Haven't we been here before?

Flame gorget go! I couldn't get a party to try it out though :\



I've been pushing to make progress with Bastok missions, and so far got from Rank 2~5


My third (and final) run in with the mission 2-3 dragon. Much easier solo on BLU than it was for RDM. I filled my inventory with hi-potions, and ended up using 2 (which I would have lived without anyway) so now have a ton of them to shift.


Rank 3 involved trading crystals to skip the pointless missions! Also mission to Jeuno to save the ebassador guy who randomly wanders into Delkfutt's tower (for NO reason, and still doesn't explain after you save him) and gets knocked out in a place that is inaccessible unless you climb ten floors, kill an NM for the key, then travel BACK DOWN to reach the basement. Good thing the key is re-useable and I've done it twice before! I climbed the tower anyway, to grab the key item for ACP 11.


Magicite. Did this all as WHM to tele/warp around faster. Turns out Otzroja is a bit annoying solo at level 42. And some of the levers (the door you need the torch for especially) are really annoying to open because you have to be in a really specific position.


5-1 next, just need to borrow a mnk (or almost any other job would do, I imagine). Northlands outposts would be nice as well...

Apart from all that, I spent some 3 hours in Sacrarium helping people farm subligars. We had a good drop rate at first, but then the THF had to go and it fell to 1/109580185 kills. Fortunately the guy who wanted THF subligar d/c'd so we managed to get subligars for everyone else who was left and gtfo. At least I got some Conquest Points out of it? Yay.

I saw an ACP 11 shout while I was looking for a party, and decided to give it a go, since I'd just farmed the key item. Typically, the last guy who joins doesn't have the key item and we have to escort him up the entire tower, killing/kiting everything in the way (no sneak/invis and I can't cast on him when he's level-capped). Thankfully it wasn't in vain.


Everyone knew what they were doing! PLD had magic damage gear, and could actually hold hate for a bonus (and didn't get charmed once). The only difficult part was the THF (designated clone-killer) was on the opposite side of the room, so we had to run into aoe range if they needed curing, and they had to run into aoe range to pull the clones because they were running towards us. Coupled with the fact it was spawning clones in pairs for some reason, things got a little messy towards the end when the THF got hit with Seed of Judgement and died, leaving me to nuke the clones (but was running out of MP) and my Thunder got resisted on the last clone (which then killed the SCH), so I used weapon bash, stunned the crystal again, and was about to melee the clone to finish it off (was out of options!) but luckily the SMNs kept up the damage on the crystal and finished it off.

So even with a good group it can get messy.


WAIT LOL, HOW DID WE EVEN GET HERE???

look, it's that bit from the starting CS and I'm not in it:(

So anyway, the entire ACP storyline is pointless and confusing because it revolves around Aldo's sister who has being missing since Tavnazia got owned, but has been in the game since the start.


Except that she does have a different name, and that was never explained either. I'll try talking to her to see if she says anything different.

So, ACP is a mindless nonsensical expansion, with a 'storyline' that opens more plot holes than it closes. But if you want to try for some neat augmented items, and a shiny new body piece, then go ahead by all means.

Horse, Weekend pickups and a new salute.

(The following may not follow logically or chronologically, I can't be bothered to organise this entry)

Stuff that I did:


I got asked to help kill Dark Ixion, not that they really needed me at all (and I missed a pickup party that beat the final ACP mission in the process ><), it felt like I was there out of pity and to soak up MP from all the damage I took (it was difficult actually getting near to WS without being hit with some form of AoE), but there was a cool moment when I dodged Wrath of Zeus with Super Jump.


This probably isn't jaw-dropping, but my gear could be better, and I was at least pleased with it considering it was 100%TP with no angon, and my only buff I had was food. I assumed Wheeling Thrust was the best WS for the job, since I was doing SAWS but I would have liked to play around with others to see what they did, Impulse Drive might actually be half decent at 300% TP and with Angon to make up for Wheeling's ignore defense.

Well, I got a title out of it at least.

I got a nice screenshot of Saruta as well while getting the outpost for Cuddles.



And subsequently got my own, along with the few other areas Bastok had claimed. They are seriously poor at conquest for some reason, despite more players being with Bastok than Windy. So Northlands outposts may be a while off.


YOU DO NOT HAVE ANY GREENS.

I did some misc quests to help me get around Bastok a little easier as well, like the Mog House exit upgrade, and the Whitegate warp.


Now, here's a shot of another attempt at the final ACP mission;


SNES graphics were neccessary to reduce lag in the fight. I have a sword out because it all went tits-up and I wanted to melee cloned people for giggles. (Prepare for wall-of-text RAEG post)

I've gone with some workable setups, I won't lie. But I'm still 0/2, so how can this be?
a) I could simply fail so hard at this that I can't succeed regardless of group
b) Despite having suitable jobs, people are idiots and cannot do anything right unless I spell it out for them, which I tend not to do because I don't want to sound condescending.

While it may be easy to assume I only pick b) due to my own self-serving bias and so attribute failure to the actions of others, I genuinely get stuck with idiots the majority of the time and sometimes I can't pick up the slack short of playing their jobs for them.

Now in this particular fight, I didn't go in with high hopes. The PLD wasn't particularily well geared, and clearly didn't know much (if anything) about the fight. The combined total of all his magic damage reduction gear was:
MDB +5, Magic damage taken +5%.
I didn't want to patronise him about his fundamentally retarded gear choices because it would only be met with the usual "I can't get good gear Q_Q", which annoys me greatly, because you can get non-retarded gear pretty easily, especially a half decent magic damage set for PLD, from the AH.

I wasn't too bothered about damage taken anyway, because we had a good WHM and RDM to keep him alive, as long as he could hold hate and not get charmed. I told him explicitly what to do and what not to do before we went in, so that should have been ok.

Right?

Right???

lol,

Wrong.

He proceded to run in, use ALL of his abilities like a champ BEFORE he'd done anything to the crystal, so invincible/sentinel/rampart/etc = 0 hate! It's literally astounding (and sad) how someone can play for 75 levels on one job and still fail to understand the basic game mechanics that surround said job's only purpose.

Oh yeah, I forgot to say he started RUNNING IN CIRCLES around the crystal after he finally flashed it (didn't have hate the whole fight, just ran around it to take damage). Which is something I explicitly told him NOT to do beforehand...

Granted, I screwed up as well and stunned a clone instead of the crystal on it's second cast (I was busy trying to tell the PLD what to do...), which made everyone panic and despite me stunning every other subsequent cast, we didn't recover and wiped.

Now I do focus on this PLD alot, but there was a SAM/RNG10 and dual-wielding WAR, but they can't be blamed for having not-so-useful jobs, even if I do dislike mediocre melee-only people. Couldn't fault the SMN, but with the absolutely tragic performance of the PLD there really wasn't much room left for anyone else to fuck up to a degree that was even noticeable compared to him.

I'm being pretty horrible to him, poor guy. He wasn't a terrible person, just pretty lackluster and could have just broke down horribly under pressure (wat, I know).

What makes this even more irritating is that this guaranteed failure after only 1 minute inside the battlefield means I've got to spend another half-hour climbing a 30-capped tower, and then wait another 30 when I join my next party for the rest of them to collect the key item AFTER they join and keep the considerate people who got it beforehand waiting.

If I'm not zerging this next time, I want to make sure I get a good tank. If not, I'll get my MDB gear (and buy an I.R. Lance) and just give it to them.

Short version: Don't join weekend pickups.

Rank with the stench of defeat

I've been trying to finish up some mission storylines. Here's how they went:

ACP final fight!
Our setup seemed decent, we had RDM/drk x2, PLD, RNG, SMN, BLU. One major problem with this fight for me is that my "telepoint lag" seems to manifest itself fourfold in the swooshy whirly attack animations of this boss, and that really kills my performance in the fight unless I face the wall, which is not altogether too helpful. God forbid should I actually get in range of the crystal.


It went alright for the first 50%, but we were burning MP way too fast, because people kept going into AoE range to cure the tank who was running all over the fucking place. Better positioning would have made it much smoother. Charm really screwed us over as well because it was resetting hate on the tank, so everyone else was getting drawn in and taking damage. I've since learned that you can outrun or stun the charm move, so that's something that will help for next time. (we failed, by the way, so I get to do another climb of delkfutt's, yaay)


It's a 30-minute BC so you aren't really in a hurry to do damage, you just need to keep people alive. So a strong backline (3 mages) plus one decent DoT melee (MNK) on the crystal and 1~2 people to deal with adds and maybe do some damage to the crystal as well should be good. If you're going to have a dedicated tank, then make sure they have a decent magic damage build (assuming the TP moves are magic damage, they look it anyway) and they seriously need to look out for charm and outrun it because it's not easy to get hate back from 0 with reset timers. Need a stunner somewhere in there for -aga nukes, and two if you want to stun charm as well.

Alternatively you can just zerg it.

San d'Oria finale!
I tried shouting for help to get 9-2 done to no avail (granted there was only one other Rank 9 Sandy person in the zone), so I headed out to Fei'Yin alone to gauge the fight solo.


11 vs. 1? Seems fair to me.

RDM/pld because cocoon is annoying to recast every min and it's very easily interrupted.

I just did the usual stuff, but didn't bother with any sleeps after the first couple because it slows down killing too much, and there's too many to sleep without an -aga version. They broke through Stoneskin pretty often, but were really lousy at interrupting me, so I could just recast it whenever. They kept running around me to form this circle, so I couldn't make full use of my shield. if I started by aggroing them, then running back to the corridor, I might be able to make better use of it and even tank without stoneskin for extremely fast TP gain plus shield mastery bonus. Also good for skillups, I got a couple of parrying ones in the fight.



Part deux. The bit I was worried about, having to keep Trion alive vs. three significantly harder orcs. There's a BLM, PLD and DRK, and all have pretty heavy bias towards their jobs - meaning that PLD doesn't hit especially hard (50~70), the DRK hits like a truck (100~200), and the BLM... well, silence lands on him so he's not a concern.

I cast Protect on Trion, not shell because I didn't intend on letting the BLM get a spell off and I wanted to conserve MP for cures. I made sure to tell him to not get his fucking shit killed.


Should have taken my own advice.

Sleep II > BLM. Trion decided to attack this first. What an ass.
Sleep I > DRK. Forgot to cast sleep II over it afterwards. My bad.
Bind > PLD. Wore early, and had him hitting me while we tried to take the blm down.

BLM died, I cast flash on the PLD to get stoneskin back up, but didn't notice the DRK had woken up, who ran over at that point, interrupted my stoneskin and then finished me off while I was unable to act for 30 seconds thanks to the awesome way SE designed the game.

I forgot about Sentinel :|

As this actually seems a do-able solo now, I'll try again. Same strategy, the first part is easy but I'll make sure to filter damage taken so my log isn't spammed horribly and I can tell what's going on.

For the second part, I think I'll chainspell right off the bat and sleep 2 everything. Following that, hopefully Trion will go for the DRK or BLM first (DRK is rough, and I'd like to get that out of the way, but I'm not sure what the BLM is capable of spell-wise.

Adventurer Appreciation

Even if it's not much compared to the mog bonanza, it's at least a nicely illustrated and extravagant way of announcing a new batch of anniversary rings.

And I was genuinely amused by this little message from Tzee Xicu:

Hark, unclean adventurers; accursed worshippers of the false Goddess.
Your wicked existence, while an affront to the true faith, strengthens the bonds of the noble Yagudo race. To you blasphemers do we owe our unfaltering unity.
May death take you and your tainted kith and kin.

Anyway, I've been doing some ACP stuff:


A level 30-capped Delkfutt's tower climb. Daunting at first, it's not at all bad if you're careful and take your time, though next time I'll do it as WHM for Reraise in case of emergency (I forgot they lowered the level requirement).


More junk from repeating the Fei'Yin fight.


Killed this guy, so I can summon all but Fenrir now on my Lv. 10 SMN!


And also spent 2 hours killing crap to learn an awesome WS that freaking explodes when you hit stuff!

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 :\

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.