Leveling: LLS (66-67) versus Flies and Crabs in The Boyahda Tree

A week ago, the Low Level Static got off to a late start, since it took us awhile to get a main healer for the evening. Sadly, Erock's pretty much officially bowed out of the group. He doesn't really like playing WHM, and would rather spend his game time doing things he likes to do, which is very understandable, however disappointing it may be for the LLS. We picked up a level 66 RDM/WHM and headed to Bibiki Bay. The only open camp we could find was in the south end, and we were concerned the dhalmels were at the high end of the range, and there were really only two available at that camp, and the nearby gobbies were a higher tier than recommended for level 66. Plus we had an unknown healer, so we headed for The Boyahda Tree.

We ended up getting less than 2 hours of fighting in, with Skimmers and Steelshells as our prey. They were a bit low for us, but the Skimmers still were pretty hard on us with Cursed Sphere being especially damaging. We only got 8k exp with our empress bands, and called it a night.

As happens 99% of the time, our pickup mage was really not so good. He didn't cast a single debuff on the mobs, refreshed only himself, never cast poisona, nothing but various Cure spells and an occassional Curaga. He did protectra and then use a higher level protect on Kiki and Itera, but not consistently. He probably had never played with a Bard before, and wouldn't stand where Elboron had asked him to, so Elboron was running all over the place to hit both me and the RDM with Ballad. Between fights, I would run over to the RDM to try to help Elbo out, but it wasn't a great camp to stand in a single spot the whole night - had to pull the fights to different sides to try to avoid links.

The highlight of the night was getting to do a Level 3 Light skillchain for the first time. We had Red Lotus Blade (kiki) -> Raging Fists (Itera) -> Sharkbite (either Grym or Yobun), and it worked quite nicely. The first time we tried it, the Skimmer took over 1000k just on the Light. Even the Steelshells, which aren't particularly weak to Light, were taking good damage from it. Kiki decided to try bursting with Holy once, but the 212 damage wasn't worth the 100 MP, despite how pretty it looked. I think we have a couple of options for Darkness, but I didn't have them on-hand Sunday night for us to try. I think to have a THF close it though, we need them to have Evisceration, so it will be a long time before we get to try that.

No one gained a level, so we still had just Itera at 67 and the rest of us at 66, with Kiki being the closest, with about 2k to-next-level.