General: Catch-All

Elbo 1, Maat 0:
This past weekend, Elboron beat Maat as a BRD70, on his first attempt. Congratulations Elbo! See his blog entry for full details.

Skillups and Farming:
Kiki needed to get her Greataxe and Scythe skill capped for her level 40 DRK, so dragged Grym's THF70 off for some skillups on Friday afternoon. We first headed to East Altepa and fought Dhalmels, then switched to spiders in West Altepa, but it was pretty slow. We ended up going to Misareaux Coast and fought Bigclaws for awhile. Greataxe is capped, but Scythe is still a couple points off of the cap.

We spent some time over the weekend farming the level 40 scrolls for elemental Ninjitsu for Grymalkyn. We spent a few hours in Castle Zvahl Bailey and Keep, killing Yagudo Conquistadors, Lutenists, Zealots, and Priors. We got 2 each of Raiton, Katon, Doton, and Hyuton, but didn't see any Huton or Suiton scrolls. The Bard types also gave up a Dragonfoe Mambo and a couple Blade Madrigal scrolls. Grym read the ones she needed, and we made 160k or so on the ones we had to sell. We decided to try Castle Oztroja on Sunday, and sure enough, we got the other two scrolls there, with a duplicate of Suiton, which sold for 140k. Elboron came to help us as well, and we found an Electrum Hairpin in a treasure chest, which will be useful for his WHM.

After finding lizard blood on diremites in Pso'Xja, we decided to try to farm the other ingredients for Blood Broth, which allows BSTs to call a Diremite familiar at level 43. We were heading to Norg to pick up Grym's Ninja AF1 quest, and killed a few leeches in Sea Serpent Grotto for a couple containers of leech saliva. Later, we headed to the Sanctuary of Zi'tah to kill bats for beast blood, and finally went to the Labyrinth of Onzozo to kill more leeches for bird blood. Qiara was able to turn these into Blood Broth for us, but we'll have to get our BSTs out leveling before we can use it.

While doing our farming these past days, I've been trying to skill up dagger and club, and they're making decent progress. It seems like weapon skill is like craft skill - the lower the skill level is, the faster you get skillups. They really seem to slow down the higher they get.

Fishing:
Grym and Kiki headed off to Selbina to catch the ferry and try for tuna and skillups on noble ladies and bluetail. We subbed BLM to make it easy to get home. We made about 4 trips before our pockets were pretty full, and decided to make one last trip, with two open slots each, figuring we'd warp when we couldn't catch any more fish.

I caught a tuna, and then a noble lady when I already had a full stack. So I started trading the single noble lady to Grym to get an open slot and keep fishing. In the middle of our trade, we noticed the "Sea Monk" that had been floating around the ship since we left Selbina suddenly seemed much bigger than it had, and seemed to be quite interested in us, and seemed to have the name "Sea Horror" above it. So we cancelled the trade and Grym started getting hit by the Sea Horror, and used Perfect Dodge and warped out. Meanwhile, I ran to the back of the ferry and warped out myself. Grym had taken two hits, one for just over 100, the second for over 200, which is about how hard Maat had been hitting her. I do think if we were properly dressed and had our proper subjobs, that we could take the Sea Horror on as a THF70 and PLD70, and if we had Elboron's BRD70 with us, most definitely. However, it wasn't something we were willing to try with underlevelled black mage subs and in fishing gear.

We ended up with enough tuna for Qiara to make 6 stacks of tuna sushi, which got her over 75 Coooking, and both Grym and Kiki got a few fishing skillups as well.

Under Oath (PLD AF3):
On Saturday evening, Rovont requested some help with the fight for his Gallant Surcoat, his Paladin AF3 quest. When Kiki did this fight for her quest last October, we had a full alliance of 18, with several members in their 70s. This Saturday however, we only had six of us: Onima MNK75/WAR37, Tsakiki PLD70/WAR35, Grymalkyn THF70/NIN35, Elboron BRD70/WHM35, Itera MNK70/WHM30, and Rovont PLD60/BLM17. I was a bit concerned about our ability to succeed with the tank also being the main healer, but was certainly willing to give it the old college try.

We got the the area in Davoi with the disused well that Rovont needed to examine to spawn two NM Orcs, one a PLD and one a RNG. We cleared the area of all the orcs and Rovont examined the well. It was a really tough fight, but we did win. Rovont hurried back to San d'Oria to complete his quest, and is finally in his full set of shiny white AF - truly a milestone for every Paladin.