Mage of All Trades

With the spliting/breaking of Consumed, I’ve spent a lot of the last week doing salvage runs.  We got 500k for our first glass from the Consumed bank, which is stupid since the whole linkshell was supposed to go to Staren when Rev and Arrey stepped down…but it ended up being a “oh, we’re breaking the shell and keeping the gil.”  Oh well, it is what it is.

Star and I met these really nice guys doing a salvage pick up run — one of our very first dynamis officers came with for the run and he’s super nice, so it was fun to see him again.  Since then we’ve done 3-4 salvage runs with these two, and it’s gone really well.  We’re still doing our 4-a-week static with friends, but that gives us 3 extra tags a week…and we’ve been using them.  Last night was a double boss run — we did Zhayolm and got to like 6% before wiping :<  We had an all but useless white mage and monk though, and it kind of took it’s tole.  We did fairly well until the last 10% when we got 3 discords in the span of a minute, I kid you not.  I’m told the boss is typically zerged for the last 10%, but we were recovering from an earlier mishap where our two good monks died, and we just weren’t able to get on top of things by the 10% mark between the crummy WHM and 3rd MNK.

Right after that was our static’s run, and since we were missing a few people (Saturday is so hit or miss for us, like 5 people are maybes on Saturday and I don’t think any were there last night), so our friends from this pick up group tagged along ^^ Hopefully we’ll be able to do another run with them tonight since we don’t have dynamis — we decided after the break, and the other group stole some of our memebers (and by that, I mean Star should have gotten everyone who wanted to do dynamis, and these people basically said come join us and didn’t mention Star was still a leader…), that we’d take a 1.5-2 week break to recruit some new members and whatnot.

Hmm, what else have I been up to…

Einherjar: It’s been canceled for the last few weeks due to Aion’s release.  The linkshell I go with apparently has a LOT of people missing due to the new MMO o:

Limbus: We did an Omega and an Ultima within the last two weeks, and managed to get a few nice pieces: Shoes/Body/Hands off Omega, and Hat/Hands off Ultima.  I’m first in line for Nashira Seraweels now, and really looking forward to getting them :)

SMN: The other day, Q and I ended up going to duo Imps on our Summoners, and it was really fun :D Not anything else about it to really make note of, other than I rarely ever use my summoner and it really is a fun job, so it was nice to be able to dust my gear off and play with it for a bit :)

Sea/Ix’Aerns: Probably a week and a half ago or so, Star and I and a few friends popped Ix’MNK and got the kill — only a deed dropped, unfortunately, but hey it was 40k or so for each of us.  Yesterday, I got on and found Star and Q in sea, camping Ix’DRK, so I ended up joining them.  Iwas on WHM, and thought they had said Ix’DRG so I swapped to BLM and then had to change to RDM ~_~ Lots of changing!  It was fun though, we killed probably 4-5 rooms and just as I was going to log for a nap, Q got the message in his chat log so we popped the NM and off we went.  It was actually a really fun fight — out of all the Ix’s it may be my favorite, sans the bagillion reraises (I think we had 7-8, which isn’t horrid; first time Idid it we had around 20).  Star pulled the Aerns out of the room to the zone and got all the ghrahs, and then I grav/bound the two Qo’Aerns and ran them to the zone while Q ran to the balcony room.  He ended up dying :< so on my way back I grabbed Ix’DRK and kited him by myself for a good 10-15 min while I waited for Star to unweaken and Q to hp and run back.  Pretty easy with D. Chapeau and W. legs!  Only a deed off him too, but oh well!

Anyways! More later I’m sure~ Until next time! :)

Oy.  Talk about an overdue entry!

Dynamis_____________________________

September has become anti-city month in Consumed…which is fine by me.  We’ve done a few Xarcs, a few Beaus, and I think one Qufim?  Nothing super exciting, lots of drama as usual, but that’s what Consumed is!  Kinda burnt out on the drama, certainly not enjoying it.  I don’t really feel like venting though, I’ve done a lot of that to various people recently…so I’ll let the cat hold my tongue ;) This month I did manage to net both an Argute M.board as well as a Summoner’s Horn — off the same Xarc, no less!  It was a pretty good night, other than I died a lot :<  Both went open lot though, and I was lucky enough to win both of them.  That puts me at 3/6~7 of the relic pieces I need out of Xarc!  Black Mage is actually what’s on my list, and after I got my second hat I made a comment about “watch, NOW my hat will drop”…and sure enough, it did.  It went to Star though, so I’m not too bummed out.  I would though love to get it before the month ends so I can put WHM as my Xarc list for next month.

Other than Xarc, I need several dreamworld pieces–SCH acc is the only one I have.  I’m not too concerned about them; we don’t do dreamworlds enough.  City/Beau-wise, I need SMN body and hands, BLM gloves, and PLD shoes…so I really don’t have a heck of a lot left.  My wish list is slowly dwindling down, which is amazing.  7~8 pieces of non-dreamworld dyna gear and I’m done with what I need…until I level  new job ;)  Very happy with how things have been going lately, drop wise at least.

Limbus______________________________

Sea Monkies has seen a lot of change over the last few weeks, and most of it has me really excited.  When I first started we had probably 12-15 regular members, which worked fairly well.  We did 2 runs a week, and whenever we did Proto-Omega we had a few old members come to help out — people who didn’t need coins or AF+1 mats and so didn’t show up regularly.  Proto-Ultima was only a dream really, which was really dissapointing.  We tried it with our rag-tag bunch and timed out at like 10% or so, possibly less, and at least 2-3 deaths per person.  Our RDM actually lost between 15-20k exp that fight.

Fast forward to this last month.  Star suggested Sea Monkies to a few people in our dynamis linkshell, who in turn suggested it to others in the shell…in the last 30 days, we’ve had SEVEN people from my dyna shell join my limbus shell.  On top of that, we’ve had several people from other misc. places join as well.  Now every night we have at least 18 people, and unless it’s a boss run we’re doing split runs.  I’d imagine if we get a few more people, say 3-4, we’ll be doing split runs even on boss nights.  It’s amazing to see the shell like this, and really fun to be apart of.  Lately I’ve been doing a lot more leader-type stuff too; Raven leads the larger group, and I take a small group to do a low-man run.  It’s a blast!  Typically I steal Q or another officer so I’m not doing it all alone, but I get to work with Raven to see who gets how many members/what jobs etc…, and get to do things my own way :D

With Ultima taking 6 runs, and Omega taking 4 to get pop sets for, we’re not able to get an Omega pop in a week and an Ultima pop in a week and a half — plus, we’ve got a lot of partial sets.  We’re doing a boss every other week now, somtimes every week.  Just a few days ago, my honey got his Homam body (we also got two pairs of gloves that night).  A week or two before, we netted our first pair of Nashira Seraweels, by far our most wanted piece.  Now there’s only one person ahead of me in line for those, which is really exciting–potentially I could get them off the next run if double legs drop — a girl can dream :)

Salvage/Nyzul_______________________

…has been dramatastic lately, unfortunately.  Nyzul has offically come to an end, and we’re doing a third weekly salvage run on Saturdays now in place of Nyzul.  This leaves Star and I with 7 tags a week to work on getting Captain, and we’ve been taking full advancage of that.  I actually just finished up the FL quest today, and got to watch the graduation ceremony :)  Unfortunately I’m still only 26/51 or so to getting captain, but it’ll be nice to have a break from doing rank up quests.  I’m really enjoying assaults, and the different rank up quests were quite fun.  I’m hoping by the time we’re done I’ll have enough points to get both Yigit Gages and Crackows, but we’ll see.  I think I may have been spending my points in Lebros though, where Crackows come from, because I’ve done over half the assaults and have less than 5k points :(

For Salvage, I’m super excited to say we’ve gotten 3 35s in approx 5-6 weeks.  Two of them were secondary pieces (though for one of them the guy who wanted them was missing, so they went to someone else instead, though they were still wanted), and just the other night we got our first primary 35 piece!  We’ve gotten 35 Morri hands, 35 Skadi shoes, and 35 Usukane pants…not half bad!  Last night we were hoping to do Bhaf. fl4 rampart for 35 Skadi body (someone is 2/3 for pieces on it), and then the boss for the 25 that matches a few of the 35s we’ve gotten, but managed to time out :<  We opted to do the fl4 rampart, and for all that we got the NM 4 times, we didn’t get a single 35 off it.  Oh well, that’s Salvage for you!  Skipping the drama again because it’s really stupid stuff and I don’t wanna escalate it or anything, but certain people need an attitude adjustment — this is for a GROUP, not single people, thanks.

Drouggle_____________________________

Mr. D’s gotten quite a bit done lately, though I haven’t been on him too much for the last week or two.  He’s now 67 black mage, and has his /whm completely finished at 38~  Bastok’s been in 3rd place conquest wise so I can’t get fame in Windy for him (<3 the cornette quest), but he does have Teleport-Holla/Dem/Vahzl/Altep.  Need to get him to 42 WHM for tele purposes, as well as for when I start doing CoP on him.  He’s got dyna access, but no wins due to it being anti-city month.  We did Jungle Boogymen the other day to get a few of his torques, and netted an elemental torque, an evasive torque (which was traded in the group for a dark torque), and an ore worth 120k that I sold to buy him a spider torque.  I’m pretty content with that; his gear is at par at least now.  I started doing RoZ on him, and am now at the QSC fight — one day that we’re free Star and I will probably finish up getting him Sky access.

Misc.________________________________

Not really anything misc. I guess…was gonna include assaults here but put that above! :D  Oh! I don’t think I ever posted here…but I finally dinged 75 SMN a few weeks ago ^___^;; That Summoner’s Horn went to use ASAP after I got it :D  And here’s a fun quote to end the post, even though I’ve already included several:

On Monday, I did my first Salvage run with my new static.  We did Arrapago, and it went fairly well — though no 35 drops :(  However, at the end of the run…we came to the conclusion that another monk would be a HUGE help.  We did our run with MNK DRG BLU THF BLM BRD WHM RDM, and it went fairly well…but another monk was requested.  Since Star’s monk was just under 70, we decided to push for 75 by our next run — next Monday.  Needless to say, most of these last few days have been Star, Sto, and I leveling our MNK, PLD, SMN, respectively.  Presently Star’s monk is at 73, thanks to the SECOND Kupofried’s Ring that he just found a few days ago, while my summoner is at 72 thanks to the last few charges of my aniversery ring.

I’m really enjoying leveling summoner, it’s not my FAVORITE job, but with nearly 6 75s now they can’t all be :)  At 71 I was able to equip my Evoker’s Ring — which I just got on Sunday — my Yinyang Robe, and my Summoner’s Spats, so now I feel like a real summoner :D  The last few pieces I’m hoping to snag for my summoner are a few pieces of relic — I need hands, body, and hat — as well as Nashira Gauges at some point.  I’m more worried about Nashira pants though at this point, so it’ll be a bit before I get Gauges.  To be honest, it’ll be a while before I get summoner Relic as well, since we’ve got like a million Astral Burned summoners in my linkshell now…all wanting SMN relic, of course.  Oh well, I’ve got more points than any of them so once I get my Sorcerer’s Gloves I’ll swap city wants over to summoner, at least.  To be honest, I can throw it on my wish list for the glacier as well, since I don’t need anything there for my current 75s.

Speaking of dyna, we did our second Xarc run on Sunday.  We managed to get 5 relic, all of which was wanted.  After doing so many city runs were relic is trashed, it was really nice.  We got BRDx2 (not on anyone’s wish list, but like 5-6 people lotted on them), WHM (on someone’s wish list), DNC (on someone’s wish list), and MNK (on someone’s list but they were got, Star wanted it though so he got it!).  Tonight will be a Bastok win, which a few of our new members need.  Hopefully once we get them access we’ll be able to focus on Xarc!

The only other thing I’ve done over the last few days is prep-work for salvage.  Right now I can pay for approx. half of a Morrigan’s Robe upgrade, so I sat down and figured out how many ISNM Puk runs I would need to do to fund it.  At a 1/5 drop rate, I could have 24 K. Ores in six months, so long as I do 5-6 runs a week.  I’ve got approx. 1/3 of the IS I would need to do this, so I’ve been trying to merit more to make sure I’m able to do this (:  Star and I have done an ISNM a day for the last week or so, and it’s nice: even when we don’t get K. Ore, we still make 20-50k/run.  Anyways…that’s the past few days for me :)  Hopefully my next (Anexia) post won’t take nearly as long to write up!

Screenshot of the Day: Stoters came BRD to the salvage run, and was unhappy with where I was standing…lol:

So, that was interesting.  After staying up WAY to late trying to finish the new expansion, I woke up today to try and find Mr. Shiki.  Star was working from home so he was able to help, and Udders logged in to help as well.  We also had a WAR friend on who came with to help.  I’ve killed Shiki before, and he was never too difficult so I was pretty confident that we’d fare well if we got claim.  We arrived early, and did two pages of FoV.  Then, like always seems to happen, just as his window opened a ton of people showed up.

Udders was so funny, we were all running around and he ended up dead — he goes “Well, I was running and I got stuck on something…something invisible.  So I casted to see if it was Shiki.”  Anyways, this little white mage taru was casting RRIII on himself and aggroed Shiki as well as 3-4 of his friends.  It was odd, he ended up dying as I was running over to him, and I tried to cast Dia but Shiki’s name went green…like a npc.  Didn’t get claim, but I did aggro 2-4 mobs from attempting to .__.  Managed to have probably 6 on me by the time I died somehow, and once everything ran away I got up.  Of course, by this point there’s 15+ people running around…waaay too stressful for not getting enough sleep the night before!

After several more deaths and aggroed mobs, we managed to snag Shiki.  I had just raised Udd, and 2 mobs on me, aggroed a third, and then finally Shiki aggroed.  Star got him, Giu was off somewhere else killing aggro tha the got, and Udd managed to get hit by AoE and died again .__.  I helped Star as much as I could with my 300 hp and 100 mp, while trying to keep 3 other mobs slept…it didn’t go too well, beleive you me!  I ended up dying, and got up after the other mobs went away — the people who showed up to camp were apparently our WAR’s friends, so they helped cure our melee while I was unable to <3  They also helped kill the weapons I had aggroed.

At one point I was just like you know what, we better get the drop today…because I don’t want to come back and camp against all of these people tomorrow!  Anyways, it thankfully dropped 8D  My summoner is going to be pretty darn nice once I get to 75 — I’m really looking forward to leveling it again one Sto gets back!  Summoner’s Spats, YYR, Evoker’s Pigaches +1…just need to kill Fenrir for my Evoker’s Ring! ^^

Quote of the day:

Back when we got Uddoro his YYR, we somehow got on the topic of fashion and I shared my disgust for how the YYR looks.  I hated wearing the one that looks similar on my ninja at 40, and I just don’t really care for it x:  It looks ok on mithra, but looks rather silly on humes, imo.  Anyways, it’s just really funny that he remembered that and is using it on me now, 18+ months after I gt him his, hehe.

As if sensing the presence of the protocrystal, the tuning fork begins to softly resonate…

…Who interrupts my slumber?
Was I dreaming for but an instant,
or an eternity?
The radiance that illuminates all, lost…
Which is the real world, and which is
the dream?
Am I…?
But enough…
Wager your life to prove your skill.
Let us see if you can provide me
with a moment of amusement.
Are you ready, you who is one yet many?

We sleep in a time that is neither
an instant, nor an eternity.
Is this world a dream,
or is the dreamworld an illusion…?
Very well, child of Vana’diel.
I will grant you a fragment of my power
to bring order to this chaos.

Over the last few days, I explored the nooks and crannies of Vana’diel with a handful of friends in tow.  A good friend of mine recently rejoined good ol’ xi, and as a summoner it was easy to convine him to accompany us.  With my summoner at 65 presently, and my paladin static!buddy on vacation for the week, I decided it’d be a great time to work on the last few pieces of gear I need for my summoner.  Other than Ying Yang Robe (which, conviently the maintenance that’s occuring as I write this will reset Mr. Shiki’s ToD — and the honey and I logged out so we’ll hopefully have a shot at getting claim in a few hours!) and Evoker’s Ring, I’m pretty much set on gear.  Thus — our fun adventures poking various avatars recently.  Star needs a few more avatars — even though he doesn’t have summoner leveled he wanted to nab them while he had a chance for when he eventually decides to.

We started our trip with myself, Star, Uddles, and Usmc, a friend from our old linkshell.  The avatars were no issue really, though their Astral Flow damage was very unpredictible.  For every Astral Flow, we had buffs up — blink or utsusemi, stoneskin, bar-element, shellra v, etc…  The first avatar we did was Garuda, and her Astral Flow killed me through all 3 buffs, when I was at full health.  Star, who was kindly taking on his THF, took close to zero damage, while Uddles and Usmc went down to about half HP.

The next few fights, people would either take small doses or moderate amounts of damage, but no deaths.  Then, randomly we had Usmc and Uddles both die, but I remained at full HP — my SS didn’t even wear.  It was really odd.  Later on, we had two other friends — Omni (BLU) and Nego (DRK) — tag along.  Omni threw up an AoE Saline Coat for an additional Magic Def. Bonus +50, and of course, just to prove the randomness of damage, Omni was the sole person to die.

Anyways, odd damages aside, we had a pretty easy time with the avatars.   On Saturday, we poked all six original avatars, as well as Diabolos.  Uddles and Star both had a few whispers already, so they both missed out on a few fights.  For all that we got the wins rather easy, we did have a few mishaps on getting people wins.  Our last avatar of the night was Levi, and just as we got to his home, Usmc’s internet went down for maintenance.  We had no way to get ahold of him though, and so after waiting for ~30 min we went ahead and did the fight without him.  It was late and we all wanted to head to bed, and we jumped the gun on engaging Levi — Omni accidently got left outside :<

As such, on Sunday we repeated Levi for Omni and Usmc right after JP midnight ^^  The point of all of this was to get me my Evoker’s Ring items and to be able to fight Fenrir as well for my last item and to get a few people the purple puppy as a summon.  As Omni joined us halfway through our Avatar-killing spree, he wasn’t 6/6 on whispers.  After Star and Usmc turned in their whispers to get their Moon Bauble for Fenrir, we all grabbed another Tuning Fork of Wind to get Omni the last whisper he needed.

It was an absolute blast to travel Vanad’iel with friends over the last few days to poke the avatars.  For all that summoner isn’t my favorite job, I really love the avatars in this game.  The script the avatars say is really nifty, and being able to do these fights with my friends make it even more enjoyable.  These fights are something I looked forward to doing ever since I started playing, and even thuogh I already have all the avatars, these fights still make me smile.

We actually got to meet and help someone who joined our old social linkshell since we left as well — on Sunday Uddles was helping her get Shiva, and the two of them tagged along to get her Garuda as well.  It’s been weird, doing things with people from my old shell — which I left on bad terms.  I’m very glad that Uddles is back in the game though, and if it means  I get to do things with him I don’t mind so much.  It’s not that I really dislike anyone from the shell, but I’m not on good terms with one or two members and previously made pretty much a complete break from the shell, which is no longer complete.

When we finally went to fight Fenrir Sunday afternoon, it was a bit of a dissapointment.  Right as we got to Windurst the first Mog Tablet was found, so of course people were off and checking zones to try their luck — my honey was actually lucky enough to find one.  We checked two zones to try and find one for me but didn’t manage to, and he checked a fourth as well and missed just one section of it due to everyone being ready for Fenrir…and shortly after someone found a Mog Tablet there.  Bummer!  Anyways, our final party for Fenrir was myself (SCH), Star (BLM), Uddles (SMN), Usmc (RDM), Omni (BLU), and Eni (PLD).

The fight ended up as a total disaster :(  With the Mog Tablets happening, there was a good hour or so of dinking about before the fight, which, people started to afk, have other things they needed to do, etc… so I think everyone was a smidge distracted.

Eni got slapped with a double attack, one of which was a critical hit for 540+ damage, and went down very quick at about 60%.  It didn’t take long for the rest of us to wipe after that.  Then, to make matters worse, Omni had to leave due to some rl-stuff going on.  Due to the fact that I wasn’t really sure what we could do differently and that we had promised Star’s brother we’d visit him and Omni’s leaving we decided to just call it.  Usmc and Uddles also both had things they needed to do irl, and as much as it sucked to walk away defeated I think it was the best call.  It just means we need a rematch with the purple puppy soon!

When I got him as a summon I went with a party of 4 summoners, so I’m thinking if worse comes to worse that’s what I’ll try later this month.  I’ll wait until I ding 70 SMN for the new bloodpacts, and then beg Stoters and Uddles to come out on SMN and try to hunt down a 4th and possibly a 5th and kill him that way.  We’d be able to leech a few people through that way so that Star, Omni, and Usmc could also get the summon.

Another interesting stragety I found on wiki involves a manaburn party, which is certainly an option as well.  One idea would be to have a RDM and two BLMs, which Star and I could try with Stoters next week, or to have 4-6 BLMs which would be a bit harder to put together but still do-able.  It’d be great if Star, Stoters, and I could trio it — I almost want to try just to see if we can.  It’d be a blast to do.  I know another friend with both RDM and BLM leveled who says he can duo Fenrir so I may poke him for advice as well.

Anyways, it’s just been a rather nice weekend — doing things with old friends is always enjoyable.  Star and I had planned on doing a few things this week that Stoters’ is gone on vacation, and I’m glad I’m so close to my last two pieces of summoner gear that I need.  I’m 6/7 on Evoker’s Ring items — I’ve turned in 3 of them, have two in inventory, and need to snag one from Kazham yet.  I’ve also turned in my second whisper from Garuda for 10,000gil, and will need to turn in my second Garuda whisper as well for another 10,000gil.  After that I’ll be able to collect tuning forks again and be ready whenever to do avatar fights again!  Fenrir will be taken care of within the next week or two, and I’ll hopefully have my YY Robe tonight, or at least within the next few weeks.  Ooh, speaking of gear for my summoner — this isn’t anything to quest for or camp, but I’ve been watching the Auction House over the last week or two to try and snag a Blue Cape +1.  This will be my main back piece for summoner, and I’ll also get some use on it on red mage, white mage, and scholar — possibly even black mage as a HP down piece of gear if I ever decide to get rid of my Dark Grip or Star Necklace.  I finally managed to get one today, and I think the 200k pricetag is fairly decent for the 40 mp as well as how much use I’ll get out of it.

Anyways, seeing how long this post is — I’ll leave my Diabolos experience and screenshots for another day, and talk about how limbus and dyna have been recently in that post.  I’ll end this post with a fun quote and screenshot:

We were talking about which jobs we wanted to level next, and I lol’d fairly hard at Uddoro’s response to my saying I wanted to level corsair.  When I originally said I wanted to level corsair, blue mage, or ranger, he said I should level corsair due to the fun hat — he’s got a hat fetish.  And apparently he likes their guns as well!

As for the screenshot, this is from when we were waiting on Usmc to kill Levi the first time.  Omni found the deepest patch of water and sat down in it.  Wearing his Homan hat, he proclaimed he was a shark.  Here’s me panicking at the visible “shark fin” showing through the water, hehe.

Limbus_______________________________
A few weeks ago, I was promoted to an officer in my limbus linkshell.  So far, that’s not amounted to a whole lot — I have inventory -7 for a full Ultima/pre-Ultima set and a metal chip, I post news updates, and I can help call out drops and edit wanted lists.  Last night, Q said that Raven was going to lead the run, and that on Friday Anexia would be leading.  Que double take here.  My very sophisticated response: orly?  I actually wasn’t even looking at the computer when Q said that — Star was sitting behind me on his laptop and goes “apparently you’re leading limbus on Friday.”  And then, of course, I have Stoters sending me “hahas” in tells, silly guy.  So anyways!  I poked Q a bit about it, and found out that he’s wanting me to pick a Temenos run since we just did Apollyon last night…and I’m leaning towards Temenos West.  Q -hates- that zone, but we do need the chip for it.  Q got me a full Ultima set, and then when we did Temenos West for my pre-Ultima set, two other officers lotted on the chip because that was the only chip they needed to complete -their- pre-Ultima set.  So, provided Illi or N are on, that’s what we’ll be doing methinks!

If they’re not there, of course, that means back to the drawing board, but that’s what I’ll plan for (:  I’m not sure what all the other officers have for chips, but I’ll figure it out ^^  Here are my more recent shinies from Limbus, both of which I picked up on Monday:

Summoner____________________________
After what seems like entirely too long, I partied on my summoner again last night!  I had a blast with Star and Sto, and our friend Ryo caught his RDM up to us while we were taking an unplanned break from leveling, so he joined us in party as well.  It was just a really relaxing night — we goofed off on vent and joked back and forth, and managed to get 15k exp or so.  Star, Sto and I are all now level 64 — just a few levels off of the Mire, which I think I’m the only one who’s looking forward to that, lol.  Though, getting silenced is going to be a pain in the rear since I need to run in for buffs…maybe I should see if I can snag an Ecphoria Ring for myself so I can release my avatars.

We also had an interesting conversation about Astral Burn parties — and when we think they are vs. aren’t ok.  We all agree that when your skills aren’t capped, or you’re leveling a job that you want to take to 75 vs. a support job, Astral Burn parties are not the way to go.  If it’s a job you want to take to 75, you really need to know how to play it, and getting lots of exp fast via Astral Burn parties may get you to 75 asap but you lack an understanding of how to play the job.  Thinking about it now, you technically can learn how to play the job and cap your skills once you ding 75.  The issue then becomes this: people astral burn, from my understanding and experience, so that they can level jobs quickly.  They then try to play the job at 75 before they have the knowledge, skills, etc… to play the job well.

In Nindo’s recent blog entry, a good example of this comes up.  She partied with a red mage who, at lvl60+, did not have Cure III, Cure IV, Haste, OR Refresh, because they “didn’t think they needed it.”  IF you’re going to astral burn your way to 75, at least make sure you cap skills, are up to date on spells and gear, and that you know what you’re doing before joining a non-AB party or try to do end game on that job, please!  Of course, there are a few times when I have no problem with Astral Burning — our THF in dynamis, for example.  I’d LOVE it if we as a linkshell could Astral Burn a few times a week to keep his exp buffer capped since he dies to benefit the lot of us.  Capping buffers and meriting is a-ok for ABs, in my opinion.

Anyways, that said — I randomly got an invite to join an Astral Burn party today, and since I’ve never done it before…I decided to try it out to get a first hand experience.  To be honest, I was rather dissapointed by it.  I got invited at 11:30 or so, and it took a good hour and a half to actually do it.  On top of that, we got all of 5.5k exp, which is nice enough for 3 minutes of work on my end…but the fact that I was waiting for 90 min kind of negates that.  I was making 10k/h in my party last night, so in 90 min I would have had 15k rather than 5.5k.  Anyways, each to their own.  I think Astral Burn parties are acceptable in some situations…but for every time it’s ok there are a handful of times it’s misused, in my opinion.

Other Events___________________________
Other than limbus, I’ve had dynamis and nyzul both recently.  And both have been about the same: uneventful.  We did four Nyzul runs on Saturday, and got a lovely pair of uncontested Denali Kecks for our ONE pick up member, and an uncontested Goliard Saio for our ONE (different) pick up member.  For fl100 we managed to time out/wipe for both runs.  After our fl80 run, I got a tell from Ryo saying “Well now that we’re done getting pick-ups gear…”, to which SE responded, more or less, “well, if you don’t want pick ups to get gear, then you won’t get any gear a’tal.”  Boo! :<

For dynamis, we did a Sandy run last Thursday, which we ended up getting a Bard’s Roundlet for Star — which we were both estatic about.  The last run of June was a Sandy, and a Bard’s Roundlet dropped which should have been Star’s, but he passed for me <3  A second one dropped later in the night just prior to a full wipe…and after a stressful five minutes on our end it free dropped to someone else.  Needless to say, we were both very happy when it dropped to his inventory last week.  On Sunday, we didn’t do a run, which I was frustrated about.  I mean, I understand why we didn’t — Bastok was the only zone open that we could do, and no one that was a regular attendee needed anything — and none of the flaky people who needed items were there.  Moreover, bills on Remora aren’t worth very much, so we’d be doing several hours of work to break even and not get any gear that anyone has on their wanted lists.  But still, boo to missing an event :/  We need more people or the people we have need to be more reliable so that we can finish up with city zones and focus on outlands.  Ah well.

I’ll end with a fun quote of the day — we were talking about why people are mentors and what exactly it is that mentors do.  Here, one of our dyna members is pretending to answer a newbie’s question:

I enjoy limbus, I really do like it.  Over the past 8 months or so, I’ve upgraded quite a few pieces: bard hands, body, and legs; scholar body; black mage body; summoner shoes.  For bard, it was all win-win for me; it was my third job, and I tossed the pieces I’d never use into storage.   Starting with BLM though, and for SCH and SMN as well, whenever I’m not on that job, the AF is with an armor storer.  With 8 jobs past 50 with full AF sets, it saves SO much space to not have it on hand.  That said…it’s a HUGE pain in the rear to upgrade anything and have to request that piece to restore the set :<  Particularly when you upgrade pieces back to back D:  Not only do you have to quest that particular piece…but you also have to do all of the prequests.  So far, I’ve requested the SCH af1 scroll just to toss it, and ditto to the SMN af1 and BLM af1 weapons.  I’ve also requested my SMN bracers, just to toss them, so that the Calling Hands quest would be labled complete.  Pain. in. the. rear.

That said!  I now have a few nice shiny pieces for my SMN once I get 70+.  I’ve got Evoker’s Pigaches +1 at level 74, in addition to Summoner’s Spats at level 73.  I’m not too worried about getting my Evoker’s Ring–that’ll be pretty easy.  YYR will be intersting to camp…but I like poking Shiki ^^  I’ve helped a handful of friends get their YYR–four now, I think?  So with any luck one or two of them won’t mind coming to help me, and I know Star’ll help.  Other than that…I found the CUTEST dat-mod for tarutaru–isn’t she adorable?

Dyna’s been fun lately!  We’ve now got 4/4 city wins, and will hopefully be doing a Beau. on Thursday!  Our first Windy run (we’ve done three now) was pretty darn crappy — we got ONE relic piece, war, and no one wanted it.  Second and third was much better, netting probably 15-20 or so relics between the two runs.  The second run I lotted a pair of Cleric’s Duckbills, putting me 4/5 for White Mage, and the third run I netted a pair of Summoner’s Spats ^__^  I passed a pair of PLD shoes that I debated on lotting…but oh well :<  Hopefully we’ll do enough Windys to get me the gear I want!  I just need PLD and BLM from Windy now before I’ll have everything from the zone I want :D  Though…hmm.  I want brd hat from Sandy, nothing from Jeuno, and nothing from Bastok…wow!  Three pieces and I’m done with city gear!  Here’s a fun dyna SS that I took during our last Windy run:

As far as Sea goes, Star and I have been doing some more farming but haven’t had a ton of luck…we’ve gotten a handful of ghrah chips, ONE HQ Aern Organ.  We’ve both got capped buffers though, so I can’t complain ^^  On a similar note — I’ve also been doing a bit of meriting~  I’m now 5/5 on INT merits!! :D  I did a bit more meriting after that and put a second upgrade into Freeze II (: Just antoher 7 upgrades to cap out BLM!  Other than just meriting and farming in Sea, my limit points have increased thanks to a few CoP missions…mainly 8-3 and 8-4!  Omniflare and Ryong, two friends from my Nyzul Static, finally reached the end of CoP missions and let Star and I tag along to the BEST fight in the game!  8-4 is SUCH a fun fight, all of CoP is worth it for that one fight (:

Nyzul wise…we actually had a bit of luck last weekend!  Two floor 80′s yielding two Askar bodies, and two floor 100′s yielding one Askar hat…which unfortunately hit the floor due to us timing out :(  Oh well ^^ That’s two Askar bodies down!  Now our big pieces for Nyzul still to get are: Askar pants x1, Askar body x1, Denali hat x1, Denali shoes x1, Goliard Shoes x2, and Goliard Cuffs x2…still quite a bit but if we have more nights like last Saturday it won’t take us too long!

Dynamis

Dyna has been going pretty darn well for us — our first four runs were the four city runs, of which we got one win.  The next two were city runs again, and we got wins on both of those; as of now, the only win we need is Windurst.  Unfortunately, most of the people who NEED the wins haven’t been showing up regularly :<  Ah well.  We’ve had a few problems with people, but nothing TOO horrid, and for the most part everything’s been worked out.  Star’s one of the four officers, so I’m able to be involved with a good chunk of the decision making — he uses me as a sounding board for his ideas, and I’m able to poke him with mine to bring up with the other officers.  It’s really nice to actually have  a say in what happens in dyna!

That and it’s really enjoyable to play BLM in dyna — before this linkshell, I went BLM once, maybe twice…in Consumed, I’ve only NOT been BLM once.  Star’d be useful on his TH4 THF, but he’s been on BLM too…we’re really short on BLMs, unfortunately >:  We’ve got four atm, which is all fine and dandy…but if one or two are gone on the same night we’d be in trouble.  We’re really hoping to get 2-3 more BLMs, so that we’ve got a bit more flexiility.  If Star and I DIDN’T have to come BLM we could be on other jobs — he’s got TH4 THF and BRD, I’ve got BRD RDM WHM SCH, and I know another BLM also has a handful of other jobs…but we’re always there on BLM.

Limbus

Our {Mega Boss} leader has been missing for the last few runs — he has some military trip over in Germany for a few weeks this month.  Raven’s been doing a great job in his absence, and pretty much has Q’s whole absence mapped out, which is nice.  Just before he left I completed my Ultima set, and now we’re going back and forth between finishing Raven’s Omega set and finishing my tier 1 Ultima set.  Tomorrow we’ll fnish Raven’s set, Monday will be Omega, and the following Friday we’ll complete my Ultima pre-set.  I’ve also gotten pretty lucky with drops/upgrades lately:  before I even had my SMN AF, I had both mats that I need to upgrade!  I’m 5/5 on SMN AF now, and am in the process of requesting my AF shoes with the set stored so I can upgrade those ^^

I’m at 1/2 for Scholar again, just need my stud from Apollyon now.  Oh — and I also got this shiny:

I debated a bit on what to upgrade — I really wanted hat, body, and gloves.  Pants would also be nice, but those’ll be my 4th upgrade, if I get that far.  Not so interested in AF+1 shoes.

Things with Friends

Lately Star and I have been doing quite a bit in game with our good friend Sto — we’ve done limbus and dynamis with him for quite some time.  We’ve also been static’ing my SMN, Sto’s PLD, and Star’s MNK together, though that’s sort of died off. We’re all just a few levels away from Ahty zones too!  Other than that, we’ve been poking about in Sea quite a bit.  We trio’d a single pop-item Ix’MNK w/o drop, but the fight was pretty easy.  We also got Ix’DRG to spawn, and got the deed…and then managed to escape before it dropped :<

Oy.  The last few days have been SMN, SMN, and more SMN.  With Star pushing for 75 for his MNK in preperatin for us doing Salvage, my poor Summoner is being dragged along for the ride!  At a fairly low level we realized that a good friend of ours was leveling his PLD, so we’ve sort of formed a three-man static.  I know SMN’s not the ideal support position :< but I do fairly well with heping heal and keeping up Ice Spikes with a nice DD Blood Pact thrown in.  So…that leaves us to find a healer, and two DD — typically not too hard! :D

I’m at 46 now — hopefully will be 47 or 48 by the end of tonight! I’ve got a full Austere set waiting for me at 50 — much <3 to our PLD who’s kindly letting me borrow it.  He’s got 75 SMN, and it’s amazing to have someone to poke in pt with my SMN questions, hehe.  I’ve got 6/8 HQ staves, and will be picking up Neptune and Vulcan soonish, so my SMN should be pretty much set for the next little bit :D  Once I ding 50 I’ll have to get AF of course, and actually should probably grab my Staff before that — not that I’ll do anything but toss it!  I’ll actually have to do it twice — as of last night I have both materials needed to upgrade my Summoner AF!  So I’ll get my Staff, start AF1, get my shoes, upgrade them, then erase my memory and do it all over D:

Speaking of AF+1 materials, last Friday I got my second piece of Brilliantine!  I upgraded my Scholar’s Gown a few weeks ago and after I get my Apollyon material I’ll be able to upgrade something else too!  I’m leaning towards M.board atm, but I’m not entirely sold, and I’ve got a bit of time to make up my mind.  I also got both chip drops from the last two Limbus runs — 1st and 3rd floors of Centeral Temenos putting me at 2/3 of an Ultima set!  It was kind of odd — Q and I were the only leaders/officers at limbus last night.   In a few weeks, he’ll be leaving the country for military duty for 3 weeks.  If a night like last night happens again…I’ll be the only one in charge, scary thought that!  He asked me which I wanted to do last night, and I said it’ be GREAT if we could get a few Ultima pop sets ready for when he gets back, since we won’t be able to do it until then :<  It’d be nice to do 2-3 within a month or so of him returning though!  As I explained, haha, we both really want Nashira Serawheels but we’re not first in line…so we need to do it several times so we can hopefully get them at about the same time as the first person to get!

Anyways, hmm.  Other than that!  We did our first Dynamis run on Sunday with our new linkshell!  It actually went fairly well, though we didn’t get the win :<  We had a LOT of people who weren’t 75 though, which was weird for me.  We had ~27 people, about 15 of which were from my old linkshell.  For our first run though, we netted I think 2.2M worth of coins, and 10 pieces of relic, so it wasn’t AWFUL.  Our newbies got their feet wet a bit, and we built up the bank a bit ^^  My biggest pet peeve of the night though was that we weren’t killing the SMN mobs first — they killed them towards the middle, and we had avatars waking up all over the place ~_~  We probably lost a good 10-15 min due to a full wipe caused by one of those avatars.  That and people didn’t wipe when they should.  I lol’d pretty hard at having about 10 mobs, most of the alliance dead, and about 4 people alive casting sleepga.  What they were hoping to accomplish, I really don’t know.  In retrospect I probably should have just cast diaga or something and gotten it over with.  Without those few little messups costing us time though we could have won fairly easily though~  Live and learn!

FRIDAY night was a pretty fun night for me, limbus wise!  We did the kings path of Apollyon, which is always a blast.  I got to go BLM for it, which I was estatic about.  Then, Brown Doeskin dropped to me, which resulted in the following over the weekend:

This is the last piece of BRD AF that I wanted to upgrade–I recieved AF+1 hands and pants last fall and have been holding onto Coiled Yarn for weeks/months.  The fact that I had an Osode from the start was kind of a joke — I hate pulling on BRD, and that’s the only thing it’s REALLY good for.  +10 VIT and +10 CHR make it a great pulling piece, though Choral justaucorps +1 has both of those as well.  Osode also has +30 MP, but since I don’t full time it (I’ve got Yigit Gomlek) that mp is wasted between macro changes.

So now I’ve got a piece of equipment which is pretty much equiviliant to KO, and it didn’t cost me anything.  I’ve not sold a single ABC from limbus, so I was able to upgrade immediately, which was nice.  Even if you count each ABC costing 8k or so, that’s 360k, and I sold the Osode for 1,850k.  Very nice ^_~  Since then I’ve changed my wishlist to Primary/BLM, Secondary/SCH, which I’m pretty excited about being able to lot BLM mats now.

However!  The above was not my only source of excitement for Friday night!

SM being SeaMonkiesLS, my Limbus linkshell, and Quendi being the linkshell leader.  And that fun little icon next to my name is a pearlsack!  He said he had been wanting to promote someone for a few weeks, and was hoping to promote someone with XX chromosomes since all of the current leaders were male…which, I guess, gave 4 choices in a linkshell of 15~20 or so (you’d think there were more girls though with how vocal we are though!).  I started posting updates on the website about two weeks ago, and I’ll continue doing that, as well as helping out with whatever ^___^

Speaking of SM’s girls being rather vocal (Neart being the only non-female in this conversation)…

MONDAY saw us doing Proto-Omega, which was interesting, seeing as one of our PLDs came /war.  Not our cleanest Omega win, but we did manage to smush him!  We ended up with head, body, and shoesies for our trouble, which was pretty nice ^^  It was also my first night on Skype with SM — I prefer Vent over Skype.  I just don’t like having to always have everyone hear all the noises on my end :<  For good reason too — my sister came down mid limbus and was chatting about new clothes, what pants made her rear look large, etc… not exactly stuff the rest of the linkshell needs to hear!

It was funny though — Q had a normal voice, and the other people I talked with all had these SUPER deep voices, and then there’s me with a very girlish voice.  I had someone ask me how old I was :<  and someone else piped up that I sounded like I was 12 ~_~ Hehe.  Ah well.  Not the first time I get asked, certainly not the last.

CRAFTING wise, I’ve been pretty busy with Bonecrafting.  Anyone who’s following me on Twitter is probably sick of my tweets about it!  I’m finally finished with scorpion synths, which is exciting! I’m now onto ladybug rings, which requires me to farm in East Ron. [S].  I’ve been lucky enough to manage to use Star’s very nicely geared TH4 thf for farming in the paSt, which certainly helps!  I planned it out with Star ahead of time, and I’ll hopefully get by ok with 25 stacks of ladybug wings to get the 5ish levels that I need.

I had 11 stacks today, and decided to go ahead and use those — I ended up with 1.9 skill ups, so with a total of 25 stacks I’ll probably only get 4.3~ or so skill ups rather than capping on the synth, but that’s fine with me.  Just another 14 synths to go!  I’ve also been keeping an eye on the NM that spawns from the ladybugs — the E.Ring sells for 40-50k, and I could be 4-5 stacks of ladybug wings for that price!  I’m really hoping to not spend money unless I have to, but if I were to get that ring while farming I’d be perfectly content to sell it and use the profits to buy wings ^^  I’ve manged to come out ahead for the last 10-15 levels or so of bonecrafting, which is really nice.

LEVELING has also been happening over the last few days — my SMN’s been getting some attention!  I realize it’s kind of a day late/dollar short type thing since /SCH has all but completely replaced /SMN for WHM, but it’s certainly still got it’s uses.  I just dinged 37 tonight, so while WHM/SCH will be my main, I’ll be able to /SMN to solo the mimics assault. When I ding 40 I’ll be able to do Caramine Dobsonflies, and at 50 I’ll be able to SMN burn Ouryu as well as PM5-3: Mithra fight.  At 60 I’ll be able to wear full AF, and fi I’m that close I may as well take it to 75!  We’ll see though I certainly won’t be rushing with it.  Star’s anxious to level his MNK though, so I’ll probably tag along with him.

Other than that…I’ve not been up to a whole heck of a lot!  Until next time~ <3