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...

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.

Leveling Subjobs

So for the last few weeks I've been gather gear so I could level my subjobs.  This meant spending gil, camping NMs, working logistics, identifying gear, and basically getting up the nerve to actually level the jobs.  As one of those packrat type players, I have four mules just for gear alone, one holds my Ninja gear (though not much, he mostly holds Ninjutsu crafting materials), one holds mage gear, one holds melee gear under level 25 and one hold melee gear over 25.  Between all those mules I had good gear for each of my subjobs, so the first thing I needed to do was identify what gear I did have and what gear I would need to upgrade on the way to 49.  Once I had the gear identified I had to decide if I was willing to spend the gil, camp the NMs or do the quests to get it.  What this ultimately meant was, for example, was I willing to purchase/camp Bravo's Subligar for my Thief (no), or would I be willing to do the quests to obtain a Promise Badge for my mages (yes).  After I vetted my top choices, I had to backtrack a bit and decide what gear I was going to get instead.

The next stage was to start purchasing the gear (and spells) as well as track down the R/E items I planned to get.  Took me about two weeks camping the AHs to track down all the purchasable gear I wanted.  During this time I camped a number of NMs (like Qull the Shellbuster and Nue) and picked up quite a few things, but there were a couple snags, Jujitsu Gi, Brown Belt and Gothic Sabatons.  Camping the Jujitsu Gi reminded me of why I didn't have it to begin with, there's always someone there and the drop-rate is crappy, at the same time the price was dropping on the AH and I ended up buying it for around 100k.  Camping the Brown Belt was a slightly different issue, I had Dodo Skin from way back in the day, so I only needed to kill the tiger and marlboro.  Nue was easy, no one was ever there, but I went 0/15 on the damn drop and became despondent, I checked in on Morbolger a few times, but he was never up.  In addition, the prices on the Brown Belt started plummeting on the AH (it was 380k when I started all this), eventually I said to hell with the camping and bought it for a measly 200k.  The Gothic Sabatons have been absurdly tough to get, they are a brown casket drop in Behemoth's Dominion and at one point I saw 2 brown caskets and 50 blue ones, the percentage odds have not favored me.  At this point I just plan to wait for the Kupower Mystery Boxes: Frontier Lands because trying to camp it as is has pushed me to the edge and I consider this piece necessary for WAR and DRK.  Aside from the Gothic Sabatons there is one piece of gear left to get and that's a Voyager Sallet.  I haven't went after this item because I'm waiting for the level cap to be removed for the CoP zones, so this is something that will have to wait til June.

The final step in all of this was taking inventory of my gear and determining what to move, when I was going to be done with it, and what to sell.  This was easy, but it took some time to coordinate everything between nine subjobs and four mules (this also includes R/E stuff I have in storage).  What I have in place now is a level by level gear guide for each of my nine subjobs and all the gear and spells I'll need to go with them and when I need to change my gear (and sell the gear in some instances).

I plan to level my subjobs solo as I'd rather do something than wait on a party, but all of them I leveled over the weekend were invited to level sync, so it seems like solo will be more of a personal choice depending on the job (everything is skilled so I don't lose much from syncing anyway).  My plan is to get everything to 40 first and then 45 if I have time, getting to level 49 will probably come later in the year.

My tally as of today:

WAR 52 - WAR was my first job, I gave up shortly after reaching level 50 to become a full-time Ninja, all I did here was modernize the gear.
MNK 40 - This isn't much of a subjob for NIN, but it's something I've kept up with in the event I want to break it out.
RNG 40 - This isn't so much of a subjob as it is my next job to 75+
SAM 40 - Like MNK, this gets used every so often, the last time I subbed it was for ZNMs.
DRK 39 - I started on this last night, Horror Voulge, Bloody Bolts and Drain have made this a formidable job to solo on.
WHM 38 - When I solod WHM to 37, it was surprisingly easy, I'm hoping for more of the same.
RDM 37 - IMO, RDM is going to be the subjob of choice for NIN tanking once we hit 99, NIN/RDM looks more exciting than ever!
SCH 37 - This will be the worst job to solo, I'm going to have to pray for party invites because it's going to take a long time by myself.
THF 37 - I plan to do this after I get DRK to 40, but damnit if I would rather leave it be.

There are two other subs that I have thought about in passing, but I doubt I ever bother to level, those would be BLU and DNC.  BLU looks like it will have a number of the spells that will make RDM so useful, so it's something to be mindful of.  DNC is probably the ultimate solo subjob, but that doesn't mean I have to level it (prancing around and doing pirouettes is NOT something I want to see Drakus doing).

Don't Stop Til You Get Enough

So yeah, once I completed the Gear Macros for my database I got another bug up my ass and decided to add a Craft Calculator to it.  I've had a calculator I created in Excel for some time now, but I've always felt it was a bit limited and now seemed like a good time to flesh out all my ideas and place the whole thing in Access.

Now, making a crafting calculator isn't the most straightforward thing if you want to do it right as there are a number of factors to consider.  The first of these factors is breaks, SE put a maximum success rate of 95% on everything, but when you are under the craft's synth level, the percentages drop to as low as 50% (anything 11 levels and under can't be crafted at all).  Now the standard calculators don't take into account just how far below the synth level you are, they just factor in 50% and leave it at that.  However, the closer you get to the synth level, the less chance of breaks so the first stage of my calculations and to take this progression into account.  The next factor is HQ Rate, once again this takes into account your levels, but unlike break rates the HQ rates are tiered and much easier to factor in.  The difference I had to look at was the percentage each stage of the craft yield could HQ, and this is where the calculations turn into a mile long statement.  After all of that was processed, I had to create a way that would display single yield items (like armor and weapons) and stack items (food and ammo) in the same form without making the form appear too busy.

When it was all said and done, I decided to add some flair.  The first thing was being able to search for a craft, this is useful because the database holds all of the data input (by design) and without being able to search against it, one could lose track of their calculations very quickly.  I also added a NQ/HQ compass and NQ/HQ days that change based on the crystal used in the synth.  Getting the look of the HQ/NQ parts actually took much longer than writing the code and formulas.  At any rate, the two below images are just a couple of examples.