But anyway, apparantly intimidated by my fiendish emoting of the NM they're camping, they decide to claim it ASAP before any of them are ready and they're mid-fight with a water elemental. Needles to say they wiped, as well as MPKing all of the people there who were afk for the ToD. Kinda my fault for pressing them into claiming so early, but meh. Not like I did it on purpose, or expecting them to react like that. So I gave them a raise, went off to finish my key quest. I came back later to watch them fight it again (all died but for one RDM, who managed to kite it until they recovered - which was impressive, because he deleveled to 74 in the wipe earlier and was full-timing a shield/wand combo, along with most errant gear (which isn't necessarily bad stuff, just srsly don't use the body for Bind - I used to do this when I first hit 75, thinking INT still had an effect on potency for sleep/bind/grav. Fortunately I learned the error of my ways before anyone could call me out on it, so ha!).


Walk without rythm, it won't attract the worm.


Of course, you want to attract Sandworms in FFXI.

We got swallowed eventually and encountered Guivre inside - a great opportunity to avenge my death at his teeth so many years ago!


Full drops! :O

I got given 100k for helping, along with the (50k) skull that Xarp won & gave to me since I passed before they said it was free lot. Not a bad haul, especially considering they were doing me a favour more than anything; letting me fight something I'd otherwise never get to see.

Seasonal goodies!

I hadn't got a witch hat from last year, so I sped through the quest in order to wear it for 5 mins and then throw it in storage.


Though the HQ one has its uses (+3% HP/MP depending on odd/even level) I doubt I'd ever use it since I'm pretty much done for the time being with leveling.



After obtaining my hat, off I went to do the new event:


Yay for stables collars! I'm gonna keep them in storage for getting to city dynamis.

The bats were the hardest part about the event, which nearly one-shotted me on several occasions despite having 1 HP.


I got the HQ version a few minutes later, but this screenshot was better :/

Can't be bothered to figure out the latent refresh effect since vermy is sperior. Obviously it could come in handy for the multitudes of level-capped stuff I do on a regular basis, but the info will show up on the wiki sooner or later (so yeah, this will be going into storage soon as it's out of fashion/I get bored of the look).


Is having to go to Jeuno to store Kindred/Beastman seals more of an inconvenience than the loss of 4 or so safe spaces? Probably is for me, but then again if I -needed- all of my storage I'd fork out for some furniture to cap my storage capacity (which I kinda did with Bahuts, but they ruin my mogenhancement and look nasty so they had to go).


...I can be pretty dense at times.

Moar Kreutzet & Halloween 2008 begins!

We got bored holding it while Arc came on THF for Treasure Hunter, so I thought I'd practice a bit of tanking, which was made laughably easy with Slow/Paralyze II on, I could just make do with just :Ichi most of the time, and even then that was with no haste equipment, and only my AF hat for Fast Cast.
Juli got a Sirocco Kukri from it, and there were smiles all round.

After we went to investigate the possibility of NMs in Kuftal, apparantly Arc saw Amemet up on the way to us.


Wasn't there by the time we got there though, so we had a gander around for Pelican, the Astral Aspis NM.
It was fun playing around with the T/VT placeholders there, along with the wyvern that pops there, with out any -na spells. Fun times.

Also, I've just seen this in Taru corner of Whitegate:


The Halloween event begins! (can't wear my pumpkin hat at the same time) :(

The post with no name.

Todays title comes from the fact I posted without putting one, a feat I previously thought impossible. Now I've used my only chance to get away with such a heading so I'll just leave it blank if I run out of ideas in the future.

I was saving screenshots to do an entry on gear and merits, but ffxiah.com has an exciting new feature that lets you list all that crap there. So I just updated my info there instead.

It's pretty handy as I can just update it easily as/when things change, so beats doing it here.

I've helped camp Kruetzet recently, and I learnt alot from the experience, the most important thing is that it sucks. (Edit: it's much better without competition, but still a pain waiting for weather >:|)


With (what seemed like) nobody around, the manticores in Cape Terrigan timidly edged closer together...

Almost two hours, through two different periods of wind weather and then we still take a while to notice all the other campers had vanished...it turned out we didn't even see it pop and people were fighting already in the tunnel.



I tried Up in Arms for the first time, after a Dynamis run - unsurprisingly, no Kraken Clubs were obtained. It was pretty easy though with a PLD, RDM, THF(possibly any DD here) combo, although it did get difficult if we tried straight tanking (really high TP gain at the start due to number of attacks, and it hits harder towards the end). Kiting also makes it easier under 25% becuase it spams buffs instead of using TP on Maelstrom and the like.

Came out of it with 50kish in random junk and crate moneys, which is pretty nice compared to the 20k or so I got from the past two Under Observation runs.

Angon, and my new best friend.

I spoke with someone in a ZNM LS about killing Armed Gears for me in exchange for the drops (bar what I wanted) so hopefully we'll do that next weekend.

Now I still have no idea who the leader of the ls is, I should have asked instead of having this guy mediate for me. Hopefully he forwarded my proposal clearly, it would suck if they just kill it and freelot everything. Or try to make me join their ls.

I befrended the lecherous swine in order to keep tabs on him, and because it's hard for me to say no. :(

After tiring of having many parties like this:



Which end up like this:



I finally got one like this:


As that's not very clear, I mean a 2x BRD TP-burn on Greater Colibri, the kind of thing that makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. I put three merits into unlocking Angon (and 25k into buying a stack of them) beforehand to make myself more invite-friendly.


On more than one occasion, the Angon animation glitched, making it appear that I'd just thrown my smart grenade, and on the first occasion my Thalassocrat. Despite how incredibly awesome this looked, I have no screenshot of it because at the time I was crapping myself thinking I'd just thrown 300k worth of polearm at an EXP mob.

A couple of hours and 5 merits later, we finish and I cap Slow II, thus completing my non-melee RDM merits (for now, I'm still not sure about 3 Phalanx II/2 Paralyze II). But before I go back and fiddle with Group 2 merits, I want to finish DRG and put whatever combat merits I have left into sword/dagger.

As for DRG merits, I hope to have Group 2 as follows:
5x Deep Breathing - That will give me double-potency breaths on a 5 min timer, which is a pretty significant reduction from the initial 15.

4x Angon - More merits in this simply increase the duration of the Defense down effect, which just gives me more for my money (an individual Angon is 248(?) gil). However, I'm not in any hurry to cap this just yet because I don't think I'll be fighting anything as DRG that will last much longer than 30 seconds anyway.

1x Empathy - Copying buffs to my wyvern is a neat idea, and has some pratical application in merit parties, but it's also useful to unlock just so I can use Spirit Link when he's at 100% HP in order to wake him up after a sleep AoE.

Strafe is meh, Group 1 are really tiny increases (3/6 seconds shaved off Jump/High Jump respectively) so I won't prioritze those, although the first one or two upgrades are cheaper than group 2, so maybe one or two levels before I finish Group 2.

Witch sash? On MAH server?

It's nice and all, but someone will have had to server transfer to get it over here. There's 2 up on the AH now, no sales in the history though. I wonder how much they're asking for it? :x

2 m.acc is kinda meh over a P. rope though, and espcially so considering the price it will probably end up as. Magic crit is moot until I see something to suggest that it does anything for enfeebles (so far the only testing I've seen suggests it gives +10 MAB on crits, and increases in magic accuracy or debuff potency are not easy to test) >:/

Hades is unlikely to ever get control of a beastman stronghold so I doubt anyone other than the filthy rich will be sporting these in the future.

Crab battle!

I won't lie. It wasn't very epic.

Followed by latent-breaking excitement:

Gogo Gimpulse Drive! (when I beat the WSNM). Savul-Kivul also dinged 65!


I was exposed to the sinister seedy underbelly of Sandy on my way to uncurse Heca feet.


...it's been a slow week so far :|

Determination.

I finally got around to finishing the last bunch of WoTG quests, and did some exploring after I spent an hour or so (including one death - trying to aggro bombs before I escaped) trying to figure out how to get through The Eldieme Necropolis [S]. Fortunately the guy who designed it, while still a sadist, made it possible to cross the area without the help of anyone else.

I thought I'd check out the little island in Battalia Downs while I was there:


So much for Jeuno [S]...


Finishing up the quest (Zeid is hot btw).


Afterwards, I got slept by the BLM orc in the room, so I had to sit and watch the other three orcs in the room link before they woke me up. Needless to say, it didn't make for an easy escape.

Now in order to continue with the latest quest additions I've gotta complete the all the missions first. Which means the Dragon BC in La Vaule.

We aren't best friends.

Of course I look up the quest, and check out the testimonials given by the ever-honest and relable populace of Vana'diel.


LET'S TAKE A CLOSER LOOK, SHALL WE??


INTERESTING


Easy, eh? I'll have no trouble doing this then!

*skips off through Jugner [S] and through La Vaule, after gearing up and getting supplies*

Things are going well, I'm still at near full MP, thanks to a Yagudo drink and Galarhigg is at 50%. Just when I appreciate my Dragon Killer trait kicking in three times in a row, he decides to flip out and double attack three times in a row. Healing Breath wasn't fast enough to keep up, and I go down. For shame.

I Home Point, and chalk it up to bad luck - after all, I was doing so well up to that point.

Attempt number #2!

Oh hey, you thought you turned away in time? I beg to differ. GAME OVAR.

Attempt number #3!

Even if I'd have brought holy waters, there's literally no way I could have survived this.

So in summary, the person who put that there is either lying or got incredibly lucky not to see any 'you die now' moves. Or I just plain suck, could go either way.

Pic of the day?



Another addition to my (somewhat lacking) healing breath gear!


Only improvements here would be AF legs +1, homam feet (which means starting limbus ._.) and a Wyrm armet, which may not be too difficult to obtain with the improved icelands drop rate (we got 2 last Xarcabard) but I'll be focusing on getting RDM first. Irritatingly enough, the ones I'm missing are the most significant boosts.