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.