Sunday, April 12, 2009

update thoughts

1) WHM, RDM, SMN Job Adjustments

Really good stuff for the most part. Fixing the SMN range issue, including the BG:Rage stuff is so nice! No more your target is too far away message and loss of 167mp!

Composure is super nice. Tripling the duration is better than what anyone could've hoped for. Basically only need to refresh/haste yourself once per convert cycle. Enspell IIs seem pointless though, I haven't even bothered with it.

WHM stuff is cool. The added stoneskin effect of Solace is nice, and Esuna will probably make WHM desired in certain situations (if your party is good enough to kill Wivres for example).

2) ACP

Huge dissapointment. The first 2 missions are beyond ridiculous. Even without the mass competition, I just don't see the point. The Pashow/Meriphtaud/Jugner part could've easily just been touch a ???. Rolanberry/Batallia/Suaromuge could've skipped the goblin farming, and just had people on the mission just click the ???s and automatically pop them.

The Fei'yin run around wasn't so bad, but it's basically repeated 2 missions later in Deflukkts, just with a level30cap. The cap doesn't matter much since you don't even lose exp when you die, so you could easily go WHM, which now has reraise as level25. And when there's like 6 missions total, when 2 are stupid farming, 2 are similiar run around zone, and 2 are BC fights...

The difficulty level was also ridiculous. Yeah, I get they like to start at low levels, and work their way up to 75, but still. WoTG/ToAU started at level 50 at least, and quickly became level75 fights.

The story was dumb. The first CS was cool, but after that it didn't make any sense. I'm not even sure what happened at all really. The people who did the cutscenes are clearly different than the people who did ToAU/WoTG; incredibly boring.

Also, the ??? broke like 5hours into the quest. When I called a GM, they didn't even answer me back in tells :( They just sent a GM message!

3) Nation Quests

So much better than ACP! I finished all 3 nations. Some did have pointless farming in them (looking at you windy with your testimonies and bottled pixies), but those drop off so many different monsters in so many different zones. Not just 1 type in 1 zone.

The fights/BCs were cool. Spoilers!

Weird tonberry ghost thing?


Star Sybil giving her necklace to the other crazy taru!

Pretty lights!

Klara holding off crazy galka!

So pretty!

Surrounded!

Eyes carry demons now?


Demons climbing walls?!
4) Salvage Changes

They should've done this ages ago. Drop rate increase is very noticable. It went from pretty much 1% drop rate, to a decent 15-20%. Lots of people have been posting tons of drops. Seeko got lucky and his gears finally dropped!


Mad Bomber being up 100% time too! Woo.

I went with a shout group, and had like 8 or 9 Gate Widows pop. First 1 dropped Macha's Cuffs, then the penultimate dropped some Enlil's!

Yay! This actually puts me at 14/15 Marduk, just need the 35 from Dekka now. Of course I need gil to upgrade Head (which may not be possible for a while because of Gobbiebag-_-) and Body (which may be possible now because of ANNM!).

We also did an LBC run, which resulted in a double usukane 25 legs drop, which was exactly what we needed.

Yay for me and Thano!


My salvage drop list of completed pieces:

Morrigan's Coronel
Morrigan's Robe
Morrigan's Cuffs
Morrigan's Slops
Morrigan's Pigaches

Marduk's Dastanas
Marduk's Shalwar

Skadi's Chausses

Usukane Hizyaroi

Marduk is missing like 12M to upgrade head/body, as well as Dekka. Skadi is missing every 35, but I have every 25 and 15 piece done. Usukane is missing pretty much everything, except I have the 35 hands done.

5) ANNM

This is nice. Introducing another way for people to obtain items such as Wootz, Khroma, Imperial Wootz Ingots, and Star Sapphires. Also, finally something to spend AN on! I have 400k and climbing!

And fancy Dance shoes!


6) Gobbiebag Quests/Satchel

As much as I need the inventory, I'm still at 70. I decided to wait it out for the satchel, and I'm happy I did. Most of my space issues are temporarily solved, now I just have crazy organization issues.

General Update!

Einherjar!

I joined a shout Einherjar LS led by Terror. First run was a disaster. The puller pulled the boss first or something, and it took literally 30minutes for us to kill it. Didn't even get any ampoules since we couldn't kill any normal enemies (and ampoules is what I'm mainly after).

I decided to skip the next 2 runs, since it was such a waste of time and decided to some other stuff. I ended up going the other day because I was bored though, and we surprisingly won! With 5minutes to spare too and minimal deaths.

Next run we attempted tier 2. We didn't win unfortunately. Started off with bats+ slimes I think, which weren't too bad, but people really need to help sleep.

Second wave consisted of imps. We made a mistake with not pulling with silence and well...huge link! Ended up wiping.

Still 1160 amps, not bad.

I was duoing wamoura with this other blm when I got a crazy idea to gather like 7 of them and -ga 3!

It worked kind of well...

till I died! Other blm managed to live with 1 hp though...

We finally did Jailer of Love. Was really easy fight, even though it took forever for us to position it properly.

Yay novio!

We did sky again. After a little trigger farming, we did Suzaku. First time I've ever seen it drop Shining Cloth.


Afterward we did Kirin. I really wanted to TP burn, and it took a bit to convince people that we were able to TP burn it. It was extremely easy to do. We had 19 people there total, but 1 was a 2box, and we could've dealt without him. It died in about 65 seconds, with no close calls, and only 2 unlucky deaths because of Astral Flow.

We used WHMx3 BRDx3 THFx1 DRGx1 MNKx1 WARx3 and SAMx6. I'm kind of hoping we can try and finish our other Kirin sets by scheduling a quick TP burn after other events.


I joined this group to try and kill the Troll king in Halvung. We got all ready, bought all our meds, made the long and dangerous hike through halvung (where we had to kill our way through, stupid true sight mobs). Got to the pop spot and...

it was empty!

The whole thing ended up being kind of funny. I really wanted to try the fight since it's like one of the few fights I've never really tried.

I solo'd (mostly) the CoP 8-3 pot bc! I saw someone on Allakhazam that did it, so I decided to give it a try.

I went as PUP/BLM (/BLM for warp because I'm lazy). It was really easy. Pretty much just nuke Water>Ice>Ice>Ice manuever. Nuke, and deactivate immediately. The mobs don't regen while passive at all.

You absolutely need capped merits though. Every minute is important too.


I overloaded on water manuever randomly, but it didn't make much of a difference.

We did end up dying; somehow one of the pots aggro'd the PLD I was helping, and of course since party hate, we all died. Lost about 2minutes of time because of this.

I solo'd up until the very last pot was at 25%, then the SMN helped with a Mountain Buster, and I finished it off with another nuke.

I'm pretty sure without the death I would've easily won though.

I helped Mithroy do a Chigre the other day. I asked Arc to come help too, since I didn't feel like soloing (such a boring dot kite fest..). In the end, I ended up soloing because of some kiting errors unfortunately.

The macc ring unfortunately dropped! Sad.

Omega has just been really crappy lately. At least one head has dropped per omega, and our last one gave us this double head drop gem.

Since we have no buyers for the head, I just gave it away to Rotaru's LS that was also doing limbus at the same time. Yay for Rotaru and HPG on their inv-1!

The good news about limbus is that we've been managing to do a pretty consistent 1/omega a week (every Sunday). The bad news is that attendance has been pretty random. Some days we'll have double digit attendance, and others we'll just have a single party.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Pre update speculation!

WHM update: Yay! I don't think people gave WHM enough credit even before the changes this update are promising. WHM/SCH is VERY powerful. Every time I join a merit party, people are usually always specifically asking "who is the rdm?"; not "who is the whm or rdm?". I think one of the problems is that people don't have /SCH. There's like 5 WHM in my LS, and I'm the only person with /SCH. In Alttab, there's like 2-3 WHMs with /SCH, out of the 10+ at least. I know some people have had WHM75 forever, and rarely play it so they don't care, which is ok. But like the new and upcoming WHMs, and the people that use WHM as their main should really take a few minutes and level it.

I actually do prefer to play WHM in situations where I'm mainly a healer and enfeebles don't work at all, like Jailer of Faith. Cure 5 is so nice, as well as all the other buffs.

WHM/SCH pre-patch

Light Arts: 10% MP reduction/fast cast. Boosts in Enfeebling Magic and Enhancing Magic to B+.
Conserve MP.
Dark Arts: Dark based Sleep 1 (which can be complimented by Repose), Aspir.
Protectra and Shellra (V). MP efficient way to quickly buff the entire PT.
Barspells. Unique gear and merits to boost them as well.
Sublimation. MP cost-free JA that gives a 2MP/tick.
Strategems. Penury, cutting your next spell's MP cost in half, and Celerity, reducing the casting time and recast by 50%.
Cure Potency gear. Through Noble's and Medicine ring, WHM can get an additional +20% potency over other jobs.
Cure 5 and Regen III.
Divine Veil, every 10minutes.

Now comparing to RDM/WHM for meriting:

Refresh. Costs 40MP to cast, restores 150MP. TotalMP gained:110.
Convert: Max merits can bring this down to 8:20.
Dia III: If merited, it's nice for merits if your RDM can keep MP up.
Auto-Refresh gear: AF2 hat coupled with dalmatica or morrigan's to give 2mp/tick refresh.

A lot of people think that convert and refresh is infinitely better than all the stuff WHM gets, when it's really pretty the same.

Conserve MP in itself is huge, which RDM doesn't get. Factor in the automatic 10% reduced spell cost (ie Haste is 36MP vs 40, cure 4 is 80 vs 88), and it gets even better.

I don't know, I just get so annoyed when people act like WHM is so much inferior to RDM, when it's pretty much the same. It really depends on the player's ability to keep haste/cures/dia up rather than the job itself.

After the update, I think WHM will reign supreme though. Esuna will be so helpful for wivres, and the added stoneskin to cure should be fantastic since most people don't /NIN anymore.

The SMN adjustment is very nice, finally getting those BPs to have a decent range. The previous pathetic 5' range was stupid. The increase to merit BPs will be really good though I think, since they're already impressive with merits in them.

For RDM, I could care less about Enspell II. New campaign toy only. Composure is nice, not for the melee ACC though. If you can click it off, increasing the duration of Protect, Shell, Haste and Refresh will be nice.

I'm excited to do the new missions! I think if they're anything liek WotG, it should be pretty good. Plus being able to do everything at once with no interruptions! I'm hoping it'll be at least as long as ToAU.

Me/Thano/Seeko finished up the Bastok line of quests

This completes all the 3 series of nation quests for me, just in time to do the newly added ones. I'm like 99% sure SE is going to create some kind of reward for finishing all 3 lines of quests, and not just 1, so I'm happy to have them all done. Also, it's possible the quests will reward items for the new Gobbie bag upgrade.

Which brings me to the Mog Sachet from the security token! I'm upset they are doubling our inventory via this thing we have to buy.. but at least it's only $10.

Ok that's it!