Non-FFXI Stuff
So I had nine days off and got a bunch of stuff accomplished and left a bunch of things pissing in the wind. The thing I'm most pleased about was finally getting the full version of Shiny Toy Guns' "Burnin' For You" cover (which you might recognize from one of the elctro-savvy car commercials). The car company (I can't remember who, seems like it was Cadillac) initially offered the song as a free download on their website, but the link to that was only for a month or two and it no longer works. I had said to hell with it at the time because I was convinced the song would be on the next STG album. When said album came out a couple of weeks ago this song was not on it (It was a remix album, which may explain why it wasn't included). This kinda pissed me off and I was resolved not to start the new year without the track. Took me about two hours to track down a bootleg, the site it was being hosted on threw up all kinds of security flags on my computer so I had to fool TrendMicro into letting me isolate the file and download it. Wasn't pleased about getting it this way, but I was able to pull the file from the site without actually going to the site. I am a big fan of Shiny Toy Guns and am enjoying the track whenever it pops up in my iPod, was well worth the hassle. Other than that, outside of FFXI, I got my car tags renewed, cleaned up my DVR queue and watched two orders from Netflix (8 movies total, The Wrestler and Crank 2 being the two I enjoyed the most). Oh, and I slept...a lot. Really exciting stuff, eh?
Merits
One of the things I had resolved to do was cap both BLM and NIN, and then finish up 31 merits that I consider to be highly important to the jobs. While I did manage to cap both, I got so burned out on Campaign that I halfassed it the rest of the week and was fed up by Christmas. All told I managed to get 6 merits, which I put towards an Enfeebling Magic upgrade (4/8) and a Ninjutsu Magic upgrade (3/4). The MP, Subtle Blow and Ice/Lightning merits are still on the to do list, would have loved to finish them, but I couldn't take anymore Campaign and just wasn't ever in the mood to Meripo...ah well.
Quests
Quests, imo, tend to be an enormous waste of time, especially when one has all the fame they'll ever need in the game, but I've had a number of open quests that I've been meaning to close up and last week seemed like a good time to do them. To my credit, once I was finished with Campaign I actually managed to clear out all of the Windy quests that had been stagnant and came closer to completing ALL of the Bastok quests. I spent most Sunday making an intricate Quest Checklist spreadsheet that shows me all of the quests broken up by category and region. Aside from the job and WS specific quests, I've done damn near everything possible in Bastok, the only things left open involve getting AH items that aren't on the AH. I've done a lot of Windy Quests too (I want to say I started these to get the Rhinostery Certificate so I could (try to) solo my BLM AF hat), the ones that I had left unfinished have been cleared out, the only stuff left is Fenrir (I have this avatar, not sure why I started another) and Diabolos (still need to beat him, been close a few times, but have never sealed the deal).
Clothcraft
Another thing I wanted to finish up was getting Clothcraft to 60, it's been at 52 for a long time now. I figured I'd have all this wonderful time on my hands that I could go farm Silk Thread, I was wrong, though not necessarily about the time, but the damn threads themselves. Before I get into that, I had five stacks of thread already and plan to use Q's guide and synth Green Ribbons to NPC, but first I need Silk Cloth and since my Clothcraft is at 52 and the Cloth caps at 53 I thought for certain five stacks would be enough to at least get to 53. Sadly I was wrong, I got zero point fucking five skill! It's not like I won't cap this, but ffs, that is just disappointing.
After that nonsense it was off to farm, which means going deep into Crawlers' Nest and farming Knight Crawlers or Rumble Crawlers. I chose to fight Knight Crawlers because the room they are in has scorpions also (claws and shells are 100% drops, their drawback is they take up space) and the Knights drop coffer keys for an added bonus (the Rumbles only drop chest keys). So I set out and killed every crawler in my path (I got 10 threads from doing this), when I got to the Rumble Crawlers the first one I killed dropped a chest key and since I had passed the chest a few rooms back I went and popped it for 9k. Diversion aside, I finished off the Rumbles and picked up another chest key. When I entered the Knight Crawler room I almost ran smack into one of the new NMs SE added, as it turns out there is no way I could solo it (it spams Cold Breathe for around 400 damage, this attack ignores shadows), so I had to keep an eye on it while killing the crawlers and occasional scorpion. During the next hour I ran into the worst cold streak I could imagine. I killed 20 or so crawlers and not a single thread dropped, all I got was a Kindred's Seal and a coffer key. Since I had Limbus soon, I decided to kill one more then go look for the chests, as you can probably figure, the last one I killed dropped a thread, damn bastards. The coffer yielded 11k and the chest gave me a Gigant Axe, which once everything was sold (and counting the silks), I got around 50k worth of stuff in about 90 minutes, not bad, but it was a disappointing 50k. I haven't touched Clothcraft since, just been sending everything to my mule.
Ranger
My RNG was at level 24 and damnit if I didn't want to get it to at least 37 (from what I've played though, I really like the job and feel confident this will be my next 75). The cold reality is, I was lfp for about 40 minutes on Tuesday, got hungry, went to Taco Bell and once I got back I switched to NIN and Campaigned the rest of the day. My poor Ranger, it's the only sub I haven't got to 37, and it's the only sub I've enjoyed playing, how's that for irony? I suspect I will end up soloing a lot of this until I can Campaign, which means it's looking like something I'll spend the winter and spring pecking away at.
Endgame
I have nothing but a long string of cursing to add here, all three endgame events went or ended badly, I'll be glad when the holidays are over and I can quit hearing about how folks are half-assing it because it's the holidays. In my opinion people should show up ready to rock, if you are there to half-ass it then you should go waste someone else's time. Fortunately for my shell members the other sacks are a little more understanding and have kept me from blowing my top. That said, motherfuckers need to get their fucking shit in fucking order before I start cracking their fucking skulls with a fucking spiked baseball bat. That is all.
Stating the Obvious
Monday, December 28, 2009
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
I Hate This Time of the Year
Rant
Driving around where I live is such a fucking bitch! I live near a retail area, which for 11 months of the year is utterly awesome (pet store, grocery, movie theater, dozens of restaurants and fast food, Best Buy/Target/Wal-Mart, etc.), I have access to all this while remaining snugly tucked away living on a golf course. But every year December makes me want to move, there are just way too many people on the road. I had to stop carrying a hammer and baseball bat in my car for fear I might be inclined to use one of them (don't ask why they were there to begin with). However, because of all the traffic about the only time I venture off the golf course this time of year is to go to work and the grocery, which means I have a lot more time to play FFXI. Except this week. It's also fucking Nutcracker season and every damn theatre group in town is putting on some form of this damn show (yeah, Drakus knows this whole fucking play by heart and he's not happy about it). My sister is the principle ballerina in one of these and I volunteered to be the stage hand for this. I also volunteered to help one of the childrens theatre groups with their set designs. They are doing some odd Wizard of Oz/Nutcraker show, I assume the two plays are separated, but the sets kind of lead me two wonder if it isn't a mash-up of some sort (the ballroom scene in the Nutcracker, for example, has a yellow brick road leading to it). At any rate I have to keep blowing things off in FFXI, but come next Monday things should settle back down, not to mention I'll be off for Christmas week.
Project: Shantottosaysgofuckyersefldrakus
Four tries and we still have not beat this, our best effort came on Sunday when we managed to get the BLM down to 3%, fucking bitch raged at 10% that led to a wipe. I think we need another DD, three mages has been nice, but we just can't seem to do enough damage to put us over the top. Honestly, when it comes to the fight I'd be more than willing to keep fighting it until we got it right if it didn't mean running around the Den of Rancor collecting the damn hexes every time we lose. It's frustrating and honestly doesn't seem to be worth the trouble when you look at the reward because the pants are meh.
Dynamis
After our last run was jacked there was some discussion during that run about what we planned to do about it. I forget the details, but somebody had said something that led me to respond with "we'll do something a little more sinister than that". My thought at the time was jacking one of their runs, but as I didn't know who the leader was the only thing I could think to do was keep an eye on the shouts in WG and try to show up before them. As it turns out I wasn't the only one thinking about this and thankfully someone (Q) knew who we were after and where they were going to be. Essentially we came to the same conclusion, but Q being who he is was much quicker to act and proposed we jack their next Xarcabard run. And thus began my Sunday.
The plan was to have people who weren't already signed up to do Valkrum show up early (like 7:30 AM my time, which is earlier than when I get up for work) in Xarcabard. We were going to enter 30-60 minutes before they were scheduled to go in and then try to get all the time extensions. As it turns out another group was already in Xarc and this pushed us back an hour, so Q was standing at the markings when the other group started showing up. What occurred next was as comical as it was classic. The leader of the other shell started sending Qtipus tells which went like this:
There was a bunch of back and forth between them with Q refusing to give any ground. Meanwhile, as this is going on, Qtipus is maneuvering Yot's mule to the trail markings in the Glacier with the intent of jacking that zone too. After some jockeying back and forth Aatst asks Qtipus if he wants to /random Xarcabard, Q tells him no and then /blists him. About five minutes later they start leaving, giving up the fight despite the fact the outnumber us three to one. My guess is they feel like we were just a bunch of asshole Americans and it wasn't worth the fight (for the record about a third of Obsidian is EU). At this point we have roughly 45 minutes before the other group finishes. They head to the Glacier where, lo and behold, Yot's mule is waiting for them! Unfortunately Q had to make a choice at this point because if he jacked the Glacier in front of them there was a chance they'd come back to Xarc and actually put up a fight. The Glacier was small potatoes, taking Xarc from them was the point we were really trying to make, so we ceded the Glacier and let them have it. A minor disappointment but our primary goal was met regardless.
So the run itself consisted of 16-18 people (a couple people had to leave early, a couple folks joined us late) and as we've never low-manned Xarc before there wasn't really much strategy going in, aside from get all the extensions. This led to some really wild sacing (from Kimi) and odd pulls, but we pulled it off. Let me repeat that a little more clearly, we got all the Xarc extensions with 16ish people, meaning, among other things, we cleared the 15 demon NMs. That just blows my mind and really shows just how skilled the shell has become. Which is ironic considering the two nostalgic posts that have been posted from two of the people who were there in the beginning, Qtipus and Kaeko (I recommend reading both their takes on the early history of Obsidian as they were both great reads).
Limbus
Dynamis wasn't the only low man craziness I was involved in this week. Limbus threw us a curveball that forced us to make some adjustments on the fly also. Our plan last night had been to do a split run between Ap SW and Ap NW. Southwest was going to be a standard tank with DDs and support run with 12 people (I think they ended up with 13, not certain) and Northwest was going to be a manaburn with our BLMs. Team SW was able to enter and get to work right away, however, Team NW got ganked and we were left with a decision to make. We had to either call it a night for the six of us or go to another zone with the set-up we had. I was ready to call it because I honestly didn't think that our other option, Southeast, could be manaburned. Hood wanted to give it a go anyway, so I relented, but added that we'd call it if the death toll started getting out of control.
The plan was basically to gravity/sleep/bind, then nuke the shit out of the mobs. I was worried about the rocs and gigas going in, the rocs can lay down some serious damage very quickly, and one of the gigas was immune to magic. As it turns out my worries were justified. The first floor went smoothly as we were dealing around 1k damage each with our nukes. On the second floor the vultures were easy kills, but the first roc got really pissed and I ended up as bird food. That said, it wasn't a total disaster and with a bit of readjusting the second roc got pummeled and up we went. The third floor is pots and dolls and this is where we lucked out a bit as the first doll we killed opened the vortex. We grabbed the time extensions and headed up to the gigas floor. Hood pulls the first gigas (Cronos) which was the one immune to physical damage and we whooped its ass, no vortex. With that, we grabbed the one immune to ranged damage, once again we whooped its ass and...no vortex. That meant we had to kill the gigas that is immune to magic if we wanted to continue. With 4 BLMs, a COR and a SCH. Needless to say, the next 15 minutes consisted of three of us chasing Hyperion around, getting what damage we could with our feeble weapons, while the other three kept applying DoTs. We slowly whittled it down and had seven minutes left on the clock. But wait. We still had two time chests left, so we got to the final floor with 17 minutes remaining and easily dispatched the dahmels for an supremely gratifying win. We won, despite the two things I was worried about happening, with a six-man manaburn group and only two deaths.
I'm very happy that the skill level of our players has developed to the point we can do things like this, because six months ago I'd have said no way in hell it could be done in our shell. So let it be said, not only can you manaburn NW, but you can also manaburn SE, expect us to try this on NE and SW in the future.
Driving around where I live is such a fucking bitch! I live near a retail area, which for 11 months of the year is utterly awesome (pet store, grocery, movie theater, dozens of restaurants and fast food, Best Buy/Target/Wal-Mart, etc.), I have access to all this while remaining snugly tucked away living on a golf course. But every year December makes me want to move, there are just way too many people on the road. I had to stop carrying a hammer and baseball bat in my car for fear I might be inclined to use one of them (don't ask why they were there to begin with). However, because of all the traffic about the only time I venture off the golf course this time of year is to go to work and the grocery, which means I have a lot more time to play FFXI. Except this week. It's also fucking Nutcracker season and every damn theatre group in town is putting on some form of this damn show (yeah, Drakus knows this whole fucking play by heart and he's not happy about it). My sister is the principle ballerina in one of these and I volunteered to be the stage hand for this. I also volunteered to help one of the childrens theatre groups with their set designs. They are doing some odd Wizard of Oz/Nutcraker show, I assume the two plays are separated, but the sets kind of lead me two wonder if it isn't a mash-up of some sort (the ballroom scene in the Nutcracker, for example, has a yellow brick road leading to it). At any rate I have to keep blowing things off in FFXI, but come next Monday things should settle back down, not to mention I'll be off for Christmas week.
Project: Shantottosaysgofuckyersefldrakus
Four tries and we still have not beat this, our best effort came on Sunday when we managed to get the BLM down to 3%, fucking bitch raged at 10% that led to a wipe. I think we need another DD, three mages has been nice, but we just can't seem to do enough damage to put us over the top. Honestly, when it comes to the fight I'd be more than willing to keep fighting it until we got it right if it didn't mean running around the Den of Rancor collecting the damn hexes every time we lose. It's frustrating and honestly doesn't seem to be worth the trouble when you look at the reward because the pants are meh.
Dynamis
After our last run was jacked there was some discussion during that run about what we planned to do about it. I forget the details, but somebody had said something that led me to respond with "we'll do something a little more sinister than that". My thought at the time was jacking one of their runs, but as I didn't know who the leader was the only thing I could think to do was keep an eye on the shouts in WG and try to show up before them. As it turns out I wasn't the only one thinking about this and thankfully someone (Q) knew who we were after and where they were going to be. Essentially we came to the same conclusion, but Q being who he is was much quicker to act and proposed we jack their next Xarcabard run. And thus began my Sunday.
The plan was to have people who weren't already signed up to do Valkrum show up early (like 7:30 AM my time, which is earlier than when I get up for work) in Xarcabard. We were going to enter 30-60 minutes before they were scheduled to go in and then try to get all the time extensions. As it turns out another group was already in Xarc and this pushed us back an hour, so Q was standing at the markings when the other group started showing up. What occurred next was as comical as it was classic. The leader of the other shell started sending Qtipus tells which went like this:
Aatst: {Xarcabard}?
Q: Yes
Aatst: me go @ 1h
Q: No you're not.
There was a bunch of back and forth between them with Q refusing to give any ground. Meanwhile, as this is going on, Qtipus is maneuvering Yot's mule to the trail markings in the Glacier with the intent of jacking that zone too. After some jockeying back and forth Aatst asks Qtipus if he wants to /random Xarcabard, Q tells him no and then /blists him. About five minutes later they start leaving, giving up the fight despite the fact the outnumber us three to one. My guess is they feel like we were just a bunch of asshole Americans and it wasn't worth the fight (for the record about a third of Obsidian is EU). At this point we have roughly 45 minutes before the other group finishes. They head to the Glacier where, lo and behold, Yot's mule is waiting for them! Unfortunately Q had to make a choice at this point because if he jacked the Glacier in front of them there was a chance they'd come back to Xarc and actually put up a fight. The Glacier was small potatoes, taking Xarc from them was the point we were really trying to make, so we ceded the Glacier and let them have it. A minor disappointment but our primary goal was met regardless.
So the run itself consisted of 16-18 people (a couple people had to leave early, a couple folks joined us late) and as we've never low-manned Xarc before there wasn't really much strategy going in, aside from get all the extensions. This led to some really wild sacing (from Kimi) and odd pulls, but we pulled it off. Let me repeat that a little more clearly, we got all the Xarc extensions with 16ish people, meaning, among other things, we cleared the 15 demon NMs. That just blows my mind and really shows just how skilled the shell has become. Which is ironic considering the two nostalgic posts that have been posted from two of the people who were there in the beginning, Qtipus and Kaeko (I recommend reading both their takes on the early history of Obsidian as they were both great reads).
Limbus
Dynamis wasn't the only low man craziness I was involved in this week. Limbus threw us a curveball that forced us to make some adjustments on the fly also. Our plan last night had been to do a split run between Ap SW and Ap NW. Southwest was going to be a standard tank with DDs and support run with 12 people (I think they ended up with 13, not certain) and Northwest was going to be a manaburn with our BLMs. Team SW was able to enter and get to work right away, however, Team NW got ganked and we were left with a decision to make. We had to either call it a night for the six of us or go to another zone with the set-up we had. I was ready to call it because I honestly didn't think that our other option, Southeast, could be manaburned. Hood wanted to give it a go anyway, so I relented, but added that we'd call it if the death toll started getting out of control.
The plan was basically to gravity/sleep/bind, then nuke the shit out of the mobs. I was worried about the rocs and gigas going in, the rocs can lay down some serious damage very quickly, and one of the gigas was immune to magic. As it turns out my worries were justified. The first floor went smoothly as we were dealing around 1k damage each with our nukes. On the second floor the vultures were easy kills, but the first roc got really pissed and I ended up as bird food. That said, it wasn't a total disaster and with a bit of readjusting the second roc got pummeled and up we went. The third floor is pots and dolls and this is where we lucked out a bit as the first doll we killed opened the vortex. We grabbed the time extensions and headed up to the gigas floor. Hood pulls the first gigas (Cronos) which was the one immune to physical damage and we whooped its ass, no vortex. With that, we grabbed the one immune to ranged damage, once again we whooped its ass and...no vortex. That meant we had to kill the gigas that is immune to magic if we wanted to continue. With 4 BLMs, a COR and a SCH. Needless to say, the next 15 minutes consisted of three of us chasing Hyperion around, getting what damage we could with our feeble weapons, while the other three kept applying DoTs. We slowly whittled it down and had seven minutes left on the clock. But wait. We still had two time chests left, so we got to the final floor with 17 minutes remaining and easily dispatched the dahmels for an supremely gratifying win. We won, despite the two things I was worried about happening, with a six-man manaburn group and only two deaths.
I'm very happy that the skill level of our players has developed to the point we can do things like this, because six months ago I'd have said no way in hell it could be done in our shell. So let it be said, not only can you manaburn NW, but you can also manaburn SE, expect us to try this on NE and SW in the future.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving has come and gone and now my mini-vacation is over, no more time off til Christmas week. :(
While I only got to spend three of my five days off playing FFXI (man I sound like such a loser), I did get some things accomplished, but I still have one irritating thing on my to do list.
Wings of the Goddess
We finished up the new Bastok and Windurst quests on Saturday (Sandy was finished the weekend before). We tried to finish Bastok when we did Sandy, but it turned out to be too difficult for me to tank. The constant double-attacking left me spending too much time trying to get shadows up instead of hitting her to keep hate, the end result was our mages had to heal the DDs and eventually hate turned to them, then the DDs, and then finally to me. Our second go-around with Klara went better, we had 6 people as we added a PLD to tank, the end result was a pretty easy win (though the mages were still pulling hate from healing), our setup was PLD, NIN, MNK, SAM, SCH and WHM. Funny thing happened at the beginning of this fight, when we zoned in I did something I do with almost any NM, I /slap emoted Klara (I have a habit of doing this or /wave). Much to everyone's surprise she apparently did NOT take this transgression lightly because she attacked me right after I did it. Now I don't know if maybe I got too close (I had only took a few steps forward from where we zoned in at) or if she really did aggro from the /slap, but we were all caught off guard when she began attacking me.
Windurst was the fight we were least worried about and as you can probably guess it ended up being the one we should have been the most concerned with. While we are all good players, to tackle that fight with five people is just nuts, you'd have to be l33t to have any chance at a win. Our first attempt was BLM x4 and SAM, we figured we'd just nuke em down and let the SAM clean up, it was a disaster, we didn't survive the first wave. Our second attempt was a little more traditional with NIN, SAM, MNK, RDM (kite) and WHM, but once again things went badly. The problem on the second attempt was the waves are just too fast and we were quickly overwhelmed when the second wave came in. So after two failed attempts we sent out a distress call and ended up getting 8 more people to help us (this fight is out in the open so anyone with access to the past can help), the end result was...well we kicked the shit out of the mobs. It was a perfect example of strength in numbers, thanks again to everyone that helped us with that.
The storyline in WotG has been pretty solid, Windy's storyline has been fantastic (with some outstanding cutscenes to go along with it), Bastok has also been pretty good (the seeds for the rise of the Shadow Lord are slowly being sown), but Sandy is dragging things down. The other two nations are dealing directly with the established histories that have been in the game since its inception, whereas Sandy only teased us with the destruction of Tavnazia. The last few quests have had nothing to do with the ramifications of that event, it's just been about a bunch of bratty ten year olds trying to act like grown ups. At this point I've given up hope Sandy will offer up anything interesting, so I'm happy the other two nations are living up to their billing.
Omega
At this point I think it's safe to say we own Omega, he poses little challenge these days. On Friday we fought him again and none of the tanks died (a first) and we decided based on the last few fights that we'd farm the pods. We knocked out five pods, but it could have gone smoother once we started kiting him. Speaking for myself I have never kited him and was out of position and generally confused about what exactly we were supposed to be doing. I'd imagine (well I know for a fact) that others had never seen this either. But as far as taking baby steps, we were able to keep walking and this will probably be nothing more than a footnote in a few months.
Project: Shantottofication
What can I say, we tried this fight twice, once on Saturday and again on Sunday. I was hoping we'd complete it because I'd really like to get to the cutscenes everyone keeps saying are so amazing. Our first fight with her was NIN, SAM x2, RNG, WHM x2, and as far as first fights go I'd say we did well, we got the BLM version down to around 35% before wiping. I was holding the WHM version (and actually kited her before the first rage), she didn't pose much trouble. After the first rage she was still easy to hold, I just voked and cast ninjutsu occasionally until the second rage. The second rage is where we ended up wiping, too much damage was taken to recover from. Ultimately though we were not able to get far enough on our first attempt.
The second attempt we changed things up a bit with NIN, MNK x2, WHM x2, SCH. This time I decided I was going to engage the WHM version instead of just standing around, I must admit I underestimated what I was going to be able to do and ended up getting her down to 80% before the first rage. At this point I had to disengage as we weren't sure what would happen if they raged at the same time, but the speculation was we wouldn't like the outcome. Our lessons learned from the first fight we got the BLM version down to 11% before wiping to the third rage. Thinking that we were good to go from that point we healed up and the MNKs again took to killing the BLM version, unfortunately this is were we made a few miscalculations. The first was something I wasn't ready for and that was when I went in to grab the WHM, I took a bunch of damage from the BLM. This led to the second mistake and that was assuming the WHM would be easy to deal with, she was not, she was much stronger at this point and it was a struggle to keep things together at first. Because I was having so much trouble, our healers were healing me to keep me alive, which led to the third mistake and that was healing me. Because they were healing me as well as healing the MNKs they were moving up the hate list faster than me and eventually I lost hate altogether, the WHM started picking off our healers and we ended up wiping with the BLM at around 15%.
This is a pretty challenging fight, but I think we are on the right track with our setup, it's just a matter of getting our timing right, minimizing mistakes and just plain getting lucky. Part of me, though, wants to see what would happen if they were both raging at the same time. A betting man would say they flatten us, but maybe the key to the fight is to fight them at the same time...
While I only got to spend three of my five days off playing FFXI (man I sound like such a loser), I did get some things accomplished, but I still have one irritating thing on my to do list.
Wings of the Goddess
We finished up the new Bastok and Windurst quests on Saturday (Sandy was finished the weekend before). We tried to finish Bastok when we did Sandy, but it turned out to be too difficult for me to tank. The constant double-attacking left me spending too much time trying to get shadows up instead of hitting her to keep hate, the end result was our mages had to heal the DDs and eventually hate turned to them, then the DDs, and then finally to me. Our second go-around with Klara went better, we had 6 people as we added a PLD to tank, the end result was a pretty easy win (though the mages were still pulling hate from healing), our setup was PLD, NIN, MNK, SAM, SCH and WHM. Funny thing happened at the beginning of this fight, when we zoned in I did something I do with almost any NM, I /slap emoted Klara (I have a habit of doing this or /wave). Much to everyone's surprise she apparently did NOT take this transgression lightly because she attacked me right after I did it. Now I don't know if maybe I got too close (I had only took a few steps forward from where we zoned in at) or if she really did aggro from the /slap, but we were all caught off guard when she began attacking me.
Windurst was the fight we were least worried about and as you can probably guess it ended up being the one we should have been the most concerned with. While we are all good players, to tackle that fight with five people is just nuts, you'd have to be l33t to have any chance at a win. Our first attempt was BLM x4 and SAM, we figured we'd just nuke em down and let the SAM clean up, it was a disaster, we didn't survive the first wave. Our second attempt was a little more traditional with NIN, SAM, MNK, RDM (kite) and WHM, but once again things went badly. The problem on the second attempt was the waves are just too fast and we were quickly overwhelmed when the second wave came in. So after two failed attempts we sent out a distress call and ended up getting 8 more people to help us (this fight is out in the open so anyone with access to the past can help), the end result was...well we kicked the shit out of the mobs. It was a perfect example of strength in numbers, thanks again to everyone that helped us with that.
The storyline in WotG has been pretty solid, Windy's storyline has been fantastic (with some outstanding cutscenes to go along with it), Bastok has also been pretty good (the seeds for the rise of the Shadow Lord are slowly being sown), but Sandy is dragging things down. The other two nations are dealing directly with the established histories that have been in the game since its inception, whereas Sandy only teased us with the destruction of Tavnazia. The last few quests have had nothing to do with the ramifications of that event, it's just been about a bunch of bratty ten year olds trying to act like grown ups. At this point I've given up hope Sandy will offer up anything interesting, so I'm happy the other two nations are living up to their billing.
Omega
At this point I think it's safe to say we own Omega, he poses little challenge these days. On Friday we fought him again and none of the tanks died (a first) and we decided based on the last few fights that we'd farm the pods. We knocked out five pods, but it could have gone smoother once we started kiting him. Speaking for myself I have never kited him and was out of position and generally confused about what exactly we were supposed to be doing. I'd imagine (well I know for a fact) that others had never seen this either. But as far as taking baby steps, we were able to keep walking and this will probably be nothing more than a footnote in a few months.
Project: Shantottofication
What can I say, we tried this fight twice, once on Saturday and again on Sunday. I was hoping we'd complete it because I'd really like to get to the cutscenes everyone keeps saying are so amazing. Our first fight with her was NIN, SAM x2, RNG, WHM x2, and as far as first fights go I'd say we did well, we got the BLM version down to around 35% before wiping. I was holding the WHM version (and actually kited her before the first rage), she didn't pose much trouble. After the first rage she was still easy to hold, I just voked and cast ninjutsu occasionally until the second rage. The second rage is where we ended up wiping, too much damage was taken to recover from. Ultimately though we were not able to get far enough on our first attempt.
The second attempt we changed things up a bit with NIN, MNK x2, WHM x2, SCH. This time I decided I was going to engage the WHM version instead of just standing around, I must admit I underestimated what I was going to be able to do and ended up getting her down to 80% before the first rage. At this point I had to disengage as we weren't sure what would happen if they raged at the same time, but the speculation was we wouldn't like the outcome. Our lessons learned from the first fight we got the BLM version down to 11% before wiping to the third rage. Thinking that we were good to go from that point we healed up and the MNKs again took to killing the BLM version, unfortunately this is were we made a few miscalculations. The first was something I wasn't ready for and that was when I went in to grab the WHM, I took a bunch of damage from the BLM. This led to the second mistake and that was assuming the WHM would be easy to deal with, she was not, she was much stronger at this point and it was a struggle to keep things together at first. Because I was having so much trouble, our healers were healing me to keep me alive, which led to the third mistake and that was healing me. Because they were healing me as well as healing the MNKs they were moving up the hate list faster than me and eventually I lost hate altogether, the WHM started picking off our healers and we ended up wiping with the BLM at around 15%.
This is a pretty challenging fight, but I think we are on the right track with our setup, it's just a matter of getting our timing right, minimizing mistakes and just plain getting lucky. Part of me, though, wants to see what would happen if they were both raging at the same time. A betting man would say they flatten us, but maybe the key to the fight is to fight them at the same time...
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
So Scandelous
The New Social
It's been a little over a week since I closed my Nightmare Syndicate shell and moved into Kimi's Purple Taru Eater (Scandelous) shell, and while I've managed to move most people over, I feel like there is some resentment. A lot of the members were given a Sky/Social shell that seems to be their new shiny, which, meh, fuck it, go play with your new shiny, cause I got my own shiny to play with. :D So far I'm liking Kimi's shell, lots of people I know (and who make me look like a noob) are in it and it's nice not to be in the de facto in charge person.
The Old Social
I remain bummed that Nightmare Syndicate had to be closed, but it was rather depressing that there were only 2-3 people in it most of the time, despite the fact there was something in the neighborhood of 15-20 members. I think a few people are holding it against me that I didn't do more to keep it active, but this was my third go-around leading a social and I think maybe the tenth or so I've seen dwindle to a few people so I've got a pretty good handle on when a shell is dying. As such, I decided to take a different approach than I've taken in the past, this time I talked to the people on my friendlist about their socials and ultimately decided Kimi's would be the best fit for my shell to merge into. I'm sorry that folks may be little upset by this, but fact of the matter, there isn't much socializing with less than a handful of people around, something had to be done.
Dynymbus
Limbus has been going great, we have 29 active members and have had little trouble making split runs. In fact, things have been so well we've only lost one run since the middle of July, I think we're something like 45-1 during that stretch. We also have a new website, which, after dealing with our previous website, is fucking awesome. I'm able to take the data straight from my database and update points, runs, members, etc. in seconds, it's made managing things infinitely easier. There are going to be two new sackholders on Friday, I can't say who yet, though. They are being promoted because we felt if we're going to be doing split runs then having raid leaders would be very helpful and two of our most knowledgeable members will be stepping into these roles. Right now the only negative we are experiencing is a distinct lack of white mages and scholars, we only have a few of each, and really need a couple more to make things easier during the splits.
Obsidian
All I can say is the BLMs are getting slammed lately, whether it's inexperience (which I feel is my biggest problem), folks being lazy, or just a lack of general direction. The black mages have taken the brunt of the blame for recent losses, which in most cases the criticisms are legit and true, but damn I really don't like having fingers pointed at me for fucking things up. Ah well, maybe this is an opportunity to improve things in the BLM group that have been building up over the last year, at any rate, shit needs to be corrected so we can start blaming things on other people :)
It's been a little over a week since I closed my Nightmare Syndicate shell and moved into Kimi's Purple Taru Eater (Scandelous) shell, and while I've managed to move most people over, I feel like there is some resentment. A lot of the members were given a Sky/Social shell that seems to be their new shiny, which, meh, fuck it, go play with your new shiny, cause I got my own shiny to play with. :D So far I'm liking Kimi's shell, lots of people I know (and who make me look like a noob) are in it and it's nice not to be in the de facto in charge person.
The Old Social
I remain bummed that Nightmare Syndicate had to be closed, but it was rather depressing that there were only 2-3 people in it most of the time, despite the fact there was something in the neighborhood of 15-20 members. I think a few people are holding it against me that I didn't do more to keep it active, but this was my third go-around leading a social and I think maybe the tenth or so I've seen dwindle to a few people so I've got a pretty good handle on when a shell is dying. As such, I decided to take a different approach than I've taken in the past, this time I talked to the people on my friendlist about their socials and ultimately decided Kimi's would be the best fit for my shell to merge into. I'm sorry that folks may be little upset by this, but fact of the matter, there isn't much socializing with less than a handful of people around, something had to be done.
Dynymbus
Limbus has been going great, we have 29 active members and have had little trouble making split runs. In fact, things have been so well we've only lost one run since the middle of July, I think we're something like 45-1 during that stretch. We also have a new website, which, after dealing with our previous website, is fucking awesome. I'm able to take the data straight from my database and update points, runs, members, etc. in seconds, it's made managing things infinitely easier. There are going to be two new sackholders on Friday, I can't say who yet, though. They are being promoted because we felt if we're going to be doing split runs then having raid leaders would be very helpful and two of our most knowledgeable members will be stepping into these roles. Right now the only negative we are experiencing is a distinct lack of white mages and scholars, we only have a few of each, and really need a couple more to make things easier during the splits.
Obsidian
All I can say is the BLMs are getting slammed lately, whether it's inexperience (which I feel is my biggest problem), folks being lazy, or just a lack of general direction. The black mages have taken the brunt of the blame for recent losses, which in most cases the criticisms are legit and true, but damn I really don't like having fingers pointed at me for fucking things up. Ah well, maybe this is an opportunity to improve things in the BLM group that have been building up over the last year, at any rate, shit needs to be corrected so we can start blaming things on other people :)
Monday, November 2, 2009
Xarcarbard (S)
San d'Oria laid claim to this zone this week and I went there on both BLM and NIN to see if it was as much fun as the Glacier is. In short, no, it sucked, but not for the reasons you might think. The main reason it sucked was due to the other players in the zone, of which there seemed to be three kinds.
1. The Serious Ones - These guys were actually trying to defend the zone, which is noble, but if the Glacier has taught us anything, even with 100 people there 24/7 the beastmen are gonna get it back. The thing that really pissed me off about these guys, though, was they expected the rest of us to forgo maximizing our jobs in Campaign, as a BLM I was expected to stay in the back, provide heals, enfeeble and the occasional nuke, in support of the PLD (we'll call him Mr. Superstar) who is calling the shots. To this, all I can say is fuck you Mr. Superstar, you're gonna cap your XP, while I'm gonna hit limits on healing, nuking and enfeebling and for an hour's work end up with 1k XP (meanwhile Mr. Superstar is talking about getting 5k XP, jackass motherfucker). I put up with this shit for one battle, then broke out the NIN and tanked the damn mobs myself.
2. The Curious Players (with a clue) - This is where I'd say I fell in, I was curious about the mobs and the coffers. I've been to Xarc plenty of times on BLM and the place is great if you have a small group of people pulling a mob at a time, it's excellent XP. I figured with the zone under friendly control the place would be teeming with people and one could move from one mob to the next (kinda like the Glacier when it's under Allied control). I'll get to how things went in a moment, but I'm not done bitching about my fellow players.
3. The Curious Players (who don't have a motherfucking clue about how anything in fucking Campaign works) - These dumb motherfuckers (and sadly there were quite a few), were CONSTANTLY getting people MPK'd, over and over and over. Seemed like about every three minutes one of these dumbshits would get hate and then run right at people either resting or fighting other mobs. At one point I was triple-weakened from these dumbasses! I'm trying to kill mobs and get XP you stupid motherfuckers, not spend the whole the whole battle staying out of AOE range because one blast with my shadows down will kill me. Sure this happens all the time in Campaign, but it's maybe once or twice a battle, not continuously all night long.
As for the actual battles themselves, my first one out there was a nightmare. I was on BLM as five waves showed up a few minutes apart, the fourth wave caught me off guard when Shadowsoul snuck up on me. Death came in two hits, guess he didn't like my Optical Hat. Two waves of NPCs came out, but they were quickly wiped out by the mobs, and I don't think either wave lasted more than a few minutes. Interestingly enough all the NPCs that showed were from Windurst, no one from Sandy or Bastok showed the whole day.
The second battle went better, we had mantelets and this was Mr. Superstar's first battle, he tanked and didn't try to coral everyone into fighting it his "way". This was my most productive battle, and we did quite well beating up on Yags, trouble didn't start until the dragons in Shadowsoul's group showed up.
The third battle was the ultimate, "why the fuck am I even bothering" battle. For starters Mr. Superstar decided to "take the reigns" and try to get us to work as a unit and defend the fort. Not a bad idea, but he also played it as his way or the highway and since he was the only tank, we kinda had to play along. He did provide a tidbit of info about a safe place to fight here. Right in front of the fort there is a valley, no mobs trek here, not even that damn flying dragon. That was the only thing he got right, the rest of the time it was about keeping his (and only his) character alive and to hell with everyone else. This was also the battle the afore mentioned dumbasses came out in full force and kept MPKing us. From watching their movements I'm confident in saying what they were doing wasn't on purpose, but rather just poorly made choices about what direction to run. In the end I barely cleared 1k and the fight was 45-50 minutes long, just pathetic.
At this point I went back to Bastok and got out the NIN gear, not that BLM was a bad choice, especially with all the AOE's being thrown around, but the other people out there were making it impossible to be productive on BLM. Once again Mr. Superstar was trying to get everyone to work together, but I wasn't taking the bait this time. My first order of business was to take the hate off the mob he was fighting, which as anyone who has campaigned with me can tell you is not hard to do (NIN/RDM > PLD/DNC in terms of hate generation), I then held it until an MPK took me out (the valley is safe from mobs, but not other players). When I got up, I got hit with an AOE and was dropped again, this was entirely my fault. On my third life I was out of the way and healing when another one of the "special" people brought three dragons to my location. I waited for the dragons to get out of range, but the dumbass not far from didn't and they came running back. I stayed down for about 15 minutes this time, sometimes one just has to admit defeat.
The last battle of the night I was once again NIN, but I decided the best tactic would be to risk aggros and fight off to the side. This worked out well, a few other people joined me and we took out three Yags and were working on a fourth when the fight ended. I did well 1900+XP/1200+AN. Convinced I had things figured out I waited around for an hour, but no battles sprung up, so I eventually headed back to town.
All told I spent 6 hours out there and got around 8k XP, with the bulk of that coming in fights 2 and 5. The coffers didn't contain anything all that special, but I don't think we defeated a single beastmen general, nor did we clear any waves, so I'm not surprised they were kinda bland.
1. The Serious Ones - These guys were actually trying to defend the zone, which is noble, but if the Glacier has taught us anything, even with 100 people there 24/7 the beastmen are gonna get it back. The thing that really pissed me off about these guys, though, was they expected the rest of us to forgo maximizing our jobs in Campaign, as a BLM I was expected to stay in the back, provide heals, enfeeble and the occasional nuke, in support of the PLD (we'll call him Mr. Superstar) who is calling the shots. To this, all I can say is fuck you Mr. Superstar, you're gonna cap your XP, while I'm gonna hit limits on healing, nuking and enfeebling and for an hour's work end up with 1k XP (meanwhile Mr. Superstar is talking about getting 5k XP, jackass motherfucker). I put up with this shit for one battle, then broke out the NIN and tanked the damn mobs myself.
2. The Curious Players (with a clue) - This is where I'd say I fell in, I was curious about the mobs and the coffers. I've been to Xarc plenty of times on BLM and the place is great if you have a small group of people pulling a mob at a time, it's excellent XP. I figured with the zone under friendly control the place would be teeming with people and one could move from one mob to the next (kinda like the Glacier when it's under Allied control). I'll get to how things went in a moment, but I'm not done bitching about my fellow players.
3. The Curious Players (who don't have a motherfucking clue about how anything in fucking Campaign works) - These dumb motherfuckers (and sadly there were quite a few), were CONSTANTLY getting people MPK'd, over and over and over. Seemed like about every three minutes one of these dumbshits would get hate and then run right at people either resting or fighting other mobs. At one point I was triple-weakened from these dumbasses! I'm trying to kill mobs and get XP you stupid motherfuckers, not spend the whole the whole battle staying out of AOE range because one blast with my shadows down will kill me. Sure this happens all the time in Campaign, but it's maybe once or twice a battle, not continuously all night long.
As for the actual battles themselves, my first one out there was a nightmare. I was on BLM as five waves showed up a few minutes apart, the fourth wave caught me off guard when Shadowsoul snuck up on me. Death came in two hits, guess he didn't like my Optical Hat. Two waves of NPCs came out, but they were quickly wiped out by the mobs, and I don't think either wave lasted more than a few minutes. Interestingly enough all the NPCs that showed were from Windurst, no one from Sandy or Bastok showed the whole day.
The second battle went better, we had mantelets and this was Mr. Superstar's first battle, he tanked and didn't try to coral everyone into fighting it his "way". This was my most productive battle, and we did quite well beating up on Yags, trouble didn't start until the dragons in Shadowsoul's group showed up.
The third battle was the ultimate, "why the fuck am I even bothering" battle. For starters Mr. Superstar decided to "take the reigns" and try to get us to work as a unit and defend the fort. Not a bad idea, but he also played it as his way or the highway and since he was the only tank, we kinda had to play along. He did provide a tidbit of info about a safe place to fight here. Right in front of the fort there is a valley, no mobs trek here, not even that damn flying dragon. That was the only thing he got right, the rest of the time it was about keeping his (and only his) character alive and to hell with everyone else. This was also the battle the afore mentioned dumbasses came out in full force and kept MPKing us. From watching their movements I'm confident in saying what they were doing wasn't on purpose, but rather just poorly made choices about what direction to run. In the end I barely cleared 1k and the fight was 45-50 minutes long, just pathetic.
At this point I went back to Bastok and got out the NIN gear, not that BLM was a bad choice, especially with all the AOE's being thrown around, but the other people out there were making it impossible to be productive on BLM. Once again Mr. Superstar was trying to get everyone to work together, but I wasn't taking the bait this time. My first order of business was to take the hate off the mob he was fighting, which as anyone who has campaigned with me can tell you is not hard to do (NIN/RDM > PLD/DNC in terms of hate generation), I then held it until an MPK took me out (the valley is safe from mobs, but not other players). When I got up, I got hit with an AOE and was dropped again, this was entirely my fault. On my third life I was out of the way and healing when another one of the "special" people brought three dragons to my location. I waited for the dragons to get out of range, but the dumbass not far from didn't and they came running back. I stayed down for about 15 minutes this time, sometimes one just has to admit defeat.
The last battle of the night I was once again NIN, but I decided the best tactic would be to risk aggros and fight off to the side. This worked out well, a few other people joined me and we took out three Yags and were working on a fourth when the fight ended. I did well 1900+XP/1200+AN. Convinced I had things figured out I waited around for an hour, but no battles sprung up, so I eventually headed back to town.
All told I spent 6 hours out there and got around 8k XP, with the bulk of that coming in fights 2 and 5. The coffers didn't contain anything all that special, but I don't think we defeated a single beastmen general, nor did we clear any waves, so I'm not surprised they were kinda bland.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Blogging is Boring
For real, yo!
I need to post something, it's been two weeks, but I got nothing, just sorta meh. Maybe I'll think of something later and this will just be a filler post.
I need to post something, it's been two weeks, but I got nothing, just sorta meh. Maybe I'll think of something later and this will just be a filler post.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
All That Other Stuff I Do
It seems like I get a fair amount of, I dunno, flack or maybe some form of resentment in my social because I'm never around or too busy doing something when I am in there. I understand where they are coming from when I read these statements, but it has never been my intent not to do things with the social. The problem seems to stem from when a lot of the folks want to do things it's often spontaneous, which just doesn't jive with me that well. I like to have things planned, I'll sit at work and plan out my entire evening in the game and once I have those plans set, I'm extremely reluctant to change them. Doesn't seem fair to my shell, and I don't do it out of spite or anything, but getting me to change my plans is...just hard to do. My event schedule looks like this:
Sunday afternoon: Dynamis
Sunday night: Freetime
Monday night: Limbus
Tuesday night: Einherjar
Wednesday night: Dynamis
Thursday: Freetime, usually spent recooping XP
Friday night: Limbus
Saturday morning: Einherjar
The rest of Saturday: Free time, usually I campaign or, like lately, plan missions and the like.
The quickest thing on that list is Einherjar, which takes around 90 minutes, Dynamis can take up to five hours, with Limbus falling in between at around three hours (I do a lot there). At some point I need to find room for Salvage and Sky too. *sigh* It'd be nice if I won the lottery so I could sit at home all day instead of working, maybe then I'd have time for the things I want to do.
Occasionally people have heard (read) me talk about my databases or spreadsheets, but I never really explain what it is I'm talking about. In real life I'm a Database Administrator/Programmer, so it should come as no surprise that that nerd crap occasionally overlaps my FFXI nerd crap. One of the things I developed was a gear/food database that allows me to search off damn near any stat (the Advanced Filter on FFXIAH is an example, albeit, a very limited one, of what it does). This started first as a spreadsheet, and quickly morphed into a database. The initial database was built over a year ago and it took me a long time to get the data in the database (like months, I literally researched every item). About two months ago I overhauled the whole damn thing into a superpimp look-up tool, but for the 3-4 solid months spent working on this thing, I've used it maybe a dozen times. It looks really cool though.
The spreadsheets are something I use daily in the game, one is my tracking workbook, it has morphed a lot as time has went by. The initial idea behind it was to project the gear I would want/need for my Ninja (this started when it was around level 50), at first it was easily obtainable stuff with some AH prices mixed in, but as I got to 75 and really learned how to play the job, I started to realize there were a lot of holes in my spreadsheet. Over time it has went from tracking dd, tank and ws gear to tracking tank, provoke, supertank, evasion, dd, ws, throwing, shadows and ninjutsu. Think about that for a second, I've researched gear from 1-75 in every slot for each of those categories. Even nerdier, about 4 months ago I wrote a bunch of code so that I could see the gear I need at any level on 1 screen without scrolling (I pat myself on the back daily for adding this bit). Once I had the grid layout for the gear I needed/wanted, I set up another spreadsheet with the AH prices. Like the grid, this started out simple, it gave me the name of the gear and the price, but it is a small marvel of it's own now. I track availability, last sold price, average price, the difference in those prices, nq prices, how I can obtain it if I can't buy it and as if that weren't enough I set it up so I could see a breakdown of costs per category. So, for example, when I look at my Shop list I see that I need another 1.1M gil to get the tank gear I want. But did I stop there? No, I also have a spresheet that tracks all my macros in the event I lose them or just want to tweak things. All that was for my NIN, I did the same thing for my BLM too.
Still, I couldn't leave well enough alone, and over time I've also added a list of game maps I still need (all of them are CoP maps btw), an inventory list of all the gear on my main AND my mules (and yeah, I know how much all that gear is worth too), I have a spreadsheet for all my merits and projected merits and I keep track of the gil I have on my accounts, my zeni balance, my ichor balance and for those times I'm really bored, I can keep track of how many Allied Notes I've obtained since my last medal evaluation. Did I mention this is all in one workbook?
Over the summer I created another workbook for crafting and, not to toot my own horn, it's better than the ones most people have available to them. I spent a month refining it so that it truly did take into account breaks and hq, and it can go from single synths to stack synths. I included the AH fees just to refine things further. That spreadsheet has helped me project costs and determine whether the losses (or better yet, gains) are worth the time I'd have to spend farming.
So yeah, I can be pretty busy for a damn game, but I enjoy it and wouldn't have it any other way.
Sunday afternoon: Dynamis
Sunday night: Freetime
Monday night: Limbus
Tuesday night: Einherjar
Wednesday night: Dynamis
Thursday: Freetime, usually spent recooping XP
Friday night: Limbus
Saturday morning: Einherjar
The rest of Saturday: Free time, usually I campaign or, like lately, plan missions and the like.
The quickest thing on that list is Einherjar, which takes around 90 minutes, Dynamis can take up to five hours, with Limbus falling in between at around three hours (I do a lot there). At some point I need to find room for Salvage and Sky too. *sigh* It'd be nice if I won the lottery so I could sit at home all day instead of working, maybe then I'd have time for the things I want to do.
Occasionally people have heard (read) me talk about my databases or spreadsheets, but I never really explain what it is I'm talking about. In real life I'm a Database Administrator/Programmer, so it should come as no surprise that that nerd crap occasionally overlaps my FFXI nerd crap. One of the things I developed was a gear/food database that allows me to search off damn near any stat (the Advanced Filter on FFXIAH is an example, albeit, a very limited one, of what it does). This started first as a spreadsheet, and quickly morphed into a database. The initial database was built over a year ago and it took me a long time to get the data in the database (like months, I literally researched every item). About two months ago I overhauled the whole damn thing into a superpimp look-up tool, but for the 3-4 solid months spent working on this thing, I've used it maybe a dozen times. It looks really cool though.
The spreadsheets are something I use daily in the game, one is my tracking workbook, it has morphed a lot as time has went by. The initial idea behind it was to project the gear I would want/need for my Ninja (this started when it was around level 50), at first it was easily obtainable stuff with some AH prices mixed in, but as I got to 75 and really learned how to play the job, I started to realize there were a lot of holes in my spreadsheet. Over time it has went from tracking dd, tank and ws gear to tracking tank, provoke, supertank, evasion, dd, ws, throwing, shadows and ninjutsu. Think about that for a second, I've researched gear from 1-75 in every slot for each of those categories. Even nerdier, about 4 months ago I wrote a bunch of code so that I could see the gear I need at any level on 1 screen without scrolling (I pat myself on the back daily for adding this bit). Once I had the grid layout for the gear I needed/wanted, I set up another spreadsheet with the AH prices. Like the grid, this started out simple, it gave me the name of the gear and the price, but it is a small marvel of it's own now. I track availability, last sold price, average price, the difference in those prices, nq prices, how I can obtain it if I can't buy it and as if that weren't enough I set it up so I could see a breakdown of costs per category. So, for example, when I look at my Shop list I see that I need another 1.1M gil to get the tank gear I want. But did I stop there? No, I also have a spresheet that tracks all my macros in the event I lose them or just want to tweak things. All that was for my NIN, I did the same thing for my BLM too.
Still, I couldn't leave well enough alone, and over time I've also added a list of game maps I still need (all of them are CoP maps btw), an inventory list of all the gear on my main AND my mules (and yeah, I know how much all that gear is worth too), I have a spreadsheet for all my merits and projected merits and I keep track of the gil I have on my accounts, my zeni balance, my ichor balance and for those times I'm really bored, I can keep track of how many Allied Notes I've obtained since my last medal evaluation. Did I mention this is all in one workbook?
Over the summer I created another workbook for crafting and, not to toot my own horn, it's better than the ones most people have available to them. I spent a month refining it so that it truly did take into account breaks and hq, and it can go from single synths to stack synths. I included the AH fees just to refine things further. That spreadsheet has helped me project costs and determine whether the losses (or better yet, gains) are worth the time I'd have to spend farming.
So yeah, I can be pretty busy for a damn game, but I enjoy it and wouldn't have it any other way.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Wings of the God Damnit
Got some of this silliness accomplished today with Dean, Strav, a lil bit of Rudi and two people whom I don't know (they are friends with Dean and Strav). The story has been pretty good, I'm enjoying it, but good grief, couldn't they have found a less indirect way to tell it? Doing the city quests is an interesting idea, but making some of them fights just sucks. Why? Well you have to find people who are on those fights. Not that the concept is unique or anything, all of the other expansion were team oriented too, but the difference for WotG is people can branch out in three different directions, whereas the others were linear from start to finish. Bitching aside, we finished the Bastok storyline today, killed the orc for Quest 7 in the Sandy storyline, and threw 2 BLMs at the Yags for quest 5 in the Windy storyline. We'll do more next Saturday and baring any surprises will be ready for the next wave of quests and missions in the November update.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Extra Baggage
No, I'm not talking about my 12-pack gut, I finally got the updated version of AltanaCubby over the weekend (it has the mog satchel now) and noticed my storage mules were just full of crap I'll never use again, particularly the mage mule. This seemed like a good time to do some moghouse cleaning and what I found was surprising. I have about 100 pieces of low level (mostly) gear that I'll never need worth roughly a million gil. I kept some +1 sets like my Federation Gi, Bone/Beetle and Kingdom, though other than a few pieces they will probably forever remain in storage, but they hold some value to me cause I busted my ass back in my low level days to get that stuff. I also kept all the gear I need for each of my jobs that I've leveled, can't imagine selling gear I could use on a job only to buy it back months later when I need it again. Regardless, now the mules will have a lot more free space for me to send the new crap I'll never use again to them...of course this is all dependent on me getting the useless stuff sold. I think maybe I'll buy the stuff for Gobbiebag X with my (potential) newfound gil... :D
Being a Leader and Stuff
Since my recent promotion to sackholder in Obsidian I don't feel like I've done a whole hell of a lot to justify it. I took attendance once, I haven't set up any parties (not that I'm in a rush to do this part honestly), I haven't done any pulling, I haven't collected coins, I've barely even done much in terms of crowd control. Arnor expressed this the other day about him having a sackholder position in our Limbus shell, he feels like he's just another member and not someone in charge. I told him I'd back him up with anything he wants to do in Limbus and I'd like for him to feel like he's worthy of the sack. You see, it' not having a sack and being in charge (I prefer to give guidance as opposed to orders), I just want to be able say, "Hey, I'm a sack in Obsidian and do all this awesome shit in one of the longest running and most prestigious Dynamis shells in the game!" Like Arnor, I find myself wondering if I'm a leader or just someone with a fancy title...
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Soloing in Campaign
This topic popped up on Alla and I considered replying, but some people there are simply dipshits and I didn't feel like bothering with them. My thought on soloing in Campaign is simple, I fucking hate it. Your selfish ass wants to eek out as much XP as possible, but my selfish ass doesn't like my time being wasted, in my book time wins over XP. So what if your unique snowflake ass extended an otherwise short Campaign and got everyone a couple hundred more XP, that "reason" is just a facade you are hiding behind. Truth is these people could give a shit about everyone else, they use the fact we all "benefit" by getting some extra XP as an excuse for them to waste everyone's time. Sorry, Campaign soloers, I have Campaign tags because I WANNA HIT SHIT, not stand around and wonder if another wave is coming. If I'm in Rolanberry expecting another wave then that means I'm not in Bastok seeing Campaign messages about where a battle really is about to take place.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
My Limbus Shell
Limbus hasn't been the same without Leetu, I haven't seen him in over a month, but the shell has marched on and I think we are finally at a point where we have a solid core and things are running smoothly. It'd be nice if there were more people in our shell, but we run around the same times as other more "prestigious" shells so getting good people who want to stay has been a constant struggle, but I'd say the core is there, we just need to expand it.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
If your linkshell can't beat Dynamis San d'Oria you need a new linkshell.
So we ended up with 23 people last night, took out 112 statues and beat the boss with about 30 seconds to go. In the middle of the run Q decided to pull a mob for each and every person in the zone, 18 orcs and 8 stats (I think), we managed to clear the entire group without a wipe. That, my friends, is where the skill comes in. Overall it was a great run by everyone involved, drops were so-so, but when aren't they? Hopefully people have found their grooves and we can continue to see great outings like last night and the Windurst we ran last Sunday.
Tonight is my one free day during the week, hopefully I can spend it campaigning, I need to get the rest of AMII tier for my Black Mage (I only have Burst II atm). I hate merit parties, if it weren't for campaign I don't know how I'd keep my level. I bet I get dragged into something for the social though, Roachy is back and it seems his favorite thing to do is camp NMs (which just happens to be one of my least favorite things to do), he's going to want folks to come and help him camp I just know it.
Tonight is my one free day during the week, hopefully I can spend it campaigning, I need to get the rest of AMII tier for my Black Mage (I only have Burst II atm). I hate merit parties, if it weren't for campaign I don't know how I'd keep my level. I bet I get dragged into something for the social though, Roachy is back and it seems his favorite thing to do is camp NMs (which just happens to be one of my least favorite things to do), he's going to want folks to come and help him camp I just know it.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
My first Einherjar
So I did my first run in Einherjar last night (with Obsidian), it was fast and over with in 15 minutes...I think it took me longer to get there... We did Wing I and I have been assured things aren't always that easy. It was also the only time I will probably ever attend as a Ninja, a job that is a bit lacking with the heavy DD philosophy Obsidian employs. That means I'll have to break out the Black Mage for this, thankfully it's not as long as Dynamis so even if I die it's not like I'm going to lose 6k XP.
Tonight we have an 18 man Dynamis Sandy run, should be colorful.
Tonight we have an 18 man Dynamis Sandy run, should be colorful.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Just how bored am I?
Well I'm really bored at the moment, thus the creation of this blog, question is, how long will I remain bored? For a long time I've pissed and moaned about people having blogs, because honestly, no one cares what you watched on TV last night. However, my personal mundane (boring) life aside, I do involve myself in something I might actually want to blog about: Final Fantasy XI. My character Drakus resides on Odin and I have Sackholder positions in Dynamis/Einherjar (Obsidian) and Limbus (Dynymbus) as well as Leader for a social (NightmareSyndicate), between the three I'm sure I can come up with enough stuff to at least amuse myself (whether anyone else cares remains to be seen). So that's it for now, maybe I'll be back, maybe I won't.
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