Fighting Warrior

June 27-29, 2008

I may be getting more into WAR than I ever expected to, despite Saturday’s “interesting” party. But I need to do Friday’s update before getting into that. Actually, Friday was a long session with almost no activity. I happened to get off work early after going to an early off-site conference. I logged in with enough time to farm two sets of tests, one Gravity, and 4 daggers. I split the items between Windy and Jeuno and then logged off for the Friday festivities. After movie night (WALL-e) and saying goodnight to Ape, I logged back in, hoping to get a party on PLD or WAR.

I waited for over an hour, switching between them, and eventually fell asleep on the floor. I packed it in and hoped for more luck Saturday.

Since Ape had to babysit, and left at about 5:30, I was able to log in pretty early and wound up online for about 6 hours. Some of that was Brigader chat time, and some was LFG time. Eventually, I got an invite on WAR from Zanbuza and bound for Qufim. It took awhile to kick the party off properly but close to 8pm I was in Qufim with 4 other players. Zanbuza never did find a sixth. We messed about with worms and eventually made our way to the lake camp. I soon died, riiiight about the time Zanbuza DCed. He was the BLM and I suspect the loss of his nukes was enough to tip the balance in favor of the worm. It didn’t help that we pulled a link too.

Zanbuza never did log back in, leaving me with 3 Japanese players. Fortunately, they kept me and Neoshannyn took lead and began filling out the empty slots. Despite a player swap and the slow movement through the area, we did OK. There was a fair degree of wait time because of deaths. I died 4 times, including a full wipe when a Wight found us near the Conquest NPC tunnel.

I and another player worked pulls and by and large everyone worked as a team. I even picked up a friend as Doumone (sp) befriended me as he raised a couple of us.

By the end of the night, I had blown 4k on two pumpkins that were lost early in their life from death, and who knows how much XP from 3 raises and an HP. But I actually hit *21* and got about halfway to 22. I still didn’t unlock Shield Bash…

I don’t regret the party – it was quite fun in fact - and hope I did well enough in my role. I certainly did my best to be the first to drop after doing everything possible to keep damage spread evenly.

Sunday was another pretty long night ending far too late… /yawn Basically, I did my first post-update Campaign, helped Logjammin (and his buddy Sartoros) with Windy 2-3 (and gave him an RDB pearl in the process, and chatted with 10 other Brigaders – 11 at once is a new record!

The Dragon party was in Ghelsbpa this time, which was new for me. But we did well and had no drama. I got screenies too which will be posted soon. [edit 7/2: Here they are. Before, at the start, and after. Does that last shot's background look familiar?]

Campaign on the other hand, sucked. Really sucked. If this battle at Fort Karugo is representative of the new system I think I may have to pass on Campaign. I died well over 10 times, largely from the new Yagudo siege engine that had pulled up to our fortification and begun shelling it relentlessly. The blast zone from these shots was considerable and I found myself double-dying repeatedly. I also died a few times from cure hate and a few times by random enemy aggression while resting.

I got a number of raises from allies as well as the new NPC buffer, the Salvemixer. Even so, I nearly gave in but decided to see how it would turn out. I wound up with 1,200 XP and questions about what I would have gotten with fewer deaths. After this fiasco, I did a synth quest and flagged another.

Oh, almost forgot, I unlocked SCH last night. It turned out to be stupid easy. I spent 14k on vellum, teleported myself into the past, changed to RDM (Hi Fhox!) and cloaked my way into the Necropolis and found the NPC. It took maybe 40 minutes start to finish and there was no aggro. The CS was kinda neat though. I got SCH to level 3 before heading off to help Log.

Reflections: WAR isn’t so bad but I still don’t expect to take it much further. But I now prefer it to NIN tanking. Evasion is nice but I need to focus on accuracy. I miss far too often to build TP efficiently. And even with +7 Eva, I get hit quite frequently.