Mage of All Trades

…and I take a LOT of screenshots.  HOLY COW.  I’ve been meaning to edit Screenshot Organizer to save my screenshots as Name/Date/Zone rather than Name/Zone/Date for ages and finally got around to it the other day.  That said, all of the screenshots below (save two, which were taken within the last week) are from yesterday.  And no…this is not ALL of the screenshots.  This is maybe half of them or so.  Never realized quite how many I take on a daily basis!

Dynamis has been going well.

Last Thursday was a San d’Oria run, which netted us FOUR M. Silverpieces.  Wiggin’s been telling us for quite some time about a new strategy that he and his linkshell have been using, and we finally got around to trying it out.  Success? I think so.  I think all city runs will see us with a THF in every party tagging every statue before the BLMs kill them.

Words like racecar are spelt the same forwards and backwards! Insert linkshell conversation about this. Also notice Kilty? Read his name backwards [;

Sunday saw us in Dynamis – Xarcabard.  It was kind of nice; being Memorial Day weekend, a lot of linkshells took the night off.  Gotta love snow with no competition :]  Sunday’s also when my Valor Surcoat dropped, making me 5/5 on Valor gear — huspag, 4 inventory spots back now that I can store it!  Crazily enough, that was the last piece of Xarcabard relic that I needed.  I don’t need anything from cities or Beauedine that I can use presently either.  Oh well!  There’s always incentive and the occasional dreamworld :]

Sunday also saw our second pair of TH4 hands to drop, which went to our resident puller.  As you can see…he’s quite happy about this!  Also, I can’t believe it, but I actually apologized for doing Xarcabard two runs in a row.  By some stroke of luck, last night had only San d’Oria and Xarcabard open…both of the runs we had done in the last week.  I felt bad for the new folks who couldn’t attend…but the officers decided as a whole that we’d rather do two Xarcabards than two San d’Orias so close together since there’s typically more competition for snow rather than cities.

Random dynamis conversations are random. Also, people need to stop watching "I'm on a Boat"!

I’m not quite sure why, but I’ve been lurking on BG’s forums more lately.  I recently discovered a thread with …interesting player names.  While gearing up for dynamis, I happened to stumble upon one and had to screenshot it~

As far as salvage goes, we’ve been steadily moving along.  Last post I mentioned that I got Macha’s Crown, putting me 3/3 on the Morrigan head piece.  I’ve yet to upgrade it (darn RR!), but since then I received a pair of Bodb’s Cuffs…making me 3/3 on Morrigan’s Cuffs! Those I quite happily upgraded this week!

This puts me at 3/5 on Morrigan’s gear, and once I upgrade the crown I’ll be 4/5!!  Just need silly Macha’s and Bodb’s Pigaches and I’ll be all done with Morrigan’s gear!  I’ve seriously got like 8 SSR Cards in my satchel too…time to spam some Zhayolm farm!  We’ve actually been focusing quite a bit on Arrapago farm/boss runs lately, but haven’t seen any Bodb’s Pigaches :<  Omni’s the last of our regular members who needs to upgrade a primary/secondary item, and since he’s got the 35 Marduk crown we’re attempting to get him the corresponding 25 from Arrapago.  Des has also come back to us and is wanting Skadi feet so it works quite well for most of us.

Yesterday also saw me dusting off my bard for not one but two merit parties.  I’m now sitting at 3/5 on Mineut merits for my bard — I figured my bard was long overdue for merits.  Even if I never use it.  As you can see, things are never dull with Des around!  He’s been really good about coming red mage to both salvage and dynamis for us, which has eaten through his buffer pretty quick, so Star dusted off his bard as well and we merited with Des for about an hour before salvage.  I don’t think a day has gone by with Des back that there hasn’t been SOME DBZ reference or another in linkshell!

Like I said…never dull with Des around!  He loves to spam people for invites etc so I figured I’d give him a dose of his own medicine :]  After all, he accused me of doing it before I did it!!  Anyways…like I said.  I take a lot of screenshots apparently!  One other thing to mention that’s not going to be SS’d in this post…Nerdie got 75!  He’s sitting quite contently at a 56 exp buffer, if I recall correctly.  I should probably do something about that at some point…  Until next month~

Lately…I’ve just not been feeling like playing nearly as much.  I still enjoy the game, but ugh.  Between early(ish) classes and late(ish) events, my sleeping schedule is WAY out of wack.  We’ve recently tried upping Salvage to 4 nights/week, and I don’t really think it’s helping, that’s for sure!  Right now, my schedule looks like this:

Monday: Limbus 7:30-9:30, Salvage 10-12
Tuesday: Salvage 10-12
Wednesday: Salvage 10-12
Thursday: Dynamis 8-12
Friday: Limbus 7-9, Einherjar 9:30-10
Saturday: Salvage 10-12
Sunday: Dynamis 8-12

I always said I didn’t want to do events every day of the week, that I wanted at 2-3 days to relax and do other things…and that clearly isn’t the case anymore!  On the one hand, I LOVE doing salvage; really, I enjoy all of those events.  I miss doing sky, I wish I could do sea.  Right now though, with working 2-3 days a week, I honestly just want to sleep in the afternoons to make up for sleep I didn’t get at night due to events or homework!  Which…leaves me no free time in game.  Most nights, if I’m not doing an aforementioned event, or something like assaults or ISNM or meriting to keep up with the events…I’m not online.  I sit in my mog house and stare at my moogle!

I’m almost tempted to say I’ll push through this stupidly busy schedule until I get a few Salvage pieces, but I know that won’t work.  I do Salvage with friends, and it would be 100% awful to get my stuff then get out.  But…I don’t really want to quit anything else, either.  Oh well, I’m sure I’ll figure something out!

So: little updates on the above listed items~

Salvage: Well, I touched on this last weekend!  We’ve had some pretty good luck this week though, that’s for sure!  A week ago today we did our very first SSR, and Monday was our second — from which I netted a pair of Macha’s Slops!  Tuesday was a failed Bhaf. boss run :< from which I still need my 25 Morrigan’s body, and Wednesday was a 35-less Arrapago farm.  Tonight, though, we tried our very first Zhaylom! There’s still tons of room for improvement, lotting was a bit sloppy.  Our biggest mistake was that we didn’t get our THF an ability cell, so we were kind of hurting on the 5th floor.  We didn’t even get to the 6th, which is were our wanted items were :(  We killed the 5th floor froggie with a good chunk of issue due to TONS of charm, a mistargeted DoT, DoTs wearing, Star being weakened at the start…basically a whole slough of things. HOWEVER!: we did get a 35 for our troubles!  We killed the NM with 3 people alive and less than 5 minutes remaining, but we DID get the Marduk’s 35 body piece :)  Star was going to pass it to me, but I’m glad he ended up getting it.  We’ve gotten…7 35s total now?  Marduk/Morrigan Body, Skadi Feet, Usukane pants x2, Morrigan pants, Morrigan Cuffs.  Right, 7.

Two went to me, my #1 and my #2, so I’ve been really lucky with that.  Star’s actually gotten two too now — Marduk body (which was completely open), and Morrigan hands (which was one of his interest pieces).  Overall I’ve been pretty happy with Salvage, we’ve had some pretty big bumps but nothing we couldn’t handle.  7 35s in 9 weeks isn’t too shabby!  Of course, we’ve only finished 2 pieces, but we’re working on it :)  I think only 2-3 of us have our #1 35s, so we’re making sure to focus on the 35 farm runs as well as boss runs yet.

Dynamis/Limbus: Nothing TOO interesting.  Completed another Ultima pop set last night, so we’ll hopefully be doing that a week from Monday!  Friday was the kings route of Apollyon for the BLM SWAT party I was in, and I had a blast — that’s my very favorite limbus zone.  Dyna, we won Sandy last Sunday, and farmed Bastok Thursday.  We were short members so had someone swap to PLD for the first time, and on a pull they accidently pulled the wrong NM, not realizing there was 2.  Not a huge deal, we’ll be back to Bastok sooner or later.  Making some nice currency compared to our all snow month last month, I can say that much!

Assaults: I’m now either 16 or 17 away from Captain, and really excited :) Star and I haven’t been as good about doing assaults as we should be, but hopefully it won’t be too long until we’ve both got captain rank and can focus on getting some of the Yigit pieces we want!  Yes, I realize I’m crazy…working on Yigit and doing Salvage as often as I am .___.  I’m thinking I’ll swap to doing RvB 4x a week once I get captain, and trying to do 3 runs a week to get points for Yigit stuff.  Not sure if that’ll work though since I typically have to help leech people in our Salvage group points. Oh well!

Merits: I haven’t been doing a TON of this, but a decent amount.  My White Mage is getting pretty close to capping out, I think I’m at 15/20 job specific merits now!  @2/5 Regen potency and @3/5 Cure cast time I think.  I debated on going for Barspell, but I don’t really do anything that NEEDS it.  I’ve got Shellra V fully merited, and have relic pants and Blessed body, so that should be pretty good for most things I do, I’d think!

Einherjar: I gave Star crap for not putting BRD on his application (he didn’t want to go BRD, which was fair enough I guess), but UGH, it’s 3 weeks in and I’ve been BRD every stinking time.  I mean, I know that’s only 3 times, but I really do believe I’ll ONLY be BRD :<  I’ve been spoiled, I get to bounce jobs pretty much everywhere else, and BRD is not my favorite job.  I enjoy it, but it really erks me in einherjar.  I keep telling myself it’s so much easier to recap BRD buffer though than it would be anything else.

Anyways! That’s about all I’ve been up to lately…maybe I’ll level another job or get a live outside of events at some point, but it sure doesn’t seem to be anytime soon!

Quotes of the Day:  First one is of Ty and I talking during dynamis, about the AB/SMN thing.  He started to tell me this really amusing little blurb, and I DC’d in the middle…so he kindly repeated it for me so I could SS it!

I don’t remember the exact context of this, but it amuses me.  I think it had something to do with us getting incentive, and that we needed to use that gil for RR?  That and this month the incentive would be much nicer than last month!

Yes, that is 11+ Statues in the background. And yes, this is Dyna - Valk!

The past few days have been quite busy, in a very (for the most part) productive way!  I’ll try to go in order:

Wednesday — saw us doing Dynamis – Valkrum, our second attempt ever.  The last one was a LONG time ago, and went so bad that we never tried since.  Wednesday, though, it went quite well!  We only killed 1 NM to weaken the Mega Boss…but had no problems with her, oddly enough!  We had four RDM/DRK ready to go–I was second, and she died less than halfway into my CS.  Of course, we then got slaughtered by the mini-malboros, but we got the win! 8D  Star got a THF cape, and Ecly got a SAM belt, so I was pretty happy for them!

I had my fingers crossed that a D. Chapeau -1 would drop, but it’s probably for the best that it didn’t.  Because of how infrequently we do dreamworlds, we don’t have good rules regarding them — I’m second in line for dreamworld RDM gear, but the girl ahead of me doesn’t have NQ D. Chapeau.  I probably wouldn’t have been too happy if it dropped and she got it :< Sweet as she is, it woulda spent MONTHS in storage before she got the NQ, with how often we do Xarc, and that would have been very dissapointing.

Friday — We did Temenos for Limbus, and it finally dropped a SCH AF+1 mat for me!  After a bit of debating, I decided to upgrade my Scholar’s Gown.  Unfortunately, this means I need to request it so I can restore the set.  This is my first time requesting AF, so it took me way too long to figure out how to reset the AF memory and that not only do I need to request my gown, but also the lvl 52 hands, and the lvl 46 spell.  Wee.  I’m now in the middle of requesting the hands (though I’ll have to drop my current hands to get it…), and then I’ll finally be able to request the gown to restore the set.

Goofing around with Star <3

After Limbus was Sea — we did a Jailer of Hope which went REALLY well.  We’ve tried both of the other Tier II Jailers and have had issues with them, but Hope was easy-peasy.  Then…we looked for Ix’DRK.  I really hate Ix’DRK.  We started at about 12:30 AM, and the plan was to spend “45min-1h” looking for him before calling it a night.  Of course, he pops right at the 1h mark.  Someone got the message in their chat log just as the ??? moved rooms, so we frantically looked for it.  We got him popped, but hadn’t cleared any of the Aerns in the room, so right away we had 6 angry Aerns on us, including Ix.  We got him pulled to the balcony room, and attracked 2 pots and a ghrah or two on the way.

The next 20 min was spent trying to seperate Ix from his friends…3 deaths later, we finally managed to do that.  19~20 reraises and 2 hours after THAT, Ix FINALLY stayed dead.  By this point it’s 4-5AM for everyone, and not only do none of us ever wanna fight Ix’DRK again, the BLUs never wanna /thf again or cannonball anything.  Me?  I just never want to go BRD to sea again :<  No cape of course, but at least we got a deed~~

Saturday — was just an uneventful Nyzul, we were 0/4 on drops :<

Sunday — Ecly, Star, and I tried trioing the Hagun ENM for the second time.  We killed it, and were quite pleased with that — last time we timed out :<  No Hagun, but I was just happy we beat it ^___^;; Maybe next time for the hagun!  We also actually did a snow dyna on Sunday!  Other than my computer being stupid (the chat log is only a few lines, so I often have to pull up the whole log and scroll up when things fly by too fast — my computer has been deleting the chat log lately :<), the run went well enough…we got the win, but got horrible drops.  For all that we only got 5 relic though, I got my BLM coat, and Ecly got his BLU body, so that was pretty nice ^^

Monday — was amazing.  We tried Ultima for the second time since I joined the linkshell (5th time since the ls started, I think?) and WON!  I was about dancing around my room I was so excited.  It would have been too much to expect Nashira pants, but I was hoping they’d drop so that Q and/or Raven could get because a) they’ve both put in a lot of work and haven’t gotten all that much from the ls and b) so that once they get theirs, I can move up in line for mine!  Of course, Ultima wasn’t feeling generous, but I’m just super excited we beat it!

It was pretty funny — we got it down to ~22% and I /tell Omni “and now for the moment of truth.”  Which, by the way, poor Omni — trial by Proto-Ultima! What a nice welcome to limbus!  All hell broke loose once we got Ultima below 20%, but we won!  We had 3 SAM who 2h’d one after another, and a DRK who 2h’d closer to 10%.  Pretty quick way to get Ultima from 20% to dead!  Our PLD had better gear this time around too, and it was a HUGE improvement.  One died earlier in the fight, but neither died to CB.  I think CB only went off 2-3x, and both PLD were left with 300 HP or so.  Anyways, like I said, VERY happy that we managed to take Ultima down.  We got a Turban and a pair of Crackows, and I got the Turban 8D!

Tuesday — today!  I’ve got sea tonight, but I logged in this morning to have a friend poke me about doing Salvage.  He’s trying to get a group going regularly, and while Star and I won’t be able to go frequently due to the times they go at (mid morning for Star and I — we’ve got class and school!), we did get to tag along today.   I’ve always loved Salvage, and have always wanted to do it regularly, so it was nice to do it today — though I’m sure Star wasn’t too happy with me fussing about wanting to do it more after we finished!  Right before timing out I managed to snag an Anu’s Tiara, which I was pretty pleased with!  Now I’ve got Marduk’s head (15) + hands (15) as well as Morrigan’s pants (15) + feet (15).  Nothing super impressive, but hopefully it’ll help once I do Salvage regularly!

Oy!  I think maybe I should update more often, so that my posts don’t get quite this long ^^;;  Oops!  Anywho, back to requesting my SCH af again — yay for reclaiming my inventory space!  Here’s a SS of all of my recent shinies:

Friday’s limbus run was fun! Quendi asked who wanted to do which zones, to which I replied: Temenos East or West, wee! bard mats! Half joking, of course…it was only my 4th run with the LS and I know people who’ve been there longer have more place to pick zones than myself. Quendi later said asked for people to vote between one of the Temenos I suggested, and an Apollyon run. And we ended up doing a zone that dropped the bard piece that I needed! I had the Brown Doeskin item for well over half a year, so I’ve been wanting to get the other piece like crazy since I actually started doing limbus…and now I did! From this ls I’ve gotten 4 AF+1 mats in my first four runs, one for each of my 75 jobs…not too shabby!

It was a toss-up between hands or legs, but I ended up going with legs–hands are next! I broke down and bought 5 ABCs to upgrade them though, lol–I only had 20 and didn’t want to wait until next week for my pants. Yay! for being impatient!

Saturday night saw me doing Jungle Boogymen with a handful of people from the ls–Star (blm), Rice (nin), Darkcrystal (drk), Kieran (cor), Galka (rng), and myself (whm) went. I went third, and my run went horribly wrong–the one orb we lost on was mine :( Kieran and Star didn’t have orbs, so we just did the four runs. Rice made the least, and he got 300k. Galka got the most w/ 650k or so. And then there was me, who got nothing ;-; lol. Am still slightly bitter about that, but oh well, thus is life.

Dyna tonight–am hoping for Jeuno, Windy, or Beau. And not just because those are the 3 places I need gear from!! Well, Beau is simply because I want my Duelist’s Tabard–5/5, {Yes, Please!} I need whm shoes from Windy, and whm pants from Jeuno…but Vidrie also needs Jeuno/Windurst wins for dyna for Beau. access, so I’m really-really hoping we do one of those two. But I’d be happy with Beau. too!! :D

As far as bonecrafting’s concerned, I’m LOVING not having to do ram horn synths anymore!! I officially switched to Scorpion Arrowheads at 45 or so :D I’ve been hanging out a lot in Crawler’s Nest and farming the scorpions there, which seems to work fairly well. They always drop 2 claws and 1 shell. My only problem now is holding onto all the shells I’ve gotten! Scorpion Arrowheads caps at 53 (so I’ve still got a few levels to go) and use 1 S. Claw + 1 Bone Chip + 1 Wind Crystal. My next synth will be Scorpion Rings, which are 1 Wind Crystal + 1 S. Shell…so I really don’t wanna toss the shells when I need them for my next synth. So far I’m at 60 or so, and am running out of room! All things considering though, scorpion synths are SOOO much better than ram horn synths!

A rather text heavy entry (sorry!), so here’s a fun quote to start the entry!

Well, I got my bard to 75 at the end of August, and I was so sure I was going to be good about meriting for once after I dinged. And then I got sucked into the black hole that is known as black mage, and that didn’t happen. However, as it became a necessity rather than a want, I merited on bard for a bit today :D I got down to less than 20k into my level and panicked a bit, so threw up my flag and am a nice 33k+ into my level now ^^

I really haven’t merited much on my bard–I think I’ve had maybe ONE actual merit party, everything else has been to cap my exp. Needless to say, I’m not the most experienced bard you could find for a merit party, and I’m a bit rusty on top of that :x It was so much fun though!

It was my first BRD+COR party that I was in as a bard. I’ve done it once or twice before as red mage and loved it, but I’ve been dreading it on bard–it’s so much extra work! Bard typically either does 2 songs and pulls, or does 4 songs. With a cor, bards get to do 4 songs AND pull. I’m used to just doing my 4 songs and helping heal, so it was a bit of a struggle to keep up. The cor was amazing though, and helped me with pulling. We kind of went back and forth, when his Light Shot was up he’d nab a mob and I’d sing my songs when there was 2+ mobs at camp. It was really nice–we friended each other and both said we’d look the other up if we wanted them to party with (:

Other than that, am doing campaign again on black mage. I’m hoping to get to Wings so I can buy Cobra gear for my black mage–particularly Cobra Unit Crackows. We’ll see how this goes! I’m currently just Bronze Ribbon for rank, so I’ve got a good 11 rank ups to go, so 2 months or so *if* I’m on top of things. Like I said, we’ll see how it goes :D It’s either that or Yigit Crackows, either would do nicely for Black Mage, and even for Red Mage. And unfortunately, both will take a bit of time to get!

ETA: Got a second merit party today, wahoo! Well, I started it, and did it with a few friends (/wave Staren, Enuj, Eclypse). I ended up capping my exp, and getting an extra 10k or so. I now have 5 shiny merits and will be spending them on 10 mp (gogo 7/8 after this!) once I get to my mog house ^^ AND, Star sent me a few items for a Black Cloak synth, and I caught Vinofvin online and he used his brother’s account (Rice) to make me a signed Black Cloak after I picked up the last few pieces! Good afternoon, if I do say so myself (:

…every bard’s favorite task in dynamis. Oy. I thought I had it bad playing with the black mages–or BLAMS as our linkshell affectionately calls them. But see, they all get ballad! There are five of them, and they can only really go so far!

Tonight, I get to play with the main assist party.

Oy.

I thought it’d be fun. I do sky as well as dyna with most of the BLMs, and they’re all nice, I enjoy being in that party. But! I’m just a temporary bard–their main bard hasn’t been on recently due to RL things, so when Staren suggested I join the main assist party, I was pretty excited. I like everyone in the main assist party–it was going to be myself, Staren, Sloss (nice guy, used to run the entire LS pratically, and I get to meet him next Friday when I fly down to see Staren this week!), Leahcim, and two more friends. So, fun people, hooray! And a party that I wouldn’t get kicked out of once Kenny comes back. W/W, yes?

No.

The main assist person…he runs around. A lot. Imagine how much 5 BLMs run around, and trying to hit them all with ballad. This is worse, much worse. AND, on top of that…there’s the White Mage. So here’s me, chasing down the NIN to try and March him, and we’re killing stuff so fast that he’s well out of range by the time I’m finished casting my first march off attacking another mob. And then, there I am, trying to ballad our WHM who has no MP and the melee decide to fight a mob right next to him.

Words cannot describe…everyone gets ballad! Everyone gets march!

F-R-U-S-T-R-A-T-I-N-G

Though, apparently our second assist is shaving off his beard tonight. Shouldn’t go making statements like “RDM HAT ON THE NEXT MOB OR I SHAVE MY BEARD” in Xarc…Xarc isn’t very nice with Dualist’s Chapeaus :(

Currently this guide is set up as a mixture between a shopping list and a wish list for myself, and was actually written when my Bard was mid-60′s. It’s in need of a few tweaks, but is still quite accurate (: I will hopefully be going over it soon to fine tune it and make slight adjustments in format. If there is any gear that is not on this guide that you feel is really rather good for Bards, please comment with your suggestion and I’ll look into it!

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