Leveling: Evening in West Altepa Desert (41-43)

We meant to go back to Gustav Tunnel on Friday night, but while we were waiting for everyone to show up, and looking at the potential invitees, we saw that there was one, then two parties in our level range in the Tunnel. So we decided we would head for Revelation Rock in West Altepa Desert and fight the beetles there.

Locmari invited Plumpixie, a Taru RDM/BLM, who had actually never been through Korroloka Tunnel, and didn't have the Altep crystal, so Grym and Kiki met him there, and we headed through the tunnel, snuck across the deserts and into Rabao. I invited Falofalot, a Taru WAR/NIN. Loc and Plumpixie headed to the crystal to sneak Falofalot back to Rabao and so Plumpixie could pick up the crystal too. Of course, by this time, Gustav Tunnel was empty, but it would have taken a long time for us all to get back there.

We had a really good time fighting the beetles. The EXP was great, and we had next to no downtime. Not having a WHM did make some things a bit more difficult, but I think we managed pretty well. We had quite a few links, but there was this cicular path around a rock area that was very handy for Grym to kite extras until we were ready for them.

Disaster struck at one point, leaving the entire party dead. It's been a couple days, but I think both Loc and Plump were AFK and Manon pulled, and Falo, the Taru Terror, pulled way too much hate at the start, and Kiki couldn't pull it off of him, and couldn't heal him fast enough by herself (berserk *does* reduce defense drastically, so he was really getting pounded). Oh, and we had two more beetles spawn on top of us. Falo was down first, then Kiki, then Manon, then Locmari, then Plump, then Grym. Grym HP'd to Rabao, switched to WHM and came back and raised the rest of us, warped back, switched back to THF/NIN and by the time she got back on chocobo, we were ready to go again.

Kiki ended up with 12.5K EXP for the night (went from nearly 42 to well over 43), which I think was in about 4 hours of fighting, including the downtime for the mass death. All in all a pretty good night. I'm still not sure how people can get 5000 exp/hour, since we were hitting chain 5s for 286, and aside from the deaths, really couldn't have been pulling much faster.