Events: The Festival of Swords

This year's Festival of Swords was slightly different from last year's. You're still given a wooden katana (Lotus Katana) and capped at level 1 and have to run around chasing down enchanted sets of armor, but they threw in a rogue mithra armor, Usukane Armor, which seeks out and destroys all the partcipants in the festival. This actually made it more fun, since there was an element of "danger". Elbo, Grym and Kiki all wanted Federation Stables Scarves, good for 10 teleports to the Windurst Chocobo Stables, which can come in handy if we need to get to Windurst quickly and have our HP somewhere else, and no outpost is convenient or under some nation's control.

Our first attempt at this was as a mnk/blu trio. We demolished one of the sets of armor with our Hundred Fists times 3, but didn't get a scarf. We went after another, but Elbo had forgotten he had to set his BLU spells after changing jobs, and Grym didn't have a juice, so they died. Kiki was able to keep going, and another player started whacking on the same armor, hoping for the kill, but Kiki got the killing blow and a scarf dropped, as well as a bunch of mochi (food that gives you a "costume" for a boy of the different races). The armor can also drop the colored drops which give a temporary stat bonus based on their color (e.g. Yellow Drop = +VIT).

We kept at this for several days, usually switching to BLU/WHM after burning our MNK 2 hours. Grym started using RNG/BLU, in order to use widescan to find the armors, as well as keep an eye out for the Usukane. One time, Grym and Kiki were resting for hp/mp, and Elbo was standing next to them. The Usukane Armor came running up, killed Grym, then Kiki, but not Elbo. He'd done a /wave emote at the armor, so we joked about her figuring he was a friendly little taru and she shouldn't kill him.

We discovered that the Tarutaru armor, Ubuginu Armor, could be fought in one of the canyons in East Sarutabaruta without the Usukane Armor showing up. This meant we ended up fighting him over and over and over again. Grym and Kiki together collected about 150 Tarutaru mochi, mostly on Saturday. The three of us also got complete sets of the 8 colored drops, which are probably just going to eat up storage space for years to come.

The best part of all of this was having a permanent Flee effect while under the level cap. It was so much fun just zooming around the Sarutabarutas as we searched for the armors. Normal movement speed just seemed so terribly slow after hours of perma-Flee.