FFXI's inherent flaw

Haven't played much due to the holidays and not a lot really has happened. I had some good things happen that aren't quite ffxi-related so I won't go into them. Most of my ffxi experience the past weekish have been pretty bad, and remind me so much of why I more and more find myself not wanting to play anymore.

But before I start going over what all I can remember of the week, here's a Jew with a bagel:


I spent a lot of time letting random things beat on me for Guard skillups. I started with Thickshells in La Thiene, then moved on to Poison Funguars there before finally hitting the jackpot with Sylvestres in Buburimu Peninsula. I've gotten Guard up to lvl 50 now, and it is definitely more noticeable than it was before I started levelling it (lvl 37 I think).


I also messed around with dat editing for the first time, mainly to try to help Tryxie figure out how to do it. First I turned myself into an Aern wannabe while I was checking out a BLU af recolor she wanted to see:


That was a little too much for me though, so I ended up just changing it to a slightly altered version of normal WHM gear (note the shades are just a replacement for the fugly walahra turban):


I haven't totally decided if I like it or not. It's okay, and I definitely like not having to see walahra turban so if nothing else I'll at least keep the shades, hehe.

Other than that, I xped a few times. I got my 8th and final Max MP merit and some buffer on my BRD (this was accidental, forgot to swap to merit mode, sigh). I also xped a bit on PUP as well, which I'll get into in a minute. We haven't been camping many HNMs lately because maintenances keep happening at 6-7am est and screwing with ToDs, so pretty much had no real obligations to the game.

So now to talk about the bad stuff. The dynamis shell I'm in, TheDynamisShow, is going through some rough times. I'm not sure how much longer the shell will be able to continue, though honestly I saw this coming months ago. When you have leaders that can't seem to agree on anything trying to lead people that just don't seem to care, nothing happens. We had a crappy showing of people on Tuesday (day after christmas, but that wasn't the real reason) and ended up going to San d'Oria where we wiped 3-4 times then just gave up. It was pretty sad, and probably a sign of where things are going. I might just call it quits even before the shell dies of natural causes, we'll see.

But the real thing that has me bummed with FFXI again, and no it's not a new problem or anything but it just hasn't been a problem for me in a while, is the whole job dependency thing. This game is too dependant on certain jobs in order to make a pt, and when you can't find said jobs, it's tough shit for you. Yesterday it took over an hour to make a pt because of lack of mages. We lucked out and a good whm and rdm both started seeking at the same time and I managed to nab them both. We did a dual tank setup where Ishaela (WAR/NIN) would voke, then Tryxie (THF) would SATA onto me (PUP). This would give me enough hate to co-tank with Ish, and it worked fine. Generally healing was no problem and rarely did we have to pause for mp, even though Calcobrena was in damage mode instead of healing mode (we started the fight with a different strategy but later changed to this to make the pt work better). Willian's SAM was in the pt as well, and we all gained a couple levels (my PUP went from 40 to 42).

Today everyone was on earlier than usual and we were all psyched about another chance to xp. Again we had the mage problem but this time about 15 minutes after gathering a WHM popped up (Kiali). I don't think Kiali was really going to be a very good WHM. S/He wanted to sub NIN and dual-wield clubs. I obviously wasn't wild about the idea but healers are healers and we wanted to camp cockatrice in Onzozo so Stona is essential. I was moderately worried when the WHM mt'd to me something about not wanting to leave the pt she'd just joined because s/he'd feel bad, but was assured it was just a lot of people trying to invite.

So anyway, I see a JP COR seeking and invite them. They are out in Rolanberry so it takes them a couple minutes to get to town. We all start to gather at the signet dude in Lower Jeuno and suddenly the WHM vanishes. I wait a few minutes and they come back, send a tell about their "terrible internet connection" and then vanish again. At this point I have this JP COR and all the pt needs is a WHM or even a RDM or SMN or anything and we're good (with a non-WHM we could've done gobs up in Yhoator). We sit there about 30-40 minutes, nothing remotely resembling a mage shows up. At this point I'm pissed. When it's just my friends, it's okay to sit around a bit. We can chat it up or whatever. But now we're wasting the COR's time too. Eventually a JP WHM pops up but never replies to my tells and goes off to do something else. After that, Kiali logs in again and starts seeking pt without saying anything to me. I got so mad about that that I just apologized repeatedly to the COR and tried to explain in auto-translate that we just couldn't pt without a mage. He was very polite and didn't mind at all, thankfully.

But that brings me to the inherent flaw of FFXI. We had all we needed minus a mage. There's always that one thing, whether it's a healer, refresher, tank, whatever. There's always that one thing that keeps you from putting together a pt pre-merit cannon. It's so incredibly frustrating to have to sit around and waste away your day because there's not a fucking healer available, and then you luck out and invite one who ends up being a total dick just because they can be. The game is TOO dependant on the whole pt setup, and it takes away a lot of the fun after you've been dealing with it for so long. Something needs some reevaluation here, but no one cares. S-E makes their money and we say "well, there's always tomorrow..." and that's just how it is.

Down Goes the Jorm

On Friday, I xped on PUP once again with Tryxie's THF and Willian's SAM. However, there was no tank seeking so we decided to try out PUP tanking. The initial pt started off as PUP, THF, SAM, WHM, RDM, BST. The RDM wasn't very good but other than that, we actually did pretty well against Nest Beetles. Willian would be first voke then Tryxie SATA'd onto me and for the most part I could keep hate unless luck was bad and I got hit a lot. It was a pretty neat experiment, and worked okay. I'm sure it'll be much better once Calcobrena learns Cure 4. Anyway, we stayed a while, eventually the WHM left and we got a better replacement one that we'd partied with before and shortly afterwards the RDM left and we just got Ishaela to come on her WAR (RDM wasn't really enfeebling or dispelling anyway). Good times, and we made it to 40 before ending.


Of course level 40 means AF, so I promptly went and flagged the quest after the pt. Seems that a poor taru had his automaton swiped from him while he was too busy staring at girls' asses.


Skip around a bit and we get to where I have to fight a big blob guy in the middle of the Caedarva Mire lake near Nashmau. He was a pushover, quickly keeled him on WHM, though his hp was a little high.


So that was that. Found the automaton, though didn't actually take it back to the guy (won't go into detail in case you wanna do this sometime). Got my Turbo Animator. Yay for af that doesn't really do anything!

So fast forward to Sunday, where Element decides to try killing a wyrm for the first time. Jormungand is obviously the way to go for first wyrm kill since it isn't really sought after like the others. We gathered and after a late start things were going okay. We got it to about 85% then one of the tanks (Decidence, the NIN/DRK), had to go afk for a bit. The hate got wonky at this point and a few people died, myself included. As I was sitting by myself waiting for weakness to wear, I see a CFH on my radar. Oops, someone CFH'd Jorm. We all die/logout and then start to regroup.

Unphased by the CFH, we go at it again a bit later. Hate is very well controlled, and although the fight is a bit dull as the WHM in the tank pt (barblizzara, barparalyzra, rebuff after roar, paralyna spam during spikes, occasional C3/C5/Regen 3) it's somewhat fun watching that health bar go down. We do a really great job throughout the fight. Things got a little tricky from 20ish% onwards, but we kept focused and avoided making enough mistakes to cause a flail. We got the win and it took under two hours from start to finish. It was a great showing of what Element can do taking down a wyrm on the 2nd try after unfortunate mishaps on the first. Definitely shaping up into a good ls now. Plus I got the title, which I didn't have before and I heart new titles.


Grats to Nolie for getting the Mercurial Pole that dropped and grats to everyone involved for making it happen.

Monday was maintenance day. I was hoping to do datamining afterwards but the way that data is stored in the dat files changed so I wasn't able to. No biggie. Some super crazy good armor was added but it's going to be a huge pain in the ass to get so I'm not sure if I'm going to really put a lot of effort into it yet. Prices for needed items are skyrocketing and all that jazz. So after maintenance when Tryxie got home we went out to get a few of the new BLU spells for her. Duoed Wild Carrot, Blank Gaze, and Zephyr Mantle but couldn't get anyone else to come along for the others so after getting the crag-to-sky teleports taken care of we took part in the Christmas event.

It's weird this year. A Twinkling Treant pops in the town (god, I want the real treants back, best event EVAR). Massive /cheer spam ensues then a christmas taru pops and makes you find the fake santa. It was a good chance to get the Dream Robe and DR+1 that I missed last christmas, but it was a stupid event. Oh well, at least we got to look festive for a while!


Today my parents arrived from out of town to visit for a few days. My FFXI time will be pretty limited. I might hop on sometimes at night when everyone's asleep (ie now), but we'll see. As for now, Rappa's sitting around taking a beating from several crabs to try to raise Guard skill. Basically, a whole lot of what you see below. It's been about 45 minutes now and I've gained one level. Guard sucks.

Is dat sum rare title?

First off, you'll notice I added a lil' bit of extra info to the sidebar thinger. I plan to add more as I think of more stuff to put there, just a bit of basics down first (mainly wanted my merits there so I could keep a running goal of what I'm accomplishing as I near completing my whm merits and prepare to start on the billions of drk merits I need).

Anyway.. yesterday I found myself bored in the morning and usually boredom leads to gil being spent. Sure enough, I had an itch that needed scratching so I explored Batallia Downs, did some shopping, and...


And... that's about it for that day. Don't recall doing anything, probably watched TV. Edit! I remember what I did now. I merited w/ Windaria, Miisha, Johnnyb, Cami, and Unmaligned. We got a good 5 or so merit points in our couple hours out there, enabling me to get my level 7 mp merit.

For today, spent the early hours helping Tryxie out levelling her RNG then took a break to eat and came back prepared for a dynamis but got a tell from Antor that a certain rare NM was up. So, being the collector of titles that I am I dashed to the scene so I could put some smackdown on a mr Taisaijin.


Was a pretty boring fight, no spelunker hat dropped either. But I finally got that ever so clever title in my list.


Nothing of note after that either. Had a really shitty Dynamis-Qufim run, then played some Marvel Ultimate Alliance for several hours then came back and watched Windaria solo Dark Spark (which somehow resulted in my dying, not sure how that happened, haha). And now I head to bed!

Fun in Behemoth's Dominion! (and CoP Spoilars)

Well, after helping Tryxie and Grodo get past airship we couldn't just stop there! We had to get their rings! So them, me, Cami, Drizzit (who also needed his ring), and later on Reishu went through all of the Sea missions, huzzah. It didn't take as long as I thought it would, but mostly because Cami zerged a lot of it so we could just zoom through it. During the process, Tryxie got a few more spells (me and her had soloed 3 the day before). Made it through the pot bcnm without dying and then took down Promathia. Didn't really take many SSes, but here's one of the start of the second half of the fight.


Anyway, after that I needed two more organs for my Snow Gorget so most of them stuck around and we also got some aid from Windaria and Miisha. Took way too many kills for those two damn organs to drop, but they finally did (and of course afterwards countless ones dropped), Tryxie picked up her last Sea spell, Disseverment, and good times were had. I was exhausted but determined to get my gorget before I went to bed. Rushed against the clock to pick up my Clear Chip, and then....


Huzzah!

So that leads us to today, where after a long day of sea jailer stuff (getting really tired of sea, haha), my buddy Willian wants to xp with my PUP so of course I'm all over that. We get Antor to come, too, then find some pickup folk and head out to Behemoth's Dominion where we just utterly dominate the place:




I somehow missed lvl 36 (oops!), but the pt ended on a triple ding!


Overall an amazing pt. Went from 34 to 37 in just under 2 hours. Nonstop chain 5s (and a chain 6!) and a nice way to enjoy pup for the first time in a while.

Lots of Stuff

I couldn't really think of a good name for this entry. I did a lot of things since the last update. At first there was a theme of the number two, but then it kinda fell apart so that'd make a lame title. So I just went with a lamer one. I'm just doing this entry off memory so it's probably all wrong too, but we'll see how it goes since I'm not really tired enough to sleep yet. :/

So the first thing worth noting is that I was looking into getting a Snow Gorget for my DRK (for Guillotine damage), which requires farming some organs in Sea. Well, me and Cami had duoed some ENMs earlier (yay for Maneater drop!) so he said he'd come out and we'd try to duo some organs since my jobs are all too squishy to really solo well in Sea. The hardest one to get would be the yovra (UFO) organ, so we started there. It actually took two tries to kill one, due to some bad luck on the first attempt, but we brought it down. Lemme tell ya, those bad boys aren't very easy to duo. :P


So after that we kill enough Phaubos (sharks) to get a good chunk of xp and 6 organs. I later soloed an Aern organ on WHM so I'm pretty far along the way towards getting that. Hopefully we can get that knocked out in the next couple days.

The next "two" would be the two Fafnirs we got in a row on Sunday and Monday. The Sunday one we claimed and killed in a pretty respectable amount of time. Element's definitely starting to get the hang of things now. The Monday kill was actually not our original claim. The claim was made by CelestialKnights, who had trouble early on and for 20 minutes just couldn't seem to jumpstart their offense. The nail in the coffin came in the form of a darter claim which wiped them pretty quickly. We picked him up after he went yellow and took him down fast enough to avoid hyper Faf. Here's some loot shots:




Another fire crystal for yours truly, yay!

So the following days were spent mostly alternating between camping a Brown Belt (got Morbolger ToD [thanks Ishaela!] and went 1/1 camping him, then 1/4 on Deadly Dodo and 1/4 on Nue) and duoing random stuff w/ my fav BLU kitty Tryxie. We did some silly easy stuff like the NIN af1 fight for her ninjar weapons. We also did Windurst 6-2, which was kinda funny because I remember when I first did the mission it had seemed so hard to me. I guess this was particularly enjoyable because it helped show me how much we "grow up" in this game, where things that were so scary become ridiculously easy to handle.


I also helped out in the efforts to get Tryxie to the magical world of Sea so she can get the last of her spells (well, other than Body Slam I think). She's been trying to do the Airship battle for a while now and keeps having bad luck so we assembled a pretty elite swap force from the linkshell to take it down, consisting of her, me, Kabrina, Johnnyb, Jamal, and Grodo (who also needed it). We had a freak problem with Omega the first go-round, but the second run we finished in 25 minutes or so, smooth sailing. Just one more battle for her and then it's BLU spell heaven! w00t. Forgot to snap SSes of this, so no condom hat Rappa for you!

Last big thing of note is that as of about an hour ago, I finally hit level 75 on my third job, Bard. It's pretty crazy to think that as I very rapidly approach a full year's worth of gameplay time (I wish that /playtime wasn't in the game, haha), I've managed to get three jobs to the top and to get all three pretty pimped out. I'm looking forward to using Bard to finish up merits for WHM and DRK so that I can really feel like I've become one of the very best of each on the server. Always another goal in this game, always another goal...