How I Spent My Winter Vacation

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.