Terrifying Turtle Triumph!

So I've spent a fair while in Cape Terrigan farming Fields of Valor tabs in between playing Mass Effect 2 (a good game, will become a great game if I can get the extra DLC without having to pay more).

Anyway, I ran into Kvazz at one point and we decided to go do the Valley of Sorrows augment NM after duoing for a while. He brought a SAM friend along and we went and poked it a few times. Turns out the turtle is very fragile and exploded after three weaponskills. We came out with an INT+3 weskit (lucky taru >:|) and the rest was junk. After seeing how weak the turtle seemed to be, I thought I'd go challenge it myself the next day. I was worried about it having en-petrify or something similarly lame, but I went ahead and poped it anyway because I was sick of getting nothing from Sky. So the one I get was:

-Immune to sleep
-Immune to poison
-Absorbs Ice damage
-Takes 50% wind/fire damage
-Takes 5% Thunder/Earth/Water damage
-100% En-curse effect which halves HP/MP/Movement speed

I wasn't happy.


Somehow, I managed to win eventually by kiting with Bind/Gravity (not terribly easy without any terrain or much room for maneuver and killing it with bio/drain/Fire III. It's a good thing I was carrying holy waters, otherwise that curse would have been the death of me. In addition, I knew it could be dangerous so I opened with chainspell, only to discover the only nuke doing damage was fire and that was doing half damage, so I wasted my 2-hour figuring out which elements would do damage instead of spamming drain.

Of course, my efforts were rewarded with a bow that was actually no better than I would get in sky. I'll give it one more try, if that doesn't go well, I'll stick to sky.

How I maek money?

I've no idea how you're supposed to make money anymore. I went to Sea Serpent Grotto yesterday, because the fish guys there are supposed to drop coral fragments (which I want to try and craft some HQ coral gear) but I ended up with nothing but an inventory full of BRD songs after 90 mins. I tried a bit of fishing later, which got me level 10 and a Norg Shell which just about justified the trip but it's still lousy gil for the time spent down there.



I had someone attempt to craft me some darksteel mitts +1 as well, which has put me off getting anything HQ'd again instead of buying it from the AH.


Cost me over 280k in materials and a 50k tip I gave to the crafter, when I could have just bought them for 250k. On the plus side, I have about 200k in NQs leftover materials, assuming I can sell them for a reasonable price then the HQ cost me around 130k. Problem is it's going to be a looong time before I've got rid of all this crap.

So now I'm 1/16 on the hands, and 0/3 on the feet. I'm really not going to try and HQ the body because it's a 12k loss per NQ and -3% is good enough to spend and inventory space on.


Other fun things I did!


Took 1~2 hours to pop, I was very mad. 0/6? I'm not keeping track very well, but there's still the times where I've wasted hours camping the fuck and he's not popped.


Leveled BLU to 40, learnt Blank Gaze (Opo-Opos) and Uppercut (pictured). There's a couple more I need around this level, but most important (I think) would be MP drainkiss (leeches) because BLU sucks and needs something to help keep MP up.



Finally got enough Fields of Valor tabs from leveling BLU to try another bow. No such luck. 0/17

Need this god damn level cap to go up already so I can have an excuse to spam FoV.


Cannot unsee.

Long time coming

Only a week short of 8 months waiting for the Apollyon drop. I got the second half of my DRG materials in the same run, but I can only upgrade one AF per week, so RDM body then DRG head and I'm done with the essential AF upgrades.


Bow augment of the week. Any day now...

I've been trying to find people to join to kill Farruca Fly. Never thought it would be so freaking impossible to find anyone doing T2 VNMs that would at least let me leech kills, but eh such is life.




Seems I missed the bus that all the competant people doing magian weapons took. So if I happen to find anyone doing the VNMs they are almost always complete morons.

1/6 so far, and far too many hours wasted to get that. Why is everything simple end up so difficult for me? :(


I broke my game as well, only recently noticed that Mithra don't close their eyes anymore when resting (everyone else I asked reported them closed). It could be because I changed my .dats to get rid of the goofy vanilla idle stance.

MND BOW?!

Fuck you. Fuck you very much.

Pixies? In MY canyon?

It's more likely than you think


I don't know, so don't ask.

Now for the COOL SHIT I GOT:


1/1 FUCK YEAH


WHOA AWESOME (Had the ampoules for ages, need a Gleeman's cape now so I can sell prism)


I just can't get enough of these sweet augments (0/15ish now)



Aaand Juli helped me kill the WSNM for this, not had chance to try it yet :|

So, I heard you liek bonanzas?

It's been a while. I've been super with work and shit over the holidays so I didn't get much time to play/write stuff here.

So anyway, yet another mog bonanza just got announced, which is still some time away and nobody will win it, so it's not worth worrying about (until they announce the numbers, then I can complain about getting yet another statue for my mule).

So yeah, I'm on Cerb now and unsurprisingly there are a fair few more people here:

Not that this has helped me in any way, still not seen any shouts for missions that I'm on and more people only means more competition for FoV mobs (ugh), NMs, etc. I'll try putting together some groups when I have more time after I get my dissertation in.

Mainly I've being doing my most hated activity of camping NMs for the horribly time consuming Trial of the Magians quests, which requires me to kill a fuckton of trash NMs nobody cares about SEVERAL TIMES EACH (fucking hate that part, there's no reason for it other than to waste time), then kill a couple of new NMs that you can't kill solo, and your job is not even ideal for, so nobody wants to help you with it. Hopefully we can get together some sort of loljob alliance of DRG and PUP that need the kill so we can do it, otherwise I'm SOL.



The only thing this has going for it is that you can at least team up with whoever needs the quest and everyone gets credit for the kill, so thankfully the 4k+ people on this server aren't all potential enemies.



I saw some other neat stuff too, like the way frogs pop:


Gets kinda old though when you've been waiting on the NM to pop for three hours after the window opens (single placeholder lottery pops, fuck yes).


So far, I've had to kill:
Spendlix Spindlethumb x3
Herbage Hunter x3
Kirata x3
Intulo x4
Ramponneau x4
Keeper of Halidom x4

And finally, I have the last two to go until I get my DMG:99 polearm (relic-1!):
Shoggoth x6
Farruca Fly x6

Fuck knows how I'm going to finish this pair.

As for events, Lawz left the server so Salvage is in a 'wut' stage at the moment, I've not been on much either due to work but I expect it to go downhill unless we find a good WHM/BRD and or MNK replacement (preferably all three :|). Plus I don't want to lead runs and my memory isn't great at the best of times so keeping track of what cells people have/need is not going to work out, unless everyone actually takes care of things themselves, but I can hardly ask everyone to learn everything about salvage so I don't have to tell them what to do. In any case, going 2 times a week is not enough to get familiar with everything or get practiced enough to not suck, not to mention the issue of drops, I really don't have more time to dedicate to it either so all I can say is MEH D:

I got some cool shit from Limbus at least:


And I probably dropped about 10 places in the waiting list for nashi legs because of it, but this is worth the sexy.



And, I broke my previous Drakesbane-vs-Kirin record!



In between that, I've got the usual no drop (or even pop) from Timeworn Warrior, which I'm somewhere around 0/5 at now (and at least 3 occasions where I gave up camping because he didn't pop for over an hour...).

In addition, more failed MND bow augments:


And Lamian Kamans are 20k normally on Cerb, so that just got twice as expensive as it was.

Finally, it seems like some lovely people have taken over La Vaule [S]:


Sadly I don't really have the friends or contacts to start spamming Splitting Heirs for chuchu mantles, so no gil/gear for me!

Ok, I'm done dumping.

It just occured to me

I've spent at least 120k on lamian kamans. I'm STILL 0/2 on Timeworn Warrior, because it's not fucking poped at all the 3 or so hours (3 separate occasions) I've spent camping it.

Hate Augments.
Hate NMs.
Hate myself.
Q_Q

OH JEEZ VanaFest and updates!

So it's been a while since I looked at the playonline site, or talked about news or anything really.

SO, VanaFest 2010 is imminent and so far there's been a bit of hype before the actual event, such as:

- (Nomad) Mog Bonanza. Free relics for no-one!

- Some stuff about a competition on twitter to win a cute hat. I have enough hats already, am cute enough and I don't like twitter so I won't bother signing up. Plus I'm slow and won't be able to reply fast enough.

- And today, the announcement of a new version update planned for mid-march! (ie. April)


Going by the picture, it just looks like mundane crap (synergy, more WOTG missions, campaign adjustments). I'd be happy for missions, but I've fallen behind on the current ones, and nobody does shout groups for them, so I'm pretty much shit out of luck.


Considering they're announcing the details at the event, it's likely they'll have at least something impressive (avatars?!). Here's a picture they put up as a massive cocktease to contribute to the wild speculation:

"Making macros for some of the stage demonstrations."

Even though the macro text is blurred, from the rough size and shape of the letters it looks like /ma can'treadthis < me >. This is clearly absolute proof of a new avatar, and s1= SUMMON 1?! Again, concrete proof of there being more than one avatar planned for release in the next update.



So anyway, I've been trying my luck on the Jasper Tathlum NM again, now 0/3. I included the whole log to show the silly damage you can do with 300%TP Full Swing :3




I found my Hume equivalent guarding the Xarcabard 'outpost' (by outpost I mean flag pole with 2 people stood by it).






Almost there for RDM combat skills! Shield is stupidly hard to get compared to parrying for some reason, but once I've capped that I'll just finish parrying with an earth staff.



An interesting, but ultimately useless augment. I have now sucessfully augmented bows with every stat EXCEPT MIND. It makes me very sad, especially considering that when I finally do get MND it will be negative.

I don't know...

JP players being weird. I tried to join in, but they cancelled costumes before I could get mine on :(



Auto-translate being weird. Same set of moonrunes came up every time someone used auto-translate. Guessing it's an error message of some kind, or aliens have hacked my game.




Augments being normal. Shit sucks, back to FoV I go~

DUN DUDUDUN DUN DUN, DUN DUDUDUDUN

DUN DUDUDUN DUN DUN, DUN DUDUDUDUN


Yeah, my first Odin. He's a bit of a sissy, just tried to annoy me to death with AoE status effects (bind, blind, silence, curse, blahblahblah). I want a better screenshot next time.


Drops were pretty nice though, even if I wasn't even tempted to ninja lot anything ;D

Gogo Genbu resist set? Or you know, not.

Since my augment luck sucks (who's doesn't?), I went after some NM that drops a MND+1 tathlum. It didn't. Shock.

But camping was relatively painless for the first time in my life. I showed up, no competition, killed the frist lot of placeholders and BAM! NM pops and lets me kill him. Sweet. Someone else showed up just to see it die, and they were just after scylds (some synergy thing) so I said I'd team up with them on the next pop and went off to do some FoV in between.



Cape terrigan appears to be stupidly popular (probably because it's close to the outpost, gives decent points and you can use an NPC there) so you have to compete for raptors and dumb stuff like that. I should start doing it in sky I guess, but it's so much faster elsewhere.

I returned later for 2 hours of killing placeholders and watching competition for the NM to show up, climaxing with me leaving before it pops because I had limbus to attend. This is why I hate NM camping.


And what was possibly the most depressing and humiliating limbus run in my life. This SE apollyon will haunt me for a long time.

No, you can't sac pull in limbus, and no there's no real need to ever. But my bad for explaining why something is a bad idea in an attempt to be polite instead of just typing 'NO' or 'STOP' first. Although that nearly ended the run having to reraise near to blood aggro mobs, it wasn't really the only thing that bothered me that run. 1f was a cataclysmic orgy of death due to people

a) Not being careful with slimes and forgetting how easily they can make you very fucking dead.
b) Forgetting what the fuck utsusemi or bouncing hate is for.
c) Believeing they are invincible for some unknown reason, and charging in without buffs and subsequently going from full HP to 0 while I'm in the middle of hasting them.

2f was a little better, nobody died to crabs (I think?). But the boss was handled horribly, resulting in much death including my own, which I am mainly to blame for. The kraken boss uses hundred fists. Coupled with the fact mobs hit generally hard in this area, it's not a pleasant experience. We normally just have DDs 2hr and ruin it's day, Grav it and let them run away if in trouble, this usually makes it die before hundred fists wears off, and I get to chain nuke and it's fun! Instead accomplice a DD, perfect dodge and kite it is apparantly a better strategy because you can show off to all your friends how awesome your thf is. Of course don't forget to finish it off by running back into range after your rdm has it bound and gravitied so it can one shot you and put the mage back on top of the hate list (remember that DD you just used accomplice on? Yeah). But then I decide to fuck up by expecting the DD to retake hate (keep in mind this is a WAR using hand-to-hand and a SAM that likely doesn't have capped polearm) so I nuke a bit, and it obviously is coming for me, but it's 1% now and I can kill it with one more nuke, or the DD will before it gets to me. Turns out I should have chainspell nuked, or ran out of range a bit more as it killed my stoneskin/shadows then followed up with a 1k TP move. The shame.

But anyway, even before the run our best DD (the WAR) was told to bring daggers for the slashing immune floor (2f). I expressed my doubts, saying polearm would be better. I was told he was capable of 1500 eviscerations on war (which I didn't believe at all, not without either 2 houring or dia/angon/bergressor+brd) so I accepted he'd be fine without polearm. Except he didn't bring daggers, or a polearm but hand-to-hand. This is WAR, which has a B- rank or higher with any melee weapon EXCEPT hand-to-hand, which is a D.

3f fucking sucks no matter what you do, but it's still easy to pull off, unless you're low on time from the other floors (shouldn't be, but we obviously were) OR if you try to sac pull without disbanding. What makes it worse is that a sac pull isn't even neccessary to begin with. So needless to say I was speechless when I saw an army of skeletons come marching into view.

People finally sorted themselves out for 3f boss and finally 4f where nobody actually died, though we came close and I still ran down to 0 mp before convert was up. Shit like this is why RDM is not a good main healer. Or at least I'm not without seriously good support. Anyway, we got the chip so it was not a total failure.

SO AFTER ALL THAT QQing and misc rage, what can we learn?
1) Next time we do Apollyon SE with me solo healing, I choose who comes. Even though most of the people I'd take as a first choice have quit, so much for that :(
2) Alternatively, take a better RDM. And I mean a god-tier RDM with access to cure V and light arts.
3) If we got RDM AF from 1f instead of dying all over the place and being generally wank, I wouldn't have complained at all and would have been very cheerful for the entirity of the run.

God damn, I love complaining.

Final FoV augment, Gration and Hydrawr

No more tabs, guess that's it for me unless I start farming high-level FoV (hint: I won't) for tabs :\

I got myself a picaroon's shield for 150k from someone's bazaar. Whether that's a good price or not I don't know, but I do know I can get at least 150k profit from the 100% Tatmi shield drop.


I dusted off my magic damage set to give it a try, even though his -aga is easily out runnable. I was curious.


I took him up to the river this time, instead of the previous duos I did with juli by the shed on the way to riverne. There's lots more room and no aggro so it's even easier to outrun him. I kept losing claim during the fight, which had me concerned about him dying to dot unclaimed so I stopped dot around 5% and did the rest with nukes. The shield went from 400k > 350 > 300 in the past month, but there's none on the AH so I might try to bump it up to 350 again. Chances are someone awesome will undercut by 100k just because I put mine up and I'll end up making a loss from this whole venture thanks to AH tax.



We did a couple of Tinnins, which got us an Alkalurops, couple of bodies and a hat. I think we're doing the Cerberus guy later, not sure about Tyger (pity cause I would have wishlisted Aurum body if we were). But one mystery remains: where are these pop sets coming from?! We haven't done any T3s in the LS, and nobody's mentioned it so I can't really contribute what I have left over from the ZNM soloing I did a while back (though it's mostly the seal from Armed Gears...).