Rank 10

Well worth the struggle for the final mission. Glad I tried it solo, because it's not at all easy to find people to do these missions (even by doing "/sea all rank 9 san" and asking everyone I saw was no use, they were all on 9-1).


I made two more attempts at 9-2, the first ending like this:


I unintentionally MPK'd Trion when trying to kite the DRK during his 2-hour.

The difficulty in this fight lies in
a) Keeping both yourself and Trion alive, which requires you to;
b) Keep hate of Trion because he eats up damage and has low HP, and;
c) Not run out of MP, and try not to die during Convert (which will be needed for the final part of the fight).

I guess I would have had a little less trouble (and probably won a little while back) if I took a vile elixir or two.

Although the failed attempts weren't entirely wasted time:


It's been a long time since I got any increase in shield skill, it should be very close to the cap (189?) now. (not pictured) I got another parrying level too~


Feeling a little dismayed after another failed attempt, wasted food and 2-hour, I went back in again to see if he would ever deviate from his usual pattern of BLM > DRK > PLD.

I didn't have chainspell ready, so fully expecting to lose, I just went in without food. He did change his order, much to my relief, to BLM > PLD > DRK, which works out well because I can keep the DRK slept while we kill the pld, and the BLM dies fast so it gets him out of the way.

I had to kite the DRK again during his 2-hour, because his hits happily smash through stoneskin and it doesn't help when he's draining you for 100~200 HP every attack.



I never considered the time limit to be a potential problem, but if it had lived for 30 more seconds I would have been feeling very depressed.

I did screw up a couple of times on this run (interrupted initial cast on the 2nd part of the fight, then got slept and suddenly had the DRK and PLD hitting me, and Trion getting beaten up by the BLM) but I recovered just about, and not having food probably slowed me down on the first part of the fight (having to recast stoneskin more often) so I don't think the time limit is a major issue as long as you don't waste any time or screw up too much.

So, that's the whole of San d'Oria's storyline soloed (except 5-1 D:), and 9-2 was the only challenging one of the bunch. The others were fun though, I like easy wins.

In addition to my 100k and San d'Orian flag, I farmed up an Azure key while I was down in Fei'Yin, which traded in for this;


1.6k in NPCable junk!

And I couldn't have completed these missions at a better time, because Bastok now have Saruta AND are 3rd in conquest so it'll be cheap swapping nations!



Now to see how much I can solo of the Bastok storyline. I know enough Bastokans that will help me do missions if I get stuck anyway, so this shouldn't be as tough.

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.

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.

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).

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).