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.

• 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.

The rest of the set a NIN would have to be daft to even consider, there's simply no value add for NIN, even though it has some very nice stats. I think when the time comes and my RNG is at a point it can equip this gear I won't be so quick to dismiss 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.

Overall this set looks great, and should be good until the next update, lol!  Ultimately this will mean a lot of time spent in Abyssea, but it's worth it as it has a lot to offer.

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...

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...