Umm... Refresh please!

addict

2008-01-28T15:13:00.000-05:00

Anyone know anyone selling an account? (not on eBay for $1,000...)

For Sale

2007-06-28T15:46:00.000-05:00

Well I've sat on Nivaud for almost 3 months now, and paid $17.95 each month and all I've done is get each update then logoff. That's $53.85 for 0 hours of gameplay, and I am pretty much done with FFXI, so I put out this offer.

75SMN, 75BLM, 75RDM, 64WHM, 58BST, 57DRK, 37NIN, etc etc etc

Crafts are posted on the right ->

I have 3/5 AF2 for SMN, RDM and BST, a LuShang's, and about 400k in cash as well as a Lamian Kaman+1 signed in my Mog House. The account is for sale, mostly because over the past four years I've spent almost $875 in fees, another $100 for game/HDD and probably another couple hundred upgrading my PC so I can play it on that instead of PS2. All in all I've spent a good 1k on FFXI since 2003 and as much fun as I've had in Vanadiel I would like at least something back.

If you want to make a serious offer for the account post a comment, otherwise sometime next month I'll be putting Nivaud on eBay for a few hundred dollars. It is too late to sell it before the end of this pay cycle so whoever buys it won't have to pay until August. Thanks for the memories.

irony

2007-04-19T14:03:00.001-05:00

I get more hits on my dead FFXI blog than I do on my daily updated WoW blog. That's friggin pathetic...

How to kill a weblog

2007-03-29T11:13:00.001-05:00

Pull all links from your sigs, post that you are done with the blog, and stamp a big motherf%@king CANCELLED across the header. It's a shame too, I had over 15,000 hits in about 6 months on that blog. Thanks to a combination of Ondria's lack of a sense of humor, Lunies/AD not being able to get over the fact I thought they were asses in December when they killed a charmed Minidragon at Xolotl, and overall just being tired of people basing opinions on what they hear, not what they know... I have left FFXI, (for the time being).

It was a fun time while I was here, but I came to Bismarck to join IRON, and what's the point of joining LS's that you didn't have interest in joining 8 months ago? Either way, I'm with IRON again and I don't have to deal with the plague that is RMT, the failure that is FFXI HNM, and the drama that is endgame. I think when they make server migration I may consider going back home to Odin. Who knows...

The downward slope!

My US peeps

My International peeps

Getting some love from Unreal!

finito

2007-03-16T23:12:00.000-05:00

I'm done with this blog. It has done nothing but bring me trouble. I speak my voice and then get the repurcussions later from people who don't even know me passing judgement on a person they haven't even met. I was booted from Prophets cause I called Assassin a douchebag for calling for help after his LS flailed Fafnir and wiped.

I got rejected from Lunarians because in a post dating back to 2006 I said it was pathetic that they killed Minidragon while he was charmed at Xolotl. People who don't even know me, know how I play or how dedicated I am to a LS try to judge me and my character based on stupid blog entries I post? Unbelievable. I was told that I was rejected because of my "overall general attitude". Not one person in that LS other than Lothlorien has ever even spoken to me. No one in Lunarians knows a single thing about me except what they read and interpreted in this blog.

Well I'm done, I've suffered enough through my FFXI career because of this stupid ass thing. This is my last post. Good luck to you people, if you ever bookmarked my blog feel free to remove it.

Extreme Makeover

2007-03-16T07:09:00.000-05:00

So I got my new list for Altana Viewer and wanted to change my look up a bit. The 2 new robes have great stats... really great stats but the Morrigan's Robe and the Goliard Saio truly look like crap. I did find that the Marduk's Jubbah (BRD/SMN/WHM) does look quite nice and works well with Yigit Seraweels. Here's my new look:

Short of the giant Bison-like belt buckle I kinda like it. Anyways I spent 3ish hours in Sky soloing on Fire Elementals. They are nice cause you can Aspir them, sleep them, and just nuke the hell out of em. They give 240xp without any xp band on and drop 1 crystal, 1 cluster and about 1 out of every 3 kills they also drop a Kindred or Beastman Seal. Also I'm finally starting to get some Conquest Points back so I can keep buying my Empress Bands. Even best is with Tele-sky now in the game it takes maybe 2 minutes to get to camp whereas it used to take 15ish.

The night ended with another level 7 beseiged which was going great, and we got Lamia No.3 own to 1% then she did some massive AoE, killed me and warped out at 1%... I was so friggin furious. The animation went that had the general celebrating and I got ISP but I got no xp... and thats why I'm doing these beseiged is for the free 1200xp for my 64WHM. I was pissed... I just reraised, typed /shutdown, and got up and walked away.

Solo

2007-03-15T08:42:00.000-05:00

Due to some miscommunications and a sackholder who couldn't recognize sarcasm from condescension, I was removed from the LS I worked very hard for and supported for the past 5 weeks. Without getting into a lot of details (what's the point?) I am now on the hunt for an endgame shell. I have my eye on one and if they reject me I'll do one of two things. Go back to leveling low level jobs and forget about endgame (the only thing I haven't killed is Khimaira and Salvage). This will allow me to get back to WHM, maybe BST or possibly a melee job which I have sworn off the past 3+ years. The other option besides that is moving to World of Warcraft. The game doesn't look as good but there are far fewer flaws with that game than with FFXI. We'll see, I have 3 paths I could take. Continue endgame, continue newbness, or continue WoW.

On my last night with Prophets I spent 4+ hours in sky farming Diorites for my melee LS mates. Darn, I'm so selfish. (That was sarcasm btw for those who cannot recognize it). We got only 1 from the Aura Statues (mostly cause we had 3-4 LS's up there competing for claims) but our 2nd group pulled in 6 form the Enkidu's. That brought the Autmnstone bank to 7... which I don't know if any LS has ever (before this update) had 7 Autumnstones to burn. After the alliance broke for the night I stayed in sky to solo some pots for xp and while it isn't massive, it is still 130-150xp per pot. It's a bit tricky, if you miss a Mountain Buster you probably need to use Carby to finish the pot off. It's mostly:

Summon Titan
Cast Dia on the Sprinkler
Mountain Buster the Sprinkler
Wait 46 seconds (Load on the -perpetuation gear here!)
Mountain Buster the Sprinkler
Run away!
Resummon Titan (cause he will be dead by this time)
Mountain Buster the Sprinkler

If all 3 hit it should be enough to kill it. The pots are RDMs so they cast things like Blaze Spikes, Burn, Choke, Sleep, and tier 3 nukes. Only Fire III and Aero III really do any damage. When it starts casting Thundaga III (wtf thats not a RDM spell...) run away. Titan will only take like 56 damage but you can get hit for 700+. I got about 4k limit points up there before I got sleepy and logged for the night. Its no burn party (which I'll be doing more on my RDM now that I am not required to be at any events), but it is steady/easy SMN xp without having to deal with praying that an Ule Range Agloolik uses Hypothermal Combustion; or soloing Imps for great xp but if Garuda's Predator Claws misses... you're fooked. Plus, Titan is massively strong against arcane mobs. Some of my damage output was

I also had some fun with the race converter. Stat-wise I wish I woulda been a taru but gameplay-wise... I really wish I was a Garka. If I play a job that doesn't need me to wear RSE gear I'm totally playing as a Garka model. For some reason I can't wear my Wood M Ledelsens when I change my race model from DhamElvaan to Garka... so until I play a job that doesn't require me to wear em I'm playing as ol'Longneck.

big update

2007-03-13T08:59:00.000-05:00

Fine you lazy WHMs, don't critique me. I was just gonna call it all Hullabaloo anyways. This weekend was a busy one! Took WHM from 63 to 64. Saturday was a day of soloing on SMN for XP for the most part but Sunday... Sunday was a busy busy day.

I started the morning off on WHM, and it took a few hours to not getting invited by the Japanese players to force me to make my own party. I grabbed a NIN, RNG, WAR, WHM, BLM, RDM. Colibris? No thanks. The melee actually wanted to use food so it was off to Bibiki Bay. As a 62-63 party we were getting awesome XP from the Goblins there and the occasional Tragopan. We pulled some Dhalmels which gave the same XP but were harder so there wasn't much point in spending a minute longer for the same XP. We stayed there about 3 hours and we all leveled up, and around the early evening we got word that a foursome at KB claimed. I wasn't planning on heading out there because weekends are free days, but I also didn't want to see a KB get lost because I, along with others, were lazy. I found a WHM in Horotoru Ruins to replace me and I headed out to Behemoth's Dominion as RDM.
Once there I saw that most of the people online followed suit, and we went from 4 people to about 18 in about 10-12 minutes. I jumped in and keep spamming the gravity and ocasional Thunder III. One hit for almost 600 which surprised me and 2 of my 3 Paralyzes landed as well. I hadn't even made macros for these spells, I was casting manually and with an Austere's Staff on. Once the LS arrived we had it and some UR people started headed out. Later we would find out they headed to Fafnir where they got a free claim on Nidhogg and got an E Body. Oh well, our King Behemoth didn't drop a Defending Ring but it did drop some nice stuff (no Wyrmel!!!). Afterwards we rested a bit for Dynamis-Xarcabard which was to commence in under and hour (or so we thought).

Thanks to daylight savings time we had to wait a whole hour to get into Dynamis so we didn't enter till almost 9pm (gather is 7pm, enter is 7:30). I think that possibly the first eyewall was patched, because every single BLM who Thundaga III'd on them didn't hit for more than 180-200 and we wiped. This has never happened before with 6-8 BLMs and we had 8 on hand. Even our uber BLM only beat me by like 13 damage per eye. I will look at this next Sunday to see if we have the same results. We cleared all 15 NMs and guess what dropped? ZILCH. This is like the 4th out of 6 runs where we've haven't gotten a single friggin AF off the NMs. So frustrating. A Melee Crown dropped at the wall of PLDs on the way to the Vanguard Dragons (which rotted to a 50ish MNK). We got a 100 coin off one of the PLD eyes, another 100 off one of the Vanguard Dragons, and a 3rd off DL himself.

DL was a rush pull, we had to because of something like 3 wipes up till that point. Thats like 30-35 minutes we wasted weakened. We had like 17 minutes after Ying/Yang died, and we pulled at the 6 minute mark... Well, we stuck through it and really destroyed him, (Lightningsday) and got the best drops I have ever seen out of DL. Grats to Assassin on ring and Jace on mantle. was a real close one.

We got word at like 12:45am Cerberus was up so we rushed out there and I got to see Lunies deal the killshot as soon as I got to camp. Seems we got told Cerb at the same time Lunies had ti at 10%. yay. Anyways, that was the weekend. This afternoon I'll post about our 7 Ullis we got last night. Absolutely insane.

WHM advice, can I have some?

2007-03-10T21:48:00.000-05:00

So, I finally got my PC running on my TV. Its a 32" Samsung LCD HDTV on my wall. I found (bought) a 15' a DVI cord and now I got my PC on my TV. Then I had to set it up for widescreen. I edited the windower .ini to run on widescreen resolution, but my characters looked horrid (even though I had sharp text and a huge screen). I found out my background resolution was still in 1024x768 so I found a rregistry editing program and it fixed things up. I set my reg settings as high as possible, turned on all effects and was completely awed at how beautiful the game CAN look. I could never in a million years ever go back to my PS2 version. Ever.

So I was kinda bored and looking for party on WHM when I thought I'd see if any WHMs who read my blog had any insight as to how I am geared. As you can see below I am a 63WHM and I have 7/8 Max MP merits. I'll get into what I think I need and what I don't after the pic.

I feel like (at this level) I have what I need. I've actually tried to go max -enmity for the most part since I only lose about 30-45 MP by using my -enmity gear. The main pieces I use are:

Raven Beret - enmity-8
Raven Jupon - enmity-9
Healer's Mitts - enmity-4
Healer's Pantaloons - enmity-1
Tamas Ring - enmity-3
Trooper's Ring - enmity-4

That brings my cumulative enmity to -29 and soon it will go up (@70WHM I get to use my Hedgehog Bomb which is MP+30, enmity-1). I wear a Gold Hairpin+1 (MP+33) and an Ether Ring to start out with, but as soon as I use my first spell (usually a 40MP Haste) I swap the Ether Ring (MP+30) for my Trooper's Ring (enmity-4) and my hairpin for my beret. This way I maximize my MP use. Soon when I hit 68WHM I'll need a Nobles Tunic and at 71 I'll move to the Templar Mace. Until then though, I think I have all my slots covered. Any WHMs have any advice as to what I should have or what I should be looking to get soon?

p.s. don't make fun of my NQ Earth Staff...

lawlz+1

2007-03-09T09:34:00.000-05:00

This has got to be the funniest crap I have ever seen... Last January on Odin a THF Knife sold for 85,000,000 gil. Last night one sold for 1,000,000. Either 100% drop rate or damn near 100% has truly make the THF Knife the next Parade Gorget. Anyways, I feel for the people who camped it for 3 months, but only a little. On a totally unrelated note I gave World of Warcraft a try and after a few days I just don't get that wonder that I got when I played FFXI the first week. It might be that I hate feeling like a noob and haven't in 3+ years, but still... The game has a nice interface, and it's cartoony but you go in expecting that. You can do alot as a soloing low level play, more so than you can in FFXI, but I just didn't get hooked. I refuse to pay to play both games, and I honestly wouldn't have the time for both. This new update really helped sway the vote, I mean... this update was major. This weekend I'm going to make a major push on WHM and really jump back into Vana'diel head-first.

THF Knife is the next Parade Gorget

2007-03-08T11:39:00.000-05:00

saw one for 5M on Odin, then I saw this:

So from what I read you can farm up the pop item for Sozu in 2-3 hours and you can farm up Ulli's trigger in about 1-4 hours. Honestly, this update may have actually been the difference maker in my choosing to stay in FFXI or go. RMT can't camp anything anymore and even though they didn't make a substitute for Faf they are toying with the idea of putting his cousin in Nyzul Isle Assault.

There was alot in this update which was very positive for FFXI, SE did a good job on this (finally).

resurrected from the dead

2007-03-07T13:22:00.000-05:00

someone pulled Gorokai (my original character) back form the dead, but is selling all my BRD stuff...

My guess is that they finally finished my NIN, or possibly WAR. Man... I remember camping that Viking Shield back in the day when it was worth millions. Gone. Both those Valor Earrings were signed by my old budy Suraph, gone. Oh well. Let's hope this guy isn't a douche or he doesn't sell Goro again on eBay like the last guy did.

Holy crap it does exist...

2007-03-05T09:53:00.000-05:00

After about 10 runs on Odin and... lets see. Every week since August 20th, which is... 6 months or 24 runs in Xarc... I've finally seen one drop. No, not a Summoner's Horn, that would be too easy. A friggin Shadow Ring.

So overall I've seen 1 ring drop from approx 30 runs yet 15(ish) mantles in those same 30 runs. The funny thing is, doesn't a PLD get hit with more physical damage (mantle) than magcial damage(ring)? Who knows, I'm so melee retarded. Anyways, grats to Dunpoo (yet again) for the ring, your massive lot of 503 was enough. We ended up getting three 100 pieces; very 1st eyewall stat dropped one(wtf?), DL dropped one, and a Vanguard Dragon on the way up to DL dropped one! (WTF?!?!?), yet ZERO AF from the NMs... This is probably the 3rd run out of my last 5 or 6 that have gone 0/15 on the NMs. Even the NQ demons dropped only one AF2, and it was one that one that is very coveted yet no one needed...

God I love Dynamis.

Fun?! WTF? Where did this come from?

2007-03-01T11:45:00.001-05:00

Last night was event night, and we decided to take a shot at Medusa. I knew where she was in Arrapago and also had both a map and a Lamia Fang Key in my safe so I actually felt like quite the hero en route to camp. Once the key got used we gathered at the Typhoon door. Once we wiped and tractored through the door we got ourselves ready.We really didn't take this fight too seriously, which we should have. We spammed it with TP at the onset and even though her 4 adds were taken care of she kicked the shit out of us. About 1/3rd of the alliance got killed, but we had already gotten her down to 68%. Once we realized that this would be easier than Gurfurlur but no cakewalk by any means... we recovered and worked her down. She didn't have a horrendous AoE move below 20%. She had a conical breakga move + damage but as long as WHMs were on the ball and melees didnt face her towards us mages, it wasn't much of an issue.

I came SMN again and was one of the four. Just like at Gurf we found that the most steady damage was Titan's Buster move which could also allow us to spam Ward so that stoneskin could be up for tanks. Unfortunetly I didn't get a massive 690-700 crit like I did at Gurf, but Orcrist did, so it is entirely possible. Garuda sucked, Levi sucked, Diabolos sucked. I didn't try Ramuh, Ifrit, Shiva or Fenny but I suspected they would be the same way. I averaged 370-391, and hit 414 once. When she died we only got Medusa's Armlet... no Mercenary's Dastanas. Still, we have a feeling that Medusa's Armlet, Gurfurlur's Helmet and Ja Ja's Chestplate all make something like the 3 kings drops make Black Belt. In the end we got a really cool and inconspicuous title.Aspi's first window opened during the final 3 minutes of the fight, and since were really the only ones who knew the actual ToD so we all stood by our outpost tarus for 3 hours and when he did pop, we descended in on him in record time. I was the first to zone in and see him. Of course, not wanting to waste any time I stunned him to pull back to camp only to find that the party disbanded as I was stunning and that left me alone with a big smelly angry turtle. Of course I died, but w/e, I liked my Medusa title. It was a joke kill, we had an army of BLMs that took off something like 23% with 1 volley of Blizz/Freeze MB's. Drops were 2x Martial feet (no mage stuff...) but that's cool cause I'm told they are great melee feet for PLD (I guess?). Me getting a tan:For once in a very long time, I had fun in Vanadiel.

God>> lol douchebag

2007-02-27T17:29:00.000-05:00

Yes, God hath laughed at me. Hardcore. Last week Mini's little reformed shell did a xarc and ended up getting a smn horn. Meh, bad luck happens to the best of us... including me. You can't win em all, even if I am up to 19 straight runs without seeing a horn so much as drop much less be able to lot one. Then I see this shit today and, well, I got very very upset.

This is more than is needed to push me over the edge and just call it quits on this stupid ass game...

circling the drain?

2007-02-26T09:48:00.000-05:00

I honestly feel like FFXI might be dying. The people who I used to see on all the time aren't on as much anymore. The people whose blogs I read on a regular basis don't update them anymore, and the people who used to frequently comment on my own blog don't anymore. I honestly think FFXI might be in a decline in membership. The hardcore vets either did everything they've wanted to do in-game or are just simply fed up at the lack of REAL action against RMT.

Sure, every 5-7 weeks the STFU (Special Task Forces Unit) hits about 250-500 RMTs but there are more than that on each server. In the old days RMT camped and monopolized NMs, claiming Roc, Serket, Argus, etc because those were mobs they could bot and the NMs dropped gear everyone sorta needed. Now, RMTs are smarter. They craft. There's no need to camp a NM when you can HQ craft shihei, melon pies, sole sushi or tavnazian tacos 24 hours a day all day long. They pump out the same stuff, undercuttig themselves so that they can sell faster.

This guy and another have destroyed my Melon Pie market....

Here's an RMT gearing up for his day of synthing 10 straight hours of sole

These "players" have ruined the game for me. It's not enjoyable when you see your goods' values drop 50% in 1 month because of RMTs. Soon expensive items will be 5000g and the gil you get form Goblins will once again be of value. Haubs are hovering around a mil, weskits are 18k... nothing has any value. A game shouldn't annoy you... this one now annoys me.

Transplant

2007-02-22T09:42:00.000-05:00

My PC got major surgery this week, only keeping the NIC, SoundBlaster card, 80GB HD, and the CD/DVD-R drive. I bought a brand new CPU (P4 3.2 GHz) a new mobo, new case, new 450W power supply, new memory (2GB DDR2 5300) and my centerpiece... a new GigaByte 7600 GT.

I've gone from an average of 10 FPS to about 35 FPS but I haven't really overclocked it yet and I have all my settings maxed completely out. I have some tweeking to do tonight but I had to reformat my stupid HD and reinstall XP and FFXI (what a fun 6.5 hours of updates for FFXI and 3 expansions!). My only issue thus far is my mobo hasnt recognized my sound card so I have to do some driver downloads and hopefully have some sound to go with FFXI. I also got my 32" Samsung LCD HDTV replaced after what seemed like forever. I am curious to see how FFXI looks when I use the TV as the monitor.

well, can't really complain

2007-02-19T07:55:00.000-05:00

No horn in Dyna-Xarc last night. I mean, it's hard to complain when I have gotten 2 pieces of SMN AF2 in the last two runs... but still. That horn has eluded me for so damn long... I heard it dropped in Mini's run this week. How lovely. Oh well. This weekend was spent leveling WHM, skilling up Staff, and fishing. I was able to get this done FINALLY:
I can now spend alot more time soloing Lesser Colibri's now that I can steadily get some MP back from them at each WS. I also spent half of Saturday morning getting my WHM to 63, then dropped a good 600k on it because it was really needed. I sold my Aurora Mantle and finally picked up an Intensifying Cape. This can also replace my SMN's Blue Cape which is great because instead of HP-15/MP+30 the Intensifying Cape is HP/MP+30 and my SMN now has 1015 HP and 1147 MP. It's nice to see 1k HP and MP on the bars. Anyways I digress... I also picked up an Insomnia Earring which was 15HP and 10MP more than my gimpy Enhancing Earring and finally I sold my Electrum ring for an Ether Ring. That adds 10 more MP and I don't lose the 20HP from Electrum. I ended up spending about 600k for 40 more MP, but alot of this armor should take me to 75. Now to find a damn Nobles...

I also spent a few hours fishing. I can steadily pull in Titanictus and for the most part Ryugu Titan. I do have a propensity to break my Lu... which can be annoying since my Woodworking is only 60 and I have to find people to repair it for me. Big shoutout to Frosta, Kristal, and Melena who have been kind enough to repair it whenever I have bugged them for it. Anyways, that's it for now. Omega tonight and a 10 hour maintenance tomorrow. I'll get some FFXII time in or maybe some Gran Turismo 4 in during the maintenance. Watching the Daytona 500 Sunday made me want to get behind the wheel of a racecar again.

1 in 5 months, 2 in 5 days!

2007-02-16T08:29:00.000-05:00

That was my record for SMN AF2. Once again I beat the odds and saw not one, not two, but THREE sets of Summoner's Bracers dropped in Bastok last night. I lost the first but won the second, (and the 3rd went on a mule character). That puts me at 3/5 AF2 and 2/2 on the last 2 runs. Man, if horn drops... I'll poo myself. Anyways, once again thanks to Prophets for getting me one step closer to finishing SMN!

p.s. How much SEXIER do I look on PC than PS2?!!

May I present....

2007-02-14T07:58:00.000-05:00

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Exhibit C

friggin crafters, they've destroyed the game

2007-02-13T11:15:00.000-05:00

Everytime I start making food to sell I find more people spamming the AH with those foods, flooding the supply and destroying the value. Case in point, 2 people on my server whom I believe are RMTs (Cfhbn and Myun) make Melon Pies all day and all night. Those 2 people account for about 85% of the pies sold on the AH and do you think they are driving the prices up?

Hell no.

They undercut themselves 1k every sale because they are making them faster than they are selling them. This game's economy is already gone down the drain, it's now on it's way to the septic tank... Nothing has value hardly anymore. A stack of Melon Pies +1 use to be 100k (now 34k), a stack of Sole Sushi used to be 60k (now 24k). Hedgehog Pies used to be 50k (now 20k). Nothing is worth anything anymore, and it's only gonna be worth 10% less tomorrow. There's only about 5 things in game that are holding value. What are we supposed to do when Haubergeon is 100k, a Scorpion Harness is 80k and a Igqira Weskit is 3k? Once crafts are dead, how else are you supposed to make money short of camping NMs for drops?

This game's lifespan is nearing it's unfortunate end. RMTs and morons (who'd rather make 40k now instead of 80k tomorrow) have ruined the economy and I don't see it getting fixed.

weekend pics

2007-02-11T22:49:00.000-05:00

Well, I sorta fished and cooked all weekend, watched some movies, cleaned the room. Was very lazy. Took some pics though.

First is KA camp, what a joke this has become... people holding Knight Crabs for 10, 15 minutes. The person who killed this has a Sonic Belt +1. Anyways, moving onto less drama filled ventures...
Capped my Summoning Skill and I didn't even know it. I got all SMN'd up and ran out to start spamming avatars and checked my skills... and I was capped. What a anti-claimactical way to cap skill (without ever knowing it).
Cooking is fun when you can HQ 5/12 (even if I failed on the 6th HQ...).

finally

2007-02-10T17:55:00.000-05:00

I think fishing skills up maybe 100x as slow as clothcraft did... anyways, yay!

SPATtacular!

2007-02-09T09:33:00.000-05:00

Hurray! Hurray +1! After approx 3 months of trying to get into Windy to get the only good piece of armor for SMNs at the leg position... I finally got my Summoner's Spats. Just like my 1st run with IRON when I got my Summoner's Pigaches... I got my AF on my first run with Prophets. There were 2 others lotting, so unless I had sole lotting on the item I always felt like I was going to lose.

We entered Dyna-Windy with 25 which isn't a lot but I must admit... these guys are damn strong and kill very fast. It was honestly one of the most efficient Windy runs I have ever been on. We did have one wipe but it was totally unfair... the Leviathan woke up and immedietly used Tidal Wave. I guess it could have been avoided and slept away from the raid but honestly, we were killing mobs so fast it never seemed to be an issue. Barring that one misstep we farmed the hell out of the zone. My BRD says he has to leave for work, and it just so happens he's one of the other 2 people lotting against me. Within literally 5 seconds of him disbanding one of the birds dropped the Spats. I was damn surprised but that didn't mean I would win. The first lot came up as a 349. Not great but it's not horrible either. I was psyched but didn't lot right away, thinking that the BRD had left already. No lots came up so I hit the old Cast Lots button.
Holy Macaroni. That wasn't what I exected to see. That's usually what I random when I'm gambling (9+6+9= 24 which is a bust...) and only the BRD was left to lot. He tossed up a 140 something and I finally got my spats. I was quite happy, even if a few people were saying they were crap. They really aren't... they are technically the only armor on the leg slot that decreases BP timer, which to a SMN is our main damage. It's like saying Swift Belt is crap or Walahara Turban is crap. Lower BP timers equals more BPs over time equals more damage from SMNs. Technically the "helpful" only leg armor for SMNs is:

Evoker's Spats (MP+15, avatar acc+, enmity-)

Vendor's Slops (HP/MP+25, MND+2, Acc+3)

Zenith Slacks (50HP->50MP, MND+4)

Summoner's Spats (MP+20, MND+3, Blood Pact delay -2)

After seeing that no one else was lotting I waited for them to drop, and within about 1 minute of seeing te Spats we got our 2nd RNG hands. Eventually the spats dropped and I was one hapy SMN.Thanks to everyone in Prophets who came and helped me get 1 step closer to finishing my SMN armor set.

Gurfurler the Annoying

2007-02-08T10:45:00.000-05:00

Last night was event night in my new LS "Prophets" and we planned to head out to Gurfurler the Menacing. Not for any real reason, just to say we did it. He drops a Gurfurlur's Helmet that desynths into a Scintillant Ingot and also some stupid ring called the Mercenary's Ring which is VIT+5 and then phys dmg -5% while in Beseiged. It wasn't for drops, just to have soem fun.

We headed out after what seemed like forever and finally got into the heart of Halvung. We farmed our 3 keys we needed:

Once we got our 3 keys we headed into Gurf's area. We cleared some Trolls to the base of his spawn area and then engaged. As soon as he is engaged he calls 4 Hilltroll Elite Guard which are NMs and can't be slept. On top of that they can't be killed or he will summon another Guard right away. We made a holding party for the 4 guards and a main alliance for Gurf. I was on SMN and in the tank party. My main job was to spam Earthen Ward on the NINs andPLD/NINs. I eventually ended up using "Mr. Thong" for some very nice Mountain Busters.

We stumbled at first, and within 10% we had 2-3 adds. We were able to kill them and recover. He's not too hard from 100% to 20%, but just like all FFXI HNMs the last 20% always has a surprise in store for you. He really only has a handful of moves, but they are annoying ones.

First off he uses a move called Arcane Stomp. Turns ANY magic damage on him to healing magic. That means Drain heals him. That means that doing a skillchain heals him. That means using Diabolos to spam Nether Blast heals him. So BLM are pretty much useless because he resists most stuns anyways. He does a multi-hit move called Incessant Fists that is like a Troll version of Asuran Fists. He has a massive single hit called Head Snatch (1k + damage) and 2 AoE moves he uses. One called Haymaker is damage + Amnesia, the other called Sledgehammer is damage + Petrify. These can do anywhere from 400-800 to mages WITH stoneskin on (yay). Finally, his annoying move he does when he is below 20% is called Pleiades Ray. It's damage + AoE and you get all these effects on you at once:

stun
silence
paralyze
blind
slow
poison
virus

That's... fun... I mean it's not as bad as something like a Gates of Hades, but if mages don't react to the debuffs right away tanks could drop like flies. Oh yeah, and his 2 hour is Hundred Fists...

Now, like I said we did really really good 95% to 20%. I was spamming Ward, and while Titan was out I was able to get a steady 300 dmg on Mountain Buster (which is VERY respectable versus this high defensive of this mob) and a few times I hit a 633 and a 734! Once we got him below 20% we looked out for P-Ray, but we had a few factors to deal with. First, called for help on 2 of his 4 NM guards so the guards were hitting on the main alliance during most of the fight. Second, we had 2 BLMs which could have been utilized far better. Honestly beyond that I didn't see any glaring mistakes. No screw ups, no stupid moves. In the end we had a PLD 2 hour right as Hundred Fists went off, and we got him down to 3%... but couldn't do the final push. Funny thing was when we wiped he says in /say "I is Gurfurlur, I rule Halvung, you is dead." Now that shits funny... gotta admit. In the end I was somewhat disappointed we lost because I hate giving up, but Narbie told me AD didn't make it past 19% the first time they tackled it. It's not saying "Prophets > AD!! OMFG!!!", but AD is a good LS to use as a litmus test for most mobs, and we still did very well.

In the future if we had 1-2 more people on the guards and we didn't CFH on them, and we had the 2 BLMs come as either SMNs or melees, we can beat that thing. All in all I had fun and was glad that I was able to offer some nice steady damage from Titan.

Holy RMT effect Batman

2007-02-06T14:32:00.000-05:00

@ work...
bored as hell...
found this website Remora's Most Wanted

Check this... I was reading about how screwed up some of their bots/rmts are but this was amazing. One of their RMTs seems to farm High-Quality Eft Skin. I looked that the sales on FFXI Auction House (learn it live it love it) and I started digging and found this...

yeah... steadily 25-30k a skin. Now my server's prices:

how insane is that...

migrations are afoot

2007-02-06T09:52:00.000-05:00

So many people are moving to WoW. Most of IRON has gone, now some people that I knew back on Odin... I refuse to give in. That game ruined my experience with IRON, not to mention it looks way too cartoony for me. Sure, FFXI didn't give the IRON vets what they wanted but had WoW not existed I doubt they would have left Vana'diel. They would have just stuck it out.

Back to Bismarck... I've made a 200k profit in just 2 days, churning out Tacos and Melon Pies +1 stacks. It's really not that hard, and I am only crafting 1 stack of synthable materiels each time. If I spent an hour or two on crafting I'm sure I could double if not triple that income because the food doesn't last more than 12 hours on the AH before it's sold.

Last night was a Cerberus which wetn awry because some people free stun for no reason and then a Gates of Hades goes off because people's stuns are down. This isn't a tough concept, and these were 1-2 highly decorated players screwing up stuns which bothered me even more. Lunies took it at 5% and killed it (not the way I would have done it but hell, I hear they let Prophets take a second shot at it so it's not like they stole it) and after we did a Proto-Omega which was a joke. We took it from 100% to 4% in under 10 minutes then held it for 4 gunpods netting poze of shell powder, 6 coins, a smalt chip and DRK AF+1 item. Drops were 2x Homam feet.

On a positive note I downloaded FFXI vanadiel collection and am installing it right now. I am not sure if I can play it (I havemy POL/FFXI codes but not any of the registration codes) so if I can't play it on PC I'll just see if I can use it for Altana Viewer. Guess we''ll see if I can get in or if I have to call POL to get my keys... which will be a major pain.

you're cookin with gas now you friggin idiot

2007-02-03T14:35:00.000-05:00

Gambling is bad. Gambling while pissed is worse. Gambling while pissed that you're contemplating quitting FFXI is just flat out retarded.

So I gambled away about 2.4M of my 2.9M last night, placing 200k bets and going about 3 for 13... I decided maybe this was counterproductive and I should try to make money another way. Seeing as I now have about 300k to my name now and since the LS broke... there's not a whole lot to do. So to harkening back to my Clothcrafting Kick of '06 ("I chose to be a weaver")...

I'ma be a chef!

Well... I already am a chef. My cooking is at 95+3 and my Fishing is at 84+4 but still... I'm actually going to USE these crafts now since I haven't barely touched them in the past. My main moneymakers look like they will be:

Not a lot of mage food, since many mages use cookies and such but those melee burn through the foods daily. I'm also going to use my WW and Alch to get me some Shihei made seeing as that is probably the only reason that the last dude leveled it up. It sure wasn't to play RNG.

bigger they were, harder they fell

2007-02-02T09:02:00.000-05:00

IRON is no more. Can't honestly say I didn't see this coming. I read of IRON's reputation when I found out I was coming to Bismarck, and I got a firsthand account of it in September. It was strong, dedicated, and determined. When the weekly "event night" was skipped for the first time I could hear the disapppointment in the leaders and the shell. Slowly, one after another vet was pulled away. Some went to other LS's but most went on to World of Warcraft. Slowly we were down to about 20 members when it was announced a merger with EventHorizon would happen. This happened in November while I took a month off to explore FFXII.

Membership was almost tripled overnight, but EH wasn't the same type of shell that IRON was, and slowly the more casual members of EH left IRON because they weren't all that interested in an endgame LS. By late December we were at a comfortable number but many of the remaining veteran IRON people were slowly growing tired of their new LS members. Some were slackers and never showed for events until drops might be available for them, some of them were just not that educated in what endgame LS means, and some of them frankly were hackers. (I even caught a person who hacked to get to KA on Wednesday night... we left Dynamis and within 5-8 minutes they were at KA camp... and this was a pre-merger EH person wearing an IRON pearl) This past January a few pre-merger EH people got suspended for hacking, and that was not something IRON wanted to be associated with. Finally, a handful of the pre-merger IRON people left the shell to form their own shell.

What was left was a LS with the name IRON that was about 75% EH and 25% IRON (pre-merger ppl). After New Years IRON wasn't even going to camps anymore and most events were sparse at best. The lowpoint came when IRONdynamis held a Dynamis-Xarc run and only 15 people showed up. It seems that the guests that got their flags with us no longer had any desire to come and the actual IRON members that were required to come just stopped logging in.

Last night a meeting was called at the Kobka Hostel and it was laid out for all LS members. The pre-merger IRON people understood, mostly because they knew first hand what IRON was and what IRON had become. Sadly, some of the pre-merger EH people started to say that leadership was quitting on them, blaming not the people who stopped coming to events but instead leadership for the state of the shell. Leaders didn't make Tredvolt, Deidre, Valkerine, Sendo, Winraf, Aidama, Narbie, Luminaire, and countless other amazing IRON people leave. Leaders tried as hard as they could to keep it together, but the leaders are not to blame for the elite players of IRON to either going to WoW or leaving the shell altogether for other LS's.

In the end I'm glad I was part of IRON, I made some really good friends and met some very knowledgable people. I'll remember the first time I fought Ouryu and got slapped after casting Thunder IV on it, or the time when we did a Seiryu which Hundred Fists right onto Winraf and he just stood there laughing and never used Invincible and lived. I'll remember farming those stupid Lamia Kamans for hours, and then the sheer joy from Valky when she made a +1, one of the first 2 on the server. I'll remember the first Jailer of Love we did followed by 2 more all netting Novia Earrings... I'll remember killing Tiamat in 36 minutes and being in awe of how easy they killed it, or the time that Benediction claimed Nidhogg, then flailed it killing the entire Aery. We all HP'd and Aribeth, Moontang, and Lunarian were able to sleep it for almost 15 minutes while the entire LS rushed back out there. We got 2x M Body that night. Those will be the memories I take from IRON. They also helped me get Zenith Mitts and Crown, Pahluwan body, Yigit hands, SMN AF2 and AF+1, and countless other memories.

Thank you IRON.

sup Kuwait

2007-02-01T16:48:00.000-05:00

Stay away from forums

2007-01-31T15:54:00.000-05:00

I'm bored out of my skull today because I finished all my work by 12:30 so I've been on multiple forums and blogs for the past 3+ hours and it just annoyed me. There's so many things out there I want to do in this game and I never really am takiing any steps towards comepleting those goals. Things like, make my BLM no just an elvaan lolblm. For example I found some BLM on bluegartr that had a Sorcerer's Petasos +1. Photoshopped? Nope.

So yeah, not photoshopped.... Other things I want to do are things like work on my crafting, I mean I have 2 crafts that are pretty much 85+ and I barely use either of them. I could probably make some good money if I put some effort into it. I'd also like to try a melee job, which I really haven't ever done since I started playing FFXI. I've leveled NIN and DRK to 37 for my RDMs but never any real melee job.

Back when I was a normal xp'ing level 75 player all I wanted to do was do sky. Then all I wanted to do was sea. Then all I wanted to do was get into an HNM LS and kill things like Timmy, sea gods, and Bahamut. I've done this for about 8 months and while it's still fun to kill Timmy, it's kinda easy and somewhat boring. The problem with FFXI is the fight isn't the hard part, it's the claim. LS's are big enough to swap in people if someone dies at Nidhogg, the only skill (which is lost when LS's cheat/bot) is the claim so that your LS even GETS the chance to try and kill it. I am sure this will be my downfall eventually from either endgame or FFXI altogether.

If you try to compete with people who are constantly cheating, what's the point in competing?

screw you karma

2007-01-29T14:15:00.000-05:00

The times of HNMs is really becoming annoying... there have been like 4 updates in the past 10 days and it keeps resetting times to around 12:00pm EST. The next day its a bit earlier and a bit earlier. It'll eventually creep into early morning, then in the butt crack middle of night and maybe in the next 2 weeks or so it might get to evening/nighttime EST.

Or SE could do another maintenance, reset the server and put all HNMs right back into the middle of the day.

I see other LS's getting them (NA) and I wonder wtf these kids (school??) or even adults (job where??) are doing at camps. Do these people have a job? Do they go to school? Are they failing out of college? I only say this because I have seen Tiamat pop 3 of his last 4 spawns during the work week between 9-12 EST and he gets claimed. What are these people doing with their lives? I can understand if the Kuwaitis or Japanese claim... but this has been NA's along with the Kuwaitis. For those who are unaware we have a LS that is based mostly in Kuwait. They have been caught hacking and most NA and JPN LS's know that when they see this LS they know a bot will be going off at somepoint. I think someone posted a quote from one of their leaders or members that went to the effect of

"Everyone going to have bot at the camp, your LS, my LS, all LS. Why not make it fair so everyone cheat?"

I forget where I read it and who said it, so the validity is kinda out the window but I remember reading that and just kinda being in shock. This is a LS that has something like 8-10 Ridills and about 12 Dalmaticas.... hmmm. I don't think they've beaten Jailer of Love yet though. Anyways, didn't log in this weekend. Put in massive overtime at work and was too exhausted to log in after 7 hours at work on a Sunday. Biggest news this weekend was Friday night I helped a few LS members do a mule dynamis for currency. Of course Summoner's Bracers dropped and I wasn't able to enter for 23 more hours. Rot dropped to a 51SMN or something. That kinda helped my lack of motivation to not log in this weekend... I honestly have ZERO luck in this game. Karma is bullshit.

emo

2007-01-27T23:44:00.000-05:00

Spent the morning leveling WHM and got it to 62 after about 2 hours. Wasn't the best party but it was still pretty easy. NIN, MNK, WAR, BLU, SMN, and WHM (me). Really the only healing that was needed was when the MNK would close Distortion and have a crapload of hate but I usually had more than enough MP to cover him. Of course as soon as the poor WAR taru leveled he said he had to get ready for work. Sure enough 2 birds later he died because he decided he wanted to 2 hour without telling me at the beginning of the fight and never bothered to put up shadows as he stole hate. He went down in a blaze of glory, but it got us chain #6 and he was laughing the whole time. Hurray for crazy taru WAR's! He said he used Berserk so he thought he'd role play for the final fight. Nice to see a good sport, which rarely comes in this game. Which brings me to:

Emo - the state of being when something doesn't go the way of a whiney FFXI player; see Gorocry

I finished the party and heard some of the people from the LS were starting a 64-65 party. Even though I was only 62WHM I still wanted to go and even with being lower in level only I would get the decrease in XP, not the higher leveled players. Well, instead they took a 64DRG ("cause we have PL's we don't need no WHM). This has been a trend as of late, another group of LS members started a static without ANY healers because they had outside PL's... which is annoying because I don't play melee and really am not that interested in being PL'd at level 65.

So I got pissed, bitched at the people making the party, unequipped LS pearl, and eventually logged out and played FFXII. I was ashamed of myself but also annoyed at the people who didn't want me. I'd rather play with people I know, not random people. I was pissed, and now that I reflect back on it I'm pissed again... GDI.

"Yeah we need a RDM"

2007-01-25T13:25:00.000-05:00

This will probably be funny to everyone except the person who it involves, cause he's told me I'm beating a dead horse but I don't care... it's a funny story.

I logged in yesterday evening and saw no one really doing much of anything in LS, but one of our melees was in a party but anon in Bhaflau Thickets. I sent him a tell "RDM Do you need it?" and got no real reply, so I grabbed sanction and headed to Alzadaal Undersea Ruins to play with my Qiqrin friends on BLM. I spent my 200 ISP and ported to Nyzul Isle only to realize I left my Empress Band in my mog house. I warp back, grab the band and pay another 200 ISP to get a 2nd Runic Pass and port back out to Nyzul Isle. I use my Empress Band and get a tell "Yeah, we need a RDM". Ugh, ok. So I tell them I am warping and changing to RDM. I warp for the 2nd time and change to my full RDM/WHM spam party gear. I ask if they are at Mamool Ja Training Grounds camp and he said just grab a choco. Thats when I shoulda been tipped off...

I change to 75RDM/37WHM and get an invite from the party leader. I grab a choco and head out to Waj Woodlands then up to Bhaf Thickets. I enter the zone and see people with 700MP and 1000 HP and I'm like, "wtf?". I check the party members menu and see 3 level 65-66s, 2 anon people, and me... 75RDM/37WHM.

I got off my choco for some reason and had to run back to Whitegate and grab AF outta storage for my WHM, then shuffle BLM/RDM gears around to make room. I finally got out there almost 20 minutes later and we had PLD, SAM, SAM, BRD, WHM, WHM. Thank god I had my xp bonus on, because I was getting about 250-300 xp up to chain #5. I tried meleeing but that felt retarded and I hit only 25% of the time anyways. I ended up skilling my Divine from 128 to 137 in just over an hour, getting many +0.5 on my Holy casts and some of those Holy ("nukes"?) landed for for 212 damage. I even impressed myself. Chains woulda been way faster if I had a 65 melee or if they dumped me for a 65-67 melee but they kept me in there and I got about 5k in an hour.

I just found it ironic that the only person in that party in my LS was anon and even told me they needed a RDM when most people know I am a 75RDM. Slacker! I won't give out his name, cause that'd just be rude... but if you want a hint think Tarzan.

Also... we had a pathetic turnout at Dynamis - Xarc... pissed alot of us off. Maybe 15 people at enter time and even after an hour of waiting we ended up with only 28. We didn't go for DL obviously, but I died alot. We stayed the full 3.5 hours, cleared all 15 NMs, and got BST (lovely), BRD, and NIN. Wow, no horn. What a shocker.

My Zenith Dreamith

2007-01-24T09:16:00.000-05:00

After months of hoping to get that one special Fafnir claim, last night I obtained one of the most important pieces of gear for a BLM. Short of HQ staves and a Weskit, Zenith Mitts is one of the most important things to put on a BLM. Of course, the mitts come a week after I spent 20,000 Assault Points from Mamool Ja Training Grounds to acquire Yigit Gages. At least now I can do some testing between the two and see how damage varies from having Mag Attk Bonus+5 vs. INT/MND+5, Mag Attk Bonus+2.

It all came about when I found a Gem of the North in a bazaar. Last night we did a Ultima run (got a whopping 2 turbans, such BS) and after that clusterfu@k we headed up to sky. We planned Salvage but remembered sky was Tuesdays so we headed up. No pop on Steam Cleaner, Despot, Faust or Mother Globe. We lost claims to Zipacna and Ullikummi and ended up killing a Brigandish Blade and an Olla. I myself had my own Gem of the North but told leaders I wanted to secure Aquarian Abjuration: Hands and I'd donate my stone if I had sole lotting rights. At first they were weary which was fine with me, I was asked about my stone, and never "offered" a deal. I just told them what I was after in the long run and if I had to buy my very own Winterstone from a bazaar I was cool with that. I really have Iwubhooters to thank for donating his water to be used for Olla, which in turn was used at Genbu.

The fight as always was a joke, I made sure I didn't watch the treasure pool, and our TH4 (Minidragon) was not the killshot but was in the killing party. Drops were Genbu's Shield, Aquarian Abjuration: Hands, Aquarian Abjuration: Head and Adamantoise Shell. Shield went to Zylador but i forgot who the Zenith Crown went to. Either way I owe a big thank you to Iwubhooters, Evilbob, Minidragon, Moonpie, and everyone else who was there to help take down poor old Gambu. Tonight is Dyna-Xarc which means a possible SMN horn... here's to hoping we break this wretched streak of 1 horn in the past 3 months...

Gone but not forgotten

2007-01-23T12:53:00.000-05:00

Last night was kinda depressing. A great guy in the LS and someone I consider a friend decided to hang up his boots, which blows. I came home to find everyone in the Boyhada Tree. Fafnir? Nope, Voluptuous Vivian. They had killed it 5 days straight and held onto the ToD. i headed out there and killed PH's for almost 2 hours and no pop. I think they lost the ToD, but we can't be sure. A PLD/RDM from another LS was there soloing Mourouches but he had a Fafnir Slayer title, so who knows.

Headed to Sea and tried to pop Ix'DRK who never showed up either... Four hours after I had logged in we'd camped 3 NMs and gotten nothing from em (also camped Jailer of Temperance). It was getting somewhat late and we still wanted to get some Assaults in so we did 2 Assaults and logged. Tonight is a Proto-Ultima (Nashira Gages/Crackows/Seraweels anyone?) followed by an Assault run and a Salvage run. Hopefully it turns out to be a good night.

On a side note a good friend of mine left the game last night. Her name was Valkerine, and she was the 1st person in IRON to welcome me. She answered all my questions, was a liason of sorts between myself and leadership, and once I got in she made sure I knew my role with each new fight. We spent hours together farming up the Lamian Kaman -1 so that she might be able to synth a +1 which at the time was worth about 8M and only 2 were on the server. After 28 tries we finally made a Lamian Kaman +1! We agreed to split the 8-10M right down the middle once it sold. Well, it never did. I saw less and less of her as Oct rolled into Nov, and I hadn't spoke to her since Thanksgiving. Last night as I finished up with my 2nd Assault I got a tell from Valky letting me know she was leaving the game and wanted me to have the bow. She said I could do with it what I wanted to. I was shocked, and I told her I'd never sell it. It was great memories when I first joined IRON and it's even signed by her. I'll keep it always, and I'll also remember her by my signed Igqira Weskit, Igqira Tiara, and even a signed Demon Helm +1. She always looked out for me and Valky, you will be missed but not forgotten!

relaxation

2007-01-21T17:54:00.000-05:00

I didn't log in at all this weekend.

Saturday Night Live tickets! Jeremy Piven was hilarious!.

Sunday AFC/NFC Championships! SuperBowl XLI teams will be decided tonight!

Logging in Monday to getback in the grind.

I don't know why I spaced this post like this... nor why I used so many exclamation marks!

Oh well.

2007-01-17T11:39:00.000-05:00

quick updates, nothing major happened so nothing big to report.

Did a salvage run with 10 people, got 3 tiaras for BRD/WHM/SMN, lost but we still did well. We now know which floor we have to skip.
After what seems like forever in Assault I finally got my Yigit Gages and immedietly noticed better nukes with these new hands. Thanks to Charlie and Moonpie for trudging through Mamool Ja Training Grounds. Now I owe them any assaults for a long time.
I also completed my Mannequin (ABOUT TIME)! Traded it in for a Galka mannequin and bought a mithra one. Freed up alot of space in my Moghouse. I now have about 30+ spaces available in total from my Mog House, Storage, and Mog Locker.
Sunday we did Dyna - Xarc. Came RDM, stunned DL. Got Mareko his Shadow Mantle. Got not one friggin AF2 to drop. NOTHING.
Monday was sea night but it was my birthday so I took it off. I did end up getting Fenrir for Mittens. I ended up getting Fenrir's Stone cause I already had Fenrir's Torque and my Evoker's Ring.
Tuesday was Limbus, they did a Omega and got Body and 2x Legs. Best drops the LS has ever seen. Basketball shorts went to Dun and Zartan, body went to Cerrra. I think he's 4/5 or maybe 5/5. After we did a Suzy and I ended up with a Suzaku's Scythe in the off chance I finish my BST.
Tonight is another Dyna-Xarc. Looking for horn but not holding my breath. I found out that aquariums are good gil when they sell. They cost about 13k to make and sell for about 200k. My crafter offered a 50/50 split as long as I get the materials which in my opinion is more than fair. Lets just see how long it takes to sell.

pics!

2007-01-13T09:35:00.000-05:00

Just clearing a lot of stuff out of my pics folder for now.

passed this the other day in sky... cmon SE, 2?? That's not even fair.

Smaegol and I can get very bored very fast at Ix'MNK

I was actually quite impressed with the detail on this event's furnsihing!

Next time you do this I want her to use that firework that puts butterfly wings on your back

Hydra tank party RDM is fun

My weekly BLM accomplishment

My weekly SMN accomplishment

My weeekly RDM accomplishment

Some people camp Faf after server maintenance, me? Stray Mary.

Why would a 75RDM/75SMN/75BLM/61WHM kill this stupid NM? I got bored looking for the Bugards in Saruta and no one in the zone wanted the club, which I dropped 2 seconds later...

Spent nearly 35 mins setting the traps to kill this Cure+5% earring NM, and not until I engaged him did I realize it was a PLD ONLY earring. Subsequently, no drop.

Well... if I ever want a Templar Mace at least I know how she spawns....

aint karma a bitch

2007-01-11T13:15:00.000-05:00

I gotta say, every time I think I can't be surprised...even this surprised me. Last night, Dyna-Beau again (we changed from Dyna-Xarc cause we were determined to get Dun's Attestation of Inv.) and I had Summoner's Doublet up on the comment. Drops... were everywhere.

We start off with a Duelist's Tabard, then came a Sorcerer's Coat. At that point right there I was like, "WTF... both jobs that I have at 75 and I selected SMN. Next came an Abyss Cuirass and a few minutes later... a Saotome Domaru which makes 3 SAM bodies in 2 total runs (got 2 on Sunday). At the Hydra camp we got Valor Breeches. After that we went to Yagudo camp and they gave us our 2nd Duelist's Tabard. Moving along to Quadavs we found a Melee Cyclas and even a Bard's Justacorps. We moved down to Orc (charmga) tower and got ourselves another Sorcerer's Coat (WTFityFFingF!?!). At this point I was getting quite pissed. Not because a guest got the second BLM coat (lame) but because I have 3 jobs at 75... RDM/BLM/SMN and 2 bodies dropped for 66% of my jobs, and I didn't ask for them when I enetered so I couldn't lot on them when they dropped. By the end of the run we had gotten 9 AF2 pieces.

Oh yeah, and I sacrificed myself for Dun's Attestation of Invulnerability when we fought good old Goupey. Used ES Thundaga III, Thunder IV, Burst II, equipped my Uggal Pendant and Manafonted. Used Blizzaga III, Thundaga III, Thunder IV, and Blizzard IV before I pulled hate. Goupey turned to me at 10% and did a 560 crit damage and finished me off with a 420 normal hit. I died at 3% but it dropped shield and great axe. After being raised we rushed back to charmga tower for gun attestation but ended up with Attestation of Legerity (katana). We ran out of time but spent over 3 hours in there getting awesome AF2.

Once back in Jeuno I remember Dun saying he wanted Hachiman Sune-Ate +1. As I was running to the Al'Zhabi AH I passed a bazaar and since I want those damn Mannequin Hands to finish my stupid Mannequin... I check everyone's bazaar now. They had SAM JSE body, head, and feet all +1. The body was 5M, and the head and feet were 3M. I sent a tell asking if they would accept 2.5M and they said, "ok". I later found out that some other SAM told Dun earlier he wanted 15M for those feet. Dun got em for 2.5M. At the end of the night I had sacrificed myself for Dun's test, "called" almost all AF2 that dropped earlier that night, solo'd the only statue that dropped a 100 coin, and found Dun's feet+1 for him. I have some major MAJOR karma built up. If SMN don't drop for me this Sunday then there isn't a God.

There was good news tho... I got my payouts for drops we got a month or so ago, so I finally have some cash on me again. I'm honestly not too sure what to do with it. I can't choose a new craft with my cooking @ 95, fishing at 84, and woodworking at 60. I guess I could pump some gil into cooking but I don't see that making a nice profit for quite some time. I'm not sure... maybe I'll spend some of it on WHM gear, maybe not. I've pretty much been pinching pennies the past 4 months because my wallet went from 13M+ when I got a gimpy Nivaud down to 400k when I was pretty much finally "properly" equipped. Now I just need rare/ex stuff to finish my RDM/BLM/SMN jobs, and seeing as that stuff is free...

yo es muy {slacks}

2007-01-10T13:43:00.000-05:00

Already Wednesday and I have done so little this week. The main reason was because Monday night was the BCS Championship and being an UF alumni it was a holiday night... and boy did Santa deliver. We are the first school to ever hold the NCAA Mens Basketball and Football Championship trophies at the same time. I wish I was in Gainsville on Monday night... anyways, needless to say I didn't even login Monday night.

Tuesday was an Ultima run, ran fairly smooth. We had a few deaths but I mean come on, it's Ultima. It did Citadel Buster 3 times before it died, and when it did finally die we ended up getting the ingredients to Nashira Seraweels and Nashira Turban. This time it went to WHMs only (grats Smaegol) and the legs I thought were going to go to our only remaining main RDM without them (we have like 6 pairs in LS). He was to lot against a WAR main who also had 75RDM and I guess he might have been insulted by the fact he had to lot so he decided to pass. Well, I too have RDM and I played it for years as my main until I changed servers. Getting those pants was a dream... so I asked to lot them and I threw up a 402 on the board, the WAR lotted a 949. No pants for me. I think that's our last Ultima till we do 2-3 Omega's so maybe I'll wait till the next cycle. Honestly I wanted the Nashira Gages more than anything because it is the ONLY -perp gear for hands. Guess I'll have to wait a month or two.

Later that night I helped out in sky, we killed Despot and I have never done that with a NIN, only PLDs. I was pretty impressed by the NIN. He didn't hold hate as well as a PLD but he damn sure took a hell of a lot less damage. Was a fun fight. I logged due to how late it was getting. Oh yeah, I was able to flag the prime avatar fights for whenever we do them and I also finally got this stupid thing:

Now I can get to Khimaira camp safely without aggro'ing the 15 imps/soulflayers that are between the zone and the spawn point!

Weekend wrap-up extraveganza

2007-01-08T09:42:00.000-05:00

Friday

ENM [win]/no Cloud Evoker
Saturday

Limbus [win]/no BLM item

Broke out SMN and duo'd with Mittens (SMN) then trio's with Postal (COR) in Nyzul Isle Imps

5 Merits in burn party to end the night
Sunday

Killed Zoraal Ja's Pkuucha (no drop)

Camped Jaded Jody 4+ hours (no pop)

Dyna-Beauc [win]/no SMN Doublet

Bhaflau Remnants Salvage [lost]/Anu's Tiara x2 dropped

Only thing I really did this weekend worth noting is got in a really good TP burn party and got about 50k xp over about 4 hours. Helps when you have a relic GKT in your party. Ended up with 5 merits and put them into my Max MP. I felt like I needed to complete another category before I moved to Ice Potency, seeing how the Max MP benefits all my jobs. After Ice Potency I'll finish Elemental Magic and that should close out BLM. I doubt I'll start Freeze II, I'm sorta moving to SMN main and want to cap out the attack/acc of my BPs.

Also cause Hydra was overlooked last week:

Guess everyone has THF's knives?

2007-01-05T14:43:00.000-05:00

A LS buddy of mine was camping Sozu, and there was no one around during the pop... how nice that everyone who wants Thief's Knife on Bismarck already has one! Did 4 Kirins last night, got 2 Shining Cloths, 3 Osodes, 2 Kirin's Poles, D Body and N Body. 0/4 on W Legs... stupid manticore.

Hydra Headhunter

2007-01-04T13:57:00.000-05:00

emo posts aside... before Dynamis-Xarc we decided we wanted a crack at Hydra. We thought it might be a 30 minute fight, ended up being about an hour. It was a fun/annoying fight. The fun came in that I had never fought Hydra much less seen him in game. The annoying part was actually fighting the stupid thing.

First off he's immense. I can't even begin to explain his size. Someone long ago took his model and Vrtra's model from model viewer... let's just say Hydra's tail is a tad bigger than Vrtra's entire body. Hydra is big. He had 3 heads, and he hits fast. We landed elegy a few times but not much else. I came on RDM/WHM to help out with the curing/hastes/refreshes and boy did he keep my hands full. On top of curing the PLD/NINs and hasting them I had to poisona, paralyna, and erase the curse put on by Hydra's AoE. The weird thing about Hydra is he's huge, his AoE hurts BAD, but his AoE range is very small. The only time I got hit by AoE is when he drew me in.

The fight itself is like Ultima. Pretty much the first 70% is a breeze. Once you get into the 30s and 20s he starts spamming these AoE moves, some of which erase all your buffs. Not fun. We took him from 100% to 8% in about 27 minutes, but then he spammed some stuff too fast, mages were low on MP, and all our tanks died. Some people spoke of coming back tomorrow but the leaders said screw that, and we stayed. He regenned (while we were lightly using melee/DoT on him) from 8% to 42% before tanks were unweakened. When he re-grows his heads the regen speeds up exponentially. We started back up and went back at him. With about 10 minutes we had him to 15%. Due to real life issues the main tank's RDM had to afk so I jumped in the tank party and refreshed the PLDs, BRD, WHM, and NIN/DRK. Because of this I didn't watch Hydra's HP all that much but it seemed that Melena on WAR was doing some serious damage because he was getting more cures than anyone. Before I knew it people on Vent were saying "8%, now we push" and the WS's started coming out.

He was down to one head and with each WS we were taking off 1%, and eventually it took a Mighty Strikes to finish him off. This was the 1st kill for many of us there, myself included. People say Hydra is worthless and all, but his synthable stuff seems to have some value. Drops were everything. Hydra Fang x2, Hydra Meat x2, Hydra Scale, and a Berserker's Torque... hell even the Sirius Axe dropped. No one will want that stupid torque (Latent so far is -50HP for +1TP) but that axe isn't half bad for a BST in a party. The DMG base is 43 and increases +2 for every person in your party capping out at 53. That's a awesome axe, only matched by the Guttler (final BST relic axe).

Oh yeah, I forgot to give a big congrats to one of our PLDs, a good guy named Zartan for getting his Shadow Mantle last night. Grats bro. LightSpirit!

t(-.-t) horn

2007-01-04T08:03:00.000-05:00

15 Xarcabard runs
2 dropped horns
1st drop - Outlotted by veteran SMN
2nd drop - Was on vacation, dropped to a SMN on his 2nd run with the LS
0/13 otherwise

This is absolutely retarded now.

Patience young grasshopper

2007-01-03T09:47:00.000-05:00

Last night was an interesting night. We had a Ultima run which dropped Nashira Seraweels and Nashira Turban. I was kinda bummed because I really wanted Nashira Gages for my SMN or Nashira Crackows for my BLM. I wanted to lot legs for my RDM but found out that one of our main RDMs needed them and lotted em. We still have one more set for Ultima we will probably do next week. I'm hoping for the gages.

We then headed up to Sky for some farming and gods. We killed Olla and then did 2 Genbu runs. The 1st dropped V. Claw, Genbu's Shield, and Martial Abjuration: Hands. The second dropped V. Claw, Genbu's Kabuto and Aquarian Abjuration: Head. I was so psyched to see "A. Abjuration Hd." that I screamed "HANDS!" but once I viewed it I realized it was head. I was the only person who wanted it so I got to lot and then hit up the AH and bought a Cursed Crown and made my Zenith Crown. Stats aren't that bad on it:

INT+3
MND+3
Enhances Resist Silence Effect
Convert HP to MP +50

It can work for my RDM, BLM, or SMN if I am in need of MP but still want some mage-type stats. I'll probably wear it on my WHM when I get it to 73 (it's hovering at 61 now). All in all not a bad night, I started off disappointed but ended on happy note. Grats to everyone in the shell that got their drops. It's always nice to see people get stuff, and this was sorta the 1st real drop I have gotten in IRON. I've snagged 4 jailer weapons which no one wants most of the time, I've gotten 2 SMN AF+1 items from Limbus and 1 SMN AF2 from IRONdynamis. Hopefully next week's Ultima will drop either feet or hands and maye we can farm up a new Genbu.

Additionally I am about 6k from my Yigit Gages which will be an acceptable alternative to Zenith Mitts for the time being. It's going to suck though, because if I do four runs at 1k a run I'll still not be able to get the hands until next Wednesday. Oh well, hopefully my freakin Summoner's Horn drops tonight. I've now been waiting almost 3 months for that damn piece. Thank god it's still restricted (I think they did that just so I would get it and shut the hell up about it already!).

quick update

2006-12-30T18:22:00.000-05:00

After reading Kuuhalee's Blog, I got some inspiration to do my own, so here it is. I finally got the forumla inserted and everything up to date so whenever I raise a level in anything, all I have to do is change the total and everything is automatically calculated. Don't ask about the STR and evasion... the previous guy thought his RDM/NIN was actually a melee job that needed merits tossed into.

maybe worst night ever?

2006-12-29T15:27:00.001-05:00

I started out having a bad night, I was soloing in sea on SMN for xp buffer with Empress Ring on, and for some reason Ifrit was putting some gimp ass numbers up for Flaming Crush. Usually with the Om'hpemde's mouth open it does 1500-2500 damage. Well... Ifrit was putting forth some lame BPs, averaging about 900-1200. All my normal gear was on and macro'd. The worst was when I desummoned, summoned from far away and waited for the mob to come to me and the avatar. Ifrit whiffs the mob, and I take a hit. With it's mouth open it hits like 2-3x harder than normal. Stoneskin down, 129 damage. I let Ifrit smack it once and use Flaming Crush (which generates enmity). I get hit again without any stoneskin on for 318. Down to 500 HP and Ifrit's BP MISSES. Now I'm screwed... cause Ifrit has yet to get hate back and I'm getting beaten to a pulp. Next hit is crit for 567... and I'm dead. Of course I didn't use reraise because I never die to these things. I get a pity raise and head to Whitegate because we were going to get an Assault in before we gathered for Salvage.

We get our tags and enter PFC for Mammol. It's very easy, and we go RDM, NIN, NIN and just trio the 12 mobs. It's 1k APs everytime, and is never any trouble... but tonight is tonight, and tonight is a crappy night. I pull the 1st mob, haste the NINs, and debuff the Mamool. I head off for the second pull, cast Sleep 2 on a Mamool down below, and it loses one of it's shadows (cause it was a NIN). I now have hate so I start to pull it back to the party and ready Sleepga. Suddenly I'm being hit by a Puk? I was like "WTF puks don't aggro from the bridges!" Puks also don't link with Mamools, so I have no clue where this stupid bug came from. The NINs had their timers down and I was being hit by 2 mobs and couldn't get Sleepga off. So I died, again... without RR up. They tried to duo the remaining 11 mobs, but only got through nine and a half before they ran out of time. It sucked, I got my 2nd pity raise of the night... At least it was almost time for Salvage.

Well, after being disappointed in losing an Assault I was told Salvage was now being cancelled because we lieterally had no MNKs (or any melees for that point) and all mages. Something like 8 mages, a THF and a SAM. Won't get too far on that setup. Instead the LS of wasting people's Assault Points, my static burned through our remaining 3 tags. We did Mamool again (with RR on this time) and it went flawlessly. We picked up a 4th member and did a Leujaoam Sanctum run called Orichalcum Survey. Seems all you have to do is get a key item pickaxe from an NPC, mine the multiple mining points in the zone, and once you get an Orichalcum Ore you return it to the NPC and win. Sometimes while mining for the ore a Mineral Worm pops. Kill it, wait for it to disappear and start mining again. There are also many Qiqrin Miners that are NPCs while you mine up the ore, but once you do finally get the ore, they start to aggro. I got the ore at the 24 minute mark, turned it in to the NPC and got 1680 APs since it was my 1st time and I had the armband bonus.

The 2nd attempt wasn't so easy. One of our NINs got the ore at the 20 min mark but I got aggro because I was stupid and forgot... so I died but at least the NIN by me avoided the aggro, and waited in a safe spot till the other NIN with the ore turned it in. Well, the BLM and other NIN got aggro, and since she had the ore she had to stay alive to turn it in. The BLM unfortunetly subbed SMN (I tried explaining why you should be /WHM and wearing a Black Cloak the entire time but the point was missed so I gave up) and since the BLM didn't have enough MP to stun/bind/sleep/cure... you can see where this went. The NIN died, the BLM died, and the other NIN in the safe alcove just used Mijin Gakure to exit the zone. So we wasted 2 out of our 4 I.D. tags last night which equates to about 2k APs which equates to about 1 Salvage run... so when we got kicked after 3 dead minutes I just HP'd and called it a night.

I know, I tend to complain alot, and I earned the name Gorocry... but this rant was justified.

Triple play

2006-12-28T10:09:00.000-05:00

What an eventful night! I got my 3k on BLM using the old Emp ring coupled with BLM/RDM at the Marid camps. After I got a little addition to my buffer I headed out to Dynamis-Valkurm. We had alot of people there and ended up sending a dozen or so to Dyna-Jeuno.

We entered and things went well, we got all 3 flies right away and headed to Fairy Ring. Then, for some reason, leadership told the raid to go to Selbina and the pullers to FR. I had somewhat of an argument about it because I told them without a RDM to grav it, it would be too long a pull. Well, 2 dead RNGs later I think I made my point. We pulled it clear across the western beach to Selbina and took it down. As soon as it died I headed towards the Gobbue out towards Konschat Higlands. We pulled the Quads, got no non-currency drops, and started for the Gobbue... yet again leadership said to stay at quad camp, they were going to pull this NM across 1/3rd the zone to the raid. Again, I said we needed to go to the other end of the tunnel, but I was superceded and we stayed at quad camp. Again, all pullers died and we lost the pull on the Gobbue. We had 18 mins on the clock and some were calling it quits, but we decided to go for the mega boss anyways, something I had never done in Obsidian before.

We engaged with 9 mins on the clock and killed the mega boss relatively easily. It used charmga at 2% which annoyed me, but it died and we got the Dynamis-Valkurm Sliver. On a side note I really wish leadership would listen to me sometimes. I know that the strats I use are from another LS (props Obsidian) and I am well aware they have one once with these strats involving MASSIVELY long pulls... but efficiency and reliability should trump 1 single past experience. I hope in some future run they attempt it the way I am used to and see how much easier the pulls on the 2 NMs are.

After getting the title we farmed for 63 minutes. First Wyrm Armet -1 dropped (grats Luna), and it went dry until we killed a hippo that dropped... yup... Summoner's Cape. Something I really wanted and was hoping for. My lot was 479, Elvay was 337, Mittens was 669. No cape for me. I wasn't really all that upset for a few reasons. One, Mittens is a very nice player, and some of her gear could use an upgrade. I'm not trying to insult her here at all, but if you compared my SMN gear to hers, mine is somewhat better so it's nice to see a good piece go to a good person. Second, the cape is pretty much an Intensifying Cape that has enmity-1. It's a nice cape to have and was damn uber before that Assault cape came out. Now it's still a nice piece with nice stats but nonetheless... stats you can get elsewhere. Anyways, after that we got a Cleric's Cap -1 (Terren) and a Bard's Cape (grats PK with your impressive 178 lot). Of course with 3 minutes to go we got an amazing drop, one to rival all drops! Monster Helm -1 dropped and went to the resident french Garka (grats Kingkang). Was overall a good run, and with 5 mins left we were informed that Tiamat was up.

We headed out toTimmy and, well, not much to say. Went pretty flawless, they are trying a new tank party setup and it worked just beautifully. I even got off a 988 Predator claws, but it still didn't beat out my 1018 from late November.It took just over an hour with 22 people and drops were Oxblood, Wyrm Horn and Herald's Gaiters. We waited about 3 minutes and Xolotl popped, and since we had a full alliance we destroyed him and got a whopping Chain #1 for 33xp. Oh well, 3 titles in under 3 hours, I was happy but exhausted. Only zone left is Dyna-Qufim and then I am flagged to enter Tavnazia.

Mucho downtime

2006-12-27T13:46:00.000-05:00

The last 10 days or so have been major downtime for the LS. We've done some CoP Dynamis runs, we've tried to catch up on Assaults (got Lance Corporal), and trying to beat Salvage. So far we've gotten about 3 pieces of Morrigan Ingredients, 2 of the BRD/WHM, 2 MNK/NIN, and I think 1 of the THF/COR and WAR/PLD pieces. Still no win though. Last night I ended up in a SMNx5, THF party for Dobsonflies because someone saw them alive te previous night. We took an hour to gather, farm some scales, and enter the Unstable Displacement... only to find that they had died. I logged for the night, real life has been really hectic. Work is draining me, but this should all end tomorrow when the fiscal year ends.

Finally, big "Thanks alot" to SE. I sit at 27,200 GPs and today's item is worth 1760, leaving me at 28,960 GPs for cooking (1,040 short of 30k which is needed to learn Noodle Kneading). Guess my market crashing Carbonera session is going to have to wait one more day

Christmas edition

2006-12-23T16:54:00.000-05:00

So it's sorta been break time at the old LS. People starting Salvage, stocking up on Assault Points, meriting all day. It's been a lax time but they have found time to get an Aspi adn KB in the past week so that's nothing to really look over. I'm not going to go into every pice of Salvage armor, because plenty of people are doing that in their own blogs. I will say that in our last 2 runs we have gotten 2 Morrigan Pigaches ingredients, 1 Marduk's Tiara ingredient, 2 Usukane pieces, 1 Skadi and 1 Ares piece. Still, we haven't beaten one yet but drops may not be as rare as we feared. This forsee this becoming a nightly event with the next month or two.

Personally I merited today, got 5 merits as RDM in the Mire, and plan to pump them into capping my Lightning Potency on BLM. After that I will probably move onto capping Elemental Skill or maybe put some merits into my SMN. Right now I'm about halfway merited on SMN but still have 3 levels left for Avatar Accuracy and Attack. I still haven't unlocked Freeze II yet but seeing as my Ice Potency is only merited one level I doubt Freeze II would do all that much damage. The last thing I'm planning on is Max MP, as being an Elvaan has its limits. It just hard to put 50,000xp into 1 level of MP which at the end of the day grants me a whopping 10MP more.

Finally, I got an early Christmas present in the form of not 1 but 2 payments from items the LS sold. It took months to sell but the payday finally came today so that was a nice thing to wake up to. Still, unfortunely there is very little that I need to buy for my SMN or BLM that can come off the Auction House. The only things I have my eyes set on (besides Salvage gear) is Summoner's Horn, Summoner's Spats, Evoker's Gages, Nashira Gages, Zenith Mitts, Sorcerer's Petasos, and a Magnetic Earring. Not one of those can be bought, so this gil will hopefully fund some cooking and maybe I can turn a profit with this newfound capital.

*capped Lighting Potency (5), and got 2 additional merits which I used to raise Ice Potency (2)

Mad scramble

2006-12-19T02:31:00.000-05:00

The update came today, and boy did it bring alot with it. One of the first things they announced was that you were going to be able to reach sky from the 3 crags, you just had to "meet certain requirements". It's been figured out you need to trade a Clear Chip to each machine in each crag's Hall of Transference, and then change your title to the one yo get after beating CoP 8-3. Also, big news was Lord of Onzozo will no longer drop Kraken Club! They actually want more players to be able to experience this weapon so it seems they are going to move it elsewhere, maybe a BCNM like Peacock Charm.

SE had another huge release which was all this new gear, and boy did they not disappoint. They made sure they covered all the bases, making it pretty much better gear than AF2 or Abj armor, but so far it looks like only millionaires will be able to own it for a while. The NIN headpiece alone needs 12 O Ingots and they are at 200k but I see them hitting 1M each, making the NIN headpiece run 12M + gil. You also need to collect 3 items from Salvage to trade in with your Imperial Currency to get these final items. I won't get too far into it, but I see the synthesis materials that you can buy on the AH sky rocketing soon. (yay)

Also, pics of the armor were released, and I must say that while I am stunned by the amazing stats on them I am disappointed with the models. Yet again SE just took models that are already in the game and just added some flair to make them look new. The BLM/RDM/BLU pieces are just a reworked set of Errant gear, the WHM/BRD/SMN gear is just a reworked set of BLU AF, the MNK/SAM/NIN/PUP gear is reworked Shinobi gear, the WAR/PLD/DRK/DRG gear is reworked DRK AF, and I believe the THF/BST/RNG/COR gear is a reworked Raptor set. The last time we saw new armor was the PUP/COR/BLU AF, and before that was Sipahi and Jaridah gear! The last major update we got gave us Yigit (Sha'ir), Pahluwan (THF AF), and Amir (Homam). I really wish SE would come up with new looking gear... sorta like they did when we got Barone, Igqira, and Bison gears way back in CoP. This new gear (while statistically amazing) looks absolutely horrible and recycled.

Last night we logged on to find that Salvage would be VERY hard, and since we didn't want to waste Assault Points we set out to get the teleports to sky activated. We didn't know much, and soon found out we needed a chip at the apparatus in each Hall of Transference. We thought for some reason it would be some new chip so we prepared for a Promyvion farming run. We spent 45 minutes gearing up and right before we headed out, we found out about the clear chip which is bought from any of the 3 city Goblins... so we gave up on farming and decided to just xp/merit. We need ISP to get the coins used to make the new gear anyways since you know Gold Coins are going to go from 17k to about 500k a piece (of course I sold 5 coins this weekend for 17k each). Anyways, I needed a buffer on my SMN and even though xp was super slow it was easy as hell and alot of people were out exploring so we had most of the Mire to ourselves. I now have about a 17k buffer which should be good for at least a month or so. Now I can go back to solo-meriting on SMN in Sea when I am bored.

Tonight is an Ultima run and I am hoping that Nashira Gages drop because the last time we did an Ultima was months ago and I was on the No Loot List. Since then we have gotten tons of Homam, even 3 pairs of Homam Cosciales in the past 2 runs... so I am hoping that I luck out on the gages. Oh, and we did a Mamool Ja Training Grounds Assault and poor Moonpie DC'd with us standing at the Rune of Release with 2 minutes on the clock... and it took her 10 miutes to reboot and log back in. Sorry Moon! We'll get you your 1000 points back soon enough!

(pics to come later tonight, I'm at work right now)

We suck, it's all your fault!

2006-12-17T06:48:00.000-05:00

Drama on the high seas. Bismarck server dead ahead, ETA, 1 single Aspi window. Ok, enough stupid talk. Today was a day of mind numbing video game playing. I leveled on my WHM for a while, which was fun because I had put it off since before my break and I wanted to finally wear a damn Nobles. Got it to 60 on a weird party. Started off WHM, BRD, PLD, MNK, RNG, RNG. We had the damage but no hate control and after each Sidewinder a RNG would pull hate and get the crap smacked out of them because they just had to sub WAR for the STR/attack that comes with WAR sub. Well without ninjitsu they would get smaked for 200 damage and that meant curing the RNGs as much as the damn PLD. After an hour both RNGs had other things to do, and we ended up replacing them with another MNK (taru) and a lolDRG. The last time I leveled with an lolDRG was WAYYYYY back in Bibiki Bay on my RDM (prolly June '05). All I remember is the lolDRG saying all anyone thought he was good for was making Light with a DRK. Well, except for the fact I had to tell this lolDRG to Call Wyvern after the 2nd pull, he did not only amazingly but our kills went about 5x smoother. No one spiked hate and caused major curing needs. It was just steady xp from mobs that gave 220+ on Chain 0 and 340 at Chain #4 and #5. After a few hours we all got a level and a half cleared, and when the PLD pulled with me having 63MP and died the MNKs 2 houred and kill the Colibri. People said they were tired, the (Japanese) BRD said it was 5:25am JST so we all headed out. I grabbed Reraise II and made some new gear choices (Healer's Mitts over Magna Gauntlets as well as Raven Beret over Gold Hairpin. Going to head back to it and hopefully get it to 62 so I can wear my Wood M Ledelsens

I then went and solo'd on SMN for about 45 minutes, making about 3k with my XP ring and getting the XP back I lost when we fought Timmy. Was easy stuff, if only I could use Empress Band more often. After I releved I did a quick Limbus run where we cleared ApollyonSW and got THF and RDM and 2 coins. We had Assaults planned to finish but some people did Waughroon Shrine KS30 runs. I went off fishing, getting no skillups but enough Bhefhel Marlin that one of them, when cut open, had in it a Pirate's Chart. This is the trigger to enter the fight for Mercurial Kris but I'm really in it for the Pelican Ring or the Albatross Ring. More to come on these developments.

Finally, the good stuff. Drama. It's what makes the world go round. I ran through 2 Mamool assaults and then helped 4 people get ToAU missions 11-15 done. When we finished the final CS we headed out to Aspi and that damn turtle popped 1st window! Some Japanese LS got it but they lost claim almost instantly. We were voking/spamming from the possible claim when it popped, and it got claimed by us. Then the /shouts, /says, and general whining and complaining ensued. We didn't get MPK'd, nor did we try to MPK anyone. We didn't hear from a GM and in the end we really didn't do anything wrong. They could not hold claim on the mob. It's like if Nid popped and 5 people cast stun on it. Should I be angry and act childish to the players who created more hate on the mob when it popped, and thus got the claim? Of course not. We made short work of Aspi, and in the end A.Body dropped. I sent a tell for it but I'm behind all the RDMs and BRDs in the shell. Even though I have RDM, because SMN and BLM are my mains, the RDM-main and BRD-main members get precedent. The Dalm went to Poundkake, and he'll definitly put it to good use. Now he's our giant Garka Christmas Tree. We had an official tree lighting ceremony when he got it uncursed in Sandy.

breathe

2006-12-15T09:22:00.000-05:00

Crazy night last night at Ouryu. I'm writing this from my work and am exhausted. We had an Ouryu planned at 9EST last night and didn't enter the fight until 11:48EST. Ugh, and we were doing good but we were never ahead of the clock. At 51% we had 30 mins left. It took forever and a day to shuffle the alliance around to get the right people As far as I could tell we went in as PLD x2, WAR, SAM, BLMx4, SMNx4, WHMx2, RDMx2, BRDx2. Damage was steady but Ouryu hits like a armored truck. We went the PLD/WAR route to some people's chagrin, but we didn't really have any trouble along the way, we just weren't outright overpowering it.

The one thing I saw was that 4 BLM are more than enough to kill the elementals. I could have probably come SMN and done more damage to the wyrm. We kinda called it at 30% with under 10 minutes left. Kinda sucked but what can we do? For some this was their 1st Ouryu Cometh fight. No one screwed up and caused a flail, no one called for help. The things I would suggest are possibly making some sort of Distortion SC because I found myself free nuking whenever there weren't any elementals. I would make it 5 SMNs and 3 BLMs since 4 was more than enough, and maybe PLD/NIN. Dun seemed to want to come /NIN and after getting punched in the face by Ouryu I believe that's his current stance on it.

Tonight is Friday, an ENM night, and I'm going as SMN dammit. I have a 746 buffer on my SMN and I need that 3500xp from the ENM. Afterwards I'm going to probably level my WHM or BST. With Monday (sea), Tuesday (limbus), Wednesday (dyna-xarc), and Thursday (event night) one has very little time "to themselves". Thank god the king camps are 6-10am right now or else I could be summoned to stand in Dragon's Aery for 3 hours hoping some douchebag doesn't claim, CFH, then wipe. On a positive note I'm 2/3rds to Noodle Kneading. Soon I will be a carbonara whore and either get rich off it or crash the market on it. Details to come!

p.s. if you haven't seen "Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang" yet please do so. Robert Downy, Jr is great as always and Val Kilmer friggin STEALS the show with his rendition of "Gay Perry". Trust me on this, you will thank me afterwards.

surprise surprise

2006-12-14T08:51:00.000-05:00

Cleared 15 NMs, and not 1 AF2. DL dead, no shadow gear (AGAIN). Just a stupid Jadepiece. At least we destroyed the Animated Gun for Melena. That was long overdue. Farmed for 2+ hours and got another 100 piece, THF, DRK, and PLD. I'm hopeless at this point. The horn is LS restricted and it still won't drop. I've been to like 12 Dyna-Xarcs in the past 15 weeks and 1 horn has dropped... and it was during one of the 3 that I didn't attend. Irony.

Oh yeah, we got Dunpeald his Amatheia Hide finally. He should have his Aegis possibly by New Years. That would be nice. Tonight is event night and we're doing Ouryu BCNM and hopefully clearing Bahamut v1 for the people who need to catch up and get their earrings.

Oh yeah, during the sky run Tuesday night they managed to farm a Genbu set and I logged before they completed said set because it was getting late. Of course Zenith Mitts dropped. Just to add to my run of good luck. w00t!

New lows

2006-12-13T09:36:00.000-05:00

Just when you thought LS drama couldn't get any more pathetic, another LS goes ahead and proves you wrong. More to that in a moment.

Last night was just Limbus. We were doing an Omega run (our final set... this is like the 4th in a row) and a chip run. I wasn't in the Omega alliance but they killed it in about 10 minutes. I wish they would hold him at 10% and farm Gunpods, but alas, they only killed 2 Gunpods before dropping Omega and getting 2 Omega's Hind Leg which make 2 Homam Cosciales. They went to Evilbob (nemesis) and someone else I can't remember. After loot dropped we entered Apollyon and farmed NW. We ended up with WHM, MNK, RNG and NIN as well as 3 coins each (we had 18 ppl!).

Now, onto the wonderful drama. I wouldn't normally air dirty laundry but this can possibly be a warning for LS's on Bismarck that didn't know that this event happened and maybe they can be more aware of this shell. Lunarians claimed Xolotl while we were in Limbus. They either pulled it late or took too long to kill it, because they were fighting it during the daytime. Seems they were all standing around him and he used Charmga. A WHM died and he went unclaimed/white and it was daytime. It depopped. IRON went to Xolotl and waitied till nighttime with Lunarians. When Xolotl spawned, IRON claimed. They were doing fine and then Minidragon (the tank) got charmed. Then Lunarians, pissed that they lost claim to IRON, decided that retribution was in order so they all ganged up and killed the charmed tank Minidragon.

How fucking pathetic can a LS get?

I guess I shouldn't expect much from a LS that can't even kill Tiamat alone, they had to go and create a seperate linkshell with ArchDominus because they can't kill it alone. I sure am glad when I went LS hunting I was steered away from Lunarians.

fantabulitastic!

2006-12-10T20:11:00.000-05:00

So tonight was Dyna-Windy. We ended up with NIN, DRK, THF, WAR. WHM, WHM, and SMN!!!! And one of our main RDMs outlotted me.

yup.

So no SMN pants for me, since rules say that if you have the job at 65 or higher you are allowed to lot it. I honestly didn't even know this person had SMN, much less ever use it. I have always seen him attend events in his full RDM AF2. Even still, we had like 5 people lotting it. Lotting was 2 guests, a main RDM, and 2 main SMNs. The hard thing to swallow is that SMN gets nothing but total shit for legs. I would have rather lost lots on the Summoner Horn than the Summoner Spats because at least Austere Hat gets you by until you get Horn... The Evoker's Spats pale in comparison to any other armor that SMN can wear on the legs, and Summoner Spats are lightyears better than the Evoker's Spats. Since I lost that means that I'll still get stuck with shit for legs and the other RDM stores his newfound in his moghouse until the one time they mightneed his SMN instead of RDM. I'm pissed, not at the person who outlotted me, just at the situation; but rules are rules and that's why we have them. It would have been nice to see them get passed to the 2 main SMNs in the LS, but by no means was the RDM expected or obligated to do so. Sometimes it works out for some people like last night when 3 people passed the Plaited Cord for Mini to get his AF+1, sometimes it works out like tonight.

I don't know when we'll be back in Dyna-Windy, I hope it's soon, unfortunetly I doubt it. Most people who needed Windy got their flag tonight.

Slow Saturdays

2006-12-10T00:20:00.000-05:00

Saturday tends to be a slow day. Today was an emergency maintenance, so it shut down from noon till 2pm. We headed out to Fafnir and logged as the server dropped. When we came back 2 hours later we thought we had the window figured out. Slowly more showed and Faf wasn't popping. On the 2nd to last window we spammed for 90 seconds and pretty much 3-5 seconds after a leader typed "over", it spawns. My dumbass was going into the spell menu to recast protect which had worn off, and as I see it appear I get stuck on the "Chat" tab and entered into the GD onscreen display keyboard. The most annoying part was that for all previous windows I had been spamming 30 seconds after each window supposedly closed, just in case, but I had to stop or I'd catch one of the respawning Darters. I blame myself as much as I blame whoever said the window closed, just because I wasn't being consistant like I had for the previous 2 hours. Oh well, they only got Hrotti, A Feet and E Hands. We woulda been bummed had a Ridill or A Hands dropped.

We did camp Adamantoise but again one of the newer members didn't pull properly, died, had to be tractored and raised by me. While we waited for his sickness to wear off another LS gathered up the people and killed it. The are minor mistakes but if this isn't corrected this could present bigger problems. This is the 2nd Adamantoise I've been to where we've claimed, lost it due to a mistake... only to watch another LS kill it. That's just unacceptable in my eyes and extremely frustrating. If we are going to tout that we are "Bismarck's Leading HNM LS" then we'd better start showing it.

Moving on we did some Limbus. It was Temenos Central floor 3 (beastmen gods) and we ended up with 4 coins each and a Plaited Cord. That's the 4th NIN we've gotten in the last 2 runs... but Mini got his much deserved 2nd piece of NIN ingredients to synth up his Ninja Tekko +1. Now if only Diabolic Silk dropped, then I could finally get my Wizard's Petasos +1. The 2nd alliance got MNK only so that wasn't much of a help either. Everyone broke after Limbus and I did some personal stuff. I came back around midnight to check on things. Not much was organized for any type of LS event and it was too late for me to start XPing (or I'd be up till 4am... no thanks) so I logged for the night. Catching up on some old pics though:

This was our last KS99 run. Was flawless for the most part. I wound up with Purgatory Mace and a Behemoth Horn. Netted me about 700k I think. Pretty much all KS99's (including Horns of War) have dropped in profitabilty. The only way to make gil is to get maybe Unsho, Behemoth Hide, or a Shining Cloth. Otherwise you're only going to be netting about 1M gil per orb. On a final note I did some nice WHM leveling last night. The party was skeptical at first, but in the end it worked out. The people weren't SUPER hard core but very understanding and it was nice to just get into a mid-level xp party, make some mistakes, correct those mistakes, and have fun while getting good easy XP. The setup was WAR, THF, SAM, MNK, WHM, WHM. Not a real tank in there and no refresher but we tried to make it work. At first we tried Puks which was a mistake. Though they gave 300+ xp with ring on, but we couldn't chain them past Chain #1 and they hit the WAR hard as hell. We moved to Lesser Colibri's by the porting pad out in Waj Woodlands and the xp flowed. It was easy and the WHM (which only spoke japanese) started to get into the flow with what I was doing and we were very effective as a team. We lost the SAM and got a NIN which made it all the much better. Everyone was getting Haste, the NIN was keeping good hate, and the WHMs had so much MP left we started to spam Holy and Banish II. I got about 20k in just over 2 hours and called it a night. We all leveled up and warped out happy. I'm currently 59WHM and have all my spells and gear. At 60WHM I will get Reraise II. There are no spells from 57-60 so this is a very boring stretch. The cool thing was we both were elvaan and both had on the same gear, so not only did I respect him for his good gear I was pleased other people chose enmity and MP over just wearing full AF1 like some WHMs I see.

Anyways, that was too long for a 1am post. I'm headed to sleep and hoping, hoping, HOPING that Summoner's Spats drops in Dyna-Windy tomorrow because I really need to finish this SMN out. Also, the good news I heard is that on Wed's Dyna-Xarc run Summoner's Horn will be restricted to IRON LS memebers only! I'm pretty sure that includes me... and me only at this point. If those pieces dropped from the next 2 Dyna's I'd be content to say my SMN is complete. Summoner's Doublet is cool and all, but I'd give it up for Sorcerer's Coat any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Until tromorrow, I bid you adieu.

Been meaning to post this

2006-12-09T02:13:00.000-05:00

This was 2 Tiamats ago but I'm still proud of it though...

Your love is like a Rollercoaster baby, baby I wanna ride

2006-12-08T11:30:00.000-05:00

Chilipeppers stuck in my head. Meh, anyways, Wednesday was Dyna-Xarc. We all know what happens there... (no drop of SMN horn) After the obvious happened, we took out old DL in nice time, dropped no Shadow crap tho which was weak. Took Animated Gun down to 7% before he warped out. Farmed some more, and ended up PLD (Dun), RNG (Guapa), DRK (Resi), and MNK (Zart). I am very happy that all of those pieces went to some very deserving people, even if Guapa is getting every damn drop in December (I kid).

Thursday was event night, and for shits and giggles we took a stab at Vrtra. I had never fought him before and most of the newer members of the shell hadn't either. We did very well (I thought) and took it to 22% before it started spamming wings and BLM and tanks started dropping. At that point add control was breaking down. We had about a 75% wipe and pretty much threw in the towel. Most people couldn't get up with blood aggro, Vrtra wouldn't stop spawing new summons, and it was becoming overwhelmig to the point where we decided it wasn't worth it. I hate to quit, and the one thing that made me feel ok about calling it was that we had a flail at about 50% which caused about a 90% wipe and we recovered from that! Still, we got the experience we wanted from it, we had a good turnout, and we all learned something.

I learned that's a frustrating fight.

you must have poison pots on because his wings AoE damage and sleepga
you must have stoneskin on to rest mp because you have a poison pot on draining HP
SMNs are the main DD'rs, so you have to have a steady form of MP (i.e. you must rest alot)
kiting him is a pain in the ass for SMNs, because if you BP he'll run out of range, thus wasting a BP and 57 more seconds

It was still a hell of a lot of fun to do, and if I was still Gorokai 75BRD and in need of a manteel I'd push to try Vrtra tillwe won, but alas those are the old days and what I really need is that GD SMN HORN. Thank God its a restricted lot next week.

some bardtastic memories

Man I made a sexah BRD...

exploring Arrapago on day 1 of Aht Urghan

Full BRD AF2, thank you so much to Obsidian LS on Odin

Full Sha'ir (this was in December '05, sold manteel for 35M in Feb!!!)

busy bees

2006-12-06T09:37:00.000-05:00

Yet another long night at work but luckily after I logged in Tiamat popped within about 3 minutes. We redirected from our Limbus gathering and ran out there right away. The other major shells were in Dynamis so we had Timmy all to ourselves. I didn't know this until I got out there, and since I was a BLM for Limbus I rushed back to be SMN... woot.

Thank you SE for putting Timmy only about 7-10 minutes form a crag. That at least eased my suffering a tad. When we pulled him we decided to time it. We didn't have the convenience of 2 Gjallarhorn, so it wasn't going to be a 40 minute Timmy. Still, we only had about 2 deaths and 1 sleep cycle to recover, and the fight was just under 80 mins. Not bad, drops were Wyrm Horn, Divine Log, Dragon Heart, and Noritsune Kote. Fun times.

Fafhogg's window opened when Timmy was at 10% so after we killed Tiamat we joined the people we had already sent to Aery. We got there and had half the zone, which was awesome turnout. Of course it didn't pop until the 2nd to last window and of course it was Nid. The claim was ours and we reshuffled our alliance so we had the proper number of skillchainers and magic bursters. The fight went almost flawless except we have a few BLMs who are pretty damn uber (Eowyyn/Qinny), and when you get a 1943 MB on Nidhogg you won't be standing for very long. Still, Dunpeald held hate amazingly for his 1st PLD tank on Nid and we got the kill in just over 30 minutes. Drops weren't stellar (only 1 abj) but we did get Earthen Abjuration: Body which went to Guapa. Big congrats on that, I hear it's somewhat a nice piece of armor.

stupid melees.

NO CFH! All right!

2006-12-04T14:39:00.000-05:00

So last night was a Dynamis Jeuno run. Was retarded as usual... drops went THF, MNK, NIN, DRK, RDM, THF, MNK, DRK, THF. Yay 4 jobs' AF. We somehow got four 100 pieces though. No BLM dropped and I already had rdm tights. Later we headed to Dragon's Aery for Fafnir. Hopefully this time, a bunch of immature kids wouldn't claim and CFH when they start dying.

Wouldn't you know the stupid dragon popped on his 2nd to last window, but we got claim anyhow. He died in 27 minutes. I was hitting my MBs left and right. It was weird though, my first couple hit well, (one Burst II hit for 1660). Then toward the middle of the fight I was getting resisted, and once I MB'd for 168 Burst II... Towards the end it picked back up and I got the killshot on him for 1558. Drops were Neptunal Abjuration: Head which I think went to Resi. I logged after that cause I work Monday morning.

Oh yeah, over the weekend we took Tiamat down and got the greatest drop set I have ever seen. Seriously, this has to go down as THE most sought after item in the game. The gil I will get from this single item could possibly pimp my character out for good, or I could power level through a craft with all the gil due to me. The item in question?

Fire Crystal

yup.

disgusted

2006-12-03T11:26:00.000-05:00

So I come back to FFXI hearing about all the success that my LS is having without me, getting a few Dalmaticas and Wyrmal Bodies, not to mention a Summoner's Horn (of course). So my 1st Dynamis back we do Beaucidine and get 2 AF... after they got 19 combined the previous 2 runs. The next weekend I camp Fafnir with them. We don't get claim on the final window (force pop ftw) and the LS that claims it says "If we start wiping I'm going to Call For Help".

Awesome.

So we escape out and wait on the ledge and the LS that claimed it had a BLU meleeing under a wing and a NIN that voked a few times near the back foot while trying to tank Fafnir in a Haub. Yes. A Haub. At 10% they of course turned it and Spike Flailed themselves. Assassin, the guy who threatened to CFH if they wiped, reraises after the flail, and of course he calls for help. How mature.

Yup, CFH under 10%, and of course stupid ass Straight LS claims it and doesn't let it regen, killing it while in CFH mode. No drops for anyone, thats how we roll. If that wasn't enough we got claim on Adamantoise this morning and took it to 10%, then one of the newer members mistakingly called for help on THAT. Why? I have no clue. We had 6 people there and had no trouble with the adds seeing as 2 SMNs could use carby to kill them and still get MP refresh (we both had yinyang robes). Instead a member of Unreal finished the final 8%... so yet another wasted king placeholder. This makes 2 of my last NQ ground HNMs dying while in CFH mode. Awesomeness.

Contemplation

2006-11-07T11:03:00.000-05:00

I haven't logged into FFXI for 5 days. In the past (July/August) I'd have been scratching my skin like a crackhead, jones'ing for a Vana'fix. Instead I picked up FFXII and am thoroughly impressed. The game mechanics are easy, the storyline is political instead of one big badass baddie wanting to explode the world. The characters are gorgeous, though SE thought putting Vaan in some stupid ass pose all the time was cute... it's not. Standing with both hands behind your head and your hips cocked to the side makes you look like you are posing your abs in a bodybuilding contest or striking a pose for Madonna in the Vogue video... Lame.

There is no way to cheat, bot, RMT, or have lag. The game is fun and cost me $60 for the lifetime of the game. On FFXI I've spent $15 a month for 2.5 years. That's 33 months x $15 or... $495. Yeah, so right there I think my days are numbered. $500... think of what gadget you could buy for $500, where you could buy a plane ticket to for $500, or the kind of night you could have at a strip club for $500. The LS I am in is rebuilding with some great people but in the weeks that I was on before my hiatus, the motivation was starting to lack, even though we were still claiming.

I realize that I will eventually beat FFXII, and then what, try a new game? I've started to think that spending 3 hours a night trying to claim something isn't very productive. Sure it's for great gear, but I enjoy things like Tiamat, Ultima, Omega, KS99. Camping has lost it's shine, and just hasn't become that important to me anymore... I have some time to think about this, I am only 1 week into this month's billing cycle.

meh

2006-11-03T09:01:00.000-05:00

Dyna Xarc
WHM
BRD
BRD
Tired of getting my hopes up. Seems that Summoner's Horn isn't in the cards for me.

FattyDunkles hit day 19 and it seems he's yellow with white tips.
Done with choco raising... tired of wasting 19 days only to get disappointed.

FFXII is so much fun.

number crunching

2006-11-01T18:44:00.000-05:00

I am so bored at work. I decided to hit up my statcounter service and check and see how I am doing with all you visitors. Well here's some early numbers.

My old blog has been up for 45 weeks, my new blog has been up for 9 weeks.

I got 11,046 hits in 45 weeks on my old blog
I got 4,180 hits in 9 weeks on my new blog

I'm down 60 returning visitors per week and 10 returning visitors per day (that's you people who come back more than once to read the blog).

11k hits after 45 weeks (old)
4k hits after 9 weeks (new) x5 = 45 weeks (new) and 20k hits

That means that if I stay on pace I should double the readership my old blog had. Now... I just have to think of something interesting to say daily...

hmmm...

12

2006-10-31T11:11:00.000-05:00

Man... what a scary thought. Last night was the 1st night I haven't played FFXI in... I can't rememebr how long it's been since I didn't log on for a night. How weird/scary.

Last night I hit up GameStop at midnight to get my copy of FFXII. I was tempted to buy a strat guide but they are made by BradyGames and we all know how their FFXI guide was. Still, this game is cofusing as hell. I got lost just reading the instruction manuel! Gambits (macros), Espers (avatars), battle chains (skill chains), and something called a LP Board (no clue!) are just a few things that are throwing me for a loop. I got home around 1am so I spent an hour watching the bonus DVD before passing out. Tonight I'll take my 1st steps into Ivalice.

1 for the money, 2 for the show...

2006-10-29T12:09:00.000-05:00

Interesting couple of days it has been since our shutout in Dyna - Xarc on Wednesday. Thursday was a Jormy run that was strictly meant for practice. We really didn't care if we won or lost, the loot isn't much of anything really. It was mostly for training against adds and getting our tanks trained. It was good practice too, we took Jormy to something like 17% then we had a few deaths in the add party and that ended that. Still, good fun.

Friday was our slow day. We did our usual ENM Totentanz which dropped Corse Cape and other crap. No Cloud Evoker again for the 2nd week... and I lost lots on all items for the 5th straight week. It's gotten to be just a 3500xp boost for me at this point. Afterwards myself, Xyo, Aida, Fuuko, and Melena all headed out to Navukgo Execution Chamber to finish off the Aht Urghan missions. Was a super easy fight but it sorta confused me. We had BLM, BLM, BRD, WHM, THF and somehow we tanked it with no tank. I mean Shantotto used like... 12 AMII spells so I know she had to have hate but she wasn't really taking any damage as far as I could tell. Was weird but in the end we killed the Chimera and got our cutscenes (and 5 Imp Gold Coins).

Saturday... what a day! I was up real late Friday night so I kinda slept in on Saturday. When I awoke I found that we were camping in Dragon's Aery. I rushed right out there on BLM and got in position to claim. We went through 3 or 4 windows cause I was able to watch about 4 episodes of Scrubs in between (22 min episodes are perfect between windows!). The Darters were being cleared each window by Mini which meant it was a spamfest. When I saw the big purple guy appear as my target and I waited my .85 seconds to use stun and viola!

Mine! Stoneskin didn't last a single hit and I actually got one Blink shadow to save me... but my stun hit! Sure it didn't actually stun for any real period of time, but it proc'd! People (including myself) laugh when they see stun on Faf/Nid. Well, it works... sorta. This was back-to-back Nid claims for me (hence the name of the post) and I was feelin mighty good about myself. The kill was VERY clean and VERY fast... unlike the flail heard round Vana'diel last week. We took him down in about 25 mins and that was with 2 sleeps to recover MP. Of course at 3% we tried to manaburn it... and I got toasted, but that's the fun of being a BLM. Also the weather was absolutely perfect for fighting him. It was Lightningday with double lightning weather. Since I had my Rairin Obi I got some nice shots in to him without having to piggyback a MB.

Drops were less than we hoped, but we had no TH of any kind in the alliance. Ended up with N.Legs for the 2nd straight week. Still, fast, efficient kill on our part. Less than 1 hour later the call went out that Tiamat was up. I had run to the grocery store after Nid, so i joined at 80%. Still, we had everything under control and our tanks were getting it done. Again this was our 2nd back-to-back Tiamat claim and keeping with the pattern, we got the Herald's Gaiters again, which now makes 5 gaiters for sale in IRON bazaars. If these things would sell we'd be rich, but the economy is in deflation and there's now way they are going to get them to sell like they did in Feb/March. Still, we got the job done and it was so much fun. I am so glad I found this LS after leaving Odin. This is exactly what I wanted to do in this game and am elated I am finally able to do it.

Thanks to all that read, I've gotten some /tell's ingame from some readers and that makes me really happy that I can offer something back in blogs (which is really just a glorified "Dear, Diary") I found this in my pics folder and it made me laugh. It's the only positive thing to happen to me at Wednesday's Dyna-Xarc run.

Dynamis sucks.

2006-10-26T08:20:00.000-05:00

No Summoner Horn. Dynamis sucks. Dynamis Lord dead. Dunpeald mantle. No AF all night. None. Only two 100's all night. Dynamis sucks...

Finished up ToAU21 and 22. Only the BCNM left. I'm never getting a horn. Dynamis sucks.

Timmah!

2006-10-25T08:24:00.000-05:00

Last night I worked late, logged in at like, 7:45pm which is an hour later than I normally do. So I logged in and saw 98% of the LS in the Chasm. As I scurried out there as SMN I realized that we had less than 18 out there including no add pt. When I got out there more and more people logged on, and we smoothed things out. To be honest it was kind of fun to take on timmy "behind the gun". Sure killing her in our 45-60 min timeframe is easy, but not always that fun. Just like our Spike Flailed Nidhogg last week, easy fights are no fun. I decided to Astral Flow at 2% since we wanted to just end it, and since she was in the ait I pulled out Diabolos and used Ruminous Omen... for a whopping 167. What a insult. Somehow I was too close and me, Dun. and Smae ate it at 1%... so we got kicked. Drops were great, we got hide, kote, gaiters... was a full drop.

We went straight to Limbus after. They made an Omega alliance and took him down no problem. Drops were 2 pairs of Homam hands (Gambrias?). Since we had almost 30 people online we sent 12 into ApollyonNE and we did that run with ease. Drops were BLMx2, NIN, and SAM. We also managed to score 6 coins each! This brought me to 20 so I can pretty much afford my next AF+1 when we start doing Temenos again. I'm sitting on RDM, BLM, and BST items from Apollyon and need the Temenos items to complete the set. I think we will start doing Temenos again since we have an Omega next Tuesday and another Omega the following Tuesday. Homam for everyone!

The highlight of my night was hitting a Burst II MB on one of the NM dolls on floor 2 last night. I hit an 1875 Burst II but no one had the ability to screenshot it and I DC'd and lost the chatlog before I could get a screenshot... It was Watersday with double darkness weather, so I don't know how it hit that high... but it's a record for me. So far 1700's was my max. Yay me.

Forget to add this... at the end of the night I was ready to crash, but Xyo and Smae were out trying to get him Vertical Cleave off of the Qutrubs. They found a NM pop named Lamie No.7 which is a COR. They tried to duo it with BLU and RDM/BST but died a horrible death. I headed out there (reluctantly mind you) as SMN and was going to just keep resummoning Carby till it died. Well Carby did suprisingly well until the NM COR rolled and spammed Hysteric Barrage. Still, with Xyo's leech pet hate wasn't totally lost when Carby died. We killed it in about 10 minutes with only one death (mine when the others got close and charmed off of belly dance...) but I reraised and was kept alive long enough for weakness wear. Oh yeah Smae died @ 1% cause he thought he could melee it out and then got destroyed by 5 HBarrages! The drops were a magical 2 water crystals! I'd like to try this again with 2, maybe 3 SMNs just using Carby. Meteorite averaged 238 with a low of 117 and a high af 370. Seeing as Shady is the only COR in the LS maybe if he came to fresh 2 SMNs using meteorite then we could get some cool COR drop. As it is, had anything worthwhile dropped... it would have gone to waste between the 3 of us. Fun times though!

easy kills are no fun

2006-10-23T12:12:00.000-05:00

Last night was a Nid/Aspi camp and we went to Nid. Had a good group of people there and Nid popped and guess who claims. Me. My first king claim, though I have claimed Faf and Adamantoise before. Anyways I was feeling quite good about myself... but that last only about 90 seconds. Seems someone (a new applicant to the shell) mistakingly got it to flail on his 1st WS... It wiped almost the entire pit but somehow we had 3-4 people survive. We all HP'd and got back out as soon as possible. Took maybe 15 minutes round trip but we got there and we still had claim. We took him down but he was a bitch last night. Killed him a few minutes before rage set in and I was glad the LS persevered for the win. I got a good MB in on him too right at the end, though it was the end of me right after it landed.

Drops were pretty damn weak (N. Legs) for the work we put into it, but there's always gonna be another Nid another day. Aspi didn't show, he sent his bastard step-brother Adamantoise. Afterwards we hit up some Dynamis - Sandy. Absolutely nothing in there for me but WHM and BST and I don't think I can lot either since they are below 65. We ended up with PLDx3, MNK, DRG, BRD, and WAR. Grats to those who got some AF.

Afterwards Fuuko, Godbae, Xyoflite, Mirax, and myself got ToAU M15 done "The Black Coffin" and got me up to mission 20. Good stuff, the storyline looks like I may actually be able to follow it, though when you go to the palace to recieve your glory crown there's about 6 NPC's talking and the only one I knew was Ovjang the automaton and Grand Vizier (the dude in full Homam). Server maintenance going on right now so all kings ToDs should be real nice for the JPN players... and midday for the NA players (yay). Here are some random pics I found that I took so I might as well post them.

Soloing on BST/SMN/RDM/BLM has its advantages

Manafont/MB fun. Got in 2 MB's and the killshot but the screen wasn't big enough..

in addition

2006-10-19T13:02:00.000-05:00

WTF is this SE? Behemoogle?

10% Diabolos
10% Moogle
20% Cerberus
60% Behemoth
100% retarded

(ninja stole R3's pic, thx bro!)

fu@k!ng smn horn...

2006-10-19T08:20:00.000-05:00

FU dynamis. I'm tired of your BS. You drop summoner horns like a dresses @ the prom, and when my turn comes and I desperatly need to get rid of this stupid hobo hat... you clam up. SCREW YOU, stupid dynamis. I'm through getting my hopes up. Zero horns in 6 weeks, what a friggin joke. We got BST, WAR, SAM, and THF. Not a single mage drop.

t(-.-t) dynamis...

calm before the storm

2006-10-18T08:42:00.000-05:00

Last night was a dual Limbus run and an impromptu sky farming night. Beforehand I jumped into a manaburn party and capped xp with Selanda (I love your GjallaBallads!!!). Got about 14k in 80 minutes, and to think... I had a 4k buffer two weeks ago. Next we did Apollyon SW and got BST, RDM, and BLM. And I had every... single... piece already. Grats to Moontang who finished his BLM AF+1 set and to whomever else ended up with RDM and BST. I heard the 2nd alliance ended up with 2x BLM in their run, so a helluva lot of people now have Diabolic Yarn and will be shooting for the other piece which is Diabolic Silk. Yay... Anyways our run yielded 2 coins each (Appy SW never drops alot) and also completed an Omega set we are using next week.

After our limbus run Evilbob (aka Nemesis) organized a 20 man sky run around midnight EST. I was exhausted from the day at work and was starving because I skipped dinner and had been on ever since I got home at 6:30pm. They ended up with something like 4 waters and a Gem of the South and West. If I do ever get up to sky I'm not gonna be able to lot anything since I have missed 2 runs so far.

On a cheerier front, the version update is tonight. We all logged in Aery so we can possibly snag a Fafnir when the servers come up. The update brings changes to DRG, DRK, RNG, SAM, and SMN!!! We now have an offensive and defensive BloodPact timer which is gonna be real nice. Let's hope we claim Faf and some A. Hands drop since I really haven't earned the right to lot them if they dropped from Gambu.

Ketchup

2006-10-17T08:37:00.000-05:00

This weekend was spent catching up on alot of things I was behind in. I finished up getting my WHM AF, successfully farmed Raise II from Castle Oztroja since there was no way in hell I was paying 200k for that spell. I also did the necessary quests to raise my NPC's level to 55 since he was at the cap and was getting no xp whenever I called him. I nabbed a handful of maps that I was seriously behind in getting. Finally, I finished up PFC and hit SP on assaults (still need ToAU mission 15 and Bahamut v1 though).

Saturday was a Limbus run that yielded Astral Leather! That finished my set for my next AF+1 piece on SMN. I went with the Evoker's Pigaches +1 this time since I was conflicted last time as to which I should choose 1st. Now my macros have me summoning the avatar with the -perp gear on and when I use the BloodPact it equips the -BP delay equipment. The feet save me 1mp per tick on avatars so as soon as soon as I get that damn Summoner's Horn my Fenrir should be completely free in Dynamis. Sunday afternoon I also did a Fenny run which yielded my much needed torque.

Monday night was sea farming night. We set out early and farmed chips for a while. After getting 5 HQ Aern organs, about 2 stacks of Grah M chips and some xp we setout to pop Ix'DRG while the rest of the alliance tackled 3 Fortitudes. We ended up getting 2 virtues and 1 torque. The BLM party I was in got a crapload of xp (about 12k) and eventually popped Ix'DRG. He was the usual easy kill and we got deed but no vice (I want my SMN cape!). The LS met up and finished the night with 2 Ix'MNK fights. Again, 2 deeds, no vice. Still was a good night for the LS and for whomever got that Fortitude Torque.

I got back to my moghouse and had 5 merits. Dropped two merits into Level 2 Elemental Skill and 3 more into Level 3 which finally made my Elemental skill break through 300 , so next is either elemental skill level 4 or maybe lightning potency level 3. Sadly the LS wants my BLM more than my SMN but I'm finally starting to get some good numbers out of my BLM. If I were a taru I'd be right up there... but I can only do so much with my elvaan self. Tonight is Limbus and it should complete an Omega set for the weekend which will be nice since the last time we did Omega I didn't have cleanser and watched them fight it outside while sitting next to the swirlig vortex...

LET THE HEALING COMMENCE!

2006-10-14T00:58:00.000-05:00

So I guess I'm a WHM now. Dropped a few hundred K on some gear (neck, waist, back. etc) and got into a party in about 15 minutes. So far it's been pretty good. Got my 2300xp to get to 56WHm and so far in the past few hours I've knocked out 56WHM and am current 2k tnl (57WHM). The xp has been very good off Lesser Colibri's, chain from 200-253 after the ring wore off and being WHM really isn't that hard. Make sure people stay out of yellow HP and they are happy with you!

I don't get anything at 57 really, no AF and only Shellra III. At 56 I should have Raise II but I sold it last month when I farmed it up on RDM/NIN so I'm gonna have to head back out to Castle Oztroja and grab another one since they are about 200k a piece (why??).

no shows

2006-10-13T08:34:00.000-05:00

So last night's Ouryu was cancelled since there was so many no shows, which is really lame since we should have had 2 orbs for Ouryu and 2 orbs for Bahamut... I didn't even get Bahamat v1 done either so the night was quite disappointing. We did decided to check the Dobsenflies and some were up. We killed the three that were there but got only 3 Dobson Bandanna. Not even a sallet or ring. Kinda on par with the night we were having. When we warped I had a greater desire to watch TV so I didn't xp on WHM, but I am going to see if I can drag it to the ENM tonight and possibly leech 3k xp (I'm 2300xp till 56WHM) so I can wear my Healer's Pantaloons.

surprise surprise

2006-10-12T17:08:00.000-05:00

No horn, melee and/or RDMs didn't have poison pots. DL pwnd us and I really hope it's going to become a requirment to bring a RR item and a damn poison pot. After the wipe we farmed for 90 mins and got 0 AF again...

Highlight of the night was getting RDM and BLM to drop from non-NM mobs before we fought DL. Both were for IRON-members-only, and neither went to me. Grats to Omnaru for the Chapeau (this is what, her 4th uber item in a month) and Tsatin for his Pestasos. Tonight is Ouryu I think and after is Bahamut v2. I can't enter v2 yet but I am hoping the LS beats v1 for me tonight and unlocks v2 for me so I can get closer to my Magnetic Earring.

Briault

2006-10-11T12:59:00.000-05:00

Last night I logged in to miss Faf, then somehow the NPC took my gil but didn't give me a Cleanser to enter Omega... so I was locked out of that. They got Feet/Head. Afterwards some people went to sky, but I wanted to finish out my WHM AF and all I had left was my AF Body. I researched and only needed to trade my Tavnazian Bell to a ??? to spawn a level 65 NM. I thought I could solo it on RDM/NIN and just as I was about to hit up the HQ warp taru someone shouted they had 4/6 and wanted WHM AF body! Damn!

I hopped into the group, headed out to Fei'Yin and we killed it 4x without any problems. I was having fun trying to steal hate from the NIN, and it wasn't hard by using Spirits or debuffing the NM. Eventually he pulled out his NIN tricks and used his ja's and ninjitsu to keep hate. Still, wasn't too hard with WHM, BLM, RDM, RDM/NIN, and a NIN. I also realized there is no way in hell I would have been able to solo him, he spams aga's and then manafonts (wtf this is for WHM body not BLM!). I was real tired, it was 1am and I needed some sleep so I headed off after I got my Healer's Briault. Now I just need to get to 60 to wear it all (currently 55WHM and 3k tnl). I might just do WHM next instead of BST... cause BST is realy starting to annoy me with how slow xp is. I'm getting about 2k per hour which is damn slow. Annoying this is I bought gear for BST and if I put it on the back burner thats like 500k wasted.

Tonight is yet ANOTHER night that I am going to try for SMN horn. I just pray this damn thing drops so I can be done with it. Oh yeah, my bud Wyred put a link in his blog to show where he lives, well this is where I work:NYC.

Holy Manaburn Batman

2006-10-10T12:59:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I was pretty sick, so I stayed home from work. I got about 3.5k on BST before Selanda asked about a BLM pt. She had 1 spot left. I jumped in cause I absolutely love getting Gjallarhorn ballads coupled with sanction refresh and my Black Cloak. I xp'd for 5 friggin hours but got 60,000 xp. Sixty thousand. We had a corp of dedicated BLMs who didn't have anything better to do with their time. I walked in with 1 merit + 5300 limit points and left with 7 merits and 5700 limit points. Crazy.

The only thing that broke the party was Fafnir's upcoming window. I capped Burst II and saved the other 2 merits for something else (maybe ltng potency, maybe INT, maybe a SMN merit since the update is coming soon). Fafnir popped 1st window right in my face. Darters were up and I made sure to not claim a bug, but my stun was interrupted and AD took it down. The even got a Ridill which I'm sure made all our WAR's heads explode. Oh well, no Aquarian Abjuration: Hands dropped... I'm told by a little wyrm that Faf is saving them for me.

After we farmed sea for what seemed like days. Three hours later we finaly had the chips and organs to pop Faith and Fortitude. We got one Jailer of Faith off and it killed about 3 people's PS2 upon spawning. I don't know what SE has programmed into that NM but the only way I don't lock up is to face a wall in 1st person. Pretty friggin stupid since it's the only time, place, event that does this to my machine. It's not laggy like dynamis... It's laggy so that I can't turn, move, type, anything. After about 15 seconds the whole screen goes black and I have to reboot the entire PS2. Whe I came back it was dead but they got weapon, torque, and virtue. Needless to say I was pissed since we spent 3 hours getting to this stupid thing only to have me and 2 other PS2 people get locked up and have to reset. I warped out cause it was getting close to midnight and I had been going almost 14 hours straight at that point. Concerning Burst II I was getting a steady 1352 on most mobs I was casting on. This was without Rairin Obi or Uggalepih Pendant on, just regular equipment. I want to see how much I'm MB'ing on things like Chlevnik, Fafnir, etc.

Oh and some asshat undercut my Hedgehog pies so he could make a quick buck... moron. People will pay full price for these items, these undercutters just can't wait more than 1 hour to get their gil though.

I'm sick, this sucks

2006-10-08T22:07:00.000-05:00

I spent all day today running a 101 degree fever so suffice it to say I have been grumpy all day. Started out the day finally getting Mt. Zhaylom maps, Gates of Halvung key, and Oldton Movapolis map. Just things I saw that I needed to get done earlier this week. Crafted up 6 Hedgehog Pies and went afk till Dynamis... I mean, this is Sunday and football comes before FFXI.

When I came back we did Dynamis - Sandy. Got PLD x3, RDM x2, WHM x2, BRD x2, MNK, RNG, WAR, and NIN. No BST which is the only thing I could really use since theres no BLM in Sandy and I already have RDM and SMN. Twas an easy run and afterwards we went to Fafnir. He popped early and the same LS that claimed and died to Faf last night claimed it again... After 20 minutes that had done 3% damage... I understand that the only way LS's get better is through practice, but on a personal level it gets annoying losing claim of an HNM to a LS who is "practicing". Luckily, this time the LS leaders got together and agreed to /random. We won the random and after a while the LS just slept it and escaped out. Once we claimed it we killed it in 16:00. Really wasn't that hard a kill and I think I hit an all-time high for MB with 1541 (and I didn't even die!) Drops were kinda weak though. We did get a Neptunal Abjuration: Head which makes (when uncursed) a Hecatomb Cap. Grats to Hares on that mean ass beret. Still no A. Hands from Faf yet... cheapass. Anyways, was a fun day. I logged at 11pm which is early for me but I'm feeling crappy so I'm heading off to sleep. If I am miraculously cured overnight I'll head into work but I highly doubt it. If I do call in I'll try and xp BST so that I can get to 60 so I can finally wear my AF.

Drama on the high seas!

2006-10-07T23:48:00.000-05:00

So yea, we just killed Fafnir. So much lame drama. Word to the wise, if want to kill HNMs do not:

bring only 6 people
claim it and let it whack you 4x till you die
also claim darters (and more darters and more darters and more darters)
expect the surrounding LS's to not to claim once you wipe

Long story short, some party of about 6 people claimed Faf, and a darter, then 3, then 5. They were wiping and another NA HNM LS says in /say "random". Now there are 2 other LS's besides us two NA LS's here, and one of them always refuses to random, so even if we did random and win we aren't guaranteed a claim when the current holders wipe... so we didn't random. When Faf goes white we claim, and the hilarious part of it was I saw about 4-5 vokes/flashes from the people who were clammering about randoming.

Once it was established we got claim it turned into a crybaby fest. So much lame crap being said in /say, then they were going to try and train darters into Faf, then they just hit rock bottom and spammed /random for 5 minutes straight. Absolutely pathetic. And just to dispel some of the BS that was floating around in /say... yes, we did wipe to Nid yesterday. No, we did not flail it. We wiped from breath after we claimed a darter and then tried to kill links. Another LS claimed and tried to pull it to a corner (bad idea). Then and only then did it flail and wipe all of Aery (which was funny as hell). BTW there was no randoming last night when we got Darters, and the very same crybabies at Aery tonight were at Aery last night trying to claim as we wiped. So obviously they are not only crybabies but they are hypocritical crybabies.

Anyways, excluding all that drama we did pretty well seeing as we had only 2 BLMs (I went SMN cause I was not in the mood to change jobs and shuffle equipment). Took about 25 mins and drops were scales, heart, Aegishjalmr, Andvaranauts, and Aquarian Abjuration: Feet. No hands... but oh well. They went to a BRD which is best. Tonight was Tiamat, Limbus, then Fafnir. Tomorrow I honestly don't know where we are going to do dynamis, I'm hearing jeuno and beaucidine. Anywhere is fine with me except sandy...

slacker

2006-10-07T21:05:00.000-05:00

I been neglecting this for the past few days, here's a quick update.

Thursday - we claimed and killed my first King Vinegarroon. Wasn't that hard, dynamis style type kill. CS stun and let melee go to town. Got a measly 28xp to drop from it and that's it... no Ace's Helm which is a damn fine melee head piece. Later we camped faf but lost claim.

Friday - camped KV again but he didn't spawn, headed to Aery to camp Faf. On the very last window Nidhogg showed up. We got claim and took it to 14% without breaking a sweat. Then a BRD accidently cast threnody on a darter. Honest mistake, there's always massive lag. We tried to kill em but Nid used breath and wiped us. Funny thing was another LS claimed him and pulled him across Aery... and they caused him to Spike Flail! Killed every person in Aery, deleveled 3 people. We quickly HP'd and while we were en route Aribeth and Moontang claimed and were able to hold him for about 5-8 minutes. We arrived and took him down without any more problems. We were rewarded with not one but TWO Martial Abjuration: Body!! Huge grats to Hares and Kataru and a bigger thanks to Moon and Ari! Fun times.

Saturday - I was afk most of the day but came on for Tiamat's pop. We took longer than normal, we were short on SMNs and tanks. Took about 1:15 whereas our average time is 40-50 mins. Dropped more Gaiters so that was nice. After we did a Apollyn SW and got 2 coins each and BST/MNK items. I had the BST so it wasn't a big deal. Right now we are camping Faffy [Day 1] so I have some downtime between windows. I'm finally off the No Loot List so I am hoping that some Aquarian Abjuration: Hands drop.

Tomorrow it's sounding like Dynamis - Sandy which blows for me since I have RDM and SMN from there and no BLM drops from there. I'll settle for the BST AF2 pants even tho it goes AF+1 > AF > AF2. That's about it. Also capped BLM xp in an insane manaburn pt outside of Mamook. Something like 30k in 2.25 hours. Now I need to just get another 5 merits for Burst II (tier 3) as well as raise some avatar attacks/acc. The new update targets SAM, DRG, RNG, DRK and SMN! Blood pacts are now offensive and defensive and have 2 seperate timers. So nice to be able to Earthen Ward, release, then use Predator Claws right away.

4 8 15 16 23 42

2006-10-05T08:29:00.000-05:00

Lost.

That was the exciting part of my night, because Dyna-Xarc sucks hardcore... The Lost numbers have more interest, thought I did have my own countdown tonight. 4 hours, 3 deaths, 2 AF2, and 1 Shadow Mantle. Oh yeah, and ZERO Summoner's Horn.

At least starting at midnight tonight I am off the No Lot List.

yawnga

2006-10-04T10:15:00.000-05:00

Ultima last night. Seriously, I don't know why we had ANY trouble with him last week... this week we had him dead in less than 30 minutes and he only got off 2 Citadel Bustaers. I was hoping for the killshot with Tidal Wave but this little eveil taru NIN decided to Mijin Gakure right as my avatar was about to execute my Astral Flow, and he stoled my kirr!

Anyways it dropped 2 Claws and Heart. I am 2 days from coming off the No Lot List and was not able to lot the hands... I want to vent but I'm not going to start drama. There will be other Ultima's, and I am currently happy with my Evk. Bracers +1 so congrats to everyone who got their loot.

In happier news tonight may drop my GAWD DANG Summoner's Horn in Dyna-Xarc, so I have that to look forward to.

My weekend recaps suck

2006-10-02T12:04:00.000-05:00

Mostly because I do alot of little stuff that has not much rememberance to it. Saturday was Limbus, we won again, RNG dropped (and was lost cause no one wanted it). Sunday was Dynamis-Windusrt... oh wait, one LS didn't want to try and follow our little schedule on the ironmog.com website so we had to change our run to Dynamis-Jeuno.

That meant I couldn't get any SMN AF because Jeuno drops no SMN AF. BST AF (while pointless atm) also doesn't drop there. I have Duelist's Tights from Jeuno so all that was left was BLM... and the Sorcerer's Sabots suck for the most part. Conserve MP+5 is their main stat which is nice if it only processed enough. Well we got the win and AF rained down on us (WHMx4, MNKx2, RNG, SAM, THF, BRD, DRG, and BLM). I lotted 704 on the boots but lost to a 777 and an 806. Since I wasn't hard pressed to get them it didn't sting that much, but what did sting was not being able to do Dyna-Windy which could have dropped Summoner's Spats which is the only piece of body armor I have that isn't BP- delay. Oh well.

Friday night I helped Xylo get t ToAU mission 15 and later on did 4 straight Assaults (2 Mamool, 2 Lamia 13). I have 17,340 Assault points in Iltrusi Atoll area, and even though I know I should get that stupid Yigit Turban I am so so so tempted to get the melee body piece. Right now on RDM/NIN I use Narasimha's Vest which is STR/VIT+3 and acc/eva+4. The Pahluwan Khazagand which is HP+20, acc/ranged acc +10 and an increase in critical hits. Comparing them I think having more HP, more acc, and more chance for a critical attack outweighs STR/VIT+3. I'll never wear the Yigit set for auto-refresh, and I have 4 pieces of headgear already for BLM... so I'll end up getting the melee body probably. Then again, I need 2-3 parties this week to get that piece...

Oh yeah, I made a Porcupine Pie this morning! It's a HQ version of Hedgehog Pie. This wouldn't mean alot but to me it does because not only is it a 35k profit on the NQ (55k on the HQ) but it's a 94 cap synth and I am a 95+2 cook. That means I made a tier 0 synth! Yay me... I think I'm gonna start cooking some more, I made a stack of Melon Pie +1 last week that sold for a nice coin as well.

Change of plans!

2006-09-29T12:47:00.000-05:00

We didn't have much planned for Thursday event night, so we decided to do 2-3 Kirins. Of course as soon as 20 of us gathered in Kirin's room... Tiamat had to pop.

I'm not sure how we knew it popped, but I do know that we were the 1st ones to know and the 1st ones there on the scene. The fight took about an hour. (We were very sloppy) Winraf and his brickwall tank wasn't there, and I don't think Aribeth showed until the 45 minute mark. I didn't die this time (thankfully) and when all was said and done the drops were a Damascne Cloth and Wyrm Horn.

Stupid cheapass wyrm.

Real rough night...

2006-09-28T08:47:00.000-05:00

So I put BST on the backburner for a night, it just was annoying me too much, I'll pick it up again this weekend. Instead I headed out to sea on SMN and started to solo. Used my Emp Band, killed 3 Om'Hpemdes and on the 4th instead of using my Flaming Crush macro I used Release macro... I mean, I've done this before and that's why I renamed my release macro OOOOO on the macro set, but I was half paying attention and got my ass handed to me... with no reraise... and no one was anywhere even remotely close. Only if people were popping JoL would they find me. So I HP'd, upset with myself.

Bumped into a casino, I won 1.2M gil and walked away. I went to Windy to find out my stupid choco "KikuFubuki" hurt it's leg in group exercise. Then I raced it and it won... I am now 1/1 when it is sick, 1/1 when it is injured, and 1/3 when it is healthy. Awesome. I ate dinner, came back and bought a Prism Cape to upgrade my Rainbow Cape. Hit the casino up again cause I just couldn't walk away with the luck I was having, and proceeded to lose 1.4M and finally gave up. So not only did I spend 1.5M on a cape I really didn't need but I lost 200k on top of that. I headed to Dynamis - Xarcabard hoping that a Summoner's Horn would lift my spirits.

Nope. Not only did we not get any AF from the NMs, not only did we lose to DL from back to back Oblivion Smashes, not only did we get no AF from every single mob we hit up the 2 hours we spent farming after we lost to DL... but I died so much on BLM I deleveled 2x only to get my level back with 5 mins left. I have a 1300xp buffer on my BLM now, which absolutely blows.

Recap:

HP'd on SMN
Injured choco
Lost 200k overall @ casino
No Summoner's Horn
No DL win
Deleveled and lost my buffer on BLM

Liberator

2006-09-27T08:29:00.000-05:00

Last night's event was Proto-Ultima. Started off good, got him down to 24% in 36 mins, then Win had to go and die, and Mareko 5 seconds later so we held him while they unweakened, then BLMs got hate and started to drop. Of course while we were holding him he dropped below 20% and we had to outrun some Citadel Busters... It was quite sloppy but we won in the end with about 5 minutes to spare. Drops were pieces for Nashira Gages and Nashira Seraweels. Gages went to my arch-nemesis Evilbob and Seraweels went to Lunarian, so a huge grats to both.

Afterwards I did some meriting into the night (too late because I woke up at 8:41am and needed to be at work at 9:00am). Ended up getting about 28,000 xp and am halfway to getting a fourth merit which will take me to Burst II tier 2. Other than that it was a slow night. Tried to solo BST, died twice and ended up with 200xp less than I started with when I gave up. BST is really frustrating me... I think I'm just camping the wrong place (Ule Range Hares).

Dynamis-Xarcabard tonight, is tonight my night for Summoner's Horn?

Treasure Hunter... over-rated or under-appreciated?

2006-09-26T10:30:00.000-05:00

Last night was sea farming. To some it is boring but to me I have yet to tire of farming sea like I have tired from farming sky. Amazingly we had about 22 people show up and we were able to get alot done. We farmed up our chips for fortitude, and in the process aggro'd every single damn Eo'zdei in the area. To our luck we popped Temperence. Killed him, got virtue but no torque. I was able to snag myself a Temperance Axe for my BST. Kinda sucked cause Kulgan was high lot and was escaped, then Dunpeald was high lot... and escaped. So it kinda fell to me. NOW I am officially done with jailer weapons... I have no more jobs anywhere that can use anymore weapons. Next we went to Fortitude, popped him, killed him, got virtue but no torque. I had a nice MB and either need to merit enimty or our gimpy PLD Winraf needs to merit his enmity. Either way... I got rocked.
Then we finished our night off with a Ix'MNK. Very easy, popped all 3 of em since we had so many people, and I pulled out my BLM TH4 skills with the killshot. Who needs Treasure Hunter???Congrats Eowyyn on your new shiny Merciful Cape. The alliance broke and a handful of us went to Oldton Movapolis to pop Goblin Wolfman for Winraf and Aribeth. There was about 5 other people spread out at all 3 spawn points trying to get the target to pop so they could trade their Goblin Drink to it. We ended up getting 3 of the 4 pops in an hour and 2 of the 3 dropped the Parade Gorget. Grats to Win and Ari for their nifty neckpiece. It is an item that has been a FFXI mystery for over a year and it's finally been solved. It's got nice stats too, MP+10 and 1MP/tick refresh when your HP is over 75%.

Pretty uneventful weekend

2006-09-25T15:20:00.000-05:00

Well no ninja stolen pics from JoL. Meh, oh well. Saturday we did Limbus, got some coins. Sitting at about 23 coins and 1/2 items for SMN, RDM, BST and BLM. Also went out and solo'd my Beast Trousers (lv60). Easy stuff. Got some help from Cerrra getting the Beadeaux coffer key to drop for the Jackcoat (lv58). Ended up popping that coffer on Sunday.

Tried to xp on BST, but I say tried... cause I wasn't that well versed in the job nor did I have any good gear for it. I died 4x in 2 hours and gave up. Netted a whopping -2500xp.

Sunday was Dynamis - Beaucidine. Was looking for Sorcerer's Coat to drop, it did. I lotted a 347, winning lot was 904. Grats Zylador, you can join Evilbob on my "hate to love ya/love to hate ya" list. Duo'd some xp on BST with Cerrra, xp was ok but nothing great. Might have to wait till 60+ in Attowha Chasm to get good xp. Finished off Sunday with some KS99 runs. We did 4 runs and the loot all sucked... badly. Most expensive drop was a 1M Baynard's Sword (which I got) but has been undercut from 4M to 1M in the last 10 sales and doesn't sell at all on the AH. No hides, no tongues... was a crap night for drops. Oh yeah, found a casino in Whitegate. Ended up winning 1.4M from this dude over about 15 minutes. Ended up paying for the melee gear I needed to buy for BST, though I still need a pair of Ryl Squire's Breeches until I hit 60BST. There's one pair on the AH and the last 10 sales have averaged 140k with one of the last 3 sales being 100k. Guess what, it won't sell to me for 200k... greedy morons. No sale for you.

Dammit show me some Love...

2006-09-22T08:31:00.000-05:00

Last night we had only one event planned. That event was to fight Jailer of Love three times. I figured we'd get at least one Absolute Virtue... nope. Either way, still was fun. We took the first one down in one hour and five minutes and the drops were Love Halberd, Love Torque, and Aura of Voracity which when traded in was the Novia Earring. Not a bad set of drops. We rested, buffed, and took the 2nd one down in forty minutes. Was a real clean fight. We started off with BRD's 2 houring and our DRK's 2 houring and going apeshit with their KC's. We took 20% off in the 1st six minutes which is insane. When it finally died we got the exact same drops. We chuckled and sent off two people to get their COR's so that maybe we could get those 2 hours back. Well we went 0/2 on Wild Cards and popped the third and last JoL.

This guy was a pain this time. He spawned 2 sets of pets really fast and we lost our pace. After the 6 pets were killed we focused again on JoL. When he died the third and final time we checked the Treasure and he dropped the exact... same... drops. We ended up getting 3 Halberds, 3 Torques, and 3 Novias. Hell even the Halberd was lost cause I don't think anyone wanted it. AV never showed his face which kinda annoyed me but I was getting tired and didn't feel like losing 10k xp. I bought 2 reraise hairpins cause I thought I would die multiple times to either JoL or AV, and at the end of the night I hadn't died one single time. Poor Drako and Tsatin seemed to draw way more hate than me when his pets were spawned and we were all resting. My only thoughts could be that they share hate and that they were BP'ing for more than me each time which builds up over the course of an hour. Fun night, grats to Cerra, Melena, and Zzion on their Love Torques. Also to Dracosam, Tsatin, and Aidama to their Novia Earrings. Aidama now has both a Novia and Novio Earring. Her friggin taru is a little black ball of death.

(I'll ninja-steal pics when they get posted on our site)

DL dead... yay. No horn dropped... boo.

2006-09-21T10:14:00.000-05:00

Camped Aspi, were the only ones there. Spawned NQ and we killed, no egg and only 2 ores. Stupid turtle. Headed to Dynamis - Xarc and took DL down easy, drops were Jade and yet another Shadow Mantle. That's something like 14 mantles and 8 rings. I don't know the exact count but that's pretty close. Then we headed down the slope to the Animated Gun mob. Killed that in literally 20 seconds. I had time to ES, Thunder IV, and got 50% into Burst II before it was dead.

Tanutanu got his fragment and we made some nice coin. I hear he has 2-3 more Kirin sets he bought so that he can get those elusive W Legs. Fine by us, means probabaly 1-2 more Osodes for the LS. On a sad note this was the 2nd week in a row that no Summoner's Horn dropped, and I'm a little disappointed. My Austere Hat is nice but that horn is so much better. There's always next week. What else... I did end up buying the Vulcan's Satff (now 5/7 HQ staves missing only water and earth), then put 3 merits into Meteor Crush. I headed out to sea to get my 3000xp off my empress band and found that M.Strike hits for about 1500 and costs about 182mp while Flaming Crush hits for about 2000-3500 and costs only 164mp. All I know is if I put 2 more merits into that BP it better out-damage Flaming Crush...

Tonight we have 4 pop sets for Jailer of Love. I'm buying 2 RR Hairpins cause I just know we're gonna pop at least one (maybe two) AV's and there's going to be a fair amount of death before we "lock him" into a beatable mode.

"OMG I CLAIMED ASPIDOC...um, crap... Adamantoise.

2006-09-20T13:36:00.000-05:00

Well I got home in time to camp Aspi, he popped and yours truly claimed him. That's my first ever claim on the turtle, but not until I pulled him to a clearing did I see that I claimed Adamantoise. Funny thing was it wasn't until after I type "OMG I GORT HIM!" Anyways, he died in almost 30 seconds and we got 4 ores and I lost my cool Nid title. Oh well, I'm sure he'll pop during our Dynamis - Xarc run tonight anyways.

Afterwards people kinda dispersed into xp parties, I landed in one that was sorta questionable but tried to make it work. SMN, RDM, THF, NIN, RNG, DRK. Pulled in 10k after about 90 mins but I was using an xp ring so it was prolly closer to 7k/hour. Wasn't meriting, I badly needed a buffer on my SMN, so I got it 1/4 full and then sorta logged. Was a slow night, no sea, no assaults, no dynamis. This morning I tried calling POL to buy a content ID so I can befriend some people on Odin and found out that a POL customer service guy bent the rules for me last week and now I can't get an id.

I'll explain. On Sept 1st I called in to reset my email password. I was able to provide everything but a registration code so the rep issued what they call a "one time exception". I got the email password reset and was fine. The very next day my ID's were deactivated because I transferred money into savings, not checking... POL still got paid but since there was a banking error they deactivated the IDs. I called them up and tried to confirm the account. I was asked the regisration codes and again was unable to provide them. The sales rep was cool and said he'd go ahead and put down I provided my codes if I could verify all the billing info. I did, and he reactivated my IDs. Now I call up today asking for a Content ID and this asshat is telling me that he can't update my IDs without the registration codes, and since my account says I verified them when I called about my deactivated IDs... it says in the system that I know my registration code (which I don't!). His reply was, "If you really want another character than you need to verify you current codes or purchase a new copy of the game and use that registration code".

If I could jump into my cell phone I would have gouged that schmuck's eyes out with a spoon and fed them to him through his nose. So... since I refuse to pay $20-$30 for the game only so I can spend $1 more a month for a new ID, I won't be creating a character on Odin. Feck.

Multi-hitastical

2006-09-19T08:41:00.000-05:00

Last night we camped Aspi, got Adamantoise (I just know it's gonna pop on us tomorrow in Dynamis). Then we went off to kill Jailer of Prudence. Our 1st kill was easy, we got a Sixth Virtue but no Prudence Torque. We also got a Prudence Rod which is a 100% drop. Our second kill was kind fo ugly. About 5 people died, and at about 11% Mareko called off damage so we could get our TH4 in tot he alliance. I was about 15% into a Burst II and I moved around to cancel the spell. Some people kept hitting it and for some reason and at about 4% I still cast Burst II on the stupid NM... and killed it. Why the spell went off I have no clue, lag maybe. So of course our TH4 wasn't in alliance and we only got the rod. The third one was even easier than the first one, and we had TH4 in the alliance and still got only the rod. One of those rods went to me and that means I now have all three weapons for my lv75 jobs. I've collected Hope Staff, Justice Sword and Prudence Rod in about a week. Fun stuff.

After the jailers we headed into Hu'xzoi and and farmed up some chips to use towards a Fortitude and also to pop Temperance. We ended up with only 4 chips because ee had no treasure hunter in the parties and after hitting 3 of the 5 towers we got no pop on Temperance. It was coming up on KB window so we headed out.

I put my Jet Seraweels up on the AH for the last time, this time for 2.499M (I paid 2.8M) and got ready to go to sleep. His window was going to be 1:30am to 4:30am (EST) and sadly I usually can't go past 2am when it comes to having to get up for my crappy job. When I woke up this morning I heard we got KB! The drops were Crimson Mask and Pixie Earring. Grats to Omnaru on the mask (good god, Zenith Mitts, Dalmatica, and now Crimson Mask in about 10 days... someone is sleeping with the leadership!) and Dunpeald on the earring (I've seen Dun delevel his RNG about 10x since I joined 2 weeks ago... he deserves it). I also found that my "well undercutted" Seraweels sold finally, so now I have about 3.4M gil and nothing really to buy for SMN/RDM/BLM that I can think of. I stood at the AH for about 15 minutes and could only think of buying a Vulcan Staff for when I solo with Ifrit on SMN... and even then I couldn't bring myself to spend 1.2M gil for avatar perp-1. (though I'll prolly buy it when I get home...)

second guessing sucks

2006-09-18T14:04:00.000-05:00

Well after a while I'm second guessing whether I should have upgraded SMN AF feet. I got the hands done which is BP delay -1. It's a nice stat, and it's what all AF2 is centered around. The AF+1 feet are avatar perpetuation-1 which is great to have if I am soloing.

Honestly I'm still going for the feet as well trying to gather up as much AF2 as I can. Right now with my gear on I am at BP delay-10 and avatar perp-4. Had I chose the AF+1 feet I'd have been at BP delay-8 and avatar perp-5.

Honestly I need the damn Summoner's Spats which is BP delay-2. Legs is the only place I dont have either BP/perp gear. Damn I'm hella bored at work, I have this window resized so only the text portion shows and I have it on top of my Outlook so it looks like I'm writing an email to someone...

*random thoughts

Tonight I'm coming to sea farming as a SMN cause I need xp
I have 3 merits and I don't know whether to put em into a new BP, Lightning potency, Elemental skill, or Freeze II or just save em for Level 7 Max MP.
SMN really needs to drop Wednesday in Xarc
I need gil... and 96 cooking/84 fishing isn't the money maker that my old 96 clothcraft was
I need to find out what my damn registration code is so I can buy a content ID and make a mule on Odin to befriend some people

Holy Macaroni...

2006-09-17T20:40:00.000-05:00

After getting my AF+1 I headed out to Fafnir. Sure enough Nidhogg popped early and a japanese LS named "Benediction" claimed it. They started off a little short-handed (I think they had 9-12 people) and within about 2 minutes their tank DC'd. I have no clue if he ever came back but it took them 23 minutes to take off 7% and they kept sleeping it and resting and we knew the inevitable was going to happen.

They started inviting outside players and took it to about 22% after an hour, but when that 60th minute ticked over Nidhogg went from managable NM to raging king... They were able to hold on for about 10 minutes but then the wings started coming and they were hitting for 600+ and we knew it was time to try and claim. It got to about 20% and we claimed it, and I'm not sure but I was told that it was no longer in rage mode after we claimed and slept and reset hate. Not killing a lot of kings I wasn't too versed in how to (if possible) reset rage mode, but we were able to handle it without much problem and take Nid down, and boy did he reward us... Grats to Omnaru and Ohlaeym to their new green carpet bodies (i.e. Dalmatica). Was a nice way to start the morning. We did a Dynamis Beaucidine afterwards but it was a attestation run so we didn't go full force into farming mode. We ended up getting Attestations for hand-to-hand, great sword, and dagger. The AF we got was Cleric's Briault x2, a Koga Chainmail, a Abyss Cuirass and a 100 coin. We also got 2 Assassin's Culotte which were free lots. One went to Evilbob and the other... I can't remember. No SMN or BLM AF dropped... either way it was a fun run, congrats to Fuuko and Smaegol on your Briaults and to Kulgan for his Cuirass/GS test and finally to Mirax for his dagger test. Such a plentiful day!

Limbus goodies

2006-09-17T15:15:00.000-05:00

Didn't do a whole lot yesterday, we camped and claimed Fafnir, but didn't get any good drops from him though. I did alot of soloing in the Thickets on SMN and ended up using Fenrir most of the time. I got my Staff skill ip to about 207, unlocking Full Swing (which looks cool but is kind of a sucky WS).

At the end of the night we did a Limbus run. We did Temenos West and I got my 2nd piece needed to make my first SMN AF+1. I turned it in with a 60k Wolf Felt and 20 coins. This morning I picked up my new armor, Evoker's Bracers +1. The Summoner's Bracers (AF2 hands) are better since they have BP delay-2 and MP+25 but until I can snag those I'm wearing these whenever I don't wear carby mitts.

Thank you Tiamat!

2006-09-16T12:11:00.000-05:00

Started the night off heading to Attowha Chasm for the weekly ENM. I didn't have to climb that stupid mountain cause last week I didn't turn in my Parradamo Stones to the NPC for the Key Item to enter the ENM... (dumbass). We gathered and waited but we weren't getting enough people to come to Boneyard Gully so we decided to camp Tiamat. We had killed it Sunday night and it being Friday night Tiamat was due to pop within the hour. Within about 25 minutes she popped and we got our people there. We already had about 10 but we needed our tanks and SAMs.

We pulled and once again had no trouble on her. This time though I was a BLM because I had come to the ENM as BLM and was really not in the mood to warp back to change jobs only to have to run back out here as a SMN. We ended up having something crazy like 1-2 SMNs and 6-7 BLMs. MB's were becoming a competition. Earlier in the day I put 3 merits I had on hold into my lightning potency bringing it up to Level 3, so I was eager to test out my findings. On my first Burst II MB, I actually ended up pulling hate and dying. The sad thing was when I got my second Burst II MB to land Tiamat didn't so much as look my way, and it hit for 43 more dmg!

I started feeling good about myself because every MB I landed they got stronger each time. Ater I landed that Burst II MB pictured aboved, Mareko used Meditate and went again for Fragmentation, but this was my result.

Wow, what a burst... I follow a 773 Burst II MB with a 68 Thunder IV MB. Go go lightning potency! Afterwards we did the ENM and it was a breeze, though we got crap drops and I didn't win lots on a single item. Still I ended up with 3500 limit points so I can't complain too much, plus the drops on Tiamat were pretty nice as well.

Finally at the end of the night we did a little Ix'DRG farming with the BLMs. This is really really easy xp and you can actually get stuff out of it as well. I ended up getting another merit there and we popped the NM after about 45 minutes. It ended up dropping only a deed but we have enough now for 3 Prudence fights, so that's good I guess. No Jailer of Love this past Thursday, we're holding that till next Thursday, though we did see Lunarians kill a JoL before Tiamat and after Tiamat AD popped AV after killing JoL. They fought it for a few hours and gave up. I heard it never got below 79% because they locked him in TP mode. At least they didn't lock him in spell/2 hour modes. Either way, another depop for a mob people still don't have any proven strat for.

I'm far from Captivating

2006-09-15T08:53:00.000-05:00

Last night was a sky raid. We started with Olla, then headed to Genbu. He dropped A. Head and Kabuto. I always feel bad for Genbu, he's such a joke to fight and dies so easily. We moved over to Seiryu and I was able to witness something amazing while fighting him... When Seiryu used Hundred Fists Winraf didn't invincible and he solo tanked through it's 2 hour. He got down to 200HP once but for the most part he just stood there and let it whack him for 30 seconds. That's the beauty of a D. Ring, Shadow Ring and Shadow Mantle coupled with an Aegis. Truly something to behold. We got got D. Head, W. Hands, and Kote from the dragon, and then over to Suzaku where we got D. Hands and Sune-ate. We were headed to Byakko but AD was doing like 5 of them so we were lucky in that our "contracted member" logged in.

I had never known this but there was an agreement from this taru WHM that he wanted W. Legs. He "contracted" IRON to do two Kirins for him, and we could keep any and all drops except for the W. Legs. Sounds good to me, so we popped the 1st and took it down in record time, was like 30 minutes or so. Dropped Osode, Pole, and D. Body. Sucks for him but we just got a free Osode. We waited 15 minutes and popped the second one. Same story different chapter. Took him down in about 30 minutes and he dropped another D. Body and two O. Ingots. The taru was probably a little upset, but I'm sure this guy bought the seals since when I checked him he had the most amazing gear, including relic club, Triumph+1, and a HQ Errant cape...

Then he let leadership know he had a third and final set of seals. Damn boy, he came prepared. We popped Kirin and he decided to Astral Flow while we were fighting Byakko and it hit pretty much everyone. While we tried to recover he summoned Suzaku. We had a near wipe, I think 20/25 people died. We slowly raised and sac'd to keep him up in the middle, and when we were out of weakness we were able to kite the bird and take the cat down. Once we started in on Suzy it was smooth sailing, and when Genbu died Kirin was at about 85%. We got our brickwall (aka Winraf) into the alliance and that sob straight tanked Kirin on PLD from 85% to 0%. It was really one of the most amazing things I ever saw. We took it down quickly and to the taru's dismay (not to ours) we got another Osode and Quake! So when it was all said and done we had 3 Kirins, 2 Shura Togi's, and 2 Kirin's Osodes and didn't use a single seal from the LS vault. Not a bad bounty.

By this time AD was done with Byakko so we headed out for our final 2 fights of the night. We got 2 D. Legs and a D. Log from the 1st Byakko (wtf) and on the second we got E. Feet and a B. Hide. Ended up going 0/2 on Byakko's Haidate and it was the only god gear that didn't drop last night, but still it was a successful night all in all. I got screwed on my Astral Flow though when we took down the 2nd Byakko... see pictures below, they speak for themselves.

Astral Flow for fun

then

Good way to end the night, 2 Astral Flows, 1 hits for 62 damage and the 2nd is paralyzed. Whoopee!