The first thing at Christmas that's such a pain to me...

is fin-ding a freak-ing par-ty.
...

Some kind of exciting stuff for me goin on lately. First up, was setting up Ventrilo (server and client) on my desktop. I haven't tested out the server yet, but it seems simple enough to get running. I've connected to Treu's server, but unfortunately we couldn't really test anything out because neither of us have a microphone. lol I DID use it with HellsBells at an event on Sunday; again, no mic, but it was still helpful to be able to hear ppl talk about what the game plan was and not have to wait to read what they typed 2 minutes after they wanted to get something done.

What I actually did with HellsBells on Sunday was NOT our normal Dynamis run. I went with them on my first Einherjar run. (Wing III: Gerhilde's Chamber) As most runs with these guys, it seemed like a cake-walk and we cleared it with 7 minutes to spare and 0 deaths. Well, 0 deaths for ME; I think a couple people may have died once or twice, but nothing major. I definitely plan on doing more Einherjar with these guys. Not that I really want/need any of the drops from here; I'd just like to experience something different for a bit and also get that Odin clear just to show off the Title in my AH page. lol

In other news, I finally got my DNC up to 30 using xp scrolls. only 7 more levels til I'm done with getting it up to full subjob status! Woo hoo! Another SJ will soon be out of the way!

Last night I got up to sky a little early for our normal farming... and then realize that pretty much noone else was planning on coming up. We had 4 or 5 DDs show up but no mages, so we weren't daring enough to head down to farm some waters or anything. A couple of us ended up just killing some Flamingos for like an hour or so, which at least capped-out my buffer again (so it's not like it was completely worthless).

While we were up there, I was also trying to compare my damage on my Destroyers with Larva's damage. For the most-part, it looked like I was doing just as much damage as he was so I think my Destroyers are finally broken... but I honestly don't know how to actually confirm that. Oh well. I'll still hold on to those Indra Katars for a little bit more in case the Destroyers aren't broken yet by the time we do our next gods... but whateva.

Holy priceless collection of Etruscan snoods!

ok, so the title of this post really doesn't have anything to do with anything IN the post, but it's late and I really couldn't come-up-with/find a quote that explained my surprise for the happenings of this evening.

I guess I could have just used a non-quote and gone with something like "Man, Treu's gonna be pissed that his gf kept him from gaming tonight." (well, actually that IS a quote... from me... said in LS chat earlier tonight. lol)

So, I get up to {sky} around 7:00 tonight and just kinda camp out at Despot while I take a nap. (Figured I might as well get up to sky early and not have to worry about rushing up there at 9:50... and might as well camp out the ToD for Despot too.) So I get the ToD... yay. Everthough we didn't go after him tonight.

Well, it's REALLY late and just to make a long story short, we beat Olla, Suzaku, Mother Globe, Kirin, Seiryu, Genbu, Byakko, Byakko again, and then Kirin again. Yeah, so if you're keeping track of points... that's 15 points. So anyone that shoed up on time tonight and stayed til the end... got their 15 points they need to take a slice of our LS payout for the week. :-P heh, whatever. I'm just glad we had the ppl to DO all of these gods tonight.

We got a Haidate from the 1st Byakko we did, which was sold to Cyrel for 4,948,000 gil (woo hoo!) When it came time to do the 2nd Byakko, Drayco said he'd pass for now... and Niyah wasn't there... and Xzavier wasn't there... so... um.. wth?... are you f-ing serious?! ... no.. quit toying with me... SERiOusLY?! _I'M_ up for the next Haidate?!?!?!?! (/em pees himself with joy.) So, we start taking out Byakko again and everything's running smoothly... and then the unexpected happens: one of the monks we have swapping in-and-out of the alliance to Boost and Chi Blast ends up pulling hate, and so when he drops from the pt, noone else can attack. :-P This somehow just screwed EVERYTHING up and we practically wipe. (at this point I'm having flashbacks of this exact thing happening to Treu when it was his turn for Haidate. lol) Well, this time, we actually recovered... but still no Haidate for Khrone. oh wellz. At least we still got the kill and a couple other drops.

Well, we ran from 10:00pm til 4:15am so... it's time for some sleep for me. Damn, i'm glad i got that nap in for a couple hours earlier tonight; i have to be awake in like 1.5 hours. XD

My Spoon is too Big

So as usual, there is a ton of stuff I want/need to get done in game, and there just aren't enough hours in the day and days in the week for me to do any of it.

I need more/better gear NOW if we are going to finally start up our Salvage group. But some of the items I need require me to complete CoP and ZM and ToAU.... I also need to start cranking out Assaults just so I have enough Assault Points to get IN to Salvage. heh, not to mention the fact that I still need to finish that last fight or 2 so I can actually ACCESS Salvage. lol

And yet, I can't really work on any of that stuff right now because I need to focus pretty much all of my time in-game into LolFail and {sky}. I NEED more LS points so I can get my Byakko's Haidate sooner (I think I'm actually up to like 3rd or 4th in line by now!). I don't want to just do what some people seem to be doing and show up ONLY for God-runs. Yes, it seems like it's the most efficient way to get points per time spent in sky... but we still need to farm those damn pop items so we can actually FIGHT these gods. (ie. we ALWAYS need more Despots and Dios) I want to keep showing up, ON TIME, every night so that other people don't get discouraged and start dropping out. The past few evenings, we seem to have fewer and fewer people up there with us. Tuesday night we only had 12 people show up the entire evening. /sigh

But Haidate is the one single major item I REALLY need, ASAP. After that, I'll still be more than happy to keep coming up to sky to farm and kill gods (cuz I'd still like to have my Shura Head and Legs) but at least I won't feel like crap if I miss out on an evening because I'm trying to get Promy-Dem done, or am in a merit party, or am running a couple assaults, etc....

But whateva. It's not like this is something new. I've known I have a TON to do for ... heh, pretty much since I started a year and a half ago. XD

On to other things...
So, I was in Dynamis - Jeuno with HellsBells again last night. We were cruisin along, gettin drops left-and-right (as usual) but the drops apparently were just crap because people kepts groaning at every AFv2 drop and I think only 1 or 2 items were actually lotted on. I'm pretty sure we had 4 THF feet and 3 BLM feet drop and NOONE wanted them. lol Man, I really hope this keeps up with other jobs that I plan to eventually level. ANY free AFv2 would be sweet.

But on a sour-note, we ended up NOT clearing the city. WTH HB? That's 2 cities not cleared in the past 2 weeks. These guys are usually pretty sweet when it comes to rolling thru the cities, but last night there were just a few things that seemed off. Like, we had our 1st, 2nd and 3rd assists determined before we entered... and yet once our main assist went down, we all wipe because all melee are just standing around waiting to assist someone... and the 2nd and 3rds are just standing there with their thumbs up their butts like the rest of us. Don't agree to be an /assist if you don't know how to do the job! Apparently the puller screwed up a little on the boss too, cuz we were overwhelmed at the AH at the end of the run. (But then again, Jeuno is apparently kinda rough on the Boss pull. At least it was for AN... wait, did I just compare these guys to AN?!? I'm sooooo sorry. It'll never happen again.) I think I was the last man standing (well, the last one standing that DIDN'T manage to find a good hiding spot) and I was about to just drop my hourglass since we had already been given the 10-minute warning, but ppl were saying "don't drop glass!" "we can recover" blah blah blah... so I stayed and died along with everyone else.... And then AFTER I die they say "oh well. nvm. no time. let's just timeout and get R3s...."
/sigh
Jackasses.
Well, next time I see that we are about to wipe so close to the end, I'm just gonna leave. Hell, there was no point in me staying really anyways. I already have the city clear, and it's not like a MNK is of any use against the boss. Why were ppl telling me not to drop my hourglass? :-/

What else. What else. . .

Well, last night I got asked to join the HellsBells Einherjar group. They wanted me to come right after Dynamis, but I was just too tired, so they asked me to come on their next run on Sunday @6:30pm. I guess I'll try it out. It only takes like 30 mnutes (so I guess maybe an hour total of my time if you include the time it takes to get out there, etc...). I'd like to at least experience Einherjar, eventhough I really don't want/need anything from there. It'd be a nice change of pace to do something different from just sky and Dynamis, which is basically ALL I've done over the past couple months. Plus, you know, assuming we get the clears, I can show off a few more Titles on my AH page. And getting an Odin win would help me out in my quest to... ok, help me out in my fantasies of getting that Monk Mythic weapon. lol

I also did a bunch more reading up on Einherjar and Mythic weapons today.

The gist of what I've read for Einherjar: you need to come prepared (food, poison pots, eyedrops, whatever...); you should expect to wipe; when you DO wipe, die in a cluster; and apparently abjuration drops are pretty infrequent... like, so infrequent, I don't think any have dropped to HB in the past couple weeks. (then again, I have no real idea how often they have been doing these runs over the past few weeks...)

The gist of what I've read for Mythic weapons: they are like 10 times harder to get than relic weapons (already knew that tho); a lot of the weapons aren't really as good as they were expected to be (only a few jobs seem like it would really be worth the effort, and MNK is one of them); and the aftermath's don't work like people expected them to be.

The big problem with the aftermaths is that when it says "Aftermath: Increases Acc./Att. Occasionally attacks twice" what they actually mean is "Aftermath Level 1: Increases Acc. --- Aftermath Level 2: Increases Att. --- Aftermath Level 3: Occasoinally attacks twice". You can activate the various levels of aftermaths by doing the following:
1. build up at least 100% TP and WS - This activates level 1 AM.
2. build up at least 200% TP and WS - This activates level 2 AM.
3. build up 300% TP and WS - This activates level 3 AM.

So, basically the AM that they tell you isn't quite true; you need to build up to gaining the full AM. "But wait! There's MORE!" The AMs only last a certain amount of time. Level 1 lasts 60 seconds, level 2, 90 seconds and level 3 120 seconds. So, basically you only have a minute and a half to build up 300 TP oterhwise you're never getting that level 3 AM. "But wait! There's MORE!" On top of that, you also cannot "renew" level 2 or level 3, meaning that: say you have level 2 AM and you are about to time-out (85 seconds have passed) and only have 215% TP, you decide to WS before time runs out and before you hit 300% TP... you just get kicked back down to level 1 AM again. So, I guess if you plan on maximizing your AM, you really need to pay attention to the clock; you don't want to kick off level 3 too soon!

The power of the force has stopped you, you hosers

So, the other day I went back into Campaign for a bit and bought some Cobra Unit Leggings. I was planning on holding out for the body piece, but since it didn't come out with this latest version update, I decided to just buy the rest of this Cobra Unit set in the meantime. I figured, this set will still help me out in Campaign Battles and also it'll give me any extra accuracy I may need against gods or ... well, against anything, in case my Acc is lacking. (ie. Last night I was missing a bit against Byakko, so I swapped in the new leggings in place of my Wulong Shoes, and that semed to be just enough to make a noticable difference.)

I also finally hit one of my goals and capped-out my h2h merits. ^^ I so happy. Now I can put the next 4 merit points into Crit Hits and cap that out too. After that will most likely be Kick Attacks, but I guess we'll see.

Disdain was on this weekend and has been cruisin along with his DNC, so we decided to hit up the bird camp with my SAM37 and cranked out a couple quick levels in 2 or 3 hours. It was actually a little wierd getting back to SAM. Like, I couldn't remember what the various JAs were and/or when to use them. (And Treu made sure the whole pt knew that I was clueless too. :-P lol) So I got my SAM up to 40 now. I'll probably put-of leveling for now tho and focus any freetime into finally breaking the latent on my Destroyers. (Sush likes making the whole LS know that THAT hasn't happened yet. :-P lol) Man, everyone's so quick to point out my flaws. Gosh. I have nunchuck skills. Bowstaff skills. ... but i digress....

I hit up Dynamis - San d'Oria Sunday night with HellsBells. I was pretty impressed because only 70 minutes had passed from the moment we entered until the moment we had killed the boss. And we only had 1 wipe the entire time too. The drops were kinda unusual on this run. Every other run I've been on with them, we've gotten like 12 - 20 pieces of AF to drop, and yet last night I think it was only about 6 pieces total. And nothing dropped until it turned Firesday. The only reason I noticed that was because all of a sudden 2 or 3 pieces had dropped in a matter of 4 mobs, so I looked at the clock and noticed it was still the first hour and a half into Firesday. /shrug Maybe that has something to do with it... maybe not. Some ppl in the LS were just saying it had to do with the new moon or something. Who knows.

But at least I got my Melee Hose!!! Woot woot! Yeah, the first AFv2 piece that dropped were MNK Legs, so they went straight to me. ^^ And like 3 pieces later.... another MNK legs drops... which just gets autosorted. :-P Seriously. Apparently noone in this LS wants Monk AF. (So I made a point to tell everyone in LolFail as soon as we were done that, if they want Monk Afv2, they gotta join HellsBells. lol) I don't get it; Melee Hose are like the next best thing to Byakko's Haidate for a TP build for Monk, and yet noone wants it? (They ended up free-dropping to our main PLD, Carldiedrich, in case anyone was wondering.) Whateva. I got mine. I'm happy.

So, now I have the 2 AF pieces that I really wanted/needed from Dynamis (hands and legs) and I think I still might continue to come to any future runs that I have access to. Might as well keep collecting points for when I get a few other jobs up to 75 and, hell, maybe even start collecting on other items if good stuff is just gonna free-drop like this!

Finally, LolFail killed all gods last night. Got some decent drops and should make roughly 1.3 million just off of the AH items. Only Sunday and already makin some big bank. Nice! We also apparently have a buyer or two in line for Byakko's Haidate. We're gonna be selling those off for 4.75 million a pop. (oh so nice) So, we've already determined that, to make it fair to ppl with points in the LS, that we're gonna be trading off and on with sales. Member gets one. One gets sold. Member gets one. One gets sold. etc... This is obviously gonna delay my haidate a little bit, but then again, I'm not gonna complain about the amount of income we'll be making off of this stuff.

All-in-all, a successful weekend!

Rollin' Rollin' Rollin'...

Well, not enough ppl showed up for our Kirin run last night, so we ended up doing a bunch of farming instead. . . which turned out to be a pretty good thing. We were rolling through NMs really quickly and relatively painlessly.

Pop-items obtained last night:
- Gem of the West
- Gem of the East
- Gem of the North
- Springstone
- Summerstone
- Diorite -> (didn't pop Ulli yet)
- Ro'Maeve spring water -> Winterstone
- Ro'Maeve spring water -> Winterstone

So basically we got almost an entire 5-gods popset. ^^

I've also been keeping track of attendance, pop-items and dropped items in the new spreadsheet. Sush already told me last night that it's a HUGE improvement over what he normally gets when someone else takes attendance. I replied with something along the lines of "Always glad to help out. Anything to make your job easier, thus keeping you and the LS around longer... at least til I get my Haidate. lol" But yeah, today I decided that I'll be keeping the Attendance and the Items Tracking lists in their respective spreadsheet tabs on a per-week basis; otherwise these sheets could get out of control fairly quickly. I also decided to add another spreadsheet to keep together a list of who wants what items and who's in the lead for those items. Check it out here.

This weekend will probably consist of just being in merit parties trying to get my Destroyers finally broken as well as get that last 7k xp that I need to finally cap-out my h2h merits. ^^

It's a Festivus miracle!

Good stuff! Good stuff last night!

1. I implemented and started using my new Google Spreadsheet to start tracking LolFail member attendance and item drops.

2. We killed LOTS of Gods: 1 Suzaku, 1 Seiryu, 2 Genbu, and 4 Byakko. Well, technically "popped" 4 Byakko, but only killed 3... that first one sucked. Not really sure whether it had to do with the fact we were fighting it on Lightsday or just the WHMs weren't playing thier role properly and keeping the PLD tanks alive. Maybe a little of everything. But whateva.

3. Treu got his Haidate! Which means it's time for him to start loot-whoring everything he can get his grubby little hands on now that he's not really saving up LS points for anything. He says he might start saving up for a D Body, but since there's not really a line for it, that shouldn't be an issue.

4. Exion got his Haidate!!

5. Lux got booted from the LS!!! (This was kinda funny cuz Exion /tells me "It's like winning the lottery! I get my kitty pants and Lux gets the boot!" rofl) Yeah, Lux has just been a really annoying prick lately. Last night he just wouldn't shut up and kept badmouthing pretty much anyone that would say anything in LS chat. The night before he wouldn't let us kill Despot; it was like he just wanted to take it out himself and keep the item to sell on his own or something... whateva. Apparently he ended up dying and we got it anyways. lol After we took a vote, the results came back: Should Lux be kicked out? 11 yes, 6 no. And then Lux procedes to say how those 6 ppl are complete morons and should be shot or something. So... the 6 that voted for him to STAY are morons... wth? O.o I don't know. I'm guessin this kid probably forgot to take his ritalin the past few days or something.

So... good stuff! Tonight, Wednesday, apparently is a night off so I'm not really sure what I'll do with myself tonight. Go out drinkin? Rock Band 2? Campaign Battles? Pop my 2 sky coffers? Dynamis - Dem? SO MANY OPTIONS!!!

Dream, Dream, Dream

Vaguely remember my dream from last night... during the 4 hours or so that I actually got some sleep...

Something about Salvage gear again... although I don't think it was Usukane. Don't think it was really ANY existing Salvage set. Maybe I was thinking it was a new Salvage or ZNM set added in with the version update yesterday... whateva.

So, I'm going through these 3 sets of 3 rooms (thinking about Einherjar?) and haggling with other characters about prices for items that I need to get my gear. Sometimes it was gil. Othertimes it was LS points. Othertimes it was just agreeing to go on an NM run or something. One or two times were just me talking to the person and getting the item right away. ... I never got the final 9th item that I needed to complete my set.

Then there was something about either running through sky or lower delkfutt's tower... just CRUISING past mobs that should be aggroing but they were always facing a different direction and I'd just run right behind them with out being spotted. (obviously this part came from the dio farming the other night when i aggroed a stat.)

Hmmm. What else... I know there was another part....
Maybe it had to do with sea?
Maybe it had to do with a weapon? (h2h or sword or something??)
Maybe it had to do with Dynamis?
Maybe it had to do with ...
For some reason I'm thinking it had to do with "moss" or the ground/floor. ("Moss" was my "green thing" when Treu and I were playing "I spy ..." last night while waiting for Despot to pop.) Maybe I was recalling a conversation that someone brought up in Dynamis the other night asking why Elvaan are the only ones the die face-up and everyone else dies face-down? /shrug

Meh. Can't remember. Shoulda wrote this down earlier.

Company always on the run, Destiny is a rising sun...

This past weekend didn't even turn out remotely as good as I had anticipated.

CoP:
On Saturday Disdain wanted to start blitzing thru CoP and I still needed to do Promy Mea and Promy Dem. Well, we got our party together: Treu and Hybrid on SMN, me and Zspa on WAR/NIN, Disdain on DNC/NIN and Ramoth on RNG. Well the first Mea we failed, but that was mainly because we didn't have enough animas and didn't quite use the ones we had at the right moments. Disdain altered the plan a little bit for when we pop the animas and the 2nd run ended up being a cakewalk.

Then ppl had to start going their own ways to events or dinner or whatnot, so we were just going to put off Dem until Sunday. Well... we ended up not getting back together because someone was always busy the entire day. But we did farm up a bunch more remnants and memories so it shouldn't be that bad if/when we DO get around to Dem. Hopefully tonight around 9pm... but then again, since the update was today, everyone will probably be busy running around checking out the new stuff. Still not clearing my Promies makes me a saaaaaad panda. ; ;

ENM:
Sheep in Antlion's Clothing. Me, Treu, Sush, Hybrid and Drayco. Beat it with 5 minutes to spare. No worthwhile drops.

Dynamis:
Sunday night HellsBells went on a Dynamis - Windurst run. FINALLY I can get my 4th city clear, right?! . . . Wrong. :-P A n00b ended up not paying attention and pulled the deathhouse. We wiped, reraised and then realized we still had a couple ppl trapped in front of the deathhouse, so we had to pick them up before moving on. Paxton ended up organizing the BLMs to time-nuke the statues and then everyone took out the remaining mobs. I had to use {Hundred Fists} and before it even wore, the damn mob we were fighting puts up Perfect Dodge. /sigh oh well. We cleared the deathhouse without further incident and the lost members rejoined.

Another wipe took place a little later because someone pulled something they weren't supposed to. ({Welcome!} to {Dynamis}!) We raise again and by the time we were set to go, we had less than 15 minutes to clear the center and then kill the boss. So, we try to speed through the center and ... well, I think you know where this is going. Wipe once again. We start raising and see the 3 minute warning and just ended up giving up. No Windy clear for Khrone. And that makes me a saaad sad panda. ; ;

Sky:
I missed the first Kirin kill cuz I was in Dynamis. I get up there as fast as possible and miss a Seiryu as well. Then we just farm for Dios. By the time I get to the camp, they had already gotten 2 right away. I head back towards the entrance to open the yellow gate for someone... apparently was seen by a stat when I used up my last invis powder, was killed, {fun}. (this was death #4 in the past 3 hours.) Whatever.

We leave to hit up Kirin again now that everyone has their 2-hours back. It takes me 13, yes THIRTEEN, attempts to get to the Kirin room. Over a stack of sneak pots used up. Had to borrow more from Kota who was stuck in pretty much the same rut I was. One of the times leaving the pot room I hear him say "help", so I turn around and see that he's attacking a weapon. Why? I don't know. So I figure he just wants to do something while we're running in circles. I engage. I ask "why we attacking this?" He replies "aggro" and then promptly dies. I immediately turn and run for my life. Guess what happens next! (this was death #5 in the past 3 hours.) Whatever. Oh, and Kota said I was bad luck and that's why HE kept failing to get into the Kirin room too. So I choose a different path...

I eventually get into the Kirin room because I gave up on the western path and too the eastern (Water) path. That worked for me the first try. /sigh Gotta remember that from now on. We kill Kirin with a quickness. We leave. Kill like 2 stats outside and then take out Despot right away. Then it was back to dio farming til 3:45am. (yay 3 hours of sleep til i gotta get up for work again!)

Lots of death and lack of sleep makes me a very sad panda. ; ;

Version Update:
Yus! Version update is here! And it actually installed relatively quickly for me tonight. (20 minutes tops I think.) Unfortunately no new ranks (level 5) and no new campaign gear, so I guess I'm just spending my allied notes on a Cobra Unit Cap and Leggings for better Acc while WSing. /shrug There's really nothing else I'd need the notes for until I get other jobs up higher so why not, right?

But yeah. It's been a kinda depressing past few days in-game. Hopefully things will turn around shortly. (Like we plan on hitting up the bird camp [S] with Disdain's DNC37 and my NIN37 and SAM37 this coming weekend.)

On a good note: I put a 7th merit into H2H. w00t! Almost done with it!
And just to kill some time, I went and finally completed the Blade of Death quest for the Deathbringer (GS for DRK). Just had to run and trade the old GS basically since I completed the 100 kills over a YEAR ago. lol Yeah, finished the kills on 7/28/2007. I guess I haven't really even GLANCED at DRK since then.

When someone asks you if you're a god, you say "Yes!"

So, apparently November is the month for Khrone gear!
- Shura Togi, as stated in a previous post, was earlier this month
- Melee Gloves were obtained this past Sunday night on a Dynamis Jeuno run with HellsBells (no more using O Kotes for my MNK!)
- Destroyers were obtained last night with a bunch of friends from LolFail
- Dissector also fell to me during the Double Dragonian run, but apparently it's not that great of a sword so I'll prolly just end up dropping it
- Shura Hands (D Hands were auto-sorted to me cuz I wasn't paying attention and didn't pass them. Not like I'm gonna spend the gil to get the cursed item crafted for this though)
- Genbu's Shield (also auto-sorted to me, and again, it's not like I'm going to use this anytime in the forseeable future)

Oh em gee, I actually look like a {Monk} now!
(Wow, that was crazy-funny: Treu just sent me an instant message "you're like .... an actual MNK now" as I typed that last line out. lol)
Now I just need Byakko's Haidate to complete my MNK. Maybe some better feet, but honestly Dune Boots (dmg +30) aren't THAT much better than the Wu Long Shoes (dmg +27) that I currently have. Some haste+ feet might be nice, but again, aren't really necessary. (and I'm getting sick of camping Quu Domi so I doubt that'll happen anytime soon; too busy with {sky} farming and putting the smack-down on gods and meriting etc... to bother with that at the moment)

So, I'm happy with my progress for the month of November! I'm also only about 6k xp away from being able to put a 6th merit into H2H. ^^

The Double Dragonian runs went so smoothly, it was practically a joke to do. I think all 6 runs were completed in under 5 minutes each, but that probably is because the people that went on the run were all fairly experienced and well-equipped/merited for their roles. The one run we must have completed in like 2 minutes because I saw the message for "your focus affect wears off" after I had already left the BC! lol

Unfortunately, there seem to be some problems with the LS now. Mainly the fact that people have been showing up to fewer and fewer evenings, but we also just realized last night that apparently noone was taking attendance for a couple of our past few runs and now we might not get our points and payouts. This would, um, how should i put this... this would suck. I KNOW I went to enough evenings last week to make sure I got enough points for the payout, but I guess noone has any proof. /sigh Now I gotta go check my screenshots and see if I took any during the nights in-question and hopefully we can see the alliance list or something. At least get SOME proof that certain ppl were there.

Damn. I went from bein in a really good mood to a pretty bad mood fairly quickly there. /sigh

oh wells.
Near future plans: merit merit merit

In The Mood

Yeah, for some reason I've had that Glenn Miller tune stuck in my head all afternoon... anyways...

The past few days have been awesome, but maybe my view is a little skewed from normal just because I'm in such a good mood from getting my Shura Togi. ^^ Oh, and Treu FINALLY got his W. Legs (which means he had to rename his Blog from "le sigh w legs"; it is now "le sigh morrigan's robe" rofl. and yes, both of those were my idea. lol) But YEAH! We both got some SWEET gearz0rz from this new LS, and really quick too. I've also made an easy 200k with these guys just from farming. (altho I still owe True/Screamin 1mil in gilz now, which I borrowed to pay for Utsusemi: Ni and my cursed togi.) I don't mind sky farming with these guys; it's actually kinda fun and I'm getting good experience (and I'm not talking about just XP) out of it.

I did a bunch of Campaigning this past weekend as well, primarily just to make sure I got to keep my campaign rank, but also just to get some xp while I was sitting around waiting for merit party invites. Ended up dropping 6 more merit points into h2h, taking it up to 5/8 now. I'm planning on capping h2h before meriting anything else now, primarily for accuracy reasons. Next up will be just getting that 4th merit into Crit Hits (because this would be useful for leveling other jobs as well), followed by filling up Kick Attacks (just tacking on more dmg to what my MNK can already do). Counter will most likely be put on hold until after I get a couple merits into Invigorate and Penance which, from what I've recently heard, apparently would both be useful in Salvage... assuming we ever get around to it. Eh, I'm sure we will. I just need better gear *cough*Destroyers*cough*cough* and get more Missions done before I'm actually ready to hit it up tho.

I ended up doing so much campaigning this weekend that I not only kept my rank, but ranked up to Wings of Integrity (3rd Wings Rank) which means, if I decide to push it, I could be at the current rank-cap in less than a week... which would be cool if they finally decide to unlock the next set of ranks (Medals is the 5th and final group) in this upcoming update, otherwise it's kind of a waste. We'll see. I just really want to see the stats on the Cobra Unit Cap [Body] piece so I can figure out if it's worthwhile to save up Allied Notes for it (for leveling other jobs) or if I should just start spending the Notes on other pieces of gear.

and that makes me a sad panda

Only 1 Kirin last night and 5 lesser gods. We didn't get to do the extra Kirin we wanted to do because we somehow were missing one of the pop items that we thought we had.

We were also informed last night that Vibion was quitting because of disputes in the LS rules. Hopefully he's just a little mad and will be back soon, but we'll see. I would assume he wouldn't just up-and-quit outright though, considering he's been around for a bit, done some outside farming, and yet still has only spent points on 2 items so far.

The whole dispute has to do with how many items can be obtained per person, which is something I've actually always wondered about since Treu first explained to me like a year ago how LS point-systems typically work. Typically, one person would only spend their ls points on a rare/ex item once, because, well, you can't have more than 1. Duh. But in this case, another member, Aguaa, has 2 characters and he wants one of the items (w.legs i think) for both characters.

I kind of have mixed feelings on this:

For Vibion's case: I guess he kind of feels like someone just cut in line ahead of him at an amusement park... someone that JUST got off the ride and doesn't have to go get back to the end of the line to ride again.

For Aguaa's case: Why shouldn't he be able to get the item? He's doing a TON of outside farming, which gets us more pop-items, which means more gods to kill every night. He could be selling these pop-items to other people and actually making gil, but instead he's just donating them to the LS. (yeah yeah, he still gets ls points for them, i know...) So, getting back to the "amusement park" allegory, Aguaa basically is paying for his VIP Ride Pass and has the right to jump ahead in line.

But now lets get back to the rules regarding other items; more specifically: Osode. Since this item can actually be acquired and sold, most LSs only allow an individual to obtain it once, thus making it essentially a rare/ex item in the eyes of the LS. If we apply the "multi-character is a different character and therefore can purchase an item again" rule, then what's to prevent people from saying "oh, I need an Osode for my 10 mules too!" and just buying a total of 11 of them with LS points and selling 10 of them for gilz.

This, however, is not exactly the situation Aguaa is in, because both of his characters can actually EQUIP the god-gear, so it's not like he's just making this up and doing it to screw other LS members frmo getting the gear they want.

Then again, back for Vibion's side of the argument: if it's an item for a different character, there should be a separate set of LS points for each character, no? Otherwise it's like 1 character sharing their points to bump another character up higher on the list to get their items quicker. Doesn't exactly seem fair.

For Aguaa's side: He IS playing multiple characters. (Altho, I'm not exactly sure if both chars are on the same account, or if he has 2 accounts and plays them simultaneously. Actually, it's probably the latter, because I think he does a lot of his farming on his own, so probably needs 2 chars at the same time.) So, if he is playing both characters at the same time, and they each have their own ls points pool, then should he be getting "outside farming points" for BOTH characters, eventhough it's just 1 person? That would mean he's technically making points twice as fast as other people.

... meh. And it just keeps getting more complicated from there. Like, what if Treu takes Screamin up into sky for farming? Does that mean Screamin gets ls points too? Prolly not, since he's not in the LS; ok, that was a bad example. What if I'm on vacation and Treu takes my char up into sky for outside farming? Does that mean (A) the farming points go to ME (because it was my char up there) or (B) do the extra points go to HIM (because he was playing 2 chars at the same time) or (C) does he still only get the normal points, as if there was just him up there? They ALL seem like valid options, and yet they ALL have problems with them. Option A might not seem fair to the player because he was one actually doing the gaming. Option B might not seem fair to the character owner because it's his character that's risking the loss of XP while up there. Option C might not seem fair because, lets face it, playing 2 characters is a little more difficult than playing just 1 character, so why would anyone do 2x the work and still get the same reward as 1x the work?

I was kind of on-the-fence about this topic last night. Then, as I was writing this, I'd take one side... then the other side... and it turns out, I still am not REALLY leaning towards one side or the other. Yes, I believe that anyone doing all of this extra outside farming work deserves the item for a character that can legitimately use it. But I can also see people trying to abuse the system if we allow this to happen. (Let's say Disdain want's an Osode and I have buckets of excess points. I can just tell the LS that Disdain is my 2nd account and I want to spend my points on getting the next Osode for him. Then BLAMO, I just cheated the system and got a friend an item essentially for FREE... which actually just rips-off everyoen in the LS.)

This is getting long-winded so I'll just end this part by saying: In my opinion (at least "my opinion at this time"), let Aguaa spend his points and get the item for his 2nd char. Vibion is still next in line for it, and at the rate we've been getting this gear, that would be MAYBE an extra day or 3 until he gets it. But we should just be careful that future ppl don't try to cheat the system, like I explained above, because that could severely delay anyone else getting the gear/items they want.

/em wonders if it might be a good idea to post all of this on the LS forum for discussion... or if it will just make some people MORE angry at others and potentially drive some ppl to quit.

ok, enough of the serious/depressing stuff...

There is some good news from last night though (besides the fact that I'm finally back into the positive with ls points, lol) is that we got another w.legs, osode, and haidate so that gets everyone else a little closer to getting their goodies... and the LS that much closer to being able to start selling these items and making some serious cash. ^^ Hell, we even sold d.hands a few nights ago to someone for 250k! Can you imagine how much people would be willing to spend for GOOD gear? lol I think Treu is next in line for w.legs, which means he might actually have to change the name of his blog! wthomfgbbq!!! Well... he MIGHT be next in line. There's still some debate as to who is actually in the lead right now considering the points db is behind by like a full week; it also depends on who wants what (someone might still be in the lead in points, but want something else first, or just might not be around when we do the desired god, etc...).

Pretty Fly For A Rabbi

That's right. My Monk is all kindsa crazy pimped out now.
ok, well not "crazy" pimped out.
not even really "all" that much actually either.
ok FINE, just 1 piece of gear so far, but I'm ecstatic about it!

D. Body

w00000000000000000000000000000t!

Can anyone comprehend how happy I am with this new LS so far? I've been here all of... what... 9 nights! And I have a Dryadic Abjuration: Body piece already! Another quick little loan of around 800k borrowed from baby brother and I has mahself mah Shura Togi! I guess I can return this Scor... wait... heh, then again, it's not like Screamin really needs his Scorpion Harness back right now. Guess I'll hold onto it. I'll need it once my other jobs start getting higher anyways. Assuming I don't already have Campaign Body pieces for them by the time they get up to a high enough level.

So we were on a god run last night up in sky and when we got to Kirin, noone said they wanted the D Body. Sush assumed Naz wanted it eventhough he didn't say anything in LS chat, but Naz is apparently saving his points up for Haidate so the only other one up there that wanted it was lil' ol' me. Yeah, lil' ol' me who doesn't even have his Destroyers yet. rofl Treu just about pissed himself when he pointed that out to me... and followed it up with "ok, yeah, we REALLY gotta get you on a Destroyers run soon now. lol"

Thank you Sush for getting this LS together and keeping it so organized!
Thank you Naz for passing on the D Body. (meh, it'll prolly drop tomorrow night and you'll get it for 5 points instead of 50 now. lol)
Thank you Treu for yelling at me to "bid on 1 NOW". And also for loaning me the gils to buy the cursed item. (Hopefully with the rate we're collecting cash from the LS cash-outs though, you'll hopefully have your gil back within 2 months!)
And what the hell, Thank you Dis for finally logging back on! (Too many ppl have been quittin lately.)

...
Oops. This was supposed to be posted yesterday, but apparently I forgot about it. As of right now, I already bought the Cursed Togi (for 949k gil) and got my Shura Togi. ^^ Was usin it up in sky last night during farming and 3 Byakkos, and I could already tell the difference. Treu also mentioned to me that this is apparently only the 4th D.Body that ever dropped for this LS. And I got it in my 2nd week with them!

Oh, and have I mentioned: "i so happy"? ^^

Change. Now it's time for change. Nothing stays the same. Now it's time for change.

[guitar] Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeew Bum Bum Bummmmmm...

This of course is in reference to not only aspects of my FFXI life, but also the political happenings currently happening in our.... wait... i'm not even gonna go there. No talking politics in here. No talking REAL LIFE stuff in here. All of that is insignificant! Must.... game.... MOAR!!!

So I joined another LS a couple days ago: lolFail. I've been having a good time so far. Everyone seems to be easy-going and don't get all bitchy when they happen to die because someone screws up. If you die, you die. Hopefully you learned something from the experience. You may pass on this knowledge to others, or you may not. You may laugh, or you may not. But at least there's no stressful cries of "wth? why'd our WHM not 2-hour ffs?!?" which usually just starts to put stress on everyone else. (or at least that's my take on it.) But I digress...

No, these guys are pretty good too. We spent my first night just farming for like 4 or 5 hours; maybe 20 of us split up into smaller groups to collect as many pop items as possible in the time we had. And because we do our runs so late, we basically had ZERO competition with other LSs when going after these NMs. Sweetness, pure sweetness. :) Then the next night (last night) we farmed a lil more then went and killed some gods (including Kirin) with basically no trouble at all. Supposedly we're doin a bunch more god-hunting tomorrow night, and hopefully that will include 2 more Kirin deaths.

Yay! Another LS that can get stuff accomplished with efficiency. I so happy.

I will most likely be spending all of my time up in {sky} for the next several months, with the rare occassion of maybe leveling some other jobs or meriting on the weekends. (And going on whatever Dynamis runs I can do with HellsBells.) Treu wants me to come help him asap on getting some of his BST AF gear too, so that'll prolly be what goes on this weekend. I'm still considering trying to do a bunch of Assaults and CoP and yadda yadda yadda... but I'll probably spend 90% of my game-time with these guys up in sky over the next several months.

Here's to hopin I gets me mah kitty pants and shura togi sometime in the foreseeable future!

"Ill change.
Not tomorrow but today..."

It's Miller time!

er... I mean: it's Melee time!

Yeah, that's right. Just yesterday I realized that jack-o'-lanterns only cost 1k gil from the festival moogles (and can even be FREE if you just step outside the city and spend no more than 5 or 10 minutes killing a single 1-hp bat and a weak-assed NM) which means it's time to start putting that good food to some good use and leveling my melee jobs this week. Most likely just DNC, but I suppose my THF is a possibility too.

Next week i'm outta town and, the week after, i'm pretty sure the event will be over. Hmmm... Maybe I should just stock-up on them for future use... or even profit, considering they normally sell in Bastok for 3k.... but I guess we'll see.

This weekend I spent a couple hours in Campaign Battles again just cuz i was bored lfp (unsuccessfully for a couple hours) on my DNC. Did a little exploring of the past over towards Castle Oz [S]. Got my final past Gate Crystal (in Meriph [S]). Got more xp and meritted Kick Attacks up to level 2. And, to top it off, even got a rank-up in Campaign. ^^

I also did more questing in Windy and am basically a fight (some bones NM in Eldieme Necropolis) away from getting my key item to get easy access into the Fenrir Prime area. And even wasted a couple hours camping Quu Domi again... 2 out of 3 I got the claim. None dropped the haste feet. When I left, I told one of the other campers the ToD and he kept me posted on his luck over the next couple hours. He was claiming both Yag NMs multiple times and didn't get either to drop to good stuff. I'm startin to think those haste feet are purely a myth, invented by some cruel, sadistic brat who just sits {Invisible} on the level up above, laughing all day and night at the people down below, wasting their time and whittling their sanity into oblivion. ... Then again, the dude I gave the ToD to "knows someone who went 1/1 on the feet and was something like 0/80 on the hands".

OMG! That "someone" was probably that same sadistic brat spreading his lies!!!

/em wants to feed the tasty brat to Jormy...

SAM's Song

Here's a happy tune (a happy tune...)

Good stuff happening this week and I don't even need to spend much time discussing it: SAM up to 37. ^^ Killin spider-pets in East Altepa = good times... except when the damn goblins keep turning around all the damn time and link and kill your chain and.... (happy place... go to your happy place....)

Other than that: defeated Ramuh Prime and can now summon him, thus completing all main 6 avatar pacts. Yippy skippy! Also: defeated Shiva and Ifrit again to start collecting whispers for the Fenrir Prime fight. Also: started on the Windurst quests to obtain the key item to get access to Toraimarai Canal via the Priming Gate in Windurst Walls. Hopfully I'll have the quests completed by Sunday so we can blitz through the remaining avatar fights again and maybe go hit-up Fenrir Prime.

nuff for now. sleepytime.

Keep the change, ya filthy animal.

So, Treu was out of town again, which means I got to borrow his equipment and be home alone, all weekend, abusing Screamin.
...
No, you perv, "his equipment" meaning "his laptop" and "abusing" meaning "PLing myself".
...
You sick little monkey! "PLing myself" does not mean "playing with myself".
...
Yes, technically I was alone and playing, but it doesn't mean it the way you're making it sound.
...
No, it doesn't mean "playing with Screamin" either.
...
Stop it already! It's not sexual at all!
...
Seriously. Just knock-off the giggling already. /sigh

Accomplishments over the past few days:
- SAM is now at level 30, and I'm startin to see how sweet of a job it is. All of those Job Abilities and Traits to help build TP faster. Mikey likey!
- DNC is now at level 25, which now means free Snk/Invis! (I've basically always just been using potions/powders/ninja-tools, which are costly and/or take up inventory space.) Some of the dances are pretty slick too, but apparently I need to be in parties to make them really effective. (Soloing from 21 - 25 went kinda slow.)
- Defeated 3 more avatars, so I can now summon them: Ifrit Prime, Shiva Prime, Leviathan Prime
- Obtained Carbuncle Mitts, which I actually should have gotten like 3 levels ago for my SMN, but whateva. Now I can get back to leveling SMN without feeling gimped.

Near-future plans:
- Defeat Ramuh Prime so I can finally summon all Celestial Avatars
- Defeat all main 6 Prime Avatars again, to get the whispers, to get my Moon Bauble, to go fight Fenrir Prime, to be able to summon Fenrir, to be schweet
- Level SAM up to 36 or 37 so we can hit-up the {fun} zone
- If that is accomplished this week, then I'll probably switch back to SMN and start leveling that up to 37 as well

Cobra Lalalalalalalalalalalalala!!!

I haven't done too much over the past several days because I was out of town for a wedding for an extended weekend. So, here's a quick summary of what's been accomplished since my last post:

1. Got my SAM to 23 with /WAR out in Qufim. It was kinda nice to make some progress on something other than my MNK.
2. Did a lil crafting and bumped my smithing and clothcraft up a tad bit more. I only mainly did this to start clearing up some inventory space.
3. A ton of Campaign Battles. (as usual) But I finally got enough xp to rank-up and get my Holy Knight Emblem and, just last night, my Brass Wings of Service key items! After getting the wings, I immediately ran over and bought some Cobra Unit Subligar for 50k Allied Notes. Yay! New Leg Piece! Maybe I can finally get rid of my Vendor's Slops!

Well, honestly, that was it. I guess now I can back-off of doing Campaign Battles and get back to leveling SAM, SMN and NIN. The only thing I currently want to save up my Allied Notes for now is the Cobra Unit Body piece, but since it hasn't been released yet, I can take my good ol' sweet time ranking up and just hope they add it in in the next update in November. (I supposed I could also save up some Allied Notes for some good gear for SAM, SMN and NIN too, but I won't be needing those items for quite a while.)

B-b-b-bird, bird, bird, b-bird's the word

So, yesterday, after I told Treu about our little bird camp from the night before, he was a wee-bit ticked-off because he actually declined the party invite that I ended up taking. Ok, "wee-bit" is a severe understatement. He was PISSED. But I'm sure he's over it now because he went to that same camp last night and made some incredible progress as well. I guess he's back up to where he should be in his grand plan for acquiring Maat's Cap y the end of the calendar year (or early January).

I actually didn't do a whole lot game-wise last night because Heroes and Prison Break have started up again and I'd rather not be letting my character die because my eyes are glued to the tv for a full hour and not paying attention ot the battle at hand. I also had a ton of other stuff to start taking care of, but I did get a little game time in.

I basically just got in a few more campaign battles, but man, a couple of those battles were pretty exciting. (and no, i'm not being sarcastic for once.) So a bunch of my MNK gear was packed away in storage and I didn't feel like running all the way back to Bastok to pick it up and then run back out to Windy [S], so I just dealt with what gear I could get out of my mog house and locker. I used my O Kote rather than my Cobra Unit Mittens. Happy Egg rather than my Smart Grenade. Nomad's Mantle rather than Amemet Mantle +1. Aikido Koshita rather than Vendor's Slops... and at one point this all seemed to make a HUGE difference, although I still haven't figured out why. Basically, I was taking on 2 Yagudo and there was a RDM that was just standing off to the side helping me out. (The Yags were Templars I think... I have a screenshot of some of the log so I'll post it up here when I get home after work.) The cool part was just seeing me fighting off both of these Yags with a swiftness. It almost looked as if I had Hundred Fists activated because my fists and feet kept flying pretty much non-stop for about 90 seconds (ot at least that's what it seemed like). I was countering EVERYthing they were dishing out to me. The log was just showing "Khrone hits....", "Khrone scores a critical hit...", "Khrone counters...", "1 of Khrones Shadows disappears...". I think they only got in maybe 2 or 3 hits in the whole spree. I was so giddy I almost peed my pants. ^^

I know the RDM was healing me and casting Haste, but I honestly can't remember (and/or didn't see) what else he was doing, but it seemed to make a HUGE difference. (I'm sure the "Counter +2" from the Aikido Koshita helped a bunch too, but I've just never seen it work THAT well before.)

The other battle that was pretty fun was also in West Sarutabaruta [S] where we had a platoon of Salvemixers and a platoon of Faeries join us. (A platoon of Casters were there too, but whateva.) Having 2 full sets of healers made this battle a joke. I immediately jumped in and started attacking, without waiting to make sure others were following me (yeah, typically that means instant-death in campaign battles) and then I'd make sure I kept standing near the faeries. The entire battle, I rarely even had to put my shadows up because I would constantly get bombarded by Cure V's... frequently them resulting in "Khrone recovers 0 HP". ^^ Faeries and Salvemixers rule!

I'm starting to get the hang of the campaign battle limitations. I make sure to keep a close eye on my parser and when I reach the max amount of damage, I head back to the arbiter, get evaluated, get tags again, and jump back into the fray! It's turning out to be a lot nicer now that I know the limits and know that I can get more than just 2k xp for an hour-long campaign battle. By the end of the night, I had enough to spend 3 merit points on another Merit for Crit Hits, which takes that up to 3 now. Woo Hoo! That'll help out on some of my other jobs that I'm leveling, as well as on my WAR actually when I'm going on my promy runs. (If I ever get back to that.) :-p

Wow. Let's do that again!

Puppets at the Information Center: [singing] / Welcome to Duloc / Such a perfect town / Here we have some rules / Let us lay them down / Don't make waves / Stay in line / And we'll get along fine / Duloc is a perfect place / Please keep off of the grass / Shine your shoes / Wipe your... FACE. / Duloc is, Duloc is / Duloc is a perfect... place.

So, last night Ara got invited to a level 37 party out in East Ronfaure [S] and kept harpin on and on about how he got a level after only like 15 minutes, so I decided to see if I could get in on a piece of that action. And what do you know, they said SURE! ^^ We were just killing colibri (and the occassional ladybug) but we were cruisin along at an average of around 13.5k xp per hour. So nice. Oh, so nice.

I went WAR/THF (how fortuitous that I had JUST leveled my THF up to 19 not even a couple hours before!) and got to toy around with Sneak Attack and Weapon Skilling. Kinda fun actually... although it would have been better if my Great Axe was actually skilled up. lol I think I started the evening at around only 65 but ended up around 95. (which is still not capped for a level 40 WAR, but whateva.) I was keeping up with the damage that the WAR/NINs were putting out (and actually slightly more, but barely noticable). The only one really doing more damage than me was our DRK who was just slaughtering everything in his path. There were times when he and I would do a skill chain and the bird would be dead practically before Ara could run away from the party to go find the next bird to pull!

My WAR started off only 54xp into level 37 but I ended up at halfway through 40. And I think I was only out there for and hour and a half or two hours. We definitely gotta remember that place in the future!

Aside from that, this weekend was fairly productive. Treu was outta town again so I got to borrow his laptop to use Screamin as my own personal PL for a couple days. Got my DNC up to 21, THF up to 19 and SCH up to 11 (mainly just so I could get rid of some low-level mage gear). Sold a ton more stuff in the AH. Bought a few more bahuts to contain all this extra crap I'm accumulating while leveling. (can't sell this stuff fast enough!) Finally went and completed WotG Mission 2 (for Windy, you have to kill this War Lynx NM which has a move that instantly takes you down to 5% hp... so it took me like 5 tries to beat this thing, but I eventually solo-ed it) and began Wotg Mission 3 (Cait Sith). Now that I'm on Cait Sith, I can start going after a couple items needed for my next Gobbie Bag quest too! And aside from all of that, of course I did a bunch of Campaign Battles and ranked-up again to Emblem of the Steel Knight $$$.

All-in-all, a VERY successful past few days. I even completed one of my long-term goals by finally getting WAR up to 40. (Which means I probably will never be leveling WAR again.)

I doubt I'll get much done this week because I have too much to do to get ready to go out of town this weekend for a wedding in Boston, but we'll see. I've already started looking into getting my next gobbiebag and also doing Bastok Mission 6-1. I'll probably do a few more Campaign Battles so I can level up again Wednesday or Thursday night. Maybe I'll even try to hit up that same camp again with my 37 NIN with Ara again and try to get Treu to come out to see what this camp is like.

You know when I'm down to my socks, it's time for business, that's why they call them business socks

Well, looking back on my daily logs (every night I log off of FFXI, I keep track of what I accomplished in a google document) it looks like since my last post I have just done a LOT of campaigning. It started off as mainly just to see what they changed to "make it easier to retain your campaign rank", but then it turned into more exploration of Campaign Battles and Campaign Ops.

I completed my first Campaign Op and realized that if I just activate those (Aegis Scream and Smokescreen) while going into a Campaign Battle, it's just an extra little bonus of XP and Allied Notes... so why NOT always do that, right? And, as I just noticed this past Sunday, it's best to do a bunch of them right away on Sunday afternoon while all of them have 5 stars, cuz there's even more of a bonus in there too.

Rankwise, I got back my Copper Emblem of Service and even progressed to Iron Emblem of Service. I'm starting to creep up on 50k Allied Notes so hopefully by the time I get a high enough rank to purchase the Wings level gear (in something like 12 days), I can finally get the Cobra Unit Subligar and have a slightly better leg piece than what I currently have. I guess in some cases, I might want to keep the Vendor's Slops and just macro them in (ie. Chi Bast) but for the most part, these subligar will be better for my MNK.

With all of the XP I've gained in the past so far, I've even added another merit to my Critical Hits. ^^

I've even spent a little time on several other jobs, mainly trying to get some future subjobs out of the way (and also while I can speed through some levels while Treu is out of town and I get to use Screamin as a PL) ^^. THF 13, WHM 20, SCH 8, DNC 16... I'm gettin there. My main goal this past weekend was to get my WHM outta the dunes because it was impossible to find a pt since everyone Level Sync's and PLs their way through. (and if I WAS lucky enough to find a pt for my WHM, it sucked ass and just ended up wasting a charge on my xp-ring.) /cry

oh wellz. Near-future plans: will probably do a little more campaign tonight because I can't stay up late tonight (have to be somewhere by 8am tomorrow). The rest of the week I might just hang around Whitegate looking for people to go on a Carby Mitts run, or to go do my other 2 promies, or go do some assaults, or go kill some avatars, or... well, or whatever. Maybe even look around for another LS to join so I can find a static to get me through my PMs to get me Sea access.

"Eureka" is Greek for "This bath is too hot"

Wow. Almost a full month since my last update... and not really all that much to show for it. ; ;

I slowed down a bit because I was watching as much of the Olympics as possible. Much time was spent just random skilling-up and questing and selling items in the auction house and ... you get the idea.

I went out and got all of my Tuning Fork Key Items to start going after the Prime Avatar fights. So far, I still only have beaten Titan and Garuda (with Treu's help, of course). We got the smack-down layed upon us when we went after Shiva and then... I guess we got sidetracked and just never we back after any other avatars.

After that, I made a bunch of progress on my Summoner, going from 11 up to 23. Even went after a couple NMs for some low-level mage gear. (Hermit's Wand and Pilgrim's Wand) Tried camping Quu Domi again for the Haste-feet and after about 6 or 7 hours, and 3 successful claims... still nada. (This brings my total kills on this guy up to about 10 or so by now and still nothing. Even the other people that manage to get the claim still haven't had any luck either. Are these feet a myth?!? Prolly not. Just sucky drop-rate.)

White Mage has also increased from 11 to 14. Oh, and btw, I hate playing White Mage and I hate the Dunes and I especially hate playing White Mage in the Dunes. I don't even want to think about the amount of hours I've put into partying (and lfp) in the Dunes for my WHM. And I've only gone up 3 levels. (and believe it or not, some of those parties actually had PLs too.) /sigh

So, after being bored trying to level WHM for my SMN, I decided to get back into Campaign now that they have supposedly fixed the requirements for maintaining your rank. So far I've gotten around 6k xp. Even decided to do my first Campaign Op. (Aegis Scream I) Wow. I kinda wish I knew about this a while ago. A few of these Campaign Ops are strictly for Attacking or Defending in Campaign Battles. It's basically just an extra bonus you can get on top of what you get from the Battle. Gotta remember to do this as much as possible now.

Also tried a couple {Level Sync} parties. The first one was with my WHM13 in the Dunes; the rest of the pt consisted of a 75, a 70, a 45, a 40 and another 13. Simply put: it sucked. Our tank was the 70 WAR/NIN... but he didn't realize that being /NIN at that low didn't allow him to use shadows, so I'd have to rest for a minute or two after every 3 or 4 mobs. (Yeah, I was the only healer. No PL. And all of their high level gear apparently sucked after level syncing down to 13.) The other time was with Treu. I took my SMN 21 out with his MNK 39. We were cruisin along nicely in Korroloka Tunnel on Worms, buit as soon as our xp rings wore and we went up a level or two, the xp trailed off practically to nothing. ; ; Oh well. At least this will probably be a good place to come with my SAM 20 in a couple days, either with Hybrid or with True again.

True and I have had a couple discussions on how {Level Sync} isn't really as good as everyone had anticipated. It kinda sucks if you're jumping down large amounts of levels because your gear does NOT stay very proportional. (Brown Belt taken down to level 20 gives you.... a MUCH worse waist piece than Purple Belt. Less STR and no haste. wtf?) Hopefully people will start to realize this and not be so retarded when putting level 75 parties together in the friggin Dunes. Idiots.

No gamin tonight or the rest of this weekend. Have a bachelor party out in Boston to hit up so I won't be online til Sunday night. Unfortunately, HellsBells is doing Dynamis Windurst Sunday night at 8pm... and my flight doesn't even land until around 10:30pm. /cry Maybe I'll try to catch an earlier flight so I can make it home in time to get my Windy clear (and watch the Browns Steelers game). I don't think they're doing another Windy run for at least a month or two, so I REALLY want to be there for this.

oh wellz.
Go Browns!
Go Buckeyes!

The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and...

Not too much happening, other than me finally getting used to mage jobs.

I've been having a little fun with SMN and Carby. Spending bunches of time on trying to figure out how I want to set up my macros. Treu thinks I'm wasting my time cuz I won't need to really worry about macros for resting gear-swaps, elemental siphons, etc... for at least a couple months, but I'd rather just try to figure it all out ahead of time so I don't have to constantly re-learn my macros as I level higher and higher.

I also got a little more xp on my WHM and BLM this weekend and had a little noob party while trying to figure out the jobs. It seemed to me that having my BLM as a melee still helped out greatly at that low of a level (still hanging around Gustaberg and the Highlands) but once I get into the Dunes, I'll probably just have to stand back spell-casting. (le sigh. sounds boring to me, but we'll see how it goes.)

So, what was actually accomplished over the past 2 or 3 days? SMN 11. WHM 11. BLM 11. (Hence the most-excellent, and most-appropriate, title to this entry.)

Well, I mainly just wanted a little more experience with mage jobs before I started partying out in the Dunes so now I'm gonna just get back to focusing on my SMN. Well, unless Hybrid is back online and wants to get back to duoing with his MNK 20 and my SAM 20. For tonight, I'm just going to head out and camp the NM to get me a Pilgrim's Wand. Figured that would help out greatly while leveling, so I might as well go camp that NOW to make leveling quicker/easier.

And yes, it seems as though meriting my MNK has been put on hold for a while. /cry oh well. Our little group probably isn't going to be doing any Salvage runs or anything major for quite a while anyways while Treu and Hybrid make their race for Maat's Cap. This gives me a good 4 or 5 months to level these 2 jobs, merit a bunch and start crankin out those Assaults. Hmmm. Maybe I should start setting out a schedule for I don't focus too much on 1 of my tasks. (Mondays, Sundays = SMN; Tuesdays, Saturdays = SAM; Wednesdays, Fridays = Assaults; any other time I have = MNK merits) ... We'll see how that works out. It'll probably change, but at least I can start thinking about this and trying to get statics together to make the process run more smoothly.

We came, we saw, we kicked its ass!

OMFG!!!!1!1!!11

Seriously, beyond a shadow of a doubt: AMAZING {Dynamis - Jeuno} run with HellsBells tonight. My initial worries about this LS have most-definitely been tossed out the proverbial window and I am certain I will be sticking around with them for a while as my Dynamis LS. (And yay! Another city clear! Just Windy left!)

The entire run had 37 - 41 members at any given time. Pretty much the whole run went smoothly, except for 1 wipe which was apparently triggered by a person or two going afk for a bit in the wrong area. No biggie. I've come to expect at LEAST 1 death upon every Dynamis entry. lol Hmmm. We got the full 3 hour time extension within about an hour and a quarter I think (if that means anything to how smoothly we were going through mobs). Itaevin and Liquidblue were our two PLD tanks again, and this time it really seemed like they knew what they were doing. (Who knows, maybe they were just both drunk/high on Sunday's run. Heh, or maybe I was.) Hermod, main puller, awesome job; don't think he screwed up even once. Retsujo was our secondary assist and had no troubles jumping right into the role the one and only time he was asked to. Bah, wish I could remember more names, but lots of people were performing well and with great efficiency. (look at me, the consultant, trying to analyze everything)

Drops. ... Drops? ... What drops? HERE'S what drops (in order): SAM, WHM, BLM, MNK, WHM, 100, WAR, RDM, BRD, DRG, SAM, NIN, BRD, NIN, RNG, BLM, THF, THF, SAM. The last SAM ended up going unclaimed cuz ppl were waiting for it to freedrop, but the mob was only killed like 30 seconds before we were booted. (ohwellz! lost a bunch of currency too cuz ppl didn't pass on it.) And the 2 THF pieces right before that actually dropped from consecutive mobs. I'm pretty sure 3 of the various AF pieces went to 1 person too. So, 18 total AFv2 pieces and a 100 currency piece dropped to us in a single run. IN A SINGLE RUN! The last time I went on a Jeuno run, we had 2 SAM feet drop. AND THAT WAS IT for the entire run! (Do I sound too exicited over this?)

Holy hell, I'm practically pissing myself I'm so pleased with these people! (like the alliteration there?)

Too bad we didn't get multiple MNK pieces. ; ; When we started the run, I thought I was 2nd in line for MNK Hands, but when they actually dropped, they ended up going to another person that was still ahead of me, so I was actually 3rd in line (and there was still another guy, Assasin, that was behind me wanting them too). But alas, MNK only dropped once tonight, not the necessary 3 or 4.

aight. enough of that. :) The past couple days haven't been very eventful, but still successful.

I did a couple more Campaign Battles but still wasn't good enough to even keep my rank, so I kinda gave up on Campaign for now, until they fix whatever it is that they broke with the last major update. I was reading a few blogs and forums where people are speculating that your rank-ups are strictly based on xp gained in Campaign Battles and Campaign Ops, but I think it's pretty clear that there has got to be more to it than that. So, the main theory going around is that it only takes 5k xp to gain a rank in Ribbons and 10k xp to gain a rank in Stars. If this was the case, then for Emblems, it should be 15k or maybe 20k to gain a rank. This is probably NOT the case because Treu was using his and Screamin's character in something like 15 Campaign Battles and still didn't have enough to even KEEP their Emblem status. (which is what's happening to me right now too. /sigh )

I keep trying to think of what else could be added into this calculation (assuming this IS the case). Do your "acquired rank points (from xp)" get reset every Sunday? If so, that would just be... retarded. That would mean, on Saturday you would probably have enough to rank up, but if you wait til Sunday, "OOPS! TOO BAD! You can't even keep your current rank now!" Once you reach Emblem, do they expect you to start doing Battles AND Ops? Maybe you don't get as many "rank points" when you are in parties when in Battles? Maybe the "rank point cost" increases for every person that already has that rank. (or something kinda like the whole ZNM Zeni-cost system.) Maybe a death resets your "rank points" back to 0? Maybe you have to start doing Battles in other cities' zones?? Who the hell knows! I'm getting a headache just trying to think of all the complexities that it could be... even when it's probably something just as simple as: you need to do 2 Campaign Battles in every zone your nation owns and 2 in a single zone owned by another nation and that's it!

So, to get back on topic, a few Battles done. One even got me 2,030 Experience Points and 1,016 Allied Notes. I'm pretty sure that's the best I've ever done. I typically only get around 1/2 to 2/3's of that amount. Oh, and I spent some merit points on getting my H2H combat skill to level 3. :)

I ran into Tekumel last night. We were talkin for a bit and he was explaining how he was kinda bummed-out and not playing much lately cuz he doesn't think he's really making any progress in-game. I'm pretty much on the same page cuz I've been having horrible luck finding merit parties lately... which is one of the reasons I'm more than happy to start leveling a couple other jobs. (I'm also leveling other jobs just to be able to level them with Treu and Hybrid while I have the chance, before they both get their Maat's Caps.) So me and Tek were about to go merit when some other LS ppl say they're goin on an Assault run. Woo Hoo! I join them, which becomes my first Assault! Of course, I broadcast my newb-ness by showing up at the staging point without my orders. :-p I thought all you needed was a tag, and you get the orders AT the staging point. Apparently you get them in the same office that you get the tags. We did Periqia - Seagull Grounded which consists of taking an NPC through some tunnels/rooms and killing a few random mobs. (a total of 12 mobs from what I recall.) I don't know, to me it seemed so easy, but maybe that was just because the guy taking care of the NPC really knew what he was doing. (Does 1155 Assault Points sound right for this one? Or is it higher than normal just cuz it's the first time I did that particular run?) Whateva. I enjoyed it. And it got me ever so slightly closer to being able to do Salvage and also getting Pahluwan and Denali gear. :)

In closing, I just want to mention the name of an NM we saw (or thought we saw) in Dynamis tonight: Dicklix Stickytoes. That is all. And goodnight.

What kinda hotel is this?

Just completed my first Dynamis (Bastok) run with the new LS: HellsBells.

Simply put: this experience was different from AstrumNovae's Dynamis runs. I actually thought that AN had their shit together better.

We broke the glass and went in. Total of 29 people when we first entered. They start pulling the first set of statues and THEN realize that we haven't determined who's going to be the main assist, secondary assist, tertiary assist.... Not only that, we don't even have any PLDs. So there's a little confusion and a little discussion while mobs keep coming and noone knows which ones to attack. So they tell us who the main assist is. Then a few minutes later, they name the secondary. Then a few minutes later they name the third. Then a fourth. I swear, I think there were 5 different ppl we were assisting, so up until the last 45 minutes, I wasn't even using assist macros, I was just typing in the name of whoever was blasting out "/assist me" and using "spacebar - up arrow" to assist on subsequent mobs.

There were other problems I saw too, like the main assists sometimes were saying "/assist me" and yet they weren't attacking anything so noone's macros were doing anything and we all stood around while other ppl got attacked and time was wasted. Mobs weren't being promptly slept. There didn't seem to be an actual order to the way mobs were being killed either. (I was always told that NINs should be saved for last, and yet there were a couple times where we were attacking NINs before even going after BSTs.)

I don't know. A lot of it just seemed like a big clusterfuck at times, and yet... I can't deny the results: we kicked ass. Went in at 8:00pm, came out at 11:30pm. Had plenty of time to beat the boss and do a bunch of farming. Didn't even wipe.. well, if you don't count the last 3 minutes before the timer ran out. lol) The drops? RDM, BLM, SAM, PLD, DRG, 4 wootz ores (practically all right in a row. it was freaky.), MNK (also freaky because like a minute before some says "wow, we haven't had a MNK piece drop yet"), another SAM, and another DRG.

I have no idea how we did so well with drops and AN always had such shitty luck with it. Just like in AN, we only had 1 THF, so it's not like TH really had that much of an affect on drop rates. Maybe it's just the sheer number of people we had? We had around 30 ppl the whole time tonight, whereas in AN we would typically have around 20. Then again, maybe it's just the number of mobs we killed or the rate we killed at? We were flying thru mobs so quickly that sometimes I didn't even have a chance to get a hit in.

I can't remember the full team setup, but I know we had 6 BLMs, 2 WHMs, 2 RDMs, 3 SMNs, 2 MNKs, 2 PLDs (when we realized we had no PLDs, 2 ppl left, switched jobs and came back in. not sure how they did that though; i thought once you left you couldn't come back in for 3 more days.)... hmm... 1 THF... and I think that's about all I remember checking.

All-in-all: I liked the old LS; I like the new LS. Since the old one is gone, I should stop comparing and get on with my life. Clearly these guys are successful in what they do, so I'm not gonna bitch. It's just gonna take me a little while to get used to the new peoples' personalities and get used to the way they do things. I'm glad Tekumel convinced me to join. (Just kinda wish I listened to him a couple months ago; I wouldn't have spent all that time building up LS points and not getting to spend them on anything. lol)

Hmm... what else... other stuff I've done since my last entry:
- few more Campaign Battles, but still not enough to even keep my current rank :-p
- did a bunch more leveling: WAR (37 FINALLY), SAM (20), DNC (13) and SMN (9)
- oh, and I applied to HellsBells. lol (I prolly shoulda mentioned that at the beginning of this post)
- Treu has his character back. Ced's back too. As far as I know, the rest of the others that got hacked are still waiting, but I'm guessing they'll be up-and-running before the end of this week.

And that's about it! The near future will probably be just leveling some of these lower level jobs to try to keep them up with Treu and Hybrid while they go for their Maat's caps. Treu already has all of his jobs at 30+ so I really gotta get movin on some of these.

Nothing to see here... Move along... Move along...

Well, I honestly haven't been gaming much lately.

First the bad news:
Went thru a bit of depression which was contracted from a couple friends and LS mates. Of course, I'm referring to the mass-thefts that took place around July 11th. First our LS leader got hacked and a couple people in the LS started saying "bullshit! he just took the money and ran!!!" And then when a couple other people in our LS got hacked (sack-holders)... well, those same people were still saying it was some big damn conspiracy. But then a day or two later me and Treu heard that not only his account, but 3 or 4 of our friends' accounts got hacked too. It was just ... devastating. Funny enough, the same conspiracy theorists were STILL insisting it was all planned, despite POL's warnings that went out the previous few days about "being careful to protect your password" and "we are now blocking large IP blocks from logging-in because of shit going down". I think I managed to convince a couple people that it really wasn't some prank, but who knows. Some people are just so untrusting that it could be a RL friend that got hacked and they'd still insist they just sold their account or something. Anyways (I wanna get this part overwith. I hate talkin about depressing stuff.) Simply put: there was talk about not wanting to come back until whatever security breach allowed this all to happen has been fixed... but whateva. Treu got his and Screamin's chars locked-out and into the recovery process. Disdain did the same for his. Ditto for Ced and Van and ... well, whoever else it was. Sounds like everyone is coming back; it's just gonna take some time for everyone to get back here.

Also, due to the circumstances, it seems (as of reading our LS forum this morning) that AstrumNovae has officially broken. With so much being stolen from our LS bank, plus pop items, plus missing leaders and noone wanting to take up the mantle of leader while Ced's going through his recovery process... I guess pretty much everyone just gave up and moved on. ; ; It sucks, but whateva. Yeah, I didn't get any Af gear or anything, but at least I got to meet more people and got in a bunch of Dynamis and Sky experience. ^^ (This is me just tryin to look on the bright side of things.)

ok... on to the good stuff:
Let's see... what have I accomplished...
- More Campaign Battles and got up to Golden Star $$$$ and even Copper Emblem of Serice $. Woo Hoo! So I spent some of my Allied Notes and bought some Cobra Unit Mittens (which will probably only be used during Campaign Battles, but I guess we'll see.)
- got Dvucca Isle Staging Point and Ilrusi Atoll Staging Point, thus finally obtaining all 6 staging points. Woo Hoo times TWO!!
- got some help from Kota, Fadee, Ruiness and a coupel other people to go on my Asuran Fists fight and got that. w00t!!!
- decided to start leveling SAM a lil more with Hybrid's MNK (got up to 16)
- decided on DNC too cuz apparently it's an awesome SJ for a bunch of other jobs while soloing or in small parties. (up to DNC 6 right now)

and uh... that's about it. I actually haven't even been online much in the past 10 days because of random road-trips and my workouts. Hopefully I'll have more updates coming soon.

I don't have to see it, Dottie... I lived it.

So much has happened since my last update... and yet, nothing really all that great that was worth mentioning. Quick summary:

Campaign: Did a ton of campaign battles and ranked-up twice. (Sterling Star $$ and Mythril Star $$$) I should be able to rank-up again tomorrow after work. Treu has been going absolutely bat-shit-crazy over campaign stuff lately because he's just been spending what little freetime he has to game doing battles, and yet it never seems to be enough to keep his and Screamin's rank. I think tomorrow is the last day he has until they both de-rank. I hope they fix campaign because since the last update it seems to be pretty hosed. It seems a lot more difficult to rank-up. The beastmen are pushing so hard that it's like impossible to get them out of the city... battles are constantly being fought and sometime they last for up to an hour, so it's impossible to talk to any of the NPCs to get evaluated, buy gear, get Ops assignments, etc....

Dynamis: We did a Bastok run... which we failed to clear. We were scheduled to do a Windurst run, but it ended up being cancelled because only about 12 ppl showed up. (probably due to early vacationers for the 4th of July weekend.) We did a Jeuno run just now... and failed to complete because they screwed up pulling the boss and then we ran out of time to re-pull it. We clearly rock in Dynamis. /sarcasm

Sky: much farming, never fighting gods

Zones: finally obtained the Mamool Ja Staging Point. still have 2 more staging points to go, but I can't figure out that damn Arrapago Reef map.

Leveling: Decided to level my SMN just a bit up to level 4 (yeah, there goes that goal of getting all summons while still at level 1 lol). I had a bit of my xp ring charge left over from another crap pt so i needed to dump it off onto something before it wore.

Meriting: finally decided to visit the Nomad Moogle in Jeuno and obtain my Limit Breaker key item so I can begin meriting. Spent 6 merit points so far (Hand-to-Hand 1 and 2, Critical Hit Rate 1, Counter Rate 1, Kick Attack Rate 1). I'll probably just be putting all merit points directly into H2H until it's full, primarily for accuracy reasons. I was initially going to spread them evenly throughout all 4 of these slots, but decided it would be best just to get the weapon skill up first, then spread the rest out.

Mog Bonanza: got 1 Rank 5 prize. w00t. Used it on my WAR, which is now only 3k xp away from being a non-gimp subjob.

And that's about it. Future updates aren't seeming like they will be all that eventful (other than the possible random bitching about stupid people) because I've already begun the monotony of just meriting and campaigning and meriting and campaigning.... This will probably keep up until I feel I have decent enough skills to move on to other things. (ENMs, Assaults, Salvage, etc...) But I guess we'll see.

A day without blood is like a day without sunshine

Dynamis Sandy run last night... got the clear. No biggie. I think we've done that run like 4 times since I joined 4 or 5 weeks ago and we've cleared it all but once so far. When the hell am I gonna get the Jeuno and Windy clear?? But I digress...

I was pretty shocked that on our run, not 1 single person WS-ed a NIN mob! Also, one of our sackholders didn't show up last night. Coincidence? Possibly... but then again, as I recall from our last Dynamis Basty run, she WS-ed couple NIN mobs right in a row, even after being warned not to do it time and time again. /shrug So last night, only 1 NIN self-destructed and I don't think anyone died from it. Good job DDs!! ^^

Hmm... what else...
- I got to put together the main DD pt (4x MNK, 1 SAM and 1 WHM; where the hell did all these MNKs come from suddenly?), so I guess I'm officially part of the main alliance now and will hopefully never be in the outside pt again. lol
- only 1 full-wipe, I believe, just before we got to the stables. another near-full-wipe happened in the stables.
- only 2 ppl de-leveled last night, one of them happened to be the WHM in our DD pt (ouch for us DD)... and she only started the run off at 70 (ouch again for us)... but whateva. I can't be mad/complain because I showed up to a couple runs still at like lvl 70 when I first joined.
- AF drops: onry PLD hands (Joel?) and BRD head (Ced)... and like 15 WAR relic weapons. lol

As for campaign, I STILL can't rank-up yet. I swear, I've done like 15 to 18 campaign battles since my last rank-up (Bronze Star), ALL of them were successes (not 1 did "the allied forces retreat"), I've made probably at LEAST 15k in xp and maybe around 8k Allied Notes and yet I still can't rank-up. WTF Mate? There's gotta be something else to this rank-up stuff. Maybe I have to do some Campaign Ops to get further or something?? /sigh Maybe I should just give up on looking forward to getting that Cobra Unit gear and just get back to focus on pting when I'm not looking for groups to do other runs that I need to go on, such as:
- Double Dragonian: last night some of us in the LS were talking about doing this run soon, so hopefully it gets done ASAP (but hopefully not this weekend while I'm out of town again!)
- my Asuran Fists fight: Tekumel said he still hasn't done his DRG WS fight either, so hopefully we can get a group together to do his and mine in the same night
- Prommy runs: I still only have 1 cleared so far
- etc...

Side note #1:
Tampa trip this past weekend was awesome. 18 guys showed up for a bachelor party (only 1 of which actually lives in Florida). Some heavy-flirting with a 21 year old broad that sat next to me at the ballgame Friday night, but didn't have the nerve to get her digits... cuz her dad was sitting right next to her and staring me down the entire 9th inning. lol Golf on Saturday was cancelled due to rain, so we ended up reverting back to our college-days and played drinking games all day long. Only 17 of us made it to the steak house for dinner (cuz one of my pledge brothers can't keep up with us now that he's got a kid). Got some contact info from a hottie later that night... turns out she's 19 (hey, it's still legal!) but was a Miss Teen Florida or something recently. Guess I gotta make plans to head down there again sometime relatively soon. Flight back home sucked (weather delays, luggage lost, etc...) so I missed out on the Dynamis Jeuno run on Sunday night. (Man, I don't think I wanna know if they cleared it or not; I still need that clear.)

Side note #2:
Word of the day: Cockaigne

Dream a little dream of me

Nice. Just had a dream that I was running down the street that I grew up on, from my grade-school towards my parents' house, avoiding mobs, with a bunch of my friends. For some reason, I could run a little faster than everyone else (maybe I activated my sprinter shoes?) but I got reckless and aggroed. (Was it a Dancing Weapon? I know those things were ONE of these mobs.) I aggroed SOMEthing and while I was killing it, like 8 more people-based mobs (like fomors I guess) started aggroing too cuz my sneak wore off from being hit by that first mob.

After killing like 3 mobs and a dozen more just coming at me, I decided it would be best if I just ran for it and tried to zone (zoning would occur when I got to mom and pops place). I was down to like 300 or 400 HP (so like 20% of my total. I know this because I could see it in my lower right corner. Yeah, like all of my dreams, I was seeing this in 3rd person.) but I eventually made it safe and sound.

I only made it home alive cuz a few "helper" NPCs and other friends were picking off some of the mobs when I crossed Beverly Hills (one of the cross-streets). As soon as I entered the house, the mobs just stopped coming at me in the street, started wandering around for a bit, then started walking back to where I had first aggroed them.

There was more to the dream, but the rest didn't really seem ffxi-related. Like, it turned out some of the mobs were in fact police officers that were trying to take me in, but they couldn't enter my parents' house. and I knew they would try to break the law by entering illegally, so i set up a PC and a camera/microphone (actually, it looked like the camera for the PS3) and pointed it out at the cops. When I opened the front door and started taunting them, they just turned and walked away.

There was another part (before all the running actually began) about a friend puking in the middle of a nice restaurant.

Now... How often have you had dreams like this? And why haven't I had more of these?

No, I didn't aggro anything by accident in Dynamis last night, so don't go thinkin this is a guilt-trip dream. lol

Aight. Gotta go pack cuz I'm flying down to Tampa after work today. I shall miss gaming for the next couple days. Hopefully I won't fall behind in points cuz after last night's run (2 MNK feet dropped), I'm now first in line for MNK gear. ^^

Ha ha, success!

So, lets see... what have I accomplished since my last post?

• Ranked-up twice in Campaign (Allied Ribbon of Glory $$$$ and Bronze Star $)
• Did 2 {Dynamis - San d'Oria} runs and cleared them both. (I still need Windy and Jeuno clears in order to get into Beau)
• Participated in my first {sky} run, where we fought (and defeated) Suzaku and Byakko
• Broke the latent on my Knuckles of Trials
• oh, and I got my {Monk} up to 75 ^^

Yes, I finally got a job to 75... and I did it on my 1-year anniversary of playin FFXI. :) Now I just gotta go get some real gear now as well as do the fight to get Asuran Fists.

More to come later... (too much stuff goin on at work this morning)

UPDATE: ok, so i lied. There's not much else that needed to be updated. That's the gist of it. Later-on tonight I finally went and got my Walahra Turban (yay, first piece of 75 gear for me!) and got the key item for the Sheep in Antlion's Clothing ENM that me, Caldera and Nomar are gonna start doing on a weekly basis. (omg, srsly? I might start to have a steady income now?! no wai!!1! and i'm gonna need it to afford Utsusemi: Ni which is currently selling for 400k. ouch.)

The Matrix isn't real

I hate when this stuff happens, especially now when I'm so close to my deadline/anniversary, but I gotta take a couple days off, away from the game. ><

Last night I was so busy with RL stuff (mow my lawn, edge, weed-whack around the house, fertilize, pick up my tux, sign up for a pass so I can start swimming again this summer, make dinner...) I don't think I even got online until around 8:30 or 9:00pm. After an hour of lfp, I gave up looking (cuz I don't want to be one of "those people" who joins a pt and then ditches after only an hour or so).

I did manage to get a few more campaign battles in and got enough xp to get to MNK 72 though. ^^ (Only about 120k more to go!) After I dinged, I just headed up to the Hall of the Gods and logged so that if I DO get out of the rehearsal dinner stuff early, I can hurry back (prolly just over to Treu's house to save myself an extra half-hour or so of driving) and join in on Sky tonight.

Of course, it wasn't until after I had already started the log-out process that I realized that I hadn't yet done my campaign evaluation. >< Eh whateva. It was only 12:20am at the time and I couldn't even get evaluated until 12:45am anyways. And I was NOT about to run alllllll the way back up to the Hall of the Gods again. No biggie; so I delay a rank-up by maybe 24 hours. /shrug

Rehearsal dinner tonight. Wedding all day Saturday. Kick the broad outta my house early Sunday morning (whichever bridesmaid I happened to bring home the night before). And then back to MOAR MNK ALL DAY SUNDAY!!! (well, and then I think a Dynamis run on Sunday night, assuming it's one of the cities.)

Next step: level MNK to 75 (working on breaking the Trial Weapon latent while doing so)

Everything else can wait.

I just realized last night that I have enough ISP for my Walahra Turban, but can't wear it til 75 anyways... but at least I know where to go and how to get it so once I'm even close to 75 I'll take care of that right quick.

Destroyers can wait.

Hell, even my Prommies can wait now.

I WANTS 75ses!!!!!11!1!!!

8 days...

Shh! I'm listening to reason!

(yes, really. a Pee-Wee's Big Adventure quote)

Last night was {Dynamis-Jeuno}. I think we did alright (not that I really have anything to compare it against), but we still didn't get the clear. :( We only had 1 full-wipe... Got a 100 byne-bill drop... Got DRG Hands AF drop, which I think just free-dropped from what i recall (Tekumel, one of my recent leveling-buddies who happens to be a DRG) was kinda pissed at me for telling him that, but he was busy with his LS at that moment over in Dyna-Sandy)... Obviously a ton of relic weapons/shields/horns drops... Not really sure what else. Guess I was paying too much attention to where we were going and what everyone else was doing.

My first 2 Dynamis runs were more just "do what you are told and follow everyone else" so I didn't really get to experience much of what actually goes on during these blitzkriegs. This time I felt more comfortable on the run so I started looking around more rather than staring intently at the log for the next instructions. Simple things that I'm sure everyone else already knows were just dawning upon me last night: mages cover our front and rear, all melee in the middle; our main defense is sleeping/stunning; melee (in general) LOVE pushing forward, even when they're not supposed to, most likely because mobs stop before they get to where we are, so we creap forward on every mob we fight; ... oh, and people still don't know how to follow directions. (but everyone already knew that) Biggest thing I learned last night: don't piss off your mages. ^^ If a DD gets pissed-off and decides not to do their job, no biggie; it'll just take longer to kill the mobs. If one of your primary mages (whether it's a nuker, sleeper, healer...) gets pissed-off from something you did, you will die or worse, the whole party will die. So please, be nice, be grateful, do as you're told and everyone will be happier for it.

Other than the Dynamis run, I got my Trial Knuckles, did an Escort Quest (FINALLY finishing off my NIN to 37... w00t!), and did a few more Campaign battles before crashing. So, several more necessary things were accomplished: no more needing to work on NIN anymore, well, at least until I decide to finish taking it all the way to 75, which probably won't be for at least a year or two; got that much closer to getting my MNK to 75 (currently only about 122k away!) and being able to merit-the-hell out of it ^^; made plans with Tekumel so we can break our latents together on our Trial weapons.

9 days remaining...

We better split up... we can do more damage that way.

So I lied: no updates for yesterday's post. Not even much to say about last night either because nothing was really accomplished other than adding a few more people to my shit-list for going AWOL. Having the party wipe once is not a good reason to just leave without even saying so. When you do that, or even when you finally get a party together and decide to leave after 60 minutes when people haven't even expended their Emperor's Bands yet, you're just gonna succeed in pissing people off.

All-in-all last night: only made about 21k in the [almost] 6 hours I was online. /sigh

I still wanna make my goal of 75 by my 1-year anniversary (I created my account on 6/14/2007), so hopefully I'll find better parties over the next several days. Only 120,000 xp in 10 nights... that's easily doable, no?

Dee dee dee...

DUR! And here I was wondering why I hit 1 xp point away from hitting 71... then after the next mob I still didn't level...

But it was taken care of shortly afterwards...
And we got back to leveling again.

(Yes, methinks this post needs much updating, but I'll take care of that tomorrow.)

To and fro, stop and go, that's what makes the world go 'round...

The weekend was filled with ups and downs... but overall progress was still made, so I can consider the past few days a success. ^^

Friday I missed out on our Sky run. (I decided I needed to go downtown to get drunk after work.) Not that it really mattered though, considering I was still only on ZM 3 or 4 and didn't have access to Sky. So that's what we ended up doing all day on Saturday. Treu (dual-boxing with Screamin) and Hybrid/Caldera took a bunch of us n00bs (me, Nomar, Rai, Hanzow, Toboue... I think there might have been 1 or 2 more, not sure though) all over the place to complete all of the necessary ZMs to get into Sky. MUCH props to these two guys for helping us out; we owe them BIG TIME. (not that I already don't owe them like a dozen favors each already.) After we got up there into Tu'Lia, Treu even gave us a quick walkthrough of some of the key points to remember up there. (what mobs aggro on what, where to walk to avoid mobs, etc...)

Sunday was spent trying to find a pt to level my MNK some more; while I was slowly gaining xp with my flag up out in Campaign, Tekumel was sitting in Whitegate trying to form a party for us. No luck on the pt though (as usual: no tanks). Hell, when I was looking to form the pt, there was only 1 group of lvl 70's in a party, so it just seemed that noone was leveling this weekend. /shrug

We also went on my 2nd Dynamis run Sunday night: Windy. The LS apparently came pretty close to clearing it, but just ran into some bad luck near the end. Well, not exactly "bad luck" so much as people making mistakes. (One guy even lived up to his characters name. lol but I don't wanna bad-mouth anyone in here so I'll just /laugh and move on. ^^ Just tryin to keep it positive in here folks!) Apparently the RDMs weren't casting {Sleep} as much as they should have been, the 1 tank was pulling mobs in the wrong order, some people kept WS-ing the NIN mobs after repeatedly being told NOT to, the melee's in general weren't listening to the leaders when they were told to stop creaping forward and pull back, and some unwanted aggro was accrued by one of the new guys at the end of the run. All-in-all, chalk it up to inexperience ... with a large dose of stupidity (people not listening to directions).

I don't know what the deal was. When the leader(s) tell you to pull back, you should pull back. I pulled back. A couple other people pulled back. The other dozen or so stayed forward and even kept pushing up. WTF mate? Our main tank would claim and run back to us, but before the mob got back, other people were already attacking and voking or whatnot so they were always fighting up front rather than back where we needed to be.

Whatever. I'm not gonna complain too much, cuz I haven't been here that long, but I definitely see why some people have been getting so frustrated with this LS. I'll still stick it out and try to help out as much as I can in any way that I can.

Now that I'm thinking about it, maybe someone should write up a newbie's guide to Dynamis on our LS site and make everyone read it before going on our next run. Simple stuff like turning on your chat filters to hold the party and linkshell messages on your screen for a few seconds might be VERY helpful. (Maybe people weren't seeing the messages because they were scrolling by too fast?) Maybe we need to specifically say ahead of time what the names of the NIN mobs are. (Doubt that'll help much though, because people actually shout "THIS ONE IS A NIN! DO NOT WEAPON SKILL!" and yet some people end up weapon-skilling anyways.) Maybe we need to name who the various leaders are ahead of time and tell people specifically "Melee always hang around where Suma is (to prevent pushing too far forward) and only /assist what Flayer is attacking unless Suma says to /assist someone else" and "BLMs and RDMs always hang around where Treu is and only /assist Ced unless otherwise told..." and "make sure RDMs are the primary sleepers because they have an A+ Enfeebling skill where BLMs are only a C+" etc....

I don't know. Just a thought. I think it would really help the new people out with what to expect and how to handle situations during these time-constrained events.