I suppose an update is well overdue.  We’re so very closed to finished with my Yagrush; I’ll post more with my thanks, etc when we’ve finished but as of now the only things uncompleted are Ichor and Alexandrite.  Both are pretty neck and neck and after somewhat slacking on alexandrite collection lately we’ll be busting our butts to try and finish them around the same time.

We’re at 26,061/30,000 alexandrite, or 86.9% done with alexandrite!

Ichor is at 86,820/100,000, or 86.8% complete :)  Ichor will be done in 4-5 weeks with our trend lately of wing 1-2-3-odin; the question is if we can get the last 4k alexandrite or so that we need by then!  Right now Levi only has 600-700 alexandrite for sale and the price has been steadily increasing lately, while dynamis currency prices have been dropping :<  We’ve been farming Zhayolm lately and netting 70-80 alexandrite regularly in about 50-55 minute runs; gotta love how by this far in the game we’ve got the art of finding/funding alexandrite pretty much down pat!  Our einherjar group though has two others working on mythics, and within the last week or two both of them hit the 100,000 mark for ichor and have just various odds and ends to finish up; I’m sure seeing their mythics will be a not so gentle nudge to finish collecting my rocks!

With any luck, another post will be coming in no more than 5-6 weeks showing off a new shiny of mine!

There were a few, particularly the ones with adds, that we were concerned about…but at 95 they were a breeze.  We fwere a bit apprehensive about Sarameya as well and so asked Nego to come out and help us, but despite the low HP numbers in the screenshot he wasn’t too bad! Actually, I think Star may have died after Sarameya did due to DoT but I could be remembering wrong!

A few days ago Star, Omni & I also finished my assault relog — wahoo, one more thing off the to-do list!  With our tags free we’ve begun working on Nyzul again and it wont be but another week or two before I’ve got enough tokens to have that checked off as well :)

Not including Nyzul, since it’s almost done, the last two things to worry about are Alexandrite and Ichor.  I wish I had the screenshot but I cannot find it for the life of me but around the time of my last blog entry I was at 33% of the alexandrite I needed and 33% of the ichor I needed.  Omni piped up that he was going to be sad if we finished alexandrite before we finished ichor.  Of course, after he said that, we made a HUGE jump in alexandrite and ichor has barely budged.  Exactly 1 week after I posted that we had hit the 10k mark for alexandrite we hit the 15k mark.  We borrowed 10 and made 65 million gil in one week and purchased 5k alexandrite — for me anyways, that amount just seems HUGE.

Since then things have slowed down — since then we’ve only purchased/made 3.5k alexandrite.  I suppose for me I feel less pressure now that I know we CAN make that type of gil…and because we’re so limited by only being able to do einherjar twice a week.  Last type we calculated it out it would be about March before I could have the 100k ichor I need…so why rush with alexandrite?

It’s been nice to take a bit of a break; this last week we only did dyna 3-4 times I think.  Probably over Christmas break I’ll push and see if we can get closer to finished since I’ll hopefully have free time since I’ve got four weeks without classes, but eh, we’ll be done by March no problem even if we slowly go on at the rate we have been this past week or two.

 In our quest for my Yagrush (and it really is our quest, much much MUCH love to Star and Moo for all the help they’ve given me!), Star recently came up with the idea to try dynamis for currency to sell to buy Alexandrite.  Actually doing salvage tends to yield 60-70 Alexandrite per day and depending on drops can be quite a bit lower — not to mention we were all getting a bit sick of salvage so a change of pace was nice!  We started at the end of September in Dynamis – Buburimu with a new strategy (before that we had tried both Bastok and Windurst on THF BLU WHM and averaged ~160 coins) and our first run netted 361 coins.  This, of course, was before the AoE nerf and we ended up with not one but TWO white procs with BLU/—, THF, RDM/— (dualboxed) & WHM.  So, pretty similar singles wise to our city runs!  The next run was pretty similar too, we ended up getting 162 coins total (yes, I am a nerd and am keeping track of how much currency/gil we get per run D:).  From there, our singles went up each run and we managed to get 280+ singles in one run before the nerf — MUCH better than cities ;)

After the nerf I was hesitant to go back since I’d have to play DNC — I leveled it for funsies and have never really *needed* it for anything before D:  Plus, our previous set up was so easy and was so rewarding coin-wise, I was not looking forward to a new method failing.  Thankfully, I was proven wrong!  We’ve done dynamis several times now since the update and have averaged 425+ coins per run including 6 white procs over 5 runs — lotsa Alexandrite gil!  In the past two weeks we’ve done a total of 10 runs and have made over 37 million gil.  Very nice indeed!  It’s pretty funny to read a few of the comments over at the official forums about this though — apparently it’s impossible to get that many coins, according to people there.  Oh well!

Speaking of Alexandrite…

Duties, Tasks, and Deeds
Balrahn’s Eyepatch: 21,980/100,000 (22%) > 31,100/100,000 (31.1%)
Wyrmseeker Areuhat: 111,232/150,000 (74.2%)
Alexandrite: 3,397/30,000 (11.3%) > 10,189/30,000 (33.96%)
Assault Relog: 13/50 (26%) > 36/50 (72%)

And that’s just progress from the last month and a few days!  One third of the way done with the Alexandrite requirement!  If we could get 6-7k Alexandrite per month for the next few months!? I’d be one happy girl indeed ;)

The price of Alexandrite though, oh!  It’s enough to make me QQ so I typically don’t linger on it too much, but here’s this for perspective: Right now, Alexandrite is selling for 15k on Levi.  I’m really, really hoping that the price doesn’t go up before I’m finished.  If I can get all of my Alexandrite for this price, I’ll have spent 450,000,000 gil on my Yagrush.  Of course, it won’t be quite that much since I did get over 3,000 from doing salvage and we have a few sellers who’ll drop the price to 13k for us and then the occasional bazaar for less, but still.  The price is just unbelievable — that 37 mil doesn’t seem like quite so much anymore!

For a bit more perspective: Alexandrite used to sell for 2-3k a piece.  I sold probably 10M worth of Alexandrite at that price for my salvage group back in the day — so not a ton, but a decent bit.  Yesterday my buyer from back then sold me Alexandrite — for 15k :<  My how times change!  At the end of the day though, it’s not the gil that matters.  This is something I’ve wanted for quite some time and, quite frankly, never thought I’d get.  It’s a goal to work towards and make progress on, and it’s going to be amazing one day to say we finished it!  …then it will be time to work on an Aegis for Moo, methinks.  We’ve not completed a relic yet!  ;)

On a much less interesting note, I’ve been spamming Brygid’s quest in Abyssea – Altepa for months now on and off to try and get a pair of subligar with Refresh +1 on them.  Prior to this week I was at 0/247 (thank you twitter for keeping track!) and after yesterday was at 0/273.  Today though, I finally snagged these –

– and ended up at about 1/295!  Finally done!  And to think, Moo went 1/53 and I was hoping to be as lucky :<  Needless to say, I will NOT be continuing in hopes of receiving Refresh +1/hMP +3 — I’m quite content with what I have!  That gives me a fairly solid idle set as far as refresh is concerned now for White Mage: Serpentes set (Refresh +1), Orison Bliaud +2 (Refresh +2), Owleyes (Refresh +1), Moonshade Earring (Refresh +1), Stearc Subligar (Refresh +1) for a total of 6 mp/tick!  The only improvements I can think of offhand would be an augmented Wirve Hairpin with Refresh +1 and the Oneiros Grip with Refresh +1 when below 75% MP — I’d still use Owleyes but this would let me take 30% less physical damage when it’s active.  Eh! Maybe someday.

Other than that!  We’ve been working on Star’s Masamune and holy cow is it easy compared to his Verethragna or even Moo’s Almace.  We just started on Carabosse less than a week ago and are 50/50 on the gems and are now working on CC and are at 35/50 iirc?  VERY quick and painless compared to the other empyrean weapons we’ve done; I wish they were all so easy!  We’ve also started doing some of the Voidwatch NMs which are interesting, I guess.  I don’t really care to do new stuff but it’ll be good to be caught up when the next round of VWNMs come out!

I’ll end with a quite update on Yagrush status since it’s been a bit…slowly but surely still trudging along :)

Duties, Tasks, and Deeds
Balrahn’s Eyepatch: 21,980/100,000 (22%)
Wyrmseeker Areuhat: 111,232/150,000 (74.2%)
Alexandrite: 3,397/30,000 (11.3%)
Assault Relog: 13/50 (26%)

For the last few weeks, Star, Moo & I have been tagging along with Snow linkshell for Einherjar.  Back when we did our own runs, several members of this linkshell tagged along more often than not, and we’ve known them since our Remora days.  In any case, I’m incredibly happy we’ve been allowed to come with so I can work on collecting Ichor…and get the Odin win just now!

This marks the quest An Imperial Heist complete!  I realize this is the easiest of the steps but it’s still a fun milestone to make!  Yagrush status report to date:

Duties, Tasks, and Deeds
Balrahn’s Eyepatch: 21,980/100,000 (22%)
Wyrmseeker Areuhat: 111,232/150,000 (74.2%)
Alexandrite: 2,145/30,000 (7.2%)
Mamool Ja Journal: 0/10
Lebros Chronicle: 0/10
Leujaoam Log: 0/10
Periqia Diary: 0/10
Ilrusi Ledger: 0/10

—–

Lately we’ve been working on Tubby’s White Mage — working on a Yagrush on one character apparently isn’t enough White Mage’ing for me!  Star and Moo have both been very helpful in letting me leech dominion ops pages off them!  We’ve also started plugging away on the Wings of the Goddess storyline, though I suspect now that An Imperial Heist is finished we’ll move back towards Treasures of Aht Urghan content.  It’ll be nice to get Moo’s captain rank finally while working on my assault rewins!

Apparently it’s true!  Less than a minute after I called him a bee, he showed up!  We ended with 3 pops and 3 coinpurses — only one drop but since I was the only one who needed a pair of Hoshikazu Kyahan it worked out quite well!  We also managed to completely Moo’s Skadi shoes tonight, so hurray for that!  It was just too funny though, to read her blog entry today and then have this happen!

A quick status update on Yagrush — slowly but surely trudging along!

An Imperial Heist
Medusa
Gurfurlur the Menacing
Gulool Ja Ja
Odin
Long-Bowed Chariot
Armored Chariot
Battleclad Chariot
Long-Armed Chariot

Duties, Tasks, and Deeds
Balrahn’s Eyepatch: 18,000/100,000
Wyrmseeker Areuhat: 110,000/150,000
Alexandrite: 1,590/30,000
Mamool Ja Journal: 0/10
Lebros Chronicle: 0/10
Leujaoam Log: 0/10
Periqia Diary: 0/10
Ilrusi Ledger: 0/10

…and with that, if you’ll excuse me, I have some Sand Sweepers to die to!

I’m sure parsing against Moo or Star would make me cry still, but I’ll enjoy it for what it is!  I’m pretty happy with my gear right now on both Dancer and Ninja, the only obvious improvements being more AF3+2 pieces right now — Dancer only has the pants +2′d and Ninja has just the pants and shoes +2′d — and a few more things for Dancer’s WS set.  They’ve both got, in my opinion, fairly solid gear sets though.  Since I last posted about Ninja gear I’ve gotten Epona’s Ring and just a day or two ago got an Agasaya’s Collar for Dancer’s WS set, and with the changes in Critical Hits and caps I also got Atma of the Sanguine Scythe.  I finally got Atma of the Razed Ruins somewhat recently — I’ve just been having a blast goofing off with these jobs!

Our big project of the last week though hasn’t been my spare-time melee jobs though!  Moo’s been wanting a pair of fasty-pants for quite some time and a few weeks ago the two of us managed to farm up nearly an entire Kirin pop set (unfortunately Suzy Q does not make herself easy to duo by two Red Mages — Chainspell hurts!), so this week we finally farmed up some more pop items and had a Ranger friend help with Shadowbinding a few birdies for us.  We ended up with 3 Kirin pop sets and then this week spent an evening goofing off killing him.  The first Kirin we lost because of a mistake on my part (hello clicking cancel RR just as I needed Tubby to zombie and Kirin depopping before I could get him up again :<), the second didn’t drop and the third gave us a lovely abjuration to make some spiffy pants for Moo!!  We ended up having a few friends come out to help us out too for the later ones, so huge thanks to Wigmasterflex, Dedra and Renzo for their help!

And of course lucky Moo managed to already get Fast Cast +4 on his Blood Cuisses!  My Crimson Cuisses with Fast Cast +1 don’t seem nearly as exciting compared to those!  We’ll get more tatters though I’m sure ^^~

As you may have guessed, I was able to get a new laptop and am LOVING how well ffxi runs on it — gogo dualboxing with no issues!  I forget how much configuration windower takes though…I’ve slowly been getting files moved over from my old laptop though and trying to get my settings back to normal.  Above is the ONE screenshot I have so far on my new computer and oy, I forgot how ugly all of the windower stuff is without having the init.txt file set to hide all everything!

Last Sunday we discovered that Windurst had control of Castle Oztroja [S] though so that was an awesome surprise!  Omni and I trio’d a few runs with a friend and went 2/3 on Roundel Earrings…and then ended up at 2/13 for the week when we duo’d the rest of the fights later on :<  My White Mage is now the happy owner of a Roundel Earring though so I can’t really complain!  I’m sitting at 49% Cure Potency on White Mage using an Orison Bliaud +2 and while I certainly do have other improvements still to work on (hello 0/60 on refresh subligar D:), I am very very very happy with where my White Mage is right now.  We’ve still been plugging away on my Yagrush as well, but due to the aforementioned reasons it’s been slow — am down to just needing the Odin win now though and have more Alexandrite, Tokens & Ichor.

One last thing to mention, since my last blog post was so long ago…HUGE HUGE congrats to Omniflare on his 85 Almace!!!  I know it’s a bit old of news for friends but I’m so very happy we were able to finish that off for him!

With all the work we’ve been doing lately for my Yagrush I figured I should officially start the quest!

The first quest, An Imperial Heist, involves killing a number of ToAU bosses: the four salvage chariots, the three beastman kings and Odin.  Luckily, I spent the better part of a year doing salvage multiple times a week and so already had all four chariot wins prior to starting this quest.  This left Odin and the three beastman kings for the first stage. We tried Medusa a few weeks ago and got our rear ends handed to us — we went as WHM SAM MNK BLU and BLM, and it just didn’t work out.  Shortly after that we started doing Einherjar biweekly to work on both collecting Ichor for the second quest and to get the Odin win — as of last night, we’re at 4/9 feathers to have an Odin pop.  After Einherjar, we sent off for round two with Medusa:

Unfortunately, Medusa was not there :< Someone had actually killed her within the last few days!  Unfortunately the respawn for her is 72-96 hours…maybe we’ll get her next weekend!  From there, we went to check on Gurfurlur the Menacing and see if he wanted to play.  I know I’ve said this before, but I really do enjoy doing all of the content of ToAU — for all that it’s a pain to get to all of the bosses, I love seeing what SE put in place to get there.  With Medusa it was farming keys from all over the place and using them all at once to open the Tidal Gate to allow us through.  Gurfurlur the Menacing was very similar.  Both kings had true sight monsters on the way; with Medusa they were fairly easy to avoid but there were a lot of true sight trolls in the way of Gurfurlur.  There are also some nifty gates in Halvung that required 6 people to open them:

By the time we finally got there, our numbers had dwindled.  Thankfully, Gurfurlur was up though!  We had seven people for the fight: WHM WHM RDM MNK WAR DRG PUP.  Moo was our RDM and he kindly kited the adds the entirety of the fight, once we cleared the room of regular monsters.  He said it was pretty easy — two were rangers, I’m not sure what the others were.  Either way, he had time to run up to us and debuff Gurfurlur as well as Refresh II me, so it must not have been too hard!

One ToAU beastman king down!  Today then we (or Moo and Star, I should say!) farmed up two sets of keys for Gulool Ja Ja and used one to make sure he was up (he’s there!) and then the three of us farmed up three key sets for Medusa (I checked — she hasn’t popped yet :<).  Afterwards we got people together for Gulool Ja Ja, and managed to down him with 7 again: WHM WHM WHM RDM WAR WAR MNK.

Yagrush Status Update

An Imperial Heist
Medusa
Gurfurlur the Menacing
Gulool Ja Ja
Odin
Long-Bowed Chariot
Armored Chariot
Battleclad Chariot
Long-Armed Chariot

Duties, Tasks, and Deeds
Balrahn’s Eyepatch: 7,100/100,000
Wyrmseeker Areuhat: 52,000/150,000
Alexandrite: 492/30,000
Mamool Ja Journal: 0/10
Lebros Chronicle: 0/10
Leujaoam Log: 0/10
Periqia Diary: 0/10
Ilrusi Ledger: 0/10

I’ll leave it at that since I don’t have anything for the third or fourth quests finished.  We were going over what all needed to be done on vent last night, and apparently not everyone knew that in order to get a mythic weapon you needed a Pandemonium Warden popset and, not only that, you also had to win a melee fight.  This lead to lots of laughs about my lack of melee ability — Star told everyone he’d video tape  the fight so everyone could hear me swearing and freaking out during the fight.  Everyone seems to think we’ll be farming several PW pops for me x:  Suppose I’ll have to practice on my White Mage melee’ing before I get there!

TP Set		Blade: Jin Set

Obviously still room for improvement, but since my ninja is getting at least somewhat decent gear sets I figured I may as well make a post about where it’s at! It’s only 87 right now — I’ve got Atheling Mantle and Twilight Belt both to ding into. The Sekka +1 is augmented with DMG: 43/Delay: 201/AGI+8/Evasion+18 and I’ve got the Breeze Geodes to upgrade it to the lvl90 version once I ding. The Resilient Mantle I’m using right now is augmented with Accuracy+1/Attack+17/Evasion-1. I’m also currently using Koga Tekko at night for both sets.

Ninja’s still a side project so I’m not overly anxious about getting upgrades for it — the bulk of my time is working on my Yagrush or helping the friends who are helping me with it! The next few ninja pieces I’ll be working on when I have some free time will be Iga Kyahan +2, Iga Zukin +2 and Epona’s Ring. I’m still doing Limbus twice a week as well so I’m hoping I’ll be able to upgrade to Ninja Tekko +1 soon for my Jin set. I’m sure once I get those I’ll add more to my wish list, but all four will be pretty easy to get, depending on how nice Limbus decides to be!

…I had more to this entry, updating my Yagrush status, but it got really long!  That and we’re off to poke Gulool Ja Ja, so perhaps I’ll get another ToAU beastman king win tonight! I’ll just save that extra bit I typed up and post another entry soon ^^~