Leveling: Subjobs hit 40

Over the past two evenings, Grym (NIN), Itera (WAR), Elboron (WHM) and Kiki (DRK) have been leveling their subjobs, getting from 37 to well over 40. Again, there just weren't any people looking for parties at our level, so we rotated in two of our NPCs at a time.

Wednesday night, since Crawlers Nest had a party our level, we decided to head to Yhoator Jungle. Elboron used the outpost teleport to Yuhtunga, while the rest of us travelled to Kazham and chocobo'd out to the area we were planning to camp - near the southern-most zone to Yuhtunga. It didn't look like it would be a good camp, so we headed to the northeast side of that area, and ended up camping near a couple Opo-opos in a T-shaped area near the tunnel that leads north to the area with the teleport crystal. Itera opted to sub his underlevelled NIN for the shadows, and that ended up saving him a bit of damage when he pulled hate.

We started tearing through the Worker Crawlers, and ended up over 8K exp in just over 90 minutes, using a ring, but also having an NPC out. Crawlers are great for fighting with the NPCs, since they don't have any bad AOEs, as long as the people with hate keep the mobs turned away from the NPCs to avoid poison breath. We had to fight a coeurl or two since they got in our way. Those are more trouble than they're worth, but at least we managed them fine. It's kind of fun using the NPCs. They don't go AFK or complain, though they do only give one fight notice when they have to leave. However, it's quick to get a replacement out, as long as someone still has a fresh tactics or signal pearl. When we were regularly getting 280 point Chain #4s, it's hard to complain about not being able to fill in the party.

We left the jungle with Elboron and Kiki at 39 (Kiki levelled on our last kill). We didn't think we'd be able to exp again on Thursday, but Elboron's real-life plans were put off until next week, so we headed back to our camp, courtesy of Elboron's newly learned Teleport-Yhoat spell. I was thinking about subbing NIN too, but then I remembered that my Axe Belt only works with a warrior subjob. That belt turns my DRK's greataxe skill into an A level skill, and allows me to use the Horror Voulge as effectively as any scythe or greatsword. Since the Horror Voulge is arguably the best weapon a DRK at level 40 can weild, I want to use it for Diabolos, so have been using it on my DRK while leveling until capped.

This evening there was an Anemone lurking about near our camp, which made Itera's pulling a bit trickier, but he did a great job, and before we knew it, we were all 40. Itera got aggro'd on his first pull after Kiki and Grym hit 40, and tried unsuccessfully to zone it. Since the exp had really fallen off dramatically as we got to 40, we followed Elboron as he went to raise Itera, and then we headed off to fight Bigclaws in Misareaux Coast (teleport-Dem, chocobo, dunes vortex, Lufaise Meadows, Tavnazian Safehold, Misareaux Coast). We had fought the Bigclaws here quite a bit on our main jobs in the mid-50s, both for skillups and simply for farming silica to make our goldfish bowls, so it was a nice familiar spot. The crabs don't aggro and don't link, making it fairly safe, as long as the Makara don't get too close.

Since Elbo and Itera were further ahead than Grym and Kiki, they called their NPCs and we started in fighting the Bigclaws. They didn't go down as fast as the crawlers in Yhoator, but fast enough that our first set was a chain #5 for 300. I also liked fighting the Bigclaws since I could Aspir MP off of them, so I was using more spells per crab. Things slowed down a bit when Itera switched to his hand axes, but we still got lots of exp rather quickly. I think we were in that camp about 70 minutes, but got over 5k exp for it, so Kiki's got quite a good death buffer for facing Diabolos.