Besieged: Keeping the Astral Candy-Sense Safe

It seems the SquareEnix has been tweaking the mechanics of Besieged every other day, and I find that it's been getting to be more fun. It's still terribly laggy, but the enemies take quite awhile to kill, and don't die by the time you get engaged.

The recent changes have included increasing the frequency of attacks, increasing the number of enemies, as well as their strength, removing the home point from Al Zahbi (though it still works if you had set it there before it was removed), and randomly teleporting players to different areas within Al Zahbi after getting the opening cutscene for Besieged.

Monday evening I had logged in as Qiyuk, to check her mail and the AH in Al Zahbi. Her moogle wouldn't check her mailbox, which I thought was really odd, and so I headed out the door, and found Al Zahbi was under attack by the Undead Swarm. I had no choice but to stand there in front of the locked mog house door as a level 1 THF, watching the excitement from the sidelines (it was actually a bit boring that far from the gates, but peoples' shouts were amusing). Then as soon as we had won, the Trolls stormed the gates, before the mog house was unlocked. Qiara was warped to the main square, so I headed over to the gate to Whitegate, hoping to remain inconspicuous.

Not even two hours later, the Mamool Ja attacked the city, and Itera, Elboron, Grym and Kiki warped back to Al Zahbi to join in on the fun. Elboron kept Goddess Hymnus active on us, which is incredibly handy for this sort of thing. Itera, Kiki, and Elbo all were killed at one point, and having reraise on us meant we didn't lose our points for the event. Kiki's defeat came at the hands of a Mamool Ja Enchanter, which hit her with Radiant Breath for 9777 damage. 9777!!! Talk about overkill (my max HP is under 1200, unless I'm trying really hard to have as much as possible).

I still don't understand how they decide on the points. For this run, Elbo and Kiki both got 700 EXP/IS, while Grym got around 200. Grym and I fought the same mobs, and probably did about the same amount of damage, but I used Rampart (party defense boost), and cured myself as well as other members of the team. It's got to have something to do with the amount you help out the team, and seems to cap at 700, but that's just so unfair to a melee. I think Grym should sub WHM next time and use protectra and curaga, just to see if he gets more points.

Between exp'ing in the new areas and the points from Besieged, we have enough IS points for 2 of the 3 maps we can buy with them. Grym and I both got the Arraparo Reef map, and Grym got the map for Halvung, while I will pick up the map for Mamook later. The last time I had checked, Lakshmi had successfully repelled all 27 enemy invasions. There have been some prisoners taken hostage, but people were quick to put together rescue missions to save the prisoners. We were thinking it would be funny if the enemy forces would take player characters hostage, but then reflected that perhaps there were some players that would never be rescued, and that would pretty much suck for them.