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.