General: The Elusive Old Goobbue

For Windurst Mission 9-1, Doll of the Dead, we need to get a rare/ex Goobbue Humus. This drops from both the Old Goobbues and the Elder Goobbues in the Boyahda Tree. After completing Mission 8-2 a week ago Saturday night, a number of us decided we should head to the Tree and see if we could get some of the Goobbue Humus we all would need.

We killed the Old Goobbue twice, which resulted in a single drop (yay for Wendell!), and after a bad experience with someone getting an IT++ Korrigan mad at him just as someone else pulled an IT++ Elder Goobbue, Kiki, Grym, and Elbo decided to call it a night and try some other time. Part of our group had managed to escape, while Kiki, Grym, and Elbo were left to their own devices. Fortunately we survived (Elbo was able to warp out with his Treat Staff, and Kiki and Grym made it to the Cloister of Storms zone), but I just didn't think the group we had would be capable of taking out the Elder Goobbues, especially not when Wendell (WHM) was supposed to leave soon. The group that escaped decided to take on Aquarius as they made their way back into the Tree, and painfully learned that a foursome with a PLD68, SAM62, THF66, and WHM65 shouldn't try to fight Aquarius.

I decided that Grym, Elbo and I could easily trio the Old Goobbue, and since Elboron needs a Lucky Egg from the Knight Crawlers in the same area for his Opo-Opo Crown quest, we could kill those while we waited for the Old Goobbue to respawn. So two evenings this past week, we spent about 4 hours total fighting dozens of Knight Crawlers, a handful of Robber Crabs, and one, yes, one Old Goobbue. No Lucky Egg, no Goobbue Humus. I don't know what the deal is with the Old Goobbue, but he was there when we arrived on Wednesday evening. We killed him, and there was still no respawn nearly two hours later when we headed home for the night. Thursday evening, the Old Goobbue was nowhere to be seen, and didn't put in an appearance during our two hours there. Fortunately, we've been getting some skillups (Kiki's staff skill is now 211), and exp (the mobs are pretty much all DC, with a couple EMs thrown in).

It's going to take us forever to get three Humus items that we need. Too bad the Elder Goobbues are so painful to exp on, otherwise we could convince the Low Level Static that we need to fight those.

Since getting PLD past 66 and having Phalanx with RDM subbed, I've been doing this sort of farming/hunting as PLD/RDM, and bought some gear to try out for it: Darksteel Cuirass (+VIT and +MP), Darksteel Cuisses (+AGI and +MP), and a Darksteel Cap (-1% Physical Damage). This would allow me to leave my AF in storage and free up a bit of inventory space as well. Since I've been trying to skill up staff, I used my Earth Staff for the minus physical damage, plus it does less damage than my battle staff, and when trying for skillups, you don't really want to kill the mobs too fast, especially if they're "good" ones. With my "boosting MP" gear, I ended up with about 586 MP as PLD/RDM, which is handy for our BRD/THF/PLD trio.

One problem with this gear set up is that I lose 6 Enmity by not wearing my AF. And even with both my Hercules and Mermaid's Rings on for +5 Enmity, both Elbo and Grym were getting smacked around a bit. So I think I'll keep my AF on going forward. As PLD/RDM without any plus MP gear, I still have over 500 mp, so it's not really that big a difference. It was fun playing dressup though. :-)