Adventurer Appreciation 2010

This popped up with little warning, and I have 6 charges left on my anniversary ring from last year :\

Anyways, here's the obligatory compilation of stats from previous years:

A whole lot less of everything this year, except I've managed to keep up my momentum on deaths.


We also got some fancy looking dinner jacket set, which has been given a place in my RDM idle set for the time being because it looks nice.

Now I'm going to have to start leveling SCH something fierce so I can use this anni ring up in time to get a new one.

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.

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.

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 :|

Okay so

I've been busy the past week, and went home over the weekend so no play for me. Even now that I actually log in, I've ended up spending my time afking in Whitegate again. Could be a sign for me to quit...or you know, get a LS/some friends.

Anyways, on a lighter but infinately more mundane note, I finally managed to break my Pole of Trails while doing FoV.


Petrify gets me every time; had to sit and watch my wyvern kill the fucker from 33% and it nearly killed me first.

I paid a visit to the Retribution WSNM, and it turns out he is popped in a fucking terrible area, with linking sight/magic/sound aggro mobs all around and nowhere really safe to kite while soloing on RDM, so I didn't bother poping it. It would probably be do-able straight tanking in a corner somewhere, but I didn't have haste crap on me for utsusemi timers, nor did I feel like going to the trouble of getting it into a 'safe' area only to have a bunch of bombs and bats wander in and gank me when I get the NM to 50%.


I also had a look at some pre-built MMM mazes, in hopes that I'd find a setup for the Mamool Ja earring NM that I want.


I saw one that looked like it had the right runes, but it also had 19 (Weakness) and 20 (Paeon) which make the mob inside weaker and (I think) lower item drop rates, or remove them completely. I only heard that as a rumour and can't really find anything on wiki to support it, but it would fit with the whole "Fuck you" design of the game, not to mention if people were capable of creating the right rune setup they would sooner keep the maze design to themselves and sell you the drops instead of sharing them for free.

As the screenshot above suggests, yes I went inside, and it was the right NM. I ran him around a little, found he attacks incredibly slow (like "I can cast stoneskin between your attacks" slow) with Slow II on, and didn't really hit too hard (150~ish and 230~ crits with -25% PDT). The question is now, should I bother trying to fight this if it won't drop, or just try and buy the earring for 1.2mil. The answer may seem a little obvious (free vs not free) but I have that whole no friends thing working against me, and do wonder what kind of setup I'd need to beat it with.

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.