It's that time again...

Mog Bonanza III.


They didn't even wait a year after the last one this time? So this either shows SE can tell the dwindling interest in their game (so are planning regular bonanzas), or don't intend to be holding any more events like this by the time next summer rolls around.

Either way, I look forward towards burning 60k between all my characters and maybe winning a couple of statues for my mules.

Lootwhorin'

Jailer of Love. Full drops. I get three of them :D


My inventory is all jumbled because my game crashed shortly after lotting (I don't know why, I just opened my satchel to make sure I had space) but fortunately everyone passed/it dropped before I d/c'd <3

Needless to say, I could build a new house with all the bricks I shat while trying to log back in.

Voracity = Novia by the way, Novio will be a long time coming. But I'm more than pleased with what I have for now, Novia is a tasty piece of gear and very underrated.

Gulool Ja Ja

Just because.



We had to pass true sight stuff in Mamook, so we just rampaged through to the boss' room.



I was in the adds party, we were in a side room holding them while the others killed the boss so I missed most of the fight but it wasn't terribly difficult or demanding either so I couldn't mess anything up!



Wasn't easy to get a good picture at that distance :\ not that I dared to go closer anyway.


It turns out he's a really pathetic king. Is so low level he doesn't even grant EXP, and is incredibly poor! He doesn't even have any good loot, what a loser. And I didn't even get a picture of his throne because it was so crappy looking. Even so, it's a shame because I'll probably never go back there again! I also discovered he has a back door to the Jade Sepulcher which takes 5 mins to get to Whitegate. With this in mind, why does it take so long for him to arrive for Besieged?

So I got some cool shorts I thought I'd post pictures of them and some other stuff

Now I'm happy with my DRG at last, any other major improvements (Vork, Rajas, Aurum body, n.head/legs) are out of my reach but I'm satisfied with leaving it at is for now. I'm still making improvements however, just not going to be a major priority.


Byebye limbus points '-')/

Also means I'm in no hurry to finish the Shantotto expansion for the leg gear from that.

I've had a fiddle with my Healing Breath trigger as well.


I decided to test whether it was worth going for full HP+ on trigger, then equip Wyvern HP along with the relic hat before the actual breath goes off, instead of the Wyvern HP+ going on my trigger set.

It seems to work quite well, despite there being a lag with wHP+ showing up on the UI, for the sake of healing breath it doesn't appear to suffer from that delay. I still need to try it in actual soloing situations to see if it's totally reliable under laggy conditions etc. because I don't want to get caught out with a crappy 200HP healing breath at a critical moment because I bashed my macro too much. For now my trigger HP is approaching 800, and I should easily surpass that if I open up wHP slots for more HP gear.


Got me a pickup party for ASA 10:


Easy stuff, only 2 DRGs for DD so it got a bit chaotic when things started resisting sleep but we pulled through with no deaths and won in 11 minutes. This is probably a really easy fight anyway even if you have to wipe, because you could kill half of the mobs with a weak group then wipe reraise and continue. Assuming it's a 30 min BC and not 15, that is.

The final fight looks like a complete nightmare, so that may take several tries (and much fun running around the Den of Rancor for 16 key items).

Shantotto mission progress

So, which were the clones again?


Somehow people actually wipe to this fight. This worries me, because the same people will be attempting the last BCNM when I need it and chances are you'll need to collect a million ??? points, capped at level 1, before attempting the BCs which will all be lost on entry. Because the add-ons are awesome like that.

My progess has been slow, but steady despite spending hours backtracking because I keep forgetting to get certain cutscenes etc. Most recently I've had to embark on another tedious farming quest, which includes the exciting twist of each target monster being weak to only one type of damage (Ranged, Piercing, Blunt, Slashing or Magic) and any other damage types will do 0. Plus they despawn after ~5 minutes of being engaged, so despite them being weak overall, you can't possibly solo it as no job can do every type of damage....or can it?


Unsurprisingly, RDM manages to reach around SE's opressive policy of forced grouping by just being generally awesome. Most jobs can solo several different ones, but only RDM (and NIN?) can deal all the different damage types.


The Ranged-damage only guy was naturally the most trouble, since RDM has a poor selection of bows, and very low skill (210 cap) plus I only had /RNG 15 so no extra accuracy bonus or Barrage. Despite that, I managed it with a level 58 bow, which was the best available on the AH at the time aside from a Failnaught, and I wasn't about to dump 3 mil for the sake of killing one monster.

I'm very pleased that my time spent skilling bow for RDM actually came in handy, who would have thought? So this feeling of elation almost offsets the time I'm pouring into this expasion to make such slow progress.

Crafting and complaining

Having finally come the realisation that people might not want to fight over trash mobs so that they can advance, SE have allowed people to sell/buy the drops instead of doing away altogether with the mundane fetch quests. Of course this only means that people are going to spend time farming said items to sell to those who are too lazy/rich to do it themselves at inflated prices. Not to mention the now added fun of crafting thrown in so there's a chance you lose the items you just farmed in a failed synth!


Fortunately they're low enough level so that anyone with 0 skill can attempt to craft, but I still got skillups at 4 Alchemy. I was lucky enough not to break any synths, so I didn't have to go through farming again, and could sell the spares I got! I've made about 100k from this stuff, which is decent considering I didn't go out of my way.

Parchment turned out to be a rare commodity when I wanted it, with singles going for over 3k and no stacks on the AH. It's a level 31 leathercraft synth so I wasn't able to make my own. However, I found that you can get it from a level 2 desynth involving flutes (which are very cheap and easily obtainable from NPCs)

So I grabbed a stack of lightning crystals and fired Cuddles into action in Bastok's music shop. Hopefully I've got the worst of this expansion over with, and the rest is just NM fights/cutscenes.

Business as usual.

Servers are up, but I've got an 90+ mins left to update, so I guess I'm not doing anything until tomorrow. Nothing new here. Love my ISP!

Updaet notes.

SCH got Modus Veritas nerfed, because you could do a shit ton of damage with it in a short space of time with impeccable timing/the right conditions. SE actually nerfed something before it was exploited for a change, which is the biggest surprise. Some guys killed a yovra, some people got upset because they wasted merits, the world moves on. I always thought it would be a useful thing to speed up lowman kited fights etc. but you don't really find that many (good) SCH's that actually gear for nukes/helixes rather than just curewhore.

/tell filter for spam messages will be nice if it works, I've been getting a load of RMT tells recently and it's starting to irritate me.

Avatar Favors will provide a few minutes of entertainment for me before they become taken for granted, assuming that they are even used at all (considering SMN is brought for damage, if you need party support you're gonna get a BRD or COR).

I can't even be bothered to think about MMM or the other misc junk because nobody careeees.

I gave in and got the Shantotto crap, just so I had everything. If it's going to follow the same pattern as ACP or MKD it'll be a few months before I finish it.

Hurrr FFXI

Possibly the weakest version update preview I've ever seen. My god.

Even if they did announce something remotely interesting, like deleting all jobs beside WHM, PLD and SAM, I wouldn't be terribly interested because I've got a ton of RL shit to sort. Shit like:

"oh sorry, that three weeks worth of data collection you devoted yourself to organising (very well, might I add) is going to be scrapped and all your efforts were wasted :) Hope you didn't neglect any other area of your work to make sure it was done properly! Oh you did? Whoops! Glad I'm not you. Now could you start from scratch and re-collect twice as much data in 4 weeks? thx! :)"

The above is obviously exaggerated. It only refects a FUCKING IDEAL SCENARIO and I have no gurantee that the stimuli for the experiment are working reliably, much less a full 4 weeks to test in, as I need to recruit more participants from a now dwindling pool, wait for their responses (fuck people who don't check emails for 7+ days), arrange dates for testing, and make sure I can get someone in to test them. If I can't get anyone in, or they decide they feel like FUCKING OFF ON A HOLIDAY WITH TWO DAYS NOTICE RACHEL, YES I'M REALLY NOT HAPPY ABOUT THAT, guess who has to cover for them? Moi.

Fuck

My

Life

Of course, nobody has specifically asked this of me, but I seem to be the only one that can get shit done without having to be told explicitly what to do. Despite this, I probably have the weakest CV out of the lot of us simply because I've not done any part-time cannon-fodder jobs at a warehouse or fast food outlet. Fuck yeah employers.

Maybe I'll just take off for a few days and hope everything is peachy when I come back.

CUT ALL THE REST BECAUSE IT GOT SERIOUSLY WHINEY AND DEPRESSING :)

INSTEAD HERE'S A KITTEN IN A BOX WITH HIS KITTENY FRIENDS :))

Bad form from me. Hopefully this post is more amusing than it is depressing.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

So by now everyone has relised the add-on scenarios are pretty bad. Like "WTF why have I even payed for this" bad. It appears SE have realised this as well, but instead of actually changing the content from bad > good (the logical solution) they instead tease us with powerful quest rewards (see earlier rage post) and now random convenience items!


Why it has a 40 hour recharge, I don't know. Apparantly you can abuse convenience. Now having scanned over the list of areas you can use it in, I see it has little use in gathering people for endgame activities, although it could be useful if people have spare characters to park them in certain areas (say, Uleguerand Range / Attohwa Chasm for easy-access ENMs).

I could say at the very least it prevents idiot party members getting lost in the jungles, for example, but chances are you don't want to be partying with the kind of people that get lost in the jungles.

So anyway, I leveled MNK a bit.

Blessed Radience nom nomnom. 15~21 still works pretty nicely at Buburimu outpost. I intend to do parties from 21~37 now I can get some decent gear going.

I also noticed an odd thing with Counter:


I'm 99% sure that the counter skillup came from the WS, and it's already known that counter can proc on WS, but I don't think I ever saw a 'miss' message before (this is speaking from 60 levels of MNK experience on my mule, obviously kaya hasn't done much punching).