Missions, Merciful cape, and more!

Everyone makes a big deal over Karaha-Baruha summoning Fenrir to save the day and whatnot, and while I'll admit it was a cool cutscene, I could have just summoned Fenrir on my level 10 SMN with no problem and saved everyone a big fuss.


So I've got my progress on the WotG Windurst quests up to date, and I've gone as far as I could solo with missions, and this time there wasn't too much hugely unecessary and tedious chores to get sidetracked with.


Lilisette takes her dates to some pretty grim locations.

Also, as the title of this post suggests, I've obtained a Merciful cape. Now this is the first time I've ever seen one drop, and since I've started sea I've had enough time to build up enough points to be first for it. But anyway, I've rolled out my Glamor Jupon once again so I can hit 301 enhancing skill (at the cost of 2 inventory spaces). I need to re-evaluate what I'm carrying around with me.

Pictures aren't uploading it seems, I'll try and edit it later.

Brb, soloing sea access.

So SE confirmed what I was looking forward to most from the next update: abolition of CoP level caps.



But that isn't the only change being made. They are removing the level caps on CoP battlefields, so it's now entirely possible that at the very least a few jobs will be able to solo right through past 6-4 (I'm looking at you, NIN and RDM). While this will undoubtebly upset some people, and will certainly cause people to start boasting about beating CoP 'when it was hard', it's great for people who don't have a strong circle of friends or haven't been playing that long and are finding it impossible to find help for these missions. I think it's a great move, even if it does take the challenge out of the fight (even though the biggest challenge about the un-nerfed fights was getting the right people to do it with).

Unfortunately they're also changing the level and monster distribution in the areas

The upcoming version update will see the lifting of level restrictions in Chains of Promathia areas. In light of the planned level cap increase, the level and distribution of enemies in certain Promathia areas will also be adjusted to pose a worthy challenge to players level 75 and beyond.

Which could either result in the addition of high-level exp camps in the far reaches of Riverne or Pso'xja, or at the same time some level 85+ enemies guarding the entrance to the newly uncapped CoP mission areas. Since I was looking forward to the idea of soloing my own Stoneskin gorget after the update, I fully expect SE to ruin my plans by distributing high-level promyvion monsters around the NMs that I want, which is to be expected following SE's first law in MMO development: 'fuck you, buddy'.

As for my activities, I'm not really logging in at the moment so I have less distractions as I procrastinate massively (by writing this, for example) before my final exam. But here's what I did since I last posted:


(Almost) caught up on WoTG missions, I'm on the last available trio of quests for each nation, each of which culminates in a fight of some sort before I can progress onto the final set of missions to truly be up to date, but Juli is on all the same quests as me so I at least know one person who is at the same point as me.


Bored myself to tears in hours and hours of Campaign to finally earn my medal rank back, so I could buy an Allied Ring. Still too low for Fiat Lux, but I don't know enough people to do it with anyway so it's not a big deal. Somehow I've lost 4 ranks since they released the final one, and the worst part is I don't need any exp for my 75's so there's really no advantage to doing campaign anymore.


Did some leveling of subs from 37~40 in East Ronfaure [S]. Never actually partied there before, but it's very easy exp (as to be expected). SAM and WAR now 40 (in the same evening!), even though they don't offer much over /37, and I never use /WAR anyway...but regardless WAR is fun as hell and is a beast of a job (pictured is my best WS at 38, with uncapped skill, and I did another for 500~ at 40 without Mighty Strikes).

Still need to do DRK/PLD/THF/BLU to 40 (not likely to see much use, so not essential) and BLM, but mage jobs are boring as hell and don't get invites, so I'm bound to be lumped with pet soloing again.

WTF (Windurstian Teen Force)

Oh, you.

...I finally found some people to do the WOTG mission I was stuck on, and since then have been speeding through them to the next set of nation quests, which I'm in the middle of doing (not checked if I can do them solo though).



Some of these quests I REALLY despise, not because of the story or difficulty or anything, but because some of them are fucking tedious, for example, Beneath the Mask goes something like this:

> Talk to guy in Bastok
> Go to Beadeaux
> Warp back to own nation, warp to Gustaberg and walk to Bastok again
> Go to the Eldieme Necropolis, talk to guy
> Said guy has forgotten some seal, you need to obtain some items to make a new one.
> Trip to Whitegate/Jeuno auction house to obtain said items
> Go to Vunkerl inlet to make seal from items
> Go back to the useless fuckwit in the Eldieme Necropolis
> Return to Bastok again
> Go to Beaucedine Glacier
> Wonder where the last hour of your life went

Another fun example is the Windurst quest I'm on, which is supposed to be a battlefield fight. Except it would be too straightforward to have me go to X zone and press Y button to initiate the fight. No, I've got to go to king's room of each beastman stronhold in the present to get three key items before I can do the fight. I'd be fine with them drawing out shit for the sake of it just to make you go and use old areas, it's cool to go there once in a while, but I have other shit to do and I only live so long, do I really have to keep doing this shit for every quest?


Am not impressed.

One good thing came out of these quests though; I encountered a JP group doing Shoggoth and they let me tag along


I got 4 kills over 1 and a half hours at most. Is good.

Later, I saw someone shouting for it, so I joined against my better judgement as they'd been shouting for a good 30 min with no success and they were failing to correctly spell VNM.


By some miracle we managed 2 kills over the space of 4/5 hours when I finally went to bed at 1am :\
(I must admit though, the 2nd kill was mainly done by 3 BSTs, and it was relatively painless)


So 6 Farruca Fly Kills to go and I'm done with this ordeal.

WoTG quests, Scholar and Ballista

Relatively eventful weekend for me outside of the usual event stuff. Started playing catch-up on WoTG quests (since it's the only thing I can do solo) namely The Price of Valor, which requires you to kill some random BLM orc.


You just need to kite him around the lake you pop him by, although there are some sound-aggressive mobs (and one HP aggro ghost at night) around the lake, it's a big enough area to avoid them and even if they do aggro you can just keep running until you lose them. Alternatively, you can just cast sneak and plough straight through them if they are being obnoxious with positioning. Which reminds me, aggressive mobs seem to follow me EVERYWHERE even before they've detected me, they ALWAYS move into the worst possible place, or just fucking run straight at me from across a zone. Game hates me.

Anyway, the orc took me two attempts because he has a fairly potent en-curse that I didn't think much of at first, so wasn't very careful to avoid melee hits. After it did inevitably curse me, I remembered curse reduces movement speed, which didn't go down too well because I had to stop and use a holy water while he broke my stoneskin with melee attacks before I could run away. So when I get curse off, he decides to hit me with an -aga 3 as I'm stood right next to him and can't outrun it. Annoyingly, it only just did enough damage to kill me (thanks to the -50% HP from curse), so if I'd spent 100~200k more on my MDT set I'd have survived. Figures.

SCHOLARAWR
I quested an all jobs lvl 1 great axe because it looks silly on other jobs. I mainly used staff for actual fights. Soloing is painfully slow.


I've since realised I might be better off trying to follow a BLM solo guide rather than grinding like a melee. But I got a party later, and naturally got thrown into the main healing role cause Scholar has cures so must be good.

Actually, that's false. SCH doesn't have cures. It has cure. And that's it until level 17. People joke about RDM casting one spell (refresh) over and over in a fight well, this LITERALLY was casting cure 1 repeatedly over and over until the mob was dead. It was agonising.


Even more so when goblins used bomb toss, and I'm the only healer. I suggested the leader get another job for support when we started, so I didn't have 5 useless front line jobs to heal (NOBODY had a dancer support job, despite it being the only useful DD sub at this level). So, we got a DRG/PLD to help cure. I find that in low-level parties, it's better for your sanity if you just roll with it. If you repeatedly wipe and lose exp, then sure, make an excuse and go, but 90% of the time your party will be just plain bad so there's no point in getting worked up over it. Even if your backline support is a character that can cast a 20HP cure 1 twice before running out of MP. Level 15-17 in two hours is abysmal, even back in the day before level sync and fields of valor. But hey, at least I have cure 2 now.

Ballista!
Or Diorama-Abjhalalalis Ghelsba (however it's spelt) as it is better known. Nem organised a pretty big Diorama get-together for his LS anniversary, as with previous years. And it's freakin' fun.


I actually prefer chaotic big games to 1 vs 1 crap, probably because as RDM there are few (if any) jobs that can stand a fair chance against you solo, and I love those great moments chasing people around a corner, only to find 8 or more of their buddies waiting for you, or letting a small group of DDs whack away at you with phalanx and ice spikes on, and then take them all down one by one, or stall half their team whilst yours gathers or takes out a squishier target than you. RDM is stupidly overpowered in much of ballista, and I love it. Especially when you drop invisible behind a group of 2-3 people, and they start to run because there's no point even trying to fight.

Yo FFXI players, I'm really happy for you, and I'mma let you finish but FFXIV is going to be one of the best MMO's of all time

...of all time! (clearly not overdone yet)


After a long period of nothing amazing being announced by SE, which definately has nothing to do with XIV's scheduled release next year, we finally get notice of the next version update;

New Version Update Scheduled for November! (24/09/2009)



We're pleased to announce that the development and quality assurance teams are hard at work on the new version update, currently on track for an early November release.
With thrilling new episodes of the Wings of the Goddess nation quests, job-related adjustments, added features for Moblin Maze Mongers, an extensive and all-new system involving items, and more, there's sure to be something for adventurers of all stripes!

Further details will be posted here as the release draws closer, so keep checking this space!

Nothing really worth commenting on, apart from they're releasing the next add-on expansion in October, so it won't coincide with the update. Neither of these seem particularily interesting, the video for the new expansion is kinda cool but it's hard to get excited at all now that we know it's going to be 3/4 tedious and badly planned fetch quests, one low-level NM fight and two BCNM-type fights, which are easy as long as you have the right setup, but quite unforgiving if you have a couple of bad jobs and/or players in your group.

But on the positive side, that dagger looks kinda cool. (I would comment on [S] nation quests as a plus, but they are mostly designed for 3~6 man parties, and very few people do them so I don't get to enjoy that content).




I've not done much, and nothing notable has happened in salvage, dynamis or limbus (apart from some shield/parrying skillups farming bhaflau ramparts, woo).

There are fewer people online on the server in general these days (1k~1.2k during weekdays when I'm on) and there are generally fewer pickup shouts for stuff, which is why I've not done much outside of events and soloing. Unless the next few updates motivate anyone to keep playing XI, even just for the sake of completing the main story for WotG (which is what I'd personally like to achieve) I don't see the number of players going back up. I could be wrong though, it could just be Hades that everyone's jumping from ;).

Whatever. Stuff I did:


Campaign! Got my RDM buffer back from 35k > cap. Been doing a whole lot of dying before then.


WotG quests/missions! I need to do fights to progress and I've not had the time to try putting a group together for it ;|


Farming tier 2 enspells, beacuse I needed something to do. Grauberg has 2 mobs that drop it, and took over an hour to actually put out. I farmed enough Quadav chest/back plates to just buy the scroll.

Dynamis-Xarcabard home delivery

Demons have wings; why do they need to hitch a ride? And they look far too heavy for that to be possible.

I found a pickup group doing some of the WoTG quests, but I had to leave early before we finished the windurst wing of them. I can solo the rest, but I'm not sure if we were doing other nations or missions afterwards.


FITE. Here's me doing 25668 damage in a single attack because I'm so good. Eyes are very squishy, the demon dude on the ramp was unsleepable and not very squishy. Also hit hard and his friends began resisting sleep after a couple of casts. I won't spoil it, but windurst's storyline is still pretty grim.


We farmed some bottled pixies afterwards, which is a fairly mundane task to begin with, I just thought my first exact 1000 damage WS was noteworthy.



Other stuff I've done -
Not enough people showed up for Salvage so we couldn't do that, what a shock. But the leader got morri legs 35 recently so decided we should do Zhayolm boss next, so I might have a chance at completing my own. Basically I've come to the conclusion that anyone who can reliably get 6 competant members with good jobs to show up for Salvage is already doing it, and would rather sell drops than let new people join.


Wiped to Ultima at 7% which is frustrating, but we did have around 13/14(?) people, and alot were inexperienced/new and one champ who is a near complete liability managed to forget soap. It was a smooth, albeit slow kill to 20% and a couple of dissipations got off, but we managed to recover from those. It's just we had to eat about 3 Citadel Busters and too many people died to it, plus he was being an asshat with shields as usual.

Wiped a whole bunch in dyna-xarc, wasn't a great run to begin with and after Flam left I was seemingly the only one sleeping anything. Bad drops also.

Basically endgame is not going well for me at the moment.

More interestingly....I tested Para 1/2 on robber crabs after a skillup session, using the same method that I used back in March. I still need to do high MND and high skill conditions (even though I never bothered with +skill on Tiny Mandragora, crabs are at least above 'Too Weak' so there may be some improvement in resist rates) but chances are resist rates are still floored on Easy Prey mobs, most likely because of the ~15 level gap + merits. Although you will never see an outright resist (magic, or enfeebles at the very least do not suffer from the 95% accuracy cap that melee attacks do) there may be some improvement in the average duration of paralyze when casting in +skill gear.



I've done 30 casts for each paralyze and paralyze II, which is still lacking in size but it's really fucking tedious to do so many in one sitting, and without any way of recording results other than by hand it's not going to get any easier.

Results need writing up so I can compare them to the previous tests, I'll add them to the old post when I get around to it.

Twins!

To confirm the authenticity of my twin, I had to do our secret handshake. I see how it could be mistaken for something else, but any onlookers didn't seem too bothered by it.


I managed to finish the last WoTG mission, so here's a picture of a horny Elvaan chick to commemorate the occasion.