Twin #2

Hopefully I can get a collection going!


I killed this bird guy for Sandy mission 9-1. He has a friend, but you can just zone them both and come back to claim the main one, leaving the other to depop while you kill it. He doesn't hit exceptionally hard, but will break stoneskin in 3 hits so /nin is worth having, although I didn't try supertanking him. It's easy to dot/zone him if you're not too confident, but it will go much faster kiting and nuking, as he doesn't resist much at all and has pretty low HP.

The only rough part was the initial pull, because he decided to Horde lullaby me, so I had to run to the zone with both of them beating on me. Had about 30% HP left when I made the zone, despite having capped stoneskin, phalanx and shadows etc (but I did stop to bind him before zoneing, which might be unneccessary).

He used lullaby about 3 times in the fight, but I just let him wake me up again and bound > out of range > rebuffed.

Easy! 9-2 doesn't look terrible for soloing, it's just keeping the NPC alive for the 2nd part of the fight is what makes it tricky. And with no outposts still, I don't fancy running down to Fei'Yin 100 times to check if it's doable.

New job and yet moar missions

I left off at just getting rank 7. First changed race to Elvaan in keeping with the whole San d'Orian theme. Also sexy behind. Here's the stuff I did to progress:




Hit MNK orc in face until it died as RDM/BLU. Laughably weak.



Hit more orcs in face until they die. Again as RDM/BLU, again very easy.




Octopus guy who actually did some damage for the first time, I had to bind him during Hundred Fists.
Someone asked me to help them do ZM12 while I was there, that was a success with SAM/DNC, BLM/WHM and RDM/BLU. I just meleed while spamming cures until the pot died, because all I had was melee gear.


Next mission was kill this doll guy (or pair of, but you can sneak pop and pull one, like the rest of the open-world NM fights). Again not too rough, but I bound it for mighty strikes and had to save TP in case it used meltdown. It didn't.

So those bunch of fights netted me 60k and 80k for rank 8 and 9 respectively, currently half-done mission 9-1 which has me running to far away regions I still don't have the outposts for (Sandy failed to get anything useful this conquest cycle). Then I need to get through the Eldieme Necropolis to kill some birds before I can do the final BC. Almost done!


While I had to wait a real-life day between some missions, I decided to start leveling jobs to 37.


I started with BST because it didn't really need much fancy gear. I don't want to start on inventory-intensive jobs (SCH, RNG) until I've got my satchel space sorted, which is still going to be a long time yet at this rate :(

Also, I just managed to beat ACP 7, the Fei'Yin fight. I was supposed to kite the majority of the mobs while they picked them off. Hate was silly in the fight and I couldn't keep the mobs on me, despite spamming cures on whoever they were hitting. The WHM got silenced and ran out of echo drops, I lost Convert to Paralyze and everyone died. It wasn't pretty.

Second run was pretty much the same as far as hate goes, but we left the gobbie until last this time because he's a pain. We just spam cured everyone while mobs ran around beating on whoever they felt like. I got a crappy elixir from my key :\

Mission progress.

I just remembered I hadn't been labelling my posts for the best part of a year, so I'll resume again. And maybe go back when I'm bored and re-label all my old posts...

I gave up on soloing 5-1, couldn't get the boss below 33% before timing out and I can't really think of a better strategy that doesn't involve spamming nukes and meds.

Well, there was 1 other strategy...bring a MNK!


This was much easier and didn't require any meds :3

Maybe if I just ignored the adds and meleed the boss for the enitre duration of the fight, hoping they don't sleep me/nuke me too much, it might be doable but I can't be bothered to try now. The RDM solo video I saw is very old, and I'm pretty sure he enters the BC fully buffed, so there's likely been some changes since then. Also, nobody knows about it so I can deny its existence.

With that out of my way, I can get back to finishing this damn mission line.


The Shadow Lord is an absolute pushover. First time I went, I forgot my shihei and with no northlands outposts or warp on me, I just logged until warp was ready because I didn't fancy walking through Xarc > Beauc > Ranguemont Pass > Ronfaure > Sandy and back again. In hindsight, I probably didn't even need shadows. He never even broke stoneskin in his second form and it took about 10 mins to kill both forms after I'd buffed. First form I could have gone afk for, were it not for casting shadows but he didn't hit that hard anyway.

RANK 6 GO

6-1 I had to collect a ridiculously rare flower for the dead queen's garden because she thought it was perfectly acceptable to put it in her will and have somone run to the other side of the world every time the old flower died out. Bitch.


Naturally picking the flower spawns a cactuar NM who, according to the wiki, "SPAMS 1000 NEEDLES CONSTANTLY ALL THE TIME OMFG DON'T FIGHT THIS JUST LOG OUT AND UNINSTALL SAVE YOURSELF ARRRFGHHGHZGGHGFNGH".

This led me to believe it might be rather dangerous, so I took care and opted to kite/dot/nuke as RDM/NIN, which apparantly can take up to 1 hour, 45 minutes. I was genuinely worried about 1000 needles spam, especially when I forgot to bring my NPC to soak up damage. It took me ~20 minutes to kill, and although it spent most of the fight within 1000 needles range, it didn't use it once. Cactuar guy doesn't seem to spam TP that much at all either, maybe uses it as soon as he gets 100% but really didn't use anything that often. So wiki people either lied, or had 4 MNKS hundred fisting it with level 1 clubs.


Another easy fight, and many of the fights later on follow this pattern of force-pop mobs that you can pop and then pull 1, and let the others despawn.

From the looks I can solo every mission up to 9-2 from here, so should make speedy progress now. Shame I couldn't beat 5-1 though.


Your missions suck and you should be ashamed. I like Halver more now for some reason, eh's a pretty cool guy. The rest of the Elvaan are pretty dull though.

First they came for the Dual-wielders,

I didn't speak up, I was not a Dual-Wielder.

Then they came for the Rangers,
I didn't speak up, I was not a Ranger.

Then they came for the Black Mages,
I didn't speak up, I was not a Black Mage.

Then they came for me (and BLM again, lol),
By that time pretty much no-one cared anymore and thought I deserved it.

Grand Greedalox attempts Mission 5-1

Gobbiebag IX complete! 360k total cost, so not too bad.



Part X will have to wait until the ingot prices drop considerably, so I'm not quite the Grand Greedalox.

As previously mentioned, the next part of ACP I needed to do was in Fei'Yin, and without any Northlands outposts I needed more than one reason to slog all the way there on foot, so I decided to do mission 5-1 at the same time.


I embarked on the long journey through Ronfaure, Ranguemont Pass, Beaucedine and finally Fei'Yin because I don't like shouting for teleports, even if they would save me time (Banana chocobo has nothing to do with this actual journey, I just wanted an opportunity to post the screenshot).

Anyway, I get some cutscenes, zone into the arena place enter the BC for the imaginatively named 'Rank 5 mission', check my gear and spells (can use Composure!), zone out and re-enter for the actual attempt.



I went as /BLU because I wanted to pile on defence + phalanx to get as many hits down to 0 as possible so I could focus on damage. This worked, the only things to cause trouble were the TP moves of the boss skelly, and spells.

This first attempt went well, I nuked down the two BLM adds ASAP (they had more HP than expected, so I could only get the 2nd to 50% before running out of MP, so I meleed it down). The point of CS nuking these two down is not because they are overly dangerous (you can still melee them both down) but because they need to die fast so you can start killing the boss, as this is only a 15 minute BC and he has alot of HP to take off. Once those two are dead, the warrior skellies are stupid weak and will kill themselves on your spikes so can be ignored. Also, killing entire waves of them with Battle Dance was fun.

So all was going well until this happened:


My keyboard/mouse both broke themselves and I was stuck unable to target anything, use macros or even type commands in manualy. All I could do was run around. I had to force d/c after that, and logged back in dead.

I got a raise from some nice ACP mission folks, and went off to do the quest for that - which is running around Fei'Yin to find some swirly crystal light power stuff. You can choose the key item to enter the BC after completing this, or a key for the reward box in the Tenshodo HQ. I chose the key because I am greedy and selfish (and it's easy enough to repeat).

A second attempt at 5-1 without Chainspell available (I meleed the BLM adds down) taught me that the time limit is a serious problem, but I still think it's a possible RDM solo. INT potion, vile elixirs to make sure I can kill both BLMs in the first minute may be essential, as well as keeping poison on the boss throughout and maybe subbing WAR for double attack and defender (for CS nuke phase).

Omega

Did not go as planned. One tank was lagging to hell, other died while I was converting and it all went downhill from there. We might have recovered had we not tried to zombie it before dropping from the party (everyone forgot it had alliance hate until it was too late).



More cheerily, I've finally finished the farming leg (I hope) of the new expansion, and can get on to something more interesting, like nuking wave after wave of incredibly weak mandragora!



Annoyingly, the next part is in Fei'Yin and I don't have any of the Northlands outposts yet. I've got to do mission 5-1 there as well, so I hope that doesn't get in the way.

Final run for ISLS

Sky has finally come to an end. It's been a long time coming, we've been short on members for well over 6 months and few of the people we got in that period stayed for long, but I'm grateful for those who did stay to the end. And thanks to Xarp, and then Nem for keeping the shell going for so long.


For our last run, we started early (with a grand total of 3 people) to get a stone from Despot and pop the 2 Ullis we had. As more people logged on, and friends came to help, we had 6 by the time Despot popped and 8 when we did the 2 Ullis.


Here I am casting blizzard on Ulli's groin.

We had enough pop sets for 1 of each god, and an extra Byakko pop set because we wanted to make sure we got our last member his Haidate.

So we went from Suzaku > Seiryu > Genbu and finally to Byakko, nothing amazing dropped aside from a few gil items that went to helpers. I failed to take any screenshots of our last few gods because I suck.

Haidate dropped on the first Byakko, and because I was the only LS member without any by this point, I was encouraged to take the second pair if they dropped (better than letting it go freelot with nobody around to buy). Even though I hadn't got a job leveled to wear them, everyone felt that I had earnt them anyway, which was a nice gesture from them :)
Unfortunately the gods of FFXI (Byakko specifically) didn't share that sentiment and a second pair did not drop. Oh well, if I wanted them that badly I would have leveled a job and lotted them a year ago. If they had dropped, I probably would have only leveled BST anyway (SAM or WAR would have pretty much made DRG obsolete as my DD job).

We finished off with a last Kirin burn with the help of the other LS I forgot the name of. No W.legs dropped AGAIN, which is probably Kirin's way of saying FU and GTFO. He's such a dick. But at least we managed to do all the gods + Kirin for our last run for some sense of completion, even if it wasn't all done by merit of our LS alone.

We gathered in Aht Urghan's teahouse place as a final goodbye thing.


Much fun and silliness was had with fireworks and rice cakes. So at the end of the day, I got 9 hours of free time per week back AND +1 inventory space! On the other hand, I never got to try out Fields of Valor in sky :(

Proud Wind'Orian?

Being unable to progress with Crystalline Prophecy missions due to everyone and their mother farming beastmen that drop the required items, I saw this:



Not wanting to pass this opportunity up, I swallowed my pride and swapped allegiance to Sandy for 40k. My homepoint is still in Windy. Stinkin' Elvaan.

Now I'm hastily grabbing outposts alongside missions.





The salute is kinda cool...

Anyway, I'm curious to see how far RDM can solo this set of rank missions. I saw a video of a 5-1 solo, but that was a long time ago and it seems to be pretty difficult. 5-2 is easy, and alot of people have pulled it off, so I don't expect problems there. I've not looked at most of them in any detail, but I think most of the later missions are do-able, except perhaps the last one.

Anyway, so far I've killed this:


/blu supertanking didn't work (timed out). I did have to sleep and rest MP though, having yag drinks would help, and it probably would have died in time if I remembered to use enspells. Second time was /nin and it was equally shitty, but killed it sooner (enspells this time!). Proper level-capped gear would have helped, most of my 75 stuff did nothing useful.


Aaaand here I am. Just doing magicite now, and hopefully I'll see some Yags and Orcs to farm crystal bits from (for earlier missions, I've been through Jugner > Davoi at least 4 times and seen ONE fucking Orc, and even that was claimed).

A post about update stuff after the update.

Despite missing the initial rush for gobbiebag items, and now having to wait a few months for the prices to cool down again, I logged in the next morning with a grin you would expect to find on the peachy face of a child on the morn of its 10th birthday excitedly tearing its way into the packaging of the Super-Action-Battle-Zord figure they had spent the past few months dreaming of.


With all the exciting new content from the update, there was endless things I could have done - tested Composure, the new Enspells, New missions or they myrad of additions to Fields of Valor and Mobiln Maze Mongers. Well, I don't know anyone who's interested in doing the latter two, so those were out the window (although I may try to start soloing MMM for giggles, now I can have my NPC in there with me).

As I logged in Lower Jeuno, I was treated to the initial cutscene for the new expansion. It involved some crystal thing, and Aldo mouthing off about it. Young Aldo also shows up to stop time and do some weird shit, but after WoTG time travel seems to have become the norm.


Pretty, huh?

Well my first task set by the little runt was 'go farm some crystal bits, then meet me in Qufim'. Telling me where to get them was apparantly unnecessary, so I had to look it up on the wiki. So much for getting as far as I could by myself.

As we know from some of the Wings of The Goddess quests, arduous farming sessions for rare/ex mission items is a great substitute for actual content. Especially when half the server wants to obtain them at the same time. It took almost an hour to farm the first of three, and until I have all three, that's more junk clogging up my inventory. In light of Mog Satchels not being active until we physically recieve our security tokens (and ridiculous gobbiebag quests), I take back what I said about this being a good update for inventory - I'm worse off as it currently stands.


Oh well, maybe I'll go get some new enspells to play with. Now where do I buy them from...?

You can't? I have to farm them?

With all the other 486248billion RDMs farming theirs as well?

And the other asshats farming so they can rip people off on the AH?

Oh, ok...

More farming beastmen! No drops here, I've not even seen any proof that it drops in Crawler's Nest [S], I was curious and it was the only place where people weren't farming (not a good sign).

Soon I got bored of farming, and I saw that Enstone II dropped in Ro'Maeve, so I moved there to farm some more! Mostly because not as many people will have a Moongate pass (and I wanted to put mine to use) and more people are likely to aggro/wipe to the VT/IT weapons and statues there.

Super fun 45 mins of pot hunting resulted in this:

My first, and (judging by the performance of it) only tier 2 enspell for now, at least until the hype dies down. Only as I left Ro'Maeve, I found that you can now do Fields of Valor there, and pots were one of the training regiemes. :/


So I went out to play with it on some weak mobs. I'm not impressed. Firstly, you need to melee in enhancing gear to actually get the highest damage cap from it (rather than just cast in enhancing, then switch to haste/accuracy/whatever), and "Sword enhancement spell damage +X" gear does not have an effect, or at least my JSE ring didn't.


Wiv ring. (Equipped after damage hit cap)


Wivout ring.

Maybe you can't increase damage further after hitting the cap determined by enhancing skill, maybe you need to equip damage+ gear on cast, maybe it's broken, I don't know. All I know is Joyeuse + Tier one Enspell = Superior damage.

Lowering elemental resistance is, was, and always will be useless.

Sigh...

So much for staying up late...I'll just wait a few months until the prices go down again.

On the the other hand, at least Composure is quite good.

The Version Update Is Here! (09/04/2009)

Satchels (even though I can't use it until my token arrives...) and new gobbiebag quests make this a very friendly update for my inventory space. Mannequins hold four times as much now, so there's actual point in having them instead of swapping for a bookshelf. In addition, I can now turn my Delkfutt key into a key item and FINALLY store those goddamn bells from the christmas event...if only they handn't gone and added a /bell command.




Increased Silver Sea Remenants drop rates make me sad, because it's hard enough to find someone to sell me Bodb's slops, so it's going to get even less likely with more people getting Macha's slops. :(

Now, a quick look at the gobbiebag update;

Gobbiebag quests Part IX and Part X have been added.
These quests will become available after fulfilling certain conditions, and completing them will allow players to carry even more items in their inventory. Players must complete all previous gobbiebag quests before the new quests will become available.

I've logged myself by the gobbie so I can try to get on ASAP and grab the items (assuming it follows the same format as the previous quests) as cheap as possible before the cost is driven up.

I just REALLY hope isn't not something absurd like Behemoth leather/Damascus ingot/Star Sapphire/Cashmere cloth. There will be tears if this occurs. They might even add new items you get from doing A Crystalline Prophecy...

Twins!

To confirm the authenticity of my twin, I had to do our secret handshake. I see how it could be mistaken for something else, but any onlookers didn't seem too bothered by it.


I managed to finish the last WoTG mission, so here's a picture of a horny Elvaan chick to commemorate the occasion.