OMG, it DOES still exist!

Things all of a sudden seemed to come together and a whole bunch of projects were completed last night. As you well know if you have followed my blog of late, our Nyzul mission has been to secure Enin his Askar body so we have spent the last few weeks (4 iirc) spamming 80's in this pursuit. Last night was our last night all together before I go on vacation next week for the month of December and I was really hoping it would drop for us then. Well guess what...



Yay, it still exists. After a flurry of Korazin drops when we first arrived at 80, this is the first one in months we have seen. Mucho congrats Enin. Thanks for your patience on it and all your help with everyone elses drops since you joined. Thanks to the rest of the group for all of YOUR patience as well. When I get back, we'll be spamming heads!

A theory was put forward about why we had such horrible luck with that last Korazin. The theory stated that because Byany, our bard, refused to take a Goliard body, going as far as to pass on it for our first time THF Dawn last week, Nyzul refused to give anything else till he got one. So last night, the first 80 boss dropped nothing, 2nd dropped Goliard AGAIN which Byany took as no one else wanted/needed one, 3rd was Korazin. Hmmm.


I accidentally deleted the screenshot of By in his body but you get the idea in Enin's one above. We also completed all of our weapon needs with Dyl getting his WAR GA and Loren getting his COR gun, both weapons not even for jobs that are at 75 yet. Its a good feeling to know we are checking stuff off the list.




And congrats to Loren on finally attaining SL rank, getting Perdu GA and getting rid of that damn awful Berserkers axe. So nub looking if you ask me.

A running joke with our group is the existence of a character called LorAn who always seems to be in the vicinity when we are doing our Nyzul runs. This being a joke because we have our member LorEn. Anyway, he decided to make a cameo last night both in screen and vocally. Kinda creepy really.



In other news, Limbus provided the mats for my RDM hat upgrade. A nice piece for me. I'll use it often for sure.


And my SAM seems to be progressing nicely too. I have a lot of things I want to do with it, things that are not really necessary but just in the interests of making it as good as I can with resources available to me. Of course merits are a big thing. I finished Group 1 SAM merits recently and started back into the Group2 ones. I reluctantly decided to open Blade Bash and Shikikoyo before finishing Overwhelm. That done, Overwhelm #2, GO!



After Overwhelm is finished, I'll finish the other 2 before moving on to RDM or STR.

Another thing I have been working on has been /RNG. Sidewinder/Soboro spam is just too intriguing to pass up so I finished RNG sub, got my Breeze gorget (Sidewinder AND Kings Justice tyvm!) and even got Hachiman Domaruuuuuuuuu and pants made/signed by friends for it. Since then, my Archery skill rose high enough to get Sidewinder which I immediately tried out. Encouraging numbers to say the least.



Archery at 185 and climbing steadily!

Tomoe still remains high on my list of SAM priorities too. I got enough Zeni and killed all the mobs to acquire the pop item for Armed Gears. Now I just need the people and luck to make the kill and get the drop. I even got an Shadow gorget as well for Penta/Kasha. Yay for the winning lot??!!



Gorgets now are Snow (Gekko/Yuki), Shadow (Kasha/Penta) and Breeze (Sidewinder/Kings Justice). Flame into storage. When I get Tomoe, I will also work on capping Parry skill. Kinda placebo but useful nonetheless and helpful in making my SAM as good as it can be.

So there you have it. Lots done, lots acquired, lots of happiness. A great way to go on vacation. The blog will not be updated again till January some time though I will be checking in on the Shout box periodically. So if I don't talk or hear from you again before then, merry Christmas, happy new year, good luck in your game pursuits over the next month and thanks for your interest in my writings over the last year.

Cya soon! ^__^/

Pictures worth a thousand words.

So yesterday was equally as annoying and frustrating as it was good and funny. Another 2 runs at bosses in Nyzul Isle resulted in no drops again. Our 100 floor Cerberus was unusually easy whereas a couple of deaths on the way to Hydra on floor 80 cost us the valuable seconds we needed to finished her off. Back to back Pyric Bulwarks ended up our undoing and we were ejected with about 9% left on her.

I did get this cool shot though. If you can't make it out, Hydra turned all black after a WS or spell that was cast on her. You see it now and then on mobs when you cast fire on them and they turn and stay orange. I had never seen black before though. I'd be very interested to know why they do that if anyone knows. Does it do anything of note to the mob? Are the temporarily weakened to spells of that element? Please advise if you know.


Equally frustrating was our Limbus run. Was the first time I have been to SE Apollyon as a melee. I didn't realise how much damage the mobs take in there provided you aren't using a weapon that is weak to the current floors mobs resistance. First floors were slimes that I knew took no damage from blunt weapons. OK yay GKT right? Waited a few seconds for PLD to get hate then did a Tachi: Rana which is usually quite weak anyway. 1156. Say what? Next thing I know, mob hits me twice for 303 and 294 then BAM! Fluid Toss right in my face for nearly 800. Hmmm, ok. Got up thinking ok that must have been a particularly unlucky shot I took, decided to do a couple of Jumps on the next one when it was 50% dead and Fluid spread owned me again. 5 minutes later when I'm unweak, I start meleeing again, did a WS at 50% for like 1500, BAM, BAM, Fluid Toss, I'm dead AGAIN! orz

So I sat out the rest of the slime floors and waited for crabs on the next floor on which I could use Polearm (strong to slashing mobs). At 240 skill, I figured I'd just poke away but I ended up doing over 1k on each Penta. No deaths this time so that was fine. Hesitant kicked ass on PLD especially on that floors boss. Invincible > Hundred fists yo!

On to the skeleton floor (strong to piercing obviously) which resulted in my best self Darkness chain yet. A little biased I know since these mobs all take a lot of damage but still, I'm a numbers whore and flashy ones make me happy. Biggest Rana to date too by the way.


Skeletons went down without a hitch and we moved over the the Corse boss. Of course Bubbo and I got charmed and went after the next person on the hate list. OHAI2U Alessandra! ^__^/ The next screenshot made my day. All the aggro and frustration of the day dissolved away in one glorious moment in time.


Wheee. Only thing that could have made that better was if it was Aless who was charmed and I could WS for big numbers. But hey, I'm happy nonetheless.

So we ended up winning the zone with ease, 6 coins each giving me enough to upgrade my RDM hat. Byany went over to the other party to tele our new THF but she had warp already and by the time he realised, the rest of us were already teleing out ourselves. LOL. Cya!

Nyzul update

Oh the joys of Nyzul Isle. The ups, the downs, the highs, the lows. A great snapshot of how FFXI is in general.

Now that we are all at 100 with our Runic keys and weapons, our focus has been purely on acquiring the Askar body for Enin who has been with us for a while now without getting his number 1 piece. So by my count we have spent some 3 weeks, 6 tags a week, and no Askar body. Hell, when we got to 80 the first time, we got 4 in quick succession! Now all we seem to see is Goliard bodies. /sigh.
I guess I shouldn't really complain. Once we get this Askar body, we don't need more than maybe 2 other pieces to finish 80 forever. I guess its just frustrating when you have other goals in mind and the lure of 100 hats is extremely prominent.

Anyway, here are the latest drops from floor 80!









Congrats guys. Hang in there Enin. We'll get that Askar body for you yet! Grats Dawn on acquiring an armor piece on your very first run with us.

In other news, I have discovered for myself the wonders of Level Sync over the last week or so. My Ranger sub had been sitting at 23 for a long while when I decided that I needed to get it finished. It would provide a means of piercing damage (while I wait for Tomoe) in Limbus and a fun alternative sub for bird camp.
So I joined a few Level Sync's with Al and got to 28 then grabbed Bubbo on her COR (which was doing more damage than my RNG >.>) and Al on his WHM and we trioed a few levels in North Gustaberg [S] and finished it all off with 2 parties from 31-37 over the last few days all under the Level Sync restriction. Wow I say. Apart from not having the higher 30+ ability to Barrage, it was awesome. No need to have lowbie gear kept on a mule. Just join, go and have fun watching your levels fly by.
So I finished that off yesterday and have started the arduous task of leveling Archery to 230. Seems to skill up ok. I got 15 levels in about an hour last night so if that keeps up, I'll be able to Sidewinder by weeks end. really looking forward to seeing what that can do.
Now all I have to do is level PLD (05), MNK (15), BRD (21), DRK (32) and SCH (1) to 37 to be done with subjobs/Maats Jobs to 37. I think I'll do DRK and BRD first then see about PLD. PLD might be fun enough to take further but we'll see.

Ohai2u Kreutzet

So after camping Kreutzet with Dylorian over the weekend, missing the one pop we saw to another group and then not seeing him again for a few days, we decided to go and hang out there for a while again after Limbus (which might I say went very smoothly) and see if he would pop for us. Dyl had a friends character out there for the day and no pop had been seen so we had a chance.

A couple of hours of messing around making enormous 3 step Darkness skill chains for fun, wind weather came up for the 4th or 5th time since we'd been there. Guess who decided to show up?! Ohai2u Kreutzet!

I grabbed with Animated Flourish and ran him over to Dyl at the tunnel where the handing out of asses begun. I did my best to support as /DNC as Dyl two-boxed his WHM friend. Yay for capped Meditate and Meikyo Shisui which gave me over 500 tp to use on cures for the duration of the fight. I wonder if in the history of SAM Meikyo Shisui has ever been used to solely cure...


After watching the gimp THF in my last post take some 20 mins with RDM and BRD support, Dyl destroyed it in about 5 mins and got DORP!




Mucho congrats guy (yeah I'm your guy now eh buddy?!). Well deserved after camping him since Friday. Note the Ulthalam's ring from yesterday's ToAU mission fight too!

We played around with it afterwards and his tp gain went up considerably. By came back from a long afk just as he died so he rejoined us, Soul Voice Marched us and the Hundred Daggers began. So much fun. Sure with Hundred Daggers and Hundred Great Katanas (Soboro) wailing away on a mob, fed tp is kinda huge but hell if it ain't fun right?! This would be one of those huge, straight golf drives I spoke about last post.

Small accomplishments make it all worthwhile

Another good weekend this weekend. FFXI, Poker, Mountain Biking, naps. All these things make for a fun relaxing weekend though make Mondays that much harder to endure. Good thing tomorrow is a holiday in Canada so this particular Monday is somewhat easier to deal with.

Nyzul was decent this past week as well. We started at 85 on everyones disc and successfully climbed to 100 without a problem. Now that anyone can lead any given run, its simple to target specific weapons for people. Enin still lacked a couple of weapons so we have him lead the first run as MNK and Byany lead the 2nd 100 run that night on BRD acquiring both Enin's weapons.



Only 2 weapons left to get, those being Loren's COR gun for his level 17 COR and Dylorian's WAR GA which he doesn't really want at this point. No gear drops from the 2 100 bosses though. Needz moar head. >.> (/em awaits the pervert translation that Loren just thought up.)

Speaking of Nyzul weapons, I finished cleaning my last one this week too. RDM sword was one of the ones I was particularly looking forward to due to the cool animation. Did not disappoint animation wise and the damage was about what I was expecting. Apparently, this can strip a mob of any enfeebling resistance it might have had. Here's the end of the exploding rose animation. Sounds cool too.



In addition to cleaning Vorpal sword, Dyl helped me clean the weapon that had become the bane of my existence, my Trials Spear. Trouble with cleaning this weapon is that SAM can't use Wheeling Thrust to make a level 3 skillchain so I had to resort to Gravitation which only gains me 3 points per chain as opposed to the normal 5. Argh! Had that weapon for 2 or 3 months. Camping Kreutzet with Dyl was actually time well spent in the end even if some gimp ass THF with these on won the claim and got the drop that went to his full AF1 level 75 RDM friend. Good times eh Dyl? Need Tomoe now to make it worth while.


So this weekend, I hung out with Dyl a fair bit. We did Brothers ENM and got a large chunk of exp while burning King Buffalo waiting for the weather to clear which resulted in enough merits to finish SAM group 1 merits. On to Group 2 now with Overwhelm getting priority. Any advice for how to distribute merits between Shikikoyo and Blade bash are appreciated.


We camped Kreutzet who popped right on top of us and we still missed claim ; ; We also farmed organs for obi's in sea with Loren and finished the weekend with the easiest run through Nashmeira's plea I have ever been involved in which resulted in Dyl getting the last fight done and getting his new ring. So it was a weekend to thank Dyl for all his help and willingness to be helpful over the past few months. Also much thanks to Liseth coming to help us with the fight. Note to anyone doing this fight. Having a RDM with 340+ enfeebling skill to sleep the BLU in between nukes makes that fight EASY!
Next weekend, we will hopefully do the prerequisite quest for and the fight of Requiem of Sin and hopefully get X's knife to drop and pimp out our Nyzul THF even more.

In other news, I finally got SAM pants upgraded. Since I don't do sky anymore and my WS accuracy seems to be capped, these will more than adequately suffice till the lucky day I get Hachiryu pants. I'll also use them for my Jumps when /DRG.


So another fun weekend resulting in some success. I find this game to be somewhat like Golf. You tend to fumble your way through adequately having a decenet amount of fun and then every so often you hit a clean straight drive that sails off into the distance or a nice precise pitch onto the green that rolls right up to the cup which makes the rest of the time spent in the game all worth while. I seem to have been hitting a few straight drives of late. ^__^b

The weekend from...heaven?

One word: WOW!

A great week led into an even better weekend. During the week we made a push for 100 in Nyzul Isle as a group so that everyone had access to the weaponskills ASAP. Unfortunately we were thwarted a couple of times and ended up with everyone at 85 for now. We put the last 2 tags toward a couple of shots at 80 which resulted in...



...and then....


...which resulted finally in....


Again, maximum respect to my group who got Cerberus down to 1% before we all died with only meds, Paeon and 2-3 2 hours in hand. I never saw so much Magma Hoplom spam in my life. Had it been Khimmy or Hydra, we woulda won it EASY! All in all, it was fun especially now that we do things on Skype. Makes things far easier not having to type out instructions and calls in addition to everyone being hilarious. Oh and congrats Al on Grimace body.

The week also saw me temper my desire/plan for Maat's cap. While it is still my ultimate goal in this game, I have settled on just working slowly toward it instead of spending all my spare time on different jobs. This has led to a sense of relaxation that I had lost after considering the mammoth task ahead as well as being able to continue focusing on merits. The plan at this point is to get PLD, MNK, BRD, DRK and RNG to 37 which will put all my Maat jobs at 37 or more also opening more subjob options like RNG on SAM. After that, I'll just choose a job at a time and play with it to ~66. Slow and steady wins the race right?

The weekend arrived which saw Al and I decide to work on our Orc SNM popsets. We had duo'd 3 items so far making a little money along the way. We put away another 3 as a duo as well as killing Onyx Eye again in hopes of getting a Mirror Tiara to drop. Onyx Eye is an easy BST duo and the tiara sells for 400-500k. Easy money...if it drops. We did get Llwyd's clogs and Viator Cape as pricey drops from the day however. The BLM NM was #7 in line and we were ready to do it when a couple of other BSTs came into our camp and started on the RNG. Needing the pets they were using, we decided to team up with them and get them on their way sooner and get our camp back. One of them dc'd midway and we got the other into our pt for the BLM afterwards. The BLM would be np to duo but we were getting tired and wanted to wrap up our popset ASAP so we trioed him easily. Some shots of the successful kills...





Lastly, we attempted the DRG mob but I am convinced he is nigh on impossible to take as a trio or less. As his HP diminishes, his Jump power (which he spams incidentally) increases. At 50%, he we jumping for 1300+ and taking half of a pets life. Needless to say, pets were dying too fast and we ended up zoning. I think we will save him for when the LS gets together for the SNM and take him Omega style.

So we ended up 7/8 items for our popset in Al's possession and 2/8 in mine. Gnadbhod's helm, you will be mine!

Evolpmal had also planned to get together on Sunday outside of our regular schedule and burn some Kindred seals for everyone. We also got a couple of extra tag along friends who we helped gladly. Its good to be able to help friends out where normally they'd pay someone else to do the work for them.
So the plan was to burn two orbs each and hopefully make some people some money. After all the fun including this hilarious moment...


...I had the best run I have ever had scoring two Damascene cloths (kids, make sure you have a good buffer before playing on a job that takes a lot of hate and dies easily). With the extra one I bought from Enin from his drops, I ended up paying about 200k for a shot at a Vermillion cloak. A decent price to be sure! My RDM has been in need of a refresh armor piece for a while and with this opportunity to get it cheaply, I decided to jump on it. I asked Bubbo if she would sign it for me to which she agreed. Check out the most unexpected result...


Woot! Signed HQ gears ftw! Thank you so much Bub. I'll be keeping this till I get rare/ex refresh armor for both BLM and RDM which will probably never happen or a dire need for gil arises which I can't see happening because I also saved enough gil to purchase my Haubergeon +1 this weekend as well! Now I am at a point where I don't need to buy anything else for my jobs. Everything else I want/need comes from drops that are rare/ex. Its a nice position to have worked ones self into.

Also helped Rathiel and Nelwynn out with Amaltheia for Kurosawa.Kuro is just starting on his Aegis quest so I was happy to come along and help them beat the sheep down. Yay kill shot!


Great weekend resulting in some gear that I have needed/coveted for a while all in the company of friends who make the game fun. Thank you everyone ^____^b