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Saturday, May 31, 2008

Tanks but No Tanks

A Long Time Ago-May 31, 2008

Since the last proper update, a lot has happened. In personal news, it seems June 30th may be the end of my employer. My position is considered most likely to carry forward somewhat, but I’m not confident I’ll be here after the MHP software goes live around August/September.

The good news from that is, after some more fighting, April calmed down upon hearing this news. She’s trying to maintain a normal life for the time being, trusting in my ability to get another job. So far, a couple of good openings and a few more OK ones, but no offers ><

She’s even calmed down about gas being nearly 4 bucks. We still go out and have had a few nice date nights. Especially last Friday when we watched Juno and had a long chat about having another kid of our own. She wants one but knows we can’t afford or house it. So I really need a good job!

Family’s doing well though. Mimi should be moving in to her new townhome this week, much to Kevin’s relief. The Lumina may live on at St. Paul’s as a nun’s car. And The Bradlee Family Funfest 2008 continued, with Missouri, followed by an afternoon at Universal, and Indy 4 and Narnia 2,

In the land of Vana’diel, I finally made some major progress.

BST: I got BST to 13 and haven’t touched it since.

SMN: I finally got my weather and have been able to level this to 10. I still need to work out some of the elemental spirits and get some better gear but overall it’s a nice magey melee job. Carby fighting helps soak up XP, but SMN and BST can’t run pets at the same time…

NIN: I stopped all other play last week to focus on Norg fame farming. After about 8 more sets of Yagudo Necklaces and 4 of the Zinc Ores, I had my Fame 4. I popped the Utsusemi quest (as well as the last questable scroll, Hojo: Ichi) and completed both. I picked up Utsusemi: Ichi but did not pick up Hojo yet – too low level-wise and don’t have the room to store it…

I grabbed some shihei and gave “Shadow Clone Jutsu” a shot while in Whitegate. This was Tuesday or Wednesday IIRC. Now, with this set all I needed was a way to be a tank and then level NIN to something more Dancer-friendly.

WAR: Yes, you read right Fhox. WAR. I realized there’s no way to avoid this if I want to level /NIN for Dancer or tank as a Pally. So I grabbed BST’s Bronze Axe and went to town. I went from 1-5 with no deaths and no resting. 5-7 with one or two rests. 8 was a little harder because I kept taking tougher mobs with WS overconfidence. Anyway I started working out my Voke macros and such and then… I did manage to die once again from a Crawler’s Poison, while in town.

Friday I set up NIN/WAR and flagged up as a tank. I got an invite to a party that never started. In fact, the other two died outside of Valk and I died once I got to them in La Theine. The leader couldn’t get any more members and so I packed it in and played GTAIV until 6 am. /yawn

Doesn't she look peaceful, on that tree-shrouded hillside, in the twilight, under the watchful gaze of a murderous Orc?

Saturday however, I got an invite to a mostly JP party in Korroloka Tunnel (/gasp) and after a long wait for the last two members who didn’t have the Altepa crystal, we finally kicked off at about 12:30 with me tanking Tunnel Worms. Blink-tanking, for the first time. Ever.

So of course I and another player died when I voked on the leader’s signal. Without shadows up… And without Reraise… Fortunately we got Raised very quickly and I got into the groove pretty quickly. Not one more death and we wound up taking on 4x linkfarms of the worms.

I constantly tweaked my macros and eventually, the rhythm settled in when the Ranger started our fights with a Voke, then I’d make sure I had shadows up and let him take a couple hits and then throw my own voke and also have Utsusemi’s recast reset.

I soon discovered tanking is a perverse form of self-sacrifice. It plays a lot like WHM in the sense of having to constantly monitor activity and manage party-mates’ HP levels and watch for mob TP moves. But instead of fixing this stuff with –na spells and cures, I get to soak up damage with my shadows and HP.

I have a lot to learn still, and really need to work on my gear and spell timing, and Ninjutsu level. On leaving the party at 3:30am, I upgraded my katanas and looked at armor. Basically, WAR, NIN, BST and PLD can share many of the same sets, and a good level 16 set is the Bone +1 set which brings +5 evasion. If I can find some accuracy in food or gear then I’ll be able to hold hate with DD and vokes and get more WS off. As it was, I missed a lot or hit for 0’s. And the mobs were hitting me too often, eating up shadows too quickly for the recast, or interrupting me when I could cast.

WHM: Other than roasting yags in Giddeus for the Norg fame, I didn’t do much with WHM, and I missed it terribly. No Campaign, no parties until last night. But I did try to get Archer his Limit Break 1 item from the Nest. This was a hilarious hour that saw both of us die twice and only four mobs killed, with no drop. But we had a laugh or two. Vegis, Stoik and IIRC, Yogepoge all need LB1 stuff so maybe we can do a LS party for it.

I did get my 68 back with Archer, by 37 XP mind, so I went ahead and sold the Vermy and upgraded to a Noble’s. Which helped a lot Sunday night.

This party was started by Parkway and headed to Caedarva to kill Imps and Jnuns. I joked for the party to be kind to the mages after they mentioned they were going to chain-pull. But no… Even with +5 Refresh with gear, Sanction and Caocao’s spell, I ran out of MP 3 times. Nobody died and I didn’t have to Benecide, but it was touch-and-go a few times…

They did chain pull and we hit Chain-5’s a LOT. After almost exactly 2 hours, I had pulled in 15k XP and didn’t even use my Anni Ring.

And once again, the RDM was quick on the –na spells and the Curagas to fix Imp Sleepgas. But I did OK I think.

My plan now is to see if I can get WAR and BST to 16 and get the Bone +1 set (about 40k). And probably better weapons. And a shield. This will help keep inventory a little cleaner.

Oh yeah, almost forgot. I had to drop almost 7k into a Mog Locker expansion to store the 10 Mog Bonanza marbles I bought (for 10k total). And I have to store NIN tools (about 4k per stack) now too… Gobbie VII? 60k-ish? I need to win some dough!

Sunday, May 4, 2008

Sunny Friends But No Sunny Weather

Fhox was chatting with Isabiel about harassing players or the blacklist because some LS chat popped up unexpectedly about how one would do that. He said something like, “Putting someone on black list makes it so you never hear from them again, like they’re invisible”.

Wanting to tease Fhox about getting out of the Brigaders or not have to put up with him (not seriously of course!) I threw {Black list} {Can I have it?} {Please assist.}. Fhox’s reply caught me off-guard… “You don’t have dark soul to get on black list Aerin.” /sniff

Of course, when I thanked him for the compliment by saying, “That was very nice of you Fhox – I take that as a compliment” he had to reply with, “You need to be pet every now and then.” Talk about a back-handed compliment ^^

But honestly, I *was* touched.