With the September update having come and gone, and with some time to settle into the new world SE has created for us, it's time for me to start putting it all together.
Obsidian
We've got new gear, new zones, new skills, new spells, new all kinds of shit, but the most important change with this update was not something SE had any say over and that's the Obsidain Linkshell. Before the update we were seeing a drop in attendance for Dynamis and it was becoming clear to us that people were losing interest (interest has been declining for some time, but recently it's turned into an avalanche), hell I was losing interest. Fact is Dynamis is a big commitment, twice a week, 7 hours of playing time minimum and there is so much new content and stuff to do from the last two updates, most folks are opting to go with the new and say to hell with the old. This is understandable, especially since much of the gear just got bitchslapped by the Empyrean Armor (I'll get into that another day), the only motivation for most people to do Dynamis is to hang out with friends.
So with that in mind, about two weeks ago we had a sackholder summit and laid out the direction Obsidian would be going forward with. The biggest change is a massive one, our focus is switching from Dynamis to Abyssea. For those of you unfamiliar with Obsidian this may not seem like a big deal, but Obsidian has been a Dynamis shell for almost 6 years (some knowledge for you courtesy of Qtipus and Kaeko: Obsidian's Origin and Old School Dynamis), and that's a lot of history to walk way from. We'll still do Dynamis, but we're scaling it back to once a week and only focusing on Xarcabard and the CoP zones. Even with this shift in focus, the sign-ups for the CoP zones are disconcerting, 20 for Qufim, 20 for Valkrum and 9 (yes, fucking NINE!) for Buburimu. Hey, I know we're all level 85 and shit, but those bosses don't kill themselves... At any rate, there is so much to do in Abyssea, that we had to adapt or watch the shell die.
It also doesn't stop with Abyssea, we also still have Einherjar, VNMs, Sky and Dynamis in our event schedules and we're doing so much stuff all the time, I've given up and just use Obsidian as my social shell also.
Job Changes
Ninja
So it turns out I was way offbase with Yurin and Myoshu, both of them are essentially Subtle Blow as opposed to the Silence and Defense Down spells I was hoping for. Yurin is a debuff that "Inhibits TP" gain for a mob, while Myoshu is a buff that is "Subtle Blow Plus", and both are very nice for soloing. The thing to note here is that Yurin is easily the more useful of the two tools for a group event, especially when fighting an NM. The reason for this is Yurin helps the group as a whole, it's inflicted on the mob, Myoshu on the other hand is only on the caster, it's solo only and even then, if you are near the Subtle Blow cap (it's 50), it may not be helpful at all. So not total fail, in fact Yurin is something I can cast with Aisha that gives me two debuffs only a NIN can use to help the cause.
The damage increase for elemental ninjutsu has been disappointing, it appears Ichi got roughly a 25% increase and San got around a 10% increase, however, as near as anyone can tell, Ni spells seem to have LOST about 10% of their damage. I can't personally verify these numbers, but I can say the numbers are marginal at best, there was no significant increase.
The one thing I can say about the Skillchain Bonus is it's real, and it seems to generate enmity. I've actually got to test this one quite a bit with Atma farming when I've self skillchained Blade: To > Blade: Chi (creates Impaction) and I've been pulling hate with that. Now anyone who knows much about Katana Weapon Skills can tell you, they don't do much damage, in fact a single two-hand weapon skill will out-damage both the weapon skills and scillchain combined, so to be pulling hate from doing this seems odd to me (especially with Innin up). It might be my imagination, or the fact I'm piling in multiple hits and the game mechanics dictate more hate generation, or the way we are fighting the mobs, I simply don't know.
Dual Wield V, say what? My initial thoughts on this were, no, SE would have put that in the update notes, but now I'm not so sure. Many jobs are reporting tier increases in their job traits and SE was mum about those also. Is it noticeable? I haven't been able to tell, I hit so damn fast already so it's hard to say. Plus, I'm not one of those people that understands how to test and confirm it, so all I have is rumor.
Black Mage
As I stated in a previous post, BLM didn't get much in this update except new spells, it seems most people still feel BLM didn't get much. Break is probably the one that has most folks irritated. On the surface it's a great spell, lasts about 30 seconds and stops the mob cold. That is, if it lands. For some dumb ass reason, SE decided to make this a spell that relies on Enfeebling Magic, which BLM has a C+ rating in. This means a typical BLM has to put a ton of work in just to get decent Enfeebling Skill, and even then, against high level mobs there a good chance it will get resisted. It also has a 4 second cast, which is middle ground casting, but if you are hoping to get this off like Stun and give yourself time to run away, then you better hope the mob doesn't interrupt you. I can live with the casting time, but why Break isn't Dark Magic is beyond me, would be tons more useful if it was.
The -ja spells, as it turns out, are indeed like Cura, going up 5% in damage after each successful cast, however, there seems to be a time limit for casting so it's not a permanent increase. They are also AoE spells, so they seem to be the next tier of -ga spells as well. However, like Stone V and Water V before them, most BLMs don't have merits in either element so the interest in them has been marginal.
BLM also got two new traits, one we knew about, the other we found out about. The first is Occult Acumen, this grants TP applicable to a spell's MP cost (elemental and dark magic only) and was first introduced for DRK and SCH in the last update, now it's BLM's turn. On the surface this seems rather intriguing, the return is 2.5% of the MP cost (I have no idea if Conserve MP or Clear Mind affect this, btw), so if you cast Thunder IV, you'll get 4.275 TP, Burst II will give you 7.175 TP. Seems cool, but then...when does BLM ever melee that they need TP?! It's almost exclusively a solo thing, so meh, it has its uses, but most of the time no one will give a shit. The other trait is Magic Attack Bonus V, like Dual Wield V above, SE didn't mention BLM was getting this and in fact no one was expecting it until level 90, but it's been confirmed that BLM does in fact have MAB V at level 81.
That should be enough for today, there's a lot more stuff to cover, gear, AF3, Abyssea, etc., but that's for another day...
Stating the Obvious
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Friday, September 3, 2010
September Update Thoughts: NIN & BLM
So the with the September update just a few days away, it's looking like this update will be job centric, with additional content if one purchases the second Abyssea expansion. This is fine with me as I have plenty to do as is, if someone needs more then they need a better fucking hobby.
NIN
I never look at the BG forums as they are mostly filled with immature elitist assholes, plus I hate looking for things there, it just doesn't work for me. Instead I tend to focus on the Alla discussions, which also have immature elitist assholes, but there isn't nearly as many (aside from the BLM forum, that one is full of fuckwads). Why do I bring this up and what does it have to do with the update? Well NIN has been getting shit on daily at Alla, led by the Jerk Ass Rog (ThePhsycoticOne), who has declared NIN useless, him and his minions karma bomb anyone who dares state otherwise. Folks there are demanding that SE make NIN a top tier DD or it will be branded the next BST. Meanwhile, Rog himself is a RDM (though he says NIN was his first 75, thus, apparently giving him the right to bitch and moan like a fucking asshole all he pleases), and if anyone has been paying attention they will note that RDM and NIN are becoming similar jobs with slightly different approaches. Neither are the best at anything, but both are in the top five of everything, so I find his bullshit to be that much more annoying because he comes off as a smug little hypocrite to me.
The worst part of all of this nonsense is his constant barrage of bullshit has somehow convinced otherwise smart people to think like him and QQ over the death of NIN. You fucking morons! NIN is just as good today as it was a year ago, it's a great DoT DD, a great tank, a great puller and a great kiter, not the best at any of those, but far from useless. Some want it to be a better DD, but to make it on par with SAM you need to buff one-hand damage and add an epic WS, which would be nice, but probably not necessary. Others think it's dead as a tank, and these special little shitflakes think this because of the nerf to RDM hate spells. WTF?! You dumbasses were supposed to be subbing DRK for a fucking reason, i.e. Weapon Bash and Last Resort (you open the fight with these abilities shit for brains) and then spam Stun and NIN enfeebles, RDM was always the better option for kiting! Idiots. The only thing lacking for NIN tanks is a native hate generating ability like Flash or Provoke (Yonin is good for holding hate, but not generating it), as a tank it can still embarrass a PLD when one tries.
At any rate SE responded by...not changing any of that, which is fine with me, I think NIN is a great and versatile job that doesn't need any serious changes. What SE has decided to do was shore up the major weakness in NIN by addressing Ninjutsu, specifically adding more debuffs (or are they buffs?) and adjusting the damage to the elementals. Sure the aforementioned shit for brain message board saps may think this is bad (as witnessed by the near immediate karma rating of someone who did like it), but Drakus is excited (yes, I just referred to myself in the third person). I'm stoked by the idea of higher damage Ninjutsu, especially if it means Ni = Tier III and San = Tier IV, nuking is the best part of being a BLM and I always enjoyed it on NIN (I even carry around tools just in case I feel like nuking shit), so if my Nis can do a minimum of 200 damage and Sans start at 500 then I'll be a happy NIN. Think about the damage that can be inflicted in a short period of time, running through a Ni wheel will net 1,200 damage in around 30 seconds, while a San will do 3,000 damage in under a minute. Sure, BLM and maybe SCH or RDM can top that, but I won't be out of MP or have used up my two-hour to do it. As for the two new spells themselves, I'm not as bent out of shape this time, sure I'd prefer my Ni tier be finished, but if my hunches are correct, I'll be happy.
Yurin: Ichi
Yurin apparently means deep woods. Initially I took this debuff to mean defense down to collaborate with attack down, but after seeing the animation (found here at 0:37) I'm thinking something altogether different. There is no sound after the spell is cast, thus I'm thinking it's Silence. This makes sense when you consider the translation, that deep woods, are thought of as a quiet darkness, i.e. silence.
Myoshu: Ichi
Myoshu means something along the lines an extraordinary, excellent, or magnificent move. Unlike the above one which makes sense as a debuff, this translation sounds more like a buff, to be more specific, it sounds like Accuracy. However when I see the animation (it's right after the one in the link above) I'm reminded of the RDM Sword WS Death Blossom, that WS gives RDM an aftermath effect of Magic Accuracy and Magic Attack. Again, it seems more like a buff. That said, aside from Shadows, Sneak and Invisible, NINs have never been given a buff spell and this is why I go back to my original speculation of it being Evasion Down. I think the translation is rather telling that it involves Accuracy and the debuff for that is Evasion Down. We'll know what both of these do in around a week, in the meantime, it's been kinda fun to conjecture.
Blade: Hi
Could this be the WS I mentioned that will put an end to Jin? Somehow I doubt it, but fuck if it ain't a cool animation (found here at 1:47). There's some speculation over the translation (could mean fire or secret), but the animation seems pretty clear to me it's a fire based attack that probably deals fire elemental damage and if that's the case then it's not gonna beat Jin (Shell and MND come into play with elemental WS).
BLM
I imagine BLMs were a bit disappointed with today's update one sheet, unlike most jobs BLM is getting no new abilities, traits or tweaks, instead they get five new spells. When one considers the spells though, I think it all evens out in the end.
Aero V
This was to be expected, some people were expecting Fire V, but it looks like they are giving us V spells every three levels which means we can expect Fire V at 86, Blizzard V at 89 and Thunder V at 92. That aside, just like Stone V and Water V (neither of which I've bothered to get yet), Aero V doesn't bring much since merits are in Blizzard and Thunder, will be nice for Kirin, but beyond that I don't think it will see much use when I do get around to getting it.
Aspir II
Fucking win. This is a fantastic addition to the job, even better than Convert imo, couple this with Aspir and you're pulling back around 400 MP and you aren't risking death to do it.
Stoneja/Waterja
These two spells have led to a lot of speculation as to what they are. It's clear they are AoE spells, but they are not the expected -Ga IV spells, even though those spells are in the game and used by mobs. My guess is instead of divided damage, these spells will do the same damage to all mobs within range. For example, say a -ga spell does 1,000 damage to a single mob, if there are three mobs, each receives 333 damage, -ja on the other hand may deliver 1,000 damage to each mob whether there is one or 20 of them. Maybe, who knows?
Break
Another potentially cool spell. If you've ever fought that fucking turtle and his pieste pets in Pashhow (S) you have an idea of what this spell can do, here's hoping it's our Stun II spell.
I'm excited about this update, in addition to the above we are getting Armor Trials, the first half of our AF3 (BLM is gonna be fucking awesome, NIN is a wait and see), more WotG and more Abyssea, lots to do!
NIN
I never look at the BG forums as they are mostly filled with immature elitist assholes, plus I hate looking for things there, it just doesn't work for me. Instead I tend to focus on the Alla discussions, which also have immature elitist assholes, but there isn't nearly as many (aside from the BLM forum, that one is full of fuckwads). Why do I bring this up and what does it have to do with the update? Well NIN has been getting shit on daily at Alla, led by the Jerk Ass Rog (ThePhsycoticOne), who has declared NIN useless, him and his minions karma bomb anyone who dares state otherwise. Folks there are demanding that SE make NIN a top tier DD or it will be branded the next BST. Meanwhile, Rog himself is a RDM (though he says NIN was his first 75, thus, apparently giving him the right to bitch and moan like a fucking asshole all he pleases), and if anyone has been paying attention they will note that RDM and NIN are becoming similar jobs with slightly different approaches. Neither are the best at anything, but both are in the top five of everything, so I find his bullshit to be that much more annoying because he comes off as a smug little hypocrite to me.
The worst part of all of this nonsense is his constant barrage of bullshit has somehow convinced otherwise smart people to think like him and QQ over the death of NIN. You fucking morons! NIN is just as good today as it was a year ago, it's a great DoT DD, a great tank, a great puller and a great kiter, not the best at any of those, but far from useless. Some want it to be a better DD, but to make it on par with SAM you need to buff one-hand damage and add an epic WS, which would be nice, but probably not necessary. Others think it's dead as a tank, and these special little shitflakes think this because of the nerf to RDM hate spells. WTF?! You dumbasses were supposed to be subbing DRK for a fucking reason, i.e. Weapon Bash and Last Resort (you open the fight with these abilities shit for brains) and then spam Stun and NIN enfeebles, RDM was always the better option for kiting! Idiots. The only thing lacking for NIN tanks is a native hate generating ability like Flash or Provoke (Yonin is good for holding hate, but not generating it), as a tank it can still embarrass a PLD when one tries.
At any rate SE responded by...not changing any of that, which is fine with me, I think NIN is a great and versatile job that doesn't need any serious changes. What SE has decided to do was shore up the major weakness in NIN by addressing Ninjutsu, specifically adding more debuffs (or are they buffs?) and adjusting the damage to the elementals. Sure the aforementioned shit for brain message board saps may think this is bad (as witnessed by the near immediate karma rating of someone who did like it), but Drakus is excited (yes, I just referred to myself in the third person). I'm stoked by the idea of higher damage Ninjutsu, especially if it means Ni = Tier III and San = Tier IV, nuking is the best part of being a BLM and I always enjoyed it on NIN (I even carry around tools just in case I feel like nuking shit), so if my Nis can do a minimum of 200 damage and Sans start at 500 then I'll be a happy NIN. Think about the damage that can be inflicted in a short period of time, running through a Ni wheel will net 1,200 damage in around 30 seconds, while a San will do 3,000 damage in under a minute. Sure, BLM and maybe SCH or RDM can top that, but I won't be out of MP or have used up my two-hour to do it. As for the two new spells themselves, I'm not as bent out of shape this time, sure I'd prefer my Ni tier be finished, but if my hunches are correct, I'll be happy.
Yurin: Ichi
Yurin apparently means deep woods. Initially I took this debuff to mean defense down to collaborate with attack down, but after seeing the animation (found here at 0:37) I'm thinking something altogether different. There is no sound after the spell is cast, thus I'm thinking it's Silence. This makes sense when you consider the translation, that deep woods, are thought of as a quiet darkness, i.e. silence.
Myoshu: Ichi
Myoshu means something along the lines an extraordinary, excellent, or magnificent move. Unlike the above one which makes sense as a debuff, this translation sounds more like a buff, to be more specific, it sounds like Accuracy. However when I see the animation (it's right after the one in the link above) I'm reminded of the RDM Sword WS Death Blossom, that WS gives RDM an aftermath effect of Magic Accuracy and Magic Attack. Again, it seems more like a buff. That said, aside from Shadows, Sneak and Invisible, NINs have never been given a buff spell and this is why I go back to my original speculation of it being Evasion Down. I think the translation is rather telling that it involves Accuracy and the debuff for that is Evasion Down. We'll know what both of these do in around a week, in the meantime, it's been kinda fun to conjecture.
Blade: Hi
Could this be the WS I mentioned that will put an end to Jin? Somehow I doubt it, but fuck if it ain't a cool animation (found here at 1:47). There's some speculation over the translation (could mean fire or secret), but the animation seems pretty clear to me it's a fire based attack that probably deals fire elemental damage and if that's the case then it's not gonna beat Jin (Shell and MND come into play with elemental WS).
BLM
I imagine BLMs were a bit disappointed with today's update one sheet, unlike most jobs BLM is getting no new abilities, traits or tweaks, instead they get five new spells. When one considers the spells though, I think it all evens out in the end.
Aero V
This was to be expected, some people were expecting Fire V, but it looks like they are giving us V spells every three levels which means we can expect Fire V at 86, Blizzard V at 89 and Thunder V at 92. That aside, just like Stone V and Water V (neither of which I've bothered to get yet), Aero V doesn't bring much since merits are in Blizzard and Thunder, will be nice for Kirin, but beyond that I don't think it will see much use when I do get around to getting it.
Aspir II
Fucking win. This is a fantastic addition to the job, even better than Convert imo, couple this with Aspir and you're pulling back around 400 MP and you aren't risking death to do it.
Stoneja/Waterja
These two spells have led to a lot of speculation as to what they are. It's clear they are AoE spells, but they are not the expected -Ga IV spells, even though those spells are in the game and used by mobs. My guess is instead of divided damage, these spells will do the same damage to all mobs within range. For example, say a -ga spell does 1,000 damage to a single mob, if there are three mobs, each receives 333 damage, -ja on the other hand may deliver 1,000 damage to each mob whether there is one or 20 of them. Maybe, who knows?
Break
Another potentially cool spell. If you've ever fought that fucking turtle and his pieste pets in Pashhow (S) you have an idea of what this spell can do, here's hoping it's our Stun II spell.
I'm excited about this update, in addition to the above we are getting Armor Trials, the first half of our AF3 (BLM is gonna be fucking awesome, NIN is a wait and see), more WotG and more Abyssea, lots to do!
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Imagemania!
Revenge of the Air Conditioning
This summer has been a hot one in Memphis; I don't know whether or not it has been the hottest summer since I've lived here, but between the news and walking back and forth to my car, it wouldn't surprise me. We had triple digit heat for nearly four straight weeks with the heat index reaching as high as 130 degrees, simply put, it's been fucking hot (today it will only be 90 degrees, perhaps I should have broke out my winter coat). So with that going on, the air conditioning breaking anywhere will make for some miserable times (the Memphis area has reported 18 heat-related deaths, almost one a day due to the heat). My problems started on the way back from the BBQ, I was about halfway between Memphis and Nashville when I noticed I wasn't getting A/C, I figured I was just pushing the car too hard and tried to fiddle with the dash to no avail. At any rate, it was nighttime by this point and I was driving 90 down the interstate so I just rolled the windows down and went on my merry way. Once I rolled into Memphis and was going at a slower speed the A/C seemed to kick back in and I didn't think anything more about it.
The next day, which I took off, I had some errands to run. Once again the A/C seemed ok; I was getting cold air at any rate, so I proceeded to run my errands, get groceries, etc. My last stop was Taco Hell; I had just spent time in the grocery and was hungry, so naturally fast food. While I'm sitting there I can hear the car in front of my making a squealing noise...or at least I thought it was the car in front of me, as it turned out, that was my car. At this point I start to panic, my engine has always been a fairly quiet one and I wasn't getting a check engine light, but something was clearly wrong. I noticed the A/C starting going out again, so I played with the dash dial a bit and the noise went away went I turned the heat on (oh the irony). So at this point I'm starting to think there is an issue with the A/C, I can get cool air and the check engine light isn't on, so it must not a critical issue, I'll get it checked out when I get paid again. Fast forward a week and I get to work only to observe smoke coming from my engine, now I really freak the fuck out. So I pop the hood and sure enough, the smoke is coming from the area my A/C is located in. I wasn't entirely certain what the problem was, as it could have been a few things, but one thing was clear, my belt system was connected to the A/C unit and if that was locking up, then my belt might snap while I was driving. I couldn't ignore the issue any longer and at lunch I drove it to my mechanic, during this drive the check engine light finally came on.
I get the car there and tell them what's going on, they suspect the A/C compressor has locked up but they decided to run a diagnostic to be certain (i.e., we're gonna make some kind of money off this guy). Since I didn't care what the issue was, I wasn't getting in the car again until it was fixed I had them take me home. When I got home I pulled up AutoZone's website to get a general idea what a new compressor might cost, for my car, the prices were coming in around $200, I cringed, but things could be worse. I got a call about two hours later and it was indeed a locked A/C compressor, it was at this point things got worse. The mechanic told me the price of a new compressor would be $439 and he was going to have to overnight it (talk about a price mark up, cha-ching!), and because of where the unit was in my car, they were going to have to take half the front end apart to get to it, labor $500, I also had to pay for the diagnostic, new freon and some sort of disposal of old freon, final estimate $1,200. Oh, and they wouldn't be done until the next day. Fuck. Next day rolls around and I get a call, started out great, the mechanic says he quoted me too high on the compressor, it was $419. /facepalm At any rate, I got there, everything was fixed (the check engine light remained on, was 3-4 days later when it went off) and I had A/C again, but my bank account was pissed. Obviously this was going to happen eventually, but fuck, it was about the worst timing possible.
XP Bitches!
Moving on, one of the things that came out of the BBQ was a need for the Obsidian to start taking Abyssea seriously as reports were starting to surface that folks were not only XPing there, but that the XP/HR was blowing everything out of the water. Our first attempt to do an Obsidian XP party was during the BBQ and sadly it didn't go very well, seems there was more to it than showing up and killing mobs for an hour. We tried to kill Crapaudy (or Crapdaddys as I like to refer to them), and it just wasn't working as we didn't know enough about the system to make things happen.
Our second and subsequent attempts have been infinitely better, most of us have capped out 4-5 jobs (just two for me) and we've only done 6 of these XP runs. The key to it all is getting the lights, our strategy is to mix magic and normal attack kills at the start to cap out azure and pearl light. Azure light is easy to get to 30, you just need to have nukers with a sense of timing. Pearl light is a bit trickier as it's not 100%, this one you simply have to have patience with because it may take up to an hour to get the 30 lights needed to cap. Once capped it's an all out offensive where we focus on kill speed and managing diminishing lights.
We have tried our hand at Ruby and Amber lights, but trying to force these lights seems to cut into efficiency. Our last run we just focused on killing quickly and over the course of 3.5 hours I pulled in 15 merits. Saturday's run would ultimately see me finish the day getting 17 merits, but the last two were earned while we hunted for NMs to work on quests.
Gearing Up
I love getting XP this way, I've always hated meriting, but at the end of the day I want the gear in Abyssea more and there is simply an amazing collection of gear to be had. Some of it is easy to get, some of it absurdly hard, but a lot of it is just flat out better than most other gears.
Ninja
Ninja got a ton of customization out of the new gear, more -PDT gear, more MDB gear, more Evasion gear, more Ranged gear and more Enmity gear.
For most of the new weapons, if they weren't involved with the Magian Trials, then there wasn't much to see, however katana was one of the exceptions. The Hochomasamune has a slightly higher DPS than a completed Sekka, but five more points of base damage, so it would be a main hand weapon. That DEX +10 is simply sick and will allow a NIN to change up their WS gear a bit (I'll get into more detail in a moment). Early testing on the Fast Cast has shown it to knock off about 3 seconds from Ni recast which is pretty significant if it's found to be factual.
The Iga Erimaki neckpiece isn't awe-inspiring as some of the other new items, but it is a NIN only piece and it would work great in an evasion tank set-up which often suffers from lack of accuracy.
Juogi and Anguinus Belt in a WS build are just insanely awesome pieces, add in a Hochomasamune and NIN WS will go from "lulz" to "eh, not so bad", which is a huge step up. The drawback here is you lose 10 STR (and 10 DEX if you don't have the katana), and there's no way to really make up for this loss. I suspect there will be a large increase in damage despite that, but until I have all three pieces (or ever have), I can't say for certain.
The Ocelot Gloves replace Dusk Gloves and I can't get these soon enough, I hate having decreased movement speed. The Ocelot Trousers make a fantastic addition to Enmity and Evasion tank build and giving those builds some DD ability with the ACC and Haste.
If nothing else, the Missile Boots have a cool name, but they actually do have more, especially in a slot that NIN doesn't have a ton of Ranged options for.
The Terebellum Mantle is a Gunner's Mantle without the negative stats and makes a fantastic addition to Ranged sets.
Black Mage
Unlike NIN, the new gear for BLM wasn't really about customizing, it was about maximizing.
The Augur's set is like Nashira +1, and any piece would be nice, but the feet really jump out at me, they are just an outstanding piece for BLM.
If your MACC is solid then you would have to be a complete idiot to pass a Yhel Jacket up. I'm salivating just looking at that pic, that's just an insane amount of boost to nukes!
Once the BLM community started seeing this piece, those without it immediately became gimp. Now I won't pretend to be one of those preening, prissy little BLMs and call folks without it gimp, but it is an outstanding piece and not overly difficult to get, so not having one is kind of silly.
The Goetia Chain is the BLM specific piece offered in this expansion and it should be a fantastic piece for when your BLM is having MACC issues.
I may have to prostitute my mom to get a Hirudinea Earring, but it will be worth it. Having an Aspir/Drain piece in an earring slot is awesome as you won't lose anything there on Dark Magic if you macro it in.
Outside of body pieces, there hasn't been much standing gear when it comes to refresh, the Serpentes pieces help resolve this issue some by offering a tic in the hands/feet slots.
Actually Getting Things Done
One of the things I had resolved to do with this update was tackle some things I had been putting off, mainly missions and maps. The maps were all CoP maps and for obvious reasons they had never been worth the trouble (level capped areas that I never go to and would require help to get said maps). With the level restriction taken off the CoP areas, getting these maps suddenly became very easy. I now have all the maps in the game except two of the Sea maps (which I will get in the next update), it's a silly goal, but I've always wanted to have a complete map set for some reason and I'm almost there.
The missions were a different type of beast because I was going to need help. Like the Prommy maps, I was putting off Apocalypse Nigh until I could safely move through those zones. So a couple of weeks ago I talked a bunch of people into helping me get this done (along with Tammyrose who had not beat it either), fight wasn't a smooth as I was hoping it would be, but we prevailed and set the record. So Magnetic Earring mine.
A few days before completing AN, Rues sent me a tell about one of the ToAU fights (that fucking Yag NIN). I was reluctant at first as I had wanted to put an Obsidian group together to finish this, but I never got the impression those who needed it were serious about completing the storyline, so I agreed and joined up with them. We burned through the missions, 5 levels really do make a difference. On the same day I finished AN we also did the Alexander fight and went 1/1 on it with a couple major assists courtesy of Mav and Jess. So Jalzahn's Ring mine.
With ToAU beat I could move onto the Odin Prime and Alexander Prime SMN fights. Last night was my first run on Odin and now Aesir Torque mine.
I still need to finish the Moogle and Shantotto expansions as well as the most recent WotG city quests. Not too particular if I finish the expansion missions before the update, but I really want to get the WotG quests done so we're ready to go when the update arrives.
Magian Trials
As I mentioned in my last blog post I worked on Magian Trials during the BBQ, the one I spent the most time on was for the Eva Sekka. I had finished all but one trial on the -PDT katana before the BBQ, but I needed level 80 to wield a Sekka, so there was no rush to complete this. It would take an XP run in Abyssea before I dinged 80 and once that happened I spent the following weekend in the Necropolis laying waste to Skeletons. While there I also did the first two trials on Uzura.
During the BBQ I mostly worked on one trial and that was the Dragon portion of the Eva Sekka, which I must say was a general bitch to complete since I decided to go off the beaten path and work alone in Riverne. Not the best of ideas as I could have just teamed up and killed Puks in the Woodlands in a fraction of the time, ah well. At any rate, I had planned to do the next two Trials with Q since he would be killing vermin for his last Relic trial. I figured we could kill diremites until I got 200 and then we'd move to a place with more abundant vermin. What I learned about diremite is that they are a bottleneck trial. You see there are only two places in the game where they pop for XP, Pso'Xja, which has no wind weather, and Aydeewa, which does have wind weather. Oh, and their repop times are 16 minutes to boot. Because of this, diremite are overcamped, which is great for a mob of ninjas killing them en masse, but sucks for Q as he needed TP+killshots. So that part of the plan wasn't going to work and we parted ways. Finishing the diremite took three Windsdays and some wind weather; there were always people down there and on the trial so it went quick. My next step was to head out to Attohwa Chasm where Q was pillaging and join him in the slaughter. I headed out there Saturday and was by myself for a bit, Kreoss joined me on Firesday since he also had vermin on his dagger trial and we knocked out a huge chunk of his trial and some of mine (wind weather). We then went to Abyssea and proceeded to get a massive amount of XP. After that it was almost Windsday again and this time I pulled and Q killed, when all was said and done, I needed 18 more kills. The last trial was colibri and this was nothing short of crazy. You see, like the diremite, there aren't a lot of place to kill colibri, but there sure are quite a few trials requiring them, so teaming up was the only practical course of action. Because of this teaming up, it took me two Windsdays to know out this trial, the first one we killed 149 colibri, the second one I only needed 88 colibri and got that with 8 game hours left on the clock still.
So there you have it, two Sekka complete. It's like have an Earth Staff and a Wind Staff rolled into one, while still having an awesome DPS. I think my next Sekka will focus on the INT/MAB katanas because they are going to be stupid easy to complete and I want to give myself a bit of a break before going down the MDB path. That said, no more trials until subjobs are leveled.
Nature is Weird
What you are seeing there is a photo taken of Saturn's North Pole. Yes, folks, that is a natural hexagon swirling around the polar cap of a giant gas planet. The center of that is large enough to fit the Earth comfortably inside the walls of the hexagon. It's as bizarre as it is cool.
This summer has been a hot one in Memphis; I don't know whether or not it has been the hottest summer since I've lived here, but between the news and walking back and forth to my car, it wouldn't surprise me. We had triple digit heat for nearly four straight weeks with the heat index reaching as high as 130 degrees, simply put, it's been fucking hot (today it will only be 90 degrees, perhaps I should have broke out my winter coat). So with that going on, the air conditioning breaking anywhere will make for some miserable times (the Memphis area has reported 18 heat-related deaths, almost one a day due to the heat). My problems started on the way back from the BBQ, I was about halfway between Memphis and Nashville when I noticed I wasn't getting A/C, I figured I was just pushing the car too hard and tried to fiddle with the dash to no avail. At any rate, it was nighttime by this point and I was driving 90 down the interstate so I just rolled the windows down and went on my merry way. Once I rolled into Memphis and was going at a slower speed the A/C seemed to kick back in and I didn't think anything more about it.
The next day, which I took off, I had some errands to run. Once again the A/C seemed ok; I was getting cold air at any rate, so I proceeded to run my errands, get groceries, etc. My last stop was Taco Hell; I had just spent time in the grocery and was hungry, so naturally fast food. While I'm sitting there I can hear the car in front of my making a squealing noise...or at least I thought it was the car in front of me, as it turned out, that was my car. At this point I start to panic, my engine has always been a fairly quiet one and I wasn't getting a check engine light, but something was clearly wrong. I noticed the A/C starting going out again, so I played with the dash dial a bit and the noise went away went I turned the heat on (oh the irony). So at this point I'm starting to think there is an issue with the A/C, I can get cool air and the check engine light isn't on, so it must not a critical issue, I'll get it checked out when I get paid again. Fast forward a week and I get to work only to observe smoke coming from my engine, now I really freak the fuck out. So I pop the hood and sure enough, the smoke is coming from the area my A/C is located in. I wasn't entirely certain what the problem was, as it could have been a few things, but one thing was clear, my belt system was connected to the A/C unit and if that was locking up, then my belt might snap while I was driving. I couldn't ignore the issue any longer and at lunch I drove it to my mechanic, during this drive the check engine light finally came on.
I get the car there and tell them what's going on, they suspect the A/C compressor has locked up but they decided to run a diagnostic to be certain (i.e., we're gonna make some kind of money off this guy). Since I didn't care what the issue was, I wasn't getting in the car again until it was fixed I had them take me home. When I got home I pulled up AutoZone's website to get a general idea what a new compressor might cost, for my car, the prices were coming in around $200, I cringed, but things could be worse. I got a call about two hours later and it was indeed a locked A/C compressor, it was at this point things got worse. The mechanic told me the price of a new compressor would be $439 and he was going to have to overnight it (talk about a price mark up, cha-ching!), and because of where the unit was in my car, they were going to have to take half the front end apart to get to it, labor $500, I also had to pay for the diagnostic, new freon and some sort of disposal of old freon, final estimate $1,200. Oh, and they wouldn't be done until the next day. Fuck. Next day rolls around and I get a call, started out great, the mechanic says he quoted me too high on the compressor, it was $419. /facepalm At any rate, I got there, everything was fixed (the check engine light remained on, was 3-4 days later when it went off) and I had A/C again, but my bank account was pissed. Obviously this was going to happen eventually, but fuck, it was about the worst timing possible.
XP Bitches!
Moving on, one of the things that came out of the BBQ was a need for the Obsidian to start taking Abyssea seriously as reports were starting to surface that folks were not only XPing there, but that the XP/HR was blowing everything out of the water. Our first attempt to do an Obsidian XP party was during the BBQ and sadly it didn't go very well, seems there was more to it than showing up and killing mobs for an hour. We tried to kill Crapaudy (or Crapdaddys as I like to refer to them), and it just wasn't working as we didn't know enough about the system to make things happen.
Our second and subsequent attempts have been infinitely better, most of us have capped out 4-5 jobs (just two for me) and we've only done 6 of these XP runs. The key to it all is getting the lights, our strategy is to mix magic and normal attack kills at the start to cap out azure and pearl light. Azure light is easy to get to 30, you just need to have nukers with a sense of timing. Pearl light is a bit trickier as it's not 100%, this one you simply have to have patience with because it may take up to an hour to get the 30 lights needed to cap. Once capped it's an all out offensive where we focus on kill speed and managing diminishing lights.
We have tried our hand at Ruby and Amber lights, but trying to force these lights seems to cut into efficiency. Our last run we just focused on killing quickly and over the course of 3.5 hours I pulled in 15 merits. Saturday's run would ultimately see me finish the day getting 17 merits, but the last two were earned while we hunted for NMs to work on quests.
Gearing Up
I love getting XP this way, I've always hated meriting, but at the end of the day I want the gear in Abyssea more and there is simply an amazing collection of gear to be had. Some of it is easy to get, some of it absurdly hard, but a lot of it is just flat out better than most other gears.
Ninja
Ninja got a ton of customization out of the new gear, more -PDT gear, more MDB gear, more Evasion gear, more Ranged gear and more Enmity gear.
Black Mage
Unlike NIN, the new gear for BLM wasn't really about customizing, it was about maximizing.
Actually Getting Things Done
One of the things I had resolved to do with this update was tackle some things I had been putting off, mainly missions and maps. The maps were all CoP maps and for obvious reasons they had never been worth the trouble (level capped areas that I never go to and would require help to get said maps). With the level restriction taken off the CoP areas, getting these maps suddenly became very easy. I now have all the maps in the game except two of the Sea maps (which I will get in the next update), it's a silly goal, but I've always wanted to have a complete map set for some reason and I'm almost there.
The missions were a different type of beast because I was going to need help. Like the Prommy maps, I was putting off Apocalypse Nigh until I could safely move through those zones. So a couple of weeks ago I talked a bunch of people into helping me get this done (along with Tammyrose who had not beat it either), fight wasn't a smooth as I was hoping it would be, but we prevailed and set the record. So Magnetic Earring mine.
A few days before completing AN, Rues sent me a tell about one of the ToAU fights (that fucking Yag NIN). I was reluctant at first as I had wanted to put an Obsidian group together to finish this, but I never got the impression those who needed it were serious about completing the storyline, so I agreed and joined up with them. We burned through the missions, 5 levels really do make a difference. On the same day I finished AN we also did the Alexander fight and went 1/1 on it with a couple major assists courtesy of Mav and Jess. So Jalzahn's Ring mine.
With ToAU beat I could move onto the Odin Prime and Alexander Prime SMN fights. Last night was my first run on Odin and now Aesir Torque mine.
I still need to finish the Moogle and Shantotto expansions as well as the most recent WotG city quests. Not too particular if I finish the expansion missions before the update, but I really want to get the WotG quests done so we're ready to go when the update arrives.
Magian Trials
As I mentioned in my last blog post I worked on Magian Trials during the BBQ, the one I spent the most time on was for the Eva Sekka. I had finished all but one trial on the -PDT katana before the BBQ, but I needed level 80 to wield a Sekka, so there was no rush to complete this. It would take an XP run in Abyssea before I dinged 80 and once that happened I spent the following weekend in the Necropolis laying waste to Skeletons. While there I also did the first two trials on Uzura.
During the BBQ I mostly worked on one trial and that was the Dragon portion of the Eva Sekka, which I must say was a general bitch to complete since I decided to go off the beaten path and work alone in Riverne. Not the best of ideas as I could have just teamed up and killed Puks in the Woodlands in a fraction of the time, ah well. At any rate, I had planned to do the next two Trials with Q since he would be killing vermin for his last Relic trial. I figured we could kill diremites until I got 200 and then we'd move to a place with more abundant vermin. What I learned about diremite is that they are a bottleneck trial. You see there are only two places in the game where they pop for XP, Pso'Xja, which has no wind weather, and Aydeewa, which does have wind weather. Oh, and their repop times are 16 minutes to boot. Because of this, diremite are overcamped, which is great for a mob of ninjas killing them en masse, but sucks for Q as he needed TP+killshots. So that part of the plan wasn't going to work and we parted ways. Finishing the diremite took three Windsdays and some wind weather; there were always people down there and on the trial so it went quick. My next step was to head out to Attohwa Chasm where Q was pillaging and join him in the slaughter. I headed out there Saturday and was by myself for a bit, Kreoss joined me on Firesday since he also had vermin on his dagger trial and we knocked out a huge chunk of his trial and some of mine (wind weather). We then went to Abyssea and proceeded to get a massive amount of XP. After that it was almost Windsday again and this time I pulled and Q killed, when all was said and done, I needed 18 more kills. The last trial was colibri and this was nothing short of crazy. You see, like the diremite, there aren't a lot of place to kill colibri, but there sure are quite a few trials requiring them, so teaming up was the only practical course of action. Because of this teaming up, it took me two Windsdays to know out this trial, the first one we killed 149 colibri, the second one I only needed 88 colibri and got that with 8 game hours left on the clock still.
So there you have it, two Sekka complete. It's like have an Earth Staff and a Wind Staff rolled into one, while still having an awesome DPS. I think my next Sekka will focus on the INT/MAB katanas because they are going to be stupid easy to complete and I want to give myself a bit of a break before going down the MDB path. That said, no more trials until subjobs are leveled.
Nature is Weird
What you are seeing there is a photo taken of Saturn's North Pole. Yes, folks, that is a natural hexagon swirling around the polar cap of a giant gas planet. The center of that is large enough to fit the Earth comfortably inside the walls of the hexagon. It's as bizarre as it is cool.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Running Down a Dream
So I haven't updated my blog since the BBQ, partly because I've actually been busy at work since the my last update and partly because so much has happened in that time frame I'm not sure where to begin. I'll begin with my quick rundown of the BBQ itself (yes more shit happened that I'm not covering and yes I had a blast).
Obsidian BBQ
What can I say that Qtipus didn't already cover in his blog? Well...for the most pair my hair didn't do anything batshit crazy the whole time, not sure what it is about the way I sleep, but more often than not I wake up looking like I belong in a punk band. Also, the drive there was literally a 42 hour marathon. It started on Tuesday, I woke up around 10:30 AM my time, showered, packed, watered the banana tree (and one of the cats by mistake), checked to make sure I had my token maybe 50 times, etc. and I left a little after noon to meet up with Qtipus. Now I knew we'd be driving most of the night, but I figured we'd be there and sleeping within 24 hours at the very worst, what I didn't count on was just how many stops at Wal-Mart we'd make (and subsequently all the Mudflaps we'd find). For me a road trip is all about how fast I can make it, an eight-hour drive for me consists of one stop: gas, food and a piss break, I go into robot mode, Q looks for robots lol! At any rate, we arrived at our destination around 2PM local time, Q had managed to get some sleep (at a rest stop while the sun was coming up), Kreoss got quite a bit of sleep, and me...well I dozed off a few times, but my body won't let me sleep for very long in a moving vehicle (god forbid I ever decide to go to Japan or something). So when we got there I was dog tired, but, as one might expect, meeting up with everyone got the adrenaline flowing and it was another nine hours before I was too tired to continue functioning.
The next day I was the last to get up (I think), someone made breakfast, pancakes I think, but I'm not a morning person and that includes eating, so I can't say what went on for the first hour or two I was up. When I did get up, I noticed it was Earthsday in the game, thus I found myself killing dragons for my Magian trial, and this would inadvertently be a running joke all weekend. Most of the day was spent playing video games, chit-chatting, etc. One would think a summit of the Obsidian leaders would lead to long, drawn out discussions about Final Fantasy XI and how to best run events and such, but one would be wrong. We did talk about our characters, in-game goals and Obsidian related goals, but for the most part, FFXI was more about something we all had in common not something we obsessed over. That evening we ate at a Japanese Steakhouse, and let me say, the food was fucking awesome, especially the rice, that could have been all I had to eat and I would have been happy. When we got back to Mt. Cranky it was almost Earthsday again, most everyone went outside to look at the stars (for those who don't know me, my original ambition in life was to be an astrophysicist), but the Magian trials were calling and the sky being unlikely to yield anything new, I stayed inside. Thirty minutes into Earthsday and Q decided he'd had enough of me and my damn trials by demanding I join everyone outside. I figured it was best to not be anti-social and dejectedly put the controller down.
Saturday was our one and only LS event, it was an Odin Einherjar run. It's a bit different doing something like that with living, breathing people in the room, which was kind of cool and I wish we had done something larger (like a CoP Dyna run or something). After Einherjar we left for Baltimore to go watch the Orioles lose...ahem, play. For the most part this was a fun time, except the asshole sitting on my right (not Kaelis, he was on my left), fucking jackass kept leaning forward and blocking my view! By the 8th inning I was getting vocal about this, but even though the jerkoff was trying to lean back (I'm assuming to avoid any confrontation), he kept creeping forward until he was blocking my view again. I know the seats were kind of small, but ffs, sit your ass down like a normal human and not the fucking Hunchback of Notre Dame! You jackass!
On Sunday we had the actual BBQ, which once again I found myself doing Magian trials (now before you give me shit, please observe, Kaylea went to Dynamis). Unknowingly, being inside was probably a good thing given that everyone else came in with a sunburn. During this time inside I received a few tells about the BLMs making a mess of things, being the micromanaging asshole that I apparently am, I decided to investigate and find out what the problem was. Turns out some people had suggested they do things differently without me there, this pissed me off. It still pisses me off. Did I mention this shit pissed me off? While it essentially reinforced what I've been saying all along (i.e. BLMs multi-tasking is not the best way to go about things), it also showed that left to their own devices, people won't stick to the plan and that's what upset me the most. Simply put, I don't give a shit how it was done in the past, when it comes to playing BLM in Obsidian these days, it's my way or the motherfucking highway. For those of you who like to bitch about the way I run my ship (and should you be reading this blog), you're not in charge (and thus free of taking the blame for anything that goes wrong) and you're way has been outdated for a long fucking time now, just give it a rest already because shit ain't changing!
Monday was the last day everyone was together, and it wasn't for long as half of us were leaving at noon. Kreoss and Kaylea were flying out, while Kaelis and Erimentha were hitting the road. Because of this, I drew the short straw and had to stay behind and guard the fort (ok, I volunteered to stay), needless to say I did virtually nothing, even in FFXI all I really did was chat. By the time Qtipus and Suraph got back, I was bored out of my skull. We started the evening out watching Monday Night Raw, but that morphed into three hours of South Park Tower Defense, which was a hilariously fun game. When done, we packed our shit and got ready to depart in the morning.
Tuesday promised to be another marathon drive, but it wasn't nearly as long, myself and Qtipus covered the same amount of ground in about half the time (and actually found the Transformers we were looking for). Unfortunately we didn't cover it fast enough and I knowingly put my character in the hands of Qtipus so I wouldn't miss Einherjar. Now, needless to say, I expected things to be fucked with and they were (Q sent my gil to my mules, rearranged my furniture, changed my HP to Raboa, moved gear and items all over the place and he even found time to log into every mule and clear my inboxes forcing me to walk each mule back to the delivery box to return my main character's gil), but the thing that he managed to fuck with me the most about was actually nothing at all. You see Q made a casual reference that some of my gear had been hidden on my mules, this in turn led me to look at each of the mules, which eyeballing them yielded nothing out of place. Me being too obsessive to let this rest (and failing to recognize Q really was fucking with me), I pulled up my Altana Cubby and proceeded to run down my inventory list (which I update weekly with my inventory and what character it's on) and verify everything was where it should be. All told, I spent about three hours looking for shit that was never out of place to begin with. Thanks Q, I could have been doing Magian Trials...
At any rate, more stuff has happened since then, some of it I'm very happy about, some of it is shit only I could care about, but that's for a different day. And yeah, the title has nothing to do with this post, I just like the song.
Obsidian BBQ
What can I say that Qtipus didn't already cover in his blog? Well...for the most pair my hair didn't do anything batshit crazy the whole time, not sure what it is about the way I sleep, but more often than not I wake up looking like I belong in a punk band. Also, the drive there was literally a 42 hour marathon. It started on Tuesday, I woke up around 10:30 AM my time, showered, packed, watered the banana tree (and one of the cats by mistake), checked to make sure I had my token maybe 50 times, etc. and I left a little after noon to meet up with Qtipus. Now I knew we'd be driving most of the night, but I figured we'd be there and sleeping within 24 hours at the very worst, what I didn't count on was just how many stops at Wal-Mart we'd make (and subsequently all the Mudflaps we'd find). For me a road trip is all about how fast I can make it, an eight-hour drive for me consists of one stop: gas, food and a piss break, I go into robot mode, Q looks for robots lol! At any rate, we arrived at our destination around 2PM local time, Q had managed to get some sleep (at a rest stop while the sun was coming up), Kreoss got quite a bit of sleep, and me...well I dozed off a few times, but my body won't let me sleep for very long in a moving vehicle (god forbid I ever decide to go to Japan or something). So when we got there I was dog tired, but, as one might expect, meeting up with everyone got the adrenaline flowing and it was another nine hours before I was too tired to continue functioning.
The next day I was the last to get up (I think), someone made breakfast, pancakes I think, but I'm not a morning person and that includes eating, so I can't say what went on for the first hour or two I was up. When I did get up, I noticed it was Earthsday in the game, thus I found myself killing dragons for my Magian trial, and this would inadvertently be a running joke all weekend. Most of the day was spent playing video games, chit-chatting, etc. One would think a summit of the Obsidian leaders would lead to long, drawn out discussions about Final Fantasy XI and how to best run events and such, but one would be wrong. We did talk about our characters, in-game goals and Obsidian related goals, but for the most part, FFXI was more about something we all had in common not something we obsessed over. That evening we ate at a Japanese Steakhouse, and let me say, the food was fucking awesome, especially the rice, that could have been all I had to eat and I would have been happy. When we got back to Mt. Cranky it was almost Earthsday again, most everyone went outside to look at the stars (for those who don't know me, my original ambition in life was to be an astrophysicist), but the Magian trials were calling and the sky being unlikely to yield anything new, I stayed inside. Thirty minutes into Earthsday and Q decided he'd had enough of me and my damn trials by demanding I join everyone outside. I figured it was best to not be anti-social and dejectedly put the controller down.
Saturday was our one and only LS event, it was an Odin Einherjar run. It's a bit different doing something like that with living, breathing people in the room, which was kind of cool and I wish we had done something larger (like a CoP Dyna run or something). After Einherjar we left for Baltimore to go watch the Orioles lose...ahem, play. For the most part this was a fun time, except the asshole sitting on my right (not Kaelis, he was on my left), fucking jackass kept leaning forward and blocking my view! By the 8th inning I was getting vocal about this, but even though the jerkoff was trying to lean back (I'm assuming to avoid any confrontation), he kept creeping forward until he was blocking my view again. I know the seats were kind of small, but ffs, sit your ass down like a normal human and not the fucking Hunchback of Notre Dame! You jackass!
On Sunday we had the actual BBQ, which once again I found myself doing Magian trials (now before you give me shit, please observe, Kaylea went to Dynamis). Unknowingly, being inside was probably a good thing given that everyone else came in with a sunburn. During this time inside I received a few tells about the BLMs making a mess of things, being the micromanaging asshole that I apparently am, I decided to investigate and find out what the problem was. Turns out some people had suggested they do things differently without me there, this pissed me off. It still pisses me off. Did I mention this shit pissed me off? While it essentially reinforced what I've been saying all along (i.e. BLMs multi-tasking is not the best way to go about things), it also showed that left to their own devices, people won't stick to the plan and that's what upset me the most. Simply put, I don't give a shit how it was done in the past, when it comes to playing BLM in Obsidian these days, it's my way or the motherfucking highway. For those of you who like to bitch about the way I run my ship (and should you be reading this blog), you're not in charge (and thus free of taking the blame for anything that goes wrong) and you're way has been outdated for a long fucking time now, just give it a rest already because shit ain't changing!
Monday was the last day everyone was together, and it wasn't for long as half of us were leaving at noon. Kreoss and Kaylea were flying out, while Kaelis and Erimentha were hitting the road. Because of this, I drew the short straw and had to stay behind and guard the fort (ok, I volunteered to stay), needless to say I did virtually nothing, even in FFXI all I really did was chat. By the time Qtipus and Suraph got back, I was bored out of my skull. We started the evening out watching Monday Night Raw, but that morphed into three hours of South Park Tower Defense, which was a hilariously fun game. When done, we packed our shit and got ready to depart in the morning.
Tuesday promised to be another marathon drive, but it wasn't nearly as long, myself and Qtipus covered the same amount of ground in about half the time (and actually found the Transformers we were looking for). Unfortunately we didn't cover it fast enough and I knowingly put my character in the hands of Qtipus so I wouldn't miss Einherjar. Now, needless to say, I expected things to be fucked with and they were (Q sent my gil to my mules, rearranged my furniture, changed my HP to Raboa, moved gear and items all over the place and he even found time to log into every mule and clear my inboxes forcing me to walk each mule back to the delivery box to return my main character's gil), but the thing that he managed to fuck with me the most about was actually nothing at all. You see Q made a casual reference that some of my gear had been hidden on my mules, this in turn led me to look at each of the mules, which eyeballing them yielded nothing out of place. Me being too obsessive to let this rest (and failing to recognize Q really was fucking with me), I pulled up my Altana Cubby and proceeded to run down my inventory list (which I update weekly with my inventory and what character it's on) and verify everything was where it should be. All told, I spent about three hours looking for shit that was never out of place to begin with. Thanks Q, I could have been doing Magian Trials...
At any rate, more stuff has happened since then, some of it I'm very happy about, some of it is shit only I could care about, but that's for a different day. And yeah, the title has nothing to do with this post, I just like the song.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Trial of the Magians
Those of you who know me, know that I've been actively working on the Trials since they were introduced, I seemed to be one of the early adopters of the system as it was quite clear to me I could get far better katanas than what was currently available in the game. The BLM Staves (before the update) showed promise, but because they all had the same name I wasn't crazy about going after them. I had a hard time understanding why folks weren't all over this (I found them exciting and couldn't wait to get things done, tedious though they were), but since the update the Odin server seems to have flocked to the Magians like bugs to lightbulbs. Who knows why this is, and while I'm happy to see my fellow server mates getting in on the fun, the side-effect is there has been a ton of whining. I don't plan to get into it so I'll just say this, it called the "Trial" of the Magians, not "Giveittomenowbecauseiwantit!" of the Magians, you gotta fucking work for your supper, so shut up and do it (unless BST are taking over your camp, then you have my permission to piss and moan).
Ninja Trials
While others went directly for the High Damage and Occasionally Attack Twice katanas, I personally took a different route. You see for me, while those katanas looked like great DD weapons, I saw something altogether more amazing in the Elemental Trials. The reason here is because NIN can equip two katanas, so anything in the Elemental paths could be doubled. This meant NIN could get things like STR+8, Attack+24, or AGI+8, Evasion +24, without sacrificing any other gear slots. Top that off with Kuinas are the highest DoT katanas your average player can get a hold of (they have higher DPS than either Senju or Fudo) and you got something special for Ninja. With the update SE upped the ante by giving us Sekka, with even better stats! The update also brought us the Empyrean Kannagi path, this path was part of the High Damage path, which means I will have to camp NMs at some point, whether I like it or not. We also got what looks like the first stage of Weapon Skill trials, if this is indeed the first stage then there's a lot of reason to be excited here also.
Kannagi
I've come to accept I may never get a Kikoru or Nagi, however a base Kannagi is very obtainable, the only drawback here is the VNM kills, getting the abyssite (and kills) for this will require time help from other people, and I hate asking for help on things that only benefit me. At any rate, I still plan to do this, but I'm holding off until the September update because I want to see what the Kannagi augments are, and I'm curious about the next stage of requirements.
Uzura
This is the Weapon Skill path, currently there are three initial trials with a fork after the third. I plan to do this up to the fork (and given the simplistic requirements, these first three should only take a day or two to complete), the reason I am stopping at the fork is I will only be using one of these katanas in my DD build (the other katana will be a Sekka) and I want to see if they are going to add more weapon skills. Currently the first fork produces a result of DPS 12.22 and Blade: Ku Damage +10%, which is kinda meh as I rarely use anything outside Jin and Kamu. The second path has a DPS 11.94 and Store TP +8, this is the path I'll take if no other Weapon Skills are added (which is possible, the next tier may simply end with a 15% increase on Ku, which still won't beat Jin). If we get Jin +10%, then it's entirely possible my head will explode from the excitement.
Sekka
The Elemental trials have a ton of customization to offer. For me I'm looking at acquiring 8 of these. Two each of Evasion, Physical Damage Down and Magic Defense Bonus for tanking and then a combo of the Attack and Accuracy for DDing, though these will likely be the last two I go after based on how the Kannagi and Uzura paths unfold. The tanking ones are obvious winners to me, a set of -PDT will give me VIT+12 and PDT - 16%, a set of MDB will give me MND+12 and MDB+16, the Evasion set would give me AGI+12 and Evasion +32 (which is also very nice for pulling or kiting). I feel like having those six katana will give me a ton of flexibility when tanking/pulling/kiting/soloing. As it stands I'm on the last trial for the first -PDT katana and I'm in the middle stages of the first Evasion katana. For Ninjas who like to tank you NEED to be getting on these trials now, otherwise you're going to have a hard time justifying yourself in endgame events as PLD is the ever increasing preference. Further, a pair of these are better than any previous combination of katanas in pure damage alone, you have to be fucking daft to hold onto the old stuff (though I did shed a tear when I put Senju away and removed it from my macros).
Black Mage Trials
Before the update I was looking at getting only one Teiwaz (Thunder path) and just getting an HQ Ice Staff. The reason for this wasn't because the Teiwaz weren't awesome staves, but they all had the same name which makes them impossible to macro in and out. However, with the update SE had the good sense to give the final upgrades unique names so my interest in getting these has increased dramatically.
Hvergelmir
This is the Empyrean weapon for BLM, and if it does nothing else, it's still a beast for DD BLM (which I love to do), DMG 87 and Delay 390 for a DPS of 13.38 just blows anything previously available for DD out of the water. Currently I have a Somnus Signa which is DMG 62 Delay 402 for a DPS of 9.25 (which was at the top of the food chain after Relic), it's nice, but I might be willing to prostitute my mom just to get my hands on Hvergelmir. I highly doubt this is the much touted Rainbow Staff (the eight elemental staves combined into one), but I am very curious as to where SE plans to go with this in future updates.
Elemental Staves
Put simply you are now gimp without these. Base testing has already shown they blow the current HQ Elemental Staves out of the water. The only catch here is actually killing the mobs without getting yourself killed in the process. BLM is not exactly the king of melee, so a certain amount of teamwork goes into finishing these, even worse is it's counterproductive to team up with other BLMs because of the kill objectives. What I like about them, at least from a BLM perspective is you can start and stop whenever as the trial objectives are not based on the day or weather, but what elemental spell you kill the mob with. When I initially looked at this path I chose Magic Damage +4 for all eight staves, however, it occurred to me that logic wasn't entirely practical. I don't use light and dark magic to do damage as much as I use that magic to land DoTs or add buffs; so the sensible solution here is to get Magic Accuracy +4 for those two paths.
For me, I'm in fucking heaven doing these trials, yeah weather it's a bitch to wait on, and it's easy to get distracted, but the Trials fill in big holes with my free time much in the way Campaign does. In other words, I'm actually accomplishing something every single day and not just staring aimlessly at the screen waiting for something to happen. Thank you SE, and fuck off to the complainers.
Ninja Trials
While others went directly for the High Damage and Occasionally Attack Twice katanas, I personally took a different route. You see for me, while those katanas looked like great DD weapons, I saw something altogether more amazing in the Elemental Trials. The reason here is because NIN can equip two katanas, so anything in the Elemental paths could be doubled. This meant NIN could get things like STR+8, Attack+24, or AGI+8, Evasion +24, without sacrificing any other gear slots. Top that off with Kuinas are the highest DoT katanas your average player can get a hold of (they have higher DPS than either Senju or Fudo) and you got something special for Ninja. With the update SE upped the ante by giving us Sekka, with even better stats! The update also brought us the Empyrean Kannagi path, this path was part of the High Damage path, which means I will have to camp NMs at some point, whether I like it or not. We also got what looks like the first stage of Weapon Skill trials, if this is indeed the first stage then there's a lot of reason to be excited here also.
Kannagi
I've come to accept I may never get a Kikoru or Nagi, however a base Kannagi is very obtainable, the only drawback here is the VNM kills, getting the abyssite (and kills) for this will require time help from other people, and I hate asking for help on things that only benefit me. At any rate, I still plan to do this, but I'm holding off until the September update because I want to see what the Kannagi augments are, and I'm curious about the next stage of requirements.
Uzura
This is the Weapon Skill path, currently there are three initial trials with a fork after the third. I plan to do this up to the fork (and given the simplistic requirements, these first three should only take a day or two to complete), the reason I am stopping at the fork is I will only be using one of these katanas in my DD build (the other katana will be a Sekka) and I want to see if they are going to add more weapon skills. Currently the first fork produces a result of DPS 12.22 and Blade: Ku Damage +10%, which is kinda meh as I rarely use anything outside Jin and Kamu. The second path has a DPS 11.94 and Store TP +8, this is the path I'll take if no other Weapon Skills are added (which is possible, the next tier may simply end with a 15% increase on Ku, which still won't beat Jin). If we get Jin +10%, then it's entirely possible my head will explode from the excitement.
Sekka
The Elemental trials have a ton of customization to offer. For me I'm looking at acquiring 8 of these. Two each of Evasion, Physical Damage Down and Magic Defense Bonus for tanking and then a combo of the Attack and Accuracy for DDing, though these will likely be the last two I go after based on how the Kannagi and Uzura paths unfold. The tanking ones are obvious winners to me, a set of -PDT will give me VIT+12 and PDT - 16%, a set of MDB will give me MND+12 and MDB+16, the Evasion set would give me AGI+12 and Evasion +32 (which is also very nice for pulling or kiting). I feel like having those six katana will give me a ton of flexibility when tanking/pulling/kiting/soloing. As it stands I'm on the last trial for the first -PDT katana and I'm in the middle stages of the first Evasion katana. For Ninjas who like to tank you NEED to be getting on these trials now, otherwise you're going to have a hard time justifying yourself in endgame events as PLD is the ever increasing preference. Further, a pair of these are better than any previous combination of katanas in pure damage alone, you have to be fucking daft to hold onto the old stuff (though I did shed a tear when I put Senju away and removed it from my macros).
Black Mage Trials
Before the update I was looking at getting only one Teiwaz (Thunder path) and just getting an HQ Ice Staff. The reason for this wasn't because the Teiwaz weren't awesome staves, but they all had the same name which makes them impossible to macro in and out. However, with the update SE had the good sense to give the final upgrades unique names so my interest in getting these has increased dramatically.
Hvergelmir
This is the Empyrean weapon for BLM, and if it does nothing else, it's still a beast for DD BLM (which I love to do), DMG 87 and Delay 390 for a DPS of 13.38 just blows anything previously available for DD out of the water. Currently I have a Somnus Signa which is DMG 62 Delay 402 for a DPS of 9.25 (which was at the top of the food chain after Relic), it's nice, but I might be willing to prostitute my mom just to get my hands on Hvergelmir. I highly doubt this is the much touted Rainbow Staff (the eight elemental staves combined into one), but I am very curious as to where SE plans to go with this in future updates.
Elemental Staves
Put simply you are now gimp without these. Base testing has already shown they blow the current HQ Elemental Staves out of the water. The only catch here is actually killing the mobs without getting yourself killed in the process. BLM is not exactly the king of melee, so a certain amount of teamwork goes into finishing these, even worse is it's counterproductive to team up with other BLMs because of the kill objectives. What I like about them, at least from a BLM perspective is you can start and stop whenever as the trial objectives are not based on the day or weather, but what elemental spell you kill the mob with. When I initially looked at this path I chose Magic Damage +4 for all eight staves, however, it occurred to me that logic wasn't entirely practical. I don't use light and dark magic to do damage as much as I use that magic to land DoTs or add buffs; so the sensible solution here is to get Magic Accuracy +4 for those two paths.
For me, I'm in fucking heaven doing these trials, yeah weather it's a bitch to wait on, and it's easy to get distracted, but the Trials fill in big holes with my free time much in the way Campaign does. In other words, I'm actually accomplishing something every single day and not just staring aimlessly at the screen waiting for something to happen. Thank you SE, and fuck off to the complainers.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Digesting the Update (BLM)
So my other main job in the game is BLM and at some point I'm bound to get it leveled to 80 (full disclosure, I was level 76 for about 18 hours, then Dynamis happened and I have done nothing but go backwards since).
Subjobs
Unlike NIN the subjobs for BLM haven't really changed, all three remain situational.
Abilities, Spells and Job Traits
I think my next update will focus on the Magian Trials as that's been my primary interest in game since the update.
Subjobs
Unlike NIN the subjobs for BLM haven't really changed, all three remain situational.
- BLM/WHM: I would suspect most people are still subbing this as it still meets the status quo. Virtually nothing has changed; you get the Altep and Yhoat teleports at 76, Stona at 78 and Haste at 80. There's nothing gamebreaking here, especially since the Afflatus Job Abilities remain WHM main only. At 80, a BLM would be using /WHM because they are a support job, if they nuking only, then one of the other two would be better options.
- BLM/RDM: There are two major changes to using RDM sub now, Raise and Convert. Raise isn't that big of a deal (personally I'd much rather have Reraise), but Convert is a big deal to a job like BLM. Before the update the big reason for subbing this was for soloing (though people would still sub it to events for the defensive additions it adds), however, Convert changes that. You essentially trade Blink for Phalanx, but you also gain another MP bar worth of nukes which is especially useful on bosses like Dynamis Lord where you do nothing but straight nuke the shit out of the mob. Coupled with Manafont a BLM can go through their entire AMII tier in one volley.
- BLM/SCH: Gamebreaker with Resist Silence II Job Trait! Kidding, like WHM, nothing has really changed here, if you were using /SCH before the update, there is no reason to change. At level 80 you get access to Accession and Manifestation, and as BLM you're probably going to get a lot more mileage out of the later. Sleep and Sleep II become AoE spells without the hate of their -ga equivalents and you can also AoE Blind, Bind and Dispel. The drawbacks here are recast times getting tripled and you can only use it once a minute, which makes Manifestation something great for those oh shit moments, but not overly helpful on a consistent basis. I know a lot of people seem hyped up about being able to sub /SCH now, but realistically it still doesn't beat out /WHM or /RDM...yet.
Abilities, Spells and Job Traits
- Stone V and Water V: The first of the Tier V spells are really only for people who insist on completing things (like me). Because of merit limitations most BLMs have put their focus on the higher elementals of Thunder and Ice, which actually allows some folks to outnuke these two spells. Obviously no one should be surprised here, what we are really waiting on probably won't be in the game until December (Ice V and Thunder V), I just wish they weren't so damned expensive to get from NPCs. People have been finding them in the Walk of Echoes and Abyssea, but that hasn't eased the prices any, though I'm sure the prices are affected equally by the newness of the spells and the (still) relative scarcity of obtaining them. They'll probably be worth 20k at best by the end of the year.
- Mana Wall: This Ability seems to be a fairly polarizing addition, some BLMs think it's the best addition in years, others are furious SE is messing with their MP pool. For me I only had a brief chance to use it in Dynamis and it did save my life once, but it put me on the sideline briefly while I got my MP back. Regardless of how you look at that, it's better than sidelining me for five minutes from Death weakness. I think for events like Dynamis, this is something I will want up all the time, but for other stuff like Einherjar, it won't be that useful (since most mobs there require light sleep, BLMs either stun or nuke).
- Magic Burst Bonus: This would be great about five years ago when the game was centered around Skillchaining and Magic Bursting, but in the post Two-Hand Update world, Zerg is King. There are times when MBing is still used, in Obsidian we try to MB on Sky Gods, though with the additional levels we should be able to spank the shit out of those mobs anyway, so it's not like MBing is going to give us much of an edge. I'm not sure if the early testing has been confirmed but the increase here was only marginal going from a 33% increase to a 50% increase. To make that an example, say you land a nuke that does 1,000 base damage on a mob, before you would get an MB in the neighborhood of 1,333, now that MB is 1,500 damage. It's a nice increase, but nothing that blows one's mind either.
I think my next update will focus on the Magian Trials as that's been my primary interest in game since the update.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Digesting the Update (NIN)
So what did the update do for NIN? Well, on the surface not much changed at all, but dig a little deeper and one finds things have changed a lot.
Subjobs
One of the biggest shifts are the tanking subjobs, with many of the common hate generating spells being nerfed this changes how a NIN has to approach tanking. The familiar subjobs are still there and they are still viable, but a new one has been added and it will eventually jump to the front of the pack.
Tanking
DDing
Abilities, Spells, and Job Traits
Sometimes it's hard to guess just what the hell SE expects NIN to do in the game. Recently they finally admitted to looking at NIN as a viable tank option in the game and we started seeing enmity+ gear, so most NINs were expecting that trend to continue. It didn't…or at least not in a way that's obvious to anyone but the developers.
Next up will be BLM and then hopefully Gear (I'm waiting to go over the gear until people start obtaining it, no point getting excited about stuff that may be near impossible to get).
Subjobs
One of the biggest shifts are the tanking subjobs, with many of the common hate generating spells being nerfed this changes how a NIN has to approach tanking. The familiar subjobs are still there and they are still viable, but a new one has been added and it will eventually jump to the front of the pack.
Tanking
- NIN/WAR: This sub will always be the preferred sub for leveling or meriting since it's easy enough to manage and more often than not you're only there for first voke anyway. The other subjob choices require MP and expecting refresh and ballad will do nothing but gimp your entire party (and piss off your refreshers). Additionally /WAR is the best choice for Tank/DD hybrids which are ideal in the above parties.
- NIN/DRK: While not totally nerfed by SE with the adjustments to Bind and Sleep, NINs will have to take more time to lock hate in with /DRK. Stun and Aspir were not affected so they still have their CE enmity, and after the next update Absorb-TP will also be in this group so this still remains a good option for NIN. In addition to the CE spells, NIN will still have the high VE job abilities Last Resort, Weapon Bash and Souleater for those oh shit moments.
- NIN/RDM: Sub RDM was never the popular choice, and it looks like it will be regulated to soloing and small groups even more so now. There are no instant CE spells here anymore, but literally any spell you cast will generate VE so it isn't totally dead, the difference is you have to constantly keep up the casting. I was really hoping this would move ahead of /DRK with the update because it offers a lot more self defense, but this is the hand we've been dealt so people just need to learn to deal with it.
- NIN/BLU: The new kid on the block and the one I think will eventually move to the front of the pack. The reason BLU becomes an option is because in this update is the ability to cast Blank Gaze is gained at Level 76. It has a 10 second recast and pulls 320 CE, which is equivalent to what Dispel used to be able to do. It doesn't stop there, Sheep Song and Soporific are also available right now and they both generate 320 CE. This update isn't moving it to the front of the pack just yet, but by the December update that will all change. In addition to the above spells, MP Drainkiss (Level 82), Stinking Gas (Level 88), Geist Wall (Level 92) and Jettatura (Level 96) will all be available, making this a very powerful subjob for anyone tanking, not just NIN.
DDing
- NIN/WAR: As I stated above, /WAR is a great DD subjob, with the Double Attack job trait, a hasted NIN can almost appear to be constantly hitting the mob and over time that damage will move ahead of any frontline DD except a Black Belt MNK.
- NIN/SAM: The real game changer here is Sekkanoki, before this was a niche subjob that most would use when they needed TP without hitting the mob (this meant using Meditate). The problem with using /SAM is you need to be using a Great Katana to get to Hasso and that just kills a NIN's potential for straight DDing (not to mention, Weaponskills on Great Katana suck ass for NIN).
- NIN/RDM: I'm still using this in Campaign, for mobs that take time you just can't beat having Enspells. As a DD subjob though, /RDM still has a few updates before we see it's full potential, it won't be a top choice obviously, but depending on the situation it has the potential to be a great DD subjob.
- NIN/THF: As of this update /THF doesn't offer anything it didn't at 37 (unless you want to be picky and claim Resist Gravity II). But let's face it, this is a farming subjob, you could possibly tank with it, but it's not advised and DDing with it in a party is just asinine. The good news is the September update will give everyone access to TH2 at Level 90, so there is that.
- NIN/RNG: This isn't something you see often, but there are some benefits, in particular Sidewinder (if you have the Ranged Accuracy that is). Wide Scan IV becomes available at 80 as well as Shadowbind so if you're hunting NMs solo or in a small group, this is a highly useful subjob choice.
- NIN/DNC: It's obvious SE wants every job in the game to start subbing DNC, but you know what? I don't give a fuck how awesome it is, I refuse to dance. I'm not a fucking monkey.
- NIN/BLU: Like tanking with BLU, before the update this wasn't the best of choices, but with the new magical direction SE seems to be pushing on NIN, it's time to take a look at this and possibly get some use out of it. I don't think I need to go into any great detail here, but there are some very nice offensive spells, coupled with the curing and enhancing spells, I think BLU will make a fine choice as a DD (assuming you have Refresh).
Abilities, Spells, and Job Traits
Sometimes it's hard to guess just what the hell SE expects NIN to do in the game. Recently they finally admitted to looking at NIN as a viable tank option in the game and we started seeing enmity+ gear, so most NINs were expecting that trend to continue. It didn't…or at least not in a way that's obvious to anyone but the developers.
- Tactical Parry: Of the new things available to NIN, this is the only one where we have to be tanking to get use out of it. My Parry skill is still shit (like 195 or something) so this isn't something that triggers that often for me, but I can see where this is will be something very useful. Basically you get 2% TP for each time Parry triggers, even triggering once this removes an attack round for Weaponskills (at least for me, I see 98% and 99% quite often).
- Magic Burst Bonus: Huh? Granted, we've always been able to MB on mobs, but I'd be surprised is most NINs have any idea when to start casting and to be quite honest, elemental nukes aren't going to return big numbers regardless of whether we MB or not. The only way this works is if…
- Futae: …we use this Job Ability beforehand in conjunction with a San nuke and Innin. This means we could very well approach Tier IV nuke numbers, but only once a minute. There are just too many things have to be lined up just right to see the big numbers though, and neither help any with tanking, it's strictly DD stuff.
- Aisha (Ichi): Instead of getting our Ni tier finished off, SE decided to give us a new spell that is like Bio, but without the DoT (Attack Down). How this helps NIN in anyway is beyond me. As tanks we are supposed to avoid getting hit to begin with as DD this will only benefit whomever is tanking and that will most likely be a PLD who didn't exactly need the help to begin with. Had this been a Defense Down spell then I would have been all over it, the benefit there is obvious, but this one just has me scratching my head. I just don't get it.
Next up will be BLM and then hopefully Gear (I'm waiting to go over the gear until people start obtaining it, no point getting excited about stuff that may be near impossible to get).
Monday, June 28, 2010
Digesting the Update (Events)
So we've had a week to play with the update and check out all the new toys SE has given us. I myself have been rather casual about leveling, something no one should find surprising given my aversion to leveling before the update. That said I have NIN about half way to 78 and my BLM deleveled to 75, where it remains with about 3k tnl. Leveling aside, there was an immense amount of content in this update that I wanted to check out, and for the most part I have.
Abyssea
As I said in my last update, Abyssea is quite fun, it is content one can do solo or as a group, the only gripe is the time constraint, but there's nothing that can be done about that. There is also some very nice gear that you can purchase with Cruor (Abyssea currency), the gear for NIN is niche/side grade stuff (and I think it may be pink), but the mage set has some actual upgrades to my current gear.
Aurore gear (light armor): Looking over this set the two obvious beneficiaries are RNG and THF as the set is stacked with DEX, AGI and RACC. It also contains quite a bit of Haste, which would benefit any job wearing it. On NIN there are two pieces worth considering, the head and legs.
Teal gear (Mage armor): To me, this set has a couple of pieces that are immediate upgrades to my current gear (my BLM has average gear, nothing all that elite). Because I plan to get a few pieces I will end up completing the set (I'm one of those people who aren't happy until I have 5/5 of a set, even if I never use some of those pieces).
Walk of Echoes
Stupid Hate Rules = Stupid Event. I don't see the point in paying 1k to have my ass handed to me repeatedly for a half hour. It'd be one thing if it was a controlled event where you knew all the participants, but it's open to anybody and thus open to every fucking idiot in the game. It only takes one clueless dumbass to ruin things, fuck this, I'm not doing it again.
VNMs
This one surprised quite a few people as it was not mentioned in the one sheet, but SE added a new VNM path. There were a couple of differences in this path, first the mobs are easier, not "any idiot can do them now" easier, but noticeably not as difficult as the first group of VNMs and secondly, they give you no XP (though you can get skill-ups on them). The Tier III on this path is a Tiger (Dewan) and by all accounts, it seems to be Byakko's big brother. We made two attempts on it, neither resulted in a win, but we did get it down to 30ish%, a couple of tweaks and this fight will be no problem (and ultimately may be the easiest path to Yilbegan).
I'll go over the job changes (NIN and BLM, who cares about the other jobs lol) and more of the new gear in a future blog, for now my fingers are tired and I probably should get back to work anyway...
Abyssea
As I said in my last update, Abyssea is quite fun, it is content one can do solo or as a group, the only gripe is the time constraint, but there's nothing that can be done about that. There is also some very nice gear that you can purchase with Cruor (Abyssea currency), the gear for NIN is niche/side grade stuff (and I think it may be pink), but the mage set has some actual upgrades to my current gear.
Aurore gear (light armor): Looking over this set the two obvious beneficiaries are RNG and THF as the set is stacked with DEX, AGI and RACC. It also contains quite a bit of Haste, which would benefit any job wearing it. On NIN there are two pieces worth considering, the head and legs.
- The head piece contains DEX +4, AGI +4 and Haste +4%; the obvious comparison is Walahra Turban, which has HP +30, MP +30 and Haste +5%. To me this is a side grade, do I want to give up 1% Haste for a bit more ACC and RACC for DD, in most situations, no. Well how about WS, DEX is a modifier on Jin after all, again the answer is no, as one should either have a Hissho Hachimaki (ACC +8, ATK +8) or an Anwig Salade with WSACC +15 augmented on it. So while it seems like something for a NIN to get, ultimately there is better gear worth your time.
- The leg piece is a bit harder to dismiss, but it's also ultimately a side grade to what a NIN should already have. The piece itself has ACC +9 RACC +9 and Haste +3%. DD is the one place where a NIN could consider using this piece, BUT, only if you don't have Byakko's Haidate, if you have the kitty pants then there is no reason whatsoever to trade 2% haste for 1 ACC, you'll only be gimping yourself doing so. For WS it makes even less sense if you have Byakko's as that 15 DEX almost assuredly takes your average NIN to the next DEX tier (which will up the average Jin damage quite a bit). The last place to consider this piece is in your Ranged set, but again it falls just short of what a NIN should already have and that Ninja Hakama (also applies to +1), that piece has RACC +10 on it.
Teal gear (Mage armor): To me, this set has a couple of pieces that are immediate upgrades to my current gear (my BLM has average gear, nothing all that elite). Because I plan to get a few pieces I will end up completing the set (I'm one of those people who aren't happy until I have 5/5 of a set, even if I never use some of those pieces).
- The first piece that has me salivating is the head piece. For starters it's a blue…ahem, teal pimp hat, and I would get this just to wonder around town, but the stats on it are also top of the line, INT +6, MND +6, Enmity -2. This piece is basically a Demon Helm +2; the added MND will obsolete any other piece BLM can equip for curing, enfeebling and most importantly Stoneskin. The Enmity -2 is also very nice, as a nuker I can't begin to stress how important Enmity down gear is, and this rivals Sorcerer's Petasos, though the +1 has -3 on it. This piece is without question the first one I plan to target and obtain.
- The body is also very nice, especially for those of us who simply don't have the time to obtain Morrigan's from Salvage. You will find a lot of BLMs in the game have one of two bodies, Morrigans or Genie/Igqira (I went a different way and use Errant because I can't stand the way Genie looks). In comparison this is Morrigan's -1 as all of the stats are a bit less than that magnificent piece, but it moves well ahead of Genie imho. The stats on the Teal Saio are INT +6, MND +6, MACC +4 and MATK Bonus +4, The Genie Weskit has Elemental Magic Skill +6 and MATK Bonus +7. While the Genie clearly has it beat with the Magic Attack Bonus, it only comes in handy if you land your nuke, the Teal Saio, on the other hand, offers much more accuracy and still has the ability to do the similar damage with the INT. I'm definitely getting this.
- For me the gloves and pants would be side grades as I have Oracle's Gloves and Shadow Trews. I would go for the pants because of the INT, but they have no enmity down like Shadow's and if I get the body then I lose the -3 Enmity I was getting from Errant's, so at some point I have to start thinking about surviving a nuke. The hands are MND based and could come in handy for healing and Stoneskin. The feet aren't a side grade to anything I have, they are an upgrade, but like the hands, they are MND based and would be used for the same things, which are nice to have on BLM, but ultimately do not define the job.
Walk of Echoes
Stupid Hate Rules = Stupid Event. I don't see the point in paying 1k to have my ass handed to me repeatedly for a half hour. It'd be one thing if it was a controlled event where you knew all the participants, but it's open to anybody and thus open to every fucking idiot in the game. It only takes one clueless dumbass to ruin things, fuck this, I'm not doing it again.
VNMs
This one surprised quite a few people as it was not mentioned in the one sheet, but SE added a new VNM path. There were a couple of differences in this path, first the mobs are easier, not "any idiot can do them now" easier, but noticeably not as difficult as the first group of VNMs and secondly, they give you no XP (though you can get skill-ups on them). The Tier III on this path is a Tiger (Dewan) and by all accounts, it seems to be Byakko's big brother. We made two attempts on it, neither resulted in a win, but we did get it down to 30ish%, a couple of tweaks and this fight will be no problem (and ultimately may be the easiest path to Yilbegan).
I'll go over the job changes (NIN and BLM, who cares about the other jobs lol) and more of the new gear in a future blog, for now my fingers are tired and I probably should get back to work anyway...
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Early June Update Observations
I've been delaying any blogging until the update because the only thing I had to blog about was shit I had done and shit I was looking forward to. I'm sure that is of interest to some folks (for the record, other people's lists have interested me), but I was struggling to come up with anything of substance, so after a couple of tries I said to hell with it and decided to wait.
Pre-Update Hysteria
SE released the one-sheet for the update while I was at work, some things jumped out at me and some I didn't catch til later on messageboards. Of this stuff perhaps the most important thing to note was the possible nerfing of hate spells used by both NIN and RDM tanks. To tank effectively on either of these jobs, one cycles through the spells Sleep, Bind, Blind, Dispel and Stun (if /DRK). A mega nerf here would essentially disable either of these jobs to compete with PLD as tanks. Now one could argue why the hell any of those spells have enmity spikes to begin with, but I think the real reason SE even bothered to fix the mistakes they made long ago is for one reason and that's because they want us to sub Scholar on our mage jobs. This means Accession and Manifestation on the above spells and with hate set the way it was could mean death for the caster. Personally I think that is bullshit, as a BLM who has been in end game crowd control for over a year I can honetly say if mobs fuck you up from your Sleepga spells it's generally your own gimp ass fault. At any rate, I understand SE's logic, and the hope was they would not nerf the shit out of these spells.
One of the other things that caught my eye was the new Synergy Goldsmithing crafts. I haven't seen a lot of chatter about this, but my head fucking hurts just doing the math. You see there are eight rings named after the HQ Elemental Staves and a bunch of earrings with elemental based names. Could this mean we are getting elemental specific rings and earrings now, as if inventory issues weren't already batshit out of control?! Think about this from a BLM point of view, BLMS use seven of the eight elements in everyday use (light being the exception, but even there a good BLM will be prepared for healing), now that's seven times four for a total of 28. Motherfuckers! All I can say is I hope this stuff is shit or SE is gonna get a big angry FUCK YOU roar from me (not that they care). One of the other Synergy things that caught my eye was a Nashmau Earring, which presumably will teleport us to Nashmau. That's a big fucking win for Einherjar, I hate running there every Tuesday and Saturday, on foot, by boat and by coat are so inefficient (coat is great, but people always wait around for 20+ minutes gathering a party to warp, which means you may as well run your ass there), an instant warp that I can use at my leisure will be a godsend.
Other things that I was looking forward to were how we could obtain Water V and Stone V, what the hell Aisha: Ichi was all about, what new mobs were added in the CoP zones and what were Abyssea and the Walk of Echoes. Those last two got special one-sheets and both sounded as confounding as Synergy.
The Update Arrives!...Fuck.
So after HOURS of waiting on maintenance (during which time I cleaned my apartment, did four loads of laundry and watched a movie) we were finally able to get in game. One of the first things almost everyone was doing involved getting to level 76. This had very easy requirements, five Kindred's Seals and three Merit Points, most people had the first requirement, but many were (and probably still are) getting the second requirement. Three merit points isn't much, but it is 30k XP and not too many people were expecting merits as a requirement. I know many friends and reader's of this blog had been spending them in the preceding weeks as SE was mum on how merits would be dealt with. I fortunately got sick on Sunday so rather than close out my third merit (I had 2.6 merits) and upgrade Elemental Magic I turned the game off and went to bed. This left me with needing 4k on merits, 1k on NIN and 3k on BLM. On NIN it came easy, two campaigns and I had the 4k for my last merit (and for the record Campaign appears to be broken, in a good way, I didn't do much in those fights and got far more XP than I was expecting). BLM was a bit rougher, but both jobs are sitting at 76 now.
While working on BLM I got an invite from Sief to check out Abyssea. What can I say about this...it was damn fun, good soundtrack (I really liked the fight music) and the only bad thing about it I could find was the time constraints (who the fuck can say why SE added constraints, but it is what it is). The NQ mobs were fairly easy and even in a group of ten we were getting at least 80 XP a mob. No one was quite sure what we were doing, but one of our group noticed with each group of mobs there was a ???, upon clicking this it would tell you to trade an item to it. These items seemed to drop off the mobs around it, and amongst the Mandies (who aren't that big by the way) we popped our first NM. This little bastard was infinitely harder than the NQs around him (I don't recall his name atm), he spammed the shit out of enfeebles and all of them came together, paralyze, silence, blind, disease, and poison (maybe more, I was out of range most of the time). Nasty little shit, took us about 10 minutes to kill him, but our reward was 650 XP each and a Thew Bomblet (STR +2 and Attack +10 int he ammo slot for a few jobs). Abyssea looks like it will be loads of fun, it's a Dynamis like event and something Obsidian could very easily transition into doing one or twice a week. So I finished that up around 2AM and needed a little under 1k to level BLM, which I did in Campaign.
Some things that came to light while I was standing around waiting on campaigns made me a sad panda. The first was the cost of the new spells, Stone V 123k, Water V 135k (the WHM spells were just as bad). At that rate the V tier and IV -ga tier (assuming we get this) will cost an insane 2M or so, very disheartening. The other thing was SE did indeed nerf the shit out of the enmity spells, they are totally worthless now. For most things, at least for me, this won't matter much, but it's gonna hurt our Ultima tanking as we relied heavily on our RDMs to cover our PLDs in that fight. Also kinda makes my Fire Set useless as any dragon I fight will be a struggle to hold hate with voke and my NIN Enfeeble spells, not impossible, but it would be foolish to go into these fights without PLD tanks now.
For BLM, something that came to light was Aspir draining more MP than they previously had (I'd guess 25% more, give or take), which was a rejoice to many a mage, but sadly that is listed as a known issue by SE today and as such SE's "fix" will probably go too far the other way and they'll end up nerfing the the damn spell. Ah well, was nice while it lasted.
For NIN, SE did us a solid (while shitting on NINs for everything else) by adding a shadow counter. My only issue here is that it's kind of hard to see, not sure if it's because I'm color blind or if SE was being lazy and didn't add enough defining color tone to it. At any rate, it's a welcome addition, unlike our new spell. We found out what Aisha: Ichi was and it has every NIN in the game scratching their head, it's an Attack Down enfeeble. Since NIN's primary duty as a tank is to AVOID damage with our shadows I can't imagine a real need or want for this spell. Hopefully they add a Defense Down spell in one of the updates. And here's hoping they also finish out our motherfucking Ichi tier, I mean Dokumori: Ni and Jubaku: Ni have been in the dats and used by mobs for how fucking long now? And not to mention it's stupid to have Tonko: Ni, but not Monomi: Ni.
Overall, I have mixed feelings about this update, Abyseea was a lot of fun and I think I would have been able to deal with the most of the nonsense, but the nerf to RDM really hurts. It wasn't necessary and it changes a lot within the tanking community, instead of having multiple options for tanks, we basically have one and in my opinion, that is not the way to go. Time will tell, and there is hope on the horizon with Flash and Cure IV in our future, but the next three months are gonna be kinda rough...
Pre-Update Hysteria
SE released the one-sheet for the update while I was at work, some things jumped out at me and some I didn't catch til later on messageboards. Of this stuff perhaps the most important thing to note was the possible nerfing of hate spells used by both NIN and RDM tanks. To tank effectively on either of these jobs, one cycles through the spells Sleep, Bind, Blind, Dispel and Stun (if /DRK). A mega nerf here would essentially disable either of these jobs to compete with PLD as tanks. Now one could argue why the hell any of those spells have enmity spikes to begin with, but I think the real reason SE even bothered to fix the mistakes they made long ago is for one reason and that's because they want us to sub Scholar on our mage jobs. This means Accession and Manifestation on the above spells and with hate set the way it was could mean death for the caster. Personally I think that is bullshit, as a BLM who has been in end game crowd control for over a year I can honetly say if mobs fuck you up from your Sleepga spells it's generally your own gimp ass fault. At any rate, I understand SE's logic, and the hope was they would not nerf the shit out of these spells.
One of the other things that caught my eye was the new Synergy Goldsmithing crafts. I haven't seen a lot of chatter about this, but my head fucking hurts just doing the math. You see there are eight rings named after the HQ Elemental Staves and a bunch of earrings with elemental based names. Could this mean we are getting elemental specific rings and earrings now, as if inventory issues weren't already batshit out of control?! Think about this from a BLM point of view, BLMS use seven of the eight elements in everyday use (light being the exception, but even there a good BLM will be prepared for healing), now that's seven times four for a total of 28. Motherfuckers! All I can say is I hope this stuff is shit or SE is gonna get a big angry FUCK YOU roar from me (not that they care). One of the other Synergy things that caught my eye was a Nashmau Earring, which presumably will teleport us to Nashmau. That's a big fucking win for Einherjar, I hate running there every Tuesday and Saturday, on foot, by boat and by coat are so inefficient (coat is great, but people always wait around for 20+ minutes gathering a party to warp, which means you may as well run your ass there), an instant warp that I can use at my leisure will be a godsend.
Other things that I was looking forward to were how we could obtain Water V and Stone V, what the hell Aisha: Ichi was all about, what new mobs were added in the CoP zones and what were Abyssea and the Walk of Echoes. Those last two got special one-sheets and both sounded as confounding as Synergy.
The Update Arrives!...Fuck.
So after HOURS of waiting on maintenance (during which time I cleaned my apartment, did four loads of laundry and watched a movie) we were finally able to get in game. One of the first things almost everyone was doing involved getting to level 76. This had very easy requirements, five Kindred's Seals and three Merit Points, most people had the first requirement, but many were (and probably still are) getting the second requirement. Three merit points isn't much, but it is 30k XP and not too many people were expecting merits as a requirement. I know many friends and reader's of this blog had been spending them in the preceding weeks as SE was mum on how merits would be dealt with. I fortunately got sick on Sunday so rather than close out my third merit (I had 2.6 merits) and upgrade Elemental Magic I turned the game off and went to bed. This left me with needing 4k on merits, 1k on NIN and 3k on BLM. On NIN it came easy, two campaigns and I had the 4k for my last merit (and for the record Campaign appears to be broken, in a good way, I didn't do much in those fights and got far more XP than I was expecting). BLM was a bit rougher, but both jobs are sitting at 76 now.
While working on BLM I got an invite from Sief to check out Abyssea. What can I say about this...it was damn fun, good soundtrack (I really liked the fight music) and the only bad thing about it I could find was the time constraints (who the fuck can say why SE added constraints, but it is what it is). The NQ mobs were fairly easy and even in a group of ten we were getting at least 80 XP a mob. No one was quite sure what we were doing, but one of our group noticed with each group of mobs there was a ???, upon clicking this it would tell you to trade an item to it. These items seemed to drop off the mobs around it, and amongst the Mandies (who aren't that big by the way) we popped our first NM. This little bastard was infinitely harder than the NQs around him (I don't recall his name atm), he spammed the shit out of enfeebles and all of them came together, paralyze, silence, blind, disease, and poison (maybe more, I was out of range most of the time). Nasty little shit, took us about 10 minutes to kill him, but our reward was 650 XP each and a Thew Bomblet (STR +2 and Attack +10 int he ammo slot for a few jobs). Abyssea looks like it will be loads of fun, it's a Dynamis like event and something Obsidian could very easily transition into doing one or twice a week. So I finished that up around 2AM and needed a little under 1k to level BLM, which I did in Campaign.
Some things that came to light while I was standing around waiting on campaigns made me a sad panda. The first was the cost of the new spells, Stone V 123k, Water V 135k (the WHM spells were just as bad). At that rate the V tier and IV -ga tier (assuming we get this) will cost an insane 2M or so, very disheartening. The other thing was SE did indeed nerf the shit out of the enmity spells, they are totally worthless now. For most things, at least for me, this won't matter much, but it's gonna hurt our Ultima tanking as we relied heavily on our RDMs to cover our PLDs in that fight. Also kinda makes my Fire Set useless as any dragon I fight will be a struggle to hold hate with voke and my NIN Enfeeble spells, not impossible, but it would be foolish to go into these fights without PLD tanks now.
For BLM, something that came to light was Aspir draining more MP than they previously had (I'd guess 25% more, give or take), which was a rejoice to many a mage, but sadly that is listed as a known issue by SE today and as such SE's "fix" will probably go too far the other way and they'll end up nerfing the the damn spell. Ah well, was nice while it lasted.
For NIN, SE did us a solid (while shitting on NINs for everything else) by adding a shadow counter. My only issue here is that it's kind of hard to see, not sure if it's because I'm color blind or if SE was being lazy and didn't add enough defining color tone to it. At any rate, it's a welcome addition, unlike our new spell. We found out what Aisha: Ichi was and it has every NIN in the game scratching their head, it's an Attack Down enfeeble. Since NIN's primary duty as a tank is to AVOID damage with our shadows I can't imagine a real need or want for this spell. Hopefully they add a Defense Down spell in one of the updates. And here's hoping they also finish out our motherfucking Ichi tier, I mean Dokumori: Ni and Jubaku: Ni have been in the dats and used by mobs for how fucking long now? And not to mention it's stupid to have Tonko: Ni, but not Monomi: Ni.
Overall, I have mixed feelings about this update, Abyseea was a lot of fun and I think I would have been able to deal with the most of the nonsense, but the nerf to RDM really hurts. It wasn't necessary and it changes a lot within the tanking community, instead of having multiple options for tanks, we basically have one and in my opinion, that is not the way to go. Time will tell, and there is hope on the horizon with Flash and Cure IV in our future, but the next three months are gonna be kinda rough...
Monday, May 10, 2010
Well That Was Productive
So this weekend was a fairly busy one, and from a personal standpoint I seemed to have accomplished a lot more than I had set out to.
Friday
Friday began with me taking off early from work, my plan was to get some time in on WHM as it was halfway to 39, my hope was to get close to 40 before I had to head out for Sea and Limbus at 6:30PM. What ended up happening was I got within 1k of 40 at about 6:15PM and I decided to forgo Sea and finish getting WHM to 40 and adding a buffer. WHM is just slow going and one has to constantly watch HP and MP to effectively solo, even on EP mobs, there ends up being more downtime than other jobs as a result. Nevertheless, I managed to get WHM to 40 with a 1k buffer in about 30-35 minutes. Since I wasn't doing Sea and had some time before Limbus I decided to get the WHM AF Weapon Blessed Hammer, (this is something that my WHM will be using to melee with up to 49, though I can't equip it til 41). The quest was easy, but I got stuck waiting for nighttime to pop the NM, gotta love SE and their ability to add time wasters to everything we do. So Goal 1 for the weekend accomplished.
After I put the WHM away it was time for Limbus and I wasn't quite sure how our turnout would be since Hoodini's account got banned (I haven't heard anything from him since he told the shell), Monday was low and I had a feeling Friday would be too. My gut feeling was right, we had 15 people show up (down from 21) and I was forced to decide on a split run or a full run. Since we seemed to be lacking folks for the last two runs and both Rues and Liela would be gone this upcoming Friday I decided to go ahead and split with the hopes we could get both chips for Omega tonight.
With Hoodini down for the count, we decided to promote Rues and Liela to sackholder positions, in part because they seem to get a long with everyone, work well as a tandem, show up to almost every run and have got a ton of low-man experience in Limbus (for example, they can duo NW). Because of their expertise in NW I decided to let them take a team there for their first run as leads, and from all accounts they seemed to do a fine job and we got the win. I'm hopeful the two of them will be able to pick up the nuances of Limbus fairly quickly so I don't have to do all the work (Seif and Arnor are not always available to do runs).
With six people taking NW, my group was down to nine folks, and SE (weaknesses) was our target. Now typically I hate doing any Apollyon run with less than 10 people, sure it can be done, but I like to guarantee wins instead of hoping for everyone to be at the top of their game. We were right on the line of what I consider a guaranteed win and folks needing to bring their A Game. The first floor went well and I got the impression we were going to have an easy go at it (cue ominous music). The second floor ended up showing signs of trouble as our only sleeper (RDM) had to be told to sleep the links, I found this annoying, but it was not an issue that was slowing us down. The third floor is where the shit hit the fan, this is the floor with skeletons and this is where I discovered our RDM doesn't really like to multitask. What we needed from her was Dispel the skeletons as they came in, heal and provide paralynas for the tank party (which was just my NIN and Shilo as BLU). While she seemed to handle the first two ok, getting paralynas proved to be problematic and I had to ask the DDs WHM to cover the entire alliance with paralyna. On our last skeleton I got hit with Slow, and anyone who has tried to NIN tank with Slow can attest, it's not a good idea to cast shadows in this condition (in fact it turned out to be Slow II as Haste didn't override it). I asked to have it removed, waited a few and asked again, waited some more (at this point Tammyrose tried to Haste me to no effect). I asked again and nothing, so I finally started spamming for the RDM to Erase me, at which point she tried to Haste me and then ran away, I had to call her back and get her to Erase me THEN Haste me. All this fucking about knocked off 2-3 minutes from what was looking to be a down to the wire run. Once we were finally able to move forward we had about 10 minutes to kill Grave Digger (a Corse NM) and the Weapons on the 4th Floor. My team had to push it hard and a bad pull with the Weapons ended up getting Tammyrose killed and left us with the RDM as our only healer (which wouldn't have happened if the RDM had tried to Sleep the fucking links). So we had to finish the run with one healer and six mobs to go, which we did for the win. At the end of the day I really wish I had kept Shilo as RDM, he does a good job and knows what he has to do keep the run moving smoothly. You may be asking yourself why I even let the RDM come RDM, well therein lies the problem, I have to keep her on RDM because if I let her come NIN she goes all Leroy Jenkins on us and creates mass chaos (last time she started voking and pulling mobs, despite the fact she was neither the tank nor the puller).
At any rate, we have all four chips for Omega and will tackle him tonight, so Goal 2 for the weekend was accomplished.
Saturday
I got up early Saturday because I wanted some McDonalds for breakfast and I figured I could get some Trial of the Magians work accomplished while I waited on Einherjar to start. As such I had about an hour before Einherjar to kill birds. I thought I was in for some fun when I zoned and weather was up, I killed my first bird and during the second bird the weather went away and stayed away. I ended up talking shit in the shell the rest of the hour while waiting for nothing to happen. So technically Goal 3 was accomplished, but it was disappointing.
So up next was Einherjar and you could get a sense from the mood we might be in for a bit of trouble, can't quite put my finger on what it was, but something was off. As it turns out, I was right, as a team we were just a bit off and hate wasn't being handled well (a theme that would bite us in the ass later in the day), BUT, in the end Odin was defeated and we got a bunch of good drops. However, once again, I was shut out of the BLM gear, which bums me out, especially now that Kaeko is also targeting this gear (it's not the competition I have a problem with, it's feeling like an ass when I raise the bid knowing Kaeko can't go higher). I'm sure we'll both get it eventually, but it's fucking annoying seeing gear that we can get from Einherjar OR Sky drop all the time while the gear that only drops in Einherjar never seems to fall. Goal 4 of the weekend (for me) was fail.
After Einherjar we had about two hours before we started on VNMs, I spent this time waiting for more weather that never came. I don't care what anyone says about the other Trials, waiting for weather has to be about the most fucking boring thing possible in the game. I'm already tired of the Trials and I'm only on the second trial on the first of four expected paths. About a half hour prior to starting the VNMs I gave up and changed to BLM for the remainder of the day.
On the VNMs the goal, once again, was Krabkatoa. Now, I'll admit I wouldn't mind the MND ring, but I am getting tired of this particular path, I'd like to see the other VNMs at some point. At any rate, I digress, we had a Blue Abyssite from last weekend so our first target of the day was to be the crab. We pulled him to a fence area in East Ronfaure with the intent of two PLDs holding him while the BLMs nuked him down. What ended up happening was more hate chaos that made us all look like a bunch of fucking noobs. Qtipus may be willing to put it off as we don't typically worry about hate management in Obsidian so people are a bit rusty or misguided. I won't be so kind (especially when the BLMs take all kinds of shit for minor things), simply put, folks should be ashamed by the sheer lack of knowledge about their jobs that they are pulling hate where none should be necessary. Since hate was never established we basically ran Krabkatoa around the fence for 30% of its health, nuking when we could, eventually we all ended up wiping. To be honest this strategy might be doable, but there were too many people pulling hate, and even more just standing around in the kite paths doing nothing. It was an embarrassing display and I'm still annoyed by it two days later.
Not so willing to admit defeat, we decided to take another crack at Krabkatoa and this meant getting more Blue Abyssite, we eventually got two before heading back to E. Ron for Round 2. This time we went a different route and went with a strategy that called for two MNKs to tank him. Once again we failed miserably to get hate established and ended up with one long 30 minute fuckfest that led to another wipe. Despite all the chaos we did get him down to 35%, but damnit if people don't need to get their shit together and work as a team, especially when it comes to hate generating actions (Cure IV = bad, Thunder IV = bad, etc, etc, etc). After the second wipe we called it a day on the VNMs, next week we will try Krabkatoa…again.
After the VNMs we had about two hours to kill before Sky, not sure what other people did, but I just chilled out until it was time to head out. For Sky we had a ton of God pop items to burn through and when it was all said and done we killed three Byakkos, three Suzakus, two Seiryus, and two Genbus. The bullshit from Einherjar and VNMs seemed to have dissipated and we had a fairly solid event to cap Saturday off. From a personal standpoint I took in a big haul from Sky as I FINALLY got my hands on Byakko's Haidate (Goal 6) as well as Susaku's Sune-Ate (Goal 7) and Zenith Mitts (not a goal, but an opportunity). Once I got the pants all the frustration from Friday and early in the day went away, getting them means I can now sit back and enjoy Sky.
After Sky I had to test out my new threads, so I set my gear macros (using my database, naturally) and geared up for Campaign. I only went to two battles (it was pretty late), but I was pretty happy to see my Jins all landing for 500+ damage (a couple came close to 1k). And I got a Merit Point from being there, so that was nice.
Sunday
I only had two things on my plate for Sunday (well three, I had to make Mother's Day phonecalls also), one was Dynamis and the other was to start on SCH. Dynamis was in the Glacier and we had a smaller group than usual, but it turned out to be a pretty good run. Everyone was on their game, and we burned through all the timers we usually get with an hour to spare for farming.
With SCH, for the longest time I have treated SCH like a WHM-Lite, both jobs were sharing gear and no one invited me to parties to nuke things, so when it came to soloing I found that SCH was going to be the worst of the lot…by far. You see, SCH can't equip hammers and paddles don't do a lot of damage so using Clubs was out. Staffs aren't practical either as the delay is pretty high and for a job with paper defense, spending extended time in front of mobs is a bad idea. All SCH has left is Daggers, and with a D rating, I was looking at Sushi over Mithkabobs, which wasn't that ideal either. Thankfully Arnor saw just how foolish my thinking on this was and suggested I look at SCH like a BLM-Lite if I'm going to solo it. This was an outstanding idea and I feel stupid for not thinking of it myself, and thankfully I still had all the gear I was going to need since I used it all on BLM.
So off I went to Yhoator Jungle to pick on Tonberry Elementals, my goal for the day was to get at least to level 38 and if time permitted. level 39. My first pull ended up being a mess, I was a bit rustier than I expected to be, the Elemental killed me and I deleveled. Not to be deterred I got back up and shook off the cobwebs, getting my level back and making short work of the next Elemental. After that I spent 20 minutes running around trying to get in a good position to pull another one. I had one Tonberry guarding my safe fight zones and I was about to start fighting out in the open when I got a /tell from Meesha about doing a manaburn in the Sanctuary of Zi-Tah. It's been some time since I manaburned at the Zi'Tah OP, but I figured it had to be better than trying to get the Tonberries to cooperate so I quickly accepted.
When I got there I was surprised to see my party consisted of a WAR (Meesha), a RDM, a BLM, and my SCH. We had two more SCH on the way and we were going to sync to level 27. This was a rather large departure from my days of BLM soloing/duoing/trioing here, back in my time (this was before Moses parted the Red Sea) you had to be nuts to try this camp below 30 and everyone was a BLM. As it turned out, this set up was awesome, we were averaging 9-10k an hour with Meesha pulling leeches almost nonstop and we kept it up for some time. When we finally called it, my SCH had gone from level 37 to level 42, Goal 8 accomplished and then some!
So for me this weekend was a win over all, I got my Kitty Pants and all of my subjobs are ready for the June update. I hope the good fortune continues and we have the folks for Omega tonight.
Friday
Friday began with me taking off early from work, my plan was to get some time in on WHM as it was halfway to 39, my hope was to get close to 40 before I had to head out for Sea and Limbus at 6:30PM. What ended up happening was I got within 1k of 40 at about 6:15PM and I decided to forgo Sea and finish getting WHM to 40 and adding a buffer. WHM is just slow going and one has to constantly watch HP and MP to effectively solo, even on EP mobs, there ends up being more downtime than other jobs as a result. Nevertheless, I managed to get WHM to 40 with a 1k buffer in about 30-35 minutes. Since I wasn't doing Sea and had some time before Limbus I decided to get the WHM AF Weapon Blessed Hammer, (this is something that my WHM will be using to melee with up to 49, though I can't equip it til 41). The quest was easy, but I got stuck waiting for nighttime to pop the NM, gotta love SE and their ability to add time wasters to everything we do. So Goal 1 for the weekend accomplished.
After I put the WHM away it was time for Limbus and I wasn't quite sure how our turnout would be since Hoodini's account got banned (I haven't heard anything from him since he told the shell), Monday was low and I had a feeling Friday would be too. My gut feeling was right, we had 15 people show up (down from 21) and I was forced to decide on a split run or a full run. Since we seemed to be lacking folks for the last two runs and both Rues and Liela would be gone this upcoming Friday I decided to go ahead and split with the hopes we could get both chips for Omega tonight.
With Hoodini down for the count, we decided to promote Rues and Liela to sackholder positions, in part because they seem to get a long with everyone, work well as a tandem, show up to almost every run and have got a ton of low-man experience in Limbus (for example, they can duo NW). Because of their expertise in NW I decided to let them take a team there for their first run as leads, and from all accounts they seemed to do a fine job and we got the win. I'm hopeful the two of them will be able to pick up the nuances of Limbus fairly quickly so I don't have to do all the work (Seif and Arnor are not always available to do runs).
With six people taking NW, my group was down to nine folks, and SE (weaknesses) was our target. Now typically I hate doing any Apollyon run with less than 10 people, sure it can be done, but I like to guarantee wins instead of hoping for everyone to be at the top of their game. We were right on the line of what I consider a guaranteed win and folks needing to bring their A Game. The first floor went well and I got the impression we were going to have an easy go at it (cue ominous music). The second floor ended up showing signs of trouble as our only sleeper (RDM) had to be told to sleep the links, I found this annoying, but it was not an issue that was slowing us down. The third floor is where the shit hit the fan, this is the floor with skeletons and this is where I discovered our RDM doesn't really like to multitask. What we needed from her was Dispel the skeletons as they came in, heal and provide paralynas for the tank party (which was just my NIN and Shilo as BLU). While she seemed to handle the first two ok, getting paralynas proved to be problematic and I had to ask the DDs WHM to cover the entire alliance with paralyna. On our last skeleton I got hit with Slow, and anyone who has tried to NIN tank with Slow can attest, it's not a good idea to cast shadows in this condition (in fact it turned out to be Slow II as Haste didn't override it). I asked to have it removed, waited a few and asked again, waited some more (at this point Tammyrose tried to Haste me to no effect). I asked again and nothing, so I finally started spamming for the RDM to Erase me, at which point she tried to Haste me and then ran away, I had to call her back and get her to Erase me THEN Haste me. All this fucking about knocked off 2-3 minutes from what was looking to be a down to the wire run. Once we were finally able to move forward we had about 10 minutes to kill Grave Digger (a Corse NM) and the Weapons on the 4th Floor. My team had to push it hard and a bad pull with the Weapons ended up getting Tammyrose killed and left us with the RDM as our only healer (which wouldn't have happened if the RDM had tried to Sleep the fucking links). So we had to finish the run with one healer and six mobs to go, which we did for the win. At the end of the day I really wish I had kept Shilo as RDM, he does a good job and knows what he has to do keep the run moving smoothly. You may be asking yourself why I even let the RDM come RDM, well therein lies the problem, I have to keep her on RDM because if I let her come NIN she goes all Leroy Jenkins on us and creates mass chaos (last time she started voking and pulling mobs, despite the fact she was neither the tank nor the puller).
At any rate, we have all four chips for Omega and will tackle him tonight, so Goal 2 for the weekend was accomplished.
Saturday
I got up early Saturday because I wanted some McDonalds for breakfast and I figured I could get some Trial of the Magians work accomplished while I waited on Einherjar to start. As such I had about an hour before Einherjar to kill birds. I thought I was in for some fun when I zoned and weather was up, I killed my first bird and during the second bird the weather went away and stayed away. I ended up talking shit in the shell the rest of the hour while waiting for nothing to happen. So technically Goal 3 was accomplished, but it was disappointing.
So up next was Einherjar and you could get a sense from the mood we might be in for a bit of trouble, can't quite put my finger on what it was, but something was off. As it turns out, I was right, as a team we were just a bit off and hate wasn't being handled well (a theme that would bite us in the ass later in the day), BUT, in the end Odin was defeated and we got a bunch of good drops. However, once again, I was shut out of the BLM gear, which bums me out, especially now that Kaeko is also targeting this gear (it's not the competition I have a problem with, it's feeling like an ass when I raise the bid knowing Kaeko can't go higher). I'm sure we'll both get it eventually, but it's fucking annoying seeing gear that we can get from Einherjar OR Sky drop all the time while the gear that only drops in Einherjar never seems to fall. Goal 4 of the weekend (for me) was fail.
After Einherjar we had about two hours before we started on VNMs, I spent this time waiting for more weather that never came. I don't care what anyone says about the other Trials, waiting for weather has to be about the most fucking boring thing possible in the game. I'm already tired of the Trials and I'm only on the second trial on the first of four expected paths. About a half hour prior to starting the VNMs I gave up and changed to BLM for the remainder of the day.
On the VNMs the goal, once again, was Krabkatoa. Now, I'll admit I wouldn't mind the MND ring, but I am getting tired of this particular path, I'd like to see the other VNMs at some point. At any rate, I digress, we had a Blue Abyssite from last weekend so our first target of the day was to be the crab. We pulled him to a fence area in East Ronfaure with the intent of two PLDs holding him while the BLMs nuked him down. What ended up happening was more hate chaos that made us all look like a bunch of fucking noobs. Qtipus may be willing to put it off as we don't typically worry about hate management in Obsidian so people are a bit rusty or misguided. I won't be so kind (especially when the BLMs take all kinds of shit for minor things), simply put, folks should be ashamed by the sheer lack of knowledge about their jobs that they are pulling hate where none should be necessary. Since hate was never established we basically ran Krabkatoa around the fence for 30% of its health, nuking when we could, eventually we all ended up wiping. To be honest this strategy might be doable, but there were too many people pulling hate, and even more just standing around in the kite paths doing nothing. It was an embarrassing display and I'm still annoyed by it two days later.
Not so willing to admit defeat, we decided to take another crack at Krabkatoa and this meant getting more Blue Abyssite, we eventually got two before heading back to E. Ron for Round 2. This time we went a different route and went with a strategy that called for two MNKs to tank him. Once again we failed miserably to get hate established and ended up with one long 30 minute fuckfest that led to another wipe. Despite all the chaos we did get him down to 35%, but damnit if people don't need to get their shit together and work as a team, especially when it comes to hate generating actions (Cure IV = bad, Thunder IV = bad, etc, etc, etc). After the second wipe we called it a day on the VNMs, next week we will try Krabkatoa…again.
After the VNMs we had about two hours to kill before Sky, not sure what other people did, but I just chilled out until it was time to head out. For Sky we had a ton of God pop items to burn through and when it was all said and done we killed three Byakkos, three Suzakus, two Seiryus, and two Genbus. The bullshit from Einherjar and VNMs seemed to have dissipated and we had a fairly solid event to cap Saturday off. From a personal standpoint I took in a big haul from Sky as I FINALLY got my hands on Byakko's Haidate (Goal 6) as well as Susaku's Sune-Ate (Goal 7) and Zenith Mitts (not a goal, but an opportunity). Once I got the pants all the frustration from Friday and early in the day went away, getting them means I can now sit back and enjoy Sky.
After Sky I had to test out my new threads, so I set my gear macros (using my database, naturally) and geared up for Campaign. I only went to two battles (it was pretty late), but I was pretty happy to see my Jins all landing for 500+ damage (a couple came close to 1k). And I got a Merit Point from being there, so that was nice.
Sunday
I only had two things on my plate for Sunday (well three, I had to make Mother's Day phonecalls also), one was Dynamis and the other was to start on SCH. Dynamis was in the Glacier and we had a smaller group than usual, but it turned out to be a pretty good run. Everyone was on their game, and we burned through all the timers we usually get with an hour to spare for farming.
With SCH, for the longest time I have treated SCH like a WHM-Lite, both jobs were sharing gear and no one invited me to parties to nuke things, so when it came to soloing I found that SCH was going to be the worst of the lot…by far. You see, SCH can't equip hammers and paddles don't do a lot of damage so using Clubs was out. Staffs aren't practical either as the delay is pretty high and for a job with paper defense, spending extended time in front of mobs is a bad idea. All SCH has left is Daggers, and with a D rating, I was looking at Sushi over Mithkabobs, which wasn't that ideal either. Thankfully Arnor saw just how foolish my thinking on this was and suggested I look at SCH like a BLM-Lite if I'm going to solo it. This was an outstanding idea and I feel stupid for not thinking of it myself, and thankfully I still had all the gear I was going to need since I used it all on BLM.
So off I went to Yhoator Jungle to pick on Tonberry Elementals, my goal for the day was to get at least to level 38 and if time permitted. level 39. My first pull ended up being a mess, I was a bit rustier than I expected to be, the Elemental killed me and I deleveled. Not to be deterred I got back up and shook off the cobwebs, getting my level back and making short work of the next Elemental. After that I spent 20 minutes running around trying to get in a good position to pull another one. I had one Tonberry guarding my safe fight zones and I was about to start fighting out in the open when I got a /tell from Meesha about doing a manaburn in the Sanctuary of Zi-Tah. It's been some time since I manaburned at the Zi'Tah OP, but I figured it had to be better than trying to get the Tonberries to cooperate so I quickly accepted.
When I got there I was surprised to see my party consisted of a WAR (Meesha), a RDM, a BLM, and my SCH. We had two more SCH on the way and we were going to sync to level 27. This was a rather large departure from my days of BLM soloing/duoing/trioing here, back in my time (this was before Moses parted the Red Sea) you had to be nuts to try this camp below 30 and everyone was a BLM. As it turned out, this set up was awesome, we were averaging 9-10k an hour with Meesha pulling leeches almost nonstop and we kept it up for some time. When we finally called it, my SCH had gone from level 37 to level 42, Goal 8 accomplished and then some!
So for me this weekend was a win over all, I got my Kitty Pants and all of my subjobs are ready for the June update. I hope the good fortune continues and we have the folks for Omega tonight.
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