FFXI Blog

Voidwatch

2011-05-27T08:23:00.000-07:00

I'm kind of disappointed with the new update. They didn't really add too many new things. I know they changed dynamis drastically, but it's still dynamis. I did dynamis for years and years, and I'm not that anxious to suddenly go back to it. They also added Grounds of Valor, with caskets that contain some pretty nice gear. I don't really feel like killing tough-very tough mobs endlessly to farm gear either; that sounds horribly boring. They made a bunch of adjustments to abyssea, specifically to alleviate congestion, by adding additional ??? to spawn highly contested mobs, and by adding timed spawn NM key items (like Tunga) into gold chests. While these adjustments are very nice, I've been finished with abyssea for over 3 months now. I know some people are still in need of abyssea items, but so many people are basically just working on their, 3rd+ empyrean now, and only because there's nothing else to do.

As far as the social aspect and my current linkshell status, we seem to be making the move from AFKforever to TeamEcho. A lot of old Echo players have came back, and more are on their way I believe. So far Gniksiger, Cryton, Ceridan, Kajii (Deadstar), Maew, Jabsters, and Kiddos are all officially back. Thano is also playing a little more, and Breaze, Sedna, Laphine, and Galattea are playing every so often too. Now we just need Sevaru, Seeko, Tyjex, Lavid Rotaru, (did you quit again?!) and a few other people that randomly disappeared to come back! As much as it's nice to play to with some old friends again, I am done with abyssea, and all the other content that has been released over the 2-3years. When I log on I'd much rather do new events, and not just stay in abyssea forever.

Which brings me to voidwatch! It's probably the only thing they added that I've been interested in.　It's kind of a weird system. When they first released it, you could only get 1 voidstone every 20hours (a voidstone is needed to participate in the NM battle), then I guess due to low interest, a week later they made it so you can get a voidstone by trading in 2000CP, IS, or AN, in addition to auto accumulating a stone daily. Most people have billions of CP at this point, so now we have unlimited stones, yay?

I don't like how treasure is handled though. Basically once the mob dies, everyone gets their own personal chest(and every chest has different items in it). The mob itself doesn't drop any items. Unfortunately most of the gear is rare/ex, so gear will be distributed to the wrong people. I hated the weakness system in abyssea (just make the drops 100% and make them hard fights, why do I need to cast useless spells to make them drop stuff?), and they've brought a similar system here, so that's not exactly ideal for me There's also only 18 NMs in total, so there isn't too much content overall.

The NMs are pretty fun, and it's actually somewhat challenging (but still easy of course) to do things outside of abyssea though. Interest in the event has been low though. I don't think the NA population was ever even remotely interested in it. The JPs aren't too much better but there have been a few shouts for it, so between than that and annoying people into doing it with me, I've gotten some NMs down. The next update is said to release Voidwatch 2, so I think it's important to have all these NMs completed before the next update.

So going through the various NMs! Each nation has 4 tiers of NM, you need to clear every NM on each tier to advance. Tier1 has 2 NMs, tier2 has 1 NM, tier3 has 2 NMs, and tier4 has only 1 NM. After each tier you complete, your abyssite will upgrade, allowing you to pop the next tier. Your abyssite never breaks, so essentially you can continuously spawn the highest tier mob over and over. I thought this was a nice change. The first path I completed was the Bastok path.

Sallow Seymour is very similar to Pallid Percy. I don't have any pics of when we won, but these are from when we wiped the first day voidwatch came out (when I was with a bunch of random disorganized people):

It's really not that hard. I'm sure you can trio it easily. Just watch out for mud stream.

The other tier 1 for bastok is extremely easy. It's a weaker version of the Konschtat Highlands peiste boss. Killed it without any problems as THF BRD RDM. Paralyze, slow, and elegy all land so it's a joke to tank.

Tier2 is where things start to get a little tricky.

It's a giant clot. Casts various -ga water and aero spells. Above 50% it will use ga3, and below 50% it will use ga4 and waterja/aeroja. It also gains access to Dissolve below 50% (conal drain damage and hate reset on the target). It will cast addle-ga and silencega throughout the fight too, plus all the usual clot moves: Mucus Spread (AoE slow), Epoxys Spread (AoE bind), and Fluid Spread/Toss.

It was pretty easy in an alliance. I think a solid group of 6 could take it down. It dropped the key item that gives additional temp items when you start the fight.

Moving on tier tier3. The first NM is a tonberry in Passhow. It casts tons of random magic -ja spells, and likes to teleport around doing throat stab.

Also the temp item key item gives some pretty useful items, like a fanatic's drink. I'm not going to even begin to try and explain the weakness system in voidwatch, but the cool thing is every time you hit the white !! weakness, it instantly restores all temp items. Most people will want to hit the white !! four times to guarantee an atmatice/key item drop anyway, so liberal use of the temp items is probably a good idea.

This atma wasn't that great. It was +3DEX +5AGI -10% spell interruption rate.

The other tier3 is Ecccentric Eve's clone. It does all the same moves I believe that Eve has, including obviously Extremely Bad Breath. It can be stunned, and our stunners did get most of them stunned, but a few did get through.

It also does a charm move and turns players into mini EEs(not cute)! It liked to do Bad Breath and Charm back to back, which was rather annoying, since we couldn't sleep the charmed players then because Bad Breath also gives poison. The fight became really messy at the end between the death & charm.

The tier4 and final boss of the bastok path is this cool bird! I decided to try it solo just for fun.

It was surprisingly pretty easy. It doesn't have enhanced movement speed, and it actually is really easy to kite around the rocks by its spawn point. It casts aeroga3, aeroga4, aeroja (this was sometimes instant cast), silencega, slowga, and graviga. It's normal melee attacks can be absorbed by 1-3 shadows, but they can deal upwards of 1000damage if you don't have shadows, so it dangerous.

Convinced some people to come kill it. I thought a SMN strategy would work well, and it did. Shiva and Garuda both take very little damage from this NM. Our first win was as RDM SMNx4 WHM. RDM kites it around, while SMNs BP it to death. When avatars die, it will run after the RDM allowing the SMNs time to resummon. WHM is in charge of general cures and status aliments. This setup isn't really that ideal though, since you will need more people to proc weaknesses.

Another thing it does that's unique is one of its TP moves gives you the status effect Muddle. I can't remember which TP move, but I think it was called Typhoon Rage.

I think Muddle is a new status effect; I definitely don't remember seeing it before. It disables you from using items. The TP move gives you encumbrance (naked), silence, amnesia, and muddle, so you can't do anything but stand there defenseless.

I actually think it was easier than the tier3s before it. Certainly not as chaotic.

Sandy path!

This puk was unremarkable. I don't remember having any problems with it.

The other tier1 is just Briareus clone (see a pattern forming here?!).

We did get another key item that grants temp items though!

Tier2 is Voidwatch's Krabkatoa. Standard fight until it reaches 50%, upon which it gains access to venom shower. It likes to spam venom shower and waterja spells. Mega Scissors is hate reset. It has en-paralyze, and it likes to cast enfeebling -ga spells too. Damaging it can be frustrating due to the inability to dispel Scissor Guard or Bubble Curtain.

The first tier3 is a behemoth. It's similar to La Theine's Hadhayosh. Most important thing to watch out for is Accursed Armor, since it gives itself curse spikes. It uses meteor right after thunderbolt, so everyone will get hit by it. Damage isn't too bad with some mdt gear. Our first fight was a disaster because our tanks continued to melee through the curse spikes. Even with a good mdt set, 400HP isn't going to be enough to survive meteor, and since thunderbolt stuns everyone, there's enough time to cursna+ cure6 the tanks back to full.

The next tier3 is a really annoying pixie. I thought this was one of a harder fights.

It will do Spring Breeze > Summer Breeze > Autumn Breeze > Winter Breeze > Cyclonic Turmoil > Norn Arrows, in that order always. It's important to know when to run out of range of Norn Arrows (20').

It likes to cast tons of annoying spells do; all the -ja spells, enfeebles spells, and below 50%, it will cast death.

The atma it drops is pretty cool though. It gives a refresh sphere effect when fully upgraded.

Sandy has the hardest tier4. First time I tried this, we went with some DD tanks, and they were destroyed really fast (they weren't using PDT though). Swapped to PLD tanks from then though, and it became easier. I had to organize some shouts for this clear.

I can't even remember what TP moves it uses, since they're all named so similarly. Most do some pretty impressive damage, but the main one to worry about the is the move that gives weakness, which it gains access to below 50%. It casts fire magic, which should be stunned. We wiped once because following the weakness move, it used firaja, killing our tanks. It builds resist to stun, so using it, so only stunning fire spells would be wise.

A really messy ending, but it died!

Nobody received any noteworthy drops.

I forgot to take pics of Windy's tier 1, but the first one is this corpselight. The only TP move it uses is Corpse Breath, and it casts enfeeble ga spells, as well blizzaga3-4. Slow, Paralyze, and stun all work. Just prevent its spells from going off and it should be a simple win.

The other tier1 is a Chloris clone (hard to see it in the pic!). It casts instant cast -ga3 spells, and enfeebles. Uses all the same moves as Chloris, including Fatal Scream, so holy waters are a must. Dream Flower also does hate reset.

Tier2 is an antilion. It has additional effect : petrify, which is annoying. Below 50% it will start using Quake Blast and Gravitic Horn. It will also use both moves together as a set, and it can spam them. I don't remember the fight being too hard though.

Lacovie makes an entrance for the tier3. Really easy fight. Uses earth magic. Just nuke it down.

Lord Asag is awful. Vampire, uses all fire magic, and below 50%, death. It uses the AoE HP drain move, absorbs players' buffs (and only finale works to dispel those!), and can charm. Took two tries to beat it, the first we timed out, and the second we won with about 3minutes left.

When it charms you, you turn into a cute bat!

Windy's tier 4 is an iron giant. Uses all the iron giant TP moves, casts thunder magic, and -ga enfeebles; so it's just like every other NM! Stun works; slow, elegy, and addle all land as well, but I don't think slow and elegy do much of anything.

The room it pops in is really tight; we had PLDs stand in opposite corners, and mages in another corner. Bounced it between the PLDs, and slowly chipped its HP down using BLMs and SMNs. Similar to the Sandy tier4, it's most dangerous move, Eradicator, also gives weakness.

Someone was fortunate to find a nifty Strendu Ring in their chest.

But of course, one of the few people that couldn't make any use out of it, received it, highlighting the event's main flaw. I'm fully confident that in the June "mini update" they will add the option to add spoils to the treasure pool.

After you complete all 3 bosses, you can get the opening(?) CS to Voidwatch quest line. So far the story doesn't make too much sense, and I'm predicting it will be as interesting as abyssea was (not very).

And this is a real update! I still exist! I'm just as awesome as ever too, just look at all these compliments!

Maybe I'll update again soon!

Has everyone quit?!

2011-04-15T13:15:00.000-07:00

I've been so lazy to play lately. There really just isn't much to do online. The last time we received new content was way back in December, and the new update won't be here until May.

I think most people are feeling the same way. Every time I log on, usually I'm the only person online! Sometimes Sedna or Breaze are around, but that's about it. Even people that I used to casually talk to/do stuff with have disappeared!

Ironically, people that quit a few months (or years) ago have returned! Namely: Rotaru (yay) and the some of the old echo crew (Gnik, Ceri, Deadstar)!

Look at the lsmes from 2009!

Anyway, if you're still around and see me online send me a tell! Or send me a message on ffxiah! Would be cool to know who I can manipulate into getting me all the new gear when the new update arrives!

MMM tier4 Shadhavar

2010-07-29T07:20:00.001-07:00

Finally got access to this last fight! Unfortunately I'm not having any luck winning. Fighting an ixion type monster with people that never even seen Dark Ixion before hasn't been too great.

It's a BLM/SMN ixion. It casts thundaga3, thunder4, and stun. It uses astral flow and summons ramuh every 90seconds to Judgement Bolt you. It has a really annoying permanent shock spikes effect that deals 80-90hp per spike, plus obviously the possible stun. Slow/elegy/paralyze all landed without any problems.

Damaging it wasn't really an issue. If we can somehow stay alive I think it would be an easy win. People have been telling me you can avoid the TP moves just by sidestepping/running when you see it charge. If that's possible here I would think PLD WHM RDM BRD RNGx2 could win easily. You can get revitalizer in there, so you can have permanent soul voiced songs, and everyone else can 2hour twice.

Thundaga3 damage; people that took less damage had capped MDT.

Zeus damage.

Spear damage.

Astral flow damage. I had capped mdt for this one.

Going to need to blackmail some people into helping me kill this as many times as it takes to get my robe/any other gear that drops!

80!

2010-07-19T12:37:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the incredibly awesome manaburn exp maze(yay for Cymmina for sharing with everyone!), exping BLM was really simple. Even with tons of AFKing in between runs and a slow group, 20k/hr is easy to accomplish. If you can find people that will limit their AFKing, and with some good BLMs, getting 35k/hr is very possible. Another great thing about the maze is that it takes place in Ruhotz, not Everbloom, making getting in much easier than TP burn mazes.

Basically each run gets you about 11-12k exp, depending on COR roll. 9k from the end chest, and around 2k from the mobs.

Oh, and allied ring with this is pretty awesome.

Tried out the new camps, and honestly, only one of them comes close to ToAU exp. Misareaux Coast's vultures are great exp, but there's only 3 camps in the entire zone. Not only that, but if your party is any good, you will most likely lose chain waiting on repops, since most of camps are literally one mob short of an infinite chain.

Promyvion exp is awful. The mobs are just annoying. Wanderer's have ridiculous evasion, that even with pizza and capped merits you won't be capping accuracy. The other mob types are even worse though. Seethers have some ridiculous 20 shadows utusemi type move. Similar to Misareaux, most of the camps are short of an infinite chain too.

Lufaise had the levels of its Greater Birds upgraded. I was here as RNG and died probably 6x or so. JPs for whatever reason wanted to have a NIN with us for a first voke; except for the fact that they have a -25% slashing penalty, so he was totally useless. The birds are no joke; they double attack and have various crazy shadow wiping TP moves.

Uleguerand Range is full of high level ahriman mobs now. These weren't that great. Getting to camp is kind of annoying, unless you want to nexus up. The mobs themselves require a fairly strong backline since they spam -ga spells and cannot be silenced. Pulling is frustrating due to the constant AoE bind TP move spam. Level 5 Petrify isn't fun too, even when synced since it's based on your true job level.

Of course there was always TP burn MMM, if you can manage to get in. I tried it a few times, and after about an hour of spamming, we were lucky to get in once.

Abyssea seems to be the go to place for everyone now. I still haven't tried the exp runs, but honestly it seems like it requires about 90mins-120mins of exping at a rate of 15k-20k/hr. Once you've passed that, you can get rates of 50-100k/hr apparently, depending on how good everyone is. I hate exping for long periods of time though, so not really sure if this will end up being for me.

Walk of Echoes is so weird. It really just needs a major overhaul. I'm not even sure who thought that it was a good idea. It's far too difficult to be a casual event that you can just enter and win with a good success rate. The participation bonus system, like campaign unions, completely favor DD jobs over mages, so I can't even see why anyone would want to come as a mage in a pick up group. It's such a shame though, because there's tons of good gear from the first tier alone. It was fun the few times I did it in an organized setting though.

New magian trials! I upgraded my thunder/ice staves, which are now a whopping 25% bonus and now they have different names making it easy to macro! It's really a huge bonus when you think about it. The upgrade from NQ staff to HQ is 10% to 15% and anyone that has a NQ staff these days is considered gimp. The upgrade from HQ staff to the current final magian staff is 15% to 25%. Plus SE is likely to continue to upgrade these weapons with more trials in future updates. The trials are really not that bad. The more frustrating weather trials have been cut in half making them much less of a hassle.

The two new trials for the thunder staff had me kill 200 beetles, and then 250 funguars. Beetles were really easy since you can do Goblin's Beetles in Sauromuge [s]. Funguars were slow since there wasn't any shortcut I could think of, but Grauberg worked decently.

Ice had me 200 bees followed by 250 crabs. No shortcuts for either path here. I just did the bees in Wajaom, and the crabs in Vunkerl since they were both close to town.

I also did the cure staff. I think it ended up being by far the easiest set of trials I have done, and it went by pretty fast too.

50 mobs during lightsday/light weather took 3 nyzul runs.

50 Arcana during lightsday/light weather took like 40mins in Ro'Maeve during lightsday.

150 kill shots with light magic on beasts was next. I did them on Gigas's tigers in Vunkerl. It wasn't as fast as I would have liked, since you can't just snipe the mobs with thunder 4.

The 25 pixies were annoying. Yagudo High Priest in Meriphtaud have a 100% drop rate on the bottled pixie. Problem is, they are rare/ex, so you can only hold one of them at a time. This means you're constantly running back and forth between in Meriphtaud and the spring in Grauberg. I think it took me about 4hours to do all 25.

Final trial is 150 elementals during lightsday. It takes about 3 lightsday to kill them all, so it really just depends if your playtime matches up with lightsday. Best camp is in Meriphtaud [s], right outside Oztroja. There are 2 Yagudo SMNs there, and plenty of safe spots to rest.

Abyssea is cool. There's actually a ton of good gear to get, and even though they're old zones, it still felt somewhat new when I was exploring the areas. My main complaint is the time limit. The time limit doesn't really work because Abyssea is more like sky/sea than a Dynamis/Limbus type event. There's just too much stuff to do in Abyssea; it's almost overwhelming. Even though you can do the infinite exp/cruor runs because of all the time extensions, you can't farm NMs while doing that, so you're still stuck with the low time limit.

I started by focusing on the NMs for my OAT trials, which require 30 drops from two different NMs for each weapon. Because of the time limit, it takes about 3 weeks per weapon, if I only focus my runs on those NMs.

For my gun, I needed 10 Chasmic Stingers, and 20 Nuggets from Megamaw Mikey. Both really easy NMs.

Chasmic does Frenzy Pollen (Hundred Fists) but it paths poorly around the trees. It doesn't have any regain at all either.

Megamaw Mikey is a worm. Think that should be enough to tell you how easy it is.

There's an entire pop NM/VNM system in Abyssea too. So with my OAT weapon done, time for exploring!

This tiger NM was kind of crazy. It has en-doom and triple attacks. Yay! The fight was actually going fairly well, until holy waters completely failed and we died.

Went after Bakka, an imp NM in Konschtat for the awesome Goetia Chain (INT+8 magic accuracy +4).

There wasn't much info when we first tried the fight. Wiki only said it casts Blizzard V that goes through shadows (which we quickly found was false). Completely forgot to mention Paralyga, instant cast Freeze and..

Blizzaga IV! My super awesome paralyze saved me though!

It's actually not that bad of a fight. So far no drops on the chain!

Became obsessed with trying to pop Karkinos, since JPs were claiming it dropped the Goading Belt. Obviously now that was proved to be false, but I still wanted to pop it since we had wasted so much time trying to figure it out.

Had to kill Nahn first. Trying to pop it made me remember how much I despise fishing. Easy fight. Just kite it around the lake. When it does Metallic Body (stoneskin), it will keep spamming Floodga (with the same extremely long cast time) until you damage through its stoneskin.

The other half of the pop set comes from this Poroggo NM. It spams waterga2, poisonga2, and water bomb over and over. It also has en-charm that lands about 25% the time. No frog chorus at least though. I would say a few melees and some mages to spam cure would make this easy.

Karkinos is basically Krabkatoa +1. Contrary to VNMs, Slow/paralyze/elegy all land without the need for elemental seal. You can't dispel Scissor Guard or Bubble Curtain though, so you're basically stuck fighting it with a permanent shell and defense bonus.

We were so focused on trying to damage it, that it surprised with Venom Shower and killed some of us.

Can kite it around the lake without any problems! I'm really curious as to what it drops, but unfortunately don't have the numbers to take it down.

Rotaru told me about a Cuelebre, so we went to Tahrongi to see if we could take it down.

It's an easier version of Ouryu really. Just need some mdt gear/earth resist set!

I was surprised to see the dagger drop from this. It has a fast repop timer (1hr?) and the drop rate is around 75%+. Should be an easy item to get for most THF/DNC, especially considering how good it is.

Played around with the VNMs. I'm mainly after the T2 VNM Brooder. It drops 2 items I want, the mantle for my RNG/COR and the Serpentes Sabots for my mage jobs!

The NM itself is really easy. Drop rate on the mantle is also high, but the sabots seem rare. There's only one tier 2 per zone though, and they have a repop timer of over an hour. Not really sure how SE expects multiple groups to do VNMs at once.

And then there's all the quests in Abyssea I need to do to get higher fame levels. I've only done a few of the quests in Tahrongi so far.

New MMM boss mazes! These are fun, and worth the time. The main drop I'm after is the Arcane's Robe (MP+30 INT/MND+10 refresh effect) for my SCH, since it doesn't have any other refresh body piece. It drops off the tier4 boss, which requires all tier1-tier3 NM clears, nine in total, before you have access to it. I think this is by far the easiest refresh body piece to obtain for mages, plus all mages can wear it. Assuming no losses, you can get access to the final tier in 9 days. Once you have access, you can spam it once a day until you get the drop. If the drop rate is similar to the gear obtained in the other tiers (15-20%), it's really not that bad. The runs have a time limit of 15minutes max, so they are quick to burn through.

Aside from the gear drops, it's a decent way to make gil too. I've seen everything from cerb hides to angel skins. Plus the new tern gear set, which is nice for mage jobs haste build!

Starting with the tier1 bosses! The one thing I was really shocked at is that gravity lands on some of these.

Gumdrop uses a 2hour at 75%, 50%, and 25%. It uses either Chainspell or Meikyo Shisui. Meikyo is easy to deal with, just run out of range from its TP moves. Chainspell is annoying though, since it can cast ga2s.

Babalu Aye(forgot to take pics!), a diremite, is even easier. It doesn't cast any magic, but it has an extremely potent en-poison effect. It also does hundred fists at 75, 50, and 25%. Gravity works though, just kite and nuke.

The slug tier1 is tough. It normally takes a 75% damage cut to all magic; melee damage works fine. It has a en-slow on melee attacks that overwrites haste. All its TP moves are random AoEs that give bio, slow, HP down. The tricky part happens when it does Meikyo Shisui. For the 30 seconds its active, all melee damage will heal it. It also gains an incredibly potent regen (healed about 8%~ of its HP). The only upside is that it doesn't attack during this phase, and magic damage works normally. Our problem is that it kept doing Meikyo every minute or so, and not just at certain HP %, so we couldn't keep up damage. I think next time we try it, might do something like RDMx2 BLM DDx2 BRD, and maybe just have RDMs chainspell nuke during its Meikyo phases to counter the regen.

The second tier NMs were all really simple. The gobbue boss can't be slowed, and is immune to gravity. Its 2hr is Mighty Strikes, which also gives it the ability to triple attack. It absorbs water magic too, but all other spells work fine. Just keep shadows up and this should be an easy win.

Hippogrph boss can be slowed/elegy/paralyze. No gravity again. It casts random wind based magic like aeroga3, aero4, silencega. None are too damaging though. Its 2hr is Perfect Dodge. Just make sure to always face away to not get hit with the terror move (Jettatura), and dispel Fantod (boost) asap.

The last tier2 is a golem. It casts random wind based -ga spells, and tornado. It does do Crystal rain, which deals about 800-900damage.

Tier3 bosses is where things start to get hard. The easiest of three is the dragon.

Its 2hour ability is Blood weapon. It also has a permanent (but weak) en-drain effect and dread spikes. I think the way to go for this is to just gravity it and kite/nuke. It has all the annoying dragon tp moves like voidsong,body slam, and chaos blade too.

This corse is awful. Our first attempt was with a manaburn which we quickly learned would not work. It has some innate magic defense bonus, so even with 2hours we got it to 47%. The difficult lies with its manafont. During manafont, it casts Drainga 2, dispelga, sleepga 2, and death.

The other dangerous thing it does is meteor. Every time it does Memento Mori, it immediately follows up with meteor.

Stun lands obviously, but it was spamming the spells (particularly death) that three stuns weren't enough.

The last tier 3 is a gnole. It has a 100% double attack rate, and a strong en-paralyze effect. It also has a very high counter rate, and it does mighty strikes. I think manaburn is the way to go for this. Even with all the runes that boost our attack, acc, etc... it's difficult for melee to do damage. Its counter makes it easy for melees to die just trying to damage it. Avoiding giving it TP would also be a wise choice. Plenilune Embrace can heal it for a ton of HP, pretty much a mini benediction. I would avoid doing this on full moon...(stolen JP screenshot!)

Here are some of the random drops we've gotten so far:

Final WoTG quests!

Windy was fun. Both BCs were pretty easy though.

I think the reward for Windy is the best of the three nations. Zodiac performed better than an INT ring during the correct day.

Bastok was much harder than Windy. We did the final BC without any kind of Stona which wasn't so smart when it spams AoE petrify...

Bastok's reward is also nice. I'm not sure how much better aspir/drain is, but it's not like there were very many ring options for aspir/drain prior to this ring.

Sandy BCs were the easiest. I just duo'd with a random WHM.

The weakest ring I think. I doubt it would be worth using instead of a PDT ring.

Apparently there are a bunch of fake Tsolamogola running around! Still confused on how people can mistake my awesomeness with some random impostor! They're not being very nice!

Almost 80!

2010-06-15T22:59:00.000-07:00

Anniversary time! Let's compare deaths from this year to last!
2009:

2010:

5805-4559=1246 deaths in a single year! That averages about to be slightly over 3 deaths per day! I think everyone should send me 250,000g to pay for a SMN burn to get the exp back I lost!

Did the final prep work for the update. Finished my DNC and THF subs via some fast summoner burns. Well, it wasn't really that fast since someone was diagaing pulls for a few hours. GM call time!

I don't get why people do that at all. Such a silly reason to get yourself a warning/suspension/banning. Do people really care that much how others exp?

Capping buffers on various jobs. Allied ring is pretty cool.

I also leveled RNG to 75. Took me about 36 hours of AFKing in the tunnel to do 49->75. Looking back, I'm not sure why I chose to level WAR compared to RNG in the first place. I had all the gear already, as well as capped marksmanship merits from COR. I did need to finish skilling up Marksmanship up to RNG's new cap, which only took two back-to-back besieged.

I went on a huge merit spree afterward to quickly cap RNG specific merits too.
Not sure if this is the best setup, but I think -40enmity every 5minutes would be better than doing a slightly more damaging slug shot every 10minutes. I'm too lazy to go farm a Hightail bullet, and honestly I'd probably just mess up and use it without unlimited shot, so I went with sharpshot merits.

Here's my RNG gear. It's really similar to my COR, aside from a few changes.

TP:

I need 17 store tp to get a 5 hit setup( without /SAM) with my OAT gun. Rose strap(4) + Brutal(1) +Rajas(5)+ Skadi(7) worked. The main slot that is weak are my feet. Skadi would be cool for TP, but really lazy for that, since I need the 25+35. I had enkidu already, so I figured I would just use those. Hopefully they will add something new in the update.

WS:

I have to keep my 17 store TP to maintain my 5 hit. Again lacking feet options, but taru rse2 are 4 STR, so I went with those. I think getting a Mekki, as well as Hachiryu feet+legs will be imprtovements, but dropping 20M 5 days before a major update seemed silly, and Mekki is a pain to get. I also have another setup that swaps out triumph for a novia for more -enmity.

Barrage:

Just went with as much ACC as possible, and not worrying about my 5 hit. I think AF+1 gloves would be an improvement for the extra barrage shot.

Utsusemi! Also have some other random pdt/mdt sets too.

Thought about the jobs I'm going to take to 80 some more. I think it'll be RDM>BLM>COR as my first three for sure. Probably RNG or WAR after that. I'm not really sure about the others yet. It's really going to depend on what adjustments they receive, exp required to level, as well as the rest of the content in the update. I already foresee myself being busy with the Abyssea expansion, Walk of Echos, new magian trials, and whatever else they add. I don't really want to just be exping forever, and worrying about jobs I never even play these days.

With that in mind, I sold off a ton of my gear. BRD is basically naked aside from rare/ex and a few instruments. A few random WHM gear sets were also sold. BLU cannonball and certain specialized nuking (Eyes on me) are gone. Random PUP stuff are gone, and few other obscure gear sets that were never used.

I really never used much of the stuff I sold. The jobs are still functional, and if I do need the gear back I can just buy it again.

Did a few more magian weapons too, starting with the oat axe. I think it'll be better than gaxe when I'm /NIN! I didn't want to do this initially since my axe skill wasn't skilled up, but then I remembered I'd be killing 700 DC mobs during the actual trials, so I could just skill up then.

400 lizards and 300 puks this time around. Lizards were a lot more frustrating than they should have been. There's always a billion people in Cape Terrigan doing FoV, and for whatever reason they don't want to team up. Was really silly running around watching a bunch of claimed lizards.

Unfortunately didn't cap my skill as I was hoping for, but I did go from 100->232.

Finished the rest off in about 4 hours of Boyahda skilling up.

The VNM item needed this time was from Blobdingnag. This was easily the worst compared to Krab/Verthandi/Ruthven spam. Since I did them all in shout groups, getting people to deal with the adds was harder than you'd think. BLMs would never focus, so people were constantly dying. I'm surprised that out of the 9 fights I did, I didn't wipe once.

The tier2s weren't bad. Lamprey Lord is really easy and fast (9-12minute fight, including pull time) using pinning, but I could only do it in present Pashow, since that was the only zone I knew pin spots for. Past pashow never worked for me, and I was lazy to search through gustaberg.

Shoggoth could be done in any of the zones, but it was such a pain compared to Lamprey Lord. 20-30minute fight, but it depops extremely easily during chainspell if you're out of range for it.

Ever since people figured out the shadow thing for VNMs, I've started to play with shadows again. Out of the 9 fights, only 1 had a shadow, and it didn't drop a ring. The shadow discovery doesn't seem to have changed much, except now people can depop Yilbegans and not have to waste time killing them.

Also did the high damage gun for my quick draw setup. All the high damage trials are easy to do, since it's literally just a week of afk leeching NM kills. For some of the more horrible NMs like Bugbear Strongman and Hovering Hotpot that wouldn't repop for 5+hours, I just went to the NM's pop spot, joined the alliance that was there, and went to bed. Woke up the next morning with a few leeched kills. It was kind of funny sitting in an alliance of 12 people, where at any time 10 of which were afk, with 2 people killing PHs.

Needed 6 Yacumamas and 6 Feurenukes to finish. Missed a few shout runs, so figured I would just use the fence in ronfaure to solo as COR (plus Sedna leech!).

Did find a JP shout for Feurenukes at least. Took a few hours because of competition, but got it done.

Last weapon I did was the high damage great axe. There were less people doing this path, so couldn't do as much afk leeching!

The first of the VNMs, Jyeshtha was terrible. Convinced Silentmagican to solo it for me, and so he could get an Orcus pop. Of course he had to go 1/1! I used my colorful next, so we could keep going.

And of course.. 1/1 as well. Why does this never happen when you actually WANT the tier3 pops?

Finished the last 4 in a JP shout. It was awful. I think our setup ended up being 9 WARs 2 NINs 1 DRG and 1 RDM. They made half the WARs sub /WHM, and the other half sub /DRK for stun. Fights were slow and tiresome; doing it at 2 am made it even worse. Took 4 hours to get the last 4 kills I needed.

6 Capricornus were nice though! We just totally destroyed them, and finished in just over an hour.

An update teaser confirmed the continued expansion of trials. Most of the weapons are already the best that are available, so further upgrades will just cement that. Most likely the OAT weapons will turn into the occasionally attacks 2-3, and 2-4 times that were found in the dats, alongside the OAT. I think it will get to the point that if you don't have magian weapons, that you will be gimp. They also confirmed that they will be making certain trials easier. I'm pretty sure they mean the relic/mythic trials (1500 mobs is too much), and weather related trials.

We finally got KB in einherjar! I was so happy to finally fight it, but I think everyone else went emo that we lost. I think they need to adopt Daz's policy of making it their goal to make me happy. It would just be so much better for everyone!

Seemed to destroy us kind of fast, even though we were chainspell curaga2/accession cure4. I'm not sure why, but people were instructed to not WS at all until 50%. That just seemed hinder us, unless it does something even more super crazy if you WS before 50%? We couldn't even get it to 50% though.

We ran out of time before I could pull off an epic solo and save of the day! I think it's clearly saying something that I am the only person alive at the end though!

Randomly decided to try for Skadi Hands again.

Got it on my third try! After having not done salvage in so long, I didn't really mind doing it either, and it was actually even fun.

Also went back to trying for a Moblin Cest. You can technically make the strongest nuking belt in the game with it: something like INT+4 MAB+2 MACC+2. It's extremely rare to get all those stats on the same belt though, so I was mainly after the MAB+1~2 for my Quick Draw setup when using the correct day/weather obi isn't possible. You have to do Voucher #5's MMM.

The maze is soloable, but it's not a 100% solo. There are 3 different bosses that can spawn, and 3 different jobs that your goblin can be. In order to get the MAB belt though, you have to do the boss with your goblin as his mage job. The mage goblin does very well against 2 of the bosses(KB and slimes), but struggles against the weapons boss; so if you happen to get that, there's a fairly high chance you will lose.

A large majority of people have no idea this even exists, but the maze itself is pretty cool. You basically level up your goblin from 1->60, upgrading his armor and getting him new weaponskills and spells. Once he's ready, you go and do the boss fight.

It's pretty funny watching your goblin level up and develop. Some of his moves are complete hax though. I wish I had his 2hour ability: Elemental Blitz. He summons 6 elementals (one of each type) that cast an instant cast AM2 on the target. It's really cool to watch.

This is the best belt I got. I'm happy with it.

The update teasers said they're adding some new MMM boss fights. While that sounds exciting, they really need to fix some of the issues first. For an "instanced" event, getting in can be really frustrating. This problem is only going to get worse once the update gets here; MMM is fantastic for exp, especially if the new camps they introduce are less than ideal.

Another issue is that you can only use your maze once a day. This wasn't such a big issue before, but they keep adding more content to MMM. People will want to exp more than ever before soon, and if the new boss drops good gear, it's going to be annoying if I have to choose to save my maze for EXP or for gear. They should just limit yourself to not repeating the same voucher per day, not just any maze.

Leviathan got Fiat Lux again. I lost my medal the day before yet again, but it didn't really matter. This BC has become an absolute nightmare. So many more people have access compared to last time, and not only that, but people are now entering with 4-5~ people somewhat regularly. The price of the cape has completely crashed, and now pretty much everyone wants the body/head only. Entering with less people is of course going to be smarter. Unfortunately this means that there we will be even more groups, and the fights will take longer on average. Even at times that were good before, like the afternoon, aren't anymore. The minimum I had to wait was 30mins, but most runs had around a 90min-150min wait. These weren't even in JP primetime, where I'm sure the wait time is around 3hours...

Plus it didn't help that every single run this time around ended up in near fails. People forgetting the ops, not listening to instructions, slow responses on dealing with the adds. It was just terrible.

I did finally see a Nocturnus piece drop! I lost lot though! Emo!

We got Splitting Heirs again too. I would've preferred Plucking Wings, but oh well.

I've also been doing some solo limbus just for the fun of it.

Started with kings. I used to think BLM was the king of this solo, but I tried RDM/SCH and it really felt a lot easier than BLM. I wasn't even used to RDM/SCH quite yet. Kills are a bit slower because of tier 3 nukes only, but a good use of convert and the restore chest means you rarely have to rest.

KB is also much easier as rdm. With refresh and convert, you can spam blizzard3 instead of drain. The extra fast cast traits, as well as dark arts are also nice to have. This solo only took me about 18mins, and I was playing safe. Could easily cut it down to probably 12-14 minutes I think.

I really do think NW is 80-90% solo rate. You need to be insanely unlucky on the first two floors to lose. Even killing 4 mobs/floor you should be good to win.

Next I did NE, again as RDM/SCH. The first floor is definitely harder as RDM compared to BLM, mainly because of the lack of sleepga. The mandragoras love to hang around the time/restore chests too. I actually had to skip one of the time chests on this floor because I had aggro'd so many mobs. Luckily they run at normal movement speed, so I was able to make it to the teleport.

The second floor is where I think RDM has a much bigger advantage. The greater bird is probably the hardest part of this solo. Chainspell is really nice to deal a large chunk of damage safely. RDM also has better recasts for bind & gravity. Don't forget your poison pots/elshimo fruit so lullaby doesn't own you!

Third floor is easy as either job. Maybe RDM is a bit nicer because of chainspell? Doesn't really matter either way though. Just need to kill the doll and port up.

For the gigas floor, I brought my melee gear in the event I got stuck with the magic immune gigas. I ended up getting the vortex to open after the first two gigas though, so it wasn't needed. I'm not really quite sure how meleeing would have worked out as /SCH though. This is the only part where I would say you can lose this solo, so roughly 33% chance of losing.

Last floor is just kill 8 dhamels. BLM works better if you feel confident enough to ga3 a bunch down at once. If not, kill speed is probably about the same.

Then I did SW! This actually took me two tries. The first time I timed out with the final elemental at 35%, and the second time I clicked the final chest with 7 seconds left.

This run will actually slightly differ depending on your race. If you're taru or mithra, you will need to melee down the first floor. Galka, Elvaan, and Hume can nuke it down. You will still want to bring melee gear regardless though, for the third floor.

The first floor is the hardest. You need to kill the fomor associated with your race. There is 2 of each race; one will open the vortex to the next floor, and the other will spawn chests, which you can only pick one of. The hard part isn't really killing them, but dealing with links, and waiting for a clean pull. On my first attempt, I had to wait 4 minutes for one of the taru fomors to move into a safe spot. The vortex opened on the first taru. I decided to skip trying to kill the second taru for the time chest (10minutes) since I felt like I could possibly lose time by waiting forever for a decent pull, or barely break even.

Second floor is really simple. You just need to kill the Jidra without any leaves. Sleep and gravity land without any trouble, but I learned bind didn't. It really doesn't matter much though. Sleep/grav/nuke it down as fast as you can and port up.

Third floor are mimics. You only need to kill one mimic to make the vortex open. There are hidden time, restore, and an item chest, but as far as I know there's no way to differentiate between mimics and the real chests. Plus they draw in, so it's not like you can just randomly start clicking chests to test and run away.I went ahead and melee'd these down too. I brought antidotes to deal with death trap, but it's a weak poison, so not really needed.

For the final floor, you need to kill the 3 elementals associated with the game day you port onto the floor on. You can't obviously do this on darksday. Most other days should be ok, I chose water because both thunder and ice work well. This is where I would say bringing some kind of ranged item is useful. On my first run, I lost 1 minute by pulling them with a melee swing; they move around almost constantly, only stopping for a few seconds here and there.

They all automatically link, so once you've pulled one, pull it back to where you ported in. Sleeps, and quickly chainspell nuke them. Again on my first run I made a mistake in that I used convert prior to pulling the elementals, instead of resting my MP back. I think it would have been better to instead maximize chainspell and save your convert for it. I literally lost 20-30seconds of chainspell because I ran out of MP. I was unlucky and had the elemental resist me too, so it didn't end up dying, and I was stuck with 3 elementals and no MP. Resting is harder with 3 elementals up, so you really want to make sure you can get at least 1 down prior to chainspell wearing.

For my second run, I brought vile elixirs to make sure I would win. The coin total from this zone is awful compared to NW/NE, so you will lose gil doing it. It does make the win much more manageable though.

I couldn't get a perfect pull, so I purposely pulled a link. Sleep lands easily. Unfortunately I messed up, and my add woke up just as buffs were down. Few seconds of macro fumbling and panicking later , I decided to just quickly Death Blossom the taru down, and take the death.

Lost a lot of time waiting for weakness, and I had only brought 1 pizza with me, so I was stuck with crab sushi for the remainder of the run.

Made it to the last floor with about 7minutes left. The vile elixers helped a lot. I was able to kill 2 elementals with chainspell active.

I was freaking out because I thought I would run out of time a split second before I could hit the chest.

I think this zone is the hardest and the easiest of the three in a way. Easiest because there's no random surprises. You know exactly which mobs you need to kill to advance. The only luck based part is on the floor when you have to wait for a decent pull. It's the hardest because it's not very forgiving to mistakes. With NW, you can die during the run probably twice, and as long you are lucky with the portals you can still win. Of course all three will be much easier in a week when we become 80.

These were fun to do, but the downside is now I'm stuck with inventory -3. SE can't be done solo at all, so maybe I'll just bribe some melee to duo with. Only then I'd be stuck with inventory-4! I'm really far too lazy to do omega again. Finding/dealing with buyers is such a chore.

I really need to meet this taru dancer with a name similar to Tsolamogola. I've also never been more offended in my entire ffxi career. How can someone dare to confuse me with another taru?!

Really excited for this update next week. Everything seems like it will be fresh and exciting so I can't wait! See you guys next time when I'm super awesome level 80!

Give me all your drops!

2010-05-03T20:41:00.000-07:00

Levi got access to the Shadow Lord BC! Of course it wouldn't have been possible had I not helped the JPs take control of the areas! If you benefited at all from the BC you owe me a few favors!

Killing campaign mobs without tags on is pretty lame. They should at least give AN or something.

I actually messed up and lost my medal the night before the BC was unlocked, so I was only able to do the fight 8 times. The fights started to get annoying towards the end actually. For a 15 minute BC, it took an average of 60-90mins just to get there, wait in line, and then finally enter.

The fight wasn't too bad, I lost once out of the 8 tries. Seemed like depending on how lucky you got with what TP moves it chose, the easier the fight was. The most annoying thing about the fight, is the sacing. Any time it does "Spawn Shadow", it creates 3 clones of itself. The easiest way people have discovered to deal with this is to have a mage diaga them, and die. I had one fight where it decided to do it 7 times. The EXP loss kind of adds up...

It also has a few other annoying TP moves like a massive HP down AoE move and AoE doom. When I did my runs with JPs, they seemed to save TP to 300%, and only weaponskill when it was dual wielding, and not when it was using his great sword. I couldn't figure out why, but it made the fights last an extra 7-8 minutes longer than they should have.

For the first few fights I did, I was the suicidal diaga taru as RDM. When I went with the JPs they made the BRD (me of course...) sac. I guess it kind of makes sense for BRD to sac, since it's not one of the healers, and can still do songs. The nice thing about going with JP groups though is that they automatically give the BRD any synth items/grips that drop because of sacing I guess. With items like Imperial Wootz Ingots in the loot pool, it could be pretty cool.

The last few runs we did I made Sedna sac as WHM though. With RR3 it's not as bad. I was fine healing by myself as RDM.

Our 1% wipe :( oh well.

The drop rate on the helm/mail is absolutely terrible. Out of 8 fights, I didn't see a single one. Two Nightfalls, 3 capes, and 2 necklaces though.

Picked up my Allied ring after the tally! Saving it for BLM 75->80 I think.

I'm pretty sure the JPs will get access again within the next few weeks. Everyone wants the helm/mail, and allied rings as a bonus is always nice.

After finishing my magian great axe, I went ahead and completed a few more weapons. The quests are terribly boring/annoying, but pretty much the best weapons (aside from relics, and some are better than relics for certain jobs even) come from this. Plus SE has confirmed that they will be continuing the quest line, and the current best weapons will get upgraded even further.

Started with the gun. Took me a little less than a week to complete the whole thing.

All the low level NMs were pretty nice, popping within 90mins each time.

400 arcana! Just had to live in Ro'maeve for a day.

300 Hippos! This took a bit longer, since I couldn't play during the times when a large group of people seemed to be doing them. I did the see the Cradle Horn NM pop several times though.

And then it was time for VNMs again! This time it was Verthandi spam!

The T2s for this path are probably the most annoying. Urd is basically not soloable because it can cure4 spam itself. Skuld can be solo'd, but it's really annoying and a rather long fight (60mins give or a take). Plus a little bad luck with what spells it chooses and you can be dead anyway.

Duoing with a SMN made them both a lot easier. For Skuld, using Ramuh and Chaotic Strike for stun was really nice. I think the nicest part was when it did chainspell. It's like the ZNM imp in which it will try to cast on you even if you're out of range. Since during chainspell, it's constantly trying to cast, it ends up just sitting relatively in place as you are out of range avoiding it all.

It's a still a much harder fight compared to Urd though. I did Urd a few ways, RDM+SMN, RDM+BLU, RDM+SAM. RDM+SMN is probably the "safest" since it won't get TP at all, and thus you won't have to worry about mute/dispelga, but duoing with a melee is just as easy. Once we kind of got the hang of it, and it wasn't been cure happy, we got fights down to 10-15mins.

It spams buffs on itself a lot. You're going to need to keep it dispelled. It doesn't cast any offensive magical at all. Slow lands, and between that and its buff spamming, it's easy to keep shadows up.

At 79%, 59%, and 39% it 2hours. It does 4 TP moves back to back. Zephyr Arrow-->Lethe Arrow-->Cyclonic Turmoil--> Cyclonic Torrent. Zephyr is just knockback + weak damage. Lethe is weak damage+ bind/amnesia. However, getting hit with it would be bad since then you'll be forced to eat the following TP moves. Turmoil does a full dispelga + damage, and Torrent does mute+ damage. All the moves can easily be ran out of range though.

It can start casting cure4 when its HP reaches 48% or so. The fight can be prolonged a bit if it gets cure happy, but overall it's not that bad.

Once I got my abyssites to upgrade, it was back to whitegate for more shouting! Finding help was really easy. I don't know why anyone is doing the gimper weapons where you have to a million more EP-DC mobs. People are much more likely to help with NMs where they can score fancy stat +6 rings or synth materials worth 1-2M.

Verthandi was actually a lot easier than I excepted. The only chance of death was if it did Norn Arrows/Cyclonic Turmoil/Torrent, immediately followed with a holy2. Norn Arrows is really predictable though. It will always (and only) do it as the next TP move following Winter Breeze. When you see it do Winter Breeze, just make sure everyone is out of range until it uses Norn Arrows.

Yay for naked fun times too!

Only 1 ring, and 1 gem dropped in all the fights I did. We did get 13 eyes though, which was more than what was needed.

With my super gun finished, I moved onto the staves. It's pretty hard to pass up 20% mab!

I had to redo treants again for my lightning staff.

Spiders during lightning/fire/wind/light weather. I think this was easily the most annoying in the lightning path set. I just camped weather NPCs for Boyahda Tree/Kuftal. I was fortunate enough to find an Amano that needed kill shots on vermin, so with him kills went by really fast. Also unlike the terrible slime weather trial for the ice, there's plenty of spiders for when weather occurs for you to slaughter.

Next trial was a 100 mobs of any family during lightningday or weather. From here on out, the trials got better since you could plan around them a bit more.

Then a 100 beasts during lightningday or weather! I just leeched off Breaze who was killing beasts for her own staff trial.

150 vermin with thunder magic kill shots! Without day/weather to worry about, it's a lot nicer. You can just work on them slowly/whenever you please. The 150 vermin was actually extremely easy. Chigoes count, so I headed to Aydeewa, and Nosferatu's pop room. There's 10 chigoes in the room.

I just pulled them all at once, and a few ga3s later they were dead! The 16minute respawn timer means this will still take a while, but the pull/killing part only took me about 5 minutes max.

And for the final quest, kill 200 slimes with thunder magic! Yay! Took forever to solo. I couldn't really think of a good camp for this with more mobs even if I could find help. Most of the dungeons with slimes in it have them all spread out across the map with tons of aggro in between. At least with the mire camp there's 2 slimes close together on a 5minute repop, with zero aggro possibility.

So after an eternity of killing EP mobs, my super thunder staff was complete!

Ice staff was next!

The slimes during dark/ice/water/earth weather trial is really the worst. This trial was really the main reason I decided against making a SMN pet mab staff. Even though I love SMN, I rarely play it, and this was way too much work for a job/staff I would rarely use.

Once slimes were done, it was time for any mobs during iceday/weather! Just head to Uleguerand for a bit if you don't feel like waiting for iceday, easy!

Then 100 amorphs during iceday/weather. I stayed in Uleguerand Range and killed worms.

150 skill shots on Arcana! Luckily, a lot of popular trials require arcana mobs, so it's pretty easy to find people to leech off of. Still, getting kill shots in a group setting is really annoying, especially since after a certain point everyone just goes on autopilot and they stop paying attention the mob's HP.

Then finally 200 lizard kill shots! The polearm trial needs these, so I teamed up with Kouk and got it done in a few hours.

Super ice staff done!

Went out to test them on puddings really fast, and I'm pretty pleased with the results.

Thunder4 with Jupiter's:

Thunder4 with Teiwaz:

Blizzard4 with Aquillo's:

Blizzard4 with Teiwaz:

Definitely worth the time! The thunder one is obviously a lot better, especially since you lose the 5 INT and 10 elemental skill from Aquillo's. Now nobody will be able to nuke harder than I can! Not like anyone could before this anyway!

I had a Lord Ruthven pop from a while ago, so I shouted for some people to try and a get a silver, and then finally a HQ medallion!

Yay silver! Now for some pre-synthesis good luck!

Yay finally!

Since my WAR is so awesome now, everyone has been begging me to bring it to einherjar!

Still no sign of KB, but we did get a Khimaira finally!

Random afeet! Yay for useless abjurations!

Odin dropped exactly what I wanted, Nlegs! I don't know what I should ask Odin for next!

Did Pandemonium Warden with Radiance! Or we tried to anyway. There were a TON of people there. somewhere around 55-60. I think one of the biggest problems was that there were so many people. It's hard enough to organize 18 people, let alone 60. I don't even know if some of the people there were even worth trying to organize.

Anyway, finally get there and we pop it! I was in one of the lamp melee alliances. I'm not sure if the killing of the lamps went exactly as they were hoping it would. It seemed like we were all fighting right on top of each other, and everyone was getting blasted with the gears AoE moves. By the time we got it down to 2 lamps, over 3/4 of the people were dead.

It ended up not mattering though, since PW shortly depopped. There was some misunderstanding with having to take action on PW if people had hate on gears to prevent it from depopping. So the entire fight only lasted 2 minutes. Really lame, since I think most people were looking forward to the experience of the fight, but mistakes happen. Even though it was a really silly/common sense one people do make them from time to time (and I can't even say anything! At least nobody had a genius idea like I did to trade the trigger to a ??? in the completely wrong area!). I hope people in Radiance didn't go too emo over it, and maybe they can try again soon!

And my winning never ends! Until next time when I get 100 more drops!

I love remora!

2010-04-19T10:11:00.000-07:00

Seriously, I should have just transferred to Remora years ago. I've made so many friends already! I think Leviathan people are sick of me or something! Nobody from original Levi is as nice as the Remora people are!

I did the new missions as soon as I logged on as usual. Not a lot of pointless running around, and no farming at all, which was a welcome change. Just 4 BCs one after the other. The missions did end rather abruptly though I thought.

Fun screenshot time (spoilers!)!

I really hope Levi gets access to the Shadow Lord BC. It looks pretty cool, and decent rewards!

WoTG story keeps getting better! Now I'm in a love triangle between Lillith/Lilisette?! Who are the same person just from different futures?! So much drama!

Odin/Alexander!

Both fights are easy and simple enough. Can be SMN burned or TP burned without much effort at all.

Alexander can be chainspell stunned to make it really simple.

As for Odin, using a SMN and Perfect Defense makes it a joke. When we first started Odin spam, we didn't know about it. Had this crazy win with a dia kill!

I went ahead and spammed Odin so I could complete the final Odin quest. It's kind of silly to have you repeat the same fight 13 times, but oh well. It's fairly obvious that there's going to be some connection between ToAU and WoTG (similar to Apoc nigh and ZM/CoP) or a Bahamut2 style BC to follow up the end of ToAU, so might as well get these Odin wins out of the way.

And after the 13 wins, I became Odin's knight!

And I'm in yet another love triangle between Nashmeira and Odin! What's next?!

Even NPCs admit I'm the best!

VNMs!

I think this system is nice overall, but has some aspects that I think they should change. The first being the repop timer on the NMs. I don't understand why T2 have a 1hour repop, and T3 a 3-4 hour repop. It just seems pointless for forced pop NMs. I also dislike the random upgrade style. I've gone 1/1, 1/10, 1/30...it's just so random. I wouldn't mind if it was something like "Kill 10 T1s for a colorful abyssite!" or something along those lines.

It does feel like with every new NM system they release, SE has been trying to avoid RDM solos. Over the course of the past several updates, it's been fairly apparent. All the NMs are immune to gravity/bind; most are immune/resistant to paralyze; and all of them run at incredible movement speed to avoid kiting strategies. Yet despite all that, players have developed strategies around them. Mostly involving a cheap "pinning" strategy, but still.

Anwyay, started with the Krabkatoa path. Capricornus is a pretty easy solo for RDMs out there looking to get their hands on a Karka Ring. Just slow2 and nuke. It 2hours every 20%, when it does you just want to run away and never stop running. Stopping to cast utsu is pointless since it'll just recoil dive those shadows away; whereas if you keep running you'll just get the out of range message.

I heard Yacumama is soloable using a pinning strategy, but I haven't gotten a chance to do it yet. It's an easy duo though. Just have some PDT gear, and bounce hate during HF.

When we first started doing Krabkatoa, we were doing the usual PLD tanks and BLMs for DD. Wasn't that easy of a fight. Mega Scissors on the tanks was annoying, since then it would run to the BLMs and proceed to kill them.

Saw a strat on BG about using RDM/NINs and bouncing hate, so we figured we'd try that! It was a lot easier. If you can get slow on, it's really a joke to tank.

Did the blob path next. Only did Lamprey Lord for the T2, since it actually has a useful drop!

As for the blob itself, it wasn't that bad of a fight. Just need BLMs to ga3 the adds when they pop.

No agi ring dropped!

Lord Ruthven path next!

Erebus is another NM that is soloable by RDM. Basically, you abuse the fact that it can kill itself to your advantage. The first thing you'll want to do is make sure your filters are setup properly so that you can see differentiate if it's casting on you, or itself. The way I set it up was to make sure "Special actions started by foes" was ON, and "Special actions started on you" was OFF. This way when it starts casting something, if it appears in the chat log, that means it is casting on YOU. If you see it casting something, yet nothing appears in chat log, that means it's trying to heal itself. I don't know if this is the best way to set it up, but it worked for me.

Erebus switches its element depending on the last spell cast on it. So if your last spell was water, it'll start casting water spells on you. The best element I found to keep it in is fire. In fire element mode, it only casts fire IV and firaga3. In other modes, you have to deal with stunga, slowga, paralyga, etc... Something to note is that only damaging elemental spells will change its element; so don't worry about slow, bio, and poison changing it. Also note that when you switch its element while casting something, you won't have to worry about changing it back to fire.

Basically you want to just dot/kite it, and when you see it trying to heal itself, cast a stone1 to make it hurt itself instead. I've found the best spot to do is around any of the towers in Beauc. As for Xarc, I haven't really found as good as a spot yet, so I just end up running around the entire zone.

Keep slow2, bio, and poison on. It has terrible pathing, so it's easy to keep distance even though it runs really fast. Even with a decent (not the best, but above average) magic defense kit, his ga3 spells will do 200-300 through a 380damage stoneskin. My recommendation is to just run. It casts a spell every 30seconds or so, so you generally only need a maximum of 3 shadows to survive its melee attacks. If you keep running, you should be able to run out of range of both ga3 and fire4. Once I'm safely out of range, I'll cast a fresh utsu, and then keep running.

The main difficulty of this fight is when it uses Blood Weapon. It does it at 74%, 49%, and 24%, and then after the 24% one, it'll start using it exactly every 2 minutes. During blood weapon, it gains increased attack speed. You're going to want to hope that it blood weapons after it's cast a spell, so that you'll have plenty of distance and make it easy on you. It only lasts 30 seconds, so you could avoid the entire thing if you have enough distance from it. Alternatively, you could again use a pinning strategy and make it even easier.

One final thing to worry about it is losing hate and it depopping. I highly recommend against getting out of 50' from it. I'd stay around 40' max, and even then let it catch up. Despite the ridiculous movement speed it posses, it can depop somewhat easily. I've even had it depop at 1%, which is very annoying; since it immediately returns to 100% HP.

Only takes about 20-25 minutes to solo, even without you nuking it yourself. Once you get more comfortable with the fight, you can speed it up even further.

Though I will say I hate Erebus defeats Erebus. No exp is lame.

Feuerunke is pretty easy if you use the cheap pinning strategy. I'm really not a fan though, gets kind of boring moving left and then right every 5 seconds!

Moving on to Lord Ruthven itself. First fight we did was with 7 people + mules and it wasn't too bad. Really the frustrating part is it's constant drain attacks. Nosferatu's Kiss is extremely annoying especially if it hits avatars.

As long as you don't face it, it's most dangerous TP moves can't hurt you, so it's not a bad fight. For our next couple of fights we had melee build TP on the surrounding mobs and SATA WS. Worked much better, and faster fight. Just make sure people don't stay in range to get drained!

Ever since our initial attempts, I've just been spamming it to try and get a HQ medallion/STR ring. So far out of about 15~ fights, only 2 rings have dropped(one of them went to me, yay!). The silver to make the medallion is a fairly common drop (50%~), but I can't seem to get an HQ. I think out of the 6 or 7 synths Stamos/Sedna have done, 2 of them HQed, but neither were for me.

Used our first Yilbegan pop in a shout-ish group. I knew we weren't going to win, so it was mainly a learning experience. His ga3 spells are so weak, it's basically like casting diaga to wipe shadows, so it could flail you.

Damage wasn't too bad, with only 1 RNG and in only like 8 minutes, we got it to 90% or something.

Next time I tried it was helping dryroot with theirs, and it went really well.

Really don't remember it doing anything crazy in this fight. I was outside alliance for half of it, but it went down really fast. It did meteor once I think.

Using all that we learned, we decided to give it a go ourselves. We went with RDM/NIN tanks, and I was one of them(woo?!).

First fight was in West Saru and despite the maybe not so best tanking, it was going well. RNG took hate a few times, but overall wasn't that bad. At like 80% we lost hate to a RNG, and needed to reposition. As we were, Side (cotank) ate a mean flail and died. It turned to go after someone else and depopped a second later. Someone was very slightly (maybe like.. 24' instead of 22..) out of range as we were trying to reposition.

Was pretty disappointing, and I really wish SE would fix it. Why doesn't it draw in like EVERY other mob? What's the point in it just depopping..?

Oh well, we ran to Xarcabard right after for our next fight. Arc joined as PLD, so we used PLD+ RDM instead of dual RDMs for this fight.

Was a much better fight I think, until 72%. Suddenly it gained its bio aura thing, and then just went crazy. Took 3 meteors within a 5 minute period; its regen went drastically up, recovered 72%->89% within 6 minutes (though we did stop DDing during this period); started using Slowga and Paralyga (never saw these spells before aura on any of the fights I did). Oh and Dark Star is always fun. In the chaos we lost hate for a second, and it did chaos blast, yay for HP/MP/TP down.

It's survivable but I think we were just caught way off guard at how difficult it became suddenly.

Started the Magian Trial. SE actually released a ton of good weapons and there's a lot of weapons I want, but I'm not sure if I have the patience to do them all. The cure potency staff looks really nice; COR has a new highest damage weapon for Quick Draw and crazy OAT gun; PUP has some pet: MAB hands; new BLU/RDM joytoy, SMN: Pet MAB staff, staves that actually beat HQ staves for potency, and the OAT Great Axe.

I figured I would start with the Great Axe and one of the staves. I doubt I'm going to take BLU to 99, and don't really care too much about it. I haven't really solo'd anything on COR in a while, PUP mab is nice, but don't really use it that often either.

The quests for the actual upgrades aren't the most exciting/creative ever. My gaxe started with low level NM hunts, which is kind of stupid. I guess this is the best way SE can reuse existing content!

Then I had to do 400 birds and 300 clusters... so much fun!

I really prefer vnm collecting than killing EP to DC mobs over and over. I was losing my mind killing them.

Last part of the quest needed vamp nails, which of course I had enough of!

And super great axe done!

The kill XYZ family during certain weather/day is absolutely stupid though, and I'm talking about the staves trials. First trial: kill 100 treants under any weather. It wasn't too horrible in Grauberg, but still... occasionally there we 20-30minute periods without any weather. Frustrating.

That was nothing compared to the next trial: kill 100 slimes under dark/ice/water/earth weather. There's absolutely no good camps for this at all. Best we found was Pashow Marshlands [s]. Two slimes with 5 minute repops. Water weather occured like every 20-30minutes, for a duration of 5 minutes... It was like kill 3 slimes> afk. It's even worse since you can't really afk, since you have no idea when exactly the weather will occur. So ridiculous.

I think they should change it so you don't have to repeat the same quests over and over. A lot of the weapons start off with the same base trials, before branching out to more specific trials. I think if you've completed the base trials once, you shouldn't need to redo it again for another version of that weapon

Despite not the so stellar quest design, everyone is being really nice/helpful to each other with these. Allowing people to AFK in party to kill counts; finding common mobs to team up on (I did my 300 clusters with several Kikoku NINs who needed the kill shots on arcana mobs) so it could be worse!

Regular news time!

Had a two hilarious back to back wipes in Einherjar. Breaze called slimes, and she was right!

I don't think a single DD was /NIN, and they completely destroyed us. It was just death after death after death!

I think /SAM is a better choice for T1 and T3 runs, but for T2, I don't see a reason to not /NIN. In my experience we've never needed the extra DD output from a non-/NIN to win in a T2. Dead DDs do no damage. Some people will say to have BLMs spam stuns, but fluid toss will still go through, nobody is perfect, and the runs end up going downhill kind of fast once a few people start dying.

After the two wipes, and some canceled runs, we finally made it to Odin like a month later! I think he got tired of me killing him in the Odin Prime BC, so he decided to reward me with a ebody!

Yay! Now nobody will be able to contest with me that I am the best WAR on Leviathan! Plus super cute!

Omega is just so annoying now. Another double head drop. It's not even worth the headache of making sure buyers are on and able to come so stuff doesn't hit the floor (and all that effort doesn't matter since head ALWAYS drops). I think we've kind of just put a stop to limbus for now.

Started repeating add-on fights again, particularly ACP7, final MKE, and final ASA.

Tossed!

First fight led to this:

Finally something nice! I think the best part was the reactions, rather than the mantle itself!

Such terrible language directed to such a nice person as myself! Proof #457389 how everyone is just jealous!

Some of the items we got:

I'd say post update, these fights are well worth your time to repeat. Far better than stupid FoV augments. Key item collection isn't that bad too; most of them are on the way to the BC or a 10minute detour at the worst.

Remora brought over Spatha, some guy that seems to almost strictly sit in whitegate and operate a casino. He must be successful with it because he shouted and offered gil to people that would win his silly quiz games. Of course I took the opportunity to show everyone how much I win, and won a quick 100k!

Was kind of confused by this! Not sure what I/Sedna did to give off the impression he was a mule!

That's all for now!

Fresh start!

2010-03-21T21:15:00.001-07:00

So in LS news, it's been rather frustrating lately. A bunch of people quit the game recently, and then a few others left the linkshell. Most of the people that remain hate the game and go /emo that they have to log on. At the start of every event, I'd basically have to ask Thano to start sending mass texts reminding everyone to log on. Then they would log on and talk about how much they hate doing events, and rather would be playing xyz game.

It was like we were begging people to come to events that were for them. It started becoming so ridiculous. It wasn't that we didn't have the numbers to do stuff (everything can be done lowman at this point anyway), it's just that nobody wanted to.

After thinking about, we decided it would be better to go back how the LS was before it was officially an "LS": just a bunch of people that enjoyed each others company and actually liked logging on/doing stuff. I'm calling it a "social" since there aren't really going to be set weekly times for stuff anymore. Just more like we'll help each other out. If someone needs a novio, we can go do sea for a bit. If someone needs a ZNM item, we can go do that. No need to deal with people that hate FFXI/the LS!

Boring stuff aside! Update is tomorrow, so I figured I'd do a quick update on stuff I've done!

Started the subjob grind.

And finished 3 of them: NIN, SAM, and RNG!

MMM makes this pretty simple. Average run takes 20-25mins at level 37-50, and the end chest gives you this usually:

This doesn't include the 1.5k~ or so you get from killing the mobs up to the final chest, and no exp rings either.

I think MMM has started to finally become popular among the non-JP population. It's really nice to have an instanced exp camp at a convenient location. The main downside is that because of the nature of MMM, people will tend to take a few minute breaks in between runs. These slowly add up. Add in the occasional "Hands of darkness prevent you from entering" when trading your maze to waste even more time in between runs, and you can end up wasting tons of time. It'll never end up being really great at a merit level compared to the smooth, constant exp of a traditional camp, but before that it works really well.

We did a few KS99 runs. Arc somehow managed to trigger flail...and then be out of range?

I didn't get very good drops at all!

My bad luck spilled over into Odin which resulted in another no Ebody drop!

Though I did win the freelot Pbody!

My WAR doesn't need ebody to beat everyone in a parse though! Had a decent merit party finally and take a look at the parse!

I win! Even though Riki was using great katana instead of polearm, it doesn't matter! I still win!

Also had an embarrassing (for the other DD) party on COR. Really wish I could find a party with solid DD that won't AFK constantly...

Oh, and I did this too:

Going to miss my Tamas!

I did some dynamis for the first time in about 8-9months. Just as boring/long as I remember it being. I died too! Byebye capped BLM exp!

We did a fragment though, and I got to play WAR! Wasn't really that exciting of a zerg, it was over in like 5 seconds. I don't think half the melee even had the chance to WS.

Another 5 man omega. I think we killed it in 10minutes since we were lazy to farm chips... I forgot to take a screenshot, but the usual 100% head dropped!

Really excited to do new stuff tomorrow actually, I can't decide what I want to do first! I think I'll end up going with missions, since Odin/Alex will have potentially long lines!

I am the best WAR on Leviathan.

2010-03-08T08:55:00.000-08:00

My 3 day plan to get WAR75 worked! Not everyone was so supportive though! It's all just jealousy! Everyone knows I'm the best WAR on Leviathan!

Literally just stalked the tunnel, and convinced anyone that was SMN burning that it was in their best interest to let me afkleech exp!

After spending my little adventure in the tunnel, all I can say is people need to relax. I've never seen so much drama/whining/emo over something so silly. Tunnel is taken? Tough luck. Nobody owns the tunnel, just like nobody owns any other exp camp in the game. If you can't deal with the competition, go summoner burn somewhere else.

I had to merit on WAR to finish capping my gaxe skill! I did a fairly decent job considering my skill was gimp!

At least I didn't unlock King's Justice in a merit! I'm not that gimp!

Doing Nyzul for the weapon was more challenging that I thought it would be. Took three tries just to win the run, and had this wipe at 1%.

Cerb is tough to do in random pickups usually. Ironically when I convinced people in the LS to help, we got the much easier Hydra...

More Einherjar/Odin!

A random tier1 dropped Hfeet!

Still no sign of KB. Hydra continues with its 99.99999999% pop rate! I guess most people would be happy with easy tier3s, but KB looks fun!

Rizko tried to get me kicked before Odin! Not very nice. I'm still going with everyone being jealous of how awesome I am!

Odin was a little messier than usual, and we almost wiped! No ebody for me, sad times!

Started on my quest for N.hands. No linkshell would sell me the abj, so I went to jeuno and bought some overpriced triggers, then put together a random group to kill Byakko!

Horrible drops!

I figured I'd try farming for my next Byakko attempt, and got pretty lucky.

Diorite on the first kill!

Despot took an hour to pop, but at least we got it and not the competing linkshells!

Second fight was much smoother, and actually had some nice drops!

Yay nhands for me!

I still haven't tossed my Tamas yet. I know how much better rajas is, so it really should be an easy decision. Maybe once I get ebody!

Moving on, did tons of sea recently.

Fortitude finally dropped his torque, and I haxed the lot! Hasn't dropped since!

Have also been spamming Faith for Breaze's torque. Using a MNK straight tank strategy is a lot easier/faster. I remember trying it this way like 2 years ago, and it was a little more challenging. The WHM update has made it significantly easier though, as well as just better geared monks in general.

Had some better torque luck with the other Jailers though. Wish we could trade this Temperance torque for something else!

Two hope torques back to back(with no TH)!

Yay justice torque!

I despise Ix'DRG. Not only does it like to take hours to pop, but we had an unlucky(or lucky..) streak where several capes in a row dropped. I think everyone in LS has a cape now, that would want one anyway.

All the Ix'DRGs capped my BLM buffer! First time ever!

Did a few prudences with the deeds that took forever to drop.

And I win the torque! Yay me again!

I hate Scid.

I hate Scid even more.

I really hate Scid.

Do you hate Scid now too?

More fomors! Finally got some drops.

Had a particularly bad Lugh, but it was nice enough to drop feet finally!

I stole the feet! Greedy taru go!

Hagun ENM has been blah.

Not even a galateia!

Random ACP7 shout. I was surprised when the JPs asked me to go WAR, maybe it will have a use!

Lame earring, tossed!

More limbus!

Omega is starting to not be worth it anymore with our ridiculous 100% Omega's eye drop rate.

Decent drops I guess! Would've preferred a body in there though.

Random FoV augment! Pretty cool for Slug Shot I think!

This guy's seacom made me laugh. JP ONLY to a new level?!

That's that! Next update soon, once I get my pretty new avatars!

New changes

2010-02-28T20:23:00.000-08:00

No pics this time! Will have a pretty update sometime later! Just going to talk about everything that was announced at fanfest!

Level cap being raised to 99 is obviously the big one and has everyone buzzing about how the game will change as a result. I think it was smart of SE, the game did need a little spark to reinvigorate interest and I think this will be it. I've noticed a lot of people that have lost interest/quit express interest in coming back for a bit even. Just the same, the announcement killed a lot of people's motivations because they feel everything will be useless in a few months.

I'm feeling a little bit both. I'm not excited for the grind of finishing several sub jobs to 49 (NIN, SAM, THF, DRK), and then of course the probably ridiculous exp total of 75->99. I have WHM BLM RDM BRD SMN BLU COR PUP SCH WAR 75; 10 jobs! I really can't see myself doing that much exp if every TNL is incremented by 2k (if not more) as you level. Maybe if they were nice and had it increment by 100 each level. I probably won't end up taking every job to 99, which is unfortunate since I enjoy all my jobs. I think I'll do RDM first, for utility purposes mainly. BLM after, then it'll be a toss up between COR/PUP/WAR/SMN. SCH & WHM will be done after those 6, and then BLU & BRD will definitely be staying at 75/done very last.

It's also going to be interesting on how they plan to balance the game. Will all the events we currently do be outdated finally?

As for the power of level 99 characters and the new level 49 SJs, there's so many possibilities. Big ones that immediately come to mind are every mage subbing /RDM for self convert, refresh, and haste. There's also /WHM, which will give Afflatus Solace/Misery, /SCH which will give Manifestation/Accession (hello Hastega, Refreshga!), /DNC and Haste Samba and tons more that I'm too lazy to list. They said they would tweak JA/spells when subbed though, so I'm thinking that things like Refresh and haste will be weakened; maybe refresh when subbed will only give 1MP/tick, and haste will only give 5% instead of 15%.

Moving on from the level cap news to job adjustments! FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY new avatars! I'm unimpressed though at them being Odin/Alexander. Those models were in the game forever, it really needed to take this long to implement them?

Also the fact that they can only be used during Astral Flow just basically means SE noticed that AF was useless at 75 aside from free perpetuation cost, and is trying to make it more useful. If they can turn Odin's into the equivalent of a melee DD's 2hour (Mighty Strikes, 100 fists, etc..) that would be nice. There's already tons of speculation on how to use Alexander, and possibly cycling SMNs to make your alliance invincible. Regardless of how useful they will be, I'm excited for a new toy finally! I can already see the lines at Nyzul Isle/Hazhalm Testing Grounds for the fights.

PUP update finally as well! The skill increase from C to A is crazy. Not only are they doing that, but they are enhancing the Valoredge (melee) automation, and enhancing attachments (hello 3k Blizzard IVs!). It's been a long time coming for PUP, so I can't wait to destroy everyone in a parse!

Among the other job adjustments they teased about, BLM getting meteor is crazy. Even if it's useless in actual practice, I just want to go ballista against a bunch of people and meteor them all to death!

Next on the big announcements is server merges. I'm on Leviathan, and so we'll be welcoming Remora in 2-3 weeks. Like everything else, it should be interesting to see how it plays out. On one hand, having more people around will be nice. More people to do stuff with, and I'm sure it'll help recruitment for certain linkshells. On the other hand, I can only imagine the absolute nightmare this will cause for endgame events. Dynamis is already busy enough as is, I don't think the server needs an influx of new linkshells that run at the same time to make things ever more hectic. I've been out of the HNM scene for several years now, so I haven't kept up on everything, but it could be interesting to see what happens there! If anything, the potential drama is so great that I don't think I can be disappointed no matter what happens!

The new add ons: Abyssea. I don't really know what to think just yet, aside from being annoyed that were paying $9.99 for each again. I'm just praying it's not another dynamis-ish event.

Smaller announcement time: I'm ecstatic at the release of the new WoTG missions/quests. They're always entertaining to me, and I can't wait to see how the story progresses. The new upgrade weapon quest could be fun, as long as it's not random augment part 2.

Ok that's it! Pretty update with full details about my 3day quest to get WAR75 and more soon!

New project: Warrior!

2010-02-15T00:29:00.000-08:00

So I was thinking of new ways to occupy my time/new goals. After a while of debating what to do I decided on a new job. I have WHM BLM RDM BRD SMN BLU COR PUP SCH already, and really the only thing I'm missing is a a 2h melee DD or THF. THF seems annoying to play, so decided against that. So it was between WAR SAM DRK DRG, and WAR won!

I started thinking about what gear I have already, and what gear I'd need to get so list time!

Have already: Walahra Turban, Peacock Charm, necessary gorgets, Brutal Earring, Triumph Earringx2, Dusk Gloves, Toreador's Ringx2, Flame Ringx2, Cuch Mantle, Swift Belt, and Byakko's Haidate. Which means I need:

1) Aurum Sabatons: Armed Gears or Achamoth.
2) Hecatomb Cap: Fafnir
3) Hecatomb Leggings: Suzaku
4) Hecatomb Mittens: Byakko
5) Ebody: Odin
6) Assault Earring: AH
7) Fire Bomblet (I think): AH
8) Pole Grip (I think): AH
9) Perdu: IS, have enough already.
10) Ancient Torque: Upper Jeuno Bazaar!
11) Fortitude Torque (not sure if I need this?): Jailer of Fortitude
12) SAM SJ.
13) And of course.. to actually level WAR

So I started working down the list, first up Aurum Sabatons! Sevaru still needed Tomoe, so we teamed up and went after Armed Gears.

Farming zeni is always difficult for me due to my extreme lack of inventory, so thankfully we got the drops we needed in 2 kills. We also found some buyers for extra drops, but unfortunately nothing extra dropped. Still was nice that we both got our stuff though!

I thought N.head was going to be a nightmare, but Fafnir was conveniently in my timezone, and it dropped on my first time out there!

It was my first time in aery in at least 2.5 years, though I think it's been closer to 3. Thanks to dryroot for letting me leech a cute cap! It goes well with Dalmatica!

N.feet was next on my WAR to do list. I know RDM can solo Suzaku so at first I was thinking about doing that. After thinking about how long of a fight it was, and my sometimes frustrating internet connection I asked Ro and Breaze if they wanted to fight it. Breaze needed Sune-ate, and Ro wanted the Alegs, so it worked out quite well!

Breaze brought along a WHM 2box too. I was unsure of how exactly the fight was going to go. For the RDM solo method, Suzaku runs out of MP by the time it hits chainspell, which makes it non threatening. Obviously that wasn't applicable here, but I figured between our own Chainspells and a magic defense kit we'd be able to pull through.

Suzaku surprised us when she chainspelled at 90%. I don't think I've seen a god 2hour that early ever. Strangely I decided to test bind to see if it would land literally half a second before I saw the 2hour animation go off, and it conveniently landed! It only lasted for about 15seconds, but it helped. None of us ended up chainspelling, and nobody died.

So with the hard part out of the way, the rest of the fight went by very smoothly, and fairly quickly. It took us about 20-25minutes. I was honestly expecting a longer fight. I know this isn't a huge accomplishment since it is soloable after all, but it was pretty fun to do.

N.feet dropped! So another item off the list.

Ebody was next. My einherjar LS is actually mostly capped on them already. Unfortunately I can't spend points on it until I'm 75 so I have to get them freelot against other people for now.

Well an Odin run comes up, and Ebody drops! It's announced free lot, and 3 other people lot! Highest is 245, so I'm thinking I'm going to win lot...

...and it turns out my super amazing lot of 61 is less than 245! Oh well. Once it's 75 I can guarantee myself one. I just hope we don't get an unlucky streak of no drops.

In other einherjar news, we had stupidly easy tier3 run. The first wave was chigoes, which do... nothing. No tp moves, they don't hit very hard, sleep easily...

Second wave comes, and it's the Dvegyr boss! It was a little messy, but still simple. I died though which made Breaze happy. Not nice!

Ran out to sea next. Breaze needed help with a Faith Torque, so we killed it really fast.

Using a zone>damage strategy is pretty cheap, but it gets the job done!

After that we farmed a bunch if Ghrah M chips up, and went after fortitude.

Easy fight as always. Having a second RDM really speeds things up compared to soloing.

No drop! I got mixed reactions regarding if the torque is better than Ancient/PCC, but for now I think I'll just not bother with it. Drop rate is kind of frustrating.

Finally unlocked SAM as well! Now it just needs 1->37!

The hardest part is going to be actually leveling it to 75! Most people aren't very supportive of the soon to be super awesome TsoWAR!

Some more omegas as usual. Had a surprise 5man omega when Thano forgot her cleanse. We still won, but 6 people is far better. Much easier to farm to gunpods for potential chips.

Legs FINALLY dropped though!

Capped club skill finally!

Hagun ENM still isn't being nice to me.

Did more add-on repeats. I didn't even get actually items this time. Not fair!

Tried Vrtra again. This time it ended in a CFH!

Was actually a pretty good fight until the CFH went off. Reminded me of when Rosemarie CFH'd like two weeks in a row when I last did Vrtra a few years ago.

Watched a JP group fight Pandemonium Warden!

Fulmination owning everyone (me included!)

Pretty avatars! I died again though!

They had it depop around 40% or so, but still wasn't a bad attempt. PW is actually one of the fights I really want to try again before I quit. So hopefully soon!

During a Tinnin, Dig was struggling to land paralyze forever (gimp! unlike me), but he finally got it on like the 100th cast!

I like the way Breaze thinks!

Continuing with ways in which I win: random compliments from JP buyers!

Oh and yay I found my FFXI-valentine! Sorry I decided to share our love with the world!

Happy birthday to me!

2010-02-02T00:44:00.001-08:00

I've been meaning to update for a while! This was originally going to be a happy new year's post, but I kept delaying and delaying...so now it's a Happy Birthday to me post! Speaking of my birthday, where are my presents?!

1g doesn't count Dig! I did have a super awesome birthday bash though!

I was about to log off for the night when I thought of some areas that were never used, and then it hit me! The kokba hostel thing in whitegate! Such a strange addition to the game, but perfect for me!

I needed people to come though! So I started shouting offering free gil to anyone that would attend! Some people actually believed that I would give them gil!

Entering the party!

Until next year!

Birthday party shenanigans aside, first thing I want to say is a huge congratulations to Breaze for finally completing her Vajra! I remember when she was first starting and needed her ToAU king kills a year, so she has definitely come a long way!

Bonanza came, and I won nothing as usual! I did come close to winning a rank3 prize though!

JPs decided to be nice and take over La Value for us. Spammed Splitting Heirs, and made some gil!

I was actually surprised at the amount of tells I received asking for a strategy on how to win the BC. I thought everyone knew about the extremely easy manaburn strategy.

If you don't know though: RDM/BLMx2 BLM/RDMx4. You can drop a BLM and easily win with 5. One RDM/BLM Sleepgas the 3 helpers in the arena, while the second RDM and all the BLMs grav/nuke the boss in the entrance hallway.

The RDM and BLMs need to make an ES gravity order. You really only need 2 or 3 gravity though, it's highly unlikely that everyone's gravity will be needed. Begin with a timed AM2, and then just spam nuke the boss down. Stun works, so use it to your advantage. It takes double damage when it counterstances, and is particularly weak to thunder magic.

The lone RDM sleeping the adds probably has the hardest job. The adds share hate with the boss, so they will be running after the BLMs, not the RDM sleeping. Make use of gravity, and overwriting sleep spells and you'll be fine though.

The entire fight takes about 3-4 minutes, and an additional 3-4 minutes to buff/rest MP in the beginning. It actually takes longer to farm the key item (hello BLM buffer!).

Oh, and waiting in line. That's always fun!

The BC is a very good source of gil. Both mantle and sash have fairly high drop rates, and you can do the BC 13-14 times the week it is active. It's fast to do as well; scheduling was the most difficult part between everyone's linkshell events, and random HNMs that decided to be in NA primetime during the most inconvenient week possible.

I really wish we could get Plucking Wings for a Roundel Earring though. Unfortunately, Windy and Bastok are being completely destroyed. Hopefully the JPs will come through for us!

Did Ouryu. First fight in a while for many of us and it wasn't very pretty.

Also did B2. First fight a gigaflare got through somehow, and we ended up wiping :(. Second fight we won though!

Good drops!

And we did the event I hate the most: Kirin.

I hate Kirin so much. It takes longer to get to the stupid room than to do the actual fight. Even with the very handy sky port from holla/dem/mea, the actual port to the Kirin room is random. It's frustrating because you end up waiting on that one member who is 0/10 on trying to get into the room, through no fault of his or her own.

Oh well, it's an easy fight to TP burn. We had no problems with 12 people once when we were low on numbers. We got some decent drops too so I can't complain.

More JoL. Got the same Novia only drop twice in a row, so disappointing.

We did Tygers for the first time in a while. I really dislike Tyger, and its path in general. The tier3 NMs just pop in annoying places, despite them actually being the easiest tier3s out of all three ZNM paths. It just takes forever to get to them. Tyger itself also pops on Khimaira's island, where a million soulflayers/imps reside. It got me thinking on how exactly do people race to Khimaira when it pops? Do they just die and hold it weakened or something?

Lucky for me I just leech and auto follow people, and then watch them die!

First two fights were a little messy, but by the last fight we got the hang of it. SMNs really do destroy it though, and you don't have to worry about hate/TP!

Was kind of hoping for a Tyger's Tail, but none dropped! We did get 2 Aurum Cuirass though, and a Hachiryu Kote, so good drops overall!

I did some more synergy. I think somewhere they must've ninja'd the drop rates to make treasure hunter work because I've started to see more drops than ever before.

I made an Ebur Jerkin, an Ebur Bliaut, and Ebur Caubeen. Look at how pretty I am!

I think the Jerkin is pretty good. Snapshot on a body is pretty cool, and it's only 5acc less than what I was previously using for ranged TP (Pahluwan Body), while I gain 5 attack and Snapshot. I stuck cure casting time on it because for whatever reason, the third slot is ALWAYS magic, even on the melee pieces. This seemed like the best bet, for those COR/WHM times.

New COR ranged TP gear:

I could use PCC over faith torque too, but I can't do math so no idea what's better! Not like it matters since I never do any fights where I'd be shooting...

I stuck some vs. birds ranged attack/acc on it too. The values definitely go higher, but I'm lazy so I'm just going to leave it like this for now.

I wasn't originally going to make a Bliaut or a Caubeen, but I ended up getting a size8 evolith, so I decided that I might as well. I think they're pretty good pieces. They work not only for cures, but -na spells too!

Funny story with the Caubeen! Here I am in Windurst Waters [s] campaigning to get my Moonlight medal back. Kaiser Behemoth was conveniently there, so I decided to pull it and proceed to MPK everyone for fun! Of course with Barthunder I take 0 damage from its Thunderbolt spam, but everyone around me doesn't!

So I'm MPKing people left and right, and suddenly Rotaru is spamming me with tells asking me to meet her in Xarc since they just killed Zir for the evolith, and they didn't need the pigment. Of course since KB is spamming Thunderbolt, I'm pretty much stun locked, but after a minute or two I managed to make it away, and port to Xarc.

Crazy timing; the chest icon wasn't even loaded when I joined the party, and I remember thinking "ugh, I just missed it" for a second, until the log showed that I obtained the pigment!

But it gets better! Hitoma/Nylee are getting ready to go etch their evolith into their body, only they have a Furia Bliaut. Of course only Ebur Bliauts are the only ones actually large enough to fit the healing magic casting time evolith. Oh and to make an Ebur Bliaut you need an Ebur pigment, the very thing they thought they didn't need and gave to me to leech!

Oh! And Rotaru still hasn't gotten her size 8 evolith, while Nylee goes 1/1 on it.

So in the end I got to MPK a bunch people, leech a pigment, and laugh at everyone else's misfortunes! Fun day!

I got to fight Ixion for the first time.

It was kind of interesting. I think the first time I fought it in Jugner, I was confused during the pull process. I didn't know where they were pulling it to or anything (or even that they were pulling...), and I actually almost died because it did some weird AoE and almost killed me!

Once the pull part was over, fight wasn't too bad. I wasn't in the tank PT, so I guess I was missing most of the excitement! I just spammed cured the RNG when they took hate. Though, they rarely took hate so I felt like I would've been better off as BRD or something.

Second fight was a little more hectic though. It was going after the RNG a lot more, and I was actually strained for MP.

Bad drops I think!

Spammed ISNM. Got a few khromas!

I started duoing with Sevaru and Breaze here and there. We split ore drops so it was still profitable for me.

Dryroot started Einherjar again. Over the 2 month break we lost a few mules apparently? So we had to redo all the chambers I think for new mules.

Tier1 is so boring! It's like over before you know it.

Tier2 is a little more exciting!

All leading up to Odin as usual.

After reading a thread on BG about einherjar the other day, it got me thinking that there's still a lot I haven't experienced in tier3. If I remember correctly, we got Hydra boss a LOT; KB once (my first run, where we wiped at 50%), chair guy once (kind of fun!), and I don't think we ever got Khim? As for normal mobs I've never seen Dahaks, so I'm actually kind of hoping for that in the future.

I did some Fay weapons too. I was trying to get song casting time on the BRD dagger, but unfortunately nothing there.

Literally felt like I was getting the same dagger over and over...

PUP weapon (trying for Pet: MAB) wasn't being nice either.

Moving on to SMN now. I need Pet: MAB here too!
During one of the runs, someone noticed the Hippogrph Lullaby Horn NM up, so we ran over and nuked it down really fast.

No drop!

I randomly decided to try and go for a Gnole Torque again, so I asked Ro if she wanted to try and duo the bunny with me. All the previous times I've done it were with 5xBLMs and an ES Sleep>nuke order.

First time I tried with just Might only, and it was VERY easy. Easy enough I could solo I'm sure.

The next day I decided to try with it with Supreme Might +Might (aka super bunny!). We managed to win, but it was close!

This version is much more resistant to nukes/enfeebles. Paralyze works really well though, so try and land it as soon as possible.

You can still get unlucky and die though unfortunately. Sometimes it just seems like there's no avoding it: Ni>-ga>Ichi>Whirl Claws through 4 shadows> dead taru.

No drops! I think I need a lot more practice with it; made so many dumb mistakes, and ended up losing a few of the runs too.

I did Vrtra with Dryroot. Last time I fought it was during the weird Echo/Shadows team up like 3 years ago(?), which led to two CFHs in a row, and a flail, So then we stopped trying!

Unfortunately this fight was basically over before it even started. We didn't have enough people dedicated to the adds and had an unlucky moment where it decided to Cyclone Wing right as everyone's poison wore. There was also some kind of miss communication on what the SMNs should be doing. Some people were saying to leave Garuda out, so if tanks were charmed Vrtra would attack Garuda... which was weird. The big rule I remember from wyrms as SMN: "Don't assault!".

The bright side is that it was going down really fast (for the 5 minutes we were alive anyway!). We got it to 86%!

Overall it was fun. I was disappointed at the lack of a flail though. Cyclone Wing killing everyone just doesn't do it!

More Limbus, more Omega's eye.

I'm beginning to think that at least 1 eye is around 99% drop rate. Out of the last 14 omegas, we must have gotten 12-14 eyes; it's too depressing to count.

Stamos is also a fail duo partner! Look at him getting resisted and almost costing us the run!

Ultima has been nice though and we got two more pairs of legs!

No Fomor will drop anything, except for Elatha of course.

Did some ANNM. I'm really interested in trying to get a Mythic Pole with +10 SMN skill from Meriphtaud, but unfortunately it's not dropping. Just Elite Berets/Errant Hpl.!

Also did a random Batallia run for some gil.

Breaze is bad luck. She cursed me and caused me to wipe in the hagun ENM!

Wasn't paying attention + aggroing other antilions= bad! I actually probably could've done it by just keeping the first one I aggro'd slept, but I continued to mess up and just aggro'd everything.

Bad Breaze!

Helped some people out with final 2 ASA fights. Got horrible augments!

Where's my speed belt already?!

At least I didn't get this completely useless augment that Sedna got:

How does something that bad even pop out anyway? I can see getting that from random FoV stuff, but not from missions...

I went on some crazy skill up/latent unlock time spree, and finished both Detonator (finally...) and Mystic Boon, as well as Hexa Strike(even bigger finally! WHM was my 2nd 75...).

Tried to FoV my Dusk Gloves again, some more crap.

Did some trio Arrapago to try and get Thano get Morrigan's Robe/Hat.

No drops so far!

Helping Thano with AR reminded me of when we first started salvaging years ago, and when I got my Macha's coat. (stolen screenshots from Thano!)

Also did some SSR for some Skadi hands/Marduk Feet, and no drop there too!

During the GG2 room, our puller messed up and literally pulled EVERY mob somehow. Because I'm awesome I manage to get by unscathed, while everyone else dies!

Another run I did duo with Breaze as THF +RDM.

Breaze's TH doesn't work for me! I actually don't really care much for the pieces itself, I just am 2/3 on several pieces that are taking up so much inventory space. I need another ZR run where I get 3 35s in one run!

Did some Verdelets, and finally got a Muse Tariqah.

I was doing an Undead Besieged, where you get those awesome Lamia to charm everyone! Perfect opportunity to Holy people to death!

Sorry Madmaxx! At least I was nice enough to raise you after!

Karma in the form of Arcangel got me back though when I was charmed during an Anatabonga (or however you spell it!)!

I did get some staff skill ups off Lilweezy first though!

Seeko still has a Ducal Guard's ring...after ALL these years. For those that don't remember, you get it from completing CoP 6-4, and it only has 5 charges.

Tanoshii's failed drama:

I got charmed at Nosferatu, and look! I'm super cute even as a bat!
Also, how many of you guys randomly get tells in whitegate about how awesome you are?! I do all the time!

Once again I win!

Synergy fun!

2010-01-03T16:35:00.000-08:00

I figured I would make a post about synergy, and in particular the ebon gear, now that I finally have 2 completed pieces.

I think there's a lot of flaws in the system that can be easily corrected, and should hopefully be fixed in the next update.

A lot of these steps can be done simultaneously, kind of like upgrading salvage gear. You can get the 15/25/35 and materials in any order, but need them all together to upgrade the piece.

The first thing you need to do to upgrade a piece is to obtain the base piece via the AH or having someone craft for you. They are rather expensive; my Ebon Frock cost me 1.4M and my Ebon Beret 500k.

Once you've done that you need to collect your aptant to upgrade your base piece into a specialized form. For example: Aptant: Secan will convert any of the Ebon Frock pieces to an Ebon Coat piece. Aptant: Geoc will convert any of the Ebon Frock pieces to an Ebon Talar piece. You can find the particular aptant you need on wiki.

Each aptant has 5 NMs that can drop it. Most of them are timed spawns, but several are lottery as well. Each "aptant NM" has 2 aptants they can drop. Which means that you can get the wrong aptant to wrong.

The good news about this is that you have tons of choices as far as what to kill/farm for your aptant, the bad news is that the drop rate is HORRIBLE. I went 0/31 on trying to get my Aptant: Secan, and then got 2 in a row, so 2/33. I was unlucky in that I had the NM drop the incorrect aptant 3 times, but regardless 2/33 is horrible. I couldn't imagine if there was actual competition for these NMs. I was basically killing the NM > afking for 2hours> killing the NM> afking for 2hours. SE definitely needs to up the drop rate a bit on these.

Some of my kills:

Bunch of no drops!

Wrong aptant #1!

Wrong aptant #2!

Drop!

I would also recommend collecting Scylds (used to get evoliths) while killing your aptant NMs. Several of the NMs are good scyld builders, so you might as well take advantage of the fact that you'll need to kill them a billion times.

You will also need an Ebur pigment, which thankfully is a 100% drop off of Oupire, Zirnitra, and Scylla.

Already posted about Zirnitra, but I recently tried Scylla too as RDM BRD SMN.

Scylla is harder than Zirnitra, so I really wouldn't bother really. Basically you need to DD it without feeding TP at all, which means your only DD options are COR and SMN. Between the 2, SMN is obviously a much stronger choice. No bio, and it's immune to poison. No nukes either obviously. Slow works though.

Once you have your pigment, aptant, and base item you'll need to find a crafter.

Trade your aptant+ base item to get the upgraded Ebon version. Then the Ebon piece+pigment to get your ebur piece.

Now starts another annoying part, etching. Each ebon piece has 3 slots, the first 2 are "VS family", which are useless honestly... The 3rd slot is the important one where you can actually add a somewhat useful stat. I don't know exactly how synergy works, but when you "etch" you can HQ or NQ like normal crafting. On the Ebur coat for example, the max size you can etch into a slot is size 8, but during the synergy part if you NQ it, you'll get a slot of size 1-3, or so. If you HQ it, you'll get a slot of size 5-8. My #s may be a little off, because I don't know exactly how it works, but that's the gist.

The frustrating part is that you can't just redo a particular slot if you're unhappy with it. You need to START all over, and re etch slot1 , slot2, and then slot3 again, until you get your desired result. This can get annoying quickly. Getting the max size slot3 will probably take a few tries at least, which means redoing slot1 and slot2 over and over. This would be even worse if slot1/slot2 were actually useful instead of just vs family, since getting HQ on all 3 is difficult.

Getting a 6/8 and 1/8 forcing us to redo the etching process from the beginning.

HQing slot 2!

Finally HQing slot 3!

This could be easily solved if SE would let you constantly retry a particular slot over and over, without erasing what you've done previously.

One nice thing is though if you fail the synth you have no danger of losing anything.

Once you're content with your etching, you need to actually get the evoliths to put on them. Most of the NMs with useful evoliths for the 3rd slot actually need scylds in order for you get the hunt. Hopefully you've collected some scylds from your aptant hunting, if not you will need to do lower tiered hunts in order to builds Scylds.

Find the specific evolith you want, grab the hunt for that NM, and head out. Each completion of the hunt will give you a random size evolith, so more than likely you'll have to do your NM/hunt a few times to get your desired sizes. I chose Sarcopsylla to get Lightning Magic critical hit rate, since for some unknown reason there is no elemental magic accuracy/attack bonus evoliths. I personally went 2/5 on getting the max sizes I needed for hat and body.

Once you have your evoliths, you need to attach them to your upgraded piece. This step is thankfully really simple, and you don't need to worry about HQ/NQs.

Finished products:

I am leaving the first 2 slots blank (VS family) because I'm too lazy, and they're useless. Plus when people /check you it looks funny with first 2 slots blank!

The gear isn't that bad, but could definitely be better given the amount of work involved. There are a few stand out pieces though. Ebur Talar (RDM/BRD/BLU) is a Fast Cast body, which is really nice for example. I think if they can fix the etching/aptant drop rates, as well as add a few useful evoliths (hello elemental magic attack bonus?) the system would be greatly improved.

Plus now I'm super cute!

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-25T10:40:00.001-08:00

I'm still waiting for presents! Don't worry if you accidentally forgot to send me something in time, I accept presents year round! Just send away!

FFXI has been nice to me recently, got a ton of stuff!

I decided to go do some ENMs, and FINALLY got lucky!

Yay Hagun!

Even Brothers gave me a drop!

Started soloing ISNMs, so that nobody else can steal the only ore drop away from me!

Compliments to the Chef (Talacca Cove) is really easy. Run in, gravity, chainspell nuke. Convert when needed, and keep nuking. My chainspell nuke, assuming no resists, takes it from 100% to 48%.

After that, kite it around using gravity and bind, and bio for damage (it resists poison). You don't want to spam gravity/bind since it builds resist to them. I'd only use one of them at a time, and occasionally use neither. It has pathing problems, so it's easy to kite.

Nuke/Convert when you have MP, and it'll die! Takes me between 12-17minutes to kill on average, so plenty of room for error.

Yay for an ore!

LS did a bunch of SCNMs the other day. Went and solo'd 8/8 of the NMs in preparation.

No good money drops, but oh well!

Hat finally dropped though, and I win!

LS did Ultima. It was actually my first Ultima in about 2.5 years I think. Last Ultima I did was when I got my Nashira legs!

It was so much easier than I remember it being. PLDs surviving Citadel Buster make it so much easier to deal with.

Feet dropped too! Now my SMN is super awesome!

Byakko was nice and gave me a haidate! Go BRD TP gear! Now I just need N abj for super BRD WS!

Fomors haven't been as nice as everything else though. Basically nothing dropping at all.

Really want the MAB/Ele skill feet!

Finally got the kill on Lugh/Ethniu though. Much easier to TP burn.

Also want these feet for PUP/COR TP and BLU Big 3! It was kind of funny, for some reason the THFs had hate exclusively in both fights, and died in both fights.

I did Gulool Ja Ja with a shout group a few weeks ago.

Fight wasn't that hard. 4 RDM/NINs to hold one add each, and then everyone else was for Ja Ja. I think the weird part was what jobs they chose for their DD. Ranged damage would have been the best here, but we only had 1 RNG. We had a DRG for some reason. While he did good damage, being in AoE range was annoying. Oh and we had a BLU/THF which would've been good too, except he was meeleing, which kind of defeated the purpose of Cannonball.

Also seemed to lack healers; I think an extra WHM would've made the fight smoother. Regardless we won!

Don't forget to send me presents!

Mother Globe Duo!

2009-12-22T21:26:00.000-08:00

I've been wanting to do this for a while ever since Rotaru showed me a video of 2 JPs doing it! We tried a few months ago, and failed, but came back today for revenge and won easily!

We did it as BLU/NIN (me) and RDM/NIN (Rotaru). I usually don't say this, but I think it wouldn't have worked out at all if my BLU didn't have an excellent MAB build (ie full morrigan's, novio). It might be possible without, but you'll probably need some add-on augments geared towards MAB maybe.

For my nuking gear I used:

Neptune's Staff/Bugard Strap+1/Phantom Tathlum
Morrigan's Coronal/Faith Torque/Moldavite/Novio
Morrigan's Robe/Morrigan's Cuffs/Tamas/Snow
Prism Cape/Penitent's Rope/Morrigan's Slops/Morrigan's Pigaches

Basic strategy is to have the RDM/NIN focus on Mother Globe itself using the typical RDM solo sky strategy: bio/poison/bind gravity when needed. The BLU/NIN is in charge of dealing with the Slave Globes.

I used regurgitation and feather storm to kill the slaves. When they pop, regurgitation. Not only does it do significant damage, but it also binds the target. My regurgitations would almost one shot, and then I'd follow up with feather storm to finish it off. I did occasionally one shot with regurgitation when I used it from behind, since regurgitation gets a bonus when used from behind. It was nice when it happened, but I never planned for it. When the slaves spawn, they will immediately go for Mother Globe's target, the RDM, so you'll want to get it off the RDM as soon as you can.

I think the pull is the hardest part. Since MG actually has all her slaves globes alive with her, you have to kill them during the pull too. In a normal setup, most people use BLM to one shot with Thundaga3. Obviously there's no BLM here, so you'll have to use BLU's own ga3: Maelstrom!

Maelstrom gear is the exact same as Regurgitation gear. From the screenshot above, you can see I did 700~ damage, which is over 100 necessary. I used Memento Mori+ 2hour to be safe.

The RDM should Chainspell utsusemi during the pull too. We got unlucky and Mother Globe decided to cast Thundaga 3, its worst spell, during the pull. Burst or Shock would have been nicer!

I hasted myself via Refueling, and Ro took care of refreshes. MP Drainkiss was VERY kind in this fight; I aspired for over 100 many times.

Only problems that came up were when my regurgitation got resisted. When that happened, Ro finished it off with a blizzard3. This only happened twice in the entire fight though.

Overall I'd say other than the pull it was an easy fight. Ro haxed lot and won the springstone.

But I'll have her failing utsu screenshot on the internet forever! So in the end I win again!

X's knife solo

2009-12-20T12:20:00.000-08:00

Not really new or anything but I did it for fun! Wasn't even that hard, even though I messed up quite a bit.

Only meds I used: 2 charges of my reraise pin (you lose exp in here, sad!), and 2 Tavnazian Tacos. Oh, and 1 echo drop!

Make sure to buff OUTSIDE the BC. Buffs aren't removed when you enter, so you should be fully buffed with rr and full HP/MP when you enter. Once you enter you're going to want to immediately begin the fight.

Elemental Seal>Chainspell>Sleepga>bind the rabbit>nuke Shikaree X down. The rabbit is immune to sleep, so that's why you need to bind it separately. Something to be careful of: X is a BST/NIN mob, which means she has access to Utsusemi, which she CAN use. She did this to me (can see below). If that happens, cast sleepga to wipe her shadows and continue with the nukes. it took me about 600MP of nukes to kill her.

Stupid mithra casting Utsusemi Ni!

What makes this a little bit challenging, is that all sleeps only last for half their duration. So Sleep 1 is 30seconds, and Sleep2 for 45 seconds. More than likely just as use finish X, the other 2, Y and Z, will wake up. When they wake up, Z will Call Wyvern. Its wyvern doesn't have that much HP, and you could probably (and should try) to chainspell nuke it down too. You'll probably need to convert to have enough mp for the wyvern though. I didn't get to do this on my attempt and still won, so if you don't manage to kill off the wyvern with CS, it's not the end.

After the chainspell nuke phase is over, die as fast as possible, let the mobs reset (aside from the rabbit, it won't move at all and that's fine, it won't aggro), get up, rebuff, and wait for weakness.

The nice thing is that the rabbit will now be completely out of the fight until the end, when you need to kill it. It won't aggro/link with the mithras at all, so just completely ignore it. You should only have 2 or 3 mobs to deal with now (depending of if you killed the wyvern during the CS part or not).

Once I was unweakened, and ES timer was up, I once again did ES +Sleepga, then bound+gravity the wyvern(just like rabbit, it's immune to sleep), and nuked it down. I actually got unlucky here and it resisted two of my nukes, so it took longer to kill than it should have; Y and Z had woken up and started hitting me as I was finishing it off.

Can see it resisting me twice in these pics :( Even with all my gear! FFXI and it's random resist generator thing!

Once wyvern was down, I decided to kill Y next. Z is DRG/WHM and has some Magic Defense Bonus, so I figured it would be harder/longer to kill. I basically just kited everywhere and Bio3/Poison2 it to death, with occasional nukes. I think in future fights I'll probably try and be more aggressive here to cut down on time.

Both mobs stop to cast spells often, giving you time to cure/stoneskin/nuke if needed. Bind also lands without the needs for ES, so I used to bind Z, and nuke Y when it was casting on me. Only problem with this is Z casts Blink, so when blink absorbed bind that was annoying. Z also buffs herself and Y with shell2, so you may want to dispel. She can also cure3 when below 33%, but she doesn't do this 100% of the time.

After like 10 minutes of dot/occasional nuke, Y died!

Once just Z and the rabbit are left, the fight is much easier. You can be really aggressive nuking Z down, since you're only fighting one mob now. Make use of ES sleep when you need it, as well as bind. She should die pretty fast.

If you look at timestamps, took me about 3:30 from death Y and Z.

Once Z is down, rest up as much MP as you need (watch the clock), then kill the rabbit.

Sleep doesn't work, but both gravity and bind do, just spam nuke away!

Don't forget to pop the chest to watch your knife not drop!

My time wasn't that great, but still had 2 minutes to spare! It was my first try too, so always room to improve.

I think this is actually a good way to try and get your knife. It doesn't cost any expensive meds, and you don't have to bother others for help every week. If you do have people helping though, I would just try and split up if possible. You can always share lootpools, and it's much better to have 2 or 3 tries at a knife per week, instead of only 1.

Tsola to the rescue!

2009-12-04T21:05:00.000-08:00

I was so bored and had some free time so I decided to update!

In LS related news, the LS has gotten a LOT bigger. We went from about 9-10 members total to 19 members in about a month. Wasn't even trying to recruit or anything, just a bunch of really good people decided to apply. I think other linkshells (like AZ) deciding to go social only helped, since people that wanted to keep doing events needed a new LS. I'm not really sure if I like the sudden doubling in size of the LS, but I guess maybe it'll work. Just is a lot harder to organize from a leader a perspective (and a leader that gets lazier to lead everyday...). More drama regarding drops/more schedules to keep track of.

Ok enough about that! Stuff I did:

Dryroot doesn't do einherjar anymore, so I decided to finally spend more ampoules since I wasn't gaining any more of them. I bought Aslan Cape/Gleeman's Cape, in addition to the Buccaneer's belt I bought earlier. More MND/INT for RDM never hurts! I still have enough ampoules to buy 1 more item, but I'm not sure yet. Morgana's looks kind of nice, but so does Omega ring, and Kubira Bead Necklace and Animator +1 (for my super awesome taru PUP!) I guess I still want everything! I've been lazy about finding a new linkshell though; DR's time was like perfect for me because it was just as I got home from work, so I could log on>immediately einherjar>free for the rest of the day. It would never interfere with either FT events, or personal events since it was so early in the day too. I think I might try and join some weekend JP shell maybe, wouldn't be too bad to go every Sunday morning.

More ZNMs!

I tried out SMN on Tinnin for fun. It worked pretty well I think. SMN merit BPs are nice when you cap them.

Grand Fall did 952 every time, which is pretty nice, considering it's hate free. Was nice to be able to DD carefree for once.

I also MBed Thunderstorm! 1147! It made me kind of wish I changed some of my add on augments (particularly ACP) around for Pet: MAB.

Got ok drops:

TP burned Sarameya. Much easier than I thought it would be. Even without a full alliance, you don't need 2hours to do it.

Still no haidate, but we did sell a Sarameya's Hide that dropped (no pic though!).

I finally got to try Sandworm!

It was only Serket, but it was still cool. I guess I was a little disappointed on the difficulty. It didn't seem to do anything special; I kept waiting for some crazy attack and nothing happened! I think the entire fight took less than 10minutes; I'm pretty sure running through Meriphtaud (hateeeeeeeeeee Meriphtaud!) and waiting to get Doomvoided in took longer... I was scared to take hate/miss stun too, so I barely nuked.

Did so much sea, in particular JoL and JoJ over the past 2 weeks.

We did 8 JoJ straight in one night. I've been trying to find people that would want to try and 6man it with me, but nobody ever wants too! So I used our full alliance as a test run kind of! 2 BLM/SCH is by FAR the best way to handle the adds. Parsimony + AM2 one shots the adds, and is far better than having 2 BLMs nuke. Usually 1 of the BLM messes up the timing and you end up getting Mijin-ed, that never happens when you one shot them. Also, SAM tanks destroy Justice. Our kill speed was dramatically reduced over PLD tanks.

Went 1/8 on torque!

JoL is still as boring as ever though. We did get quite a few torques, and a decent amount of Novios though. LS is almost capped (kind of!). So hopefully we'll never have to do sea again for a while.

Did some more fomors. Elatha decided to be nice and dropped my cuffs!

Tried Tehtra once. I used a strategy that was posted on BG about using RNG for DD. I really don't see how that works, unless we were doing something terribly wrong. Half the shots were doing zero damage; nuking was FAR more effective. You just can't nuke while it's casting, or you'll heal it.

We wiped eventually, but I think we could do it if we started as the right jobs from the start. It's probably the weakest in terms of offensive damage of the 5; Slowga is annoying though.

More omegas! Funny drop!

Tanoshii is my new favorite person! Always willing to start (lame) drama for my entertainment!

That's it for now!

PUP infinite chain solo

2009-11-28T19:45:00.000-08:00

Really fast update on something really cool!

Ok so I only got chain 22, but technically you could go on forever! Basically the only thing that can stop you is a resist/overload (and even then you can still keep the chain) and boredom.

You'll probably need capped magic merits/optimization and a piece of MAB gear (AF2 feet, ACP body, random augments). Go PUP/COR for Corsair's Roll. Camp is in Xarcabard[s] right where you OP into. There's a bunch of Gigas BST in the area.

Just use the standard Water>Icex3 maneuvers and run around one shotting the pets. If you get a resist/overload, I would just nuke>deactive>nuke again without manuevers. The 2 weaker nukes will be enough to kill.

I think EXP/hr is maybe like 10k or 11k/hour, so it's not great, but not horrible either. Would be better if Sigil gave an exp bonus though.

Initial Fomor Kings Exploration!

2009-11-27T00:25:00.000-08:00

Tried the new fomor NMs! Started off with the Galka, Elatha.

We had 5 people in the beginning: RDM/NINx2 BLM/NINx2 WHM/SCH. A little bit into the fight we realized that /SCH wasn't the best SJ for our WHM, /NIN would've been much better. Will definitely do that next time.

Two Explosures(bombs) spawn in his area as well, but they both con EP, and are on the standard 16minute dungeon repop. We just killed them as they popped, wasn't that big of a deal.

Hate is REALLY random. I have no idea how people are using normal tank parties on this. Any little thing, and it'll run off and attack someone else, which is why /NIN should be required for everyone. Not only for the random hate though, it also counters all magic with an instant Blizzard IV of its own(think like the Beaudeaux[s] SCNM Observant Zekka).

It's ice based, and casts all the standard ice based spells: Blizzaga3, Blizzard 4, Bindga, Paralyga, and Freeze. It also casts some ice based blue magic: Cold Wave (Small AoE Frost, heavy damage/tic), Frost Breath(400~ damage + paralyze), and Ice break (AoE bind+ 100-200damage). The -ga black magic spells wipe shadows as typical, but the blue magic spells don't which is nice. His Blizzaga3 is surprisingly weak too, doesn't even break a capped stoneskin.

In terms of melee attacks, he hits fairly hard (400-500 a swing), but incredibly slow. If it wasn't for all his shadow wiping -ga spells, I'd have no problems ichi tanking it, even without any form of slow/elegy on it. It has the standard GS weaponskills, none of them are dangerous except for Shockwave, which is AoE damage+ sleepga. It uses the normal fomor TP moves too, like Grim Halo (AoE, can be blocked by shadows), Carnal Nightmare (AoE TP reset), and Netherspikes (bind+damage, can be blocked by 2-3shadows).

Wiki claimed that it "levels up" when you cast any spell that would give it a status effect, so we avoided bio. I leveled up anyway, despite us not casting anything on it other than nukes. At about 50% it seemed to reach its max level, and stopped leveling up, which is when we started to bio it anyway, since it didn't matter. It does have an auto-regen, so any little bit to counter that helps. We stopped worrying about level ups when we moved onto the other NMs too.

You only want to cast fire spells on it. I think all the level ups made it more resistant, especially for the RDMs. I was having no problems in the beginning, but once it reached its max level, I considered it lucky to get a 50% resist.

At 35% it can start to 2hour, Blood Weapon. When it does that, its attack speed literally becomes 100 fists, which is annoying because if he gets through your shadows, he'll just heal itself. I think our first Blood Weapon he healed himself almost 12%. Best way we found to deal with it was to abuse draw in. Kite it away, and it'll draw you in back to it's spawn point, which gives you breathing time to utsu, and then kite away again.

We had 3 more people join as the fight went on. Got a Dull Claymore drop(the level1 aern weapon), but no Britca's cuffs! Going to have to spam this one.

Next we tried Buarainech.

A LOT easier. I'd say the easiest of the 5 probably. Same strategy applies: RDM and BLM/NINs. He's thunder based, which is actually nice, since it doesn't have annoying paralyze spells. Obviously cast stone instead of fire. There's 2 scorpions in the room, instead of 2 bombs, which isn't much different.

It levels up if you buff apparently. We didn't even bother trying to avoid it, and really noticed no difference when it leveled up.

It casts thunder magic, but they are just as weak as the ice spells Elatha had. His blue magic selection isn't amazing either. There was Temporal Shift (AoE stun), and Mind Blast (small damage+ paralyze).

It uses polearm WS, which are slightly worse than GS, since they're multi hit. Was pretty fun watching something Penta Thrust you though.

At 35% it can start doing Spirit Surge, which really did nothing except give it endoom. Just bounce hate/shadow block it. Use Holy Water if it goes through, problem solved!

Horrible drops!

We wiped to the next 2 fomors unfortunately.

Ethniu! Basically a disaster. Not really much to say except its pop area has a ton of mobs compared to the other NMs. 6 Goblins, and 4 Gazers. Our plan was to have a THF and DNC duo the adds as they popped, while the RDMs/BLMs took care of Ethniu itself. Unfortunately what we failed to realize was that it's immune to all magic anyway, so we would have never won. It also attacks extremely quickly too, and hard (200-300 damage). No slow or elegy since it's wind based. Needless to say, it was a quick wipe.

Lugh!

We did a little better here. I think our lowest was 85%. It has a 100% double attack proc, which is annoying. Black magic spells are just as weak, but his blue magic was a little stronger. Heat Breath did 700~ damage.

En-plague was frustrating too without an actual WHM that wasn't being 2boxed. I think we could probably win though, with a dedicatd WHM and maybe an extra person or two to help bounce hate.

Didn't try the taru, Tethra! Hopefully soon!

Oh, and I got my Spurrer Beret! Went 1/2, so yay for that.