General: Just because it's been out for over 18 months...

... doesn't mean it's not still new for us.

Friday night, rather than let everyone explore the new areas, our CoP static headed to Riverne Site #A01 to farm hippogryph tail feathers, and to try the Fire in the Sky ENM as long as we were there. I opted to farm in A01 rather than B01, which is indeed new to us, since the ENM is a level 40 cap, and I didn't think we'd want extra gear to farm at a 50 cap and switch to 40 cap gear for the ENM. We went with Kiki PLD, Splinte NIN, Grym THF, Elboron BRD, Wendell WHM, and Itera MNK.

We need to get the hippogryph tailfeathers so that we can have mistmelts for our next fight in CoP, against Ouryu in Mission 4-2. Ouryu is a dragon that likes to fly around, and he's much more deadly while airborne. The mistmelts force him back to the ground again.

It took us maybe two hours to get the dozen tailfeathers I thought we needed (we'll have enough to get 8 mistmelts with feathers Elbo and Itera already had), but it was fun, and we got a decent chunk of exp while we were at it. I think the level 71s ended up with about 2.5k, and Splinte's level 40 NIN did much better. On one chain, where Kiki got 130 points, Splinte got 260. I'm not sure why they gave such a penalty to high levels in the level capped zones, but I understand there's no penalty for the 75s working on merits rather than experience points. One bad thing to using level capped zones for exp would be the hit you'd take on skills development - everything's capped for me at 40, so no skill gain. So I guess it's not a good idea to exp in level capped areas after all.

We fought hippogryphs as we made our way towards Monarch Linn, camping for awhile in a spot with 3 Cloud Hippogryphs, and camping finally on the second to last island before Monarch Linn, which is through an unstable displacement, but we knew had three or four of the Cloud Hippogryphs on it. Both Splinte and Wendell ended up leveling, Splinte to NIN41 and Wendell to WHM69, so that was a nice bonus.

After we got the feathers we needed, we headed into Monarch Linn and went in to face Razon, a cluster NM. We'd fought it 4 times last summer, 3 times successful, 1 not so much. One of the possible rewards for winning is a Woodsman Ring, a nice level 40 accuracy ring that goes for 1.5-2 million gil. Razon is more resistant to physical damage than I had remembered, so Splinte's ninjitsu was doing most of the damage. We got it down to what looked like one hit from death, when it did its third self-destruct, blasting us out of the arena, and leaving us dead in a heap, having done 2038 damage to us with the blast. It was fun though, and with no EXP loss in ENMs, there was no downside. I think we could even try it as a threesome some day, with a NIN, WHM, and RDM.