Well we just had an update from SE and RDM looks like its getting a few nice pieces it can equip. About time too. Probably going to be semi hard drop rates on the stuff but at least this type of thing is more doable with my schedule than anything I could hope to do with a sky/hnm LS. That body piece with refresh looks real nice for merit party use, tp burn in particular for the refresh effect, and for Nuking and Solo play especially something like ENM Holy cow type of solos.
I hate that I’m not going to be able to really play much in the next two weeks with all the holiday stuff going on. Probably put me behind in trying to get a good salvage group together. Although, I am very hopeful that Spirit Link will do runs on the weekends I can go on. With this new gear it puts a slight damper on all the sea stuff we can get but the Gorgets, COP rings, and loquacious earring is still going to be nice. I figure we will probably just finish up the last 3 missions of COP and then hit salvage and assault pretty hard.
Anyways yesterday was Dynamis-Beac. Pretty good run for number of drops although we had a couple no one was lotting on and they just auto sorted (a bst and drk). Pusarah finally got her first piece of Relic AF and it was the whm body. That’s a really good body piece to have from what I can tell. So congratulations to her. We also had our very first Duelist tabard to drop. Too bad I had to spend so many points getting my hat. Oh well it looks like only one person ahead of me for the tabard now instead of two, unless he decides to hold points for the hat which may or may not happen. It’s more of a situational piece anyways unlike the hat that I try to keep on full time.
We did 2 attestation mobs trying to get the sword and dagger ones to drop. Killed both without too much problem but got a horn and great axe attestation instead. We did get a 100 piece to drop though from one of them. All in all I think we walked away with 6 AF 2 attestations and 1 100 piece. Pretty damn good for a northlands run. And to top it off I only had one death as main puller although to me personally this is the far and away easiest zone to pull.
Probably won’t have anything to post for a while but who knows.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Monday, December 18, 2006
Best Weekend Ever
Wow what a weekend. So much happened it can only be referred to as my greatest weekend in game ever.
Friday.
Nothing too big happened Friday. Well at least not too me. My Cop static fought the NM’s for 7-4 in preparation for the tenzen fight. Unfortunately I had to log before we got to tenzen but the other 6 members went a head and did the fight. They won and got sea and it was a great night for them. I was able to log in a little later right after they got sea and congratulate them. My turn would be the next day so I wasn’t really disappointed I only wish I could have shared the experience with them when they got it.
So anyways after logging back in that night I decided to go give Wolfman a try again for my gorget. Vartan offered to come out and help (and bring me more Goblin Drinks) so I told him to come on. On the third spawn he finally dropped my gorget so now I get to go back to leveling PLD again. YAY! I have really been enjoying PLD even more than I thought I would.
Saturday.
This is the day all the stars aligned for my character. If you read my last entry you know this was Dynamis Xarcabard day. Can you guess where I am going with this? That’s right, after 8 month’s in my shell and who knows how many Xarcabard runs the Duelist chapeau dropped and I lotted a 713 beating out Clownfyre. I couldn’t stop shaking for like the next 30 minutes. I can’t begin to describe how great it felt to obtain this. This is an item that all RDM dream about from the day they hear about it. Hell, even jobs that aren’t RDM know how extremely good this piece of gear is. It turns a so-so RDM into a good one, and I like to think I was good before I ever got it.
I didn’t get much chance to play around with it much after dynamis because my COP static got together to do my Tenzen fight so I could join them in sea. Ss we go at tenzen again and it was just laughable. Not counting my cut scene the fight took 45 seconds… we could easily have set the record if I had just speed through the cs. So on the same day I got a Duelist chapeau and sea access. Simply incredible.
We also went ahead and got the map for sea and finished up 8-1 so now we all have our Tavnazian ring as well. This is really nice considering Bastok has yet to own Tavnazia so I can’t get the outpost warp there. So like I said, this was a really great day.
Sunday.
When I logged on Sunday Zeitsev sent a tell wanting to know if I would do Bionic bug so of course I said yes. SO me Zeit, Pusarah, and Hemdall all went to farm the stones in Movapolis. This is where I got to see a brief glance of my Hat in action. Most of these mobs are DC to 75. Hemdall, who was on brd, would pull them with elegy and I would bind them. Bind was simply stated amazing for me now on DC’s. My one cast of bind several times lasted through 4 tier IV magic blast and another 3 tier III blast from me. It was ridiculous that all that damage couldn’t break the bind effect. This wasn’t a one time thing either, it happen about 90% of the time I would say. So I was very much pleased with that.
After about 2 hours of farming we had a stone for everyone to enter and went into the mine shaft. Bionic bug is pretty easy really. Could get away doing it with just a RDM and BLM I believe. But since we like doing things as a LS anyways and do lots of these things its no big deal splitting the gil up and having more people come along to get the xp too. Drops weren’t all that great. Got an eltoro leather and a martial knife. About 370k total so it’s another 92.5k in my pocket.
After this the LS had scheduled a swift belt run. Unfortunaly Zeit ran into a problem with his connection and couldn’t get on. He called POL and was trying to fix things but that wasn’t going to well apperantly. WE waiting around for about an hour and a half but Zeit wasn’t able to make it back on. So the 4 of us who were gathered already, Me Marlow Hemdall and Keeva, decided to go merit some.
I was glad for the chance to merit since now that I have my hat I really feel like maxing everything out so I can as good as I can. WE did good with just the 4 of us in the mire and I know Marlow was thankful to be doing it on BLM. In fact in a 4 man I think blm can be a huge bonus as basically with our setup of NIN BRD RDM and BLM we would let Keeva melee a imp down to 50% and then Me and Marlow would nuke it to death making for some very quick kills. It also helped with the times we had to pull jnun as those things have a lot more HP to take care of.
Oh and for the record 8 mp a tic refresh now felt like cheating. I converted 3 times in about 2 hours of partying and this was with me doing a decent amount of nuking which I almost never do in merit parties. We even asked Vartan come help kill making me have to cure more and adding in another haste and it still didn’t put much of a dent into my mp reserve. Oh and enfeebles were kind of hard to notice much on as these things are already easy to land stuff on and in general I only need to cast Dia as they die to fast. Maybe next time I’ll experiment a bit more.
Friday.
Nothing too big happened Friday. Well at least not too me. My Cop static fought the NM’s for 7-4 in preparation for the tenzen fight. Unfortunately I had to log before we got to tenzen but the other 6 members went a head and did the fight. They won and got sea and it was a great night for them. I was able to log in a little later right after they got sea and congratulate them. My turn would be the next day so I wasn’t really disappointed I only wish I could have shared the experience with them when they got it.
So anyways after logging back in that night I decided to go give Wolfman a try again for my gorget. Vartan offered to come out and help (and bring me more Goblin Drinks) so I told him to come on. On the third spawn he finally dropped my gorget so now I get to go back to leveling PLD again. YAY! I have really been enjoying PLD even more than I thought I would.
Saturday.
This is the day all the stars aligned for my character. If you read my last entry you know this was Dynamis Xarcabard day. Can you guess where I am going with this? That’s right, after 8 month’s in my shell and who knows how many Xarcabard runs the Duelist chapeau dropped and I lotted a 713 beating out Clownfyre. I couldn’t stop shaking for like the next 30 minutes. I can’t begin to describe how great it felt to obtain this. This is an item that all RDM dream about from the day they hear about it. Hell, even jobs that aren’t RDM know how extremely good this piece of gear is. It turns a so-so RDM into a good one, and I like to think I was good before I ever got it.
I didn’t get much chance to play around with it much after dynamis because my COP static got together to do my Tenzen fight so I could join them in sea. Ss we go at tenzen again and it was just laughable. Not counting my cut scene the fight took 45 seconds… we could easily have set the record if I had just speed through the cs. So on the same day I got a Duelist chapeau and sea access. Simply incredible.
We also went ahead and got the map for sea and finished up 8-1 so now we all have our Tavnazian ring as well. This is really nice considering Bastok has yet to own Tavnazia so I can’t get the outpost warp there. So like I said, this was a really great day.
Sunday.
When I logged on Sunday Zeitsev sent a tell wanting to know if I would do Bionic bug so of course I said yes. SO me Zeit, Pusarah, and Hemdall all went to farm the stones in Movapolis. This is where I got to see a brief glance of my Hat in action. Most of these mobs are DC to 75. Hemdall, who was on brd, would pull them with elegy and I would bind them. Bind was simply stated amazing for me now on DC’s. My one cast of bind several times lasted through 4 tier IV magic blast and another 3 tier III blast from me. It was ridiculous that all that damage couldn’t break the bind effect. This wasn’t a one time thing either, it happen about 90% of the time I would say. So I was very much pleased with that.
After about 2 hours of farming we had a stone for everyone to enter and went into the mine shaft. Bionic bug is pretty easy really. Could get away doing it with just a RDM and BLM I believe. But since we like doing things as a LS anyways and do lots of these things its no big deal splitting the gil up and having more people come along to get the xp too. Drops weren’t all that great. Got an eltoro leather and a martial knife. About 370k total so it’s another 92.5k in my pocket.
After this the LS had scheduled a swift belt run. Unfortunaly Zeit ran into a problem with his connection and couldn’t get on. He called POL and was trying to fix things but that wasn’t going to well apperantly. WE waiting around for about an hour and a half but Zeit wasn’t able to make it back on. So the 4 of us who were gathered already, Me Marlow Hemdall and Keeva, decided to go merit some.
I was glad for the chance to merit since now that I have my hat I really feel like maxing everything out so I can as good as I can. WE did good with just the 4 of us in the mire and I know Marlow was thankful to be doing it on BLM. In fact in a 4 man I think blm can be a huge bonus as basically with our setup of NIN BRD RDM and BLM we would let Keeva melee a imp down to 50% and then Me and Marlow would nuke it to death making for some very quick kills. It also helped with the times we had to pull jnun as those things have a lot more HP to take care of.
Oh and for the record 8 mp a tic refresh now felt like cheating. I converted 3 times in about 2 hours of partying and this was with me doing a decent amount of nuking which I almost never do in merit parties. We even asked Vartan come help kill making me have to cure more and adding in another haste and it still didn’t put much of a dent into my mp reserve. Oh and enfeebles were kind of hard to notice much on as these things are already easy to land stuff on and in general I only need to cast Dia as they die to fast. Maybe next time I’ll experiment a bit more.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Dynamis Xarcabard
So Dynamis Xarcabard was last night. I’ll go ahead and end the suspense by saying my hat once again didn’t drop. The anticipation of it happening is mind numbing. I mean I have gotten myself into a high point position in a very good Dynamis shell that does Xarcabard a ton. I know one day it will drop and that I’ll get it. It’s still hard though not to feel utterly sick every time we kill Duke Berith and no AF drops. Especially since I may have to wait for a second drop as I could lose the lot against the one other person who is high enough in points to lot against me.
Enough about my woes. We were originally going to go for the win but we had several people missing yesterday so are going to try for the win Saturday instead. At least it is another chance at the Chapeau. We got 5 AF total which is really nice for a Xarcabard run. I think we got SAM, BLM, RNG, WAR and I can’t remember the other one. On a side note Zeitsev finally lost a free lot item. He had won I think the first 4 he had lotted on.
The encouraging thing to see was the BLM drop. Not so long ago BLM AF pieces were even harder to come by than RDM. But for the last month we have seen 4 BLM hats drop. That’s 4 of the best pieces that BLM can get. It’s been unreal to see one drop a week. So hopefully the tide will turn like this for RDM pieces. We currently have 8 people lotting the RDM hat so it could take several years for some of these people to see one at our current rate of 1 in 6 months I think. At least I’m on the first lot and have no worse then to wait 2 drops.
So any ways like I said 5 AF drops no 100 pieces but all in all a very clean run. I only died twice and remember I pull so for those that say you need shadows and pulling is for thf and nin only…
I can’t wait till Saturday to go at it again and not to mention my COP group is doing the Tenzen fight so maybe I’ll even have Sea access.
Enough about my woes. We were originally going to go for the win but we had several people missing yesterday so are going to try for the win Saturday instead. At least it is another chance at the Chapeau. We got 5 AF total which is really nice for a Xarcabard run. I think we got SAM, BLM, RNG, WAR and I can’t remember the other one. On a side note Zeitsev finally lost a free lot item. He had won I think the first 4 he had lotted on.
The encouraging thing to see was the BLM drop. Not so long ago BLM AF pieces were even harder to come by than RDM. But for the last month we have seen 4 BLM hats drop. That’s 4 of the best pieces that BLM can get. It’s been unreal to see one drop a week. So hopefully the tide will turn like this for RDM pieces. We currently have 8 people lotting the RDM hat so it could take several years for some of these people to see one at our current rate of 1 in 6 months I think. At least I’m on the first lot and have no worse then to wait 2 drops.
So any ways like I said 5 AF drops no 100 pieces but all in all a very clean run. I only died twice and remember I pull so for those that say you need shadows and pulling is for thf and nin only…
I can’t wait till Saturday to go at it again and not to mention my COP group is doing the Tenzen fight so maybe I’ll even have Sea access.
Monday, December 11, 2006
December Weekend 8th through 10th
Had a very busy and productive weekend. First off Friday I logged on, which is rare, and as soon as I did got a tell from Pusarah asking if I wanted to do the Brothers ENM at Bearclaw Pinnacle. So of course I said yes and I, her, Zeitsev, and Marlow headed off to get it done. Had a few mishaps with a bad slide but with some tractoring and raising we all got the key item fine.
You may remember from my last post my buffer was down to 1k. Well after getting the key item and having to eat a Raise 1 I had I think a 75 xp buffer…Blah. So anyways we beat the ENM no problem and get absolute crap drops; a raise three scroll and a dragon bone I think. We did however get the 3.5k xp from it so my buffer was now up a little. WE all decided to go ahead and xp on some of the King buffalo while we were there so by the end of the night my buffer was back up to 14k. YAY!
Saturday. What a long and productive day for us. My dynamis shell had Dynamis-Sandy so we did that first. Not a bad run but we have certainly had better. 5 AF total but once again no RDM so my fellow mage class people once again are just point hoarding at this point. Zeit did get the lolwar AF taking him to 4/5 pieces. I died I think 4 times and 2 of those was because I think no one but me had cast sleep so of course I got beat on by all the hate. Oh well I wasn’t really into Dynamis then as Sandy is just way too easy and I had no AF that I could get there. We more or less cleared the entire zone and even went ahead and killed the Mega boss as some members brought their alternate characters in to get the win.
Next up is Dynamis-Xarcabard. We are going for the win there and if we don’t win this time HPG said he is going to recruit some more people so we can just get it done with. Going to focus on recruiting DRK’s and MNK/DRK to increase our damage output this time around (aggh Darknessfalls if only you were still around I could get you in). Last time we fought Dynamis lord everything went fine but our damage just kind of stalled around the 40% mark as the DD’s had used up there TP and wings by that point. If we had more sustained damage it would have been a sure win as the Chainspell stunning had gone very well.
That night after Dynamis, as is the case every Saturday night afterward, our Cop static got together for the next mission on our quest to get sea and to finish up COP. This was a very big night as it was the 6-4 airship battle. Some people say it’s the hardest BC type fight in the game. We had come prepared though and done some dry runs the week before.
So it was me Pusarah, Zeitsev, Marlow, Keeva, and Lyeia with Janaka on the outside cheering us on. Janaka would replace me in the following run and get his win. We have a 7 person COP static which means we do each instanced battle twice. See I told you my LS was made of great people, doing all the hard work of COP 2 times and not jumping ahead when they could have leaving one of us behind. We use to have 9 people we were doing this for but Darknessfalls of course left the game and Candyman seemed to just get disinterested and stop after we got to about mission 5-1 I think.
So anyways we go in and kill the mammets fine but have a bit of an issue with Omega for some reason. We ended up wasting a lot of time on him and got to Ultima with about 12 minutes left on the timer. With 2 people still weak we were only going to have about 7 minutes to deal with him so we decided to just time out and try again rather than waste our 2 hours. This time we go in and just blow through mammets and omega with an amazing 30 minutes left to kill. Needless to say we were all pretty excited.
We start off and as bad luck would have it Keeva, who was tanking on nin, gets hit with some move that goes through shadows for about 800 damage and he’s down after only about 2 minutes in and ultima sitting at 90% health still. However, things went very smooth for a while with Zeit and Lyeia bouncing hate and with just 5 people we got him down to 35% before we wiped and reraised. At this point we knew it was just a formality to get the win.
After weakness wore off we reengage and after second provoke from Keeva, Lyeia does hundred fists and I hit chainspell and it was over very fast. 6-4 Defeated!!!! So 1/3 on this mission for us although you could say that dry run didn’t count I suppose. At this point it was very late and I needed to log off, I wish I could have stayed to cheer Janaka on afterwards. They got the win for him too though and it was a great day for us all around. Next Saturday is the Tenzen fight and finally after a long journey Sea access.
Sunday.
This has traditionally been my catch up day. I try and get all the Cut scenes done for next week’s mission and xp or merit when I can. So I start off doing all the CS for COP 7-1 through 7-4 and since I know I am heading to movapolis I grab some Goblin Drinks to try and get the Parade Gorget for my PLD which is now 50.
Got the CS’s done and after 4 spawns of Goblin Wolfman still no Gorget. Oh well at least I know how to get to the spawn points now and He is a really easy kill.
After finishing this up Pusarah sent me a tell asking if I wanted to do some KSNM runs so of course my broke self went along. We ended up doing 4x Copycat and 4x Operation desert swarm. The ODS drops were all crap except for one D. Cloth and all in all I think we each made 600k. Now that I finally have a bit of gil I really need to upgrade my equipment. Finally bought a penitents rope after almost a year of being 75 (told you my gear was gimp) and so sold my Ocean Rope which means the total cost of the belt was really only about 200k. After I get the gil from the KS drops from everyone (we do even split no your orb your drop crap) I’m going to get the hume RSE gloves as well so that’s a good bump up in my RDM equipment.
I think that is enough rambling for today. I’ll post again Wednesday after our Xarc run and who knows, if I am really lucky maybe I will have my Duelist Hat to tell you about….. yea right.
You may remember from my last post my buffer was down to 1k. Well after getting the key item and having to eat a Raise 1 I had I think a 75 xp buffer…Blah. So anyways we beat the ENM no problem and get absolute crap drops; a raise three scroll and a dragon bone I think. We did however get the 3.5k xp from it so my buffer was now up a little. WE all decided to go ahead and xp on some of the King buffalo while we were there so by the end of the night my buffer was back up to 14k. YAY!
Saturday. What a long and productive day for us. My dynamis shell had Dynamis-Sandy so we did that first. Not a bad run but we have certainly had better. 5 AF total but once again no RDM so my fellow mage class people once again are just point hoarding at this point. Zeit did get the lolwar AF taking him to 4/5 pieces. I died I think 4 times and 2 of those was because I think no one but me had cast sleep so of course I got beat on by all the hate. Oh well I wasn’t really into Dynamis then as Sandy is just way too easy and I had no AF that I could get there. We more or less cleared the entire zone and even went ahead and killed the Mega boss as some members brought their alternate characters in to get the win.
Next up is Dynamis-Xarcabard. We are going for the win there and if we don’t win this time HPG said he is going to recruit some more people so we can just get it done with. Going to focus on recruiting DRK’s and MNK/DRK to increase our damage output this time around (aggh Darknessfalls if only you were still around I could get you in). Last time we fought Dynamis lord everything went fine but our damage just kind of stalled around the 40% mark as the DD’s had used up there TP and wings by that point. If we had more sustained damage it would have been a sure win as the Chainspell stunning had gone very well.
That night after Dynamis, as is the case every Saturday night afterward, our Cop static got together for the next mission on our quest to get sea and to finish up COP. This was a very big night as it was the 6-4 airship battle. Some people say it’s the hardest BC type fight in the game. We had come prepared though and done some dry runs the week before.
So it was me Pusarah, Zeitsev, Marlow, Keeva, and Lyeia with Janaka on the outside cheering us on. Janaka would replace me in the following run and get his win. We have a 7 person COP static which means we do each instanced battle twice. See I told you my LS was made of great people, doing all the hard work of COP 2 times and not jumping ahead when they could have leaving one of us behind. We use to have 9 people we were doing this for but Darknessfalls of course left the game and Candyman seemed to just get disinterested and stop after we got to about mission 5-1 I think.
So anyways we go in and kill the mammets fine but have a bit of an issue with Omega for some reason. We ended up wasting a lot of time on him and got to Ultima with about 12 minutes left on the timer. With 2 people still weak we were only going to have about 7 minutes to deal with him so we decided to just time out and try again rather than waste our 2 hours. This time we go in and just blow through mammets and omega with an amazing 30 minutes left to kill. Needless to say we were all pretty excited.
We start off and as bad luck would have it Keeva, who was tanking on nin, gets hit with some move that goes through shadows for about 800 damage and he’s down after only about 2 minutes in and ultima sitting at 90% health still. However, things went very smooth for a while with Zeit and Lyeia bouncing hate and with just 5 people we got him down to 35% before we wiped and reraised. At this point we knew it was just a formality to get the win.
After weakness wore off we reengage and after second provoke from Keeva, Lyeia does hundred fists and I hit chainspell and it was over very fast. 6-4 Defeated!!!! So 1/3 on this mission for us although you could say that dry run didn’t count I suppose. At this point it was very late and I needed to log off, I wish I could have stayed to cheer Janaka on afterwards. They got the win for him too though and it was a great day for us all around. Next Saturday is the Tenzen fight and finally after a long journey Sea access.
Sunday.
This has traditionally been my catch up day. I try and get all the Cut scenes done for next week’s mission and xp or merit when I can. So I start off doing all the CS for COP 7-1 through 7-4 and since I know I am heading to movapolis I grab some Goblin Drinks to try and get the Parade Gorget for my PLD which is now 50.
Got the CS’s done and after 4 spawns of Goblin Wolfman still no Gorget. Oh well at least I know how to get to the spawn points now and He is a really easy kill.
After finishing this up Pusarah sent me a tell asking if I wanted to do some KSNM runs so of course my broke self went along. We ended up doing 4x Copycat and 4x Operation desert swarm. The ODS drops were all crap except for one D. Cloth and all in all I think we each made 600k. Now that I finally have a bit of gil I really need to upgrade my equipment. Finally bought a penitents rope after almost a year of being 75 (told you my gear was gimp) and so sold my Ocean Rope which means the total cost of the belt was really only about 200k. After I get the gil from the KS drops from everyone (we do even split no your orb your drop crap) I’m going to get the hume RSE gloves as well so that’s a good bump up in my RDM equipment.
I think that is enough rambling for today. I’ll post again Wednesday after our Xarc run and who knows, if I am really lucky maybe I will have my Duelist Hat to tell you about….. yea right.
Wednesday, December 6, 2006
Dynamis-Jeuno
I am a somewhat casual player when it comes to FFXI. Now that is a bit misleading, as I still log about 20 hours a week in game. 20 hours for most any game or activity a week is a good long amount. But as any FFXI player knows that just a scratch on the surface of many people. Several people log 3-4 hours a week night with 8+ on the weekends. Therefore, they may be logged in and active for 31+ hours a week. My time logged is based on a pretty strict schedule; I play Tuesday from 8pm-12 pm and on the weekend from 4pm-12pm.
Now you're probably thinking what the hell does this have to do with Dynamis-Jeuno? Well it's to illustrate how much of my time in game is dedicated to Dynamis. Tuesday when I get on it is just for Dynamis, and half the day Saturday when I get on is devoted to Dynamis. 8 out of my 20 hours, or 40%, of game time is spent doing this activity. I do this because the RDM gear there is really good, and I have a lot of fun there to be honest.
So last night we go to Dynamis-Jeuno and for those that are curious I am the main puller for my shell. Yes that's right I main pull and I do it as RDM/BLM to boot. Pulling in Dynamis is all about knowing what to pull and when. Any job class could do it if the player takes the time to learn the zone and pay attention to mob behavior. Yes I even do northlands like this.I entered Dynamis last night with a pathetic 3.3k buffer. I have put off getting any xp, or merits for that matter, in a while for a lot of reasons. I wasn’t too concerned though because with raise three you only lose about 300 xp so I would need to die 11 times to actually stay delveled at 74. For the most part I die maybe 2-3 times a zone. Not bad for a puller really, and most of these deaths are just all the hate I get from sleepga's.
So needless to say of course I die 7 times leaving my buffer at a horrid 1k. Wasn’t really my fault for all the deaths. It just seemed like a lot of people were half assing it yesterday. Jeuno is a really easy zone to win. We beat the zone with somewhere around an hour and 45 minutes left to farm. At that point I had only died once and things had been going well. But as tends to happen after wins a few people left, some decided to afk for long periods of time, and others just played far too relaxed. All in all a lot of things contributed to just a piss poor farming performance from the LS. I can safely say this was one of the worse runs I have had in the LS. Oh well I’m sure next time will be better as no one had to like all the xp loss that was going on.
We did decent with drops getting 3 100 pieces and 4 AF that I can remember, I’ll update with exact numbers once it’s posted on the site. The number of AF was low for a city but 3 100’s makes up for it. We also lost a NIN AF as time expired before it dropped and someone was afk so couldn’t pass on it…. Sad because the winning lot was someone from my Social LS. **EDIT** We actually ended up with 6 AF so a little better than I thought. MNK THF RNG BRD and 2xWAR.
Speaking of my Social LS, Spirit Link, there are now 4 of us in the Dyna shell. I have been with the Dynamis shell for about 8 months and 2 months ago Pusarah and Zeitsev joined up and yesterday Marlow went on his first run with us. Its nice having familiar faces around and people to cheer you on when you get some AF.
Speaking of AF after 8 months in this shell I still sit at only 1/5 pieces obtained for RDM. It’s by far the lowest job dropping AF for us. The piece I do have, the Duelist Boots, is a good one though so it holds me over. It’s a great nuking piece so I get a lot of mileage out of it in ENM and solo/duo play.
With my long stretch of no AF my points have really built up. I have the 3rd highest in the LS and us top three are only separated by 7 points, less than one runs worth of points (we get 10 for a full run). This means the next Duelist Chapeau that drops I will get to lot on and against only one other person. It also means I am not going to spend any points on lower AF as I don’t want to lose my position in the standings. So I may be 1/5 for several more months.
Next up is Dynamis-Sandy on Saturday which means more point collecting for me. At least maybe some more RDM boots can drop so the other RDM’s in the LS can get some AF. It really is sad how little RDM AF has dropped for us. 5 of the top 10 points leaders and 7 of the top 13 are all lotting RDM. It’s not because they are saving points up like I did just that there is nothing dropping for them to lot on. One day our luck has to change.
How bad is it? Here is a table of drops for the last 4 months.
As you can see a paltry 3.1% of all drops are RDM. In a perfect world all jobs should have a 6.7% share of the drops. 4 lousy drops in 4 months time. Meh I need to stop being emo about it. Luck has got to change soon right?
** As a side note for those who bothered doing the math our drops per run are low (about 4) because 90% of the time we do northlands and deal with the lower drop % there. Also, I only have 5 months worth of data as we had a LS name change and split at that time and I didn’t keep all the data from that. If I had, WAR would have gotten a big boost as we had a streak of 3-5 war boots in sandy every time we went there.
Now you're probably thinking what the hell does this have to do with Dynamis-Jeuno? Well it's to illustrate how much of my time in game is dedicated to Dynamis. Tuesday when I get on it is just for Dynamis, and half the day Saturday when I get on is devoted to Dynamis. 8 out of my 20 hours, or 40%, of game time is spent doing this activity. I do this because the RDM gear there is really good, and I have a lot of fun there to be honest.
So last night we go to Dynamis-Jeuno and for those that are curious I am the main puller for my shell. Yes that's right I main pull and I do it as RDM/BLM to boot. Pulling in Dynamis is all about knowing what to pull and when. Any job class could do it if the player takes the time to learn the zone and pay attention to mob behavior. Yes I even do northlands like this.I entered Dynamis last night with a pathetic 3.3k buffer. I have put off getting any xp, or merits for that matter, in a while for a lot of reasons. I wasn’t too concerned though because with raise three you only lose about 300 xp so I would need to die 11 times to actually stay delveled at 74. For the most part I die maybe 2-3 times a zone. Not bad for a puller really, and most of these deaths are just all the hate I get from sleepga's.
So needless to say of course I die 7 times leaving my buffer at a horrid 1k. Wasn’t really my fault for all the deaths. It just seemed like a lot of people were half assing it yesterday. Jeuno is a really easy zone to win. We beat the zone with somewhere around an hour and 45 minutes left to farm. At that point I had only died once and things had been going well. But as tends to happen after wins a few people left, some decided to afk for long periods of time, and others just played far too relaxed. All in all a lot of things contributed to just a piss poor farming performance from the LS. I can safely say this was one of the worse runs I have had in the LS. Oh well I’m sure next time will be better as no one had to like all the xp loss that was going on.
We did decent with drops getting 3 100 pieces and 4 AF that I can remember, I’ll update with exact numbers once it’s posted on the site. The number of AF was low for a city but 3 100’s makes up for it. We also lost a NIN AF as time expired before it dropped and someone was afk so couldn’t pass on it…. Sad because the winning lot was someone from my Social LS. **EDIT** We actually ended up with 6 AF so a little better than I thought. MNK THF RNG BRD and 2xWAR.
Speaking of my Social LS, Spirit Link, there are now 4 of us in the Dyna shell. I have been with the Dynamis shell for about 8 months and 2 months ago Pusarah and Zeitsev joined up and yesterday Marlow went on his first run with us. Its nice having familiar faces around and people to cheer you on when you get some AF.
Speaking of AF after 8 months in this shell I still sit at only 1/5 pieces obtained for RDM. It’s by far the lowest job dropping AF for us. The piece I do have, the Duelist Boots, is a good one though so it holds me over. It’s a great nuking piece so I get a lot of mileage out of it in ENM and solo/duo play.
With my long stretch of no AF my points have really built up. I have the 3rd highest in the LS and us top three are only separated by 7 points, less than one runs worth of points (we get 10 for a full run). This means the next Duelist Chapeau that drops I will get to lot on and against only one other person. It also means I am not going to spend any points on lower AF as I don’t want to lose my position in the standings. So I may be 1/5 for several more months.
Next up is Dynamis-Sandy on Saturday which means more point collecting for me. At least maybe some more RDM boots can drop so the other RDM’s in the LS can get some AF. It really is sad how little RDM AF has dropped for us. 5 of the top 10 points leaders and 7 of the top 13 are all lotting RDM. It’s not because they are saving points up like I did just that there is nothing dropping for them to lot on. One day our luck has to change.
How bad is it? Here is a table of drops for the last 4 months.
Job Hands Body Legs Feet Head Total % of Drops
WHM 2 4 1 5 3 15 11.7%
PLD 5 2 1 2 3 13 10.2%
NIN 2 2 5 2 1 12 9.4%
WAR 1 3 4 1 2 11 8.6%
THF 2 3 3 2 10 7.8%
BST 1 4 3 1 9 7.0%
MNK 4 1 1 2 8 6.3%
BLM 2 3 3 8 6.3%
BRD 2 3 2 7 5.5%
DRG 2 1 2 1 1 7 5.5%
SAM 2 2 2 6 4.7%
RNG 1 1 3 1 6 4.7%
DRK 2 1 3 6 4.7%
SMN 1 3 1 1 6 4.7%
RDM 1 2 1 4 3.1%
Total 23 20 27 30 28 128 100.0%
As you can see a paltry 3.1% of all drops are RDM. In a perfect world all jobs should have a 6.7% share of the drops. 4 lousy drops in 4 months time. Meh I need to stop being emo about it. Luck has got to change soon right?
** As a side note for those who bothered doing the math our drops per run are low (about 4) because 90% of the time we do northlands and deal with the lower drop % there. Also, I only have 5 months worth of data as we had a LS name change and split at that time and I didn’t keep all the data from that. If I had, WAR would have gotten a big boost as we had a streak of 3-5 war boots in sandy every time we went there.
Tuesday, December 5, 2006
Background
Ok now that I have more time today i figured i would go into more detail about who I am. I like to babble on sometimes so this may get wordy. Oh well not like you have to read this.
So anyways if you haven't figured it out yet this is a blog about my FFXI character. I currently play on the leviathan server but some people may be surprised to learn i actually first started this game on Carbuncle.
You see I first started playing this game after moving to another state. When I first moved I didn't have a place to live in for a few month's as me and my wife just decided almost on a whim to up and move closer to her family. So when we first got here we lived with her sister and brother-in-law. It just so happened about a week after we moved in her brother -in-law (hence forth referred to as Niege) bought a ps2 with a hard drive and got this game. I officially started playing in April of 2004, making me a somewhat older player now. My original character on that server was Ravenstrike if anyone can remember that far back, my highest level was only about 36 DRK if I remember correctly.
Eventually me and my wife moved out and got our own place and for a long while I didn't have access to ffxi. This was because I did not have a ps2 nor did I have a very good computer. It wasn't until Feb of 2005 that i was once again able to play.
By this time however, my friend Niege had already left the game. You see he works a lot and quickly discovered that ffxi was just too time intensive for him. He never did make it past the dunes after several months of playing. He retired having got blm and whm to level 18.
With that said there was no real reason for me to choose to go back to carbuncle. I only remembered a handful of people from my old ls and back then with the game being still new people came and went and started new characters a lot anyways. Odds are they wouldn't even be around. My ls leader back then was Underwatersquid, hard name to forget, and he was a very nice person at the time. Wonder if he still plays or if the game has changed his persona?
So I loaded up the game chose the name Malaketh, first try and the name went through so i got the name I wanted, and saw my first new day in Vana'diel as a hume in bastok on the Leviathan server.
I picked RDM from the very start. I knew what i wanted to be and had researched a lot about all the job classes before i ever started my new endeavor. RDM just seemed to be able to do so many things and other jobs just seemed to be missing out on some stuff. I mean i could cast spells with blm but would never be able to do much in melee. As a mnk i could beat on things as much as i like but would never be able to cast spells. It just seemed like I would be missing out on a part of ffxi if I couldn't do a bit of everything.
Now as I have progressed a long I realize that was some flawed thinking as leveling other jobs to a high level isn't as difficult as I thought. But remember, when I first started playing few people had even xped beyond Crawler's Nest. 50 + was just down right rare to see on a none JP. The dunes ALWAYS had 150-200 people in it leveling or looking for a party. If you think those merit parties in ToAU are crowded you aint seen nothing. Hell I remember the jungles would have 6 parties camped right outside Khazam with 3 more camped further out by the goblin spawns. Pulling there was truly a competition. Now if there are 2 parties there it is a rarity.
Anyways, my very first day leveling RDM I had gotten to about level 5 and saw someone running for the zone about to die from a Quadav. I tossed this guy a cure and then zoned with him, to avoid my own death. He gave me a peal to my first LS and it was here I would meet friends I still have to this day. It was here that I met Damn, Janaka, Darknessfalls and a few others but it was those three that would stay together throughout all the changes we would face.
The 4 of us moved through different LS's together so no matter where we went it always felt like home as long as those guys were in the ls with me. Very recently, October 31st, Darknessfalls had decided it was time for a break. It was a very sad day for me personally as its hard to lose a friend you have known for nearly 2 years... I really should email him soon. Damn took a break recently but seems to be back and Janaka and myself are still going strong.
Our current LS will no doubt be our last LS. Spirit link is filled with nothing but great people. A lot of us are probably a bit older than the average ffxi player and as such it's just an all around more mature atmosphere and everyone gets along great. I can't even remember one time were there has been any drama involved in the ls. I feel really lucky to have found such a great home in ffxi.
I think that's enough for today. But at least you can see how it all started for me. I have Dynamis tonight so tomorrow will be more of a current events post.
So anyways if you haven't figured it out yet this is a blog about my FFXI character. I currently play on the leviathan server but some people may be surprised to learn i actually first started this game on Carbuncle.
You see I first started playing this game after moving to another state. When I first moved I didn't have a place to live in for a few month's as me and my wife just decided almost on a whim to up and move closer to her family. So when we first got here we lived with her sister and brother-in-law. It just so happened about a week after we moved in her brother -in-law (hence forth referred to as Niege) bought a ps2 with a hard drive and got this game. I officially started playing in April of 2004, making me a somewhat older player now. My original character on that server was Ravenstrike if anyone can remember that far back, my highest level was only about 36 DRK if I remember correctly.
Eventually me and my wife moved out and got our own place and for a long while I didn't have access to ffxi. This was because I did not have a ps2 nor did I have a very good computer. It wasn't until Feb of 2005 that i was once again able to play.
By this time however, my friend Niege had already left the game. You see he works a lot and quickly discovered that ffxi was just too time intensive for him. He never did make it past the dunes after several months of playing. He retired having got blm and whm to level 18.
With that said there was no real reason for me to choose to go back to carbuncle. I only remembered a handful of people from my old ls and back then with the game being still new people came and went and started new characters a lot anyways. Odds are they wouldn't even be around. My ls leader back then was Underwatersquid, hard name to forget, and he was a very nice person at the time. Wonder if he still plays or if the game has changed his persona?
So I loaded up the game chose the name Malaketh, first try and the name went through so i got the name I wanted, and saw my first new day in Vana'diel as a hume in bastok on the Leviathan server.
I picked RDM from the very start. I knew what i wanted to be and had researched a lot about all the job classes before i ever started my new endeavor. RDM just seemed to be able to do so many things and other jobs just seemed to be missing out on some stuff. I mean i could cast spells with blm but would never be able to do much in melee. As a mnk i could beat on things as much as i like but would never be able to cast spells. It just seemed like I would be missing out on a part of ffxi if I couldn't do a bit of everything.
Now as I have progressed a long I realize that was some flawed thinking as leveling other jobs to a high level isn't as difficult as I thought. But remember, when I first started playing few people had even xped beyond Crawler's Nest. 50 + was just down right rare to see on a none JP. The dunes ALWAYS had 150-200 people in it leveling or looking for a party. If you think those merit parties in ToAU are crowded you aint seen nothing. Hell I remember the jungles would have 6 parties camped right outside Khazam with 3 more camped further out by the goblin spawns. Pulling there was truly a competition. Now if there are 2 parties there it is a rarity.
Anyways, my very first day leveling RDM I had gotten to about level 5 and saw someone running for the zone about to die from a Quadav. I tossed this guy a cure and then zoned with him, to avoid my own death. He gave me a peal to my first LS and it was here I would meet friends I still have to this day. It was here that I met Damn, Janaka, Darknessfalls and a few others but it was those three that would stay together throughout all the changes we would face.
The 4 of us moved through different LS's together so no matter where we went it always felt like home as long as those guys were in the ls with me. Very recently, October 31st, Darknessfalls had decided it was time for a break. It was a very sad day for me personally as its hard to lose a friend you have known for nearly 2 years... I really should email him soon. Damn took a break recently but seems to be back and Janaka and myself are still going strong.
Our current LS will no doubt be our last LS. Spirit link is filled with nothing but great people. A lot of us are probably a bit older than the average ffxi player and as such it's just an all around more mature atmosphere and everyone gets along great. I can't even remember one time were there has been any drama involved in the ls. I feel really lucky to have found such a great home in ffxi.
I think that's enough for today. But at least you can see how it all started for me. I have Dynamis tonight so tomorrow will be more of a current events post.
Monday, December 4, 2006
The beginning
Well not really the beginning for my Character just for this blog. I sometimes find myself bored at work and have often thought about creating a blog. So, today I went ahead and started it. Expect to hear about my adventures in the coming days and the senseless ramblings that just come to me on a daily basis.
Until then...
Until then...
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